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Showing posts from 2002

finishing fragments

Overlaid patches of the past filtered through the white slats of a venetian blind stop the light enter the tunnel a young girl, Anna picks nettles in the Vienna woods without gloves her hands soon redden and swell hundreds of tiny bites tatoo marks from the sting of the furies protect yourself Is the will just a movement repeated, an addiction? ______________________________________________________________________ In time present the snow drifts a truck spins out of control crashes towards the ditch piles of white explode a motionless avalanche faces of shock disappear two children can't forget the horror yet the thrill becomes a survival legend it is that way with the edge of near death or playing in the ditch. ______________________________________________________________________ Tunnels. Corridors breathing with no writing on the walls sometimes all the people pass by into unseen realms the crowds around me blankly stare into the beyond "How was your holiday?" the fait

turning the calendar

During the attacks I feel a coward before the pain and suffering . . . and it may be this vey cowardice which, whereas I had no desire to get better before, makes me eat like two now, work hard, limit my relations with the other patients for fear of a relapse - I am now trying to recover like a man who meant to commit sucide and, finding the water too cold, tries to regain the bank. . . . I reproach myself with my cowardice, I should have defended my studio, even if I had had to fight with the police and the neighbours. Others in my place would have used a revolver, and certainly if as an artist one had killed such rollers, one would have been acquitted. - St. Remy , July 1889

End of Violence Glare

The historian stumbles out puking and crying storms into the raging night & sinisterly growls "You," stabbing the air with a pointed finger - "You get our of here." Then moves cautiously back to her drink breathing deliberately Better than honesty. END OF VIOLENCE GLARE ... Is the will just a movement repeated, an addiction? Here, in the black box no audience but a silent witness an angel in white and gold the cloud of unknowing hanging a see through cocoon to crawl into Dare to touch or kiss the gossamer cloth Yeats speaks: "I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams." ______________________________________________________________________ I've now named the historian Rhiannon ______________________________________________________________________ ..... Don't, don't blame. But don't , don't surrender. ______________________________________________________________________ Each moment quivers a

St. Stephen's Day Reflection

In the fourth and fifth centuries the three days following Christmas Day were established as festivals of martyrs: December 26, St. Stephen, martyr both in will and in deed, December 27, St. John, martyr in will but not in deed, December 28, The Holy Innocents, martyrs in deed but not in will. (via Dan's Page ) "Happy Boxing Day but, more to the point, St Stephen's Day : "St. Stephen was a Christian martyr who was stoned to death for his belief in Jesus. He is the patron of stoneworkers and also is associated with horses. This day 'drew in' other more ancient traditions. In Ireland, boys go from door to door gathering money for a 'dead wren' they carry, supposedly stoned to death, but really a remnant of ancient Druidic wren sacrifices for the winter solstice. In Poland, people throw oats at the priests and walnuts at each other - things supposedly symbolic of the stoning, but in reality these things were done long before as fertility rituals." &q

Stupor (2)

Downstairs in the temple kitchen the water is turned off. A pipe burst. Little other than a cold storage now. An unknown attempted a break-in, twice gave up as the iron bars held fast. The lonely roomer left unwelcomed over a year ago a row of tea candles mark his departure. The rotary dial phone became a theater prop. No calls to record the comings and goings. The sleeping historian shuts the door. Take down the decorations. Give them away a pile of gold You journey to the east sitting among old women watching them sleep or gossip waiting time out till breath to us depart everlasting life amen. Mounds of crushed powder ground by teeth pressed tight till jaws shatter. Forgive not the pain. Forget not the wound. The historian declares the voices of the unspoken rise up in the early morn. Take to the streets - smart mobs texturing, urinating on the face of authority. ______________________________________________________________________ Define will: a sort of violence. Look to the graves

Stupor

Stupor All around the earth opens to endless tunnels a man digs collapsed on the kitchen table a drunk, arms reddening she's a weary historian from afar barks commands into an empty room the round table an altar you leave out scraps of food for the hungry ghosts & drink. She is the will. ______________________________________________________ A vase of dried flowers point to the deep, dark paneled ceiling a varathened shelter the birch chairs passed on from generations older than the historian (measured in lunar years) I must go to sleep leaving you unconscious. Look up through the floor. A white horse crashes through the ice flailing swims underneath blue ice, is it a death?

O B E Y (2)

Second sound A cough/choke shatters the skull pitch black night sky no moon cloudless. A child at church runs away from his guardian. I wish I were him. hide and seek, peek-a-boo, tag illusion of liberation by night The games not yet imagined. The running away patterned so sleep in the bedroom of your youth the white walls, crosses and icon borders not even a hint of the past turmoil shut the door underneath the stairway shut out the breathing above into no visible light wounded escape to nowhere, dripping blood. ________________________________________________________________ Loves lost in darkness. ________________________________________________________________ It over I mean, empty It had to the universe leaving traces exist There is nothing to request at the time of parting lighter than unknown wrongs carrying weight. Fall from grace on the land of black snow shivering death chatters to echo life that thou must accept me, exactly.

O B E Y

THRENODY REPRISE moved out for no reason. didn't change any place It's no better. & the dreams uprooted the ancient tree rotten no strength required What you must accept, fully A man with the black wool high up the neck for protecting the throat. (E)motional ______________________________________________________________________ I had left the temple waterless and frozen fatigued and peeling. On the edge of no return at least that's the case this winter solstice thousand two. how many years later? ______________________________________________________________________ It's cold outside ______________________________________________________________________ Golden light shadows the face On wall (through blinds, glass window, everywhere) "Schwarze Milch der Frühe" crisis doesn't lie lost daylight (anger doesn't see the many deaths) uprising into her burial zone No . . . ten footsteps . . . to the left future nights collapse (I had created more loss) Bea

Where Gods Set Bronze in Motion

"The dancing Shivas, lent by museums in Dallas and Amsterdam and an unnamed private collector, lead off a succession of works, many of which are well known and widely reproduced, that are rarely, if ever, seen in one another's company. A collaboration between the Sackler and the American Federation of Arts, this exhibition has been organized by Vidya Dehejia, a professor of art history at Columbia University and formerly the chief curator and deputy director of the Sackler. It is the first in the United States to concentrate solely on the bronze temple sculptures created during the nearly four-century reign of the devout, munificent and innovative Chola emperors." nytimes:arts /Displaying Hindu Ritual With Reverence and Graciousness

threnody

'a poem or song of mourning or lamentation.' The wind, one brilliant day The wind, one brilliant day, called to my soul with an odor of jasmine. "In return for the odor of my jasmine, I'd like all the odor of your roses." "I have no roses; all the flowers in my garden are dead." "Well then, I'll take the withered petals and the yellow leaves and the waters of the fountain." The wind left. And I wept. And I said "What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you ?" Antonio Machado, translated by Robert Bly Elenor Rigby (Lennon/McCartney) Ah, look at all the lonely people Ah, look at all the lonely people Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been Lives in a dream Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door Who is it for? All the lonely people Where do they all come from ? All the lonely people Where do they all belong ? Father McKenzie writing the words of a sermo

