Black Forest/Black Sea – “These Things”
Forcefields And Constellations
It’s a strange and noisy album, but sounds cohesive in that every track is something that could only come from Black Forest/Black Sea. Often the highest points of more traditional styles of music approach the quality of the best tracks from more popular or ancient bands like the Beatles or Pink Floyd. But it’s nice to have bands that, when they do something perfectly, you think “man, that is so… them.”
Of passions strong, of hasty nature,
Of graceless form and dwarfish stature;
By few approved, and few approving;
Extreme in hating and in loving;
Abhorring all whom I dislike,
Adoring who my fancy strike;
In forming judgments never long,
And for the most part judging wrong;
In friendship firm, but still believing
Others are treacherous and deceiving,
And thinking in the present æra
That friendship is a pure chimæra:
More passionate no creature living,
Proud, obstinate, and unforgiving,
But yet for those who kindness show,
Ready through fire and smoke to go.
Clarendon specimen
A nun did eat a lettuce without grace or signing it with the sign of the cross, and was instantly possessed. Durand, lib. 6 Rational. cap. 86, num. 8, relates that he saw a wench possessed in Bononia with two devils, by eating an unhallowed pomegranate.
24-hour “planet” shot, Temple of Poseidon, Greece (Chris Kotsiopoulos)
The Cubists – “The Orchestra Breathes”
Mechanical Advantage
There’s something soft and effervescent about this song, like it’s reaching you through a layer of drugs and water.
Cornelius Gemma, lib. 2 de nat. mirac. cap. 4, related of a young maid, called Katherine Gualter, a cooper’s daughter, anno 1571, that had such strange passions and convulsions, three men could not sometimes hold her; she purged a live eel, which he saw, a foot and a half long, and touched himself; but the eel afterwards vanished; she vomited some twenty-four pounds of fulsome stuff of all colours, twice a day for fourteen days; and after that she voided great balls of hair, pieces of wood, pigeon’s dung, parchment, goose dung, coals; and after them two pound of pure blood, and then again colas and stones, of which some had inscriptions, bigger than a walnut, some of them pieces of glass, brass, etc., besides paroxysms of laughing, weeping and ecstasies, etc. Et hoc (inquit) cum horrore vidi, “this I saw with horror.” They could do no good on her by physic, but left her to the clergy.
Caslon Specimen, 1728
