Some of you have expressed interest in reading my thesis when it is complete. Well, now it is complete.
click here to read my thesis.
It is relatively short at 41 pages long.
The topic is an interpretation of a Francis Bacon painting.
theory from: early Christian Byzantium, St. John of Damascus, Martin Luther, Joseph Leo Koerner, GWF Hegel, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, my own experience
fictional literature from: Oscar Wilde, Jorge Luis Borges
film stills from: The Battleship Potemkin (1929), Triumph of the Will (1935)
art from: Francis Bacon, Diego Velazquez, Albrecht Durer
>>>>
Showing posts with label platonic forms. Show all posts
Showing posts with label platonic forms. Show all posts
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Saturday, February 12, 2011
piano rolls
I spent the morning listening to piano rolls.
What is a piano roll? They are compositions that are impossible for humans to play, but not impossible for a player piano or reproducing piano to play. Thus they are a feigned performance, somewhere between live and recorded - a spectre of the reality that could be, if only fourteen fingers and three hands. Some composers composed compositions (like that?) specifically for the piano roll. Piano rolls can also preserve the composer playing her own composition - Gershwin actually playing Gershwin. Here are some paradigmatic examples.
Antheil - "Ballet Mecanique" (1924) - perhaps the most famous example, Dada. I am not partial to this type of music, but I do enjoy Legar's accompanying film.
Ervin Nyiregyhazi playing Grainger's playing Tchaikovsky's "Waltz of the Flowers" (1922) - if asked to submit a universally appealing piece of music, I would submit this.
D-albert playing Saint-Saens "Danse Macabe" - Beautiful piano roll of the piece usually performed with strings and voice.
What is a piano roll? They are compositions that are impossible for humans to play, but not impossible for a player piano or reproducing piano to play. Thus they are a feigned performance, somewhere between live and recorded - a spectre of the reality that could be, if only fourteen fingers and three hands. Some composers composed compositions (like that?) specifically for the piano roll. Piano rolls can also preserve the composer playing her own composition - Gershwin actually playing Gershwin. Here are some paradigmatic examples.
Antheil - "Ballet Mecanique" (1924) - perhaps the most famous example, Dada. I am not partial to this type of music, but I do enjoy Legar's accompanying film.
Ervin Nyiregyhazi playing Grainger's playing Tchaikovsky's "Waltz of the Flowers" (1922) - if asked to submit a universally appealing piece of music, I would submit this.
D-albert playing Saint-Saens "Danse Macabe" - Beautiful piano roll of the piece usually performed with strings and voice.
Sunday, December 26, 2010
prediction for 2011
>>>>>
the year before the apocalypse
everything will start to sound like this
brainfeedersite.com
let yourself be converted.
...amen
>>>>>
the year before the apocalypse
everything will start to sound like this
brainfeedersite.com
let yourself be converted.
...amen
>>>>>
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
post about disorder.
Thisis a GIF Illustrating a woman ambivalent about nourishing herself from the ample foodsouce in the BKGRND. She make s-s-sure she looks thin enough to eat - boy does that sound wrong - then sits back down, hungry, but with the ability to wear less clothes than before. She feels great about it.
Here is a truth not exuding any beauty because she just loves imagined competition with flowers and others. But hey who can get more honest than this truth. A dead bird rots a dead flower people press in books.
Here is a truth not exuding any beauty because she just loves imagined competition with flowers and others. But hey who can get more honest than this truth. A dead bird rots a dead flower people press in books.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Monday, June 28, 2010
What Happened This Time
Street-parked my shining silver Lexus SUV. Forgot which one it was. Thankfully the mother and children also leaving the mess pointed it out to me.
"Where are you going?" she asked me.
"To find a mountain to jump off it."
Not wanting to annunciate any suicidal tendencies I motioned to the hang glider in the passenger side.
"Oh, that's something you would do," she responded with an awkward smile, stressing the "would."
Climbed in the car. Astonished to find I had parked facing the wrong direction, thus my SUV faced the bullets of heavy oncoming traffic.
"I will turn around in this nursing home parking lot," I decided.
Parking lots textured more textured than I remember, but manuevering that car wasn't difficult. As I exited I felt the softest touch I've ever felt on my forearm from the passenger.
I jumped in my seat because I hadn't been transporting a passenger.
"You?!"
It was, it was me. A beautiful copy.
"You must be a hallucination," she said.
