Metro station in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (1978)

Then I started coming home unhappy.
“What’s the matter, Hank?”
I had to get drunk every night

A Clockwork Orange, French lobby card for the theatrical release, 1972

“You’re obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretences of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That’s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.”

- Octave Mirbeau, The Torture Garden (1899)

Der Einsame im Herbst (The lonely one in autumn), from Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde

Ryszard Winiarski, Game for One, 1988

Shashlychnaya grill house, Moscow, USSR, 1970

Tiger and Dragon cats! (Original cat-tattoo art prints by Kazuaki Horitomo)

Victor Westerholm (Finnish, 1860 - 1919) – Maisemaharjoitelma, 1885

It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence.

- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Hygeia, Goddess of Health (Detail, 1615), Peter Paul Rubens

A Lego letter to parents from 1974.

Tragedy wants more : the catharsis of the soul. Admittedly, even Aristotle does not make clear to us just what this catharsis is. This much is certain : it is an experience that touches the innermost being of each man. It makes him more deeply receptive to reality, not merely as a spectator, but as a man who is personally involved. It makes truth a part of us by cleansing us of all that in our everyday experience is petty, bewildering, and trivial – all that narrows us and makes us blind.

- Karl Jaspers, Tragedy is Not Enough

Paw Grabowski, Silent Figure with Landscape (The Worship), 2020

The Chicopee, a fine one, she were. Clean-built and trig-looking! None more fleet in ‘64 than she. We were on the breaks, a mutiny it were. Why, ask you? Why? What’s the terrible part of a sailor’s life, ask you, lad? Tis when the work stops when your twixt wind and water. Doldrums. Doldrums. Eviler than the Devil. Boredom makes men to villains, and the water goes quick, lad. Vanished. The only medicine is drink. Keeps them sailors happy, keeps them agreeable, keeps them calm, keeps them…