peace and paranoia tour 2013 the flaming lips

Peace and paranoia tour 2013 the flaming lips how to#

'The Thief' The Mona Lisa is his laughing hell and a mocking heaven. Then she seemed to grow forward out of the dark background, to become flesh, and to bask in the light of her own shamelessness. She was never so beautiful as when the fires of the sinking sun lay shimmering in the dust of the room upon her forehead, and her dark hair began to gleam as if with its own light. But a unique flavour persists a year or more later, and the three or four stories I’ve re-read in that time have pleased me, like walks through the dark forest where I myself once dwelt, though maybe never with the lucidity of Georg Heym.more It could be The Thief is a slight book, and it’s true I digested it with little afterthought paradoxically, it went down easily, despite the gruesome chunks of horror it contains. So many times afterwards it was to be his lot to suffer the extremes of joy and the depths of grief, like a precious vessel that has to be able to withstand many passages through the fire without cracking.

For all its blunt drama, its “suddenly”s, its exclamations, it’s animated by the most refined sensitivity.Īnd that was the first time in the boy’s life that he drank the cups of rapture and of torment in the same day. And actually, that’s a pretty apt description: the dark forest of youth, of nightmare, of bloodyminded determination. It’s “not the image of a dark forest but the dark forest”, as Bolaño would have it.

Peace and paranoia tour 2013 the flaming lips how to#

So complete, in fact, that it’s hard to know how to speak for it. The mark of a poet and playwright dallying in prose? In any case, despite the book’s briefness (seven stories, 100 pages) it seems complete. Strangely, given his death was accidental, it’s hard to imagine what might have followed such stories they have that terminal quality that suggests maybe he never intended to follow them at all. I don’t know I’d call his stories masterpieces, but I’d wager he was some kind of a master, or could have been. Perverse insistence on plumbing the depths. If the back-cover blurb is to be believed, when Heym’s publisher “expressed fears that the grim nature” of his stories would “put off potential readers”, “Heym replied that his subjects had chosen him as much as he had chosen them.” And certainly, it’s hard to believe that choice played more part in Heym’s actions than in his characters’ – again, a singlemindedness maybe only accessible in youth. The fish under him is turning disobedient too it’s still wriggling. He weeps of course he’s never going to get there. The castles go further down, the gardens appear to sink ever deeper. How far away might they be? If only he could just get down there, down below.

Deep below him, he sees in the green depths, lost in a few trembling rays of sun, green castles, eternally deep green gardens. He is riding on a black fish, he embraces its head with his arms. He kneels on his victim and slowly crushes her to death.Īll around him is the great golden sea, with towering waves on either side like brilliantly shimmering roofs. Even as Heym the narrator (same third-person semi-omniscient voice in all, with touch of “free indirect discourse” and sudden jolts to present tense at peaks of disturbance) retains an uncanny sobriety to which he falls back when things get crazy. Not that the horrid stuff isn’t preternatural too. But your head bent in the light, and your hair was still burning and flaming from all my kisses. And your dress, which billowed around your ankles, was like a wave of fire in the setting sun. Shall I tell you how I love you? As you moved through the fields of poppies, yourself a flame-red fragrant poppy, the whole evening was swallowed up in you. How I love you! I have loved you so much. (Heym died at 25, a year before these pieces saw publication.) But shot through with veins of preternatural gold unique also to youth: Not that nothing happens – plenty happens, it all happens, all the worst and most appalling things in life and beyond – but there’s never a choice: no road not taken, no crossroads, just a one-way trip to hell. Nor do they even qualify as “stories”, really, in many ways. (Heym died at 25, a year before these pieces saw publication.) But shot through with veins of preternatural gold unique also to Every story here, from memory, is a relentless ride to doom. Every story here, from memory, is a relentless ride to doom.