John Cage quotes/artwork

"The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason."


"I have nothing to say / and I am saying it / and that is poetry / as I needed it."

Melancholia

Lars Von Trier's 'Melancholia' might be too bleak for most to sink in to. His newest film is an operatic, stylized interpretation of a state of being: Melancholia. It is not about global destruction or the end of the world, but is instead a poetic vision dealing with a personal journey into despair. Dunst is a bride wedded to her own heightened experience of life that is colored by a startling, albeit elegant existential hopelessness. Through this hopelessness, a new world opens. A world illuminated by a kind of grey colored beauty that makes life seem magnetic, cataclysmic, doomed, and ethereal all at once. Planets crash, all is lost, there is no benevolent god. The descent into this kind of mad despondency is a spiritual revelation in itself.

At least four people left the theatre when I saw the film tonight. The pace of the film is slow, and the plot is psychologically driven rather than centering around a sequence of identifiable events. Yet make no mistake, there are subtle, but seismic emotional tectonic plates shifting throughout the course of film, even if the action is limited.

It is disappointing that American film audiences have grown so accustomed to easily identifiable story lines that jump from point a to point b. This sad fact inhibits the dullards from getting anywhere close to having an experience in cinema and instead leaves them antsy and busy fumbling around with their popcorn bags and cokes; dismissing anything unlike the mediocrity they are accustomed to as pretentious, artistic hooey.

Those who are familiar with Trier know that his films are highly influenced by post WWII German cinema. The ideas in German cinema are once again explored in this new film, and those dismissing it as 'overly dramatic' and masturbatory are missing the point. German Expressionism is marked by a stylized form of acting. As Jonathan McCalmont said :



"An emphasis is placed on the mise en scène to the extent that every scene appears to have been assembled in the same way as an artist might frame a painting or a photograph: the cameras are placed in order to film the painted backdrops from a particular angle creating a stage upon which the characters are carefully positioned.These characters and their movements are just as stylised as the backdrops as they too reflect the mental state of the narrator. They are clothed in strange vestments, their facial expressions and ages exaggerated with stage makeup while their movements are oddly sinuous and angular even in close-up...In fact, these exaggerated gestures would come to be embraced as a style of acting in its own right, a style that would come to be seen as one of the calling cards of expressionism....In its simplest and most lasting form, the message of expressionism is that all representational art is expressing an idea and as such, all film is necessarily stylised to one degree or another."


And then there's this:

"Expressionism, as an art movement, enjoyed something of a love-hate relationship with the gothic romances of the 18th century. Indeed, much like expressionism, the gothic is also an attempt to bend the landscape to express a particular mindset. Think, for example, of sinister ruined castles, threatening forests and psychological traumas made flesh in the shape of monsters such as vampires, werewolves and ghosts."


We have only to look at the German playwright Bertolt Brecht to see that it is a common theme in German theatre and cinema to view all art as a representation of life, and subsequently all art should be stylized to the point that it exposes the fabrication involved in the attempt to represent the irrepresentable. However, in confronting the fact that art cannot possibly depict the ineffable, we reach a new way of seeing and appreciating said art. In German Expressionism, and in Gothic art, we reach a heightened state where we are completely aware of our suspension of disbelief and thus discover a more poignant realism. Von Trier seems to have ventured into this complex territory in his newest film.

While watching 'Melancholia', I couldn't help but think of how bold and blind we are as human beings; clinging to ritual (as represented by the wedding ceremony in the first part of the film) in the face of imminent destruction: be it death, planetary demise, madness, or a fall from grace.


I highly recommend this film. I could ramble forever, but do yourself a favor and go see it!

Yann Orhan photos via BOOOOOOM.com

Deerhunter - Desire Lines (Live on the Interface)

Slowdive - When The Sun Hits (Picnic at Hanging Rock)

Erin O'Hara Slavick

http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/to-the-end-of-the-world-with-noam-chomsky/Content?oid=1711988

Yes.

‎"If you follow your bliss, you'll have your bliss whether you have money or not. If you follow money, you may lose the money, and then you don't have even that. The secure way is really the insecure way and the way in which the richness of the quest accumulates is the right way." - Joseph Campbell

Jayne Mansfield's Pink Palace

Lester Bangs on Lou Reed

*from Untitled Notes on Lou Reed, 1980

(shout out to Kurt for this one.) Thanks Kurt!


