Timing. It's everything.

Convergence. Divergence.

All.

Nothing.

Golden, soul-filling, splendour.

I could have missed it. But I didn't. And I'm glad.

and of apathy

Sometimes things appear that don't make any sense and are impressive all the same. I bought half a dozen farm fresh eggs. The guy behind the counter put my eggs in a container with a nest of shredded paper. When I opened the box, this one shred fell out on the bench. And I liked it. I liked the simplicity of those three words. I wondered what the first part of the quote was. I thought about the concept of apathy. Even just saying the word aloud has a sense of deflation about it. 

Looking at definitions of apathy, there seems to be a few ways of looking at it which range to fairly bland descriptions of a lack of emotion and passion through to apathy being up there with all that is evil, with one definition describing apathy and evil as two sides to the one coin. Evil wills it. Apathy allows it. Evil hates the innocent and the defenseless most of all. Apathy doesn't care as long as it is not personally inconvenienced. Seen in this light, apathy takes on a rather dark cloak. Other views have apathy as a consequence of helplessness at the hands of a greater power or in the face of a course of events over which we have no control. I leave the last word to American novelist, John Dos Passos, one of the Lost generation writers who came of age during World War I: 

Apathy is one of the characteristic responses of any living organism when it is subjected to stimuli too intense or too complicated to cope with. The cure for apathy is comprehension.

mothershucker's oyster hour

Strange Sunday evening. Dark clouds gathering. Big fat spots of rain on the windscreen. The perfect evening to be sitting on the third floor of a grand old building on Smith Street in Collingwood looking out through the large arched windows eating fresh Pacific oysters from the shell and drinking beautiful chablis. Fancy. $1 oysters...who can go wrong. Well, actually a lot could go wrong with $1 oysters but nothing did because this is The Panama Dining Room and they were perfect. 

10 people, 64 oysters, a few drinks, nice.

Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds

Tulpenmanie is how the Dutch refer to the period in the Dutch Golden Age just after the tulip was introduced to Holland. The tulip was different to any other flower known in Europe at the time with its saturated intense petal colour and everyone wanted in on it. At the height of tulip mania, some single bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman.

This communal frenzy for a flower resulted in what has come to be considered the first recorded speculative, or economic bubble. Prices reached extraordinary heights and then collapsed. This rapid rise and fall is difficult for economists to explain and assessment of this period continues with controversial theories being put forward and arguments hotly debated.

* The title of this post refers to the 1841book by Scottish journalist Charles Mckay in which he outlines the folly that takes hold of the collective consciousness of a people in the face of economic, philosophical and social trends.

crystalised

what does their name mean? chromosomes? kisses? legend has it the members of the band just liked the way the double x looked on the screen.

seeing the xx live, i was nervous. i love their music. how would they be live?  

festival hall in west melbourne. a 'concert and sporting venue'. it was known as the original house of rock and roll and has apparently hosted some pretty rocked out nights. how would the xx fill this big, dirty space?

enigmatic, ghostly music. thoughtful reflections on love mostly.and heartbreak. that's what most musicians sing about, i guess, but somehow the xx make it different.

they did fill the space, and mesmerize the people and their voices were even better live than on cd.

as I gazed around the warehouse space, there were a lot of people nodding, like a collective agreement, yes, this is good.