On the Etymology of Love

Perhaps an unusual post for this blog, but I came across this quote on another blog and had to post it somewhere. It's by Lewis Thomas:

Love

From the Indo-European root leubh, containing the general sense of loving, desiring and caring all at once, the Germanic tongues evolved bileafa, meaning belief and faith, strong terms indeed and surely the underpinnings of genuine love. It needed only a suffix to become Old English lufu, and then love. Latin used the same root for libere and libet, carrying signals of pleasure, goodwill, freedom and candor. Libido was a more carefully used variant, cautiously indicating strong desire with risks of caprice and immoderation, even lust, brushing against Cupid and cupidity. Sanskrit had lubhyati, he desires, Lithuanian still carries liaupse from the same root, a song of praise. Leubh survives in modern German Liebe, solid, enduring love.

The French je t’aime, irreplaceable, and all the variants of amour emerging from the Latinamo, as robust a source for passionate love as the language has devised, can only be tracked as far as the ancient Latin word amma, believed to be a childhood term at the outset. From amma we have the Latin and French words for love, and also amicus, a friend, a reminder not to lose sight of the old connection between love and friendship. Also two of the most agreeable English words in the language: amiable and amicable.

It is as though the language tried several paths into the meaning of love, then thought twice and corrected itself. Kwep and kwap turned out to be the wrong way to go, blind alleys leading to cupid and vapid. The other roots produced the real idea, the foundation of lasting love: trust, belief, reliance, freedom and desire all combined, something to grow up with, a string of lovely, lovable words.

- Lewis Thomas: Notes Of A Word Watcher (1990)

Cosmicomics

Italo Calvino was a Cuban-born Italian who wrote primarily in the latter half of the twentieth century.  Many of his stories combine elements of magical realism, fabulism and fantasy.  His most famous work is the novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, which takes his metafictional style to the extreme, interspersing several unfinished stories and chapters among one another, and establishing the reader as the main protagonist.  It’s a must-read if you like quirky, postmodern writing that tears down the meaning of story, and skirts the boundary between fact and fiction.  It is, however, lacking in real emotive feeling or strong characters.  Calvino is, in my opinion, at his best when writing short stories, and one of his best collections is called Cosmicomics.

Each of the stories in Cosmicomics is based on a scientific theory of the universe.  Some of the stories here neglect plot in favour of exposition, becoming more like the descriptions of worlds found in Calvino's equally brilliant Invisible Cities, but even these stories are a joy to read, since Calvino explores the possibilities of each theory with such depth and imagination that often it's like reading a tour guide to a fascinating alternative universe.  But the stories where he manages to instill a sense of conflict and determination from his central character (every story is told in the first person) are the real shining moments for me, whether it's an evolved fish trying to persuade his stubborn old uncle to leave the seas and join him on land, or the man plummeting through space for millions of years desperately attempting to embrace a nearby falling woman.  I've always loved Calvino's work, but this book gave me exactly what I always thought was lacking in his writing before, emotions that the reader can identify with rather than just pure intellectual contemplation.  That's still there, too, and as always it's expressed with the most brilliant prose, but I was glad to feel a lot more drama between his main characters this time round.  I’d highly recommend this to anyone new to Calvino, as it's accessible, short and easily one of his best works.

Stacking

One of the games I’ve recently been playing is Stacking, which came out last month.  Developed by Tim Shafer’s Double Fine Productions, this puzzle-adventure game takes place in a world populated entirely by Russian Matryoshka dolls, which stack inside one another according to increasing size.  You control tiny Charlie Blackmore, whose chimney-sweeping family has been forced to work as slaves after falling into debt.  Using his ability to stack into dolls and use their abilities, Charlie must save each of his family members, and also end child labour, which is being enforced by the evil Baron.

The game has a very charming Industrial Age setting with old train stations, steamships and zeppelins as the main backdrops.  The soundtrack, primarily consisting of piano and violin, is appropriately vintage, as are the cutscenes, which are presented like old silent movies.  The dolls all speak in a sort of mangled gibberish, like the Sims, and each has its own unique ability, which can be used to solve puzzles.  For example, prima donna Wilhelmina has a powerful singing voice, which can smash glass.  Fire Chief Russell can spray his hose to put out fires.  The Widow Chastity can seduce and distract male dolls.  Cigarette-smoking milkman, Meriwether Malador, can flatulate in order to clear the nearby area of dolls.  There are well over a hundred of these throughout the game, so the range of puzzles, not to mention the different solutions you can come up with, is extensive.

Stacking’s entirely unique style of gameplay, beautiful presentation, and lighthearted tone (notwithstanding the whole child labour angle and all) make it a great game for those looking for something a little different from the standard, violent shooters saturating the market.  It’s currently available to buy on the Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network stores.

Present Tense

Gary Usher was a California-based musician who in the sixties wrote and produced numerous hits for various Surf Rock artists.  One of The Byrds’ best albums, Younger than Yesterday, was also produced by him.  Later in the decade he collaborated with local session musicians to create several semi-fictitious studio bands, one of which was Sagittarius, named after Usher’s star sign.  Their first album, Present Tense, was a commercial flop in 1968, but with the aid of a remastered reissue thirty years later, it has since grown a small cult following.

