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27 Oct 2009 10:59
fluxus boxdetailJim Leftwich
October 26, 2009
Child and Seeing HandsHans Bellmer c. 1950
Hans Bellmer in The Art Institute of Chicago: The Wandering Libido and the Hysterical Body
Hans BellmerVanitas Magazine
Why does Bellmer's art express so well the fallenness of men their living under this spell as if out of each one had come another who walks beside that one and bears that one's name but feels nothing
It Must Be SophisticatedJohn Ashbery There are attics in old houses where doubt lingers as to the corrosive effect of night-blindness: namely are its victims directly linkable to a chain of events happening elsewhere? If so, we should shrug off resemblances to our line of work. ...
... Back when they'd send for you once they got a house built, it was clever to hedge your bets and produce a fraternal twin made of bedclothes with a mop for a wig while you scaled the wall on a rope ladder to be the next new thing that thinks and cautions others not to. Far from the inner city cry of conflicting attitudes, one fled with one's holy illusions intact, one's misconceptions too, until the whole mindset took on a largely symbolic look, an indifferent jewel, toy of the weather, of successive washes of light, I can hardly believe I'm here in this tiny republic carved out of several conflicting principalities. It's enough, perhaps, that I was questioned at the edge of my performance. That now I'm safe from my own sang-froid and scores of others, that mere forgetfulness can save up to fifty-three lives, that they can share your power and go on glancing upward. Because after all we were the three original ones, the president, vice-president and treasurer of our class. And were formed to repay what obscure debt and be summarily taken out of school and handed over to our parents. It's what matters then, and after. No one says you have to live up to principles; indeed, what are they? What difference does it make which one came too close in the richly darkened theater, if all they were after was to coax you into the light, watch you blink a minute, and then pass on, they too, to the larger arenas, each in the wind, in the sand, the reeds, growing? Because even if it doesn't punish you exactly, the thing has been lived through, the experience sealed. O what book shall I read now? for they are all of them new, and used, when I write my name on the flyleaf. Look, here is another one unread, not written. Time for you to choose.
Hommage à Gustav MahlerChiemgau, Upper Bavaria Germany, 1973Nils-UdoEnvironmental Art Museum
"a weblog examining contemporary and historical issues in landscape architecture, urban design, environmental management, and community structure. Posts report on specific site visits, community action groups, vital design/managment methodology, and how to design for global citizenship."
The Language in My Blood Margaret Randall dooneys cafe
Today I am not so sure blood doesn't bring language with it as it courses through the veins of mothers, fathers, children, grandchildren and those bound by other ties. My new sense of what language is transcends the combination of verbal sounds we use to communicate with one another. My understanding of cultural inheritance is also broader and deeper than it was back then. At Kee Tseel, for hundreds of years in this valley rent by silver creek, people spoke. Their words did not yet hold promise of permanence or continuity; any sort of alphabet still shrouded in future. Ideas: passed from person to person, fixed themselves, pecked into rock or painted with pigments mixed from powdered roots, the juices of plants and trees, gums and animal fats. Human sensibility, here as in other parts of the world, shaped sounds that would become words, words that would fashion themselves into directives and questions and answers, sentences woven together to make stories. The stories describe our lives. Those who inhabit the map of our living speak out or silence as they explore relationship, custom, need. It is not Babel we fear, but the stopped verb, expression cast to the sewers of modernization. Globalization of the human voice, criminally manipulated to erase or bury the language of our blood.
Nils-Udo
Towards The Day Of LiberationRobert Kelly It doesnt matter what we see there (the mouth is full of sense no taste in listening no sense to hear what twists in the shallow water below the tongue) (and if he says Listen! say Drink the hearing with your own ears, a word is not to hear) Language? To use language for the sake of communication is like using a forest of ancient trees to make paper towels and cardboard boxes from all those years the wind and crows danced in the up of its slow. A word is not to hear and not to say - what is a word? The Catechism begins: Who made you? Language made me. Why did It make you? It made me to confuse the branch with the wind. Why that? To hide the root. Where is the root? It lies beneath the tongue. Speak it. It lies beneath the speech. Is it a word? A word is the shadow of a body passing. Whose body is that? The shadow's own.
6 poems by Robert Kelly from: Not this Island Music
studentJulian Schnabel b. Oct 26, 1951
whose side are the side effects on?Limited, Inc.
In this spot, place, lieu, here, before I lift my pen – for I write these posts before I type them, and then, in typing them, watch them shift their shapes and burdens – I feel a rush, a lunge of citations and themes, as though, in the first sentence, at the entrance of the thing, the establishing period, everything must come tumbling out (as in some dopey comedy skit in which some target character X, laugh a minute X, opens some target door Y, boobytrapped Y, and the things behind it avalanche upon him or her). For surely I’ve reached the point in this long long course of things at which (in which?) suddenly the happiness culture, more a blueprint or a Platonic form, suddenly extrudes itself into the psychoactive, chemical phantasmagoria we are all familiar with, dosed with, prescribed, stoned and high on, chained to, attuned to deep in the immune system, our biochemistry altered in its ticking and secretions by the water we drink and the incredible array of chemicals, such as were never before on earth and never before metabolized by any terrestrial organism, that we have so casually strewed about every sphere of the planet.