The Christmas Story

With triumphal agitation, sensing that he had found the necessary, one-and-only key, that he would write something exquisite, depict as no one had before the collision of two classes, of two worlds, he commenced writing. He wrote about the opulent tree in the shamelessly illuminated window and about the hungry worker, victim of a lockout, peering at that tree with a severe and somber gaze. "The insolent Christmas tree," wrote Novodvortsev, "was afire with every hue of the rainbow. [ The New York Review of Books ]

Eric Drooker

Eric Drooker Graphics "The genesis of a graphic novel is strikingly similar in conception and construction to any conventional novel. Even a novel told solely in pictures must feature characters who live, breathe, and evolve as they are touched by their environment" Graphic Novels Speak Louder Than Words. The graphic novel is so young no one is sure what it really can do. Six new books show some possibilities. By Nick Hornby. [ New York Times: Books ]

compromise

. . . a long time ago now . . . it was in a mild winter much like this year . . . remember driving home as a passenger . . . dad driving & me staring out the window into the twilight sky . . . the saskatchewan skies live so close they beg to be touched . . . when we hooked up we would drive home together . . . he in his early years as a university administrator . . . i a first year arts student . . . we barely talked . . . what was there to talk about? . . . he turned down a wide, quiet road and spoke . . . spoke in a way which said: 'what i'm about to say is important' . . . "Don't ever compromise yourself" . . . What? . . . "Don't ever compromise yourself!" . . . didn't know what to say . . . so said nothing . . . . . . thirty years later can still hear him making that statement . . . at the time wondered if he believed he had compromised himself at some point . . . maybe even just recently in his decision to be bumped out of research i

Arts

"The Atlantic nominee among this year's finalists, Colleen Wolstenholme, is from Hantsport, N.S., and the runner-up, David Hoffos, lives in Lethbridge, Alta."

thoughts

. . . a while back, among the community of bloggers i visit, was an emotional discussion which occupied a lot of screen & transformed into an on-going thought thread in my mindspace . . . i don't participate in most of these hot discussions . . . simply read and check my responses . . . came across Sue Ellen Cases's Towards a New Poetic which further stimulated but shed no new light . . . there was a call: "The feminist in theatre can create the laboratory in which the single most effective mode of repression - gender - can be exposed, dismantled and removed; the same laboratory may produce the representation of a subject who is liberated from the repressions of the past and capable of signalling a new age for both men and women." . . . what i discovered was that a simple gender switch, that is switching male characters into female & vice versa, wonderfully exposed the bias of western theater & allowed for new signs . . . it was such a simple action and i

Tips for the Top: How to be a philosopher

" Wouldn't You Like To Be A Philosopher Too? Not so difficult. Here are 12 easy tips to get you started ... Anyone who feels chest pain, constriction in the throat, reddening of the face, or clenching of the fists upon reading these techniques should be treated immediately for anautoscopsis (an inability to laugh at oneself), a potentially lethal condition." Zebrafish Mend Broken Hearts

Teaching Timidity to Kids

"Just as parents are hard-wired to protect, children are driven to take risks and many will find a way to do so, as either rebels or adventurers or both." ... more

Fire

"But I was taken by the assertion that the Japanese have a multiplicity of words for fire, so I checked my dictionaries. Sure enough, there were a hundred or more. (The Chinese character for fire is pronounced ka, hi, ho, bi or bo, depending on the context.) Some fire-related words: kachū in the fire hisaki direction in which the flames are spreading hosaki flame tips kataku house on fire kasai conflagration kaji mimai sympathy visit after a fire kajidoro thief at a fire kajiba scene of a fire hiyo(ke) protection against fire hibashira pillar of flames hidaruma mass of flames hiashi spreading of a fire hiusturi catching fire kasei force of the flames kaen fire and smoke kanan'yoke charm against fire shōka, boya small fire yamakaji forest fire . . ." . . . more :: comment :: . . . though never blinked before have read Jonathon Delacour regularly & it is an honour to finally have the opportunity to thank him for his fine discourses . . .

Into the Woods, Children, for Dark Mysteries, Not Simple Lessons

"Inhuman acts are also human in their origin. In the first Grimm version of "Hansel" the witch is simply a "woman as old as the hills - an extreme example of the human, a withered image of who we already are. That story's creepiest element is not the witch's magic but the more mundane spell the father casts in the woods when abandoning his children: attaching a branch to a dead tree so the hollow sound made when it is swung by the wind fools the children into thinking he is still nearby." [ nytimes: arts ]

language death

"We should care because languages are interesting in themselves. As Adult Education and Universities of the Third Age are increasing in constituency, there has been a considerable demand for language courses. I have been fascinated by words and languages all my life and have lately undertaken the study of Coptic through the University of the Third Age in Canberra. I have also been engaged in teaching languages and linguistics over several decades and am constantly surprised by the number of people who share my own fascination for language studies. Ultimately we should care, because language is the most valuable single possession of the human race. (p.66) Why do languages die? In most cases, languages die as people die, especially people in a small community. Languages can also be murdered as the result of a deliberate political stratagem. David Crystal quotes part of a play, Mountain Language, by Harold Pinter which very clearly illustrates the dictatorial process: 'Your langu

Celebrating Beckett, Against His Will

"But the audience became hushed and sat very still as Ms. Seldes read "Rockaby," Beckett's play about a woman rocking herself to death. "Close of a long day," Ms. Seldes read, sitting onstage in a rocker, her face almost gaunt, and wrapped in a mauve shawl, "went down/ down the steep stair/ let down the blind and down/ right down." Finally, "stop her eyes/ rock her off/ rock her off," she read. And then her head dropped. " [ nytimes:books ]
Edward Byrne (educating the imagination) ". . . Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems , where Wright has determined: The unexamined life's no different from the examined life - Unanswerable questions, small talk, Unprovable theorems, long abandoned arguments - You've got to write it all down. Landscape or waterscape, light-length on evergreen, dark sidebar Of evening, you've got to write it down. ["Black Zodiac"] " . . . more

Audio Vault

Audio Vault "Antonin Artaud, From Texte d'ouverture An excerpt from Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu (To Have Done with the Judgment of God) Written and performed by Antonin Artaud. From the 1947 radiodiffusion franÁaise recording, available through sub rosa records. Used by permission." "Italo Calvino, First Excerpt From Invisible Cities (4:36) William Weaver reads from his English translation of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. "Cities, Memory, 1" and "Cities of the Dead, 2"."

