dolores666's photos with the keyword: Love

AntiValentine 2024 Decided to break with tradition and upload this year's AntiValentine card on Valentine’s Day, look you. It’s still an Anti-thingummybob, though. So, here they are, a couple of bitching Love Bugs, to remind us that luuuurve is not always the plain sailing the Fluffy Brigade would have us believe. Mr. LB is accusing Mrs. LB of a deficit in fondness just because she failed to appreciate his re-arrangement of their love nest along the latest diktats of fashionable Feng Shui. Mrs. LB has temporarily lost patience with her old mucker’s vagaries and she’s responding in kind. (Don’t worry, folks, they will make up soon enough. They are Love Bugs after all, innit?)

Here, have some fair-weather bliss. For aching hearts all over. The two small creatures here enjoying the environmental bonanza are just heaving a well earned break. They will soon be resuming their roles as supporting elements of a Big Juju Totem Pole currently undergoing refurbishing.

As usual, I prefer to start a new year on a nice Sweetness & Light note. That leaves me with 360-odd days for the rants and the cursing. (In fact, there is one of those in the oven as we speak -so to speak). In any case, especially in these crappy end-days, love is always something to be pushed and promoted and spread and, if at all possible, practiced. Not easy, I know; almost everything else tends to make it challenging. The trends are towards hate and division, and quarrelling and emphasizing the differences. The Masters of the Universe become increasingly repulsive and their doctrines progressively more unacceptable. Let us combat them best we can. Have a good year. May a thousand little fishes fall in love with you.

By all means take it easy, chill, relax, don’t have kittens over trivial things. Activate the Mehitabel Protocols and extract as much joy as you possibly can out of this wretched social order we’re gripped by. On no account, though, resort to sad little gimmicks like this: www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jun/21/smile-could-the-pandemic-lead-to-happier-times-laurie-santos-professor-of-happiness-yale Or this: www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/sep/05/ready-for-the-roaring-20s-its-time-to-re-learn-how-to-have-fun-says-happiness-professor (Frankly, if one needs to resort to this sort of thing one deserves any amount of shite one, invariably, ends up getting.) Avoid falling into the clutches of the Happyness (sic) Industrial Complex. You might start with a harmless-sounding weekend seminar on Happy Happy Clappy Cognition and you may end up on morality pills (or antidepressants, same difference) for the rest of your lives. Also, and on the other side of this ongoing existential piffle, avoid buying the third rate merchandise spewed by con men of the Jordan Peterson variety. Bliss is possible. Just don’t confuse it with “fun” and the ersatz joviality of selfies. One thing is good, genuine, unpretentious merriment and quite another this current hysterical, dogmatic worship of The Little God Fun, as my good friend professor Hinks used to inveigh against a long time ago. (Cheers, toots!) Oh, and in for a penny… To add a note of delicious flippancy to the rather serious theme of “happiness”, here’s my favourite (possibly semi-misquoted) line from one of my favourite films of all times, Richard Lester’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum Michael Crawford (on realizing how crossed his and Annette Andre’s stars truly are): Then, my love, for us there can be no happiness... Annette Andre: Then we’ll just have to learn to be happy without it. Admirable attitude, girl. Way to go. Have a spiffing weekend.

I’ve changed my mind and decided to do yet another Ash Memorial. I still can see him as he was the last time we met, there, standing in my kitchen, arms waving, eyes ablaze, ranting like it was going out of fashion about the absolute need of this wretched country to acquire a constitution. Also the even more urgent necessity to clear out the English language (or any other language, for that matter) of jargon of any kind: legalese, psychobabble, poliflummery, pseudo-science bunk and other though-terminating linguistic evils. I would entirely agree with him on the language thing but I though he was being naive on the first point and I would remind him of all those countries that have constitutions and are still a fucking mess and/or a pain in the gluteus maximus, like the good old USA and Australia. He was undeterred by this last argument, for as well as a master-ranter he was as stubborn as a mule; now and then he would even out-rant me. But we never quarrelled and we always had such fun rearranging the world. Ah well… sic transit gloria us puny humans. And everything else. I hope his sub-atomic particles are having fun, still and forever, somewhere spiffing, where constitutions are not needed and paranoid empires are unknown and cant is regarded a mere joke, something to pass the time in between oscillations. PS. Because o f The Dread Glitch this pic seems a bit on the late side, but never mind. I'll be uploading in strict order of "birth". Or there abouts....

