Vegetarian Morning

A diet of greens
Makes dolphin journeys visits
Instead of sea wars

Winter Forecast for Introverts

Irony's a coat,
Because subjectivity
Is out of fashion.

Fractals

Oh trendy art methodology, so full of catchphrases like "ekphrasis" and "agency!" Let's talk about ekphrasis first. Ekphrasis spent a great deal of time in school, studying language and culture in order to translate Japanese humor for Americans. Lo and behold, the only Americans who even began to get the jokes were the ones who actually were into Japanese culture, and had themselves become scholars of the culture. Sometimes Ekphrasis' comedy fell flat on it's face. So Ekphrasis began evaluating each different audience and lost a little of his honesty. He began to translate, no, convert the Japanese jokesters' verbal chicanery into something of the same spirit as the original joke, but also something that was literally unequivalent... Ekphrasis had become an Agent. He began equating things based on the system he chose for the situation that would give his preferred result. After all, it was all in good fun. 

So we choose our systems of interpretation. 

The older I get, the more I realize that understanding eachother is impossible. Being understood is impossible. We are at every moment, interpreting stimulai. We provide ourselves a variety of systems with which to view these stimulai, because at bottom, if we don't like what we see, we have a box of other lenses to change our interpretation. After all, if we are looking closely, no matter what the lens, the interpretation must be objective.

So let's take science as a lens. As a methodology it seems ahuman. We think of the approach as cold and detached. The objective is not to see what we want but simply to record what we see. So what happens when we look into the microscope and see nothing? We reach for another lens. We raise the magnification. We lower the magnification. We change our lens until we can interpret. But it is not because there is an objective something to be interpreted that we finally see through the correctly chosen lens. It is because we want to understand that we feel understanding. The goal is still happiness. People are "objective" and "scientific" for the same reason that they are "religious" or "sympathetic." There is great joy in the feeling of understanding. In epiphany. 

To say "epiphany" is nothing more than an emotional climax, a release of chemicals in the brain at the end of an arduous attempt to "understand" might sound hideous to one under the objectivity delusion, but I think it's a testament to the awe-inspiring microcosm of our human brains. Each brain is world of carefully balanced extremes, of incompatible elements all co-existing so that to the casual observer, everything is thriving. Our planet, while made up of our microcosmic brains among other equally complicated individual entities, is another system full of oppositions carefully balanced and checked against eachother. And yet our planet appears so solid from space. 

I might be getting more Buddhist in my old age, but I find great comfort in this. That every complication, everything "wrong" with the world is just as much a part of it's structure as what is "right" with the world. And how amazing are humans that they find a lens to look at every uncomfortable disharmony in a way which makes their puny life burst with meaning, understanding, and happiness.

Why Nietzsche and I Agree About Art

In his famous text, The Gay Science, Germany’s celebrated skeptic, Friedrich Nietzsche begins breaking down the concept of morality, which will eventually become the focus of his Genealogy of Morals. By calling into question the foundations and histories of every societal more that has every been considered by and large “good” or “virtuous,” and by contrast that which is “bad” or “evil,” he uncovers the hidden fallacy of an “absolute” or “universal” truth. Every authorial account of knowledge in history, according to Nietzsche rests on some faulty premise.In his critique of modernity, he recounts the story of “The Madman,” who is in fact, a self-reflection of the author and the mouthpiece of his infamous pronunciation that “God is dead.” But the madman continues, “and we have killed him.” Nietzsche’s claim is that by creating the world we presently live in, the world of consumers, of industry, of technology and science as “empirical truth” we have created an environment that is so hostile to a the immediacy of the ancient beliefs in God, that we can no longer accept the idea of God as the ultimate authority. Those judged as “immoral” are no longer at the mercy of a God who will smite him with lightning, because science explains the phenomenon of lighting and as a natural condition of earthly weather, it does not have the discretion to smite. Even those claiming religion and service to God, Nietzsche insists instead to be non-believers worshipping a shadow-in-memoriam of the god who has perished at our hand. He laments the death of God as the loss of the beautiful delusion that was for so long, the glue of pre-modern society.

Nietzsche accepts this great loss for humanity, and without nihilism, but instead with a cheerful optimism, provides a solution through art. We must become the artists of our own lives, creating from the raw materials of suffering, joy, pleasure, and pain our own personal guidebook for living. We must be able to look at our lives in terms of aesthetics in addition to the terms of rules we live by. In fashioning this life as artwork, we the artists must be able to step back, palette in hand, and look at the whole of our lives and see the gestalt of choices made intentionally by a “single taste.” In this way we become improvisers and transformers of self.

The way Nietzsche describes this self-authoring is such that we as individuals must be able to live our present lives as if we could live that same life verbatim, with all its vicissitudes, again and again for eternity, like a favorite novel.  The way I have described this life philosophy, before ever reading Nietzsche’s words, is that I must never have any regrets. In spite of what many would charge me with as “poor choices,” I have always been able to reflect on my life’s decisions and direction with the honest belief that if I were given the choice over, I would not have already acquired the experiential knowledge of having lived and suffered through the cause and effect of my actions in a given circumstance. I have come to realize that I do not write my own fate, so much as I write my own interpretation.In response Nietzsche provides that  “only one thing is needful: to give style to one’s life.” Artistic decisions require knowledge, self-control and luck. The element of luck in cicumstance makes an experimentation a necessity. When one can step back from his creation, tastefully executed, and behold it in all its disharmonies of form as a full composition and an object of beauty, he as a human becomes “tolerable to behold.”

For this reason, we as a society, can never dispense with art. Art is the most powerful metaphor of a meaningful life in modernity. With making and and absorbing objects of art, we practice living.

Church Window Design I

This past extended weekend, I went to Minneapolis to visit my boyfriend and attend an info session on the MFA program at UMN's art department. The facility was amazing. They had everything. They have a FOUNDRY right in the building. They have a shop for every sculptural medium and a studio for every 2D medium. They have an experimental THEATER just for art... with SURROUND SOUND. I asked if students could access a box truck if they needed to go to a lumber store for large supplies... our host replied that she didn't know what a box truck was, but any supplies you order are delivered, and you can use the freight elevator to get the supplies to your graduate studio which occupies a WHOLE FLOOR! 