Many of the songs on the album are ethereal pop tunes layered with strings, flutes, and multipart harmonies.  Although the band hails from the states, they sound a lot like the psychedelic baroque pop bands so prevalent in Britain at that time: the Zombies, the Kinks, Kaleidoscope, Pink Floyd, etc.  Having said that, their closest comparison is with the American band, Millennium, whose album Begin is another lost classic of the sixties.  There are also strong echoes of The Beach Boys, especially on the brilliant, dreamy single, My World Fell Down, perhaps not surprising given that Usher had once co-written several songs with Brian Wilson.

Present Tense is an appropriately sunny, bucolic album to listen to now that spring is nearly upon us.  So by all means, click here for a download link.

La Jetée

La Jetée is a 1962 sci-fi film by French director Chris Marker.  The opening credit sequence describes it as a “photo-roman” or photo-novel, since the story is told entirely through a sequence of photographs narrated by Jean Négroni, and backed with a haunting soundtrack by Trevor Duncan.

It centres on an unnamed man who becomes a prisoner-of-war in post-World-War-III France.  His captors force him to become a time traveller, seeking in other eras a means of sustaining humankind.  Initially they send him to pre-war Paris, where he meets a woman with whom he develops a romantic relationship.  He later travels to the distant future as well.

The 1995 film Twelve Monkeys borrowed this basic plot, but as much as I enjoyed that film, I think La Jetée tells in its 28 minutes a far more poignant, moving story than Gilliam’s adaptation.  There are some beautiful shots throughout, and their photo-journalistic style gives the film a heightened sense of realism, almost as though you’re watching a post-apocalyptic documentary.

The film is up on Youtube, but I’d recommend downloading a decent torrent of it.

Wittgenstein's Mistress

This experimental novel by David Markson is told from the perspective of a woman who believes herself to be the last person on earth.  While detailing her travels around the empty globe via abandoned cars, boats and other vehicles, she makes references to Greek mythology, modern art, classical music and other elements of western culture.

The paragraph structure is based on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in which bite-sized, sentence-long points are arranged into numerical categories and subcategories.  This results in the narrator giving a fairly erratic monologue in which she goes back and forth between various ideas, talking about whatever happens to pop into her head at that moment.  Through her voice Markson captures the cyclical, recurrent nature of human thought process and memories.  The style takes a while to get used to, but the more you read it the more you begin to appreciate the unique insight and sense of humour underlying the novel.

L’Enfant Assassin Des Mouches

Jean-Claude Vannier is probably best known for arranging the orchestral backing music of Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson.  That album is a hotchpotch of baroque pop strings, funky bass lines and jazz-inspired guitar arpeggios, all underpinned by Gainsbourg’s trademark gravelly spoken word vocals.  If you’ve not heard it I recommend doing so, since it’s an essential classic of the 70s.

Vannier’s own solo work goes into even more avant-garde territory.  His 1972 album, L’Enfant Assassin des Mouches (The Child Killer of Flies) is a cornucopia of fractured, carnivalesque arrangements, few of which reach the point of becoming full "songs" or "compositions," and which are interspersed among short, dark, and bizarre sound collages.  But as deranged as the music is here, it has been constructed with as much sensitivity and feeling as that given to more emotive, accessible symphonies, and it has its share of powerful moments.  For example, the second track, L’Enfant Au Royame des Mouches, begins with a sort of call-and-response session between an arcane choir and a fairly plodding prog-rock riff.  About a third of the way into the song, all the choirs, electric guitars and drums suddenly collude into one deafening, satanic song of praise, devoid of lyrics but absolutely rife with passion and terror; it’s one of my favourite moments in music. Click the youtube video below to hear it.

If you’re even remotely interested in experimental, avant-garde music you must give this album a spin or two.  It’s a hugely underappreciated classic.  I was really bummed out when I found out that Jean-Claude Vannier actually put on a live performance of the album at the London Barbican in 2006.  If only I had known about this terrific gem back then.

a download link for the album

Mind Game

I don’t want to reveal too much about Mind Game.  Its plot isn’t easy to explain, and it’s probably best to go into the film knowing as little as possible.  Let’s just say that it follows an insecure boy called Nishi, who’s in love with a girl called Myon, and who goes on a philosophical, cosmic, mind-bending journey in the wake of a gruesome crime.  The film uses multiple visual styles despite telling one continuous (though perplexing) story.  Though most of the film is presented through traditional hand-drawn anime visuals, there are also zany Ren and Stimpyish cartoons, Matrix-like wireframe digital structures, photographic collages, psychedelic watercolour love scenes, and just lots of all-round wacky, Japanese zaniness:

The middle of Mind Game drags a little, but as the film gets closer and closer to the end, it becomes more and more a complete assault on the senses, in the best way possible, building up to an exhausting, rollercoaster finish.  Seeing this at the cinema must be the best way to appreciate it, but if you’re going to watch it on your laptop, at least wear headphones, with the lights turned off and volume high.

