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“…language spreads itself on the world, and its projections are all we know.”
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“My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.” — Odilon Redon
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“Some years ago while travelling in a bus in Nepal it became clear to me how the perfect music should be. It was a very strong experience. We were driving through a valley at quite low altitude, maybe four to five hundred meters. In that area the landscape was very fertile. There were rice fields, water buffalos, children, trees, parrots and colourful villages full of vibrant life. Behind all of that one could see the mountains standing seven, eight thousand meters high, an inhospitable zone where no one can live. They appeared to be a symbol of eternity and with their shining snow peaks, also of purity. These two things side by side, colourful life and the eternal pure and unreachable, sometimes one dominating, sometimes the other, struck me to be the image of perfect music. The two opposites complemented one another; the fields would not have been so interesting without the mountains, and the mountains without the fields simply too cold. In my music I intend to have both of these elements present, the love of life’s emotions and this dimension of the eternal, unreachable. Music which emphasizes only one of these aspects becomes either too sweet or too cold. The perfect balance of course, will appear for each listener to be in another place.”
Stephan Micus on his own music and also a nice summary of the ethos of ECM
“…jazz as a future music of unfolding investigation rather than as merely a historic tradition celebrating itself.” — AllMusic.com review of Tomasz Stanko’s “Suspended Night”. Wynton Marsalis and other conservative fundamentalists are only doing their audience and their art a disservice.
Just finished Paths of Glory, and I’m reflecting on Kubricks’ body of work as a commentary on our repression and suppression of the feminine; our unwillingness or inability to reconcile conflicting impulses and instincts vis a vis our relation to “nature”, both literal nature and our own natures. How do we deal with the paradox of having to live with, for, and opposed to “mother” nature? Is this all about transcendence? That is, transcendening mortal life, transcending the mundane? Is this all about anxiety and our quest for meaning? Witness the singing German girl at the end of Paths of Glory, the dying sniper at the end of Full Metal Jacket, the sexually repressed couple in Eyes Wide Shut, the isolated and alienated hotel-keeper in The Shining, Barry Lyndon as the prodigal son in eternal search of the “ideal”, Humberts infatuation with youth, beauty, purity, and innocence in Lolita, and the sexual predators of A Clockwork Orange. The theme pervades 2001 and Dr. Strangelove throughout. I’ve thought a lot lately about how all art essentially asks these same fundamental questions questions about our relation to the feminine; as birth-giver, as provider, and as taker of life. Are all our systems and institutions since the dawn of man simply an attempt to both literally and figuratively subjugate women so that we don’t have to face ourselves? Could this speak to where we come from? Where we are going? Who we are? WHY!?
“(6) Give strong drink to him who is perishing,
and wine to those in bitter distress;
(7) let them drink and forget their poverty,
and remember their misery no more.”
—
God, Proverbs 31:6-7.
Thanks to Leah for a great article on alcohol consumption among ancient Israelites.
To all those who would so readily dismiss Monet, and Impressionism in general, as a “simple” and shallow movement, I’d urge you to reconsider:
“What makes these pictures look so modern has partly to do, as every art museum docent points out, with their lack of foreground and background and the obvious debt to Japan. But mostly it’s to do with the aspiration to render the intangible — to make millions of material facts immaterial and unshackle them from time…the effervescent pleasure of seeing and the inevitable disappearance of that pleasure…His pictures ‘make us adore a field, a sky, a beach, a river as though these were shrines which we long to visit, shrines we lose faith in when we see.’”
—Michael Kimmelman, Paris Rediscovers Monet’s Magic at Grand Palais
“…I think, I think the joke is on, I don’t know who the joke’s on really. I don’t even know if there is a joke.” — Simon Munnery, Banksy spokesman - Exit Through the Gift Shop
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I seen one!