Richard Littler
@richardlittler
Creator of @scarfolk.bsky.social. "This guy, who apparently saw the future" - Edward Snowden. Running an ASD/ADHD operating system.
"Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh. It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now." #NowPlaying the sublime Missa Solemnis by "the Lovely Ludwig Van"
Can affirm. Although, in my case, it wasn't a lone pillar but an intact, abandoned, brutalist Third Reich amphitheatre built in folkloric Odenwald, on the site of a former Celtic hill fort, and place of Wodan worship, later turned into a Roman temple to Mercury.
#NowPlaying Beethoven's late string quartets. His portrait looks like a hedgehog that was run over while trying to cross a dual carriageway.
Not to forget the traditional Christmas, erm, monkey? #merrychristmas
Nicely bonkers Victorian illustrations. "I dreamed that I was talking to a balloon" "We lunched beside that fallen triceratops'
Yet another interesting flea market find in Switzerland, the unparalleled shoreline of expat detritus. 'Black & White' magazine's Christmas number, 1894...
New Swiss magazine with "Ohne KI" (No #AI) on the cover. Nice to see some publishers openly resisting.
#NowPlaying the Caretaker's melancholic reworking of Schubert for the documentary Patience (After Sebald), about the writer W. G. Sebald.
Painty #sketch (or sketchy paint, more like) exercise using a Van Gogh palette that I sampled from several of his paintings. Started out as Warhol, ended up more like, who, Polanski?
It was all so vivid. In hope of triggering even a fragmentary memory of the lines, I'm #nowplaying Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, written in 1607. It's about as close as I can get to the period. Who knows, perhaps Shakespeare somehow heard the piece, or at least heard of it.
So, I discovered a lost #Shakespeare play. Kind of. I dreamt I saw a 1612/13 performance of his Orpheus in the Underworld. Aware of the significance, I desperately tried to memorise WS's incredible, poetic lines, which ruminated on death as his own career came to a close. All dissolved upon waking.
#NowPlaying the Cello Concerto by Frederick Delius, who always looks like he's pretending to be on the phone to avoid talking to someone.
Scriabin planned the multisensory, synaesthetic work to be performed in a specially-built temple in the Himalayan foothills. "Bells suspended from the clouds in the sky would summon the [many 1000s of] spectators from all over the world" and seat them according to spiritual advancement.
#NowPlaying Scriabin's (unfinished, but superb) 'Mysterium'. This "cataclysmic opus" was to designed "to end the world and its present race of men" and the 1st and only performance would "annihilate space & melt reality" and replace the human race with "nobler beings".
A sneak preview from Tim Burton's latest feature animation, Corpse of The Living Doll.
#Nowplaying a life-changing eye opener (or rather ear opener) from childhood. "Woah, so not all music is like Slade, Hot Chocolate, Showaddywaddy & other stuff I've heard on the wireless?" I've owned several fancy releases, but always return to this budget 1975 recording by the Hallé Orchestra.
It's ridiculous. There's still a part of me that sees a Bond film, or The Great Escape, or some such, on a normal Thursday afternoon on an ITV repeat channel, and my brain thinks "This is wrong. This is a special kind of film that should only be broadcast at Easter, Christmas, or on a bank holiday"
Saturday morning #sketch exercise. When you try to draw (albeit ham-fistedly) something like the hand of David, and you scrutinise it in detail, it really underscores just how impossibly, supernaturally talented Michelangelo was. He must have been an alien or something.
The 'Twinge' continues with Ambient Works Vol. 2, plus the 4-hour 'User48736353001' material which he released for free because he didn't want his wife & kids getting stressed about it all if he died. "I just thought I'd give it away, then they don't have to think about it." #nowplaying