when radios have green eyes...

"a green eye on the radio played coldly and distantly toward him. like the northern lights. bewitching, although it was really no more than a helpless machine. out of the loudspeaker came many different wishes."

1920's snapshot, text from tarjei vesaas (yes i'm obsessed with his writing at the moment), spring night, 1964.

what a true work of art looks like...

"in his lap he was holding a model of the temple of soloman, made of pinewood, paper mache, and gold paint... it had taken him seven years to build the temple, from the biblical description, and he was now travelling from ghetto to ghetto exhibiting the model... you can see every crenellation on the towers, every curtain, every threshold, every sacred vessel. and i, said ferber, bent down over the diminutive temple and realized for the first time in my life, what a true work of art looks like."

text from wg sebald's the emigrants
photo: circa 1900 snapshot of birdhouses

the poetry of a fragmented biography...

he daily stretches forth his invisible hands...

i have made my way alone, with means gained from my nurse, the sea...

at this period commences the first continuous record which is to be found among the large mass of books and papers...

grass literally grew in the street, and nothing disturbed the silence...

it was during this period that he built the splendid fleet of vessels which he principally named after distinguished french philosophers...

i shall not murmur...

i am wrapped up in a labyrinth...

fragments and sentences from the 1879 book "girard college and its founder" (image, another view of the archives).

the poetry of a three ring circus (or, one more kaprow post)...

"my next public happening was at the rueben gallery, which was called 18 happenings in six parts. i simply had there the basic image or structure of a three-ring circus. i remember cage was also enthralled with this, because he mentioned some of our traditions of overlapping and signal confusing as traditions like three-ring circuses. three-ring circuses are set up in such a way that people who are at one end of the tent can't see what's going on at the other end. they give you a whole show at both ends, and one in the middle as well - all of them discordant except in terms of the relative starts and stops. you can't really put them together in any kind of meaningful way. they aren't organized that way. so, i set up a three-ring circus space, which there were three rooms... where, of course, you could hear what was going on in all rooms, no matter where you were, but you could only blurrily see what was going on in the room adjacent to you. events would pass from one room to another, as well as overlap in some kind of random way. sounds in the three spaces overlapped to.

cage went to this. a week or so later we discussed it. i saw him on the street, and as my teacher, he said something like "maybe you'd be interested to hear what i thought." i said, "yes." he said, "well, i thought it was a little romantic."

allan kaprow, interview, 1995

mystery quotes...

found these quotes on a scrap of paper in my studio. probably written several years ago, but unfortunately i didn't notate the source...

"why do voices and noises seem to cause disturbances and even reopen wounds?" page 7

"and noise even has a bearing on the suffering of the mind." page 7

"on account of the gray weather of november when the bells scatter the dead ashes of the years into the air in a dust of sounds." page 3

if anyone recognizes them, please let me know where they are from.

between snowflakes and leaves...

between snowflakes and leaves there are resemblances. at the sight of snow falling one thinks that one is seeing small flowers that are falling from the sky. why is foliage dying in the autumn secretly golden, and why does one think of springtime flowers having tongues, to shape some kind of conversation? seeing leaves one thinks of hands, their fingerinesses are budlike. birds' feathers, leaves on a tree, the delicate feathery, fingery snowfall in winter - one rightly tells oneself that they are related. the wind seems to be an undependable blunderer; its lull is as sweet as compliance, blissful in itself, flowing round itself, feeling itself beautiful. does the wind feel that it is windy? does the leaf know how beautiful it is? do the snowflakes smile and do flowers charm themselves, and do curls know their curliness? a river in its motion resembles a limber wanderer in a hurry, the watery mass of a lake in its repose a beautiful woman in white gloves, with blue eyes. the profusion of leaves hides hides the enchanting finery of the branches. it is a pretty thought that pretty things exist. the shapes of waves and branches are snaky, and times do come when one knows that one is no more and no less than waves and snowflakes, or, as it clearly longs now and then for release from its uncommonly graceful confines, the leaf.

robert walser, 1927-29, in speaking to the rose, bison books

feldman, on art & inspiration...

..."cage doesn't have to be idea-orientated. he told me last summer - it was so charming the way he put it, i couldn't have put it that way - he said: "so many people tell me what to do next, i don't have to think anymore." very cute. i don't know what to tell you. i'm doing a lot of teaching these days and i find everything so conservative. you can't tell a student today: "why don't you just work and maybe you'll get an idea?" all of my most important work was done that way. i never had an idea when i sat down to work. i was reading something in one of those conversations where it turned out that stravinsky never thought about his work unless he was working, which i thought was very interesting. it's like the analyst joke, you know, a guy call his analyst and says:"doc, i'm going to be ten minutes late, why don't you begin without me?" it's just too incongruous to say: "work and the idea will come". kline began with an 8, that's what he told me, unless he came in and really had something. guston just looked out the window, made a little mark...

...the terror (of boulez's teachings) is that you have to have an idea, while with me my ideas came out of the piece. 'idea' became the new myth for that old word 'inspiration'. if i was going to wait for an idea to write a piece i'd go out of my mind, i'd commit suicide. but it's a very important terror that the piece has to be good, that it has to make sense, that is has to go somewhere, it has to exploit the materials, you have to use up its potential, it has to feed on itself, that it has to be something."

interview with morton feldman, by gavin bryars and fred orton, in studio magaine, londond, dec. 1976

when words smell of the sea...