Double Agent: Catherine Yass at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology - the lab

"This much we know: the photograph is not a true representation of its subject. Yass's art is not a literal representation of James's science and this article is not a true representation of her work. Each of our endeavours become phrases in a cultural dialogue. The artist considers the scientists who in turn observe the artist and you in turn witness the products of their collaboration. The story grows, passed from person to person by word of mouth, on printed page, in mounted photographs. We all become storytellers and each time the story is told it becomes something new yet transient, rich in questions and partial answers, coloured with decepxion and encrypxed with elusive truths."

The TV Generation

Aspen no. 4, item 3: "Kiva! Shiva/shakti! Bucky Fuller! Brook Farm! USCO! McLuhan! Back-to-the-tribe! Dig those terms? If so, you've a grasp on Solux, slated to be the newest pueblo in the Southwest, and certainly the hoppingest since the heyday of the Hopi. The construction of Solux, a "spiritual retreat away from the intense psychic vibrations of large energy centers," is planned by USCO, a tribe of McLuhan-oriented poets, artists, engineers and filmmakers, whose current headquarters is an old church building at Garnerville, N.Y. USCO earns its bread by way of "media mixes" "

tripped

tripped over a bowl of roses in the dark of the night knowledge of the bowl which was placed in the middle of the room to bring solace & comfort to a turbulent time did not prevent the tripping haste caused the fall the water dried the leaves left a silent pattern marking the moment staining the heart soon forgotten remains forever

open lesson

. . . the open lesson . . . acting students open their 'work' to an interested public . . . the question "what is the lesson?" hung in the air as the students bravely, though for the most part, presented ill-prepared material around the theme Hospitals . . . what is the actor's research? . . . the actor's processes? . . . what is theater? . . . questions which circulated as the action began . . . two hours later very little remained but shallow wallowing in pools of dissipated energy . . . . . . most of the material hinted at the compellingly humane which unfortunately resolved into the hopelessly mundane . . . there was movement but no developed study of the movement . . . no attempt to test limits or boundaries of space&time whether physical, imaginary or theatrically . . . . . . the students exercised a presentational stance - posturing and playing for an audience who might catch much of their 'in-joke' humour and pathos . . . the overlong impro

From Cabs and Darkrooms

"Mr. Weideman's approach was a reaction to necessity. Arriving in New York in 1980 with a Master of Fine Arts degree from the California College of Arts and Crafts, he confronted the young artist's perennial problem: how to pay the rent and still have time and energy to make art. Mr. Weideman took care of the money question by becoming a cabdriver, a job he holds to this day. For the art-making problem, he came up with an ingeniously economical solution: he turned the cab itself into a studio and took for his subject matter the unending flow of human cargo that he transported." Ryan Weideman's portrait of himself with Allen Ginsberg as passenger. nytimes:arts

How Masks Can Amplify as Well as Conceal

"The mask alters the revelation in a fascinating way, both buffering and intensifying its dreadfulness, creating the conflicting desire to hang on every word while also pulling back to decipher the visual power and artifice of the scene. The mask is delicately tactful, yet deadening. It respects the speaker's need for privacy, yet it executes a weird, surreal transformation, turning the speaker into a kind of freak." ...more
Image
"HALIFAX - Vancouver artist Brian Jungen is the first recipient of the $50,000 Sobey Art Award, one of the richest awards in the Canadian art world."

Ivan Illich

"December 4, 2002, 11:12 AM EST BERLIN -- Ivan Illich, a renowned sociologist who protested against the institutionalization of learning and religion, has died, a former university colleague said Wednesday. He was 76. "

nobel

"For the Swedish Academy, which will present Mr. Kertesz with the Nobel Prize in Stockholm on Dec. 10, this view is also what distinguishes his writing from that of some other Holocaust survivors. "For him, Auschwitz is not an exceptional occurrence that, like an alien body, subsists outside the normal history of Western Europe," it said in its citation. "It is the ultimate truth about human degradation in modern existence."" more . . .

Enemy of the People

. . Enemy of the People . . . overheard an audience member leaving the theater . . . "What an important work. Every student of history, in fact, all of us should be here watching!" . . . the ideas came at us with breath-taking speed . . . each scene moved relentlessly as the actors shaped the characters around the face of political intrigue . . . . . . the student actor created a Mayor revealing a depth of understanding the multifaceted aspects of the deceptive, deceitful & misguided leader in a performance well beyond her years . . . Dr. Stockman transformed from a determined visionary full of hope and conviction to a beaten victim wrestling with his own futile belief in truth & ended somewhat bravely though certainly not a heroic figure . . . . . . the supporting cast delighted with clear, articulate portrayals . . . varying the shades of response to the 'truth' as the 'truth'/whose truth shifted beneath them like the sands of time . . . . . . the st

Einstein

"Look deep,deep into nature and then you will understand everything." - Albert Einstein [via Voice of the Shuttle -> Culture Kiosque ]

The Moral and Practical Challenges of Globalization

"Close your eyes and picture your community. Whom do you see? Your family, surely. Work colleagues? Everyone who shares your area code? Your religion? All Americans? Folks in Afghanistan? Unless we start answering yes to all of the above, we're in for big trouble. That's the message of Peter Singer's timely and thoughtful book, '' One World: The Ethics of Globalization .'' A professor of bioethics at Princeton University and one of the most provocative philosophers of our time, Singer writes, ''How well we come through the era of globalization (perhaps whether we come through it at all) will depend on how we respond ethically to the idea that we live in one world.''"

international children's digital library

Led by the University of Maryland and the Internet Archive, a partnership of government, non-profit, industry and academic organizations launched the world's largest international digital library for children.... more in *context weblog* [ context weblog ]

buy nothing

... if you missed the day choose any day & buy nothing with complete consciousness/awareness ...

An Enemy of the People: Act IV

"Ibsen's Stockmann says: "What sorts of truths are they that the majority usually supports? They are truths that are of such advanced age that they are beginning to break up...A normally constituted truth lives, let us say, as a rule seventeen or eighteen, or at most twenty years; seldom longer."" more ...

