physlife

[physlife]

The progressive metal band Cynic have uploaded their 3rd studio album in its entirety! The album was released on the 14th of February 2014. The current line-up of the band includes Sean Reinert on drums (also is/was a part of Death, Gordian Knot, Aghora and Æon Spoke), Sean Malone on bass (Gordian Knot, Aghora) and Paul Masvidal providing the vocals and guitars (Death, Gordian Knot and Æon Spoke).

Reinert had this to say prior to its release: “It’s a bold new sound for Cynic and marks a gigantic leap in the band’s progression. We’ve had a lot of time to let this material develop and gestate, and it finally feels ready to be unleashed on the world. I’ve been in trio mode with Malone and Masvidal flushing out a zillion and one details, and couldn’t be happier about what’s happening with these songs. They are truly alive!”

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“I wouldn’t be the person I am, I wouldn’t understand what I understand, were it not for certain books. I’m thinking of the great question of nineteenth-century Russian literature: how should one live? A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.”

—Susan Sontag, born today in 1933.

[physlife]

Clint Mansell and Park Chan-Wook!

[physlife]

“Some of the one-paragraph stories I wrote before the novel took weeks of revision. I’d go mad with concern over semicolons. Conjunctions ruined my sleep. I wanted no needless sound in my sentences. I hated to use adverbs because of the ‘ly

’ endings. They seemed like sloopy trailers. They made the sense mushy and weak and artificial. I didn’t want to mean anything beyond what could inhere in the particular limited aural sensation. Idea and sound had to be exactly the same length, or the same density, as if a word could be flesh. That used to be my idea of real writing. Sculptural.” —Leonard Michaels Read more of our lost interview with the American writer here.

[physlife]

Anathema live for Spanish Radio 3

British band Anathema’s complete 30 minute set for Spanish Radio 3. They performed Untouchable Part 1 and 2, Thin Air, Dreaming Light and Closer.

[physlife]

Always stay true to yourself. (via Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York blog)

[physlife]

Address Is Approximate (by The Theory)

A wonderful stop motion animation created around google street view. A "lonely desk toy" takes a trip...

[physlife]

A Jules Renard quotation on a Himank BRO sign board in the Nubra Valley, Ladakh, Northern India.

Ladakh is a region located toward the northern edge of India. It spans the Himalayan and Karakoram mountain ranges.

[physlife]

Amélie

(Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain)

[physlife]

“I took little snippets of text and ideas from some of my favorite authors, and let the words be a springboard for an illustration. The illustrations incorporate and interact with the text and hopefully add up to something that engages the mind as much as the eye.”

[physlife]

“If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind.”

Happy birthday, Mr. Bukowski.

[physlife]

The trippiest films of all time 

[physlife]

Back when the English language was still young and impressionable, a London-born physician who took up the pen as a gentleman’s hobby made quite a dent, fathering a dictionary page’s worth of words we still use and tend to think of as ageless—“medical,” “suicide,” “exhaustion,” “hallucination” and “coma” among them.

The handful of books and tracts in which these words first appeared was even more remarkable than the coinages, a body of work as strange and unclassifiable as any in English literature.

That this doctor’s name—Thomas Browne—no longer keeps company, at least in America, with those of Shakespeare, Chaucer and other architects of the language would have come as a great disappointment to a multitude of other authors who revered Browne and passed his writings along, generation to generation, like a kind of formula for the philosopher’s stone.

—Reviving Sir Thomas Browne.

[physlife]

Steven Wilson - Luminol (Live From Mexico City)

This track was taken from Steven Wilson's Grace for Drowning tour. It has not been released as part of a studio album yet (It will feature on his upcoming, third solo album). This video was recorded in Mexico city earlier this year and will be part of his new live blu-ray Get All You Deserve.

[physlife]

Work And Boredom: Looking for work in order to be paid: in civilized countries today almost all men are at one in doing that. For all of them work is a means and not an end in itself. Hence they are not very refined in their choice of work, if only it pays well. But there are, if only rarely, men who would rather perish than work without any pleasure in their work. They are choosy, hard to satisfy, and do not care for ample rewards, if the work itself is not the reward of rewards. Artists and contemplative men of all kinds belong to this rare breed, but so do even those men of leisure who spend their lives hunting, traveling, or in love affairs and adventures. All of these desire work and misery if only it is associated with pleasure, and the hardest, most difficult work if necessary. Otherwise, their idleness is resolute, even if it spells impoverishment, dishonor, and danger to life and limb. They do not fear boredom as much as work without pleasure; they actually require a lot of boredom if their work is to succeed. For thinkers and all sensitive spirits, boredom is that disagreeable "windless calm" of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds. They have to bear it and must wait for its effect on them. Precisely this is what lesser natures cannot achieve by any means. To ward off boredom at any cost is vulgar, no less than work without pleasure. Perhaps Asians are distinguished above Europeans by a capacity for longer, deeper calm; even their opiates have a slow effect and require patience, as opposed to the disgusting suddenness of the European poison, alcohol.

Friedrich Nietzsche in Section 42 of The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882, trans. W.Kaufmann)

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For me, you only had the right to die when you had a good tale to tell. To enter in, you tell your story and pass on. That's what "Death on the Installment Plan" is, symbolically, the reward of life being death.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline in an interview with the Paris Review

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We are the victims of our own superiority. My music is beautiful, but when music passes from sensation to idea, it can have listeners only among people of genius, for they alone have the power to develop its meaning. My misfortune comes from listening to the music of angels and from believing that human beings could understand it. The same is true of women when their love assumes divine forms--men no longer understand them.

Gambara (a composer) in Honoré de Balzac's short story Gambara (1837).