Hans Bellmer 1902 - 1975
Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety Sue Taylor
Digital locks, proposed penalties, restrictions, statutory damages…what is happening to open education?Major Concerns With Government's Anticipated Copyright LegislationAthabasca University
..................................................... Free Education for the Masses . . . or Not Colin CurrieEDUCAUSE
A new political development in Canada might cause a radical change in what AU and AU Press are able to achieve and how learning content can be shared in Canada. The Canadian parliament is expected to begin discussion this fall on new copyright legislation that will limit what materials can be made freely available. According to AU Associate Vice President of Research Rory McGreal:
EDUCAUSE"The very stringent copyright laws the Canadian government is currently considering are based on a U.S. model. It would make it very difficult, particularly for open and online institutions, to make use of proprietary content. We have to look for alternatives."
A number of the proposed restrictions are seen as counterproductive at best, and destructive to Canada's standing in the world academic market at worst. One example is that all institutions would have to destroy online proprietary material within one week of a course's final exam. Another is proposed penalties for anyone who keeps digital course research documents on their computer for longer than three days. Speaking on the topic of the Canadian government's proposed new copyright legislation, AU President Frits Pannekoek said:"Countries with wiser copyright regimes that promote educational use will catapult ahead of Canada. No longer will we be internationally competitive because of the restrictions contained in the legislation."
..................................................... Who Killed Canada’s Education Advantage? A forensic investigation into the disappearance of public education investment in Canada Roger Martinwalrus
Dream Song 41: John Berryman(October 25, 1914 – January 7, 1972) If we sang in the wood (and Death is a German expert) while snows flies, chill, after so frequent knew so many all nothing, for lead & fire, it's not we would assert particulars, but animal; cats mew, horses scream, man sing. Or: men pslam. Man palms his ears and moans. Death is a German expert. Scrambling, sitting, spattering, we hurry. I try to. Odd & trivial, atones somehow for my escape a bullet splitting my trod-on instep, fiery. The cantor bubbled, rattled. The Temple burned. Lurch with me! phantoms of Varshava. Slop! When I used to be, who haunted, stumbling, sewers, my sacked shop, roofs, a dis-world ai! Death was a German home-country.
Pre-Cambrain SanctuaryNils-Udo 2008
What do believers in the Absolute mean by saying their belief affords them comfort? They mean that since in the Absolute finite evil is overruled already, we may, therefore, whenever we wish, threat the temporal as if it were potentially the eternal, be sure that we can trust its outcome, and, without sin, dismiss our fear and drop the worry of our finite responsibility. In short, they mean that we have a right ever and anon to take a moral holiday, to let the world wag its own way, feeling that its issues are in better hands than ours and are none of our business. - William James, quoted by Joseph Duemer
October 25, 2009
The Halfpenny Bridge Dublin John Minihan1964Rhys Tranter
Poems by Denise LevertovA Tree Telling of Orpheus Denise Levertov Oct 24, 1923 - Dec 20, 1997 White dawn. Stillness.When the rippling began I took it for sea-wind, coming to our valley with rumors of salt, of treeless horizons. But the white fog didn't stir; the leaves of my brothers remained outstretched, unmoving. Yet the rippling drew nearer – and then my own outermost branches began to tingle, almost as if fire had been lit below them, too close, and their twig-tips were drying and curling. Yet I was not afraid, only deeply alert. I was the first to see him, for I grew out on the pasture slope, beyond the forest. He was a man, it seemed: the two moving stems, the short trunk, the two arm-branches, flexible, each with five leafless twigs at their ends, and the head that's crowned by brown or golden grass, bearing a face not like the beaked face of a bird, more like a flower's. He carried a burden made of some cut branch bent while it was green, strands of a vine tight-stretched across it. From this, when he touched it, and from his voice which unlike the wind's voice had no need of our leaves and branches to complete its sound, came the ripple. But it was now no longer a ripple (he had come near and stopped in my first shadow) it was a wave that bathed me as if rain rose from below and around me instead of falling. And what I felt was no longer a dry tingling: I seemed to be singing as he sang, I seemed to know what the lark knows; all my sap was mounting towards the sun that by now had risen, the mist was rising, the grass was drying, yet my roots felt music moisten them deep under earth. He came still closer, leaned on my trunk: the bark thrilled like a leaf still-folded. Music! There was no twig of me not trembling with joy and fear. Then as he sang it was no longer sounds only that made the music: he spoke, and as no tree listens I listened, and language came into my roots out of the earth, into my bark out of the air, into the pores of my greenest shoots gently as dew and there was no word he sang but I knew its meaning. He told me of journeys, of where sun and moon go while we stand in dark, of an earth-journey he dreamed he would take some day deeper than roots ... He told of the dreams of man, wars, passions, griefs, and I, a tree, understood words – ah, it seemed my thick bark would split like a sapling's that grew too fast in the spring when a late frost wounds it. Fire he sang, that trees fear, and I, a tree, rejoiced in its flames. New buds broke forth from me though it was full summer. As though his lyre (now I knew its name) were both frost and fire, its chords flamed up to the crown of me. I was seed again. I was fern in the swamp. I was coal.