The last thing I saw was the gallery, an open, modern space with work from artists of their Chinese exchange program, which is big. I left with a high degree of inspiration and whimsy. To have so many things at my fingertips! I must go there! In terms of making and meaning, the mental state of "inspiration" invites further exploration.

When inspired, the world looks different to an artist, just like the world looks different to a person in love. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist whose life's work studies the brain in love, describes the importance dopamine plays in obtaining this feeling of love. Novel experiences often drive up dopamine levels, and she tells the story of a graduate student at a conference in Beijing who tries to make a colleague fall in love with him by creating novelty by travel in a rickshaw. The result is that the colleague does experience this dopamine rush and exits the rickshaw in a state of exhilaration and infatuation... for the rickshaw driver. "There is magic to love!" She says.

http://www.ted.com/talks/helen_fisher_tells_us_why_we_love_cheat.html

However, I find the manipulation of this discovery intriguing. Perhaps it's impossible to tamper with someone else's internal chemistry and achieve the results you want, but within yourself, the effect can be more pleasing. Though we typically do not choose who we fall in love with, we can capitalize on the emotions we get from novel experiences and live and do productive things while in that state of euphoria. As I've gotten older, I try to spend less time basking in a state of inspiration, which is inextricably tied to a sense of longing for something ambiguous, and therefore impossible to obtain. Instead I linger in the place that causes this feeling and do whatever artful thing I can with what I have. I've been in too many situations where I had inspiration and no tools, so as an adult, I plan ahead. I anticipate those moments and they come. Perhaps they come more often because I anticipate them and don't fear being unprepared. Even if I don't have my tools, I practice "being" art, moving and looking and engaging fully in my senses so that as with any "practice" I can recall the motor expressions I rehearsed in a state of inspiration and by repeating them when I have my tools again, recall a bit of that emotional state. In a way you could simply call this practicing positivity. When routine plays such a large part of my sense of security, finding a way to inject even a diluted degree of inspiration into my day makes me more productive, and in response, more secure. An upward spiral!

I went back to work on my window piece for my thesis and finished yesterday. The SALVS is the old English SALUS which means "Health" in Latin. For artists, exercising inspiration is not going to lead to dopamine rush after dopamine rush, but through practice it helps me stay in love with the world. And I think that is essential to the health of any artist.

Beatitudes of The Adytum

1. We shall always be honest in our speech.

2. We shall only use the language for the communication of ideas to each other.  The literal meaning of its components will naturally become obscured by the honest frustrations that erupt in the emotional undertones of our phonetic utterances.

3. While we will try to play by the rules of society, that is of spoken language, a medium we can never fully communicate with, when we become genuinely too frustrated by our failed attempt to understand and be understood, we will resort, quite exhausted, with music, so that the segue between speech, voice, and secondary voice (or instrument) is quite necessary and indistinguishable as separate entities.

4. We will maintain the etiquette of polite conversation in music, until our opinions and emotions are so at odds with each other it becomes necessary to momentarily project without listening. Our tantrums will be short as our group dynamic and sense of community is our ultimate ally and power.

5. We shall all align our methods of speaking with our individual characters. We have always been Four Sisters. Novieiska. Truvieiska. Civieiska. Matoschi.

6. We shall speak of things in terms of an elemental nature. The universe, our universe, is made of these fundamental elements - Earth, Air, Fire, Water.

The properties of these elements are  scientifically observable and immutable. They are found in varying degrees in all things. Their natures are found in varying degrees in all things. Therefore each person is constituted by four natures in varying degrees, and by virtue of their juxtaposition against other persons, communities are constituted by these four natures. The 4 elemental natures are as follows:

Earth:

Tangible, solid, sturdy, material, practical, grounded, unshakable, unmoving, steady, pragmatic. Earth holds its own shape and provides a reliable surface and sense of security to those it gives itself to walk upon. The sensual. The corporeal. The body.

Air:

Invisible, quick, born of the sky and higher things. Filling to the lungs. Perceptible to sight only by what it displaces. Heard in the ears and felt on the skin only after it has vanished. Witty. Contemplative, idealistic, mercurial, and communicative, it demands a dialog. A conversation. A friend. The mind.

Water:

Undulating, ebbing, flowing, gushing, freezing solid, now hot, then gradually cold, now raging, then placid, then unmovable as ice. Transformative. Emotive. Conforming to the shape of its container. Bound by gravity to move ceaselessly and restlessly until it finds it's level. Then deep, nuturing, satiating, healing. Restorative to those it gives of itself to drink. The heart.

Fire:

Rapid! Dancing! Glowing! Charming! Moving without regard for gravity or other such laws. Free and unbound! Constantly in action. Now here, now there! Free from deliberation! Brightest and warmest near those who respect its unpredictability! Blazing forward in some direction, though direction is chosen only by the necessity to blaze! Energy! Action! The spirit!

But in distress:

Earth is the earth that crumbles beneath our feet, that blocks our path, that blinds us from the sun.

Air is the air that uproots us and knocks us off our feet, that refuses to wait for us to catch up, and that in its haste, prods and stirs up a violent reaction from the other elements.

Water is the water which drowns us to death.

Fire is the fire that burns and swiftly consumes every last thing before it even knows what it has done.

Therefore, only in balance of measure does the universe remain constituted.

7. We are constituted by elemental natures and as such constitute with with our Gang of Four, our universe.

Novieiska is the Earth.

Truvieiska the Fire.

Civieiska is the Water

Matoschi the Air.

8. At the very onset of the story, in the act of childbirth, Civieiska finds her sudden demise. Before we have the chance even to experience the dynamism of the 4 elemental natures in unity and balance, we find our universe bereft of her heart! Oh woe to us! To lose access to that fluid depth! Vengeance against he who rent us apart!