Last spring I was going out with a girl who road-managed a rock band. When she told them she was seeing me they said, "Aw, all Lester wants to do is suck Lou Reed's cock."
I would suck Lou Reed's cock, because I would also kiss the feet of them that drafted the Magna Carta. I leave you to judge that statement as you will, because it is not to Lou Reed but to you that I surrender myself, you who read this. I care about almost nothing, but I know I'm always in good hands with you.
I'm a realist. That's why I listen to Lou Reed. And that's why I idolize him. Because the things he wrote and sang and played in the Velvet Underground were for me part of the beginning of a real revolution in the whole scheme between men and women, men and men, women and women, humans and humans. And I don't mean clones. I mean a diversity that extends to the stars.
Everybody assumes that mind and body are opposed. Why? (Leaving aside six thousand years of history.) The trog vs. the cerebrite. How boring. But we still buy it, all of us. The Velvet Underground were the greatest band that ever existed because they began to suggest that such was not so, in the very actfact of the tragic recognition of such opposition at the at the most groundfloor extreme angles. Angles? Ha! What is the difference between the curve of a breast on a sex goddess and the bones in the thighs of a stud and the fins on a '57 Chevy? The introduction of the Chevy into the comparison was America's idea, which Andy Warhol later perfected, which is why he is prophet of our doom. Lou realized early on that all you need to do is touch the other's cheek and just give them some small recognition and then let them be and maybe record it and thereby perhaps justify their tragedy through art. And all art is an act of love towards the whole human race. Aw, Lou, it's the best music ever made, the instrumental intro to "All Tomorrow's Parties" is like watching dawn break over a bank of buildings through the windows of these elegantly hermetic cages, which feels too well spoken, which I suspect is the other knife that cuts through your guts, the continents that divide literature and music and don't care about either.
Two nights ago my friend John Morthland was over and we talked about Iran and the future of this embassy we live in. We ended up agreeing that we were expatriates in our own homeland, and where did that leave us? Exiles on main street. Which is exactly where you always were, Lou, which is not a bad place to be. If you felt at home there, you'd really be psychotic. But you knew that a long time ago.
We will end up there in one way or another, probably sharing bar beers with our parents at our side, and they will know what no one else must know, that the unspeakable sin, the love that dare not speak its name, the dope addict, finally came home to roost.

Joan Mitchell

Eiko and Koma

Back in 2006 I was lucky enough to study with Eiko and Koma as a part of 'New Voices' at Curious Theatre. I never forgot the experience. I realize that to most, this sort of work probably seems pointless and/or pretentious. The way I look at it is that art either grabs you in your gut, or it doesn't. Watching movement work that is slow and meditative takes patience and a presence of mind. You just have to go there! I'll always remember a phrase from studying with Eiko and Koma years ago: "Imagine you are a tree: both growing and dying.." Tall order. But somehow, it has always made perfect sense to me. Enjoy!!

Click on the link to watch 'River' and check out the Eiko & Koma site...

http://eikoandkoma.org/index.php?p=ek&id=2517


Time Out New York, July 18, 2011
Gia Kourlas

In honor of their three-year Retrospective Project, the Japanese artists Eiko & Koma are making a special stop at Lincoln Center, where, remarkably, they have never performed. In Water, a new, site-specific performance in the Paul Milstein Pool at the complex’s Hearst Plaza, the dancers will expand upon ideas in previous works—Elegy (1984), Lament (1985) and Passage (1989)—but River (1995) is most on their mind. Earlier this month, they reprised the work, which takes place in a body of moving water, at the American Dance Festival in Durham, North Carolina. In it, they journey downstream, hinting at the passage of life and time. Their latest experiment in water immersion takes place in a man-made reflecting pool; despite the artificiality, Eiko and Koma’s bodies will give a sense of the natural world by showing the way water can sustain life and, as evident by the horrific recent events in Japan, destroy it.

“Why does Eiko & Koma like water?” Koma asks a few yards away from the pool. “We came out of water in the womb. Often we cry—with pleasure, with sadness. Water is very important. You need it for the muscles and the joints. The title Water is kind of a nickname. What’s more important is the idea of fluidity.”

The flutist Robert Mirabal will play his score live—yes, he too will be in the water—during the run, which will be shown nightly at 9:30pm and coincides with an exhibition at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, “Residue: An Installation by Eiko & Koma.” That show, which continues through October, will feature a tea house, along with costumes and set pieces dating to 1978.

Performing in water, the artists say, requires a sense of acceptance. “I think that it’s not about resistance or fighting it,” Eiko says. “It’s where we come from, but we’re not really in it anymore, so it takes a little bit of getting used to. It’s like revisiting an old friend. You have to go slowly.”

For Koma, the sensation is of a gradual saturation of the flesh. “You feel your body start to melt or get softer, like when you pour milk on cornflakes. After five minutes, it gets soggy. The body starts to feel heavier. We become part of the water.”

And as the public watches from dry land, Eiko and Koma become something of a different species. “At the same time, people are looking at something that is very familiar, which is this reflection pool,” Eiko says. “Once we start to perform, I hope that people actually start to feel the water—not just a nicely designed reflection pool. We don’t want to walk to it and get in and walk out. We want to stay there.” Or as her collaborator puts it, “I’m not Koma anymore. Eiko is not Eiko. We are just small beings, the same as fish. That’s the part I really like.”
Eiko & Koma present Water at the Paul Milstein Pool Wed 27–Sun 31.

The Selby is yummy :)

Richard D. James interview

Small section from an interview with Aphex Twin's Richard D. James...Click to make it bigger

Yayoi Kusama

slacker