Tatsuro Yamashita Utterly Killing It Doing Backup Vocals For His Wife, Mariya Takeuchi, At Her Souvenir

Tatsuro Yamashita utterly killing it doing backup vocals for his wife, Mariya Takeuchi, at her Souvenir concert in 2000.

Pay me a living wage and give me a couple of red bulls and I'd create a whole moby dick cartoon in a fever

Pedro Novoa aka Pedro Requejo Novoa (Spanish, b. 1964, Madrid, Spain) - Minotaur, 1990, Sculpture: Bronze

"A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it."

I didn't expect this ending to be so gruesome. There's something so gutting about a bird being nailed to the mainmast as a flag and thus being pulled down with the ship. It's such a haunting image to end on.

There's something also about the motif of birds in this book; the final paragraph mentions small fowls flying over the whirlpool where the ship goes down, the sea-hawk that stole Ahab's hat, the albatross. So many omens through birds and it feels right that we end with one being caught in the shipwreck of Ahab's hubris.

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