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Greetings and hello.

This is a list of weblog posts for June 2003.

6/28/03; 11:10:42 PM:

". . . ideas want expression and they get expressed and then they have a life of their own."(Mirrors Reflected:vog blog:vlog 2.0:Adrian Miles)

6/27/03; 7:24:03 PM:

"To talk about ones feelings . . . To be passionate is . . . To speak frankly and freely . . . To be intuitive . . . To act upon intuition . . . Not regretting . . . To grasp the pattern and disclose . . . To push these patterns . . ."(nqpaofu.com by jouke kleerebezem )

"And without love, what do you have? "(FTrain.com)

". . . tolerance of uncertainty. . ."(Sebastian Fiedler)

"the heart breaks and breaks"(Stanley Kunitz: via wood s lot)

6/26/03; 11:32:28 PM:

nietzsche slumbers
what exists before
waiting rain
breach birthing
old aged grey
tonight the thunder
rocked the earth
and the thought
of unforgiving longing
tempered the voice
activating all inner channels
demanding answers
from secret sources
sources exposed
during wild strokes of invention
leaping into the hearts of others
stomping and shouting
relentless smashings
forced entries
beast wanderings
howling horror
the sight of dry rain
barren concrete warning

past haunting memory burning

6/25/03; 11:35:56 PM:
("Fisherman and the Widow" /Luke Anguhadluq /Baker Lake)

" IQUALUIT - A community of Baffin Island printmakers recently celebrated its 30th anniversary with the launch of its 2003 collection."(CBC: Baffin Island printmakers launch new collection Joanne Stassen, The Arts Report )

6/24/03; 11:34:38 PM:

"'I felt a terrific longing for a kind of ensemble,' Mr. Chaikin told author William Goldman, for the book, "The Season." "I wanted to play with actors, actors who felt a sensitivity for one another... In order to come to a vocabulary, we had to teach each other: we had no ambitions other than to meet and play around..."(Playbill : Joseph Chaikin, Director and Actor Who Founded Avant Garde Open Theatre, Dead at 67 By Kenneth Jones)

Presence
(memorium)

the eyes, the eyes (the eyes)
the sunken space of vision territory
a place to play in the zone of imagination
the tongue resting abandoned in the cave of the mouth
the heart held exiled in the occupied sphere of the rib cage
abandonment, exile, occupation, and habitation
the living quest(going home)ion (inhabited)
(quest home going home coming)

6/23/03; 11:40:19 PM:

". . . he watched nearly every interview ever done with him - and was disappointed by what he found. "There's nothing in them about spontaneity as the secret of life, nothing about the protective qualities of art," he says. 'So that's what I decided to look at in the film. Let's give the public the Fellini that we don't know..." Fellini ruminates about everything from religion and death to art and memory. He discusses the process of filmmaking: "The instant when I begin to work- when I become a filmmaker - someone takes over. A mysterious invader, an invader that I don't know... He directs everything for me. But it's someone else, not me, with whom I coexist, someone I don't know, or know only by hearsay." And he offers this fabulist little anti sound bite, from which Pettigrew takes his title: "I'm a born liar. For me the things that are most real are invented."(NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL: Directing the Director /A documentarian looks at Fellini's life, art and lies By Michael J. Agovino)

6/22/03; 10:11:55 PM:

". . . last year in Zhouzhuang I [(c) 2003 eugene kuo] shot the picture below of a woman backstage preparing for a performance of Kunqu opera."(carte blanche pedicure)

6/21/03; 5:43:04 PM:

". . . the links that constitute your blog and blogging. What this weaves a community which is not community as people, but an emergent semantic or epistemological community, people are sort of attached there, bit like avatars, but this link economy has its own forces and logics and it isn't really about community as social agency, but community as information nodes meeting up. People are just the vehicle these information nodes exploit."(vog blog::vlog 2.0)

vs

"I believe that blogging is not about personal publishing. It's about finding your identity in conversations with others. Blogging tools are not mature yet and for an occasional reader it's difficult to see the roots of blogging dialogues. I hope that this collection of links can help you to trace conversations that feed my thought and writing."(Mathemagenic sidebar)

"1. Keep a Research Diary 2. Maintain an Electronic Bibliography 3. Know Your Search Engines 4. An Archiving System for Useful Info 5. Learn The Composition of your Research Community 6. Document Useful Learning Experiences 7. Keep a Professional Home Page 8. Maintain an Updated CV 9. Get Involved Early On 10. Develop Research Meta-awareness" (via Mathemagenic /originally Idris' post

and

"trust themselves(yourself) and get to work on what you think is important . . . Do NOT wait . . . be loose with your independent project classes. If you find you want to do something different than what you wrote up, then do it . . ."(Lex's Add-ons to Idris' Post)

