This blog always celebrates Beethoven's birthday when I remember to. Here virtuoso Rudolf Kerer plays the Appassionata for pensive actors portraying Lenin and Gorky..
16 December 2022
15 December 2022
Hans Magnus Enzensberger 1929-2022
this one was no philanthropist,
avoided meetings, department stores, arenas,
he never ate the flesh of his like.
violence walked in the streets,
smiling, not naked;
but there were screams in the sky.
people's faces were indistinct;
they seemed crushed
even before the blow fell.
the one thing he had fought for all his life,
with words and with teeth, grimly,
cunningly, on his own account:
the thing he called his peace,
now, that he has it, there is no mouth
to his skeleton now, no mouth to taste it.
To the Grave of a Peace-Loving Man, 1964, tr: Gertrude C. Schwebell
04 December 2022
23 November 2022
Bernadette Mayer 1945-2022
Crosses for darkness, parallels for light. What trees are around you, which ones are living, can you move, hold your eyes open, do battle, bend down. This ground is the real ground, ground that circles & stratas to core, it boils, the only ground, crawling, nothing between you. Hanging & crashing. A flame. You are destroyed in the fire, you are black ash, you are stone, charred, fertile, a bed for hundreds of years of black work emerging. Your soul rejuvenates the soil, blood-red flower, an element of the mix, aces your grave. Now I am present, I'm there. When you see my face, white & design, you are fixed to it, repulsed, but its effort to love. We mix. Young & live forever, my blackness seeks the moment of your death, without accumulation. The legs of the flower, bending, screens in rest. Hide us.
If a massive star collapsed to a sufficiently small volume, light could not escape from it. A rotating black hole could account for the radiation of gravitational waves from the center of the galaxy. A black hole is a region of space into which a star or a collection of stars or other bodies, has fallen & from which no light, matter or signal of any kind can escape.
All night. Poisoning. Extracting the drugs of the flower. You are lost. I choose loss. Waves & shores, oceans of loss, separate, meeting, destroy. No one can get there.
I get you shot & go to the cave mouth. I wont go in.
What is the fate of the original body that collapsed to produce the black hole? Assuming that exact spherical symmetry is maintained right down to the center, the answer provided by the general theory of relativity is a dramatic one. According to the general theory, the curvature of space-time increases without limit as the center is approached. Not only is the substance of the original body squeezed to infinite density at the center of the black hole—that is, effectively, crushed out of existence—but also the vacuum of space-time outside the body becomes infinitely curved. The effect of this infinite curvature on a hapless observer, were he crazy enough to follow the body inward, would be catastrophic. He would feel tidal forces across his body that would mount rapidly & would reach infinity within a finite period of his experienced time.
from Studying Hunger, 1975
22 November 2022
16 November 2022
09 November 2022
26 October 2022
Mike Davis 1946-2022
"The ultimate world-historical significance - and oddity - of Los Angeles is that it has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism. The same place, as Brecht noted, symbolized heaven and hell... Brecht's desperate ennui was compounded out of strange contradictions. One day he was complaining about how his Santa Monica bungalow was 'too pleasant to work in,' the next he was promoting Los Angeles as a 'hell' of Shelleyan proportions."
19 October 2022
25 September 2022
Pharoah Sanders 1940-2022
21 September 2022
19 September 2022
T. V. Sankaranarayanan 1945-2022
One of the reasons I started this blog was to complain about T.V., but for those in need of clarification, I wasn't complaining about Tiruvalangadu Vembu, on the screen right here forever.
14 September 2022
Jean-Luc Godard 1930-2022
Predictably I won’t be able to gather my thoughts on Godard’s death into one blog post right away but..
* Bazin's speculation "If the plastic arts were put under psychoanalysis.. the process might reveal that at the origin of the plastic arts there lies a mummy complex" was a coy way of suggesting the unprecedented potential for film as a sarcophagus, with Godard's oeuvre to become thereafter the most advanced mummy of all for this sad occasion.
