Gabriel Cornelius Ritter von Max (1840-1915)

The Anatomist - Der Anatom (1869)

Gustav-Adolf Mossa (1883-1971)

Tout le monde ne le connaît pas. Et c'est bien dommage. Un jour, il y a peu, je suis tombé sur ce tableau.

Here's someone who isn't so famous. Shame. One day, not so long ago, I stumbled across this painting.

J'ai eu un choc. Voilà quelqu'un qui a compris quelque chose à la nature humaine. Pas étonnant, me diraient certains. Mossa était un peintre (d'origine Niçoise) inscrit dans la mouvance symboliste, mais très influencé par Baudelaire, Huysmans, les Préraphaélites, Mallarmé, l'Art Nouveau entre autres. Ses peintures et ses écrits sont imprégnés de ses lectures et de sa vision assez lucide de l'art de son époque.
Voici un lien qui regroupe un nombre certain de ses oeuvres picturales.

I had a shock. Here was someone who understood something about human nature. This isn't surprising, some may tell me. Mossa was a French Symbolist painter from Nice who was clearly influenced by Baudelaire, Huysmans, the Preraphaelites, Mallarmé and by the Art Nouveau, amongst others. His paintings and writings are steeped in his reading and his quite lucid vision of the art of his time.
Here is a link which gathers a fair number of his paintings.

J'espère vraiment que vous aimerez ce peintre aux oeuvres mésestimées.
I really hope you'll like this painter and his undervalued masterpieces.

Radiohead/OK COmputer - 04 Exit Music (For a Film)

Hyperkundrium

It all started when I first put on a woollen hat in the middle of Summer. Dunno why – I just felt like it. Middle of June, but I'm losing my marbles. Could've been May.

Then I started pulling all of my grey hair from my eyebrows – they were bush-like. They mightn't have been all grey and perhaps I did pull one hair too many.

People started glaring at me, me who never had a single glance from anyone before. From the murky cranny of ignorance to the glaring blaring lights of onstage sympathy.

One day I felt like cutting my hair, they were neanderthal-like. And seeing how the clipper literally ate through the blackish mass felt exhilarating I had to shave my head.

It also coincided with me starting losing weight. I had stopped junk food first thing when I read in a magazine that there was so many cancer-prone things in it, then food altogether. Because you never know and then it was all so bland. Fruits and veggies tasted like water, meat had the consistency of rubber. The only thing that had taste left was soy milk. Boy I love soy milk. I used to drink gallons of soy milk a day.

Then I guess I thought I felt I became photosensitive. I shunned the sun and the day altogether and started living at night. So I had to have an ex-colleague of mine buy the soy milk and deliver it to me. I think she got scared shitless when she discovered the bags under my eyes. Or perhaps it was my face, she didn't say and I didn't have the opportunity to ask. But man, there's nothing like the night to soothe you, to take your time to listen to your own heartbeats and try and slow them down to a trickle.

Come to think of it, all of this must have happened during the same week or the following weeks. I lost track of time. Anyway.

People never said anything and I never said anything but I think they must have thought I had a cancer or something because they did look at me with pity in their eyes. It was kind of fun so I played along, just for a bit. And Good Lord Almighty it WAS fun. At least I got the attention I always wanted. People are way nicer when they see you dying – and even more so when they realise it's not contagious.

Eventually I had to take to my bed because my life was shit-like, dealing with joint pains and diarrheas and constipation and fever and delirium and blood transfusions and because of all the meds I started taking and I weigh now less than 40kg and doctors say I have acute and never-diagnosed-before and spontaneous forms of pancreatic cancer, leukaemia, lupus and lymphoma and something else but I forgot, all stemming from something they called hyperkundrium or something like that. Tomorrow, at best, I'll be dead.

 

"It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them."

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882) Poet, essayist and lecturer

 

What Really Irritates Me In Men, Women and Poodles, and Other Sartorial Considerations Very Late at Night - Part 2

Hey guys,

I know it's been a while and that it's only the second post in this series, but I hope the wait was worthwhile. Here comes:

What Really Irritates Me In Men, Women and Poodles, and Other Sartorial Considerations Very Late at Night - Part 2

I met a poodle the other day, at a relative's. I write 'met' because I was led to disbelieve that it was a normal dog and had a persona of its own. That she -  for it was a she - literally had a character quite peculiar to her and the tenacity of a dog on a bone. This one rather had a hangdog look, with lots of hair and an indecently long fringe covering its/her eyes. I was wondering how it/she made its way between people's legs without bumping into them. Fact is, it/she couldn't. Not all the time. But with eponymous dogged determination it - she, SHE - pursued calculating angles of approach at the last second and avoiding collision, not avoiding collision. Worst thing was that when someone just patted her on the head, she couldn't help herself and had to relieve the content of her bladder on the floor. So you could follow her path in the house by leaning at light's angle and spot the tiny, light-yellow droplets. Well, I guess my aunt was right, this...dog definitely has a character of her own.

Delicacies abound in our world.

I particularly distaste the people who do not smash their cigarette stubs underfoot. I always think they could save a few atoms of oxygen.

Pigeons that fly right above your head could drive me to buy a gun and start an aviary war.

People who go to Chinese restaurants and who obstinately try to eat with chopsticks and can't are mildly irritating. I'd rather see them skew the food rather than hold the chopsticks in each hand like pens or garden forks and take up the food from the plate from each side.

I have seen a few feathered birds wearing sunglasses inside a building or at night when there's only one streetlamp. Fashion never got so blind.

Lunches with old people who rant about the government and the immigrants and the social security and insecurity and blahblahblah and the state of their prostate and blood levels re-blahblahblah what can we do it's the ways of the youth and I really liked the old Franc system and Charles Martel could have done a better job re-re-blahblahblah I really like your napkins and the carrots were cooked to perfection and my uncle Robert had a glass eye and a wooden leg blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahblahblah the price of the petrol wasn't the same before the war - yes, the Gulf war - no, no, after World War II blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah really make my amygdala and angular gyrus go banana.I could throw a spider monkey at them. And those are helluva nasty bastards, 'scuse my French.

I now have a heartfelt antipathy against the men and women, girls, boys, brats, old badgers and cronies who don't care a whit when they see a wheelchair, in distress or not. Luckily, there are still nice people to help you push it. 

I wondered the other day if I hadn't become cantankerous before my time. 

You And Who's Army? - Radiohead

Hunting Bears - Radiohead

Like Spining Plates

10. I Will (No Man's Land)