April 09, 2008
"Serenidad, Yulma, tu peor enemigo puede ser el miedo."
Help, my home is being invaded my Mexican memorabilia
or
how I learned about Lucha Libre and Kaliman, el hombre increíble.
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April 05, 2008
"Men, commonplace and ordinary, do not seem to me fit for the tremendous fact of eternal life. With their little passions, their little virtues and their little vices, they are well enough suited in the workday world; but the conception of immortality is much too vast for beings cast on so small a scale." -- A Writer's Notebook by Somerset Maugham
quoted by Julian Barnes on Nothing to be Afraid Of, a book I couldn't put down not out of reading pleasure but of suspense on what would he write next that I couldn't disagree more with. It's a memoir verging on becoming an anthology of quotations by famous novelists and artists about death and dying, as entertaining as any other anglo-saxon memoir and their typically detached accounts of family's eccentricities and anecdotes. Yet, I was appalled to find, even already discounting the different nationalities, generations and gender, that this man has a way of seeing the world that is so alien to me. From small insignificant details like "when you're a child you think your family is unique" - when I was a child I thought every other family was like mine and was very surprised to find they weren't - to his interpretation of Maugham's quote "The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love" which, following a story by Browne, he believes is all about growing older, having everyone die around you until there's no one else to love - as if you'd stop loving the dead.
I hope to outlive Mr. Barnes - and I'm only saying this because he actually addressed me, the reader, asking me to consider that I might die before him. I think it will be very appropriate that on the day he passes away, there will be a book on one of my shelves in which his signature will become a sort of modern relic.
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March 26, 2008
Actually, this makes sense.
What do artist Jeff Koons and prostitute Ashley Alexandra Dupré have in common? Both can be had for a hefty price through the Emperors Club. Citing a report on Artnet, Le Monde's Harry Bellet discovers that the escort service, which counted the former New York governor Spitzer among its clients, also offered contemporary artworks through its online site. "Emperors Club was not satisfied with providing women to our financial elites but also took an interest in contemporary art," writes Bellet. "Their business, Emperors Publishing Media Group, owns a site called Emperors Club Contemporary Art, which is responsible for providing its clients with works by renowned artists like Jeff Koons, David Salle, and Richard Prince." Emperor's Club describes itself as "a highly informative venue through which you may acquire exceptional contemporary art directly from a group of highly selected artists, dealers, galleries, and members." Members are required to earn at least $450,000 per year. Sotheby's and Christie's logos appear on the site's page, although, according to Bellet, the auction houses insist that they were not informed about the posting. But auction houses are not the only ones to be roped in to the Emperor's Club experience. "The site offers images of artworks, each accompanied by a notice usually taken from the best sources," writes Bellet. "A painting by Jeff Koons is accompanied by a review by critic Jerry Saltz." -- from ArtForums's news digest
It's all about aesthetics, no? And power. And prostitution. Which has everything to do with the art market these days, Jeff Koons being one of the great meretrices. But I always thought that it was part of his artistic manifesto. No need to take it literally.
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March 04, 2008
As it happens, I was present during one delirious afternoon when the children finally did catch on to the basic principles of number - the fact that with numbers you can count anything. Released from the schoolhouse, the excited children ran hither and tither in little groups, applying their new found insight: they counted the houses, the dogs, the trees, fingers and toes, each other - and the numbers worked every time.
Account of Umeda children of Papua New Guinea learning to count numbers by Alfred Gell (cited on the Routledge Companion Encyclopedia of the History and Philosophy of Mathematics)
(I'm not sure if the Umedas originally could count up to 47 using parts of the body for each number or could count up to 5 using combinations of 1's and 2's. Either way, i found the account of this sudden realization of abstraction very exciting.)
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March 03, 2008
Visual Greguerías
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by Chema Madoz, spanish photographer
(a Greguería, invented by Ramón Goméz de La Serna, is an aphorism based on a decontextualized metaphor, à la Dada)
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February 19, 2008
Gibraltar Airport Runway
Finally made the plane into Paris,
Honey mooning down by the Seine.
Peter Brown called to say,
"You can make it O.K.,
You can get married in Gibraltar, near Spain".
--The ballad of John and Yoko
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February 09, 2008
São Paulo Stripped Bare by the Aesthetes, Even
Last year, the Brazilian city of São Paulo outlawed billboards, logos, posters or any kind of advertisement in the streets or even on buses.
(from the wonderful Flickr set by Tony de Marco documenting the process)
This year, the famous São Paulo biennial will showcase an empty exhibition space:
(Biennial Pavillion stolen from Frieze)
Considering the fact that there are almost two hundred biennials around the world working on similar issues, showing the diverse art practices which constitute the territories of the current visual language, it seems necessary to ask: How does the São Paulo Biennial evaluates this cultural phenomenon, propagated through the so-called peripheral countries or in regions of political or cultural tension? What is a biennial's role in the era of globalization? What role do biennials play for the cultural, tourism and event industry? What contribution to the discussion proposes the São Paulo Biennial based on its experience, being the third oldest organization of this kind and the first outside the hegemonic centers?
In El Pais, an interview with the curator, Ivo Mesquita:
Hay una frase de Beckett al final de Esperando a Godot: 'We are nummbed' (estamos embotados). Y es lo que me parece. Doscientas bienales, ferias, revistas, premios, más arte... No estamos mirando. Estamos perdiendo el sentido de la mirada".
****
(I have a feeling they are actually light years ahead of us all)
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January 31, 2008
Free association
Tom Zé, "All the eyes" album, Brazilian Musician
And when I brought the razor closer and with my fingers separated the borders of his anus, Estefania, my astonishment knew no bounds. My first thought was that Palinuro mistrusted me and had decided to spy on me; you won't believe this, Estefania, but there, in his anus, Palinuro had an eye.