But where to place the blame? And how to even process the grief without our heart! We grieve that which can only give substance and movement to the grief! Oh Woe!

9. The death of the heart was brought by this tiny harbinger of the future. But where is the balance and sense in such a future?! We are too grieved to yet imagine!

10. And so the rain pours. A chilly repetitious reminder of that which is lost.

Does this child have a chance?

To My Talented Lady Friends: An "Improv Opera"

Hey Ladies,

I miss you, and I'm sorry I've been so engulfed in my thesis to hang out as I'd like... however, I have a two (or maybe even ten)-fold efficient idea which should be fun and hopefully productive.

So in my thesis there is a film. In my film, there is a diluted narrative. In the diluted narrative there is a history of morality. In the history of morality there is a group of women who serve both as spiritual leaders in their community and as prostitutes. In reality this seeming division of self was perfectly legal in Medieval Europe. Today's mindset would look at this type of pairing as hypocrisy, but I'm trying to use it to show how people (especially women or minorities) make meaning out of a marginalized life in society. Culture forms in the mythology people make and need to have meaning in life (rather than life being objectively or universally meaningful in the context of societal laws) and become more fully human or transcendent. But at the same time, morality is prescribed by those in power to unintentionally make a slave class for themselves to feed and survive on, which is the animal part of human nature, to survive by eating those lower on the food chain. It is inevitable and glossed over by human idealism as something people can transcend with enough effort and presence of mind. I disagree, and believe, like Nietzsche that chaos is necessary to meaning and we discover meaning in life through art.

There are 4 characters in the introductory scene of the film. They are all nuns/ladies-of-the-night who serve their community as nurturing, earth-mother sympathizers of the downtrodden, rather than as tradeswomen of sensual goods and services. Because they embrace the chaos of the animal they are humble. Nonetheless they are shamed because they are powerless to survive at the hands of the moneyholders, who by their capacity to requite, that is, reward and punish, can prescribe morality which both condemns their way of living and enforces it. The moneyholders are mainly men in the rich church inside the town who have cast their cloister into the woods to perform their spiritual rites to society in the confines of a humble tent.

I know this is probably more philosophy than anyone wants to read this early in the morning... but here comes the practical and fun part:

I have images to show you, which are not final but which should give you the mood of the opening scene. With those moving images in mind, I want to create an organic improv piece with 4 voices. These voices should begin as your actual voices, so in that sense you'll have to play a character, but since the piece is written in the fake language, what I would like is ostensibly what we did with Literacy, to have a list of these fake words to choose from and through your compositional sensibilities, we form a musical conversation. In a way, you might think this piece would be better for trained singers, but I don't. And in fact, I think it would be cool to have your instruments in this piece too, as sort of a secondary mode of individual voice. In the opening scene the elder nun (most like Leonardo of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, if this analogy makes sense) gets into an argument with the nun of a fiery, angsty disposition (the Raphael character) over the death of their youngest sister (who could have been the Michaelangelo character, but whose sudden absence simply leaves a lack of unity among the others). A fourth nun takes the role of the Donatello character, and contemplates the sister's death quietly and with gentle reserve. Its a funeral scene but unlike Leah's In Morning piece, does not resolve quite yet. If after the erupting first movement it makes sense to pick up instruments, and I hope it does, there should be a second wave of mourning without voices that I will carry into the next scene which is devoid of human characters.

The sister who has died has given birth to a baby in this first scene which is the catalyst for the eruption of the argument between the two nuns. The story follows the child as she grows up in this scenario without the socialization of other children and makes art of what is "too real" incorporating dreams into reality and bestowing the form of her growing up with an aesthetic fashioned from the abstraction of real visions of this life.

So it's in essence a Piece, and a Piece I'm serious about - And it needs 4 voices (I can be the 4th if necessary). I think it would be cool to supplant those individual voices with instrumentation in the way that to speak to each other, Leah might just as naturally pick up her Saxophone as vocalize the script and Jessica might pick up hers and yell back with it. Basically, where in all technically received films (popular and/or critically acclaimed films, that is) there is a track for dialog and a track for incidental music and the music must always be suppressed just like the music of opera is (according to Nietzsche, for whom opera was the popular film of his time) suppressed by the libretto because the clarity of the words is the most important thing to an audience of theatre-goers.

For my thesis, I want the dialog AND the music to BE THE SAME THING. For this Piece, the words are only important in the sentiment they are producing for and between the performers, the rhythms they are then forced naturally into creating, and the musical form they are exalting over time. For this reason it will only be important to practice the language to the degree that it should feel natural like playing an instrument. The literal meaning of the words does not matter except in the feeling they cause in the performer uttering them. They should move fluidly through moments of tonality and periods of texture and rhythm.

There will then at last, be one long organic piece with 5 movements (which now reminisces of Leah's interest in the 5 stages of grief, and makes me feel this can not be done without Leah in the natural role of the elder nun) that will loosely follow a script in lieu of a score while I orchestrate the instrumentation and shifts in mood/dynamics with image cues. We will need to practice a lot, because this in essence will be like an opera... but practically speaking I credit everyone participating as a Composer as that's the nature of improv and collaboration. The way I see it, this is a history of the culture of women and only through a ritual performed by us as a group, is it going to create that mythology.

Notes on Nietzsche's The Gay Science I

Book 1:1

Teachers of purpose appear (these are ostensibly Philosophy teachers, religious heads, or any professor of the whys of existence and the insistence on preserving the whole of the human race. Nietzsche talks about laughing at oneself for this. It's laughable. That humans divide eachother up as good and evil then talk about the necessity of every "evil" attribute in the loftier goal of preservation of the human race. It's laughable because it will survive on its own. Then these professors come in with second lives that aspire to do what the life of the race will do by its own nature. He mentions drives again and then laughs about how we are the only species that from time to time must understand "why" we live when other species just go on living without needing an answer to this question.