Never say die! Friends old and new have dropped in, defying the “distancing” diktat and two-fingering the engineered paranoia, to celebrate the fact that I’m still around, alive -if not well, and pretty much as they left me last year; that is unrepentant and obnoxious. They have brought me the usual gifts. You know: flowers (or flehs, as Primus calls them), Godivas by the boxful, mock pearls, and so on. Also, the new little Black Poppet*, the vessel that contains what I most need in these trying and tiring days: Infinite Patience. The ineffable Black Goat of the Woods with Far Too Many Riotous Churumbeles, has attended again. And, lo! She’s smiling!!! Admittedly, it is a wicked smile but all the same, it’s astonishing. I suspect she’s beginning to develop a sense of fun. Really, I don’t know what the Final Void is coming to. A bonus this year has been that as well as receiving gifts, I have had the chance to make one present. A much wanted one, too. There, all is fluffy. Have the customary un po’ di mu’ and stay awkward, stay silly and stay sane. www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzZqeWNpe3U *The little Black (Voodoo) Poppet has a White Twin who will make her debut soon. El que avisa no es traidor

She’s like a gigantic Tardis; if you think she looks vast from the outside you ought to see her inner spaces: no end to them. Her larders and storerooms are inexhaustible. Her cellars are truly miraculous. She travels the places in between, rescuing the old and the poor, the rejected, the neglected, the discarded, the unloved, the reviled unintentional migrants, the endangered species and any other lost souls she can find. The finches in the upper masts cry out Oyez! Oyez! Here be shelter! The two in the middle turrets guide the drifters. This way! This way! they say. And the two in the lower barbicans say Welcome! Welcome! Come in. Have a rest. Have a drink. Make yourselves at home. Inside, the former cast-offs are fed and bathed with mystic bubbles and served stimulating, nourishing drinks by a battalion of dancing ferrets. I hope to bump across her very, very soon.

There must be an irony somewhere in the fact that when I’m in the Great Dumps the best solace comes from monsters, oddballs, dissidents, mutineers and fauna of that ilk. Thus with this year’s Anti-Mawk Festival. Too despondent to organize the usual alternative merry shindig, I was thinking of cancelling it when the Renegade Uncouth Larvae of the Final Void crawled out of the inter-dimensional woodwork and came to me with a maaaaarvelous idea: Why not have a Universal Day of Lamentation, Detestation and All-purpose Kvetching instead? See what I mean? Such a spiffing notion. So, that’s what we’ll be having. The event will take place in and around the pond at Vicky Park. (In, literally, just in case the Deep Ones wish to attend –Bumba knows they have good cause to grumble, poor things) As usual, you’re all invited. You’ll all have free access to food, drink, drugs, shows, poetry recitals, communal defenestrations, workshops, effigy burnings and anything that might be going. This year, as a bonus, there’ll be a competition for the Best Carping of 2018. Prize yet to be decided but the toss is between a Garrote Florido (Flowery Club) and a fortnight cruise for two to the slimy canals that coil around the fringes of Unknown Kadath. The gaudeamus, or rather the lamentates, will take place tomorrow, Wednesday 13th. Time to be advised, in Lemurian code, via the Today’s program, just to aggravate John Humphys or whichever State Stodge is presenting it. Keep your ears peeled, folks and see you all there, I hope. Here, to put you in the mood, have a link to one of Tom Lehrer’s best on the subject of these ghastly “Whatever Day/Week/Year/Century” capers: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Vm-8eXFgqA

Centenaries. 100 years ago today she and her poor comrade Karl Liebknecht were captured, tortured for hours on end and finally murdered and disposed of by the Freikorps’ bastard hell-hounds. She was shot and thrown into the Landwehr Canal; he was driven to the middle of some godforsaken where or other and shot in the back. The ineffable Wikipedia has this to say: Although the circumstances were disputed by the perpetrators at the time, the Freikorps commander, Captain Waldemar Pabst, later claimed, "I had them executed” Nice one, Waldemar. Today nobody remembers Captain Pabst. Rosa and Karl, on the other hand, live in our memories and in our hearts. I raise my glass (and my fist) to you both.

My love of all things Japanese (minus Shinzō Abe) began, more or less, with a film that bowled me over when I was 18 or thereabouts: Masaki Kobayashi’s Seppuku (called Harakiri in the West). I was gobsmacked and in love. Shortly after this revelation I saw Kwaidan and the love became a passion. Recently I managed to find a full version of Kwaidan on YouTube and my love was renewed and refreshed and re…whatever. This is my tribute to him, and to it, and to all the wonders that Japan has given the world of the arts. Doumo arigato gozaimasu, Kobayashi san. May your elementary particles spread endless joy across the continuum.

I still love. Many things and many people. There. PS. La Bella Mallorquina is the ineffable Maria del Mar Bonet, of course. Have a sample: www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUl6sXHtTwQ And: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mz7gOjpKEEA

