A reason to read

Whenever I opened a new book, regardless of its subject matter or genre, I always hoped it would reveal at last the truth that would illuminate my life and fill me with insight; I longed to discover that mystical something which would bestow on me what I can only call spiritual poise. I expect that sounds quite laughable to you, but it was ( is) the case: from every book I pined to receive the blessing of equilibrium. How empty that must sound, a sign of how empty I was left at the end of each quest. I was a permanent failure in the search for enlightenment, forever glued to the lowest rung, forever peering upwards into a clouded sky.

Fraser Harrison

Bulls and Humans 2

Bulls and Humans

Minotaur

How is your Greek mythology? I am sure you won't be insulted if I refresh your memory. All you have to know is that the Minotaur was a monstrous creature with a bull's head and a human body. His mother was married to Minos, the kind of Crete, but she fell in love with a white bull - don't ask- and by means of disguising herself inside a hollow wooden cow especially made for the purpose she succeeded in seducing the brute. In due course ( how long to gestate a monster?) she gave birth to the Minotaur ( It's a little Minotaur). His stepfather, the king of Crete , was so horrified by the bull bastard his wife presented to him that he arranged for the freak to be imprisoned in an inescapable labyrinth. Here, in secrecy and darkness, the misshape grew into a living metaphor: a man with all the strength and savagery of a beast; a man with a bull's mind in his horny head. He became a monster and his appetites were suitably monstrous. Every nine years the city of Athens was required to send a tribute to King Minos, seven youths and seven maidens who were sacrificed to the Minotaur trapped in the black heart of his puzzle - prison. The myth is silent on what the monster actually did with these virgins, but once they had been thrust into his liar they were never seen again.

Fraser Harrison Minotaur in Love

Mars in Scorpio

Your energies are an almost tangible force emanating from you in a sort of aura; you make yourself felt wherever you are; and can genuinely build up or tear fown another person by what you think of him. This is because your instincts are so powerful that you show in movement,action and tone what you are inwardly believing and you are nearly as effective in silence as in speech.

Grant Lewi

Venus in Pisces

Women with Venus in Pisces are receptive and yielding to other's wills and desires. They are not particularly sexual since the physical exchange is a channel for romantic and emotional feelings. The fact that many are not spontaneously sensual in a physical way is one reason why they like mind altering substances that allow them to get into their bodies and their senses.

" For years I was an easy lay. I liked how it enabled me to quickly enter into emotionally deeper rapport at the kind of level people don't usually reveal."

Stephen Arroyo

Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Picasso

Photo by Garance Dore

AA Gill on Brawn, a Shoreditch restaurant

'Brawn is going to be full of men with scarves and shoulder bags and bicycles without gears. And women who like men with gearless bikes, scarves and manbags. It will welcome people who expect food to be convivial and unencumbered with manners or cutlery or fuss. Socially and culturally correct[...]The place was packed with happy customers, engrossed in each others' brilliances and availability.It is hard to fault the essence of an honest commitment to good things in a good room [...] [but] it comes with a gnawing English parsimony, a Fabian righteousness that believes it's the right thing not to be too interested in your stomach.

That is fine and dandy, and it suits the pockets and the needs of these customers. I can't fault it as a mission, but my smile is beginning to wear thin; I seem to be eating like this too often. I'm missing some sense of occasion, some gastronomic obsession, an epicurean generosity. I want something rare and underage that died screaming on my plate. I want it made by a self- indulgent fat man with the morality of a Somali cabin boy and I want it served with lashings of tip-hungry flirtation. I'm fed up to hear with cool; I've overdosed on irony. And I want a comfortable chair.

Cats

Cats are prowlers, uncanny creatures of the night. Cruelty and play are one for them. They live by and for fear., practising being scared or spooking humans by sudden rushings and ambushes. Cats dwell in the occult, that is, the "hidden". In the Middle Ages, they were hunted and killed for their association with witches. Unfair? But the cat really is in league with chthonian nature, Christianity's mortal enemy. The black cat of Halloween is the lingering shadow of archaic night. Sleeping up to twenty of every twenty-four hours, cats reconstruct and inhabit the primitive night- world. The cat is telepathic- or at least thinks that it is. Many people are unnerved by its cool stare. Compared to dogs, slavishly eager to please, cats are autocrats of naked self interest. They are both amoral and immoral, consciously breaking rules. Their "evil" look at such times is no human projection: the cat maybe the only animal that savours the peverse or reflects on it. [...] The day of a cat-owner often begins with the discovery of a neat pile of mole guts or mashed mouse limbs on the porch - Darwinian momentos. The Cat is the least Christian inhabitant of the average household."

Sexual Personae Camille Paglia (pg 64)

Girls Looking at Girls

"Despite the difference in their audience, both Cosmopolitan and Playboy reflect the male gaze. The focus of the sexual gaze is still the woman, even when the audience is women and the sex is presumed to be heterosexual{...} The reader is therefore encouraged to look upon the bodies of Cosmopolitan's female models as a man would, to evaluate her body by those standard, and in turn, to remake herself according to that model. Femininity is defined by the ability to attract a man - to undergo the male gaze and be judged suitable [...]The male gaze commodifies women, teaching them to regard themselves as erotic objects to be displayed and remade according to the latest fashion."

'Boxing Helena and Corseting Eunice' Krauss, Blaukamp and Wesselink (2001)

Summer of Love

What is important to remember is that this is a card about suspension, not life or death. The querent might well feel that one thing has ended, yet the next has not begun, and they are stuck in a kind of waiting room. Things will continue on in a moment, but for now, they float, timeless.Something has ended, yet the next has not begun, and they are stuck in a kind of waiting room. Things will continue on in a moment, but for now, they float, timeless.

Butterflies ( sea of shoes)

Blondes at party

Dream girl, scrolling through fashion week picture this girl caught my eye over and over ( sartorialist)

The flowers, the furniture, the symmetry

The light in London ( Sartorialist)