Art

A recent spam comment caught my attention.  It is a thing of beauty.

 

 

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Author : ejmmoob 

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L. 12. 1 Bear Hunt Song, or rules of creative conduct revised

  1. Be wary when it feels like a word association game.
  2. What is the form?  Form is the wheel you don’t have to re-invent.
  3. If it’s truly new, it should be somewhat off-putting, something you would just as soon skip past or avoid, like a stranger who a year later is an intimate.
  4. Today’s intensity is tomorrow’s regret.
  5. Welcome intrusions.

I have no problem with these.  I still feel cute as a button uttering them.  Shirley Temple cute, if I’m being honest.

Three gnaws a bit, though.  I want it to be more concise, more aphoristic, more…Lichtenbergian .  Georg is the Master!  I’m so happy the quote rotator is back up to speed, humming away.  In these dark days of diminished production quotas, it’s a reason to visit the site everyday.  I can fiddle with Three, maybe, in the spirit of Lichtenberg:

3.  The truly new is that troubling stranger who in a year’s time could easily become an intimate if you gave in to your instincts, but who would more likely reject you outright for understandable  reasons.

Shirley Temple is now disgustingly cute.  I think my more compact version is actually longer, but it feels more precise and even has a touch of storytelling verve, which is not usually my forte.  So it’s a keeper.  Bon bons at play…

But I’m also content to chuck all of them.  I don’t really believe in them as working guidelines.  I don’t really believe myself these days when I claim I create.  I have been revisiting the circumstances that first put me on a supposed creative path, and the truth is, I really cannot speak of  those circumstances in any other way than as an encounter with an impasse.  At a certain point in my development, I met with something I couldn’t understand or encompass or circumnavigate.  The instruments I normally employed to get at things were useless.

Always an exciting moment, of course.  And, in my case, I think, traumatic.  Every encounter with an impasse is something of a trauma, I might assert.  The moment of defeat makes an impression and sets the stage for a lifetime of re-visiting, of rehearsing the fatal encounter.  Exciting, traumatic, and, ultimately, therefore, essential.  Because, as I said before, you are not equipped.  You lack savoir faire.  There is no help.  You become a moment of possible extinction.  Such a threat, a loss, a lack, touches on the essential, on you, on life.  You can’t find a ring to grasp.  You plunge.

Here’s a version of the Bear Hunt Song as thoughtfully preserved by a helpful Boy Scout troop.  The song is basically a guide to using prepositions in one’s various encounters with the world.  It is the prepositions that function as the working codes, the symbolic formulas, that afford you the chance to move on Reality, to engage it, to establish meaning and possibility.  Reality as a set of known possibilities is, in fact, mapped out in the song.  But here’s the interesting thing:  at the heart of the song is an encounter with an impasse.  And that moment, really, is the essence of the song.  The key moment, the thrill, is when prepositions aren’t worth a damn.  And that is why it is fun to perform the song.  Repeatedly.  The Bear.

To put it briefly, my particular preoccupation with “creativity” and all that it promises and withholds is due to meeting a Bear.  My continued engagement is a rehearsal charted by a particular practice, a particular way symbolic reality works and then unravels.  I flee and re-approach.

I was lost in a Baroque tangle and baffled by words.  That was the Bear.  At the time there were no friendlier words to begin to characterize the predicament or the effect.  I then began to collect related objects that seemed to want to adhere to the initial mysterious mute monstrosity.  The “creative” path took its place as a possible connection to that mute kernel, along with others.  All within a family drama, of course, and surrounded by various figures of interest.  And so I orchestrated more and more elaborate meetings with the thing in the cave.

What to do?  What will this new clarity tell me about how to proceed?  I’ll keep you posted.

 

 

Fugues all in one place…in order of attempt.

Yes, exploiting the fact we have a media library.  And not to be confused with “fugue state(meant)s.”  Then again…

Fugue in C

2nd Fugue-C minor

Fugue Aflat maj

Fugue Aflatminor

fugue d maj

Fugue D minor

Fugue A major

Fugue A minor

fugue g min

fugue g maj (“The Branch”)

fugue f major (take 2)

Fugue F minor

Fugue Eb major

Fugue Eb minor

Fugue Bb major

Fugue Bb minor final

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Assignment L.11.02: Reflection

I rarely propose assignments.  I rarely do them.  I do not expect an enthusiastic response.  That is not the Lichtenberg way.  Our way is toss off whatever it may be with only smothered hope.  Followed by a smirk.  And then walk away quickly.

I propose a structure that may inspire a creative response.  I’m mostly interested in whether or not the structure is useful in any and all media or though any and all modes of expression.  Need the structure be explicit within the work?  Good question.  Visible or invisible?  Subject or silent support of some other subject?  Are we always aware of what stages the supporting mise en scene of our every thought, revery or effort?

The structure is built on reflection.  Looking into a mirror and seeing not only oneself but also, behind oneself, another.  Another looking perhaps at one’s back or at the reflection of one’s eyes.  And so, what may follow?  Might one try to look into the eyes of the reflected other to discern what the other sees, to see if the other sees one’s attempt to look? Everything would then circulate about the question:  at any moment, does the other share the beam of sight with the one looking?  A beam shared though reflected.

