hum

It reminded me of an interview I read with Leonard Cohen a good few years ago, in which he talked about the time he had spent at a Buddhist retreat on Mount Baldy. I looked it up earlier this week: “During the day, you hear bells and they tell you to go somewhere - that’s the nature of those places. They are kind of hospitals for the broken-hearted and for people who have forgotten how to walk and talk,” he said. Later, he explained the appeal of zen meditation: “After a while, the activity of thinking, that interior chatter, begins to subside from time to time. And what rushes in, in the same way that light rushes into a room when you switch on the light, is another kind of mood that overtakes you.”

Laura Barton
Hail, Hail, Rock ‘n’ Roll

It is now to be a criminal offence in Italy for men to touch their own balls in public.

Alexander Chancellor
I Don’t Need (…)

My father, who died recently, used to wear a hat in the 50s and 60s, and he would only buy a car that he could fit in with his hat on. His first car was a VW Beetle. My father could have fitted in a Prius.

Anton Corbijn
Me And My Prius

Foie Gras Entier

A philosophical conversion seemed to save him. James read the works of the French philosopher Charles-Bernard Renouvier and found it an unusual solution to the problems posed by determinism. Renouvier argues that free will consists in “the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts.” One might not be able to choose which thoughts come into the mind, but an act of will can focus the mind on some thoughts at the expense of others, thoughts which then determine action.

My life has been like a fairytale … Edith Piaf was my fairy godmother, Walt Disney was the genie and my Aladdin’s cave was the Vanguard recording studios in New York.

Jean-Jacques Perrey
The Godfather Of Techno

“With Keira, I just tell her every now and then not to pout and she’s wonderful.”

Joe Wright

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.

Karl Marx
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte