Large Fierce Mammal

Aubrey Vincent Beardsley (1872-1898); photographed at the approximate age of 23 by Frederick H. Evans. (Click to enlarge.)

The Valiant

A ballad

The valiant was a noble bark
         As ever ploughed the sea,
A noble crew she also had
         As ever there might be.

When once at night upon the deep
         The Valiant did sail,
Her captain saw a pirate ship
         By the moonlight dim and pale.

Then up he called his goodly crew
         And unto them thus spake:
“A musket and a cutlass sharp
         Each must directly take.

“For yonder see a pirate ship,
         Behold her flag so dark;
See now the gloomy vessel
         Makes straight for this our bark.”

Scarce had the Captain spoke those words
         Than a shot o’er his head did fly
From the deck of the pirate ship which now
         To the Valiant was hard by.

Approaching near, twelve desperate men
         On the Valiant’s deck did leap,
But some there were less brave and strong
         Who to their ship did keep.

And then a moment afterwards
         Did a bloody fray ensue,
And as the time sped onward
         Fiercer the fray it grew.

“Come on!” the Valiant’s captain cried,
         “Come on, my comrades brave,
And if we die we shall not sink
         Inglorious ’neath the wave.”

When the morning came, and the men arose,
         The pirates, where were they?
The ship had sunk and all its crew;
         Dead ’neath the sea they lay.

What you’ve just read was the first published literary work of Aubrey Vincent Beardsley whose artistic talents were silenced when he died of tuberculosis before reaching his 26th birthday. The poem was published within the covers of Past and Present, the magazine of the Brighton Grammar School, Vol. X, No.2, June 1885, but he’d written it the previous year when he was twelve, inspired by a popular childrens’ book, The Lives of All the Notorious Pirates. Only twelve and already inspired by blades, blood, and mayhem on the high seas. Ah, what levels our modern times and their so widely held and meagre efforts at child rearing have sunk to. (more…)

I’m not sure how I managed it, but I only first learned of the Norwegian brothers Vegard and Bård Ylvisåker, and their musical talents under the name of Ylvis, in the past few months. Lucky for me, they came into my life just in time to provide the musical introduction to today’s Dark Sentiment with The Fox. From my informal opinion poll conducted among my array of associates, you’ll either love it or hate it. (more…)

Back in October of 2010, I wrote about the Wendigo –

” … a malevolent forest spirit that comes in winter. It needs human flesh to feed but can only slake its hunger by possessing a human that it then uses to hunt, kill, and devour its prey. The Wendigo comes to us through the spiritual teachings of the Algonquian people, and it’s said that when stalking its victims it has the ability to remain forever behind and out of sight. As the prey finally senses its presence, even the quickest turn of the head will never catch sight of it until too late.

“Most powerful in times of hunger and famine, the Wendigo waits and hunts in the bleakest and most remote parts of the North American wilderness, ready for the solitary traveler with the right combination of fatigue, hunger, hopelessness, greed, weakness, and desperation. Most of all it loves weakness and greed, and such is its ravenous hunger that when it strikes, all known to its host, and any it meets along the way are at risk until none are left to tell the tale.” ~ Dark Sentiments 2010 – Day 17

I told the tale of a Cree trapper named Swift Runner who took his family on a hunting trip in the Winter of 1879, and along the way, killed, butchered, and ate the lot of them. When he was subsequently arrested by the North West Mounted Police, he admitted to what he had done, but explained that he had been visited by spirits who told him to become a Wendigo. (more…)

Smugly cute SFM Viktor and his incomparable Mother, the pulchritudinous Mrs. LFM. (LFM Photo – click to enbiggen)

Our SFM Viktor is only a little more than  a month past his first birthday and is already well acquainted with the arts of seduction. At least insofar as it applies to causing everyone in the room to ignore all other children, even their own, as soon as they notice him.  When that starts, the room converges in the direction of the cries of, “Oh my GOD!!! He’s SOOO CUTE!!!” (more…)

Film noir
/ film nwär /
noun:

• A style or genre of cinematographic film marked by a mood of pessimism, fatalism, and menace. The term was originally applied (by a group of French critics) to American thriller or detective films made in the period 1944–54 and to the work of directors such as Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, and Billy Wilder.
• A film marked by a mood of pessimism, fatalism, and menace.

Today’s Dark Sentiment presents two short films of the modern era that epitomize, “… a mood of pessimism, fatalism, and menace.” To my mind, each also carries the message that the further we go, the more that is of True Value gets missed, or lost in translation. Whatever the reason, human development perpetually misses the point, on the small and grand scale alike, both with ourselves and everything else, world without end. Until it ends that is, and what also gets missed is that when people speak of “saving the planet”, what they really mean is making sure it has people on it because, to their way of thinking, without them nothing else matters.

I find these films also highlight one of the many reasons I hate any reference to “raising awareness” of anything for any fucking reason. If that were even possible, we’d be more widely aware of these Truths by now, but yet current events mirror the sins of the past. (more…)

This image was put here by me as a shameless attention grabber, and is NOT the work of our Artist du jour.

WARNING: Images and links contained in this article are of an EXTREMELY ADULT nature that may be disturbing to some readers.

If your sentiments run against subjects that include bondage, nudity, and torment in a sexual context, then please leave this page now and come back tomorrow when we’ve moved on to a different topic; But if you’re good with it all, then please feel free to wade into the wonderful artistic world of Yoji Muku, AKA Jito. (more…)

In my studies of the peculiar practice of cannibalism, I’m often surprised by the common thread in cannibals getting caught. Faced with the dilemma of disposal, they are often pack rats, and eventually something rotten this way comes to attract unwanted attention.

