Video tour of a working alchemist's laboratory in France. There is a special quality to the space where stuff is made with the complete intensity of the intelligence, the heart, the soul, the spirit. There is no appreciation of "sterility" here, instead the opposite, it is as though the ceramics and glassware in their wooden shrines and dusty counters invite impurity to give meaning to purity in contrast, and in context...just as the imperfection of your lover is the perfect setting for the gem of your love, which is perfect in anticipation and regret only, never in the moment of work....impure, dust-blessed, asymmetrical work: A mere promise of the final art. And after the true art, the artist has disappeared, and the tourists parade back and forth in their dusty settings, looking everywhere for the clue except to their own imperfections, their own materia prima, their own lapis exilis.
9.11.09
Sixty Two
My birthday this year came at the end of a year-long web redesign effort, so it got overshadowed by the drama at work. In fact, it fell on a Thursday before a Monday launch, so you know it was barely noticed. Nonetheless, I got a birthday song from the staff, a nice dinner with my kids and wife, and a furnace tune up to really top off the joy.
So what do I know?
I have looked back over the projects of interest to me in the past two years, and see this list:
1. Starting to translate Lao Tzu's Tao Te King. Exposed to some chinese language basics, and collected over 20 versions of the book by various translators, including several from the 19th century and earlier.
2. Making a tree diagram of Wittgenstein's Tractatus using his numbering system
3. Drawing a major series of historical philosophical comix
4. Reading about and studying in some detail the history of the Vietnam war
5. Getting in touch with myself as an intuitive healer
6. Studying the effects of electromagnetic radiation on human biology
7. Making a film of Cheney's wedding that took about 100 hours, even though its short.
8. Making some 30+ necklaces out of gemstones, learning a bit of the craft
9. Attending to three family members in the throes of major health problems
10. Participating in a major web redesign at work
11. Getting my Library into a computer catalog (17 boxes so far out of probably 30)
12. Digitizing all my old family vhs tapes
13 Studying the electrical and biological nature of cancer, tracking down Bob Beck's various treatments and gathering the components to build his therapeutic devices.
15. Assembling an electronics studio and craft studio of some substance, including cool measurement devices, such as oscilloscopes and impedence meters.
16 Learning enough about electromagnetics to make sense of the projects and people I have been studying
17. Coming to terms with my essential mediocrity, on a global scale, even though I can claim some limited excellence here and there locally.
18. Gathering and reading 20+ books for a projected biography of Andrija Puharich
19. Studying the shameful history of CIA involvement in mind control and the nazi influence on post war american technology, concomitant to the Puharich book
20. Revisiting and updating my knowledge about UFOs and the paranormal ( in re: Puharich again)
21. Spending dozens of hours bringing my sketching and drawing skills back up to speed.
22. Participating in a year-long course of Tibetan medicine.
23. Learning and practicing Tai Chi for 7 months
24. Mastering the challenge of the perfect fruit muffin: exactly the right texture, taste and top.
25. Studying the fundamental ideas in math behind string theory, quantum mechanics, and the more fringe forms of the electromagnetic critique of Maxwell's so-called standard equations.
26. Moving into a meaningful dialog with a friend from High School who went to Vietnam, and became estranged from everything I thought I knew about life.
27. Diving into Twitter to the extent of gathering 1800 followers, now down to 1720 or so.
28. Starting a twitter account for the county and keeping it up.
So what do I know?
I have looked back over the projects of interest to me in the past two years, and see this list:
1. Starting to translate Lao Tzu's Tao Te King. Exposed to some chinese language basics, and collected over 20 versions of the book by various translators, including several from the 19th century and earlier.
2. Making a tree diagram of Wittgenstein's Tractatus using his numbering system
3. Drawing a major series of historical philosophical comix
4. Reading about and studying in some detail the history of the Vietnam war
5. Getting in touch with myself as an intuitive healer
6. Studying the effects of electromagnetic radiation on human biology
7. Making a film of Cheney's wedding that took about 100 hours, even though its short.
8. Making some 30+ necklaces out of gemstones, learning a bit of the craft
9. Attending to three family members in the throes of major health problems
10. Participating in a major web redesign at work
11. Getting my Library into a computer catalog (17 boxes so far out of probably 30)
12. Digitizing all my old family vhs tapes
13 Studying the electrical and biological nature of cancer, tracking down Bob Beck's various treatments and gathering the components to build his therapeutic devices.
