I am charting my emotional landscapes: following the dots through this city. Emotional landscapes, They puzzle me, Then the riddle gets solved, And you push me up to this State of emergency, How beautiful to be, State of emergency, Is where I want to be.
Adrian Piper, artist and philosopher, says it’s going to be OK! The requirements for fitting into the [academic] institution, the requirements for being accepted by one’s peers and one’s colleagues… are really very, very demanding. And so I think what very often happens… is that either people decide that they simply cannot go into the [academic] institution, because they just don’t feel accepted for who they are, or else they make this horrible choice, where they say ‘OK, well I really wanna be an astronomer… and I’m just going to have to stop being an artist.” Adrian Piper says: it doesn’t have to be that way. Find a way to do all you want to do!
Tagged: Adrian Piper, exile, inspiration, methodos
Brualitat in Stein [Brutality in Stone] (1961), a collaboration between Alexander Kluge (writer, filmmaker) and Peter Schamoni (filmmaker) ________________________________ W.G. Sebald, in his essay “Between History and Natural History: On the literary description of total destruction,” considers the work of West German writer, Alexander Kluge. Kluge’s book, New Stories. Nos 1-18 (1977) takes on the prodigious task of examining the aftermath of the destruction of German cities during World War II. Although it makes use of personal recollections of air attack, interviews with military officials and primary source documents, the book is neither a history in the traditional sense, nor is it a traditional novel. Sebald pays attention to Kluge’s method of presenting this diverse material, arguing that confronting catastrophic experience in writing requires…
Let’s face the music, and dance!
Tagged: dance, mime, shields and yarnell
I do think you have to engage the reader, the viewer, what have you. I mean you just can’t–you just can’t say, ‘well fuck the bourgeoisie.’ You do have to engage. How you engage, is the secret of any great teacher, I think. You don’t insult, but you make contact, and you elevate somehow. –John Baldessari
Tagged: Art, good writing, John Baldessari, method, methodos, teaching
John Baldessari, “I will not make any more boring art” (1971). Part of the ongoing retrospective of his work, John Baldessari: Pure Beauty, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Tagged: Art, beauty, good writing, John Baldessari, method
Escaping her disgust with herself, she walks out into the night to haunt a familiar tea room—to meet a familiar stranger. An encounter with the stranger, her lover, who asks her to stay here in Hiroshima is the beginning of a slow walk through the empty streets of the night city. He’s going to kiss me. He’s going to kiss me and I’ll be lost. She walks on, passing two strolling guitarists, lovers embracing in back seat of a parked car, another car slowing, almost stopping as it passes her, a lone lady in the night. The flickering of Japanese neon is cut with day-lit memories of the sober street signs marking the corner walls of her small French village. Her thoughts drift between…
Terror! In filmic imagination, the end of the world is really associated with the end of the city. World War II saw the full destruction of great cities by radiation and fire. The massive loss of life in the powerful haze of giant mushroom clouds and the slower deaths, memorialized in films like Gojira (1954) and Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) became a real threat for urban dwellers caught in the Cold War. Walking through city streets after seeing this film, how could we not imagine the hot nuclear breath of Godzilla?
Something about Peter Turchi‘s words resonates with my own research process, which includes, obviously, keeping this blog. (This blog just might be a map of my imagination). Writing is often discussed as two separate acts–though in practice they overlap, intermingle and impersonate each other. They differ in emphasis but are by no means merely sequential. If we do them well, both result in discovery. One is the act of exploration: some combination of premeditated searching and undisciplined, perhaps only partially conscious rambling. This includes scribbling notes, considering potential scenes, lines, or images, inventing characters, even writing drafts. History tells us that exploration is assertive action in the face of uncertain assumptions, often involving false starts, missteps, and surprises–all familiar parts of the writer’s work.…
Tagged: good writing, guide, guidebooks, imagination, maps, Peter Turchi
Get your tickets here
Tagged: Art, dance, film, New York, performance
