"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take... but by the number of moments that take our breath away... "I'm pleased to present "California Stars," an Art on Wry special request, created by Belgian media artist and musician Nicolas Delfosse.
German Herrera Between Here And Now (Click on title at top of page to view slide show.) Or visit the artist's website: germanherrera.com
New York Times - Theater
"Fragmented Psyches, Uncomfortable Emotions: Sing Out!"
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: April 16, 2009
No show on Broadway right now makes as direct a grab for the heart — or wrings it as thoroughly — as “Next to Normal” does. This brave, breathtaking musical, which opened Wednesday night at the Booth Theater, focuses squarely on the pain that cripples the members of a suburban family, and never for a minute does it let you escape the anguish at the core of their lives.
“Next to Normal” does not, in other words, qualify as your standard feel-good musical. Instead this portrait of a manic-depressive mother and the people she loves and damages is something much more: a feel-everything musical, which asks you, with operatic force, to discover the liberation in knowing where it hurts. READ FULL REVIEW
Multimedia:
Audio Slide Show (Recommended)
Video/Songs (My pick: "I Am The One")
**********
Support News Media, Free Speech and Democracy -- Subscribe
A brief introduction:
THE KITE
I still heard Auntie Blue
After she did not want to come down
Again: she was skypaper, way up
Too high to pull down. The wind
Liked her a lot and she was lots of noise
And sky on the end of the string:
And the string jumped hard all of a sudden,
And the sky never even breathed,
But was like it always was, slow and close
Far-away blue, like poor dead Uncle Blue.
Auntie Blue was gone, and I could not
Think of her face; and the string fell down
Slowly for a long time. I was afraid to pull it
Down. Auntie Blue was in the sky,
Just like God. It was not my birthday
Anymore: and everybody knew, and dug
A hole, and put a stone on it
Next to Uncle Blue's stone and he died
Before I was even born; and it was too bad
It was so hard to pull her down; and flowers.
---
Letter – April 4, 2009
Auntie Blue was gone, and I could notEspecially when framed against the last:
Think of her face; and the string fell down
Slowly for a long time.
It was so hard to pull her down; and flowers.Your poems, in my view, seem to naturally prevail in that fundamental movement Jean-Michel Maulpois ascribed so eloquently in Modern French Literature to "Grand Vent," a poem by Jacques Dupin; i.e., "To move painfully towards the highest which is also the emptiest, to direct oneself towards the scarce, the rare, nay, the unbreathable. The purpose is to climb towards an air burrow or a kind of open sky deposit where the inside of man himself up there, very high, becomes a landscape where the obscure and the secret unfold in light."
We're human. Inevitably, and all too quickly I might add, it just gets messy.
-------------------------
Part deux of a 12 minute long stop motion animation, created in 1982 by the Czech surrealist artist Jan Švankmajer.
One of my fovorite poets.
Portrait
A child draws the outline of a body.
She draws what she can, but it is white all through,
she cannot fill in what she knows is there.
Within the unsupported line, she knows
that life is missing; she has cut
one background from another. Like a child,
she turns to her mother.
And you draw the heart
against the emptiness she has created.
----
First Four Books - Louise Gluck
The Rain
ROBERT CREELEY
All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.
What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it
that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me
something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.
Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out
of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.
--
The Flower
ROBERT CREELEY
I think I grow tensions
like flowers
in a wood where
nobody goes.
Each wound is perfect,
encloses itself in a tiny
imperceptible blossom,
making pain.
Pain is a flower like that one,
like this one,
like that one,
like this one.
Entries from torn journal pages -- 2007-2008
Letters - February 2009
With special attention paid to two art museums close to my heart: the DIA in Detroit and the Brooklyn Museum.
