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Protected: Friday night
Agenda item for 5/9
Johan Borgen, Norwegian writer/journalist/playwright, wrote:
“Personally I believe that man’s fascination for art lies in our unsatisfied desire for identity. I believe that our unarticulated longing for freedom, our painful and impractical and completely unreasonable longing for freedom derives simply from the fact that we are shut up inside that system of apparent necessities which is called our personality, or which we call our personality, because we need to fasten a fine-sounding name to the cage in which we have shut ourselves up. … We live a crippled life, shut up inside the narrow cage of considerations, caught in the net of expectations.” (Words Through the Years, 1966)
Be prepared to discuss.
i have no words…
…for the irony.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080505/lf_afp/usreligionpovertyenergyoil
Is that their cars in the background? Is that a “W” sticker I see in the rear window?
Iron Man!
Got my tickets for tonight, brothas. 8 p.m. at the Carmike.
Dah-dah… dah DAH DAH!
da-da-da-da-da-d-da, da-DAH DAH!
I’d like to know…
This past weekend I finally got around to watching a documentary that I’ve had saved in my DVR for ages called Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin. It was a really well done doc, and I really enjoyed it. After watching it, I was inspired to rewatch some Chaplin. (I had not done so in a long time.)
So I had a little mini marathon last night in which I watched A Dog’s Life, The Kid, The Great Dictator, and what is not only my favorite Chaplin, but one of my top five favorite movies of all time: Limelight. The thing, though, that I realized between the doc and the movies last night is just what an incredible genius he was. I’ve seen plenty of Chaplin before, and I have always enjoyed him, but it wasn’t until this past week that I have ever been just overwhelmed by his greatness. I literally can’t even contemplate being that good.
This got me wondering about my fellow Lichtenbergians as artists. Since were are all artists in at least one way or another, I am curious. Who is someone that while you have a deep respect and admiration for, there is also a deep-seeded jealousy. You are amazed by the talent, you can’t even wrap your head around being that brilliant, and yet you secretly wish you were as gifted. Who is the Mozart to your Salieri?
I ask because it is a silly thing to think about, but I am always wanting to discover new things. I’d love to hear of a nemesis that I hadn’t previously known and explore a new artists. (Do you see the irony? By revealing who your nemesis is, you may inspire someone to enjoy his work.)
Beginning with water
“…We made these little gray houses of logs that you see, and p4soutlet they are square. It is a bad way to live, for there can be no power in a square. You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. In the old days when we were a strong and happy people, all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation, and so long as the hoop was unbroken, the people flourished. The flowering tree was the living center of the hoop, and the circle of the four quarters nourished it. The east gave peace and light, the south gave warmth, the west gave rain, and the north with its cold and mighty wind gave strength and endurance. This knowledge came to us from the outer world with our religion. Everything the Power of the World does is done in a pass4sure 000-284 circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. Our tepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nation’s hoop, a nest of many nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children. But the Wasichus have put us in these square boxes. Our power is gone and we are dying, for the power is not in us anymore. You can look at our boys and see how it is with us. When we were living by the power of the circle in they way we should, boys were men at twelve or thirteen years of ago. But now it takes them very much longer to mature. Well, it is as it is. We are prisoners of war while we are waiting here. But there is another world.”
–Black Elk
1
A’tawasti’yï.
Sgë!
(Listen!)
O, now instantly, you draw near.
You come to spit on me. Red is your spit. Ela-wâ’tï.
I was blue this night. But now you come, you clothe me red.
The sun lives this night! She is blue. She is male. She is moon.
You direct her path. She/he is at my feet.
I exult.
Sgë!
(Listen!)
We begin with water.
Water above, water below.
Water East, water South, water West, water North.
We begin with water.
The Oscar Goes To…
I recall a conversational thread some time ago, continued if not initiated at our first gathering, regarding the possibility of disruptive forces to more commonly accepted modalities of “art”. In particular, we discussed the relevance of Red vs. Blue (Halo machinima) and Rock Band as potential players. While I recall little support for that particular idea, I do recall there being some support for the idea that the video game may be trespassing on the territory of film making in some interesting ways. Given that discussion, I found this particular para in a review for the recently released game Grand Theft Auto IV to be particularly interesting.
Like E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime,” GTA IV presents a number of characters that are all chasing that elusive dream, be it finding true love, building a successful business, or just staying one step ahead of the competition. While the game looks like a fairly run-of-the-mill crime drama at first glance, it won’t take long for it to get under your skin and stick with you even while you’re not playing. You’ll quickly come to realize that the nuanced storytelling and presentation is on par with the finest films by directors like Martin Scorcese or Francis Ford Coppola, both of whom know a thing or two about the criminal element of society and their American Dreams. Although it may not change the minds of non-gamers (we’re looking at you, Mr. Ebert), GTA4 should be labeled Exhibit A in the “Games as Art” debate.