Geniuses Together

"The Stravinsky-Balanchine ballets were fragile and complicated creatures, and behind the steps and notes lies a body of ideas, beliefs, and artistic ambitions. Indeed, Stravinsky and Balanchine's radical aesthetic grew out of a deeply religious, classical, and humanist view of art. " ( The New York Review of Books )

Enemy of the People Notes

Directors notes: These are turbulent times. It seems that everyday somewhere humanity is placed on trial. Henrik Ibsen articulated the ideas of Enemy of The People in 1882 and Charles Marowitz adapted them anew in 1982 and we look at them again in 2002. An individual, one man, stands up against his brother, the establishment and a whole town when he discovers that the very core of the town's existence, the health spa which is the economic life of the town, has poisoned water. Set on a stage of black and white labels meant to deliberately evoke Brecht, another great theater thinker of the past century, the cast and crew welcome you to witness the story. "A man like Dr. Stockman who has been continually battered by Establishment forces does not emerge victorious; more likely he is methodically destroyed . . . The reward for committed idealism is not the accumulation of inner strength but a one-way ticket to oblivion." - Marowitz. Counter-Polemics.(from the forward to Enemy

The Censor and the Artist: A Murky Border

"Does using software to remove potentially offensive language, sex and violence from R-rated movies constitute censorship? Or, by allowing viewers to tailor films to their tastes, is it a reasonable concession to consumer choice?" ( nytimes:education )

Reflecting on an Ordeal That Was Also Art

"New Yorkers are used to keeping closed up when they're in public, not making eye contact," Ms. Abramovic said. "But I think when they saw me so vulnerable, so open, the response was like an avalanche of emotion or an ocean. That was the title of the piece, `The House With the Ocean View,' and the ocean was their minds. They helped me through." ( nytimes:arts )

Loveplay

Greystone Theatre 's Loveplay by Moira Buffini skims tantalizingly along the surface . . . the ideas have a breadth and depth which pique the interest but what remains is nothing more than fragments - unfullfilled & unrequited . . . a horrific scene of brutal rape haunts a place and begs to be remembered . . . . . . linear time cannot erase the past despite all the future clever intentions and inventions . . . the actors seem to struggle in the darkness against a misplaced, unresolved environment where the music is loud and contrary . . . often there is a tension full of expectancy . . . a pregnant wife cries out in anguish to her unfaithful husband that she is so happy . . . two men, school friends, meet again and the unexpressed bond so long left unspoken embraces them both . . . . . .the characters touch and kiss . . . over and over again the kiss of betrayal between two nuns, two actors, two men, two love children of the sixties, two . . . and, at times, humour . . . still

dream quotes

""Dreams" has the charming literalness and naiveté of good folk art. Plaintive and sweet Korean song weaves through. There is a processional with shamanistic icons." [ nytimes:arts ] :: note :: ... wondering what it means that some days the posts are just blinks to the nytimes arts page ... if anyone can offer other rss arts feeds that provide windows into world theater/drama it would be valuable & appreciated ... thanks ...
" Will blogging lead to more tribal cocooning, only reinforcing a reader's preexisting world view, hermetically sealed spheres of thought?" . . . more (via Scripting News ) :: comment :: ... every question is a challenge ... yes or no is always the expected answer ... it is always the explanation which interests ... maybe starting in the cocoon ... but after the first blink the action is a breaking out ...

QWF

"Neil Bisoondath won the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction for his novel Doing the Heart Good, a book that is described as 'a novel of memory-what it means, how it informs, how it can salvage tomorrow from the debris of yesterday-written at the very height of a great artist's power'. "

imagination

The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. - Coleridge (found in the introduction of Frye. The Eternal Act of Creation.)

Fate

... Beyond Fate ... fate & the furies . . . hmmm ... the function of the furies was to keep categories clear ... the web of fate ... the angry ones ... the cosmic conflicts ... & then the Forum . . . will knowledge of metaphors liberate thought? :: comment :: metaphors liberate and transcend thoughts moving thought into action just as the furies drive us to accept and be conscious of the shadow

more fate

enemy of the people monstrous technology, fate & chance contemplated as one becomes a creature a mythological automata of causeless chance the consequences of resourcefulness moving remorselessly ruled by exterior forces programmed & wired not free nor fated freedom falling back into fate violence seeking a linear model of morality One Art Elizabeth Bishop The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss

Dark comic

. . . visit The Bruno Daily Times ...then visit the archives

Marcaccio

Documenta11:Interview/Details " Fabian Marcaccio: I call this kind of work "Multiple-Site Paintants". Many of the images I use are taken from the Internet. In one sense, it's as though one were to capture material that flows through the Intenet, and to "petrify" it at a certain moment in relation to a space and an architecture. This painting is meant to create a passage between the real architectural and virtual worlds. I am interested in the concept of that which we call "site", especially in the sense of place. "Surfing" in the case of this painting can be taken literally, in that one views the work while strolling by. In this case, I placed the work in a semi-enclosed area, as if it were part of both the exterior and the interior of the building. One can walk by it from one side or the other." . . . more

Pinter

Ramona Koval Wednesday August 28, 2002 The Guardian "RK: You spoke before about the joy you had in writing that latest poem. Language has been your passion during all your life, and relating the idea of war and people's words in war, and I know that the abuse of language and meaning is something that has incensed you over the years - phrases like "humanitarian intervention" and "civilised world" and "axis of evil" over the last year and the one that we've all just begun to hear recently, and that's "regime change". HP: My favourite of them all is "freedom-loving people". When I hear Bush say that "on behalf of all freedom-loving people we are going to continue to fight terrorism" and so on, I wonder what a "freedom-hating people" look like, I've never met such a people myself or can't even conceive of it. In other words, he is talking rubbish. That is the kind of rhetoric which you are referr

Surrender

Roy Miki , Fred Wah , Roy Kiyooka . . . voices from the past heard anew . . . check out Surrender . . . new hours of returning to 'old' wor(l)ds . . . Roy Miki, Vancouver, for Surrender (The Mercury Press; distributed by Fraser Direct) (ISBN 1-55128-095-7) In an exemplary fashion, Roy Miki responds to this century through political, intellectual and emotional word-play. This work challenges and disturbs, upsets and disorients official language and official history relating to the internment of Japanese-Canadians in the 1940s. Surrender explodes the notion of the documentary by infusing it with luscious imagery, poignant memory and social wit.(Governor General Literary Awards )

Panellists Threatened with Legal Action

"For me, it is not only a question of defending free speech, which is important enough, but also an issue of who controls the university. Concordia students, staff, administration and faculty voted, through the Senate, to lift the ban. It was the Board of Governors, dancing to the tune of corporate donors, that refused to lift the ban." rabble news (linkrot)

Heaney

Nobel Lectures-Literature 1995 ". . .And it is by such means that Yeats's work does what the necessary poetry always does, which is to touch the base of our sympathetic nature while taking in at the same time the unsympathetic nature of the world to which that nature is constantly exposed. The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry's power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry's credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being." more

