07 1 / 2013
“I travel a lot. I’ve seen more world capitals than I can count. Each one has its own character. No two alike. Paris, for example, is detestable. Toronto, on the other hand, is rather manageable. They have trolleys. Also the lake. You can always figure out where you are in Toronto. London is civil. That’s worth a lot. Torkyo is servile on the outside and hostile on the inside. Bangkok is harried. The place has been destroyed by automobiles. Stockholm … Stockholm is strangely unsettling.
“Two odd things happened to me in Stockholm. First, I met my sister’s son there. It was a chance meeting on the street. A bit of a shock for both of us, the unexpectedness of it. He had deserted the army during the Vietnam war and landed in Sweden. It seems that he renounced his citizenship in a moment of political passion, so now he is stateless. Stuck in Sweden. He hates the winters.
“The other strange event was like a bad dream. Decidedly unsettling. I had spent much of the night trying to get to sleep and was woken abruptly in the gray of dawn by a thunderous rattle and the beating of wings. I thought I was in another nightmare. I discovered, however, that it was a seagull. I had left a carton of milk on the hotel window ledge and this starving bird was attacking it. I don’t know if he actually drank the milk, but he made a terrible racket and a mess of the carton.
“Stockholm is filled with these birds. I won’t go back there. If I can help it.”
—Stephen Minot, “Reading the News—Keeping Informed”
Art Credit Mark Catesby and George Edwards, The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands
23 12 / 2012
Dol Guldor, Sauron’s Mirkwood Stronghold
by Andrew Ryan
07 12 / 2012
14 11 / 2012
Ophelia | John Everett Millais (1852) — Ophelia | Silvia Camporesi (2004) — Melancholia| Lars Von Trier (2011)
Perhaps one of the most reinterpreted paintings of all time, Sir John Everett Millais illustrates the previous instant to the death of Ophelia, narrated in act IV, scene 7 of Hamlet.
Her clothes spread wide, And mermaid-like a while they bore her up, Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds as one incapable of her own distress, or like a creature native and induced upon that element.
(Source: unproduitdeconsommation)
13 11 / 2012
Micro Art by Willard Wigar - all within an eye of a needle
13 11 / 2012
Abraham Manievich (Russian, 1883-1942), Winter Scene with Church, 1911. Oil on canvas, 72 x 67 cm.
(via r-mutts)
17 10 / 2012
Wow. This picture looks a lot sappier than I thought it was now that I’m done. Adventure Time, why u make me sad? I totally should be doing homework, what the hell am I doing.
The Ice King reminds me of my grandma before she died. She got all crazy and couldn’t remember things or what she was doing.
15 10 / 2012
Word Portraits by John Sokol
1. Dante Alighieri’s Inferno
2. James Joyce’s Ulysses
3. Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle
4. Ezra Pound’s The Cantos
(Source: fer1972)
09 10 / 2012
Claude Monet - Poplars on the Epte (1891)
This is a work from Monet’s celebrated series of poplar paintings made between the spring and autumn of 1891, the year after he had settled in Giverny. He used a boat as a floating studio and captured beautifully the shimmering effects of sunlight on water. The trees were ready to be sold for timber, but Monet, in partnership with a timber merchant, bought the trees at auction so that he could continue painting them.
(Source: slowartday, via catsandcrows)
31 8 / 2012
“Before his eyes a kaleidoscopic range of phantasmal images played, all of them dissolving at intervals into the picture of a vast, unplumbed abyss of night wherein whirled suns and worlds of an even profounder blackness. He thought of the ancient legends of Ultimate Chaos, at whose centre sprawls the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things, encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a daemoniac flute held in nameless paws.”
~ H.P. Lovecraft, The Haunter of the Dark