Book 1:2

Where Nietzsche describe his type of "injustice." He describes people as having no intellectual conscience. Many people. And those that do have it are lost to his kind in "the most densely populated cites as if he were in a desert." I agree with him on this, that the majority of people do not find it contemptible to think this way or that, weigh this as good and that as evil, but never account for the "desire for certainty" within himself as a problem. However he sees people who question their own "desire for certainty" as elite.

Book 1:3

Where Nietzsche talks about the "common" complaining about "noble (morally magnanimous) types because they suspect selfish motives led them to this lifestyle and when they are convinced of noble motives they simply see the noble as stupid to enjoy leading a life of martyrdom or self-disadvantage. Conversely the noble treats the common well, but complains endlessly that they won't do what is "needful" and that is their injustice.

Book 1:4

On what preserves the species which Nietzsche says "In every teacher and preacher of what is new  we encounter the same 'wickedness'. that makes conquerors notorious, even if its expression is subtler and it does not immediately set the muscles in motion, and therefore also does not make one that notorious. New is "evil" because it wants to overthrow and change the old. Old = "good." All things good as evil are just as expedient in preserving the human race as the other.

Book 1:5

Manipulative tactics of those who speak of their "Unconditional duties," and of themselves as servants to a cause he says "Because they desire the unconditional confidence of others, they need first of all to develop unconditional self-confidence on the basis of some ultimate and indisputable commandment" so that they can feel like "instruments."

Book 1:6

Loss of dignity... Reflection never stops, and doesn't require enough preparation. Thinking refuses to stop.

Book 1:7

"Where could you find a history of love, of avarice, of envy, of conscience, of pious respect for tradition, or of cruelty? He mentions vegetarianism as a basis for philosophy, then discards it. How differently have man's instincts grown! He describe culture and counter culture... and how much study it would take to give a why answer to all these variants of human instinct... then science can't do what it sets out to do with study and empiricism.

Book 1:8

...

This is how I get into the book I guess. Now I'm into Book 2 where Nietzsche slights women, provides some insight into men forming opinions about women in their minds and then finding humans instead, to their disgust and crediting women with "willingness" to reform themselves into the vision the man has dreamt up.

And at long last I discovered I was assigned Human, All Too Human for tomorrow's class and not The Gay Science until later in the semester... the human brain, oh how it works against and with the rest of the social world... nonetheless I will enter class tomorrow more educated than I was at the last class period... I feel like my prof shouldn't mind a lapse in practical sense... I hope.

Test with Masks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tPqHVV1eBA

New Scene Masks for Kloeshi

How should I create a variety of very atmospheric scenes without access to the places I'd like to shoot them in? I suppose I just make Theatre. With these images I have created an alpha mask to shade out the silhouette of a certain scenic element I want in a piece of video. 

Then I layer the mask over the silhouetted video I've taken to put the characters in the scenery. The end result is not necessarily photo realistic as American filmmakers and audiences typically find as the goal of film, but instead creates a mood narrative.

In these scenes the nuns take Kloeshi with them from their humble cloister in the woods, to pay a routine visit to the clergy at the large expensive cathedral in the city. Here we begin to see the hierarchical structure of the society in this story, and the power inequality and suffering which stems from within.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung, Freud, Nietzsche, and Process

Yesterday I went to the Writing Center for help writing my thesis. I've had little direction on how to go about it or what the guidelines are. I've visited the University's online resources, which would be more helpful if they showed an example instead of a page of words describing pagination... ultimately I find again and again that words of help written by people, are alienated from those people, and that true help is a feeling. Suffice to say, Jennifer at the Writing Center was helpful and I have an appointment to see her again in two weeks.

Though I've been reading from a variety of sources over the last two years, my research has been scattered, non-linear, and the antithesis of efficient. Nonetheless, I can't be ashamed of the process because I've been absorbing information all this time. During my session at the Writing Center, Jennifer suggested I had a lot of research to do. This was a blow to me, because I thought I had been staying ahead with the assortment of self-imposed readings I had done. When I consider what a slow-cooker I am, I forget to look at the other end of that spectrum, the pressure to produce. The Raphael reading made me think in terms of pure planning vs. pure production. Like the anecdote concerning the wall decoration he had no time to plan out with preliminary drawings, I like to wade in the pool of possibility and the fearful waters of the concern that the product might not realize my concept. I have full control of the planning. I have virtually no control on the reception of the project. While I might be happy with the end result of my careful planning and execution, there's still the concern that I won't make the deadline because I was not ready to leave the planning process. But far more frightening is the fear that I will leave the planning process in fear of the deadline and make a monstrosity that I can never love.

Jennifer, whose livelihood comes from her tutelage in getting results in writing form, needed to light a hotter candle beneath me than I had lit for myself. Typically, I'm too busy counting the different candles burning, and from both ends, to think about how hot each one is, individually. There is a collective heat that never stops. I filled the time between the appointment and my next appointment with more time in the 3rd and 4th floor stacks.

"You need to find the gap in all previous research on this topic." She explained. My thesis topic is broad because art is criticized for being too personal and Art is that which appears to invoke the primal unity of all things. Firstly I spent a lot of time working on imagery that would evoke an experience which could only be communicated through the medium of art, and now I'm being asked to convert that language into written English. Even more problematic, the English should be logically formatted, an argument, a dogma which is so well-researched it must become truth (i.e. aspires to publication). Meanwhile, my art should be original. I must research my methods as I work. I must spend all my time practicing and gaining new insights into the practical methods by which I make it. I must contribute to the technology of making art.

Fill the gap, contribute to the technology, perfect my craft, perfect my writing, perfect the world. Produce, produce, produce.

And students are supposed to do this in two years with the scantest finances. What a system our idealism has created! Oddly enough, my thesis research focuses on modernity's idealistic pursuit of knowledge and production as a linear (logical) progression biting it's own tail as it reaches its limits and rediscovers that as the people it is made up of, it is only half ideally human. When we ignore our animal drives in the hopes of transcending them, we segment ourselves, only to see that we are really werewolves terrorizing each other at night, while during the day we continue producing. 