Mortal Man

Mortal Man meets Death The Room of Decision We do not die because we have to die: we die because one day, and not so long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary. - Artaud Black lady lies invisible beneath the chair of decision, death's messenger with the task to escort souls to the afterlife. Mortal Man enters. Walks slowly & deliberately towards the chair - last breath. The characters contact each other through breath. Black lady breaks into the room, cracking through into the realm of the visible and reaches out for contact. Mortal Man first hears then sees Black Lady. The characters contact through sight. Black Lady is pulled away from Mortal Man to a gateway of the afterlife. She has violated her task by attempting to talk. Mortal Man, as a child or newborn to this afterlife, watches and is curious about this light cloth. Examines where it begins, where it goes, touches it . . . The White Lady emerges & introduces the game of hide & seek. A mother ca

Caryl Churchill

". . .Ms. Churchill, who lives in Islington in North London, with her husband, a lawyer, has made a practice in recent years of refusing to be interviewed, believing that her opinions should be no more set in stone than her imagination. But in the past, she has acknowledged that her prime concerns are the power and powerlessness of people, their longings, obsessions and dreams. She is a humanist, has described herself as a socialist and remains the dedicated foe of the class inequalities she found in Britain after spending much of her childhood in Canada, where her parents had relocated when she was 9. But she is no didact, no propagandist, and regards it as her duty to feel her way into her more unappealing characters rather than merely condemn them. As she told The Independent in 1989, her job consists of "throwing up worries and questions and complexities which you might not have if you weren't of a particular political complexion, but not actually saying, `Here is a p

Sven Lutticken

"Secrecy and Publicity - Reactivating the Avant-Garde" Interactivist Info Exchange "The curator of Documenta 11, Okwui Enwezor, has repeatedly stated that the main question for the mega-exhibition was the development of a public sphere in which art works could be discussed and utilized as a means of understanding the contemporary world. [27] Most of the mass-media coverage, though, and even that of the art media, focused on predictable quasi-topics - Enwezor as the first African curator of the Documenta, or as an intellectual supposedly expelling sensuous pleasure from art, et cetera. Not that all the blame for this rests on one side. The exhibition in Kassel was conceived by Enwezor as the last in a series of five 'platforms'; the first four had consisted of discussions and lectures on various aspects of globalization and postcolonial culture, held in different parts of the world. Some of these took place in closed session, and the published reports of their pro

Carnegie Council

"Human rights creates the ground in which we are forced, against all our instincts, our cultural superiorities, our imperial heritages, to listen, to deliberate, to find compromises. There is some point at which deliberation has to cease. There are forms of treatment of women that in any construal of any set of traditions are not humanly possible or defensible. So it is that double side of human rights that we need to keep in mind: a language of equality that creates the possibilities of deliberation, and then also a set of core principles of which we finally say, if we can't reach agreement: "Here, unfortunately, we have to disagree; and here, unfortunately, sometimes we may have to fight." But that is also true of the other tradition, which is why equality is so difficult. I don't want to over-sell deliberation to you. There are moments where deliberation ceases. Human rights both creates the grounds for deliberation and tells you "we can go this far and n

Amiri Baraka:

Somebody Blew Up America by Amiri Baraka :: comment :: . . . wondering about all the surfing & never really digging deeper . . . spending time & thought never developing anything . . . just riding the surf . . . the info wave and hardly get wet . . . friend has an epiphany about Frye&Brook&theholytheater . . . but she studies . . . i listen and ride . . . teach the known . . . somebody blow me up . . .

David Graeber

". . .some of the most interesting scholars in France today you never hear about at all. One such is a group of intellectuals who go by the rather unwieldy name of Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales, or MAUSS, and who have dedicated themselves to a systematic attack on the philosophical underpinnings of economic theory. The group take their inspiration from the great early-20th century French sociologist Marcel Mauss, whose most famous work, The Gift (1925), was perhaps the most magnificent refutation of the assumptions behind economic theory ever written. At a time when "the free market" is being rammed down everyone's throat as both a natural and inevitable product of human nature, Mauss' work . . . more " "We have no art," say the Balinese: "we do everything as well as possible."

Weapons of mass instruction

"Koyaanisqatsi" director Godfrey Reggio invented a film genre, prefiguring the campus classic "Baraka." There are no words in his latest -- just one cutting image after another. . . . . The juxtaposition of how "Koyaanisqatsi" begins and how "Naqoyqatsi" ends gets to the core message of Reggio's work. For him, nature and our self-created world (call it human nature) are so irreconcilable that we live our daily lives in a perpetual state of imbalance. . . [ Salon.com ]

beauty

. . . ah yes the whole idea of beauty . . . "There's clearly a strong force making toward conformity in society, so strong that it seems to have something to do with the stability of society itself. In ordinary life even the most splendid things we can think of, like goodness and truth and beauty, all mean essentially what we're accustomed to. As I hinted just now in speaking of female make-up, most of our ideas of beauty are pure convention, and even truth has been defined as whatever doesn't disturb the pattern of what we already know" (Northrop Frye. The Educated Imagination 35)

frye again

. . . reading & reading about Northrop Frye . . . again . . . for the first time . . . again . . . overwhelmed by the feeling of so much was missed in those previous two or three reads, decades ago now . . . sometimes it takes reading through other eyes . . . ". . .the artist demonstrates a certain way of life; his aim is not to be appreciated or admired. but to transfer to others the imaginative habit and energy . . ." ( The Stubborn Structure 161) . . . in youth . . . "Obviously the world is entering a prodigious change, but the new morality will have to do something better than a rehash of the vague deistic and utilitarian sentimentalism of the very capitalistic system the Communists are most concerned to attack. There will have to be something better, for me, than the communistic exploiting of emotion by intellect. Read Blake or go to Hell: that's my message to the modern world." (Letter to Helen Kemp, 23 Apr. 1935/Joseph Adamson. Northrop Frye A Vision

tracks

One Fluid Take Tracks a River of History: A love letter to the past created with the help of new technologies, Alexander Sokurov's "Russian Ark" made history at the Cannes International Film Festival with the longest tracking shot ever seen... "By shooting the film in a single take, my goal was not to set a cinematographic record," Mr. Sokurov said. "Rather, I tried not to argue with time. I lived in accordance with time and became its pupil." By Leslie Camhi. [ New York Times: Arts ] :: comment :: . . .the technology of film was developed at the same time as the gatlin gun & for me there is no coincidence in the use of language . . . shots, cuts . . . each image is shot at the viewer lacerating the brain ... which seeks to heal . . . the greater the cut (in time and continuity) the deeper the laceration and more effort to heal . . . this comment/observation, of course, is wild speculative nonsense . . .