In this vein, I give you the tale of Jerry.

Cannibal Jerry

By LFM

Jerry was a cannibal,
Though not for very long,
And the reason that he stopped was not
Because he thought it wrong.

The bane of many like him,
And what often gets them caught,
Is left overs aren’t a turn on so
They give them little thought.

Acquisition and consumption is
What’s foremost in their mind,
So all their planning goes to that
Until, of course, they’ve dined.

I know you’ll understand it’s hard,
Within a single day
To eat your weight in person.
Some you’ll HAVE to pack away.

Forgotten milk will tend to sour,
Old bread will go to mould.
Unless you want your meat to spoil,
You have to keep it cold.

So Jerry froze his meat supply
Until its time for eating,
But fate soon dealt the kind of blow
That never needs repeating.

An old and failing freezer
Ended Jerry’s life of sin.
He died beside the toilet
Wond’ring which end to put in.

His neighbours called the landlord
To complain about the reek.
He went inside, then reeled back out,
He couldn’t even speak.

The M. E. took the corpse away,
And all the rest as well.
So justice came for Jerry
Who now shits himself in Hell.

Picture credit: Jonathan Button

Fairy Tales, as they were originally written, weren’t the saccharine offal children who don’t belong to Mrs. LFM and me, or a few notable Friends, grew up with. They were intended to convey valuable life lessons to the offspring of people who lived a lot closer to reality than most in the so called “first world” do now, and the stories routinely employed animals as representations of very real dangers and foul intentions. One you’ll recognize immediately is the Big Bad Wolf in Red Riding Hood who represented all that was evil at its ravening, grandmother killing, child devouring worst. Today’s Dark Sentiment comes to you by way of an animated short film by British film maker Jonathan Button.

The film was inspired by a very short update to Little Red Riding Hood titled The Little Girl and the Wolf, published in 1940 as part of a collection of pieces written and illustrated by James Thurber called Fables of Our Time. In fact, it’s so short that I’m going to quote it in its entirety here:

The Little Girl and the Wolf
by James Thurber

One afternoon a big wolf waited in a dark forest for a little girl to come along carrying a basket of food to her grandmother. Finally a little girl did come along and she was carrying a basket of food. “Are you carrying that basket to your grandmother?” asked the wolf. The little girl said yes, she was. So the wolf asked her where her grandmother lived and the little girl told him and he disappeared into the wood.

When the little girl opened the door of her grandmother’s house she saw that there was somebody in bed with a nightcap and nightgown on. She had approached no nearer than twenty-five feet from the bed when she saw that it was not her grandmother but the wolf, for even in a nightcap a wolf does not look any more like your grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge. So the little girl took an automatic out of her basket and shot the wolf dead.

Moral: It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be.

Now that was back in 1940 when, as one reviewer wrote it might not be, “… quite as feministic as reflecting a time when America had just gotten through a Depression and was on the verge of war; people were disillusioned and not as naive, as the moral indicates.”

Coming forward to today, much evidence exists that little girls may be backsliding from Thurber’s day, immersed as most are today in events and conversations that are nowhere close to where they’re standing at any given moment. No need to fool them because they’ll never see it coming, and to quote Camille Paglia in her 29 September 2014 Time article, “Young women today do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.”

Thankfully though, there are still some of us who steadfastly refuse to raise victims, and so, on to the icing atop today’s cake.

Douse that light and revel in the Darkness.

“Welcome, Dear Reader, to yet another season of Dark Sentiments; being our traditional 31 October days of musings, revelations, exposé, poetry, literature, visual arts, and myriad dark expressions of the Human spirit, all chosen from the sort most in the world have spent the past year trying desperately to avoid, or pretend into nonexistence.” ~ Dark Sentiments 2013 – Day 1: A New Beginning

If you are reading this, you’ve made it through another year since Dark Sentiments 2013, and have somehow found ample forgiveness in your heart to return. We trust you won’t be disappointed in this October’s offering.

The twelve months since we last met for this event have been nothing short of a pitch black cornucopia; but ah well. Black goes with everything, and the deeper we dig, the more is revealed so that we were, for a brief time, considering petitioning for a longer October. That is, until Mrs. LFM calculated that replacing all the other months with one gargantuan year long October still wouldn’t be enough. And so, yet again, 31 days of Dark Sentiments is all you’re going to get.

So Good Reader, if you’ve come here intentionally then we welcome you with applause for your fortitude and invite you to stay the course. If you’ve arrived by accident, misadventure, misdirection, or ambush; why turn back now? Keep in mind the words of Winston Churchill who said, “If you are going through hell, keep going.”

Settle back and join us for a drink to still the racing heart … but not too still. As usual, what’s to come is best considered after dark, preferably just before bed. And then …

If you have to doff multiple kilograms of gear before you can even start taking off your clothes at the end of the day, then you will sympathize with this soldier. Gone to years worth of war, he’s returned to his Wife who, not unlike my own would do, has wrapped herself around him in greeting, giving him no time at all to even, “get oot his gear,” so he can get undressed first. Gods! Join me in a glass in celebration of delicious eagerness!

Home From th’ Wars

By LFM

Le’ me ge’ oot me gear lass!
Le’ me ge’ oot me gear!
Six years awa’ we’ve dreamed o’ this,
An’ we’ll get to it, n’er fear!

But I ken that you’ve forgotten
In the long time I’ve been gone
That I’m nay so long an’ hard as THAT,
T’is me CLAYMORE hilt yer on!