Chimerical colors (from Wikipedia)
(click for larger)
The Chimera Eye
Category Archives: Aesthetics
Rock & Rule
(Image by David Kelso-Mitchell 2023)
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Tête avec Texte
Above you can see the Peacock on a Platter, or Robert de Montesquiou posing as the severed head of John the Baptist and flanked by relevant lines of his own poetry. But there’s a better version of the poetry, as you can see by comparing the photo with this:
J’aime le jade,
Couleur des yeux
D’HérodiadeEt l’améthyste,
Couleur du sang
De Jean-Baptiste. — from “Robert de Montesquiou: The Magnificent Dandy” (1962) by Cornelia Otis Skinner
I love jade,
Color of the eyes
Of HerodiasAnd amethyst,
Color of the blood
Of John the Baptist.
Elsewhere Other-Accessible…
• Portrait of a Peacock — Cornelia Otis Skinner’s excellent essay on Montesquiou
• Le Paon dans les Pyrénées — review of Julian Barnes’ not-so-good book partly about Montesquiou
Straight to Shell
Ernst Haeckel’s “Prosobranchia” from Kunstformen der Natur (1904), or Artforms in Nature
I Say, I Sigh, I Sow #14
“In a very real sense, the Holocaust, as the ultimate moral and aesthetic obscenity, was also the ultimate drum-solo.” — Simon Whitechapel, 31i18
Pavonique
Twin-peacock lamp at the V&A by René Lalique (1860-1945)
Twin-peacock lamp by Lalique (alternative view)
Elsewhere other-accessible…
• Nou’s Who — a review of Art Nouveau by Camilla de la Bedoyere
Bash the Trash
From George Orwell’s “As I Please” for 11th February 1944, Tribune:
THE FOLLOWING lines are quoted in Anthony Trollope’s Autobiography:
When Payne-Knight’s Taste was issued on the town
A few Greek verses in the text set down
Were torn to pieces, mangled into hash,
Hurled to the flames as execrable trash;
In short, were butchered rather than dissected
And several false quantities detected;
Till, when the smoke had risen from the cinders
It was discovered that — the lines were Pindar’s!
Trollope does not make clear who is the author of these lines, and I should be very glad if any reader could let me know. But I also quote them for their own sake — that is, for the terrible warning to literary critics that they contain — and for the sake of drawing attention to Trollope’s Autobiography, which is a most fascinating book, although or because it is largely concerned with money.
Elsewhere Other-Accessible…
• Pindar (c. 518-438 BC) at Wikipedia
• An Analytical Inquiry Into the Principles of Taste (1806) by Richard Payne-Knight at Archive.org
• An Autobiography and Other Writings (1869) by Anthony Trollope at Gutenberg
Monetomania
« La couleur est mon obsession quotidienne, ma joie et mon torment. » — Claude Monet (1840-1926)
“Color is my day-long obsession, my joy and my torment.” — Claude Monet
The Flight Album
Slow Exploding Gulls have always been one of my favorite bands and Yr Wylan Ddu (1996) is one of my favorite albums by these Exeter esotericists. The cover is one of their best too:
Yr Wylan Ddu (1996) by Slow Exploding Gulls
Yr Wylan Ddu is Welsh for “The Black Gull”. But it’s become a white gull to celebrate the album’s twenty-fifth anniversary:
Yr Wylan Ddu (2021 re-issue)
Elsewhere other-accessible
• Mental Marine Music — an introduction to Slow Exploding Gulls
• Slow Exploding Gulls at Bandcamp
• Gull-SEG — the oldest and best Slow-Exploding-Gulls fan-site
El Sabor de Salvador
“Más es menos” is Spanish for “more is less”. And you can certainly see “más es menos” at work in the paintings of that greatest of Spaniards, Salvador Dalí. The more technically skilled and detailed his art became, the less powerful and interesting it was. Compare Sleep, from 1937…
Le Sommeil (Sleep), 1937
…with Still Life — Fast Moving from 1956:
Still Life — Fast Moving,1956
Overlord In Terms of Core Issues Around Maximal Engagement with Key Notions of the Über-Feral 