Italian Art

"Building deliberately and sometimes inspiredly on precedents like these, the artists of Arte Povera waged an insinuating, provocative, usually elegant assault on art. They came together in one of the last consciously fomented art movements of the 20th century. The term, which means poor or impoverished art ..." [ NYTimes:Arts ]

Flower

Flower Before I mouthed thy name thou just was not more than a simple motion. When I shaped thy name thou came to me becoming a flower. As I speaketh thy name, please speaketh my name in exact hue and fragrance, then may I go wanting to be flower. All want to be. Thou to I, I to Thou want to be . . . . unforgettable Chun-Su Kim transliteration by Ae Ran Jeong 10/26/02 :: comment :: . . . on this crisp november morning . . . sky brilliant blue . . . intense sun speaking of infinity . . . a gold leaf still clutching tenuously to the branch . . . a gentle blanket of white snow dusts the earth . . . and the breath clouds the air before you . . . stillness . . . a deep stillness hangs solemnly . . . a huge desire wells for this turbulent time to cease . . . open the eyes to see into vision . . . let the tongue rest in the cave of the mouth . . . let the eyes rest in the pools of the eye sockets . . . let the heart rest in the sphere of the rib cage . . . let the the ribs open like wings . .

project gutenberg

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation" from the U.S. won the 2002 Stockholm Challenge Award in the category Culture...

research

"Research writing begins with questions, and ends with actions - not answers." (This Public Address: Equal) :: comment :: . . . perfectly articulated . . . have spent years extending invitations to research physical responses to vibration and voice (teach the way of the actor, dare i say writing in space) . . . and students too often desired answers when the process required actions . . . take space to make space . . . making, taking, shaping, transforming, possessing . . . Magic Words after Nalungiaq Translated from the Inuit by Edward Field In the very earliest time, when both people and animals lived on earth, a person could become an animal if he wanted to and an animal could become a human being. Sometimes they were people and sometimes animals, and there was no difference. All spoke the same language. That was the time when words were like magic. The human mind had mysterious powers. A word spoken by chance might have strange consequences. It would suddenly come alive

The Forlorn Woyzeck, With a New Spin.

Robert Wilson and Tom Waits transform a tragicomedy into a musical laced with irony. By Jonathan Kalb. [ New York Times: Arts ]
The Eyes ... you think you want to write away the immediate so that what is past may some how lead to a present absolution, a huge forgiving, of all the horrible acts&words you've committed knowingly and unknowingly ... to chant some magical incantation which will be completely understood resulting in a cleansing so deep that any dirty history flushes away ... after all where does all the shit go but to a place designed to handle and transform waste into manageable fragments of burial forgotten ... but then you think maybe nothing would be left but pious acts of duty&responsibility ... certainly not peace ... ... so it came to pass, one dark afternoon, the black snow fell and never stopped ... piling higher&higher & drifts reached the eyes till breathing became difficult ... battle seemed inevitable ... impersonal warring personal ... shouts were heard all around and the ambulances pierced the ear muffling the cries and you could do nothing but watch in horror ...

Ed Rossbach

"Ed Rossbach experimented with nontraditional textile materials in artworks and often used foil, plastic bags, Mylar, twigs, staples and twine in his pieces.[ NYTimes:Obit ]"
Doonesbury:Oct 21 - 25 and still going . . . "what if we're you're wrong"

Photographs With Vision

Image
[From "Aperture at 50": "Kazuo Ohno Dancing in Kushiro Marsh IV" (1994), by Eikoh Hosoe.] :: comment :: ... images to powerful photographs from the Masters of Photograghy

hot docs

"In his magnificent new work, acclaimed documentarian Kevin McMahon poetically examines McLuhan's last scholarly treatise, the Laws of Media, using a myriad of media sources and filmic devices. The film, like the man, forces us to grapple with questions about how technology affects people and their environment. McLuhan's Wake features voice performances by renowned artist Laurie Anderson and by Eric McLuhan, Marshall's son, as well as the screen debut of Andrew McLuhan, Marshall's grandson. According to Senior Canadian Spectrum Programmer David McIntosh: "McLuhan's Wake is a visually dazzling and dynamic study of the life of a truly original Canadian thinker. Kevin McMahon has brought McLuhan's sometimes controversial and often misunderstood theories about . . ." . . .Why wake? . . . "a connection to Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Finn is being awakened by electric technology . . . wake up . . . McLuhan has left a huge footprint, a huge wake . .

frozen

frozen yoshino cherry blossoms. frozen yoshino cherry blossoms parsley under the snow so much contradicting the internal racism like a sondercommando deluded into acting true or not scream lashing out visible useless

Gift Economy

"An economy based on gifting rather than exchange. [via Abbe Normal ] "

A Language of Light Amid Darkness

" . . .he [Alfredo Jaar] has experimented with image deprivation as a kind of visual homeopathy. "Our society is blind," he said in a recent interview in his Manhattan loft. "We have lost our ability to be affected by imagery."[ NYTimes: Arts ] Image have . . . more "

enemy

the enemy rants bang & bang & bang pounding the dumpster outside/inside the glass shards don't cut the feet walking is treacherous windows scattered smashed in and out . . . come on do something . . . mobilize --------------------------------------------------------------- it was a fenced in temple then a poor exposed ruin now an abandoned dream suffering the onslaught of inner city time under the white halogen glare of the motel parking lot security light . . . you don't care --------------------------------------------------------------- perpetual manray silver prints on pollack drips please the imagination feeding what you fool fist to the head. . . sure that'll work --------------------------------------------------------------- it was quiet for so long relatively speaking the eyesight blurred the leg numbed the restoration became a daunting task you knew it had to start on the exterior you waited for the crisis to build focus underneath magnifying . . . why the

caves

"Loves in caves are love." [ CHANGE THE FORMS IN DREAMS from Disobedience by Alice Notley] "Indeed her nearly 300-page epic of a voice, dream journal of a pre-menopausal expatriate, autochthonous issue of a visionary comic poet as as 'bitterness in chunks' sounds like nothing else. But Notley is called to find 'a holy story . . . that satisfies without the temporality of successive pages, the terrible linearity of all these successive books' with a conviction . . ." more. . .

