Listen to famed singer and actress Lotte Lenya read the Franz Kafka story, from the Caedmon Short Story Collection. [Salon.com]

Walking around the Biennale des Antiquaires in Paris is like falling down a hole into Wonderland. By Wendy Moonan. [New York Times: Arts]

"Between Word and Image: Modern Iranian Visual Culture," a spartan-looking exhibition at the Grey Art Gallery, is about creative borrowing and customized versions of modernism. By Holland Cotter. [New York Times: Arts]

Images That Burn Into the Mind. Richard Avedon's portrait show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a pitch-perfect mix of prints, each an exquisitely made object. By Michael Kimmelman. [New York Times: Arts]

Timeless Themes, Suddenly Timely. "Going Forth by Day," 35-minute video work by Bill Viola on view at the Guggenheim Museum, is an ambitious meditation on the epic themes of human existence. By Grace Glueck. [New York Times: Arts]

. . . simple note . . . experienced DVD for the first time . . . watched Pollock (and yes read the book) and Kandahar . . . especially enjoyed deleted scenes & special feature commentary . . .

Buto is like poetry in that it, in its very essence, resists the substitutive function in which words are used to express some thing In poetry it the words, in Buto it is the body - the movement encloses with itself the extreme point which it must seek, while, at the same time, by twisting, jostling, and touching it opens up a symbolic space that enfolds both the reader and the spectator. Needless to say, within that symbolic space, any explanation which takes the form, "this means so-and-so becomes meaningless.

The action on stage is intended to be as resistant to critical interpretation, as multivalent and open as possible, in order to make possible a direct channel of communication between the audience and the dancer. It is hoped that this channel would be able to bypass the symbolic mode, which is seen as tainted by the inevitable intellectualizing process that traps both the viewer and the dancer in conventionalized perceptions. Ironically enough, in pursuit of their goal of creating dance that blocks critical interpretation, most practitioners of Buto gradually left their anti-technique bias behind and from the late 1960's on began to develop a whole range of specialized techniques. [Susan Blakeley Klein. Ankoku Buto: The Premodern and Postmodern Influences on the Dance of Utter Darkness p.28]

:: comment :: . . .(tease) in my thought there is a connection between utter darkness & visible darkness . . .

Joan Littlewood, British Theater Pioneer, Dies at 87. Joan Littlewood was one of the most important and original figures responsible for the regeneration of the British theater in the 1950's and 60's. Ms. Littlewood's Theater Workshop, based in a shabby old playhouse in a poor section of East London, won an international reputation with seasons of offbeat work that she staged by herself. By Benedict Nightingale. [New York Times: Arts]

"These students explain that they are busy at what they call "doing school." They realize that they are caught in a system where achievement depends more on "doing" - going through the correct motions - than on learning and engaging with the curriculum. Instead of thinking deeply about the content of their courses and delving into projects and assignments, the students focus on managing the work load and honing strategies that will help them to achieve high grades. They learn to raise their hands even when they don't know the answers to the teachers' questions in order to appear interested. they understand the importance of forming alliances and classroom treaties to win favors from teachers and administrators. Some feel compelled to cheat and to contest certain grades and decisions in order to get the scores they believe they need for the future. As Kevin asserts: 'People don't go to school to learn. They go to get good grades . . .'"

[Denise Clark Pope. Doing School, p.4]

A wood helmet mask by the Senufo peoples of Ivory Coast.

"The question of exactly how and why masks work is a topic of continuing scholarly debate. Indeed, as a field, African art history - and this should be true of all art histories - exists in a state of perpetual revision; the research database never shuts down. This is one of the things that make the field so exciting. It also obliges every new exhibition to acknowledge, if not actively advance, fresh ideas. "Facing the Mask," organized by Frank Herreman, deputy director for exhibitions and publications at the museum, does so, to some degree." [nyt]

:: comment :: not a comment about this post but concerning the previous post on teachers . . . noticed very few fellow sites use the google it macro that radio/userland offers . . . tried it on the previous post & led to this fascinating site

Yet Ms. Fiske, a second-grade teacher at Public School 195 in the Soundview section of the Bronx, has still spent about $4,000 of her own money on books and supplies for her classroom, including $400 in the last few weeks. In other words, Ms. Fiske has funneled roughly 5 percent of her total earnings from her new career back into a school system that has long scrimped on everything from writing paper to paper towels. She is among legions of public school teachers around the country who dig deep into their own pockets to pay for the ever-larger list of supplies that schools insist they cannot afford.[nyt]

... difficult day . . . came home to find the car, which is parked behind the house, vandalized . . . all the windows - front, back and sides all smashed in . . . went to the police station to report . . . was informed this is a common occurance & not to take it personal . . . just an act of random destruction . . . no more comment