'It's an optical illusion.' he said.
'No sir, it's an eye.' I answered.
'What colour?'
'Blue.'
'It's the Universal Eye.'
'That's a metaphor,' I said to him, 'And what you have in your arse is no metaphor but a real eye.'
'Are you crazy?'
'No, I'm not crazy. The General's glass eye, which you must have swallowed last night in your drunken stupor'.
--Palinuro de Mexico, Fernando del Paso
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January 27, 2008
The weekend's little pleasures
But a great deal of nonsense is written about characters in fiction - from those who believe too much in character and from those who believe too little. Those who believe too much have an iron set of prejudices about what characters are: we should get to "know" them; they should not be "stereotypes", they should "grow" and "develop"; and they should be nice. So they should be pretty much like us. A glance at the thousands of foolish "reader reviews" on Amazon, with their complaints about "dislikeable characters", confirms a contagion of moralising niceness. Again and again, in book clubs up and down the country, novels are denounced because some feeble reader "couldn't find any characters to identify with", or "didn't think that any of the characters 'grow'". -- James Wood in the Guardian, last Saturday.
This is pretty much an elaboration of what Nabokov said on his Literature lectures. They're also both as truculent:
Or, and this is the worst thing a reader can do, he identifies himself with a character in the book. This lowly variety is not the kind of imagination I would like readers to use. -- Nabokov, Literature Lectures
*****
Taking books out of boxes.
*****
Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. On Saturday evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to go to carry some of the parcels. We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs' cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-you about O'Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. --Arabya in Dubliners by James Joyce
*****
Roi Vaara, Artist's Dilemma, 1997 (my pic of the London South Bank Centre February leaflet)
Which illustrates perfectly why the cult of the author who researches extensively and writes realistically is actually very non-artistic. A novel is one thing, literature is quite something else.
*****
Um homem que se passeava nu na Praça de S.Marcos em Veneza foi salvo no último momento de ser preso por atentado ao pudor, por um bando de pombas que o vestiram completamente de branco.
As autoridades marítimas investigam o misterioso desaparecimento da linha do horizonte ao longo de toda a costa atlântica.
Levaram-no ao Serviço de Urgências. Perdera a fala subitamente. O médico que o assistiu veio a apurar que ligara as cordas vocais entre si para conseguir escapar da sua prisão interior.
Extractos de A greve dos controladores de voo de Jorge Sousa Braga
(esperando que o Jorge Sousa Braga não se zangue) Here's a probably poor translation:
A man who strolled naked on St. Mark's Square in Venice was saved at the last moment from being arrested for indecency when a flock of doves dressed him in white.
The maritime authority is investigating the mysterious vanishing of the horizon along the whole Atlantic coast.
They took him to the Emergency Room. He had suddenly lost his voice. The doctor who attended to him came to the conclusion that he had tied together the vocal cords to escape his inner prison.
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December 31, 2007
Random 2007 Music notes
| Top 10 on my iTunes (#Play Count) | ||
| Adieu Mario (Extrait de Mon oncle) | Jazz | Trio Rousseau, Tortiller, Vignon |
| What a Difference a Day Made | Jazz | Sarah Vaughan |
| Life On Mars? | Pop | Seu Jorge |
| Habla Con Hella | Soundtrack | Alberto Iglesias Featuring Vicente Amigo & El Pele |
| Yumeji's Theme (In the Mood for Love) | Soundtrack | Umebayashi Shigeru |
| Cantaloupe Island | Jazz | Herbie Hancock |
| Koop Island Blues | Electronic | Koop |
| I Say A Little Prayer | R&B | Aretha Franklin |
| Linus & Lucy | Jazz | George Winston |
| Just Can't Get Enough | World (???) | Nouvelle Vague |
Recent and automatic favourite right after seeing them live at the San Francisco Jazz Festival: Tord Gustavsen Trio
Site.
In musicology, my main field of interest is the psychology and phenomenology of improvisation. Although recognizing the importance of established jazz analysis and jazz history, I try to develop this field of research in directions that are not covered very well in jazz theory as we know it. I draw heavily on the psychology of relationships developed by German psychoanalytic Helm Stierlin and Norwegian psychologist Anne-Lise Løvlie Schibbye, both of whom offer a very exciting approach to the ancient notion of dialectics. It's all about living the paradoxes of life and art dynamically and fruitfully. It's about coming to terms with contradictions recognizing both sides of polarities without getting stuck in the middle-of-the-road. It's about synthesizing – locally, non-monolithic and (if you like) "post modernist" – your dilemmas. It's about moving creatively in a neo-Hegelian "Aufheben" kind of way. I approach dilemmas like closeness vs. distance, moment vs. duration and gratification vs. frustration, and I try to explore them combining empirical jazz research (interviews and analysis) with contemporary "scenic" music theory, psychodynamic theory and dialectical philosophy. -- Tord Gustavsen on the themes of his Musicology Ph.d. Dissertation
*****
In love with Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition". The piano original version, not the silly Ravel orchestration.
"Pictures at an Exhibition was written as a group of pieces for piano in 1874. The pictures were mainly watercolours, painted by Victor Hartman, a friend of Mussorgsky, who had died the previous year.
The piece is a musical description of walking around an exhibition of Hartman's paintings. A recurring 'Promenade' movement represents the visitor. Each of the pieces has a movement conjuring up the mood invoked by the picture, or in some cases even painting the picture in music." -- from the BBC
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