"one ought to concentrate on all that's primitive and fresh in the language with boundless avarice. no other words should be recognized than those strikingly fragrant. the ones smelling of the sea are the best. if you have the right vernacular you have the right philosophy."

"a book - glimmering from fire and salt - should be like a good storm, continual, powerful, ceaseless, with a sharp murmur as night falls."

"the greatest moment: like the silent interplay of shadows in a budding forest - the slience of a thought's interacting shadows extending inside me."

"to be consistent can sometimes be easy enough. to be honestly inconsistent can be more difficult."

"i am but an eye looking into the blind and ghastly eye of meaninglessness. why? who am i? the howling lonliness around the human."

some gems from vilhelm ekelund, written circa 1914, from a collection of his writings called "the second light".

don't kick your mother in the stomach...

"masterworks are not made to astonish. they are made to pursuade, to convince, and to enter us through our pores...

"when you lack the respect you owe to nature, when you dare to offend against it in your work, you kick your mother in the stomach...

"art is never at a higher level than when it resembles nature so much as to be mistaken for nature itself. art never succeeds better than when it is hidden...

"if i could make you musicians, you would become better painters. in nature, all is harmony: a little more or less disturbs the key and produces a false note. we must learn to sing true with our brush or pencil, as much as with our voice. truth of form is comparable to truth of sound...

"it is true that exhibitions have become part of our lives. it is therefore impossible to suppress them. but they must not be encouraged. they destroy art, by making it a trade which artists no longer respect. the exhibitions are no more than bazaars in which mediocrity is impudently flaunted. they are useless and dangerous..."

jean auguste dominique ingres, passages from his correspondence and studio talk as reported by his pupils circa 1870, quoted here from sources & documents in the history of art, neoclassicism & romanticism 1750 - 1850, volume 2 restoration/twilight of humanism.

when pens rest and dry...

idyll

"i have a steel-tipped pen rest made of long black bundled bristle set in a light blue shimmering opalized matte glass jar. protection in an ideal mantel. i think of the society for the protection of children. something tender, useful, softly and tenderly preserved. i swaddle my ungrudging elastic kuhn pen like a little child in its cradle, certain that nothing bad will befall it. it dries and rests. and the little glass jar in which the bristle holder sits is an iridescent blue, the color of waves breaking against the sun. and the steel tipped pen and pen rest return my love, my tenderness, quietly letting it be."

peter altenberg, 1859 - 1919, from telegrams of the soul.

time and the universe...

"our time on earth is only a small part of the workings of the universe. in a minute or so we forget our sorrows, even the most painful, as in minutes the ocean forgets its storms, and for the universe, days and weeks are only seconds"
hans christian andersen, travels

some silences...

she was indeed like the fairy of silence, and only now did i realize that even yesterday... in all that music and the milling crowd, etelka had walked in on an island of silence, had floated in the purified atmosphere of silence, as if a few steps from her everything had gone quiet, and her big velvety eyes had muffled the noise of the soul as velvet curtains muffle sound.
mihaly babits, "the nightmare"

for part of the night cornelius stayed there, holding the bars on his window and listening, his five senses concentrated into one - or rather two since he was watching as he listened.
alexandre dumas, "the black tulip"

whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.
wittgenstein, "tractus"

quadrilionem

from an album entitled "the bells of iowa state" containing three 78's, found at the flea on sunday. the discs contain recordings from the 1940's of the carillon at iowa state college, which was supposedly the first scientifically tuned chime of bells to leave europe. they are played here by professor ira schroeder.

the word carillon is french in origin, and is derived from medival latin quadrilionem (a quarternary), the carillons at the time being sounded on four bells (now known as a chime). the carillon at iowa state has 36 tuned bells.

some of the bells have inscriptions on their surfaces such as "my language is understood all over the world" hayden; and "harmonizing this earth with what we feel above" shelley. because of the ringing length of each note, and the potential for dissonant overtones (as well as what would appear to be the awkward physical handling of the instrument); the rhythmic structures of the melodies are really interesting... tentative at times and robotic at others...

click and listen to:
side 1,
side 2,
side 3,

field recordings...

a text from lawrence halprin's notebooks, called elements of a natural landscape on a walk up camp tucker canyon 1961:

1. unpredictable rhythms - as arrangements through scatteration of trees.

2. relatedness of things - colors all related... brown range: fallen leaves, tree bark, earth etc., shapes etc.

3. small counter rhythms - leaves falling, branches moving.

4. sounds are quiet and persistent / unpredictable within a configurative pattern - as in the stream moving over rocks.

5. all edges are soft. they feel as though they become by being worn - not created into a fixed edge.

6. evolvement by either addition or subtraction of shapes - i.e erosion shapes or the additive shapes of growth (trees, leaves, falling, etc.).

7. non completion of spaces.. the spaces all move into other spaces and are non-configured.

8. variability of light - non-fixed and glowing.

9. the environment is pervassive - it enables you to come in and participate on your own level in any way you see fit. it does not impose many restrictions. limitations but not restrictions.

untitled....

"they will comprehend that esthetic emotion cannot be understood, it can only be experienced."

merle armitage in the preface to personal revolution by louis danz