International Day for the Eradication of Poverty

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"Let us recall that poverty is a denial of human rights." [ Post ]
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fall fall fall down ... slowly holding ... A narchy R esistence Ac T Oct. 8-17 Toronto, Ontario/ location: Art System, 327 Spadina Ave, Toronto closing party Thursday, October 17, 7-11pm. In conjunction with Drawing Resistance there will a exhibition of politically engaged local artists in the project room and front window. Lines of Affinity. October 8 - 17, 2002 featuring Mark Connery, Luis Jacob, Maggie MacDonald, Andrea Matta, Alyson Mitchell and Rocky Tobey. Event will kick of the 1st Toronto Anarchist Bookfair (also the international day of the eradication of poverty)

Blodgett

Embrace Reflections of the trees were floating on the water at our feet, trees and the placid moon, and in the light we saw ourselves beside them, images reversed. Reflecting on ourselves, our depths would rise continually beside the moon, our thoughts laid bare and dancing as our bodies danced, our feet appearing nearest to the surface, heads against the fallen sky. No matter what we said, the sound of it was no more audible than trees or moon, and we divined that this is what a spell might be, to see ourselves as we are bound to move within the moon and trees, our bodies unconstrained, our gestures on the water our reflections coming back to us, and we divined it was a spell that we had cast. Holding the moon between us, we could not stray from ourselves, but move, no longer knowing how, wherever it would move, our undulations those the moon owns, returned but measured with the moon, a reckoning we had not thought. ( E.D. Blodgett . Apostrophes III alone upon the earth. p. 48)

'Moy Sand and Gravel': Darkness at Muldoon

. . . tourists . . . travellers . . . sightseers . . . The Sightseers . . . love listening to the poets read (Fooling with Words with Bill Moyers: The Poets Read ) . . . all started from . . . ...''Moy Sand and Gravel,'' Muldoon's ninth book of poems in 20 years, shimmers with play, the play of mind, the play of recondite information over ordinary experience, the play of observation and sensuous detail, of motion upon custom, of Irish and English languages and landscapes, of meter and rhyme. Sure enough, everything Muldoon thinks of makes him think of something else, and poem after poem takes the form of linked association. [ NYTimes:Books ]

Sculpture of Sound in a Downtown Space

. . ."Sonic Garden," a sound installation by four artists commissioned by the World Financial Center Arts and Events Program and the public-arts presenter Creative Time. [ NYTimes:Arts ] & more . . . a debate about sound . . .

Paintings That Recall Their Time, Now Gone

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"With Gottlieb, we have art that is more of its own moment; it looks dated. Yet while Gottlieb's painting may not have aged well, the show is still interesting for the light it shines on a period of tremendous creative ferment . . . In 1970 Gottlieb suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed on one side, but he continued to work until two weeks before his death in 1974. His last canvases have a wan lyricism. Today, in a world of post-Modernist irony and multicultural complexity, the beliefs that Gottlieb stood for - art as a heroic quest, abstraction as a universal language - are no longer as popular. To revisit Gottlieb is to go back to a time when the fate of the world's soul seemed to hang on the shadowy alchemy of abstract painting." [ NYTimes:Arts ]

Creativity

Creativity . . . [via the wonderful whiskey river ]

Digital Art Source-Sense, Memory and Media-Feature

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"Our senses take in stimuli, enter them into working memory and in the course of reflection, our long-term memory is engaged and we form a response to what we perceive. We will see that through the digital effect, the interactive and the immersive, the function of memory in the creation and reception of digital art influences the quality of intent and the quality perceived."

third story

Reincarnation Mirror becomes a razor when it's broken. A stick becomes a flute when it's loved. (from Seven Little Stories, spring 1952. Third story. Originally written in Japanese. Translation by Yoko Ono , published in Grapefruit (New York: Simon and Schuster, Touchstone Book, 1971)

Playing Pollock

. . .ever since seeing Pollock and tracking down this articulate writing I have wanted to post Ed Harris's statement . . . " . . .It's tricky, but I never wanted to pretend to be Pollock. I wanted to be Ed Harris, using all his tools as an actor and as a person to allow Pollock's experience on this earth to touch me, inspire me, lead me to an honest, true performance. I think the film is much more revealing of Ed Harris than it is of Jackson Pollock. I don't see how it could be any other way. I guess I used Jackson for a personal journey." (Ed Harris On Playing Pollock from Such Desperate Joy Imagining Jackson Pollock edited by Helen A. Harrison) . . . more ...
Oblivio > Road > Biggz "My real point is that stories are always made up, even when they ... There are different senses of "true," if you know what I mean. There's the sense of "this really happened," and then there's the sense of "this gets at the essence of something." I'm interested in both, but probably the last one more. . . [ more ...] "

koans

philosophical koans ... or something like that ...John Cleese thinks . . . more . . .

Retrospective Salutes an Indian Actress and Activist

"After watching a few films starring the Indian actress and political activist Shabana Azmi, you quickly learn to identify how she uses her eyes . . . " [ New York Times: Arts ]

An Ancient Tragedy Fit for the World of Today

"It's not that you doubt the intelligence of Ms. Shaw's Medea. But her lacerating misfortunes have broken the circuits of that intelligence, and her responses are a toxic jumble. She seems to wear her nerves outside her skin. Numbness and excruciating pain, shrill anger and mordant, bizarre humor flit across her raw features in disjunctive parade." [ New York Times: Arts ]
shadows three . . .One wrong step into the shadows three around the light of emotions - love, need & desire . . . immediately sent me scrambling into past terrors . . . couldn't find exactly what was remembered but this will suffice . . . Yuganaddha: The Tantric View of Life (3rd edition, Chowkhamba, 1976) (1st edition 1952) - "We must never forget that imagination does not merely employ childish symbols of love, fear, and awe as emotional equivalents for adult experience, but that it recaptures an intenseness and directness of emotional experiences, rarely met with in adult experience. If, in any respect whatsoever, these "childish" experiences are more important than comparable adult ones, imagination or fantasy thinking in making "infantile" emotions available for use in adult living, performs a tremendously valuable public service. On the psychic plane, childhood need not necessarily be the immaturity of man, it may be much more the preparatory stag

The Mirror That Changes

. . . as the mirror changes with the colour of it's subject so [water] alters with the nature of the place . . . In time, and with water, everything changes. - Leonardo Da Vinci (via Annette Weintraub in Drunken Boat )

A Farewell to Politics

The following speech was given by President Havel in New York on September 19, 2002, at the Graduate Center of the City University, on the occasion of his last official trip to the United States as President of the Czech Republic. "...I am saying only this: to set out on the path of reason, peace, and justice means a lot of hard work, self-denial, patience, knowledge, a calm overview, a willingness to risk misunderstanding. At the same time, it means that everyone ought to be able to judge his or her own capacity and act accordingly, expecting either that one's strength will grow with the new tasks one sets oneself or that it will run out. In other words, there is no more relying on fairy tales and fairy-tale heroes. There is no more relying on the accidents of history that lift poets into places where empires and military alliances are brought down. The warning voices of poets must be carefully listened to and taken very seriously, perhaps even more seriously than the voices

Celine

"A man's real mistress is life." - Céline

henry miller

the aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware (henry miller) lifted from a student's journal