Thoughts?
Visionary?
Um, wasn’t this YOUR idea, Dale? An idea you pitched for YEARS, to no avail?
http://www.times-herald.com/local/Jacksons–Caldwell-honored-for-their-contributions-to-the-arts
So, um, where’s your “Visionary” award?
L.08.5: Monomaniacal Masterpiece
Kyle Warez
–from New on DVD
Maxim Magazine
September 2008
The Children of the Dawn is now available on DVD, and one might learn some very interesting things by studying the demographics of the people who actually choose to purchase this exceedingly strange but admittedly monumental experiment in digital video recording and do so with the expectation of being entertained. This eight-disk set contains the complete work as it was first shown on a video monitor in a small room within MOMA in the autumn of 2007, and even in that urbane and adventurous setting, one would wonder about the motives of the few viewers who one could always see camped out in that very tiny space, those who had requested the special overnight passes and had committed to almost a day and a half of continuous viewing. Indeed, as with the original gallery installation, The Children of the Dawn on DVD will provoke for most of us questions about the mystery of what constitutes an audience and what compels a desire to consume something as entertainment or art. Those exclusive few who have made the full commitment are strangely silent about the mysteries with the work itself. Perhaps the control available in watching a DVD to stop viewing at will and resume at will might bring more viewers into willing contact with the work, but one must still wonder.
Just as one must wonder why writer and “performer†Marc Honea would choose such an eccentric form to “record†what is essentially a sprawling semi-historical novel. Honea’s method involves recording himself in a single static close-up shot on a digital camera. Addressing the camera lens directly, he acts out the entire story, speaking as over a hundred different characters, all addressing themselves directly to the camera. The sensations of scenes among characters and dialogue exchanges are created by cutting, but the shot never changes. Honea has merely adopted the face and voice of a new character who is, in turn, addressing the camera. Often the cutting among faces and voices is diabolically fast and creates a strange disorienting effect in the viewer that ‘must be experienced to be understood or, at least,…experienced. As a literary comparison, one is reminded of the almost exclusively dialogue-driven works of William Gaddis, and as with Gaddis there are occasional descriptive passages, but Honea delivers them to the viewer in the same fashion as he performs the story’s characters, adopting what he has called “physiognomaniacal abstractions,†a more extreme method of delivery which contrasts with the very believable playing of characters. And if one takes the work in small doses, which the DVD allows, you cannot help but be drawn in by Honea’s acting which, though relying much of the time on extreme facial and vocal manipulation and contortion, does draw the viewer into a kind of unique reality. Honea perfected this method in his 2004 digital video treatment of Thomas Costain’s 1955 novel The Tontine. As to the “why†of this method, it is hard to know how to interpret what Honea said in an interview from 2005: “The only thing I’ve ever worked at consistently is making faces in the bathroom mirror while talking in funny voices. Everything else has felt like pretending.â€
Such is the method that Honea uses to perform The Children of the Dawn, and he persists with it without wavering for thirty-three and a half hours, for fifty-seven chapters and an epilogue. Part of Honea’s intent is to create a kaleidoscopic, surreal cavalcade that makes stops through most of the twentieth century, but most of the story’s action takes place in London in the late Sixties and focuses on the lives of two prominent musicians in two very prominent and legendary rock and roll bands. Honea has offered the following on the story’s origins:
“I was at a party and people were trying to compare Led Zeppelin with The Rolling Stones, and as a result some people were led to say some really stupid things about both bands. I begin to feel a knot in my stomach and had to say that comparing Zeppelin and The Stones was like comparing apples and oranges. The hostess of the party agreed with me and I felt a tremendous amount of relief. That got me to thinking about how one might go about describing accurately the difference between the music and the overall vibe of these two bands. My shorthand distinction became ‘material and mystical.’ And I was rather happy with that until I started thinking about Mick Jagger and Jimmy Page in particular and how they both rubbed shoulders with American filmmaker, “magus,†and Aleister Crowley acolyte Kenneth Anger. In other words, two very different imaginations were dipping into the same pools, not only through a reverence for the Blues but also through this very theatricalized occult sensibility. How did my neatly formulated ‘material and mystical’ divergence fit into that? I came up with a few fictional identities and some imaginary discographies and let it start to play out…”
And play out it does. On and on it plays. For hours. A maddening, crazed, brilliant exercise; a naively simple technique etching out an exceedingly involved, panoramic epic tale…