You can ignore everything after my initial sketch of the lines of sight, after the first three sentences of the previous paragraph.  To imply that a question might reside within this structure is an imposition, I realize.  Certainly a possibility within the structure, but not necessary for creative exploitation.  Don’t attach anything to it unless it’s useful.   You need not let this structure lead to questions of any sort.

A mundane though uniquely modern phenomenon.  Mirrors certainly are part of the architecture of mind and self in the modern world.  And I say modern (said it twice, now, really three times, heaven help me) fully aware that glassy reflection appears in myth, theology and other pre-Renaissance moments of thought.  An aside, this paragraph, a ruffling of an otherwise smooth and unfussy texture.  Or a skidding waver of the beam.

It occurs to me to add that, for the purposes of this assignment, I consider philosophy to be a mode of creative expression.

Politeness

We’ve been watching the original Dark Shadows on Netflix Instant View.  (No, we’re not hip enough to have known that Depp and Burton are doing a remake.  Found that out later as I looked for links. It was truly just a desire to relive childhood memories.)  As the vampire Barnabas Collins made his entrance into the action over ten or so twenty-minute segments, I became quite preoccupied with his politeness.  Something about the totality of it–its comprehensiveness.  Obviously, he wants to be accepted into the family at Collinswood and not arouse suspicion.  It pays for him to be on his best behavior.  Soon enough he will be making some pretty significant requests of folks, so it’s not to his advantage to upset anyone.  Charm is his skeleton key.  But there’s more to it, I think.  The character Maggie, already under a certain amount of hypnotic influence, notes how his “old world” manners seem linked to a profound sense of loneliness and isolation.  What she doesn’t know this early on, of course, is the true nature of this separateness and the true depth of it.

I am struck by how this simple soap managed to create something dark and palpable through such rudimentary and minimal means.  I found myself nodding along with Barnabas as he spoke in various scenes to various characters he wished to charm and influence.  I, too, was appreciating what was at stake as he reached out from a position of absolute separateness.  I was in the game, and there was not one special effect to lure me along through its magic.  Barnabas is nothing but what he can say, and he gets nothing except through what he can say, so he must say it in a very precise way.  The script at times even has him discriminating properly between the uses of who and whom. What we are witnessing is Vampire Minimalism crafted wholly through language.  Sure, soon enough there will be teeth and biting and fluids, and we know something is afoot behind the veneer, but the essence of the vampire is in the words.  As if seizing upon a spoken politeness that is palpably archaic, or dead, he extends a powerful reach into the world of the living with its unsuspecting casualness and neglect and its trivial cares.  His banishment from us and his appetite for us are expressed in his strange, antique precision.

Reading too much into it due to my own alienation?   target=”_blank”>See for yourself.

 

Fractal Music

Fractal: a geometric pattern that is repeated at ever smaller scales to produce irregular shapes and surfaces that cannot be represented by classical geometry.

That seems to be an okay definition. The patterns were created:

Basic units.

Already kind of purty and fractally, I hope. The computer implemented these units at numerous scales of magnitude. And by magnitude, I mean tempo. In musical terms, I think that’s a reasonable translation for size or scale. The beats were subdivided and subdivided exponentially.

I then created color options through specifying a tone row and it’s retrograde. I also added color gradations by letting each tone also specify a key. Additional twists applied through some octave jumps.

I have made a fractal music in the past by manipulating frequencies with the Mandelbrot set, but I wanted to keep tempered pitches in this instance.

I also added some delay that would vary through assorted consonant values. The feedback of the delay enhances the contrapuntal nature of the music and adds some instrumental give and take. I chose a piano sound. Not the greatest, but it’s what I had available, and by manipulating the envelope of the sound, I could create a kind of fiddle voice to play along. Chamber piece for piano and strings. Trying for an acceptable musical equivalent of a fractal image. Here’s one:

rowingmachine10c

That was the most recent attempt.  Due to a particular arrangement of sequencer reset triggers and a more circumspect use of delays, it seems to offer a fairly controlled and dramatic musical organization of the themes.  The ghost in the machine is a touch Romantic, I guess.  Here’s the first attempt with the present tone row:

rowingmachine10a

Not bad.  More adventurous meter permutations.  More appearances by dissonant clusters.  Here’s the second attempt.  I used fewer sequencer resets and so it seems a bit more broad in its lines. Maybe more contemplative?

rowingmachine10b

Some snaps and crackles and pops because of the fussiness of the delays. Sorry. Must keep tinkering.  I am using a nifty audio processing software with a modular interface: Plogue’s Bidule.

Spam poetry

From today’s spam.  This was from Violetta, and she’s from France.

(My mail server has an excellent spamblock, but every now and then—after I click on the Reject all as spam button—I go and see what the message actually was.)

Subject: I want to find a soul mate
Tender, reliable, well educated,
passionate lady.
All of this, about me!
I accept myself so what I am.
I really want to meet a good and kind man.
I don’t need an Ideal Man – I need the one
that is
right for me.
Maybe,this man is you?
Let’s get acquainted online!!

Guess which line I think needs to go on our Aphorisms page?

Anyone else get any good lines recently?