Birthdays! The Shoggoths are ten years old this autumn. They burst into my life at the end of a particularly interesting October in 2008, evolved from a Japanese frog that then became my third Cthulhu. But the Great Old Dreamer subsequently acquired a more traditional shape, with tentacles and claws and wings and all things properly Cthulhian. The Shoggies were in them very brief early days cast in the role of minions of the catnapper of R’lyeh, but almost immediately became self-regulating and took a life of their own, which event delighted me no end. Mind you, it helped that I had re-read At the Mountains of Madness again and finally made up my mind that the Shoggoths had had such a bad press, up to that moment, because H.P. Lovecraft was barking up the wrong tree, the silly old xenophobic bugger. To cut a long story short, the Shoggoths were re-cast in the part of heroes. My kind of heroes: freedom fighters, rebel slaves, free radicals; a regular bunch of protoplasmic Maroons one and all. They’ve come a long way since then. They have established their uniquely personal world and taken over mine. They have made art and music, written poetry, developed the Shoggy Brotherhood Tango and invented their own highly unorthodox version of Sumo wrestling. They have morphed into ill-behaved sub-atomic particles, starred in remakes and alternative versions of several movies, including Battleship Potemkin and Spartacus and posed for famous paintings like Velazquez’s Las Meninas and Goya’s Los fusilamientos del 3 de Mayo. Rosie has even written a sequel to Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? They also triggered a stampede of Lovecraftian spoofy pastiches (collectively renamed Myffos), so that not only Shoggies emerged but also Cthulhus, Shub-Nigguraths, Old Ones, Deep Ones, Yithians, Mi-Go, a Mother Hydra, a GorgoMormo and a Yog-Sothoth or two. They have been the best compost my mind’s garden has ever known. They continue to grow and multiply, with no signs of exhaustion in sight. Happy birthday, my rubbery darlings. Scribe’s Note. As well as the customary birthday card, I break my own rule of never posting anything longer than the mini rants that often attend my doodles and I’m posting a link to the rejuvenated version of an uplifting, stirring account of how the beloved monsters came into my life, all those ages ago, in another time and another place and when the wench I then was is now not exactly dead but certainly closer to the grave that she’s ever been. Sic transit gloria Gorgon. :-) The story so far. www.gorgs.co.uk/gossip-column Plus: The full graphic version. www.gorgs.co.uk/a-brief-history-of-shoggoths-first-cycle

They are big, bold and beautiful. They travel fast and they travel light. But they always have time and space for bona fide chubby orphaned blobs and their companion ghosts. Their names are Minnie "the Moocher", Vinnie "the Don" and Bongo. www.metrolyrics.com/minnie-the-moocher-lyrics-cab-calloway.html

Birds wrapped in a bubble of solipsistic love, in a Love Garden, observed with forensic amazement by another couple of birdies. Totally unrelated and certainly not intentionally, I nevertheless dedicate this ‘ere doodle to all the Spanish girls who have taken to the streets, blocked roads, disrupted public life and made a wonderful nuisance of themselves, today, 8th of March 2018, on International Women's Day. Thus I break a personal tradition of never doing "Days". Rules are made to be broken. Go for it, quillas! Tell ‘em what’s what! And remember the old song: A kick in the groin Can be quite detrimental Karate is a girl’s best friend. Didactic-pedantic note. Quillas. Plural of quilla, diminutive of chiquilla. Spanish for wee lass.

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue; never mind the sixpence in my shoe –for one thing, they don’t make them anymore. This is for Ursula K. Le Guin, who died peacefully in her bed a few days ago, aged 88, after a long life of dreaming and dreaming damned well. Ah, yes, the girl could dream like nobody’s business. So here is my tribute wot contains all the four ingredients for an alchemical marriage that happened a while back, when I was young and foolish and good Sci-Fi-starved. Borges said once that nobody likes owing anything to their contemporaries. This is, if it is at all, rubbish. We all owe lots of things to lots of people so it’s a waste of time liking the fact or not. Personally I rather owe to of my age group (or near-age group) that to some centuries old geezer whose ideas were dodgy to begin with but yet linger, and linger, and liiiiiiinger (oy vey!), instead of laying quietly in the intellectual elephant’s graveyard where they belong. In fact, for this modest loving homage, I’ve borrowed from myself, look, you! Bye bye, Ursy. Fare thee well, give my regards to the sub-atomic particles and see you soon(ish).

Here, a little sweet nothing, to counteract all the bile brought forth by my poor liver -not to mention my heart, over the Catalan Soap Opera. Let’s play on, people, let’s play on.

National ShoggothHood Week starts today to celebrate the Return of the Native, Bubbles, and all things Shoggothic. Here’s an invite to the first of the many shindigs that will take place in and around my garden for the next seven days -or ten, if the spirit grabs us. There’ll be food and drink and interesting substances and music and song and dance and beautifully staged tableux vivants -and even tableaux mourants, look you! amongst which not only the now universally acclaimed “The Defenestration of Ben Bernanke” but the never before seen in public “ The Spontaneous Combustion of Henry Kissinger” Everybody’s most welcome, except for politicians, banksters, lawyers, transnational CEOs, Bildebergians and other people of that ilk. Come join us and raise a cup or two to groovy protoplasm in particular and hackers, pirates, whistle-blowers, System Irritants and other awkward creatures in general.

Bring him your tears, your grief and your deepest sorrows. In his cavernous belly, where stars germinate and suns are hatched, he'll keep your heartaches and your gripes fresh and crisp until you need them again. Or until the galaxies grow weary of their merry spinning dance, whichever comes first.