15. Assembling an electronics studio and craft studio of some substance, including cool measurement devices, such as oscilloscopes and impedence meters.
16 Learning enough about electromagnetics to make sense of the projects and people I have been studying
17. Coming to terms with my essential mediocrity, on a global scale, even though I can claim some limited excellence here and there locally.
18. Gathering and reading 20+ books for a projected biography of Andrija Puharich
19. Studying the shameful history of CIA involvement in mind control and the nazi influence on post war american technology, concomitant to the Puharich book
20. Revisiting and updating my knowledge about UFOs and the paranormal ( in re: Puharich again)
21. Spending dozens of hours bringing my sketching and drawing skills back up to speed.
22. Participating in a year-long course of Tibetan medicine.
23. Learning and practicing Tai Chi for 7 months
24. Mastering the challenge of the perfect fruit muffin: exactly the right texture, taste and top.
25. Studying the fundamental ideas in math behind string theory, quantum mechanics, and the more fringe forms of the electromagnetic critique of Maxwell's so-called standard equations.
26. Moving into a meaningful dialog with a friend from High School who went to Vietnam, and became estranged from everything I thought I knew about life.
27. Diving into Twitter to the extent of gathering 1800 followers, now down to 1720 or so.
28. Starting a twitter account for the county and keeping it up.
22.9.09
Raimond Hoghe at the Walker Art Center, Sept. 19 2009
Hoghe stands at the back of the theatre, just out of the reach of the lights, absorbed into the murk of the dark curtains. He is about to perform a very peculiar kind of 21st century magic in this space.
He is transfixed in the shadows, a dim moon of a face. We take our seats in the small theater, and notice him noticing the audience. For minutes he stands motionless. There is no transition when the performance begins, he steps out from his camouflage of shadow, and begins a procession around the perimeter of the lighted area of the stage. His slow, almost cartoon-like motion snaps a taut line from top of head to back of extended heel on a diagonal of intent, slackens it and reverses it from left to right foot, toward some unreachable goal. The audience's sense of time is stolen from all distractions, carved out with an Xacto blade.
The angle of his body expresses longing clamped into a discipline. A face gives away nothing of use as you try to decipher the ritual. You feel he is holding your head under water, until you exhale, and release your own tension and expectation. He has taken over your prerogatives of time and patience from his first gestures. Soon you will surrender your expectations of entertainment, meaning, and the very centrality of the body to identity. Not a bad agenda for a dance.
Most of the music selections are in "quotations". The taped broadcasts of the Olympic competition are intended to be jarring and ordinary at the same time. The montage of quotations sustain an ironic level of perception of the Bolero. Once or twice you can just listen to the music. Often you are hearing representations of other people's musical experience, while watching the dancer's represent Hoghe's highly processed experience of the reverie, pathos, "duende" and geometry of the Bolero....something our stereotypes of physicality and body image would seem to deny him.
His quotation, inversion of distance and closeness, intensification of marginal aspects, and ease with form, allows him to reclaim something we, or someone who resembles us, had taken away from him. It is a retaking, done with wit and discipline. It is too gentle and architectural to be felt as a rebuke. More like a gift of correction.
At one point, after his attractive and able dancers have inflected the entire lighted field of the stage with their step and gesture, Hoghe emerges with an aerosol spray bottle. He stands still, then deftly conjures an angelic fog with a spray. The fog has a life and a heart. It caresses the back of his head as he strides away from his translucent, weightless progeny. It billows slowly, and writhes, attenuates, the body of an idea teasing the spotlights, and then vanishes into the interstices of the of the air.
Hoghe is a charming teacher and fierce interlocutor, drawing us into the labyrinth of our prejudice, and meeting us in the center. Not with a monstrosity, no Minotaur, but with a vulnerability; an image of him lying on his side, shirtless, dozing, exposed, and at peace with the moment. The moment is poignant and makes it easy to forgive his occasional lapse into a mannered minimalism.
