Dark Sentiments Season 10 — Day 30: Garden Party

| October 30, 2019

On an individual level, Human beings are simultaneously insanely fragile and unbelievably hard to kill, both qualities having often been documented in the same individual. In our conceit, we find it easy to imprint that characteristic on other creatures, forgetting they don’t share our tendency to overthink things, overplay their importance, or react emotionally to […]

Dark Sentiments Season 10 — Day 26: Hier Encore

| October 26, 2019

The melancholy ballad from which tonight’s Dark Sentiment draws its title was written by Charles Aznavour and released in his 1964 album of the same name. Translated literally into English (always a mistake, but here we are), it means “Yesterday Again”, and you may know it best in the English translation by Herbert Kretzmer from […]

Dark Sentiments Season 10 — Day 24: Little Tombstone

| October 24, 2019

In case you’re at risk of forgetting both the role a healthy dose of opportunism plays in the world, and that if you find yourself in a fair fight your tactics suck, tonight’s Dark Sentiment will set you to rights. Little Tombstone is a 2011 child of the Ecole Supérieure des Métiers Artistiques (ESMA) and I’ll […]

Dark Sentiments Season 10 — Day 23: Dead Spider Serenade

| October 23, 2019

This is a song I wrote based loosely on actual events. There is music and I’ll be recording it for your edification in a future fit of publication. In the mean time here’s — Dead Spider Serenade By LFM Dearest spider on the ceiling I won’t ask you how you’re feeling We’ve not spoken since […]

Dark Sentiments Season 10 — Day 22: Keeping Watch

| October 22, 2019

Another rite of passage piece with echos of last season’s Willie and the Bear. The term “traveller’s lantern”, perverted to Hunter’s lantern here, and not to be confused with Hunter’s Moon, refers to a time when safe travel was denied to the average bloke between the last quarter, through new, and to the first quarter of […]

Dark Sentiments Season 10 — Day 21: Holding the Night at Spearpoint

| October 21, 2019

The eye is the primary sensory tool of the Human animal. Coupled to a brain predisposed to seek out patterns and sift them through a sieve of instincts and memories, the sense of sight is and always has been instrumental in keeping us alive. But it has weaknesses that become most evident when darkness falls, […]

Dark Sentiments Season 10 — Day 19: Who Gets Into Valhalla?

| October 19, 2019

I first introduced expert in all things Old Norse, Dr. Jackson Crawford, in last February’s A Long Winter’s Night — Ascent to Spring Edition: The Cowboy Hávamál. We already know HOW you get into Valhalla — the hard way. Tonight he’s back with the answer to that other burning question — WHO gets into Valhalla? […]

Dark Sentiments Season 10 — Day 18: Silent Moon

| October 18, 2019

In a blur of fevered weeks in the year 2019, a Man obeyed an otherworldly compulsion to closet himself in his New York apartment, and grind his fingers to bloody nubs giving birth to his Magnum Opus. OK, not exactly how it went, but close enough. “Prostrated on the ground in front of his shrine, […]

Dark Sentiments Season 10 — Day 17: Lost and Found

| October 17, 2019

“Upon further examination, we found a trap – a steel trap dating back to the time when the Hudson Bay Company ran things around here. Rusted and busted this trap was embedded in the mesa’s dirt for centuries. We looked it over and left it laying there. We never remove anything from its resting place. […]

Dark Sentiments Season 10 — Day 16: Of Hand Operated Head Bludgeons and Throat Mallets

| October 16, 2019

It was an afternoon in the late 1970’s when I attended my first, and so far only, estate auction, inside the lofty, creaky confines of an ancient Halifax auction house. I was there in the company of two friends with whom was shared an interest in antique instruments of mayhem, and the newspaper listing for […]