"A friend!" she said.
I had already decided I was real and she the hallucination, but then again we weren't in the car anymore and the spatial qualifiers of "driver" and "passenger" ceased to help me organize myself.
What was I concerned about? I must have been someone else as I tried to seduce her. Immediately rejected I thought of a new plan.
"No one is going to think you're real! They will see me talking to you and it will just be like I'm talking to myself."
We sat among a group of friends (I guess they were friends) as I talked to myself. "Can you see her?" I yelled. "It's another me!"
No one said anything.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Flying Lotus - Cosmogramma (WARP195)
Usually this space is reserved for my silly things; however, the only thing > words is, for me, pop music.
Several record releases in my life have truly excited me. I love almost everything - really. Since I was 15 or so I've obsessed over obtaining every new album deemed worthwhile. And all of the worthwhile albums released before me, my existence. Whatever I enjoyed most typically ran analogous to my emotional state of being, whoever I was dating/trying to fuck, my location, more and more contextual data etc.
One begins to sense patterns after so much listening. Divorcing music from yourself, applying some tonal New-Critical lens and analyzing the sounds for themselves.
"There is nothing new under the sun." -Ecclesiastes 1:9
Accepting this as a personal aesthetic maxim, for music, for art, the only segway to originality is (counter-intuitively) bricolage. And not just mash-up-ed, mixed medium bullshit. Really weaving together existing product to create something completely unresembling its prototype. We are lucky to have computers and technology to lubricate this process. Nothing depresses me more than an unapologetically referential folk song released in 2010. Nothing.
Which is why Cosmogramma excites me. Because I don't know what it is, but I know what it could be. What parts of it could be. I want bitches grinding me to "Do the Astral Plane." I want MF Doom spitting rhymes over "Computer Face." I want "And the World Laughs with You" playing at coffeeshops and "Recoiled" to be Autechre's new single. But the thing isn't all disjointed; the cohesion suggests that, yeah, genre is becoming less indicative of physical content.
I wish instead of backlashing against the increasing reliance on internet/biochips/bleeps/beeps/emoticons people would just admit that efficiency in communication is as much of an artistic merit as anything else. A good expression of this is electronic music. The evolution of it is just astounding - the only audible medium really keeping up with the times.
I mean, Thom Yorke is on board. Come on. Radiohead has always succeeded in tapping the currents of the universal subconscious.
Keep workin it baby.
Album drops May 4th. Like cocaine though headphones.
Several record releases in my life have truly excited me. I love almost everything - really. Since I was 15 or so I've obsessed over obtaining every new album deemed worthwhile. And all of the worthwhile albums released before me, my existence. Whatever I enjoyed most typically ran analogous to my emotional state of being, whoever I was dating/trying to fuck, my location, more and more contextual data etc.
One begins to sense patterns after so much listening. Divorcing music from yourself, applying some tonal New-Critical lens and analyzing the sounds for themselves.
"There is nothing new under the sun." -Ecclesiastes 1:9
Accepting this as a personal aesthetic maxim, for music, for art, the only segway to originality is (counter-intuitively) bricolage. And not just mash-up-ed, mixed medium bullshit. Really weaving together existing product to create something completely unresembling its prototype. We are lucky to have computers and technology to lubricate this process. Nothing depresses me more than an unapologetically referential folk song released in 2010. Nothing.
Which is why Cosmogramma excites me. Because I don't know what it is, but I know what it could be. What parts of it could be. I want bitches grinding me to "Do the Astral Plane." I want MF Doom spitting rhymes over "Computer Face." I want "And the World Laughs with You" playing at coffeeshops and "Recoiled" to be Autechre's new single. But the thing isn't all disjointed; the cohesion suggests that, yeah, genre is becoming less indicative of physical content.
I wish instead of backlashing against the increasing reliance on internet/biochips/bleeps/beeps/emoticons people would just admit that efficiency in communication is as much of an artistic merit as anything else. A good expression of this is electronic music. The evolution of it is just astounding - the only audible medium really keeping up with the times.
I mean, Thom Yorke is on board. Come on. Radiohead has always succeeded in tapping the currents of the universal subconscious.
Keep workin it baby.
Album drops May 4th. Like cocaine though headphones.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Port Babies.
Babies at the airport.
feeding each other onion rings.
Neither had been breast-fed.
An infant purchasing cigarettes, basically.