For me, process entails a lot of time because it's my wish to balance these two halves of myself as a person so that I do not become segmented and look for escape from reality. Nietzsche said we "need art for protection and as medicine." And as a society, I feel we are under-medicated because we are conditioned to value the product. It pleases me to focus on and even imagine the artistic process of Raphael and Michaelangelo realistically without the Apolline veil. In this way we are creating new myths which in turn reconnect us with our primal core. I've been a painter in Raphael's shop. I've been a designer explaining my vision in it's cohesion to an artistic director's vision to a shop of builders and painters. But I understand the plight of the whole organization too. Produce. Produce Produce... load-in on Friday...  

Entertainonomics: The Dark Knight

My electronic music teacher, Krzysztof Wolek, sent me this link - presumably because I would appreciate the grammar of film used to dissect one of this generation's most unique entertainonomic phenomena in film. The Dark Knight.

http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/press_play/index.html?story=/ent/movies/feature/2011/09/12/dark_knight_jim_emerson_press_play

I'm glad I don't make "Hollywood" movies. As soon as your work starts making money, people have found a new pariah.

While much of what he said about this movie was accurate from the standpoint of technical filmmaking rules, (which are about as "universal" or monolithic as the rules of tonal music) are true, I think he would be less likely to spend so much time ripping apart a Kurasawa or a Tarkovsky or a Herzog. Maybe the guy just fancies himself an action sequence guru? I guess I didn't think of the sequence as disorienting because it fit into the context of the film. Granted, I will rip up on the script - why writers or producers-cum-writers think it's a good idea to give non-characters these stupid, needless lines (i.e. "Lock and load!") is the reason I tend to stay out of the movie theater and stick to my home projector.

It seems pretty banal actually to watch a movie and pick apart how physically impossible the action is. What does that say about our culture? Why do people have this dual demand that films should behave completely in every aspect as if they are happening in real life right now, but when these things are sad, depressing or true to the content of life people are mad because it's not an "escape" anymore. If people really wanted films to be true to life, they'd make movies about the guy that hates his job working at Best Buy. There would not even be such a thing as an action sequence. Life is not physically that exciting. So the only thing of value I can see that Mr. Emmerson says is "All the jumbled up movement can cancel out any sense of momentum."

I suppose this is because I have come to see film making as if it were music. This is probably why Joey and I like David Lynch. Is the acting immaculate? Not in the usual sense for sure. It seems sometimes the characters are not even acting. Do we receive all the visual information we need to follow a plot that is real to life? Absolutely not. Do we find an overall form, rhythms, harmony, dissonance, contrast of elements? Absolutely so. Life IS as exciting as an action sequence at times, but not because things are literally physically happening like they do in action sequences. Life is exciting for the same reason music is exciting - it moves from moment to moment, ideas culminate, things appear to have happened for a reason and we perceive action and momentum. We could not experience music with only our sense of logic and reasoning. We require our emotions to make sense of music, and music makes sense of us. I don't see why filmmaking is judged any differently. I suppose it's not. There is radio pop and there are Blockbusters. Critics will leave us alone so long as we continue not making any money. :) And you will never make money unless you follow the instruction manual for making a movie.

As far as The Dark Knight goes, I don't love it. I'm honestly a bit indifferent to it. I like Heath Ledger's masterful portrayal of a 2D comic villain as a fully rounded human being.  I like the darkness, the Noirish chiaroscura, and the cocktail of comic-like simplicity and familiar political themes. But what I can truly not deny about this movie is that it managed to draw a crowd from so many sects of people. This was a movie I DID see in the theater, right there next to the people who come to see every blockbuster, the nerdy boys who only see action movies and cult specialties like Star Wars, the critics (which I don't identify with either) and the independent crowd.  

Actually, I like the role of the critic when I think about it - yes they are annoying naysayers that quest after the conquest of ruining a good thing because it's just not good enough, but they're the system of checks and balances. No one should ever make too much money.

Culmination Feeling

First of all, here is a test that I've been working on...

and you can visit the link at YouTube should you like to watch it in glorious 720/1280 at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xs81UeXlQ5I

And right now, it looks neat, but what is it? That seems to me to be the worst state of affairs for an artist. When I listen to Matthew Barney talk about his work, talk about the concepts behind his work, as an artist, when I listen to someone who just doesn't jive with me, all I hear is I made this thing from my intuitive feeling about what is aesthetic and I came up with a way to justify the images later. On one hand, it annoys me because so much money backs his productions and his sheer charisma and social (or socioeconomic) opulence propel him into a world that is his oyster - one in which he is allowed to express narcissistically and like pop artists, we look at a well-chisled american football player's face and assume the art is profound. I don't think his art is profound I don't even think he's charismatic.

But in all this, I realize it's more that I champion the underdog and loathe the celebrity. In this sense I see myself as a balancing force. I'm not going to turn it all the way back around, because the irony of this situation is that as soon as the underdog becomes the jesus whose face we see in the towel used to wipe the fluids away, I no longer see a savior or a confidant but a mere celebrity. I should look for the world's answers in the gibberish of a homeless man before I turn to someone with too much celebrity because I lose trust in someone who has happened into this type of power and embraces it. While I fully understand with all the empathy a human can possess what it is to lust after the "truth" in the world, I came to understand what a temporal concept "truth" is. Truth is not eternal, people just want it to be.

So I've been reading philosophy for a bit now - I was into Ayn Rand's theories of Objectivism in high school, but more importantly I was into a boy who was into Ayn Rand. I left my beliefs in Christianity because I had found someone with the truth. I found someone to take care of me and lead me out of delusion and tradition. Four years later, my savior had lost his shimmer. He didn't really know the truth, he just had a big personality and very persuasive way with words. He was a dialectician, a logician, an orator, and a huge deluded misanthrope. In a small town, he was also the underdog. I trusted him completely and justified all his actions because of my trust. But I feel certain that it was his actions that made me trust him in the first place. Actions are, after all, movements from point A to point B, not the intentions that drive them. Those intentions are as ephemeral as "the truth" and equally subject to interpretation.