"Smoke and Candles -This image was taken in Rokuhara Chinkouji temple during Obon. The ethereal form in the top half of the image is actually a person wearing a white shirt walking by. The exposure time was about 4 seconds."(The Foreigner in Japan:THE PLAY OF LIGHT - Kyoto at Night a photo essay by David Culton)

6/20/03; 9:11:57 PM: burnt smell
in the air
haze brings tears
static hears rain
settle down
into the cool wind
erotic tension rises
sky clears
blinds bang
against the window
startles the dusk
no penance
I am catholic audblog:burnt smell

6/19/03; 7:35:55 PM:

"As Eric Jensen points out, "Emotions drive the threesome of attention, meaning, and memory." In essence, that just about sums up what we know about learning: attending to information, constructing meaning, and lodging it in our memory. Brain researchers have shown that emotions are critical to patterning, which is the way that information is organized in the brain, how we are able to retrieve that information. Emotions assist in both evaluating and integrating information and experiences."

"However, as we know, not all emotions facilitate learning. Stress, frustration, anger, fear--all can overwhelm the brain with hormones and thought patterns that totally shut down one's ability to learn. When major emotional flooding occurs it is true that one literally cannot think straight."(Educator's Voice)

6/18/03; 11:27:25 PM:

" The poet does not believe in miracles, but in mysteries."(from THE FOREST AND THE TREES: Four Seasons From a Journal About Place and Poetry Wesley McNair)

6/17/03; 11:11:48 PM:

"Susan Sontag to get German publishers' prize: Germany's book publishers association has announced that its peace prize this year will go Susan Sontag, the U.S. author and cultural critic. She will receive it at the Frankfurt Book Fair this October. Today, the association said Sontag stood for the "dignity of free thinking" in a world "of falsified images and mutilated truths"."(Deutsche Welle)

"We have a robotic president who assures us that America stands tall. A wide spectrum of public figures, in and out of office, who are strongly opposed to the policies being pursued abroad by this Administration apparently feel free to say nothing more than that they stand united behind President Bush. A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in Washington and elsewhere, about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counter-intelligence, about options available to American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a smart program of military defense. But the public is not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality. The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy. "(Susan Sontag, The New Yorker, September 24, 2001)

6/16/03; 11:39:22 PM:

". . .the Cartier Foundation of Contemporary Art in Paris: "Yanomami: The Spirit of the Forest," which runs through Oct. 12. The exhibition is not an ethnographic show. Rather it is an attempt to explore the parallels between the imagination of the Yanomami and the creative process of Western artists."(NYTimes:Arts:Artists Touched by Amazon Tribe By ALAN RIDING)

6/15/03; 11:35:14 PM: . . . contemplating trust . . . it's about passion, genuineness, integrity . . . respect not accuracy/truth . . . truth is too illusive & just facts which can often be manipulated . . . whose truth . . . to care . . .

6/14/03; 2:50:37 PM:

"God bless Canada. First it gave the world the manifold joys of Hockey Night in Canada. Now it's presented us with En Français, Comme en Anglais, It's Easy to Criticize, a captivating performance piece by Jacob Wren and PME, mounted at P.S. 122. Toronto-Quebec kissing cousins of ERS and Collapsable Giraffe, but more somber and purposeful, the five-member group has created a collage that's part dance, part social critique, part heady fucking around."

"Four tables supporting stereo equipment anchor the dimly lit stage. Lacking a conventional plot, the piece comprises a sequence of moments that appear random but have their own internal logic. Performers Martin Bélanger and Tracy Wright discuss theorist Gilles Deleuze on one side of the stage; on the other, two women (Julie Andrée T. and Sylvie Lachance) dance together silently. Bélanger disappears, but later speaks in French over a walkie-talkie illuminated by a spotlight. Wren runs repeatedly between the front and back of the stage, delivering a monologue on how the World Trade Center attack has confused his piece's critique of bourgeois comfort. The ensemble stops for a group discussion of the work. Wright confronts Wren, complaining that the last thing the world needs is another boy genius. The group breaks into dance, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes gently coordinated. Andrée T. has a particularly compelling presence-her sullenness only makes her movement more fascinating."

