Bideodromage
Portrayed memorably by actor Matthew McConaughey, detective/profiler Rust Cohle is as troubled and enigmatic as he is brilliant. Haunted by his past (and present), Cohle is an insomniac, an alcoholic, and experiences profound episodes of paralyzing synesthesia. He’s singularly obsessed with his work, which in this case involves a sadistic, ritualistic serial killer amidst an eerie Louisiana landscape of unsettling, tantalizing suspects.
“Whatever way I ultimately took the snow falling I was assured of being glued to a stance, a localizable, diagnosable, capturable stance. No. No. No. No. The snow was falling. Kabbala Street snow was falling. But what was the furious plummet of the snowflakes doomed to dissolve on my piss-impregnated topcoat but the enactment of resistance to such an extinction. Seeing the snowfall in this manner I was all at once manumitted from the Kabbala Street furnace. I was more than ever wary of distraction but seeing the snow falling in this manner was not a surrender to distraction, a flight from actively pullulating despair. Such seeing was a full bodied exertion of despair. Seeing the snow falling as a deployed and enacted resistance to falling—seeing the snow falling as the snowβs only way of expressingβliving—resistance to falling, I was permitted to elude entrapment in drooling passivity before a distraction, a contraption recruited from Kabbala Street. The snow falling was no longer a state of affairs somewhere out there enjoining no collaborative pang, no strain of output. To see the snow falling as an enacted resistance to—the only conceivable protest against—descent into extinction was to be transformed from passive consumer of sleekly synthesized distractions into an active collaborator in, an unstinting undergoer of, what I myself was suddenly playing no small part in synthesizing. The snow falling was now very much fused with the particular slant of my consciousness on how it fell, how it was falling. I was suddenly as much out there as the snow falling and the snow falling was reciprocally as much within as my particular slant on its plight. Collaborating as I did in the falling of the snow, somehow forcing the phenomenon itself to undergo the collective spasm it induced within, I knew I had succeeded in resisting one of the prop-like traps set for me (in their eagerness to propagate the plausibility, the desirability of a fixed term to my ploy-breeding despair) by the Kabbala street gang. I knew I had succeeded in inactivating and scuttling one of the trap-like props happily still susceptible to detection by a tottering and therefore ever vigilant myopia.”
“The point of inventory was to be never-ending. Affirming the continued existence of an intact inexhaustible never-ending inventory at the same time affirmed my continued existence as a being forever on the increase, and, as an expanding sum of thoughts acquired, fast approachingβ¦the dimensionlessness, the unlocalizability, the undiagnosability, of all of being.”
“I thought of the body, the incised body. I shuddered. Surely I had come to the end of all incision, of all acquisition of incision—incision as the high road to, pretext for, acquisition of myself as more than myself, as nothing less than prefiguration of beingβs all.”
from Circuits, a novel by Michael Brodsky {1985}.
This iconic band rocketed onto the scene in the early 90s and bestowed upon us many sublime treasures. Vocalist Brett Anderson and (until his departure) guitarist Bernard Butler both are/were utterly transcendent talents.
“How quickly the thief feels the policeman’s eye upon him. When one considers the fantastic quantity of sounds and shapes that impinge upon one at each and every moment of one’s life, what is easier than to combine two and two into a pattern where none exists. For a moment the thought surprised me, like a wild beast in a dark forest. But then it was swallowed up again in the chaos of seven people talking and eating. Dinner was still going on.”
“What story? Fiddlesticks! Berging with the berg in the berg. Don’t you see? Bamberging with the Bamberg. Tri-li-li-lee. He went on in a sly tone of voice. He moved his arms and even his legs as if he were dancing joyfully. Mechanically he repeated berg, berg, which seemed to come up from almost unfathomable depths. Then he calmed down and waited.”
“So I dropped the sparrow to concentrate on the mouth and a kind of exhausting game of tennis set in, for the sparrow returned me to the mouth and the mouth returned me to the Sparrow. I was the ball in the middle and each was hidden by the other. As soon as I caught the mouth, really caught it as if I had lost it, I was aware that besides this side of the house there was the other and that besides the mouth there was the lonely hanged sparrow. And the worst of it was that it was impossible to place the sparrow on the same map as the mouth, it belonged to an entirely different one, a different area altogether, a fortuitous and entirely absurd and irrelevant area. So why did it keep on haunting me, it had no right to. No, it had no right to. No right to? The less excuse there was for it, the more it obsessed me, the more difficult it was to shake off; the less right it had the closer it clung and the more significant it became.”
—–All selections from Cosmos {1965}; translation by Mosbacher.
A sampler of monumentally exquisite moments from India, primarily featuring immortals Ali Akbar Khan, Ram Narayan, and Dr. L Subramaniam. Astonishing.
This remarkable 19 year old Spaniard has so much game, it’s often hard to believe. Blessed with electric, top-level horsepower *and* firepower, the new World #1 (the youngest ever to achieve the pinnacle) also possesses an abundance of charisma and mental toughness.
“Alcaraz has earned acclaim for his remarkable athletic and physical traits. In particular, his direct sprints, counterattacking abilities from often indefensible positions on court, and an extremely high peak footspeed which has earned him comparisons to a young Rafael Nadal and GaΓ«l Monfils. He has earned comparisons to Novak Djokovic for his assured lateral movement and court-coverage aided by physical splits and sliding through the court on defense, particularly on his backhand side where he is often able to neutralize his opponentβs groundstroke aggression or drop shot attempts. He has also earned comparisons, on occasion, to Roger Federer for his great footwork and ability to go inside-out on his forehand and control the court with his offense.” (from Wikipedia)
βIβve never played a player who moves as well,β said Frances Tiafoe, who has played the best of the best. βHeβs going to be a problem for a very long time.β
What exactly ought we do to address this alarming “Monadnock” situation??
1991’s The Silence of the Lambs, directed by Jonathan Demme, still unquestionably stands as a landmark of psychological terror. Jodi Foster, Anthony Hopkins, and Ted Levine all turn in remarkable, iconic performances. This immortal film features some of the most intense, memorable dialogue ever committed to the medium.
A potpourri of some particularly moving pieces.
A stunning potpourri of, well, I dunno. From the top: Tobias Kwan, Fulvio Di Piazza, Ben Kehoe, Omar Rayyan, Michael Sowa, Clark Ashton Smith, with a few that are unknown.
Bideodromage 