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 of the People)
::comment:: . . . apologies to visitors . . . sometimes this blog simply documents activities . . . blog, journal,calendar - it's all one . . .

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 sex is such a topic where laughs come cheaply . . .

nudity does not reveal rather numbs and this, to me, was the clue . . . the nude student actor plays numb to the nudity . . . in order to protect ourselves from the simple intelligence of feeling, more than often, we humans numb ourselves . . . and then the numbness becomes accepted as the truth . . . we play in the shallows not feeling so as to ignore the pain . . . what is love?

. . the archeology of love demands a courage to play at the nerve ends where raw feeling lives . . . at the heart's tendril. . . where is the place?

. . . where is the place?

Buffini invites us to locate this not only in the body but in some specific space . . . to transform place into a haunting, eternal quest for that unspeakable union, the moment of falling 'in' love? the moment of physical orgasm? the power of everlasting love? . . . the actors speak clearly and articulately the lines about this . . . the words circle around like moths around a flame not daring to touch . . . dare to . . .



So I went to see a play yesterday for our drama class. It's called Love Play and is really about sex and love throughout the ages. They start around 75 A.D. and work up throughout time portraying different ideas and such. It was quite interesting and I have to say that the acting was excellent; very very well done. Some sad truths though....Won't get into details on that but I'm sure that most of ya will get the drift. Sex and love - never anything clear cut, always some pain and grey areas, people who only think of it as a game and, now especially, a game of power. Was an insightful and thought provoking show.


:: comment :: added the following much later as came across some student writing in a blog:linkrot

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 them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

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 referring to, which is commonplace really in what we call the western world. I think that when you look at a man like our prime minister - who I gather is a very sincere and serious Christian - he, we understand at the moment, is considering another bombing of Iraq, which would be an act of premeditated murder because if you bomb Iraq, you're not just going to kill Saddam Hussein. In fact, you won't do that anyway; he has his resources.

What you will do, as usual, is kill thousands of totally innocent people. How Tony Blair can work that one out morally himself is actually beyond me. I just wish he would decide if he was a Christian or he wasn't a Christian. If you say, "I'm going to bomb these damn people and I don't give a shit", then you bomb them, but that's not a Christian attitude as far as I'm concerned.

If you take a Christian posture, you cannot say that. So I think that what we're talking about there is an extraordinary, fundamental hypocrisy and a distortion of language altogether which is, in itself, extremely destructive. Because language leads us, doesn't it? Politically it leads us into all sorts of fields. But what I find really dangerous and disgusting is where the kind of language we've recently heard - "humanitarian intervention", don't forget "freedom" and "democracy" and all the rest of it - actually is justifying a simply assertive act to control power and maintain power. And the question of destroying human beings while that is happening seems to be irrelevant.

There's a little story I must tell you. In the bombing of Serbia two years ago, there was a market place in a country village called Nis. And I am actually reporting an eyewitness to this event. A woman was sitting with her five-year-old daughter on a bench in the marketplace, having a sandwich. And out of the blue, bombs fell, American bombs. The marketplace was chaos. About 40 or 50 people were killed immediately. And this woman looked for her daughter who had been blown out of her arms. She saw the daughter's head in the gutter.

Now that head of that little girl would be never recognised by Prime Minister Blair or President Clinton. In fact, the death and the cutting off of the head of the girl would be totally irrelevant to those people. I would contend, and I really believe this to be so, that Clinton and Blair should be arraigned as war criminals. Because not only did they do it illegally, illegitimately - in my view, immorally - they justified it by talking about "humanitarian intervention". And that kind of crap, I think we've had enough of it. "

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 calling her child to come. Mortal Man hesitates then begins to play - even when he hides among the living (the audience) he is found.

The characters contact through play.

The White Lady coaxes Mortal Man to rest his head on her lap and then shocks him with the voice of terror. Mortal Man experiences the full pain of the physical self collapsing.

The characters contact through voice.

The White Lady prepares the body for the afterlife (washing ritual) Mortal Man rises looks to audience & consciously decides to stay in the world of the living or to enter the afterlife.


:: note :: ... witnessed a work today . . .

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 political course of action.' " . . . more

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 proceedings were still unavailable when the Kassel exhibition opened its doors.
In contrast to the 1997 Documenta X, at which curator Catherine David had organized a hundred days of lectures and discussions during the course of the show, in Documenta 11 there was a separation between a semi-public critical discourse that took place in rather secluded meetings, with few direct links to art, and the actual art exhibition. . . . more "

:: comment :: . . . wood s lot blinks if & then goes further in the search (blinking me to the above) which leads me deeper and deeper along the path . . . that is what community means to me . . . insights into insights . . . thanks especially to Mark but also to all . . .

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 no further."(Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry Edited transcript/audio of remarks by Michael Ignatieff, 11/2/01 Merrill House Conversation.)

:: comment :: . . . last year spent some time with the The Rights Revolution and must now investigate the following Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry . . . discover so many of us deal on an everyday basis with what we believe is an affront on our rights

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 Visionary Life 27)

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 . . . and let the spine be a river washing in the ebb and flow of the breath . . .