Culture - April

Films Watched -

'Heart of Glass' (Werner Herzog)
'Fata Morgana' (Werner Herzog)
'Five Easy Pieces' (Bob Rafelson)
'The Battle of Algiers' (Gillo Pontecorvo)
'Andrei Rublev' (Andrei Tarkovsky)
'The Seventh Seal' (Ingmar Bergman)
'Elephant' (Gus van Sant)
'Escape from Alcatraz' (Don Siegel)
'United 93' (Paul Greengrass)
'The Lives of Others' (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck)
'The French Connection' (William Freidkin)
'Rome, Open City' (Roberto Rossellini)
'Saturday Night Fever' (John Badham)
'Source Code' (Duncan Jones)
'Brassed Off' (Mark Herman)
'Paths of Glory' (Stanley Kubrick)
'Mirror' (Andrei Tarkovsky)
'Carrie' (Brian DePalma)
'Scanners' (David Cronenberg)
'Breathless' (Jean-Luc Godard)
'Barfly' (Barbet Schroeder)


Books Read -

Henry Miller - 'Tropic of Cancer'
Sigmund Freud - 'The Freud Reader' (edited by Peter Gay)
Franz Kafka - 'The Trial'
Ernesto 'Che' Guevara - 'The Motorcycle Diaries'
Charles Bukowski - 'You get so alone at times that it just makes sense' (poetry)
Vladimir Nabakov - 'Lolita'

Albums been playing -

Explosions in the Sky - 'Take Care, Take Care, Take Care'
Lykke Li - 'Wounded Rhymes'
Tame Impala - 'Innerspeaker'
Deerhunter - 'Halcyon Digest'
Friendly Fires - 'Friendly Fires'
Eluvium - 'Talk Amongst the Trees'
Can - 'Tago Mago'
Can - 'Landed'
Captain Beefheart & his Magic Band - 'Safe as Milk'
Igor Stravinsky - 'The Firebird Suite'
Goldie - 'Timeless'
Jon Hopkins - 'Contact Note'
Gyorgy Ligeti - Ligeti Project Vol. II'
Gram Parsons & The Flying Burrito Brothers - 'The Gilded Palace of Sin'

Culture - March

Films Watched -

'The Pianist' (Roman Polanski)
'Gangs of New York' (Martin Scorsese)
'Thelma & Louise' (Ridley Scott)
'Severance' (Christopher Smith)
'A Beautiful Mind' (Ron Howard)
'A Bronx Tale' (Robert De Niro)
'The Battleship Potemkin' (Sergei Eisenstein)
'An Inconvenient Truth' (Davis Guggenheim)
'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari' (Robert Weine)

Books Read -

Charles Bukowski - 'The Most Beautiful Woman in Town (and other stories)'
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - 'The Double'
William Golding - 'Lord of the Flies'
James Joyce - 'Dubliners'
Thomas Hardy - 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles'

Albums been playing -

Radiohead - 'The King of Limbs'
Elbow - 'Build a Rocket Boys!'
Beady Eye - 'Different Gear, Still Speeding'
The Brian Jonestown Massacre - 'Tepid Peppermint Wonderland'
Can - 'Ege Bamyasi'
Can - 'Future Days'
David Bowie - 'Low'
Esben and the Witch - 'Violet Cries'
Jon Hopkins - 'Insides'
Kraftwerk - 'Electric Cafe'
Kraftwerk - 'Radio-Activity'
Mogwai - 'Hardcore will never die, but you will'
Skinny Puppy - 'Singles Collection'
Spacemen 3 - 'Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs to'

....

Life: I drink to it and because of it.

The Question of Insanity

Increasingly I catch myself ruminating on the nature of my own mind, my very presence in this waking reality. Sometimes my conscious will have so entirely detached itself from my surroundings that it takes an act of will to wrench it back into some kind of focus. Almost as if I have torn apart the flimsy fabric of reality upon which we all project our daily thoughts and lives.

