purge/glut

a victorian magic lantern slide that i animated (obviously). it's lost a lot in the process of optimisation i must say. but there's still something about it - to me anyway. 19th century clown abuse, camp and theatrical police brutality. i added the flicker, but now i'm not sure really if that was the right thing to do; but i was assuming the gas powered lanterns would flicker.

i was looking for magic lantern slides of punch and judy (ever notice that punch wears a phrygian cap? it only just struck me). the colours of these old slides, against their black backgrounds and the drawing that can oscillate between the crude and the delicate in the same image really appeal.

another hiatus..........is there anything in the world stronger than habit? migratory patterns could be called habit. the paths of waterways could, at a stretch be called habitual (well maybe, or more like following the path of least resistance - which might be habit as well). it's easier to do today what you did yesterday; you've already been there, the channel has been carved, and it's just a case of following it. there's nothing wrong in that. obviously this is apropos of my lack of blogging, habits can be acquired unconsciously, but quite a few require work. i became a smoker and drinker through practice, fighting through the nausea. so taking up a habit after lapsing is work, for some.

there is a compulsion to repeat (i am repeating myself now). every cigarette i smoke is in many ways the same as every other, and in some ways the same as the first. certainly the craving remains the same. the desire for a drink remains the same. hunger and sexual desire do not change, just the objects of it. i was just trying to work out which was the easier to mentally conjure in its absence; the desire for any of these, or it's satisfaction. there is a chain that goes back through each instance to the first, in many of these actions, but seperating desire from object is , as many have noted, no easy thing. then of course there is distinguishing need from desire, which i sometimes think is pointless sophistry. many needs we disguise as desire, dress up as choice to disguise the rawness of necessity. on other occasions desires can come dressed as needs, to disguise the unappeasability of appetite.

ah bollocks, that's a longwinded way of saying that i got out of practice, and my life somehow closed over the gap left by non-blogging like water.

http://www.cerbslair.com/ltcc/main-avi.html

what i was thinking about is wile. e. coyote. i consider him a tragic hero. he also exemplifies, to me, desire and repetition. every time he is caught in the machines of his and acme's contrivance, his eyes telegraph the phrase "not again!". he has very expressive eyebrows, like all dogs. but he does it again, and again. he doesn't have any choice. he is caught by the horizon, which he never reaches. there are other creatures that would no doubt make an easier meal, but they won't satisfy him. it can only be roadrunner. he is trapped, whether by his own agency or fate i can't decide; but he pursues his quarry with cartoon gusto. anyway, i have come to associate him in my mind with robespierre -not the duck that apparently is another looney tunes character, but i can't recall ever having seen, but the french revolutionary one. the one who was partly responsible for bringing the word "terror" into the political lexicon. caught up in his own idea of republican virtue and perpetual revolution (which must have perpetually receded), he ended as yet another victim of his own instrument of terror or virtue, the guillotine.

what i thought was pretty cool, but meaningless, is that there is a company called ACME (wile e's chosen supplier) that makes guillotines http://www.acmemachinery.com/general/inquiry.htm (not the same type of guillotine i know, but never mind).