Tesserae: memories & suppositions Denise Levertovgoogle books
Breathing the water Denise Levertovgoogle books
Selected poems Denise Levertovgoogle books
Denise Levertov: the poetry of engagement Audrey T. Rodgersgoogle books
Denise Levertov Feature Editor: Kevin Gallagherjacket
Linda Perdido Mac WellmanEXPLORINGfictions
Her soul is anthracite, his is of zinc; the conversation is all crazy eights, tetchy, and often catadioptric. A whiff of cannabis reaches high flying birds– ducks, pigeons, and of course the little known Perdido Macaw, so rare and metaphysical that the creature’s namesake is, herself, unaware of this creatured fact. (Not quite the namesake as the bird was named for Honor and Hope, twin daughters of a distant relation, Carter Fenelon Perdido, a professor at the Department of Avian Studies at Glorious Morning College in Cananga; long dead but dearly remembered by his disciples at the Ganymede Foundation. The lovers’ collective vocabulary: Forty-six words; the central object in their over-wandering of Set County and beyond: Maximumification of the state of cool; knowledge of the finer points of balloon navigation: Hazy at first, hazy at best; the state of provisioning as of this moment: Half a dozen ham and cheese sandwiches on rye toast, two Granny Smith apples, a smallish but inordinately fuzzy pink peach, a carton of slimjims, a gallon of spring water from over in Vandalia, and a case of Blitz beer in aluminum cans (with the irate black-tufted Malabar squirrel on the label; irate and like Narthex, zinc of will, gazing knowingly and hard directly into the eye of the would be imbiber; plans for the future: Vague at best, indefinite; religious sensations: Eleusinian, priapic (loosely defined), satanic; their proximate destination: Rattlesnake Mountain Lodge in the High Sierra where the two bad ones envisage another swath of desecration and demolishment at Camp Wounded Bear, a summer institute for advanced study of the Book of Mormon and the golden questions, the playing of Bugles and other Horns; (first) secondary destination: Loon Lake on Matapan Peninsula near the Velvet Sea, a place said to harbor myriad penitent and initiates– many of them old pals of Narthex from his days in the reformatory at Weasel– at the Temple of Lower Motorcycle; (second) secondary destination: Proboscis Island in Smoke Top Bay, Each Sandwich County, and in especial, the upper slopes of Old Moldy where there is to be found a certain medicinal herb, Pheronacea or Gag’s Periwinkle, said to possess spectacular powers of enhancement in the mental realms of sparkle, dazzle and total pizzaz; (third) secondary destination: The animal shelter at New Gradual, Montana, where it is hoped pet adoption might be arranged for, in order of preference: A fennec, an Osborne’s Owlet (the blood-orange variety), and, or, a Jupiter Beetle from Kalimantan said to be able to change colors, imitate rhythmically and in various radiant Coleopteran registers the Top Ten pop tunes of any given moment; tertiary destination: The holy city of Bing in Bandana County (apparently near Laos on their map, a Ziegfield Projection based on the dubious propositions of “Lateral Thinking”) where Bhang may be purchased in bulk at a reasonable cost depending on the current exchange rate of the Beng, a black-market currency unofficially official in that errant place of untamable hoydenry, maniacal hubbub, black lizards (always irresistible for our irrepressible girl); ultimate destination, barring instantiation of the higher (as opposed to the lower) Unseen– the cave known as Morocco’s Lair said to be located behind the false wall, in an unknown closet, adjoining the antique bathroom at the Inn of the Zinn of Mohocs on the occult or hidden side of the hypothetical planet(oid) Blue Streak whose maddening and rubbery orbital periodicity is such that the object never emerges from behind the moon; their purpose in regard to this last: To ascertain the truth of what is said about this feature of Blue Streak, namely Morocco’s Lair, at the Temple of Higher Motorcycle by certain of the higher priests; and what precisely is this something that is alleged to have been said?
The Whispering Gallery St Pauls CathedralJohn MinihanLondon, 1963
A Young GirlEdith Sitwell Is it the light of the snow that soon will be overcoming The spring of the world? Ah no, the light is the whiteness of all the wings of the angels As pure as the lily born with the white sun. And I would that each hair on my head was an angel, O my red Adam, And my neck could stretch to you like a sunbeam or the young shoot of a lily In the first spring of the world, till you, my grandeur of clay, My Adam, red loam of the orchard, forgetting The thunders of wrongs and of rights and of ruins, Would find the green shadow of spring beneath the hairs of my head, those bright angels, And my face, the white sun that is born of the stalk of a lily Come back from the underworld, bringing light to the lonely: Till the people in islands of loneliness cry to the other islands, Forgetting the wars of men and of angels, the new Fall of Man.
courtesy of Ben Friedlander, The Center of Modernism (Not)
Edward Kienholz 1927 – 1994
Protest as Embodied State Practices: An Examination of Hegemonic and Counter-Hegemonic Protest Tactics Sabrina Alimahomed and Jake Alimahomed-WilsonInstitute for Anarchist Studies
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