I have attended performances at the Walker for over 40 years, and this was one of the most satisfying, and challenging. Hoghe is an arts journalist who decided to challenge conventional ideals of physical beauty and dance performance with his own presence on stage. His scoliosis of the spine is pronounced enough that it cannot be ignored, but not enough to prevent him from performing at a compelling level.
In the space between mere habits of perception and the sense of wonder, Hoghe shares with us a dance. It is a tai chi of quoted gestures and a mixtape of greatly various musics barely contained by the label "Bolero." In the end, it is an invitation to notice, then look again, and finally feel something unique, the transformation of anonymous time into shared time, that transcends attention itself at the insistence of a caring spirit.
You can't ask much more than that.
He is transfixed in the shadows, a dim moon of a face. We take our seats in the small theater, and notice him noticing the audience. For minutes he stands motionless. There is no transition when the performance begins, he steps out from his camouflage of shadow, and begins a procession around the perimeter of the lighted area of the stage. His slow, almost cartoon-like motion snaps a taut line from top of head to back of extended heel on a diagonal of intent, slackens it and reverses it from left to right foot, toward some unreachable goal. The audience's sense of time is stolen from all distractions, carved out with an Xacto blade.
The angle of his body expresses longing clamped into a discipline. A face gives away nothing of use as you try to decipher the ritual. You feel he is holding your head under water, until you exhale, and release your own tension and expectation. He has taken over your prerogatives of time and patience from his first gestures. Soon you will surrender your expectations of entertainment, meaning, and the very centrality of the body to identity. Not a bad agenda for a dance.
Most of the music selections are in "quotations". The taped broadcasts of the Olympic competition are intended to be jarring and ordinary at the same time. The montage of quotations sustain an ironic level of perception of the Bolero. Once or twice you can just listen to the music. Often you are hearing representations of other people's musical experience, while watching the dancer's represent Hoghe's highly processed experience of the reverie, pathos, "duende" and geometry of the Bolero....something our stereotypes of physicality and body image would seem to deny him.
His quotation, inversion of distance and closeness, intensification of marginal aspects, and ease with form, allows him to reclaim something we, or someone who resembles us, had taken away from him. It is a retaking, done with wit and discipline. It is too gentle and architectural to be felt as a rebuke. More like a gift of correction.
At one point, after his attractive and able dancers have inflected the entire lighted field of the stage with their step and gesture, Hoghe emerges with an aerosol spray bottle. He stands still, then deftly conjures an angelic fog with a spray. The fog has a life and a heart. It caresses the back of his head as he strides away from his translucent, weightless progeny. It billows slowly, and writhes, attenuates, the body of an idea teasing the spotlights, and then vanishes into the interstices of the of the air.
Hoghe is a charming teacher and fierce interlocutor, drawing us into the labyrinth of our prejudice, and meeting us in the center. Not with a monstrosity, no Minotaur, but with a vulnerability; an image of him lying on his side, shirtless, dozing, exposed, and at peace with the moment. The moment is poignant and makes it easy to forgive his occasional lapse into a mannered minimalism.
I have attended performances at the Walker for over 40 years, and this was one of the most satisfying, and challenging. Hoghe is an arts journalist who decided to challenge conventional ideals of physical beauty and dance performance with his own presence on stage. His scoliosis of the spine is pronounced enough that it cannot be ignored, but not enough to prevent him from performing at a compelling level.
In the space between mere habits of perception and the sense of wonder, Hoghe shares with us a dance. It is a tai chi of quoted gestures and a mixtape of greatly various musics barely contained by the label "Bolero." In the end, it is an invitation to notice, then look again, and finally feel something unique, the transformation of anonymous time into shared time, that transcends attention itself at the insistence of a caring spirit.
You can't ask much more than that.
14.8.09
Glagolitic script sample
This image of The famous Baščanska ploča, oldest evidence of the glagolitic script, caught my attention while researching Croatia. It has a "Keith Haring" quality to it that looks curiously modern, systematic, and expressive.
Now don't even ask me to pronounce Glagolitic.
Now don't even ask me to pronounce Glagolitic.
10.7.09
Wedding picture.
All brides look like they know something. This one looks like she knows something good.
It is all about them.
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