November 2011
1 post
August 2011
2 posts
the beautiful and the ugly
the beautiful and the ugly, in Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty
“For a man, there is nothing more depressing than the ugliness of a woman,” so writes the aptly titled “metaphysician of evil”, Georges Bataille.
Bataille suggests the bleakness of ugliness; its lack of any opportunity for sacrifice, or occasion to pollute. Beauty, on the other hand, is abundant. Beauty gives rise to desire for...
For Marie Curie
In 1929, Adrienne Rich wrote a poem about the great Marie Curie, proclaiming the dichotomy of her existence. Rich writes of a body that was slowly being bombarded by the very element she had purified. She reflects on Curie’s resolute denial of her wounds, “the cataracts on her eyes,” the frightening truth, that the cause for her steady demise was born in the same source as her power.
Eighty...
July 2011
1 post
My friends are all made of stars
ASHLEY
I met Ashley when I was 13. She was cool. I wasn’t. She did things like smoke in the toilets, smoke at the train station and smoke at parties on the weekend. It was almost insane how much she smoked. She had long, glossy hair and eyebrows with their own personality. Her school uniform was always shorter than mine. Actually, that was the weirdest thing, because I was at least a foot...
June 2011
1 post
We all need a Plan B.
Harold Camping was convinced that on the 21st of May 2011, the world was going to end. There would be a series of devastating earthquakes heralding the ‘Rapture,’ when faithful Christians would ascend to heaven before the second coming of Christ. Seemingly digressing from what I’ve always assumed to be the very foundation of Christianity, that plan B is, in fact, the afterlife,...
May 2011
1 post
Eric
My grandmother collapsed on our staircase. Her body rousing with grief. Hopeless, endless grief. Tears that she couldn’t breathe through. Crying, that rattled the bones of our house. Humming that I still hear. In her pink dressing gown, pilled by the years, she looked smaller than she’d ever seemed. She looked like a child.
That night, death swarmed around us.
We lost my...
April 2011
1 post
Snow.
In October 2010, I had my heart broken. I remember the words, the weather outside, what I was wearing (his t-shirt) and the way it made me feel (empty). I remember that he couldn’t look at me, when his voice cracked in the middle as he said he didn’t love me anymore. I remember our fight the night before, coming home to him passed-out cold, in some weed and booze induced coma. I remember...
February 2011
1 post
A look at Homer's Odyssey as an ode to waiting...
Am I in love? —yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.
-Roland...
December 2010
1 post
November 2010
4 posts
The female body as spatial
In many of the fictions of the Marquis De Sade, there are rooms and antechambers to which we do not have access; spaces in which predominantly women, are both enjoyed and destroyed. For Sigmund Freud, rooms are themselves feminine spaces, noting that the polite German expression, “Frauenzimmer”, used to denote woman, or rather, lady; literally translates to “woman’s room”. In the symbolic...
Eternal Summer
A few moons ago, I was fortunate enough to live with two young lovers in Barcelona. She was Spanish, he Australian. After meeting in a brief chance encounter, the pair had found soul mates in each other, albeit, at opposite ends of the earth. Together we spent many boozy, balmy nights in a haze of sangria, paella and flamenco music, basking amidst white washed buildings for days that went...
The link between masturbation and staring
Let’s consider this. If the gaze is the “erection of the eye,” then staring, when exercised with vigor and intent, is pretty much like masturbating. Both are voluntary activities, considered taboo outside the home, and recur most often in the under-sexed population. No-one likes a chronic masturbator; because, funnily enough, they’re like starers. You never know what goes through their perverse...
March 2010
6 posts
Irish pub art installation getting Canadians... →
90% of the hipsters you see at exhibition openings nowadays are there for the free booze. Everyone knows it, but no-one mentions it. Art is merely the white elephant in the room, something that’s there to make an early-evening piss-up more awkward than it should be. Here’s the drill. You walk in, you normally wear Vans, (or anything from Espionage or Carhartt is also acceptable),...
The Facehunter
Owning and displaying an assortment of coffee table books in your house immediately takes you up a notch on the social scale. The trend of the coffee table book has made otherwise boring people appear culturally aware, stylish, and modern. I would even go so far as to say that when entertaining a prospective lover in your home, your chance of getting laid is significantly increased if said guest...
November 2009
23 posts
John Cage
The name for my blog, “no why, just here” is inspired by what the master philosopher, poet, composer and artist John Cage said when asked to consider the meaning of life.
Most influential was Cage’s work 4’33”, a composition he created in 1952, a piece of music where not a single note is played. When this is performed in an auditorium full of people, what becomes...
a little somethin...
“it will be made clear to you in a stray gesture, the line of a throat, something in the hands. There may or may not be music playing, but there will be a certain velocity of the spirit, a sensation of dropping through clear space unimpeded and you will think, this is the one, i found you.”