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Pride of Lions

“Storms are, by nature, and among other things, scary, awesome, chaotic, terrible and beautiful all at the same time. My personal theory is that you cannot look at a storm brewing and not feel anything stirring in your gut. Likewise, in going through an art gallery, the masterpieces that have stopping power are not unlike [...]

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Starship Sofa review of “Assam & Darjeeling”

Over at Starship Sofa, they're running Julie Davis' very kind review of "Assam & Darjeeling" in their latest podcast. Squeee.

Briefly...

• I tend to think that what fame has done is to replace the sea as the element of choice of adventure for young people. If you were a dashing young man in the 19th century you would probably have wanted to run away to sea, just as in the 20th century you might decide that you want to runaway and form a pop band. The difference is that in the 19th century, before running away to sea, you would have had at least some understanding of the element that you were dealing with and would have perhaps, say, learned to swim. The thing is that there is no manual for how to cope with fame. So you’ll get some, otherwise likeable young person, who has done one good comic book, one good film, one good record, suddenly told that they are a genius, who believes it and who runs out laughing and splashing into the billows of celebrity, and whose heroin-sodden corpse is washed up a few weeks later in the shallows of the tabloids. —Alan Moore
• “In solitude I used to wander about the garden, alternately collecting birds’ eggs and meditating on the flight of time. If I may judge by my own recollections, the important and formative impressions of childhood rise to consciousness only in fugitive moments in the midst of childish occupations, and are never mentioned to adults. I think periods of browsing during which no occupation is imposed from without are important in youth because they give time for the formation of these apparently fugitive but really vital impressions.” -- Bertrand Russell
• “To have the management of the mind is a great art, and it may be attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise…Let him take a course of chymistry, or a course of rope-dance, or a course of any thing to which he is inclined at the time. Let him contrive to have as many retreats for his mind as he can, as many things to which it can fly from itself.” -- Samuel Johnson
• “Once you have established a belief, the phenomenon adjusts its manifestations to support that belief and thereby escalate it.” -- John Keel
• “When the Lord finished the world, he pronounced it good. That is what I said about my first work, too. But Time, I tell you, Time takes the confidence out of these incautious opinions. It is more than likely that He thinks about the world, now, pretty much as I think about the Innocents Abroad. The fact is, there is a trifle too much water in both.” -- Mark Twain