"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 and what people wanted to happen could happen. All you had to do was say it. Nobody could explain this, that's just the way it was.

. . . Of course it may be that all I have been telling you is wrong, for you cannot be certain about what you cannot see. But these are the stories that our people tell.(Edward Field.Magic Words)

Robert Wilson and Tom Waits transform a tragicomedy into a musical laced with irony. By Jonathan Kalb. [New York Times: Arts]

Exalting the ordinary, Thomas Hirschhorn somehow makes aluminum foil, plastic wrap and magazine cutouts aesthetic. By Michael Rush. [New York Times: Arts]

... 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 ... self loathing&watching other self ... avoid seeing followed by a bloody, red, angry pact with ... nothing but visible self destruction in the name of ... go ahead complete the faustian annihilation of ...

did you ever feel helpless while the storm raged?

The Eyes

by Antonio Machado. Translated by Alan S. Trueblood.

I

When his beloved died
he thought he'd just grow old,
shutting himself in the house
alone, with memories and the mirror
that she had looked in one bright day.
Like gold in the miser's chest,
he thought he'd keep all yesterday
in the clear mirror intact.
For him time's flow would cease.

II

But after a year had passed,
he began to wonder about her eyes:
"Were they brown or black? Or green? ...Or grey?
What were they like? Good God! I can't recall..."

III

One day in spring he left the house
and took his double mourning down the street
in silence, his heart tight shut...
In the dim hollow of a window
he caught a flash of eyes. He lowered his...
and walked right on...Like those!

"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"

[From "Aperture at 50": "Kazuo Ohno Dancing in Kushiro Marsh IV" (1994), by Eikoh Hosoe.]

:: comment :: wood s lot has been providing images & blinks to powerful photographs from the Masters of Photograghy

"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 . . . are we powerless or not McLuhan makes it clear we are . . . we may control our environment and technology and we have the means but we don't see the means (Kevin McMahon in conversation with Elenor Wachtel about his documentary McLuhans Wake. CBC: Radio One: The Arts Today )

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 [This,along with a picture and links, was posted on the 20th & was mistakenly deleted. Sorry for dead linkage & inconvenience.]

first gone contact lost leave too soon stay put move

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

" . . .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 "

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

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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

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perpetual manray silver prints on pollack drips please the imagination feeding what you fool fist to the head. . . sure that'll work

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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 glass? the windows? the eyes?

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. . . enemy of the people . . .enemy of the people . . .the people . . .enemy . . .

'Society is / a huge / cohesive / emotion,/not sure whether one attempts life outside it.../ becomes involved in changing it, or both variously'(Alice Notley. Disobediance.)

"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. . .

"Let us recall that poverty is a denial of human rights." [Frontier Post]

fall
fall
fall
down ... slowly
holding ...
Anarchy Resistence AcT

(image via the cbc )

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)

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)

. . . 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]

. . ."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 . . .

11:29:19 AM     comment []   Google It!  

"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]

"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."

Creativity . . . [via the wonderful whiskey river]

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)

. . .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 ...

"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 ...] [more ...] "

...John Cleese thinks . . . more . . .

"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]

"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]

. . .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 stage of the adult mind, just as the tadpole is the preparatory stage of the frog rather than an immature frog."(Herbert V. Guenther.p. 80-81)

. . . 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)

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 of bankers or stock brokers. But at the same time, we cannot expect that the world - in the hands of poets - will suddenly be transformed into a poem..." By Václav Havel, Translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson

more . . .

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

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