"Robleto continues to tell the history of popular music that relies on complex and intertwined degrees of separation. In the case of I've Kissed Your Mother Twice and Now I'm Working on Your Dad, the cast of an antique lipstick holder is crafted from three melted records: David Bowie's Rock 'n' Roll Suicide, The New York Doll's Trash, and The Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen. The choice of these specific records highlights the connection that exists among them as anthems of Glam Rock and the gender bending tactics of their lead singers and horde of followers. While the origin of the piece is from the world of popular music, the craftsmanship of the lipstick holders evokes the artistry and skill of previous generations' metallurgical designs."
From www.postsecret.com: PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a postcard.
Unless you're a seasoned collector with the cold hard cash, good luck.
-----------
From The New York Times, Art & Design:
"Night after night, collectors and dealers tentatively watched as paintings by Monet and Matisse, Bacon and Warhol went unsold. "
Read full article: In Faltering Economy, Auction Houses Crash Back to Earth, by Carol Vogel
On the bookshelf. One of my favorites by poet Li-Young Lee, from his book of the same title:
The City In Which I Loved You
And when, in the city in which I love you,
even my most excellent song goes unanswered,
and I mount the scabbed streets,
the long shouts of avenues,
and tunnel sunken night in search of you...
That I negotiate fog, bituminous
rain rining like teeth into the beggar's tin,
or two men jackaling a third in some alley
weirdly lit by a couch on fire, that I
drag my extinction in search of you...
Past the guarded schoolyards, the boarded-up churches, swastikaed
synagogues, defended houses of worship, past
newspapered windows of tenements, along the violated,
the prosecuted citizenry, throughout this
storied, buttressed, scavenged, policed
city I call home, in which I am a guest...
a bruise, blue
in the muscle, you
impinge upon me.
As bone hugs the ache home, so
I'm vexed to love you, your body
the shape of returns, your hair a torso
of light, your heat
I must have, your opening
I'd eat, each moment
of that soft-finned fruit,
inverted fountain in which I don't see me.
My tongue remembers your wounded flavor.
The vein in my neck
adores you. A sword
stands up between my hips,
my hidden fleece send forth its scent of human oil.
The shadows under my arms,
I promise, are tender, the shadows
under my face. Do not calculate,
but come, smooth other, rough sister.
Yet, how will you know me
among the captives, my hair grown long,
my blood motley, my ways trespassed upon?
In the uproar, the confusion
of accents and inflections
how will you hear me when I open my mouth?
Look for me, one of the drab population
under fissured edifices, fractured
artifices. Make my various
names flock overhead,
I will follow you.
Hew me to your beauty.
Stack in me the unaccountable fire,
bring on me the iron leaf, but tenderly.
Folded one hundred times and
creased, I'll not crack.
Threshed to excellence, I'll achieve you.
but in the city
in which I love you,
no one comes, no one
meets me in the brick clefts;
in the wedged dark,
no finger touches me secretly, no mouth
tastes my flawless salt,
no one wakens the honey in the cells, finds the humming
in the ribs, the rich business in the recesses;
hulls clogged, I continue laden, translated
by exhaustion and time's appetite, my sleep abandoned
in bus stations and storefront stoops,
my insomnia erected under a sky
cross-hatched by wires, branches,
and black flights of rain. Lewd body of wind
jams me in the passageways, doors slam
like guns going off, a gun goes off, a pie plate spins
past, whizzing its thin tremolo,
a plastic bag, fat with wind, barrels by and slaps
a chain-link fence, wraps it like clung skin.
In the excavated places,
I waited for you, and I did not cry out.
In the derelict rooms, my body needed you,
and there was such flight in my breast.
During the daily assaults, I called to you,
and my voice pursued you,
even backward
to that other city
in which I saw a woman
squat in the street
beside a body,
and fan with a handkerchief flies from its face.
That woman
was not me. And
the corpse
lying there, lying there
so still it seemed with great effort, as though
his whole being was concentrating on the hole
in his forehead, so still
I expected he'd sit up any minute and laugh out loud:
that man was not me;
his wound was his, his death not mine.
and the soldier
who fired the shot, then lit a cigarette:
he was not me.
And the ones I do not see
in cities all over the world,
the ones sitting, standing, lying down, those
in prisons playing checkers with their knocked-out teeth:
they are not me. Some of them are
my age, even my height and weight;
none of them is me.
