Waiting for Godot

April 13, 1906—December 22, 1989

—Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful.

—We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?

—We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener.

—Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for one the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us! What do you say? It is true that when with folded arms we weigh the pros and cons we are no less a credit to our species. The tiger bounds to the help of his congeners without the least reflexion, or else he slinks away into the depths of the thickets. But that is not the question. What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in the immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come.  —Samuel Beckett

Totem Transport by Arc De Soleil

Sonnet XLII —Edna St. Vincent Millay

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,

I have forgotten, and what arms have lain

Under my head till morning; but the rain

Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh

Upon the glass and listen for reply,

And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

For unremembered lads that not again

Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,

Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,

Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:

I cannot say what loves have come and gone,

I only know that summer sang in me

A little while, that in me sings no more.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, February 22, 1892 — October 19, 1950

Pablo Picasso 1881-1973

The Imploring 1937

Faun's head 1938

Head 1938

 

Self-portrait 1907

Manolo (Manuel Martinez Hugué), ask Picasso in front of one of his own pictures: "And what would you say if your parents turned up to meet you on the station at Barcelona with faces like that?"

Pablo Ruiz Picasso, October 25, 1881 – April 8, 1973

The Twilight Samurai - Learning to Think

Yoji Yamada Samurai Series

たそがれ清兵衛 The Twilight Samurai

by 山田 洋次 Yoji Yamada, 2002

隠し剣 鬼の爪 The Hidden Blade

by 山田 洋次 Yoji Yamada, 2004

武士の一分 Love and Honor 

by 山田 洋次 Yoji Yamada, 2006

The Twilight Samurai was nominated in the Best Foreign Language Film category. The first part of a trilogy followed by The Hidden Blade and Love And Honor. It was seen as a strong contender to win the Best Foreign Language Film, but missed out on the famous gold statue to Denys Arcand’s Canadian-French drama, The Barbarian Invasions. Once again, The Academy Awards was a snob.

Yôji Yamada 山田 洋次, September 13, 1931. Happy 86th Birthday! 

Lives of Girls and Women

"What good is it if you read Plato and never clean your toilet? asked my mother, reverting to the values of Jubilee." —Lives of Girls and Women, Alice Munro

Alice Ann Munro, July 10, 1931, is a Canadian short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Happy 86th Birthday! 

Heart of Darkness

I must admit I have never read any of Joseph Conrad's books, but I think of him of these terms, human condition, existential loneliness, colonialism, racism, imperialism, pessimism, de-humanized, good and evil, light and darkness, Nietzsche…
It took me 20 years to gather my courage to watch Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now. But I will never brave enough to read Joseph Conrad's Hearts of Darkness. I know T. E. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, Alfred Hitchcock, William Faulkner, Bob Dylan… and just about almost everybody love him, but I just simply can't.
How things linked: Hearts of Darkness, 1899—Apocalypse Now, 1979—The End by Jim Morrison, 1967—Paris, 1971—Paris, 1977—me

scene from Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now

Jim Morrison's tomb in Paris