Wednesday, August 27, 2008

CQ - Anybody Out There?

And for the winner...
(see original Attuning The Frequency post for its humble beginnings)

.....................................................



She called:

"CQ... CQ..."







He answered:

"Now that I still can't get you off of my mind
I don't think that we can pull this one off
We shall see, time will tell
What is time and why does it
Taste like salt water inside of my mouth?"






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Images and quicktime movie: AMC
Music: Pinback

Thank you, Sarah (and Pinback)!
And thanks to all who participated via myspace and this here bloggy.

Friday, August 22, 2008

John Cage's 4'33 - Art & Sound

"silence is the sound of life as we live it in real time. We just never stopped to listen before." - Holland Cotter


Dia:Beacon Two installations commemorating artists now gone: Tacita Dean’s is six films with Merce Cunningham, honoring John Cage’s “4’33””.


FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES ART REVIEW

"Oh So Quiet"
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: August 21, 2008

Silence is the tough one... John Cage said it didn’t exist, not in this world, and illustrated the point in his famous composition “4’33,” ” first performed in 1952.

A musician with a stopwatch comes on stage, sits at a piano, more or less motionless, for 4 minutes 33 seconds, raising and lowering the keyboard cover to signal the beginning and end of movements.

Instead of music, or not-of-this-world silence, the audience hears itself: coughing, jangling, whispering, tittering and eventually, depending on the general mood, erupting into boos or applause...

A filmed variation on Cage’s score is playing this summer at Dia:Beacon; it’s well worth spending time with. It’s one of two Dia installations that, in very different ways, quietly commemorate artists now gone whose names have a magic ring to contemporary ears.
FULL ARTICLE

Monday, August 18, 2008

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Twins



Die Nebensonnen. Herbet Pfostl

Last night I sang "moon, moon, moon" with an owl perched in the fir tree.


The Things of This World. Herbet Pfostl


I watched the Perseid meteor shower, tails burning the sky, held my nearly full grown son in my lap and laughed and sang and whooped and hooted in delight and in awe and appreciation.

It was a perfect night under the stars, among a stand of trees and the lone owl's hoo, hoo, hoo.

"Thank you," I said out loud.
"Thank you," I said silently.
"Do you feel lonely, too?" I asked

Yes.
Thank you.



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More works by Herbert Pfostl:
Herbert Pfostl's Paper Graveyard
hpfostl (flickr)


Friday, August 8, 2008

Volition


Let us choose every day to make our own magic.



Don't wait.
Never stop.


Video courtesy of Niemand.
More sites to delight listed on Blind Pony Books


Wednesday, August 6, 2008

The Gift

"I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. "




"Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end."

-----------------------------------------

All quotations, Virginia Woolf.


Image courtesy of Bats and Swallows, where many more hauntingly beautiful photos may be found. Highly recommend you have a look.

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Mad Love

Tremendous! Tremendous!

"I wish to bring back the gods: oracular knowledge. To force miracles without the traps of religion...
What seems so utterly forgotten today has never left us but was only covered up and needs to be re-found and cared for. It takes heart to pay attention."

These words make me SWOON. Swoon, swoon, swoon. I have fallen hard for Blind Pony Books. Every entry on their blog 'penetrates' me to my core and makes me salivate. Their credo alone makes me flush with excitement! My heart quickens and I feel exactly as I do when I fall in love. How can images and words on a blog be so powerful? It's magic.
--
The Pony Credo

An idea of books from a yearning
to counter the all-polluting imagery-machines
with parables of plants and animals
and old stories
of black robbers and white stags.
Fragments on death like mirrors
from a black sleep
in the forests of fairy tales.
All stories from the dust of the dead
in fragments and footnotes
like melodies of heartbreak
and north and night and exploration–breakdowns.
About saints with no promise of heaven
and lost sailors forgotten
and the terribly lonely bears.
The unknown, the ugly – and the odd.
Collected grand mistakes,
noble errors from many sources.
Sinking signals - conscious or not – sonatas and last letters
and great insults.
The impossible tears in landscapes
of ocean or stranded whales.
A going far back to coals
and cruelties and sobbing
like songs in whiskey and blood.
Of soldiers’ last letters and all seven seas.
With pirates and wars and prayers
in holes in the ground.
Of fallen women and orphaned children
and drowned slaves and burned saints.
To make songs from doubt
and books to live by.

--
Theirs is a blog that spins the mirrors reflecting sober fragments of my innermost light and darkness; the machinations and sweeping undercurrents of my poetic mind; the kindling of my heart's fancy and longing. I suppose I am simply in love with the dark, quietly illuminating philosophical and artistic brilliance of the past, with its sinking signals and dusty coals burning deep in the ash, where one, if they look hard enough, can catch a glimmer of a faint glow still red with the raw essence of life.

Go ahead and see for yourself at Blind Pony Books. Bear in mind that to understand what I'm speaking of requires looking through it all. A cursory glance will not suffice with a site of this magnitude.