"Alternately hypnotic and amusing, En Français-like much postmodern work-interrogates the idea of the performance itself. But it never fails to be that performance, and a damn good one. "The real avant-garde is to be found in doing nothing," Wren observes, despairing of the action-driven, media-saturated world. He and his ensemble have happily ignored their own counsel. "(VillageVoice:theater:Headin' South by Brian Parks)

6/13/03; 12:13:37 AM:

"One of the greatest of 20th-century German critics, Theodor Adorno is remembered for his much misunderstood remark that "it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz." But within another of his statements lies the true imperative of political theater: "Art is not a matter of pointing up alternatives, but resisting, solely through artistic form, the course of the world, which continues to hold a pistol to the heads of human beings." "(TheVillageVoice:Theater:Beyond Neurosis What Kind of Political Theater Are We Really After? by Charles McNulty)

"Yet the ensemble's dancer-like discipline and formal finesse (especially noted in the fluidity of its environmental staging) made it impossible for me to dismiss Problématique Provisoire as clichéd avant-garde indulgence. The production provided compelling research into the nature of cultivated artistic bodies in theatrical space[~]and our inherently leering relationship to them as spectators. "(TheVillageVoice:Theater:The Festival de Théâtre des Amériques in Montreal North to the Avant-Garde by Charles McNulty)

6/12/03; 12:18:24 AM:

"The fact is that we are not even masters of our own conscious memory. What we remember and what we do not is subject to an emotional control, which follows a simple principle. If a given impression has emotional meaning we learn it. If it does not trigger emotional response it is not learned. In this case amygdala works as a kind of [OE]emotiometer[base '], which regulates hippocampus and conscious learning. This serves a purpose: to economise the resources with regard to what to learn. So, if you want someone to remember what you say, make sure that it has emotional meaning for the person who has to remember it."(elearningpost: June 11/2003 via Learning Circuits)

"This is a spooky, melancholy work, merely 65 minutes in length but concentrated in its intentions, Beckett-like in its ellipses (though largely without Beckett's wry and painful humor) and finely layered with suggestions that performing is remembering, that remembering is itself living, that the stage is no less than the world. It's redolent of the implicit passion of 20th-century French intellectualism. (Duras died in 1996.) You won't be surprised that a recording of Édith Piaf is involved"(NYTimes:THEATER REVIEW | 'SAVANNAH BAY' Women, Embracing Across Generations, Find Life in Memory By BRUCE WEBER)

6/11/03; 12:07:00 AM: (SELECTED SCHOOL AND COLLEGE BUILDINGS FROM A CAMPUS designed and built by Christopher Alexander and his associates from PATTERNLANGUAGE.COM / CENTER FOR ENVIRONMENTAL STRUCTURE )

"The structure of life I have described in buildings -- the structure which I believe to be objective -- is deeply and inextricably connected with the human person, and with the innermost nature of human feeling. In this fourth volume I shall approach this topic of the inner feeling in a building, where there is a kind of personal thickness -- a source, or ground, something almost occult -- in which we find that the ultimate questions of architecture and art concern some connection of incalculable depth, between the made work (building, painting, ornament, street) and the inner 'I' which each of us experiences."

"What I call 'the I' is that interior element in a work of art, which makes one feel related to it. It may occur in a leaf, or in a picture, in a house, in a wave, even in a grain of sand, or in an ornament. It is not ego. It is not me. It is not individual at all, having to do with me, or you. It is humble, and enormous: that thing in common which each one of us has in us. It is the spirit which animates each living center."

"I believe that the ultimate effort of all serious art, is to be making things which connect with this I of the person. This 'I,' not normally available, is dredged up, forced to the light, forced into the light of day, by the work of art."

"My hypothesis is this. That all value depends on a structure in which each center, the life of each center, approaches this simple,forgotten, remembered, unremembered 'I.' That in the living work, each living center really is a connection to this 'I.'"(Christopher Alexander. An excerpt from Book 4 of the Nature of Order.)

6/10/03; 12:14:16 AM:

"The critical (in the literary sense) and the clinical (in the medical sense) may be destined to enter into a new relationship of mutual learning."(Daniel W. Smith. "A Life of Pure Immanenece": Deleuze's "Critique et Clinique" Project)

6/9/03; 12:10:40 AM:

". . .a rare tour de force of literary imagination and philosophical speculation"

6/8/03; 5:21:40 PM:

"What Mr. Bergman has now done, he says, is to take out 'a pair of big metal scissors and cut Ibsen's iron corset into pieces without altering the basic themes. It's a resonant analogy from a man whose art is based on peeling layers - social and psychological - to unveil the skin beneath the clothes, the skull beneath the skin and the soul beyond the skull. Anyone who knows Bergman film classics like "The Seventh Seal" and "Persona" is well aware of this penetrating gift for finding the spirit in the flesh and vice versa. But the same skill has been equally evident in Mr. Bergman's work for the stage, including his revelatory, searingly physical productions of "A Doll's House" and "Long Day's Journey Into Night," both seen at the Brooklyn Academy more than a decade ago."(nytimes: Arts)