Dorothea Lange Migrant Mother; Nipomo, California 1936

The invisibility and intangibility of that which moves us remained an unfathomable mystery for Thomas Browne too, who saw our world as no more than a shadow image of another one far beyond. In his thinking and writing he therefore sought to look upon earthly existence, from the things that were closest to him to the spheres of the universe, with the eye of an outsider, one might even say of the creator. His only means of achieving the sublime heights that this endeavour required was a parlous loftiness in his language. In common with other English writers of the seventeenth century, Browne wrote out of the fullness of his erudition, deploying a vast repertoire of quotations and the names of authorities who had gone before, creating complex metaphors and analogies, and constructing labyrinthine sentences that sometimes extend over one or two pages, sentences that resemble processions or a funeral cortège in their sheer ceremonial lavishness. [W.G. Sebald. The Rings of Saturn, p. 18-19]

close the eyes & open to the darkness of dream hollow sounds shake & thunder the frame don't let them in

they do nothing but disturb

keep the eyes closed find the image & let it shape into something mysterious something impenetrable

they haunt the day

turn over & over waiting in vain sure it will never resolve endlessly playing in the night

they may be forgotten

[via Future Positive]

"two roles, the identical Reader and Listener, in "Ohio Impromptu," a hauntingly beautiful, elegiac 10-minute play more moving than its throwaway title suggests. (It was written for a 1981 symposium honoring Beckett at Ohio State University.) With flowing white hair and a black coat, Mr. Irons faces himself at a long table. The Reader begins reading from a book, a tale of the Listener's lost and perhaps dead love. At times the silent Listener raps on the table, as if he can bear no more, and the Reader pauses, only to pick up the tale again. Mr. Irons, his face hollow, creates a timeless portrait of loss. As the Reader, the ghost of a memory, he does justice to Beckett's graceful words: "Stay, where we were so long alone together. My shade will comfort you." The Listener responds with expressions of excruciating sorrow.[nyt] "

""The play is about the plight of refugees," Mr. Sellars says in a restaurant on Mercer Street after the rehearsal, "and we are taking it to places where immigration is a hot-button issue. We have more refugees today than ever before in the history of the planet, but even in America, which was built by immigrants, we have a schizophrenic attitude when it comes to admitting refugees into the country." [nyt]"

. . .been watching commercial, popular Korean movies: Peppermint Candy & Joint Security Area (korean with no subtitles/no i don't speak korean but let the images guide) . . . reveals my huge ignorance about the political/social/cultural turmoil in Korea these past decades . . . can't/won't imagine the suffering beyond the petty, self generated country borders - personal boundries . . . my lower back causes great pain . . . while visiting a doctor of alternative medicines the suggestion was to lessen the load . . . stop carrying the weight of the world . . . consciously carry very little . . . how to deal with information? . . . when does information become knowledge? . . . how to act? . . . the doctor, after listening to answers of what seemed to me completely random questions . . . prescribed Tabacum a homeopathic tobacco . . . "insane in the membrane"(son's favourite expression these days) . . . grew up with a father who struggled and then quit smoking & never smoked myself find myself with liquid drops of tobacco . . . how to act? . . . search for information . . .

"Stress is a stimulus, strain is a response.[jill/txt]"

""Nothing can be made of nothing." The smile on King Lear's face melts into cloudedness. Where has he heard those words before?"

"This is a phantom war and therefore in need of an anniversary. Such an anniversary serves a number of purposes. It is a day of mourning. It is an affirmation of national solidarity. But of one thing we can be sure. It is not a day of national reflection. Reflection, it has been said, might impair our "moral clarity." It is necessary to be simple, clear, united. Hence, there will be borrowed words, like the Gettysburg Address, from that bygone era when great rhetoric was possible. - Susan Sontag"

"If we devote our resources to draining the swamps, addressing the roots of the "campaigns of hatred", we can not only reduce the threats we face but also live up to ideals that we profess and that are not beyond reach if we choose to take them seriously. © Noam Chomsky"

. . . could not fail to ask the simple and rational questions we pose ourselves . . .

- Could it have been otherwise?
- Is that how it really happened?
- Why did it have to happen?

British-Poets Archive. . .what sense I have been able to make . . .

. . . artist as prophet . . .

Theatrical premonitions >> Robert Lepage's eerily prophetic 9/11 parable Zulu Time. . .

The play is nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Airports are temples to technology; they are also places of great solitude where millions of travelers pass through, but where all differences are erased.

To evoke this universe, Lepage (Zulu Time is actually a collective work) invited artists from Québec, France, and Austria to join him in creating a grandiose techno cabaret performance combining video, techno music, robotics, and electronics. Theatre goers sit on either side of the set - two parallel walkways that are raised and lowered from scene to scene.

