Author Unknown - New York at Night (1935)
Probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. How well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn’t necessarily affect the transformation. She was there, and she was the whole city, and that was that.
J.D. Salinger
Dæmonen roller coaster in Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen. May 2008.
Tivoli, which opened in 1843, is not the oldest amusement park in the world. It is only the second-oldest (after nearby Dreyhavsbakken, which opened in 1583). Consolation prize: Tivoli, with its merry-go-round and boat rides, resident symphony orchestra and Chinese harlequin theater (which is designed like a peacock), is the most visited amusement park in Scandinavia. At night its gardens are bright with coloured lamps and hundreds of thousands of little lights.
Located in the center of Copenhagen, Tivoli is an urban phenomenon and is surrounded by town hall square, the Hans Christian Anderson house, and the main train station. The park is open from April to September, the Danish summer season, and then reopened for the Christmas season. It was founded by Georg Cartensen, who was given a five-year commission by King Christian VIII; Cartensen reportedly persuaded the king by telling him, “when the people are amused, they do not think about politics.” From the beginning, the park included restaurants, cafés, a theater, gardens and flower beds, a merry-go-round and fanciful Oriental-style buildings.
In 1964, the Beatles played at Tivoli. Michael Jackson offered to buy it. Walt Disney once described the park as “happy, with an unbuttoned air,” and he borrowed heavily from its whimsy for Disneyland. Disney even told his wife, “Now this is what an amusement place should be!” But Tivoli is more tranquil than the Disney parks, perhaps more tranquil than any other theme park, full of cozy gardens and fountains and scattered benches.
The Dæmonen (Demon) roller coaster opened in 2004 and is one of the most expensive structures in the park. It is a floorless coaster, which means that a rider’s legs dangle during the ride.
Tivoli is probably the most famous landmark in Copenhagen - if not in all of Denmark. in 1944, the Nazis attempted to burn it down. But the Danes rebuilt and reopened the park within weeks.
“She loved Tivoli Gardens, in the heart of Copenhagen; her parents had taken her there, often, when she was a little girl. she remembered the music and the brightly colored lights, the carousel and ice cream and especially the magnificent fireworks in the evenings; the huge colored splashes and bursts of lights in the evening sky.
‘I remember the fireworks best of all,’ she commented to Ellen.
‘Me too,’ Kirsti said. ‘I remember the fireworks.’
‘Silly,’ Annemarie scoffed. ‘You never saw the fireworks.’ Tivoli Gardens was closed now. the German occupation forces had burned part of it, perhaps as a way of punishing the fun-loving Danes for their lighthearted pleasures.” - Lois Lowry, Number the Stars
Tivoli still has fireworks in the evenings.
Nathan Altman. Portrait of Anna Akhmatova. 1914. The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.
Cleopatra
She has already kissed Antony’s dead lips,
already wept on her knees before Augustus…
and her servants have betrayed her. Trumpets
cry below Roman eagles, the gloom of dusk.
Noble and stately, stammering with confusion
now enters the last prisoner of her beauty,
‘You – like a slave…
. he’ll lead me in triumph before him…’
but her swanlike neck still bends peacefully.
Tomorrow her children. O, what littleness
is left to do on earth – only toy with this fool,
and, indifferently, like a parting kindness
lay the black snake to her dark breast too.
-Anna Akhmatova, 1940
| — |
J.D. Salinger |
Eikoh Hosoe Barakei Undated
I believe that the subject of this photo is Yukio Mishima, but I’m not certain and can’t find the information. It sure looks like Mishima.
I think it is too. It does look like Mishima, and disquieting eroticism of this photo is similar to a lot of the other shots Hosoe did of Mishima against the roses.
Something about this picture really radiates madness, which I guess is appropriate considering how bizarre Mishima was. His ‘Confessions of a Mask’ is a great read.
Everything is packed into a second which is either consummated or not consummated. The earth is not an arid plateau of health and comfort, but a great sprawling female with velvet torso that swells and heaves with ocean billows; she squirms beneath a diadem of sweat and anguish. Naked and sexed she rolls among the clouds in the violet light of the stars. All of her, from her generous breasts to her gleaming thighs, blazes with furious ardor. She moves amongst the seasons and the years with a grand whoopla that seizes the torso with paroxysmal fury, that shakes the cobwebs out of the sky; she subsides on her pivotal orbits with volcanic tremors. She is like a doe at times, a doe that has fallen into a snare and lies waiting with beating heart for the cymbals to crash and the dogs to bark. Love and hate, despair, pity, rage, disgust – what are these amidst the fornications of the planets? What is war, disease, cruelty, terror, when night presents the ecstasy of myriad blazing suns? What is the chaff we chew in our sleep if it is not the remembrance of fang-whorl and star cluster?
She used to say to me, Mona, in her fits of exaltation, ‘you’re a great human being.’
| — | Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer |
