SubscribeApril 14th, 2012
locating your self__odd to think about that
The viewing room will alternate two films. Diary is a short film that collages original footage taken by Hetherington throughout his career. Hetherington described Diary, which he directed in 2010, as “a highly personal and experimental film that expresses the subjective experience of my work, and was made as an attempt to locate myself after ten years of reporting. It’s a kaleidoscope of images that link our western reality to the seemingly distant worlds we see in the media.” The film’s editing and sound design are by Magali Charrier. Diary will be screened in the gallery’s viewing room daily, along with Hetherington’s 4-minute 2009 film Sleeping Soldiers.
This describes a new exhibition of Tim Hetherington‘s work. There are some examples of his “sleeping soldiers” here and here.
The thing about his work seems to require a shift in focus – from the point of view of the viewer to that of the one who has been the target of someone else’s fear and rage. I love that about his work and it seems apropos for a man who was seeking to find his self after so many years witnessing, and participating in, violence.
Called “Henri 2, Paw de Deux” there is another Henri vid here.
April 12th, 2012
Thomas Heise_a poem
Thomas Heise is a new voice to me. I don’t even know where I got the name now, but Horror Vacui came to my door and so I started to read. Oh goodness.
You might want to read here and here if you like this.
THESE NEW DAYS
After the Massacre of Lost Objects the sun went dead dark three days. The sorrow in the orchard of orange trees was ours, my family's. The zero fell off the largest number in the world. On my hand I wrote left and please return to owner. The echo in my son's skull was so loud we slept numb in the living room. I walked a mile to watch them tear off the church bell like a pear and throw it in the mud pit. Sullage spilt out of the abattoir where they were beheading the cows with a buzz-saw all summer. How soft the hay, the uneaten grass. I found my open wound and lay down next to it in a field, my wound the jellyfish. Each hour, halos of new colors, phosphorescent, pulsed once, faded, over the little earth. Little explosions. Then a city of spires bloomed in a full aurora of my last hope, where, faraway, I was wavinggoodbye, or was it hello, from a future I no longer recall.
April 11th, 2012
Requiem
Pain and solace.
I’m here in this public place, with coffee and my computer listening to Mozart’s Requiem. On pain-days, like this, I often listen to it and surf. Usually there’s something appropriate, but today .. heh .. I jumped into the data stream and came up with Bryan Fischer and Fr. Flannery. Neither man I knew.
Start with Fischer. What a dweeb! He doesn’t believe in evolution because of the first law of thermodynamics. Cackle. Apparently he has a degree in philosophy__he slept through critical thinking? If you’re interested, there are vids of him speaking up on youtube. Do read the comments, some of them are funny. In my current pain-sad place, his absurdity is a bit like prozac. I do wonder though, if the Fischer’s of the world exemplify who we are as an “evolved” species. Really, there is Mozart and there is Fischer. It makes me wonder if we aren’t speciating and we haven’t noticed that some of us have a dwindling braincase.
Then there’s the Vatican “silencing” Father Flannery and the ACP’s response.
The Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) is disturbed that Fr Tony Flannery, a founding member of the Association, is being ‘silenced’. We believe that such an approach, in its individual focus on Fr Flannery and inevitably by implication on the members of the Association, is an extremely ill-advised intervention in the present pastoral context in Ireland.
OK, but you know Flannery is only silenced if he obeys. No one sewed his mouth shut. And to call this response to Ratzinger a “Catholic Spring”? I wonder if Mozart would have obeyed if he had been ordered silent because Count Franz didn’t like his particular interpretation of the grief due the Countess. Well I suppose Mozart did die in the musical attempt, but I don’t know, I can’t see him shutting up any other way.
And you know if the fathers really want to stand on “questions about due process and freedom of conscience” then perhaps they should consider starting their own church or — maybe — consider a secular, moral life instead of the not-so-moral Catholic one. (Hypocrisy is deeply immoral you know. Then there’s that other thing the Church has been supporting.)
Same goes for those good-folk who don’t fill the pews on Sundays but still consider themselves Catholic. Yes, I know there are good people who are also Catholic. I know some of them. But what? That excuses taking part in an organization that is so deeply, and clearly evil?
Gawd, what absurdity. In the face of the devastation of our shared world, Fischer “thinks” his way into an absurdist docu-drama and Flannery can’t figure out that he isn’t silenced at all?
And we? How many of us follow them in the death of reason?
I’m going to go watch the parrot sketch. I need something sensible.
April 11th, 2012
nightmare
I’ve been gone from that job for just over 10 months and I’m still having nightmares about having to go back there. Had one last night.
It’s both horrifying and hilarious.
April 9th, 2012
serious question
Does a kinase receptor have an umwelt?
I’m serious about the question. Please answer either here so others can see your response or send me an email — mary (at) tailfeather (dot) ca.
I’m reading Deleuze and a book linking Deleuze to von Uexküll and I’m trying to get my head around a world seen through a “plane of immanence”.
I can get the idea of a limited umwelt in an animal like a tick, but Deleuze seems to be saying that the idea of a static umwelt is a mistake. Rather the question should be how such states of response to the world surface, and resurface continually. But more about that later. Right now I’m trying to figure out what an umwelt is according to Deleuze. If an organism is really a set of interlocking reactions to other “organisms”, and rocks can be “organisms” of this sort, then shouldn’t kinase receptors have an umwelt? And if so, what isn’t an umwelt, or an organism?
aaaargh
April 9th, 2012
knowing shit
At Edge they have a download link for 60 pages of Karoly Simonyi’s A Cultural History of Physics.
From reality by way of abstraction to natural law, and from law back again to reality— it is over this closed path that science walks. The correctness of a theory, and indeed the correctness of the whole methodology, is thus ensured by this twofold connection with reality.
As we shall see, this insight was long in coming, and it established itself only after significant intellectual struggle. No matter how obvious we consider this method to be today, historically it was not so at all.
Heh. Still, despite the author’s faith in the sensibility of the contemporary human mind, the book is fabulous. The quotations, the illustrations, and – of course – the text are all full of delights.
Here’s another quote:
To appreciate the beauty of (a) the general theory of relativity, (b) a sculpture, or (c) a poem, one requires, in each case, a certain willingness to learn and a considerable investment of intellectual effort. Einstein’s equation, which brings together the ideas of mass and the geometry of space, yields astounding new knowledge about our entire universe.
Uhuh. The willingness to learn – to recognize an inner lack of understanding and basic knowledge – that’s the ticket. It’s also the biggest road block because many people are deeply invested in an idea of themselves as canny and essentially “in the know”. Letting go of that can prove pretty much impossible. It’s as if they think they’ll die if it gets known they don’t understand the way the world works. So even when they make a great big booboo (remember the banana as a proof of god?), do they say, oh I guess my premise was wrong? Apparently not, instead he says the atheists took it all out of context.
Heh.
Anyway, read Simonyi. It may not make you laugh like Comfort does but at least you’ll have something beautiful in front of your face.
April 8th, 2012
John Cleese on creativity
Just because they put in more pondering time their solutions are more creative.
John Cleese on creativity. A delight to watch. It’s a bit long so I’ve just linked the youtube site.
Cleese has some funny (always – I expect his death will be funny too) things to say about creativity, but it is also quite correct.
thanks to mango for the link
April 8th, 2012
philosophical question
Asking why we live in a universe of something rather than nothing may be no more meaningful than asking why some flowers are red and others blue.
Heh.
Fun article.
April 8th, 2012
Alice Oswald, oh my what a poet
Yesterday I got a copy of Spacecraft Voyager 1 New and Selected Poems by Alice Oswald. During my not-long-before-bed reading time, I started in on the volume. I have to tell you she is fast becoming one of my favourite poets.
Here’s a poem from the “new” portion of the book.
In a tidal valley flat stone sometimes lit sometimes not one among many moodswung creatures that have settled in this beautiful Uncountry of an Estuary swans pitching your wings in the reedy layby of a vacancy where the house of the sea can be set up quickly and taken down in an hour all you flooded and stranded weeds whose workplace is both a barren mud-site and a speeded up garden full of lake-offerings and slabs of light which then unwills itself listen all you crabs in the dark alleys of the wall all you mudswarms ranging up and down I notice you are very alert and worn out skulking about and grabbing what you can listen this is not the ordinary surface river this is not river at all this is something like a huge repeating mechanism banging and banging the jetty very hard to define, most close in kind to the mighty angels of purgatory who come solar-powered into darkness using no other sails than their shining wings yes this is the Moon this hurrying muscular unsolid unstillness this endless wavering in whose engine I too am living
Frakkin brilliant. “Moodswung creatures”, the way she conflates identity with “all you flooded and stranded weeds” and my favourite – “where the house of the sea / can be set up quickly and taken down in an hour”.
That one kept me up for at least an additional hour. My mind would swim inside it, words came tumbling in on its waves, I had to get up and write them down to use later. It’s so simple really, fitting the metaphorical shift of what one can do in a human house to the non-human versions of living environments. Yet finding something like that connection that works as well as it does in Oswald’s poem is bloody difficult. I am delighted to have found her.