6/7/03; 7:56:50 PM:

"All of the actor's exercises and preparations, then, are directed at reaching the body at that point where it functions as matrix and threshold. The objective is to "re-code" the body, as it were, so that when it behaves in the context of the scene it will presence the character in the play and not the actor. The actor's training, according to Barba, teaches her how to separate herself from what her body shows. The effacement that lies at the heart of the theatre metamorphosis is achieved when a new form is instituted which functions as the soul 'of a living but re-invented body ... [giving rise to] a behaviour which has been separated from the behaviour of every day, a naturalness which is the fruit of artificiality.'"(Barba. The Paper Canoe, p. 104.)

6/6/03; 10:15:51 PM:

"Several field trips to Africa and Afghanistan during his course of study launched his idea to write an all-encompassing, scientific theory of nomadology. With this extensive project he intended to prove that the human race, in the process of becoming human, had acquired a strong migratory drive or instinct to walk long distances through the seasons. This instinctive wanderlust had been repressed into the unconscious as humans had become increasingly sedentary, but it continued to well up under the warped conditions of settlement and found its outlets in violence, greed, territoriality, status-seeking, or a mania of the new."(www.LitEncyc.com. Richard Utz)

"The Songlines demands as an ideal reader one who would not easily accept any one, exclusive interpretation of the world and its objects but who would enter into a creative and joyfully nomadic relationship with the text[base ']s own bricolage, travelling across its surfaces in a way not dissimilar from the one used by the Australian aborigines on their intersecting walkabouts."(www.LitEncyc.com. Richard Utz)

6/5/03; 8:33:52 PM:

"The government document talks about 'creativity' as a capacity for spontaneous expression lying dormant within each individual, just waiting to be set free. 'Everyone is creative', announces the report: 'imagination, innovation and original expression are vital components of what it is to be human and to be part of society.'"(Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). 2001 Green Paper Culture and Creativity: The Next Ten Years [pdf])

vs

"For a start, they talk about artistic creation as being painful and scary rather than uplifting. 'It's the most terrifying thing to do. It causes me a great deal of pain', said composer Harrison Birtwistle. His problems with the latest score stop him sleeping - and even dominate his dreams. The painter Paula Rego describes her work as 'fraught with danger and risk of total embarrassment' - it is a leap into the unknown, and most of these leaps end in failure: 'the idea goes wrong many times.'"(John Tusa. On Creativity: interviews exploring the process)

6/3/03; 11:49:55 PM: However, I ask this of them:
when my sons grow up punish them, men,
by bothering them on these things as I bothered you,
if it seems to you they care about money or anything else
more than about virtue,
or if they seem to be something they are not,
reproach them as I have you,
because they do not care about what they should,
and think they are something when they are worth nothing.
And if you do these things,
I will have experienced justice from you,
both myself and my sons.
But now it is already time to go away,
I to die, and you to live;
but which of us goes to a better situation,
is unclear to all except to God.
(Apologia Sokratous Defense Of Socrates by Plato Translated by Sanderson Beck: Final Admonitions) At once rational and passionate, Socrates' final speech to the Senate before he was sentenced to death is a moving defence of his right to free speech. Adapted and performed by Nick Mancuso. (radio one:cbc:ideas:june 3)
:: comment :: . . . listened to the final words with astonishment and awe . . .

6/2/03; 11:04:40 PM:

"To write this poem, I had to tell myself to lie still in the bed and listen for just the right line or word to come out of the air. I had to force myself because there were so many easy flippant wrong lines. But I had to be still and listen late at night or early in the morning. And then, still half asleep, get myself the proverbial pen and paper and write down my perception. Sometimes I would fall asleep at my desk and do this, too: Dream a line and snap myself into wakefulness. After I had all the lines, I needed to arrange them, not especially chronologically, but so as to both make sense and draw meaning and feeling. It took me several months to bring this poem to completion because I cared so much for the writing and for the person, which gave me both discouragement and stimulus." (WORKING NOTES, MARSHA CAMPBELL)

6/1/03; 11:42:34 PM:

"Maxwell's and ERS's pieces are very contemporary takes on what Grotowski, Brook, and Barba were investigating 30 years ago. However, being modern media kids, they approach theatrical moments with an off-the-cuff informality that's very different from the formal reverence many of the '60 experiments held dear. Actually, Grotowski's work always had a biting edge of Eastern European sarcasm that never came across in the writings about the work, that could only be experienced. This ironic edge gave the work a great complexity and depth - a trickster theater that implicated the audience."