Now I'm reading Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and considering the world's famous polarizing German personality for his influence and his power. Another great orator, I find a great deal I like in his perspective. On the one hand, he's a snooty elitist and typically chauvinist, but what surprises me is how difficult it is for great humanists to apply their philosophies to their own lives. Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer (and smacking of much older Eastern Buddhist thought) believed that there were two drives in all of humanity. Apollo named the drive that compels us to make order of things, to categorize and individuate. I think this runs parallel to Freud's libido or creative energy. But later in life, Freud recognized Thanatos, which was the name for his "death drive" which he eventually believed was in conflict with the libido. The death drive was a limiting force which drives us to suicide and self destruction because like Nietzsche Dionysian drive, we are always trying to return to our original primordial inorganic state, a state of "oneness" with the world. Dionysus is the force of chaos that makes us dance in a crowd, losing our faces to a group ritual where we no longer exist as individuals but feel the "truth" of that blissful "oneness" sought after by Buddhist monks. He romanticized the society of the archaic Greeks whose Attic Tragedies were the locus of all activity, just as the Christian Church was in the Middle Ages and as Science became to modernity. Socrates, for Nietzsche, ruined the world by having such a profound influence through his charismatic oration that he caused us to think optimistically, and with great arrogance that we could "know" everything through logic. But even worse, Socrates believed we could "know" morality through logical reasoning. Great job Socrates - knowing requires education, and education then becomes another subjective measure by the elite or those in power. Classes emerge and the "unknowing" become justified as morally inept and thus dehumanized and we enslave them. Slavery, Socrates. The logical end of morality. Yep. Logically infallible.

Nietzsche sums it up for us:

"When to his horror, he sees how logic curls up around itself at these limits and finally bites its own tail, then a new form of knowledge breaks through, 'tragic knowledge,' which, simply to be endured, needs art for protection and as medicine."

Through art, that thing that is so illogical but as yet full of "truth" in an opposite but equally viable manner to scientific and logical "knowledge," we experience the Dionysian return to oneness that has become so foreign to us since the Industrial Revolution. I get it when I look at a Rothko painting or watch Tarkovsky's films? Does that make these artist more "truthful?" I think only in the sense that any "truth" is a fleeting, overturning ephemeral thing that we can lose ourselves in only for a moment, like the glitter of silk spun in the wind.

Do I know what this test piece of film that I made is? It's practically part of something bigger, a section of the entire form of an artwork I'm making. At worst I believe it has nothing to do with the larger philosophical issues I have discussed and is instead something much more personal to my own subjective aesthetic, technology, and expression, but at best you and Nietzsche and Socrates alike can get something out of the product that I am able to get out of the process of culmination.

Color Drawing Study of One Plate of Kloeshi Window

Top left corner Plate. The first one has an extra glaze, I can't decide which one is more of a corporeal spirituality experience yet...

Color Studies with Skeleton and Mannequin III

And finally:

Color Studies with Skeleton and Mannequin II

Here are some more studies.

Color Studies with Skeleton and Mannequin I

 I shot these images last night to help with my drawing and color studies for my stained glass window. Some are altered in Photoshop and others I left alone. I think some are quite cinematic, some are sexy and some are just plain creepy.

On Making and Deification

William Wallace's A Week in the Life of Michaelangelo follows the world's most celebrated sculptor through a the romantic back-looking gaze of veneration. While Wallace takes great care to illuminate the artist's difficulties, daily minutia, and treatment by other members of society with whom he had direct or indirect contact, he often glazes over his foibles, as is common of anyone whom we, as a present culture, deify. Wallace is fair, though, in contrast with historians who encase in marble the famous artist, himself, to preserve their pristine impression of his genius.

Why do we deify people? Individually, I see it as a beautiful justification for the variety of personalities and personal attributes we find in a world of people who are, indeed, not just like us. Culturally though, why do we zombies choose a lord? Why do we imbue a real person with the entire catalog of personal virtues in order to worship them? While plausible that a real person can be gifted with equal measures of some contrapuntal and even contradictory virtues (supreme perfection and supreme speed, for instance), its unrealistic and unfair to practice deification on human beings. But this is how folklore is borne.

As a filmmaker, I find that filmmakers often seek to do the opposite. A historical figure is so bound up in his tall-tale icon, it takes a certain measure of defamation on the part of the filmmaker to bring the genius "down to our level." However, the genius, depending on the nature and sturdiness of his fame can often be reduced to some cheating, swindling ne'er-do-well, and we lose our respect for either the figure or the filmmaker, depending on who we see as the least honest. Because he's dead, does it make it safe to deify the soul of the artist? As a culture, are we simply setting ourselves up for failure? And if that artist was still alive, are we more likely setting him up for failure.

I find in my own personal form of feminism the same problems of deification found in the art historical realm. Culturally if women are or were raised by the romantic and idealistic, upon a pedestal like vestal virgins carved into Michaelangeo's masterfully chosen marble, then there they must rest, frozen in mid-animation and essentially dead to be allowed to continue to exist. A pedestal is no place for a living being. There, under splendid shafts of light, they become stiff in an attempt just to continue living. But once the deity leaves his or her alter-cage, we the idealizers, the cruel romantics, unjustly feel lied to. Who were you that you tricked us so long?! You are nothing but an impostor, a fake and whore whose sole intention is to pretend to be something we will worship!

As woman, we unbound our feet, walked right up to these ignorant romantics and said "enough is enough!" But to avoid a sexist judgment, there are also women who idealize men by created gender roles emphasizing ideas like physical strength, guardianship, etc. there is a something about the discovery of someone who is in touch with the parts of ourselves that we are not, that encourages idealism from the latter. We see sensitivity in artists and assume the possessor of this quality was simply born special. But art is not a medium's occupation. It simply takes a practiced degree of spiritual searching and self reflection, both at our ugliest primal expressions, and at how ugly our individual egos are until we can lose our faces in making. Perhaps spectators are secretly as afraid to lose their egos as the artist who becomes lost in his/her work.

But perhaps it's just this ironic tension that has us making and spectating in the first place.

