from the palace at 4 am...

"i whirl in the void. in broad daylight i contemplate space and the stars which traverse the liquid silver around me... again and again i'm captivated by constructions which delight me, and which live in their surreality - a beautiful palace, the tiled floor, black, white, red under my feet, the clustered columns, the smiling ceiling of air, and the precise mechanisms which are of no use. [and further] once the object is constructed, i tend to see in it, transformed and displaced, facts which have profoundly moved me, often without my realizing it; forms which i feel quite close to me, yet often without being able to identify them, which makes them all the more disturbing."

alberto giacometti, 1933 (as quoted in "a concise history of modern sculpture")

stars and tree...

stars
float from the borders of the main.
-
above
the vast of heaven strung with brilliant stars.
-
how looks the night? there does not miss a star.
the million sorts of unaccounted motes
now quicken, sheathed in the yellow galaxy.
there is no parting or bare interstice
where the sting of compass of a skylark's wings
would not put out some tiny golden centre.
-
stars waving their indivisible rays.
sky fleeced with the milky way.
-
night's lantern
pointed with pierced lights, and breaks of rays
discover'd everywhere.
-
the sky minted into golden sequins.
stars like gold tufts.
- - golden bees.
- - golden rowels.
sky peak'd with tiny flames.
-
stars like tiny spoked wheels of fire.
lanterns of night, pierced in eyelets.
-
his gilded rowels
now stars of blood.
-
a star most spiritual, principal, preeminent
of all the golden press.
-
or ever the early stirrings of skylark
might cover the neighbor downs with a span of singing,
while phospher, risen upon the shallowing dark,
in the ruddied country of the day's up-bringing
stood capital, eminent, ... gonfalon-bearer
to all the starry press, -

gerard manly hopkins, star images: september to december 1864 (from poems for the millennium volume 3), image: cyanotype, 1870's

celestial alphabet event...

"an extreme example of a language process event based on natural phenomena, this derives from hebrew alphabetic practice projected on the night sky. the key is calligraphic: a form of the alphabet ("magic letters") going back to the hellenistic period, in which the lines of the letters culminate in rounded points, permitting a later application to the night sky, where patterns of stars (points joined by "lines") can then be read as letters, groups of letters read as words, etc. in the process the sky becomes a massive concrete poem, whose words or "messages" are constantly transforming. the instance, above, is from jacques gaffarel, a christian kabbalist of the 17th century, but the viability of the process is dependent upon the hebrew alphabet, where the absence of explicit vowels allows a wide range of meaningful readings"

jerome rothenberg, "after the shamans" a mini-anthology of jewish oral and process poetry in an age of writing, from alcheringa magazine 1975.

the stars...

when night falls
i stand on the steps and listen;
the stars romance in the garden
and i stand in darkness.
listen, a star fell with a ring!
do not walk on the grass in your bare feet;
my garden is filled with star splinters.

edith södergran, 1916

trying to remember the sky...

trying to draw all the stars
in the sky,
seen
while lying on my back
on the floor
looking through an open window
from a darkened room,
falling asleep,
with quiet breath,
one night
in september...

how to see...

"the astronaut john glenn may have caught a glimpse of heavenly blue from the porthole of his spaceship, but i have watched the lights of a computer in operation. and they looked like the stars."

allan kaprow, the artist as a man of the world, 1964

when stars become words (and notes)...

finally back for a little while and figured before i dive into the pile of old photos to scan here, i'd do a post on the project i was working on.

a lot of the things i post here are part of the collection for various reasons, the main one of course being that an object simply sings to me. there are times when something gets deeper under my skin, and once in a fortunate while, these things actually begin to generate my work.

some of you might remember a post from january about a list of star name pronounciations. my obsession with this thing has grown over the months, and i have been working with it to generate a score for a large scale installation that will happen in porto alegre brazil in september.

rather than fill the blog with this stuff, here's a link to some notes, models, drawings, etc. on my website. the above images are a cardboard model of the largest structure (which will eventually be made out of wood and should be big enough for 3 or 4 people to be inside of!), and one of the pages of the sound score (which will be used to generate the sounds that will go inside of each of teh structures...).

philadelphia stories...