Leonard Cohen used to gather the members of his band and road crew together 30 minutes before showtime, and encourage a group recitation of a very humble Latin verse, “Pauper sum ego, nihil habeo,” which means, “I am poor, I have nothing.”
That man is idle who can do something better.
A few days after winning the electoral college, the president-elect settled a class action against him, wherein 7,000 people sued him for fraud. These 7,000 individuals had paid up to $35,000 to learn at Trump University and, according to all of the 7,000 people, none came away with any tangible knowledge or benefit. After winning the election, the president-elect paid $25m to settle their claim. It has been reported that most of the plaintiffs will receive about half of what they lost.
We are in a time of extraordinary relativism, when the incoming president was sued for fraud by 7,000 different people and this was not seen as a disqualifying fact. The president-elect was accused of defrauding thousands of their life savings, and now, across from the White House, we’re building a structure wherein he can watch a parade in his honour.
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
[…] this was all a prelude to Backster’s real life’s work, which began in the early morning hours of Feb. 2, 1966. Backster had been up all night in his office on West 46th Street and had just poured himself a cup of coffee when he noticed a houseplant, a Dracaena fragrans his secretary bought to brighten the office. On a lark, Backster, who had a playful streak that belied his military background (he studied astrology, dabbled with LSD and supposedly spent a summer as a stunt diver in a circus), decided to hook the plant up to his lie-detection machine.
In human subjects, a polygraph measures three things: pulse, respiration rate and galvanic skin response, otherwise known as perspiration. If you’re worried about being caught in a lie, your levels will spike or dip. Backster wanted to induce a similar anxiety in the plant, so he decided to set one of its leaves on fire. But before he could even get a match, the polygraph registered an intense reaction on the part of the Dracaena. To Backster, the implication was as indisputable as it was unbelievable. Not only had the plant demonstrated fear — it had also read his mind.
In the dark street light
of Hornsey Lane Bridge
(aka Suicide Bridge)
a boy sits quietly
on the pavement
I tell the police
1/2 an hour later
in the bright lights of an underground train
friends laugh loudly
a ring appears
a guy proposes
I tell a friend
I remember thinking: “I’m not leaving Soho, Soho is leaving me.” When I go back now I’m very homesick for what it was. I don’t know where you go to find bohemia now. I asked one of my young friends and she looked at me and she asked me seriously: “Have you tried online?”
I have a theory that deadlines are responsible for most good art. Deadlines are good because they stop you overcooking something. Albums that take years to make are like bad French food, where it has been so long in the preparation that everything is dead by the time it reaches you, whereas my dream of how to make music is like they make food in a busy Italian restaurant. They have fantastic ingredients and they do as little to them as possible. They just get them hot, put them together and give it to you.
I once took a band that I was about to produce, after they had made a laboured and complicated album, for dinner in a very good Italian restaurant, and I arranged with the restaurant manager to take them into the kitchen. So I sat them down to dinner and said ‘Now I want to show you how we are going to make your next record’, and I took them all into the kitchen and it was just chaos with flames, and cooks and waiters doing things really quickly. It was exciting.
It is nonsense
says reason
It is what it is
says love
It is calamity
says calculation
It is nothing but pain
says fear
It is hopeless
says insight
It is what it is
says love
It is ludicrous
says pride
It is foolish
says caution
It is impossible
says experience
It is what it is
says love
The two things I hope for now are to do more pictures and an easy death. All the rest is marginal.