* The point at which you’ve gone to so many gallery shows you are sick of attempts at referential postmodernism came long ago for me and I embrace the path into the unknown horizon that results from this phenomenon. My enjoyment of Godard, however, the most postmodern and referential of them all, was never affected by this. The grandfather clause, as well as his ability to in turn keep it new and express so much through this proliferation of quotations. There was no one whose films I would anticipate more up to and including right now, with the only certainly being surprise. The essay style from the late 60s on, imho began to reach its full potential with Notre Musique and did not let up with the subsequent offerings until the last breath.
* One such postmodern gallery show: four years ago when Miguel Abreu exhibited the models Godard made for his Collage(s) de France installations which he intended for attendees to walk through in his 2006 Pompidou Center retrospective. After reportedly “relations between the artist and the museum had soured” the museum displayed the models for the installations at the show rather than executing them at the intended scale, which seemed to me to be Godard’s version of Langlois’ museum, which also encountered much institutional resistance. I can think of no better way for Paris to remember Godard than installing these rooms by the Cinémathèque française in Bercy, and indeed any backwater could immediately have one of the headiest things going for miles by attaching these rooms to their municipal museum.
* Recently, no other major director embraced the manifold functions of the cell phone camera for the future of cinema like Monsieur G, especially in Film Socialisme and Goodbye to Language. Or was it Godardian parody? Notre Musique: Godard recounts the story in Malraux's book about Picasso when in 1858
the peasant girl Saint Bernadette of Lourdes was asked to identify the
Virgin Mary that had been appearing to her, and after being shown many
paintings using natural settings and perspective, was shown a Byzantine
icon and said "it's her!" Godard: "An icon: no movement, no depth, no
artifice. The sacred." At the end of the lecture, Godard is asked "Can
the new little digital cameras save the cinema?" He is silent, with the
high-key lighting without fill, for celluloid, creating contrast on his
face that, in the past, video couldn't handle.
* Staring at my computer from time to time I occasionally entertain ‘should my social media avatar be a Godard image’ but that last shot of 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her never gets old for me, in addition to the obvious meanings you can invent others.
* Four days ago I was listening to Bolivia's President Arce promote the managed ‘plural’ economic model by saying “the state is us” and of course I immediately thought of the line from Notre Musique: “A young German CathoIic said, in 1943: ‘The dream of the individual is to be two. The dream of the State is to be one.’ She was beheaded.” Bolivians know better than anyone how the European races will export their tortured Hegelianism but the show must go on.
11 September 2022
What's up for one more day, v. 2022, faves of the fairs
I liked Spring/ Break this year and it was very sparsely attended Saturday morning in contrast to the nonstop mob scene at fairs like Armory. If you do make it out there tomorrow you can choose to use the half price coupon code HYPER502022. The highlight for me was a room of canvases and works on paper by the German artist Juliane Hundertmark, which I'm told were inspired from the drums of war in Europe though I was unable to extract with more specificity Hundertmark's take on the Ukraine war from the curator. But in the tradition of Grosz with touches of Dix, Beckmann, and Ensor, she focuses on the class relations of the war, pertinent to both Europe and the US.
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| Red Cake, 2022, 135 x 150 cm, oil and collage on canvas |
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| Cake, 2022, 135 x 150 cm, oil and collage on canvas |
I tend to repeat the blog line that Armory was "must see" in 1913 and this year, well.. A lot of global galleries made the trip to NYC at this stage of the pandemic to detain your interest for a few hours. Without question and somewhat predictably the highlight for me was the Luisa Rabbia outside the Blum booth..
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| Luisa Rabbia, Tree of Life, 2021-2022, oil on linen, 213 x 121 cm |
Also enjoyed Terence Koh's pandemic inspired works on paper at the Edlin booth, two of which depict bursts of luminosity such as this one that incorporates a mirror..