Thoughts on Icons and the era of images in terms of Nietzsche

In his critique of modernity and his romanticism of Archaic Greek "tragic culture," Nietzsche speaks about the 'immediacy' of the cultural relationship to God(s)/spirituality. People could feel the presence of god directly through a painted vase. That ornamental image WAS God, and you knew because you could experience it with your senses, right now, in the present. What Socrates introduced with his rationalism and logic paved the way for the Martin Luther's and Calvin's Reformation. The Word is God, not the image. The image is of the heathen. This jives specifically with Socrates' ideas, passed on through his student Plato, of virtue. Through the rational and methodical Socratic method, we should all come to the same conclusions. That conclusion somehow, because we came to respect Socrates' groundbreaking suggestions, would need to come to the individual separately of their physical body. That is to say, the body is a fetter and a stumbling block from enlightenment. Therefore the enlightenment of knowing God could naturally no longer come from the experience of our visual sense.

So the Word is law now. And I'm an artist/philosopher, not an Art Historian, but I think it's Barthes whose Death of the Author finally exposed and de-deified Socratic rationalism. Nietzsche would say we had become alienated from our world, first and foremost because we had become estranged from our own bodies. We were not meant to trust our senses as they were physical barriers from our metaphysical ability to discover and understand God. Somehow reading text appears to transcend the bodily fetter with which we experience images. Nevermind how written language developed from glyphs. Like Socrates' universal logic by which we should naturally all of us come to the right and good and moral conclusions we need to live this present, but transient mortal coil of a life, a system of glyphs becomes abstracted,  checked for efficiency, aestheticized, and catalogued as a law. The Word is a system of glyphs-turned-icons that we practice and memorize until we forget where they began. Gutenberg prints, with mathematical perfection, each letter in each word of a doctrine, and we suddenly have forgotten that our minds are looking at a system of images which each hold individual history and personal meaning. Now we are looking at Words.

The printed page lends itself to a new kind of immediacy that is firmly married to the industrial revolution. Machines become the new God as they are fashioned from the rational paths of modern science, the religious pinnacle of the beginning of modernity. I probably need to read Death of the Author again - but I concern myself in part with graphic design and with Letterforms. There is a mathematical preciseness to each letter of a font, which most people take for granted. Each letter in a font is not simply a letter in the alphabet but an architectural structure as meaningful to us in our time as was the Parthenon.

As far as making and meaning, we have been preoccupied with universal systems to unite us. We have abstracted images to the point that they no longer can allow us to experience personal meaning; that immediacy which the Archaic Greeks experienced when they used their senses to experience God. Somehow we still make art out of words. Artists are determined to find and make images that can give that experience and immediacy that we long for as mortals.

Thoughts on F.W. Nietzsche Part II (on Schein)

Apparently no one should survive Wagner's Tristan and Isolde if it were presented in it's purely Dionysiac format. Everyone on stage would die of intense pleasure and pain at the same time when the audience disappeared in a puff of unnecessity.

Well now I have to see this opera, obviously.

And the word 'Schein' translates on Google to "sham"... so interpret this:

"Socrates correctly diagnoses tragedy as a purveyor of Schein, but fails utterly to see the point of this Schein. Part of the reason for this, Nietzsche thinks, is that Socrates is a deeply abnormal, unhealthy man, (and Nietzsche is so different? I mean that lovingly and with a little intellectual crush.) a man of stunted and perverted instincts and a diseased intellect that has run wild. His abnormality take the form of a kind of hyperintellectualized simple-mindedness. When he looks at tragedy, he fails to see it as an instance of life, and thinks it is just a simple lie/illusion." (Ah yes, I assume he's probably an ENTP, but that doesn't make him unhealthy or diseased of intellect. I would also guess Nietzsche was an INTJ or an INFJ, though probably the former since he seems kind of detached from actual people [not the ideas of people he knows] in his life. Also just because I'm an INFJ, doesn't mean everyone whose opinions I like to listen to will be one too.)

However, from the current Cambridge translation by Raymond Geuss, schein means "semblance." I'm still not certain what is meant by this semblance which gets used an awful lot throughout Birth of a Tragedy, but it has something to do with reflecting the well-balanced Appoline dream-image in measure with some good old-fashioned Dionysiac chaos.

Thoughts on F.W. Nietzsche Part I

Nietzsche's 'Will' appears to be similar to Freud's "libido." The underlying tension of the world revolves around sexual desire on a base level. I would jump in and attach some degree of violence to that scenario, but since violent primal urges are not something I have ever experienced, I suppose those who do could classify those urges as sexual too. Because women don't seem to display the same sort of violent urges man can, and because I know from B.W. Pelham's psychological studies of implicit and explicit self esteem that men are less self-reflective and thus less in touch with their own concept of themselves, it is indeed possible that I agree with Nietzsche in that The Will, keenly expressed in sexual desire, drives all humans towards satiation or frustration.

When Nietzsche describes Socrates as the ruination of artistic society, pitting his suggestion that men are capable of controlling their own destinies entirely through the acquisition of scientific and/or moral knowledge, against the previous Apolline/Dionysiac dualism he seems to look far too romantically at what he terms the "tragic culture" of Archaic Greece. According to Raymond Geuss's Introduction to Birth of a Tragedy, "Apolline" connotes a different reference to the Greek Apollo than does the word "Apollonian" which I construe to be about physical magnificentness and celebrity as opposed to the author's suggestion of individuality and self-discipline. Also Dionysiac seems to describe the organic way in which improv happens leaving the home base of structure in music, rather than "Dionysian" decadence and general anarchy for the sake of pleasing the flesh at any cost. I do agree that any institution or being does have both of those concepts within and one is usually more dominant - this explains the Myers-Briggs P (Dionysiac) or J (Apolline) preference.

But the author describes Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, his narrative operas as having that Dionysiac quality and I have never known a musician who didn't discipline him/herself even to the point of bleeding on an instrument during practice. How do you create organic art with others having no socialization in music, no hard-earned skill, no long-practiced repertoire?  Fishy.