The other infant prefers sipping milk with coffee.
a nipple-width latte.
Babies get dragged around states with no oceans.
babies understand that leaving is just motion,
the same motion that arrives.
but babies still cry at airports sometimes.
He might not order a ginger ale
and pick some stale peanuts over with
you but you will remember
waking up from a dream of him.
and then turning your head
and actually seeing him.
for that moment the world in your mind
and the world outside
harmonized.
Maybe that's why you feel so young at the airport.
feeding each other onion rings.
Neither had been breast-fed.
An infant purchasing cigarettes, basically.
The other infant prefers sipping milk with coffee.
a nipple-width latte.
Babies get dragged around states with no oceans.
babies understand that leaving is just motion,
the same motion that arrives.
but babies still cry at airports sometimes.
He might not order a ginger ale
and pick some stale peanuts over with
you but you will remember
waking up from a dream of him.
and then turning your head
and actually seeing him.
for that moment the world in your mind
and the world outside
harmonized.
Maybe that's why you feel so young at the airport.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Preliminary Definition of Horror
composed for my Religion and Film class
In a culture that esteems binaries so highly, defining an abstract word by simply assigning it a series of synonyms or associated terms fails to encompass the totality of the word. We gain understanding of a concept not only by declaring what it is, but also through discerning what it is not. Oppositional concepts in particular reassure the universe’s innate orderliness: male and female, figure and ground, good and evil. Dualism permeates our lives to the point of intuition. Without a match, a balance, or an equalizer, a concept threatens stability, offsets the poise of the world.
Defining “horror” automatically invokes the usual slew of synonyms. Some perfect combination of loathing, repulsion, and terror might suffice. We could add a negative embellishment to this definition and say horror is not fondness, not tranquility, and perhaps achieve a further understanding this way. Yet none of these concepts capture the true essence of horror.
This is because horror is far beyond our system of binaries and the aforementioned concepts are not. The experience of horror occurs when a person cannot readily place an experience, an event, a sight or sense into a pre-defined organizational grid. The things we find horrific disrupt the continuity of our mental framework. Stated bluntly, horror constitutes that which is beyond our realm of understanding; it falls between binaries or is way outside of them. The best opposites of horror, “awe” or “wonder,” offer no orientating cues either for precisely the same reason: they are outside our realm of understanding. Thus, we can situate horror neither through affirmation nor apotheosis. Horror is perfectly incomprehensible.
In a culture that esteems binaries so highly, defining an abstract word by simply assigning it a series of synonyms or associated terms fails to encompass the totality of the word. We gain understanding of a concept not only by declaring what it is, but also through discerning what it is not. Oppositional concepts in particular reassure the universe’s innate orderliness: male and female, figure and ground, good and evil. Dualism permeates our lives to the point of intuition. Without a match, a balance, or an equalizer, a concept threatens stability, offsets the poise of the world.
Defining “horror” automatically invokes the usual slew of synonyms. Some perfect combination of loathing, repulsion, and terror might suffice. We could add a negative embellishment to this definition and say horror is not fondness, not tranquility, and perhaps achieve a further understanding this way. Yet none of these concepts capture the true essence of horror.
This is because horror is far beyond our system of binaries and the aforementioned concepts are not. The experience of horror occurs when a person cannot readily place an experience, an event, a sight or sense into a pre-defined organizational grid. The things we find horrific disrupt the continuity of our mental framework. Stated bluntly, horror constitutes that which is beyond our realm of understanding; it falls between binaries or is way outside of them. The best opposites of horror, “awe” or “wonder,” offer no orientating cues either for precisely the same reason: they are outside our realm of understanding. Thus, we can situate horror neither through affirmation nor apotheosis. Horror is perfectly incomprehensible.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Second
We are both second
s apart, thrown together
for minutes a day.
The space next to first or
the time it takes for
Hope to evaporate
from my childish daydreams.
Doodling playgrounds for my
invisible companions.
For a second I thought
for a second thought to
become primary – it’s not
as hard as you thought.
It takes a lot
to smile these days.
For a smile it takes
a lot these days.
s apart, thrown together
for minutes a day.
The space next to first or
the time it takes for
Hope to evaporate
from my childish daydreams.
Doodling playgrounds for my
invisible companions.
For a second I thought
for a second thought to
become primary – it’s not
as hard as you thought.
It takes a lot
to smile these days.
For a smile it takes
a lot these days.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
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