Click here for a torrent of the film

Codex Seraphinianus

One of the most fantastic, mysterious and imaginative books I’ve ever read is the Codex Seraphinianus. I say “read,” though the book is actually written in an alien script that has yet to be deciphered, and is therefore unreadable.  However, it’s also filled with hundreds of miniature paintings that depict a strange, exotic world. These are often surreal and supernatural, stylistically falling somewhere between Hieronymus Bosch, M. C. Eschar and Jorge Luis Borges. Given its archaic, prehistoric appearance, you might assume this magical encyclopaedia was recovered from some ancient tomb, coated in dust. In fact, it was created in the late 1970s by Italian artist, Luigi Serafini.

There are several different sections to the Codex, each portraying a different aspect of this bizarre, unnamed world.  You’ll find diagrams of strangely-shaped plants and animals, maps of old continents, schematics for Rube Goldberg-esque inventions... The fact that there are over 350 pages worth of such unique ideas, all created in a thirty-month period, makes it one of the most impressive works of creation I've ever come across. And it is an absolute delight to read, one of those books you can pick up and flick to any page when you’re in the mood for some brief flashes of genius.

The only catch, unfortunately, is that you can’t actually pick it up, physically at least.  Not unless you’re willing to shell out 200 pounds or however much it’s going for these days. Of course, you might be lucky enough to come across a cheap copy on Ebay or at a car boot sale, but if you’re like me, you’ll settle for a digital copy. You can download it using the following torrent link, though you’ll need a program that can open CBR files, like Comic Rack or Simple Comic:
Click here

Some more excerpts:

VVVVVV

VVVVVV is a 2D puzzle-platform game released in 2010, though it has the look, feel and sound of a game straight out of the 80s.  Its story centres on Captain Viridian, whose crew has gone missing, after his spaceship entered another dimension known as VVVVVV.  The player must guide Viridian around his spaceship, finding and saving each crewmember so that everyone can escape from VVVVVV and live happily ever after.

Most of the game’s puzzles are based around the simple mechanic of adjustable gravity.  By tapping the space bar, the player can make Viridian fall up or down, allowing him to cross platforms, jump over spikes, and evade otherwise deadly obstacles.  Much like the equally brilliant puzzle-platformer Braid, the game introduces different variations of its basic playing style to keep things interesting, with some levels containing straight lines that turn you away in the reverse direction, and others where each side of the screen warps you to the opposite.  The game has a world map, allowing you to tackle the levels in whichever order you choose.

A lot of reviewers have commented on VVVVVV’s difficulty, some claiming it demands old-school levels of dedication to complete. Personally, I found that most of the puzzles were challenging but enjoyable enough to keep me trying “just one more time,” and I never got stuck on anything long enough for it to become frustrating. And I’m not by any means a particularly skilled gamer.

Also, I want to emphasise that while it might look like a fairly basic, run-of-the-mill arcade game, it is at the very least incredibly fun and addictive to play.  So much so that I completed it in one sitting, which is something I can’t say for a lot of games.  Granted, it’s not particularly long, but it doesn’t really need to be.  There are just enough puzzles and levels to provide a challenging, satisfying gaming experience without it overstaying its welcome.

Oh, and did I mention it has a superb soundtrack by chiptune musician, Magnus Pålsson?  I defy you not to get at least one of the songs stuck in your head after you finish playing.

You can play a demo of VVVVVV on your PC or Mac via the following link, though I recommend you go ahead and get the full game:

http://thelettervsixtim.es/

Zarthus

Robbie Basho was an American composer primarily active in the 60s and 70s.  Spiritually driven, he studied the philosophies and music of various Japanese, Indian, Middle Eastern and Native American cultures, even naming himself after the Japanese poet, Matsuo Basho.

His album, Zarthus, released in 1974, comprises six mystical, psychedelic, raga-folk pieces, densely layered with eastern arpeggios played on finger-picked 12-strings and lightly-stroked pianos.  Imagine if John Fahey had been born and raised in Persia and you might get a sense of how the pieces sound.  Occasionally Basho will sing in deep, sorrowful tones over the top, in a manner similar to Tim Buckley at his deepest.  Zarthus is considered Basho’s best album by many of his fans, and perhaps represents the point at which he most effectively infused his passions for oriental culture into his music.

Man Bites Dog

Man Bites Dog (original title: C'est arrivé près de chez vous, literally, It happened in your neighbourhood) is a 1992 Belgian mockumentary following the exploits of a serial killer named Ben. We follow Ben around his neighbourhood as he indulges us with his thoughts, passions, philosophies, and a variety of killings. The film crew  do not step in his way, acting as calm and unconcerned for Ben's victims as he is. The result is a dark comedy that is at times surprisingly hilarious and at others incredibly disturbing. It may make you question yourself for laughing so hard.
A clip from the film:

Click here to download a torrent of the film

The Search Begins

I plan to use this blog to promote, recommend, and discuss the various otherworldly films, experimental novels, unique video games and avant-garde music that I enjoy. On occasion I'll probably also talk about more mainstream, accessible things that I like too, but primarily this is about seeking out the curious, the enchanting, and perhaps most importantly, the criminally overlooked. If you have any recommendations along those lines, feel free to post a comment or send me an email about it.