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| Untitled, 2021, Graphite, colored pencil, charcoal and mirror on burnt paper |
Of gallery shows I was rushing through Chelsea on the way to Armory. Piri' Miri Muli' readers can surmise my return there next week is preordained because Tàpies is opening at Pace, which means that if the elevator doesn't work at Hauser as it didn't yesterday I'm not going to walk up the five flights to see the Christina Quarles show. Enthusiasts of Baselitz will encounter woodcuts and drypoints from the Eighties at 531 w 24th, enthusiasts of Martínez Celaya will find oils of 2022 at 515 w 22nd.
24 August 2022
18 August 2022
26 July 2022
Paul Sorvino 1939-2022
As Kissinger..
This cuts off his line.. NIXON: This will get me a second term. Damn it, without risk, there's no heroism, there's no history. Nixon was born to do this. Give history a nudge. Come on! I mean, if Cambodia doesn't work we'll bomb Hanoi if we have to. That's right. And if necessary, I'll drop the big one.
KISSINGER: We have to entertain the possibility.
..also liked him with Beatty in Reds and Bulworth*
* Bulworth and Sympathy for the Devil are the cornerstones of feature length Amiri-themed cinema
22 July 2022
30 May 2022
27 May 2022
Peter Lamborn Wilson 1945-2022
"For Blake, Satan is only accidentally the cause of evil, since evil has no being in itself, except as the absence of good. For the soul freed from illusion, the devil resumes his original archangelic glory, his solar and vital power."
(PLW)
19 May 2022
Vangelis 1943-2022
I don't listen to his soundtracks or, as it happens, watch those movies, but I wore out a vinyl copy of this... Apparently a jam session that was released amid his objections..
11 May 2022
Shireen Abu Aklah 1971-2022
وهي ازكى منقوشة زعتر من البلد القديمة في #القدس وعند #باب_العامود، ويسعد صباحكم pic.twitter.com/9bztZOMa9V
— Shireen AbuAqla شيرين ابو عاقلة (@ShireenNasri) June 15, 2021
07 May 2022
03 May 2022
06 April 2022
Dennis González 1954-2022
"Catechism was .. inspired by the church hymns that I play that have contributed to my spiritual growth." (DG)
01 April 2022
Richard Howard 1929-2022
How often, grim Caricature, must I
jingle my bells and kiss your bestial brow?
Until my aim is true - the circle squared -
how many arrows forfeit to the Void?
We rack our brains with subtle stratagems
and ruin many massive armatures
before the splendid Creature may be seen
for whom our fatal longing makes us sob?
To some their idol will not be revealed,
and those doomed sculptors, branded with disgrace,
upbraid themselves and lacerate their breasts,
nursing one hope, sepulchral Capitol! -
that Death as it fills the sky like another sun
will make the flowers of their devising bloom!
(Charles Baudelaire, La Mort des artistes, tr. Richard Howard)
29 March 2022
11 March 2022
10 March 2022
07 March 2022
Philosophers Philosophers
Philosophers Philosophers
Philosophers Philosophers
In various In various
In various ways
In various ways
Interpreted the world
Interpreted the world
Philosophers in their various
Ways have simply interpret-
ed the World. The point,
However, is to change it.
(Karl Marx, Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach)
02 March 2022
Happy Birthday
... to Fryderyk Chopin as it is still his birthday on the West Coast, even the Central Time Zone, so he doesn't live there but you never know these days
25 February 2022
Gary Brooker 1945-2022
The Danish artist Per Kirkeby, who passed four years ago and currently has a retrospective at Michael Werner in London until May 21, "collaborated" on the Breaking the Waves chapter titles with von Trier.
15 February 2022
07 February 2022
03 February 2022
Monica Vitti 1931 -2022
The woman who turns her head at 9:59 won't be her now but she never was. She replaced the disappeared then she spotted her reading The Sleepwalkers on the staircase. "We'll see each other tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and the day after that, and the next.." more than the tombs of Rome.
21 January 2022
Badal Roy ?-2022
Since On the Corner became my fave Miles album I haven't reconsidered the matter but Big Fun is one of the rotating contenders.
16 January 2022
15 January 2022
13 January 2022
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