What is Art

"The best way to ensure that the learned information is retrieved from memory in an on-the-job situation is to prompt learners to practice retrieving that information during the learning event. It's not the interactivity that facilitates learning--it's the retrieval practice. This explains why questions about nonessential information actually hurt learning. They provide practice on retrieving the wrong information. It also explains why feedback is useful, but not always necessary. When the correct retrieval routes are practiced, feedback is redundant." :: comment :: . . . have always intuited (and have sought empirical, written and practised evidence) that you must live the questions . . . but what is nonessential information . . . too easy or simplistic criterion will deny too much . . . the search for the essential to distinquish from the nonessential is a art in itself . . . & what is 'art' . . . and as Paul Celan wrote (in his speech on the occasion

burnt

I. British Actor Deported. Steven Berkoff, the British actor, who was scheduled to perform his one-man "Shakespeare's Villains" this week in Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids, Mich., was deported on Tuesday, apparently for a visa violation."It was a nightmare," Mr. Berkoff told The Grand Rapids Press from London. "I have never been prevented from working in America before." Mr. Berkoff was told he had stayed one day past the limit of his 1997 visa, his American agent, Joe Ajlouny, said. via II. . . . for the burning bird & her plight . . . though she never burns here . . . Ch'ienniang was the daughter of Chang Yi, a public official in Hunan province. She had a cousin named Wang Chu, an intelligent and handsome youth. The two cousins had grown up together and since Chang Yi both loved and approved of the boy he said he would accept Wang Chu as his son-in-law. Both young people heard and marked the promise; she was an only child and spent all her time w

link = promise

. . . a link is a promise . . . At 09:12 AM 6/19/2002 +1000, Adrian wrote: > ok, i think of hypertext links as like performative speech acts (they're promises). i think of hypertext links as being the *same as* film edits. film edits are also promises. as performative speech acts they have force (they're like order words) and so inside their promise that they make sense there is also this excess of force that means they will make sense. this force leaks out each side of the edit/link which is why the meaning of the before and after can change, without changing what the before and after is. ie the kuleshov effect. same content different meanings yet the thing (the image in that case) that effects the meaning (the edit) in no way changes the image itself. same thing happens in link node hypertext particularly where complex structures are invovled. so, this is what i mean by performative. links/edits are promises. Adrian, I like this notion of links as promises quite a lot, par

dreams

. . . encountered this story twice today . . in two completely different contexts . . . a story i am much aquainted with . . . since it comes here it goes . . . The Dream of Chuang Tzu Chuang Tzu dreamt he was a butterfly and, when he awoke, he did not know if he was a man who had dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly who was dreaming he was a man. (From Chang Tzu 1889 by Herbert Allen Giles ) [Found in Extraordinary Tales by Jorge Luis Borges & Adolfo Bioy Casares edited and translated by Anthony Kerrigan]

bang a dvd

"Mr. Herbert is one of many musicians who, rather than appropriating extracts from others' songs, use found, ambient and other naturally occurring sounds as the foundation for their tunes. Mr. Herbert has even written a manifesto to help define his work. Mr. Herbert's document forbids the use of drum machines and sampling from other people's music. Debra Singer, the associate curator of contemporary art at the Whitney Museum of Art who organized the sound-art exhibition in the museum's 2002 biennial, said she enjoyed Mr. Herbert's album. She said, "Even though musically it's very engaging, what really distinguishes it is the concept behind it and the source of the sounds." She also appreciated how Mr. Herbert combined digital music-making technologies with "deliberately simplistic gestures" like banging a DVD against the microphone instead of sampling its soundtrack." via

from Breathturn

O N C E I did hear him, he did wash the world, unseen, nightlong, real. O N E and unending, annihilate, I'ed. Light was. Salvation. (from Breathturn Paul Celan translated by Pierre Joris )

Heart Play

My thoughts are wounds in my head. My brain is a scar. I want to be a machine. Arms to drag legs to walk no pain no thinking. (Heiner Müller , 'Hamletmachine' ) Heartplay A May I lay my heart at your feet. B If you don't make a mess on my floor.. A My heart is clean.. B We'll see, won't we.. A I can't get it out.. B Would you like me to help you.. A If you wouldn't mind.. B It'll be a pleasure. I can't get it out either.. A cries. B I will remove it surgically. What have I got this penknife for anyway. We'll have this sorted out in no time. work will keep you from despair. Right, there we are. But this is a brick. Your heart is a red brick.. A Yes, but it beats only for you.. (1981) A beats B to death with the brick.. (Addition, July 1991). ------------- Heiner Müller ----------------- from Heiner Müller Theatremachine translated and edited by Marc von Henning

Teachers

I. . . . it happened again . . . just as sure as april is the cruelest month and it is summer . . . despite an incredible ambivalence - when the air outside becomes oppressive & there's no relief inside, not even in the basement, & seeds of the poplar trees choke the air piling like gentle snowdrifts along the front walk - the words of this mythological beast find a way into the voice of the mind like an addiction, a craving . . . inspite of myself the Strange Music seeks me out and the music repeats endlessly. . . school is out for my students&teachers . . . there ain't no cure . . . I met a man who lost his mind In some lost place I had to find Follow me the wise man said But he walked behind (from Teachers by Leonard Cohen) II. . . time to honour (mw) wood s lot . . . an incredible harvester of the web . . . little nuggets are turned into gold mines [my little Thomas Bernhard find: character assassination from The Voice Imitator & a simple pointer turns int

Viewing

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Viewing an Ancient City With Futuristic Glasses Large detail from an 1865 temple photograph by Samuel Bourne in a show about Varanasi at the Asia Society.

character assassination

"Two philosophers, about whom more has been written than they themselves have published, who met again - after not seeing one another for decades - in, of all places, Goethe's house in Weimar, to which they had gone, in the nature of things, separately and from opposite directions - something that, since it was winter and consequently very cold, had presented the greatest difficulties to both of them - simple for the purpose of getting to know Goethe's habits better, assured each other, at this unexpected and for both of them painful meeting, of their mutual respect and admiration and at the same time told each other that, once back home, they would immerse themselves in each other's writings with the intensity appropriate to, and worthy of, those writings. When, however, one of them said he would give an account of his meeting in the Goethe House in the newspaper that was, in his opinion, the best and would do so, in the nature of things, in the form of a philosophica

reflection

. . . hmmm . . . 1/12/02 started blog to explore presentation of self in a cybernetic system . . . began 'if'. writing . posting . linking . publishing to ex(periment)plore self presentation [pl(d)ay st(p)age] . . . 3/28/02 disenchanted with chronology {as a theatre practitioner/educator found} Chaikin's metaphors of "space" (grounded in practical actor training) > catagorized(archived) items into 'space', 'place', 'territory', 'zone', 'sphere', 'abadonment', 'exile', 'occupation' and 'habitation' . . . 6/2/02 trashed it . . . not blog suicide but letting it all go . . . hmmm . . . found an unused site > registered >blog squatting . . . still ['if'...ing] outlining . . . "To support arts education partnerships, grants of $3.1 million to 31 public schools and 39 cultural organizations in New York were made yesterday by the nonprofit Center for Arts Education in ceremonies