Though Birth of a Tragedy was critically panned at publication, I'm fond of the basic problem the critic, Wilamowitz had with it. From Geuss's Intro:

"Apart from various points of detail, Wilamowitz correctly diagnosed and categorically rejected Nietzsche's attempt to do 'philology' in a way that would make it more like philosophy or art than like a strict 'wissenschaft'; the proper mode of access to the ancient world, Wiliamowitz asserted, was through the painstaking study of history 'in der askese selbstverlaufender arbeit' (of asceticism in self-leveling work), not through the mystic insights used in Birth of a Tragedy. It is perfectly true that,given a choice, Nietzsche would prefer Weisheit to Wissenschaft, so there was no real response he could make to that basic charge."

And just for reference from Wikipedia:

Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.^[1]

Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin. Classical philology is historically primary, originating in European Renaissance Humanism, but was soon joined by philologies of other languages both European (Germanic, Celtic, Slavistics, etc.) and non-European (Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Chinese, etc.). Indo-European studies involves the philology of all Indo-European languages as comparative studies.

Any classical language can be studied philologically, and indeed describing a language as "classical" is to imply the existence of a philological tradition associated with it.

Two Haikus

I am your body
Forget me not, though I am
Animal and bones

I am your spirit
Forget me not, though I am
Sky without practice

Adventure Scouting

I went on an adventure today to scout some locations off the beaten path that I have seen by chance and photograph them for near future use. I already have ideas for at least one of these locations.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.7.4

Richard Dawkins

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9180871

Above is an NPR podcast, which I am referencing in the following rant about Richy Rich Dawkins.

Oh Richard Dawkins oh Rick-tiki-tiki Dawkins, you typical anglo-asshole alpha-male wannabe...

It’s just that it’s such a mundane argument. It’s the upper-middle-class white boy’s argument. It’s all he knows. It’s the only way he feels any purpose insinuating himself into the world. Intellectualism! Science! His argument is bullying at core, which is my problem with him. And while I realize that any dissenting opinion, especially that of a notorious iconoclast, can be interpreted as bullying, this one is just so old, cliché and boring to me.

Religion is boring? No! Absolutely not! Look below, and see how it’s my life’s work. You could say I’m as passionate about exposing the counter-human quality of the anti-religion sentiments of alpha-male characters masking their words under the all-consuming title of “science,” as Mr. Dawkins is about stamping out the “medieval, parochial and impotent” mindset of those who want or need religion to feel that their lives are the most meaningful. It’s not even that I disagree with the statements he makes. I simply hear this argument over and over and see two fanged animals duking it out over an unclaimed piece of carrion or a mate. Science vs. Religion. How trite.

He’s asked why people don’t become more moral as a species, but in response, he asks “If you look at the selfish gene view, the question is, ‘why are we as moral as we are?’” He expresses wonder at the capacity of humans to be altruistic in the face of natural selection. (20:00) As I see it, people are indeed both animals and humans. Like Dawkins describes in his proposal that humans and all species down to the most basic micro-organism share bits of the same “machine code,” we descend from the smallest primordial bacterium. However, we also make meaning. Around 15:40 he states explicitly that people make their own meaning. And yet he scoffs at Francis Collins of the Human Genome Project “smuggling God back in” when we have a perfectly poetic explanation of the Universe without Him (or Her or It).

Again, this says to me, that Dawkins, just like Billy Graham or Bin Laden, is obsessed with being the man (or woman, sure, just to be fair) with the one “true” answer or the awe-inspiring offerings of the “real world,” as he puts it. The world of data collection and organization, the structures by which he is trained as a biologist, as a philosopher, as a person are all a world he has created and which has created him. His “real world” is as real and as rich as that of the religious zealot. To call God “superfluous” or “redundant” when “Science” provides a perfectly poetic and “factual” explanation of the universe, just reveals his personality. What is any less poetic about the abstract thinker’s reasoning that God and Evolution exist beside and of eachother, than Dawkin’s concrete reasoning that “redundancy” is not beautiful. He hates inefficiency. It’s part of his psychological human disposition to dislike inefficiency or neat boxes, just like it is the psychological human predisposition to feel a discomfort with no life after death.

He admits to being a product of his culture, giving credence to the music and art of the Anglican Church. He is also a product of the culture of the scientific community, a no-nonsense, inefficiency untolerated environment of charts and grids – more boxes. People love boxes. Give people their god box to store in it their Einsteinian beliefs alongside their stained-glass windows and choirs.

It all comes back to the Darwinian animal need to be the alpha. Dawkins was right. What he’s wrong about is assuming that the humanity which gives us the capacity to make meaning through religion, art, family, science or whatever else we do with our lives is what’s going to win his argument. If his genes were so well-evolved he wouldn’t need to argue. He could chill out about the fact that religion is as beautiful and as uncertain and as ever-changing as science, or rather that they’re really both the same thing. To take a camp and fight the opposite camp is as futile as the human who hides the animal within himself, or perhaps more evident the animal who represses the humanity within himself. We can never be balanced without respecting both in all people. One man’s universe is only as "true" or "real" as the words he can define it with or the feelings he can impart on another man. The “evidence” (29:48) is as much in the tomes of biology as the Bible, but also as much in the feeling of genuflecting to God in a vast architectural structure as in the awe of looking through the lens of a microscope.  

Bones On Viola

From the following still. 

T-minus Frame 241, and counting.

Cvellish: Das Font ist Borne!

Below is the conveniently 26-phonetic character set I created for my fake language which is currently being called "Cvellish." There are a few sounds or letters from english I avoid. For instance there is no i because what I hear is the intersection of ah and ee. so there are 6 "vowels" representing all the open mouth sounds one can make with no aspiration. I saw no use for a K, S AND C, when I could just cut the C and have all the same sounds. I cut X, surmising one could just put the K and S sounds together to make the same sound. Instead I added a symbol for SH and CH as well as those not used so often in English, like  ZS and TSYuh, which is really just a more aspirated, staccato version of TH.