The woman who is slapped, the man who is kicked,
the ones who don't survive,
whose names I do not know;
they are not me forever,
the ones who no longer live
in the cities in which
you are not,
the cities in which I looked for you.
The rain stops, the moon
in her breaths appears overhead.
the only sound now is a far flapping.
Over the National Bank, the flag of some republic or other
gallops like water on fire to tear itself away.
If I feel the night
move to disclosures or crescendos,
it's only because I'm famished
for meaning; the night
merely dissolves.
And your otherness is perfect as my death.
Your otherness exhausts me,
like looking suddenly up from here
to impossible stars fading.
Everything is punished by your absence.
Is prayer, then, the proper attitude
for the mind that longs to be freely blown,
but which gets snagged on the barb
called world, that
tooth-ache, the actual? What prayer
would I build? And to whom?
Where are you
in the cities in which I love you,
the cities daily risen to work and to money,
to the magnificent miles and the gold coasts?
Morning comes to this city vacant of you.
Pages and windows flare, and you are not there.
Someone sweeps his portion of sidewalk,
wakens the drunk, slumped like laundry,
and you are gone.
You are not in the wind
which someone notes in the margins of a book.
You are gone out of the small fires in abandoned lots
where human figures huddle,
each aspiring to its own ghost.
Between brick walls, in a space no wider than my face,
a leafless sapling stands in mud.
In its branches, a nest of raw mouths
gaping and cheeping, scrawny fires that must eat.
My hunger for you is no less than theirs.
At the gates of the city in which I love you,
the sea hauls the sun on its back,
strikes the land, which rebukes it.
what ardor in its sliding heft,
a flameless friction on the rocks.
Like the sea, I am recommended by my orphaning.
Noisy with telegrams not received,
quarrelsome with aliases,
intricate with misguided journeys,
by my expulsions have I come to love you.
Straight from my father's wrath,
and long from my mother's womb,
late in this century and on a Wednesday morning,
bearing the mark of one who's experienced
neither heaven nor hell,
my birthplace vanished, my citizenship earned,
in league with stones of the earth, I
enter, without retreat or help from history,
the days of no day, my earth
of no earth, I re-enter
the city in which I love you.
And I never believed that the multitude
of dreams and many words were vain.
Read other poems in this collection: The City In Which I Loved You
The word Ensler, author of "The Vaginia Monologues", attributes to the 10-year war "fought on the bodies of women" in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, "where thousands of women and girls have been systematically raped during a 10-year war that some say has cost more lives than any other war since World War II."
How has this happened and what accounts for the world's mute response?
Read the article Woman: 'They wanted to destroy my body and spirit' to learn more.
A special thank you to the author of the blog Why Paisley?? for granting permission to repost this one here.
"This short was made for the 72 Hour Film Festival in Frederick, Maryland.
All of the clips used in this film came from a reel of 35mm nitrate, found in an old theater somewhere in Pennsylvania.
This reel is now in the hands of the Library of Congress."
(Film clip courtesy of CineGraphic)
I think this clip may have activated a latent foot fetish! ;)
Maya Deren in her own words. One to listen to more than watch.
(Duration: 4:25)
Maya Deren - A Study In Choreography For Camera (2:13)
Witch's Cradle (1943): an incomplete black and white film, shot in NYC at Peggy Guggehnheim's Art of this Century Gallery, by Maya Deren and Marcel Duchamp.
PART ONE (5:03):
PART TWO (6:44):
"Ballet Mécanique (1924) was a project by the American composer George Antheil and the filmmaker/artist Fernand Léger. Although the film was intended to use Antheil's score as a soundtrack, the two parts were not brought together until the 1990s. As a composition, Ballet Mécanique is Antheil's best known and most enduring work. It remains famous for its radical style and instrumentation as well as its storied history." (Learn More)
Part 1 (duration: 8:30)
Part 2 (duration: 7:41)
Posts
All Comments