Lepage didn't skimp on this production, which cost around $1 million. The results are remarkable: robot insects fly overhead, a cheesy techno Western is projected on a triple screen, and dancers tango upside down. Lepage has also succeeded in creating an atmosphere both poetic and despairing, where lonely and drunken women make love beneath the stroboscopes to lovers in harness descended from on high.

Zulu Time ends with a terrorist attack against a passenger jet, which is not the most convincing scene. [Arts and Entertainment/ Le Soleil - October 21, 1999 By Michel Dolbec]

"Things you do not hope for happen more frequently than things for which you do. . . " - Plautus

. . . more than often the ancient greek wisdom becomes questioned . . . american wisdom . . . well . . . why pay attention to place & past . . . elders are rooted to their place & past . . . which gives meaning to the word . . . i listen from my place and my past . . .

"We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect." - Henry David Thoreau

. . . most of the time the desire approaching this screen is to enter portals of brave new waves & unexpected universes . . . sometimes it simply becomes a mirror (Why try?). . . dare i recognize, dare i awknowledge, dare i be found . . . seeing part of self releases the tight ego to become the other somewhere beyond . . . where do we meet . . . in the horizontal, verticle, flat dimensions . . . see ya . . .

For both Artaud and Kierkegaard - despite their immense differences - the paradoxical notion of dying before you were born - of dying, perhaps, in order to be born - requires a theatrical staging to be articulated rather than a monologue. The dead-born individual becomes a staging area for different tendencies and forces which themselves cannot be unified in any one individual and which therefore cannot speak properly in their own name. (SAMUEL WEBER with TERRY SMITH. Repetition: Kierkegaard, Artaud, Pollock and the theatre of the image. )

"n 1 rly uzz it except 4 thOs obvious intuitive abbrz dat save space & thumb ache."

Wilson, however, z dat transl8it's engN handled Shakespeare's Hamlet "pretty weL." Doubt thou d ** R fire; Doubt dat d sun doth move; Doubt truth 2 b a liar; Bt nevr doubt I luv.

d orignL txt reads:

Doubt thou the stars are fire; Doubt that the sun doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar; But never doubt I love.

"I thought '**' 4 '**' wz quite Qt, & 'dat' 4 'dat' sounded 2 my eng ears lIk it wz bn z by SOME1 frm d Sopranos," Wilson z. ( Wired)

There's "sweet talk," "pillow talk," "fast talk," and "double talk" - all too often in the same instance. One may "talk shop," "talk turkey," "talk up," "talk down," "talk back," "talk in circles," "talk at," talk bullock" ("to use much and picturesque bad language," 1846), "talk Miss Nancy" ("to talk very politely," 1910), and "talk into the big white telephone" ("vomit," 1978); along similar lines, there is "verbal diarrhea." Talk is lame; the talker must also [base "]walk the walk.[per thou] (Talk Talk Talk The Cultural Life of Everyday Conversation. Edited S.I. Salamensky. p16)

:: why do i love all of this so much ::

. . . continuing to knaw away at creativity and fantasy and aphorism . . remember my original encounter with fantasy in Brian Bates' The Way of the Actor, Chapter 9 "Dream: Images of Power" . . .

Fantasy is taboo. In the secular, instrumental world of today, to indulge in fantasy is to dwell in a 'realm of unreality'. It is considered to be a waste of time. An indulgence.

Liv Ullmann decries this, but thinks it is important to distinguish between different sorts of fantasy. 'I think there's good fantasy and bad fantasy. The bad fantasy is what you see on television - the commercials that tell you if you use this hair spray, a fantasy life will follow - your husband will come home on a white horse. That is dangerous fantasy because that is not how life is.' This is the sort of fantasy that we all recognize as unreal, and the promotion of unrealistic expectations about life Ullmann considers dangerous and frustrating, '. . . People live in anguish because they've based their whole lives on unreality.'

more ...

. . . all my years in school i have wondered what schooling has to do with education . . . those same years past McLaren's Schooling as a Ritual Performance made it much clearer . . .

. . . can't remember the source of what i'm about to write . . .

. . . when we remember it comes out slightly different each time . . . modern theories of memory revlove around the idea of fragmentation . . . different elements are, apparently, stored in different areas of the brain and it is not so much the cells that are important in the act of memory, but the connections between the cells, the synapses, the synaptic connections . . . these connections are constantly being made and remade (being fabricated as i write) . . . the process is called sprouting.

so what i'm getting at is that re-membering is essentially not an act of retrieval but a creative thing, it happens in the moment, it's an act . . . of imagination . . . [like an act of theatre in the moment]