The way I see it, this fabric is stretched too thin across all our perceptions, it can’t take an inconceivable amount of effort to be able to punch right through and into something entirely different, gazing through a diffracted lens that might throw out the colours to paint reality anew.

And so I ponder the question of insanity. How can the essence of madness be defined in any logical or reasonable way I often wonder. Surely to get close to a definition we have to be able to assume that society and civilization as we know it represents some kind of sanity, or human consciousness enshrined in normality. But this can also be cast into considerable doubt. I have slowly begun to realise that madness is all relative to perception, unique in each and every instance.

Is the man who all of a sudden snaps and takes a gun to shoot up the town any more insane than the man who just sits tight and lets the world play him for a fool day after day? Being able to gauge a true impression on mental instability is all a matter of reassessing existing impressions and prejudices; attempting to recapitulate madness into mundane routine. Real insanity is everywhere you look, a fresh salience of vision is all that’s required.

True insanity is waking up, rubbing the sleep from morning eyes and setting out to work at a job that chips away a little piece of your resilience with every hour that ticks by. Like ocean waves striking and retreating from the cliff face, there is no let up, no release. No release from the constant grief and jealousy and stress and humiliation. The only thing that gets you through it is the knowledge that someone somewhere has fallen victim to this ritual erosion whilst your mind has remained strong and untapped for the duration of another day.

Real insanity is placing our lives in the hands of men who went mad with their own influence and self-importance long ago. We conspire to the positioning of men into the status and high office from which they wield power over us day and night. Belief in a free society and the existence of real democracy is as good a sign of insanity as any – to honestly invest hope that the figureheads of our government would do all they can to enshrine justice and democratic transparency is a delusion of the gravest kind.

Grand madness is devoting your life to an almighty god, praying that you may enter his kingdom of heaven; a place god would have abandoned in disgust and disappointment long ago if only he could be trusted to exist.

Madness is eliciting the sympathies and confidences of others, in approaching strangers with smiles, in greeting relatives, in seeking refuge.

To covet material possessions and adorn oneself with exclusive branded plumage, these are surely the obsessions of lunatics.

Insanity is taking up arms in anger and revenge, in ignoring tragedy like a minor oversight, in doubting the bile and wretched potential of associates.

Insanity is auctioning off the state bit by bit like vital organs in a hospital jumble sale; to allow prisons, schools and forests to be melted down into franchises, swallowed up by conglomerations and drained of all noble intent.

Insanity is the oceans of blood and tsunami of pain from millennia teeming with man’s fight against man. Hate provoked by race, sex, religion blooms only in the minds of the deranged.

Madness is child-rearing on a planet of billions.

Madness is destruction in a world of beauty.

Madness is fanaticism and addiction, dreams of flight and unjustified wealth.

Madness is the highway divide between casino and slum.

Madness is giving yourself up for love, surrendering yourself to tradition, isolating yourself from passion.

Insanity is money. Money is the straitjacket by which all men are restrained. The very nature of society decrees that the jacket be bound tighter for some than others, and still tighter for others, until the jacket is too tight to give life real worth. For a minority the shackles of the straitjacket are loose enough to allow free movement, and in turn this allows the controlled suppression of the majority. A myriad of lives are spent in the futile endeavour of wriggling and squirming those shackles loose. But at the end of the day we are all just bound by the same lunacy of money, the ecstasy of gold.

Insanity is a life lived in strict order, followed to the letter of habit, grazing through fads and fashions, always glancing back over one shoulder, a slave to regret, a victim of discontent, a casualty of violent ennui. The monotony of routine and technology-induced apathy is the padded cell within which we are confined. Breaking through the parameters of these imposed walls requires a denial of needs, desires and responsibilities, heralding in the perfect revolt to liberate one’s own mind.

Insanity is not something we risk descending into; it’s what we need to ascend from.