5:42pm: American Tempest: Overture
"If a theatre were to take on the task of doing the entire work of Shakespeare, out of an absolute conviction that this is the greatest school of life that they know, that group would be an astonishing group in human terms." - Peter Brook
LET'S GO backward, a vast retreat as we continue to prepare for that great leap, the very big adventure. Start at the front of the first folio, which is to say, more or less at the end of his career, da capo al fine. The Tempest. Shakespeare's farewell to music. The perfect storm is the one that never resolves. Favorite of occultists, theoreticians, allegorists and other post-colonial thinkers. Welles loved it but significantly had to imagine that he'd directed it -- a Prospero in parable only, if that isn't redundant. Jarman loved it so much he refused to see it in the flesh for fear of spoiling his own vision of the text. Auden hated it so much he loved it. Mozart ran out of time. How does the Tempest function? In particular, how does it function "for us," children of the New World an ocean and almost four centuries away from the original play, written to be performed on a smallish island on the edge of civilization in its adolescent native tongue?
If we were to stage an "American" Tempest that translates that play most effectively and alive, what would that entail?
HOMAGE TO: ZARTUSHT, Ted Hughes, Peter Brook, Fulcanelli, CF Russell, Giacomo Balla (vox), Raoul "Hyle" Hausmann, Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitter(z), JRRT, "Sir" David Lindsay, Beelzebub's grandson, AMAROK, snake-handlers and all Pentecostals here & abroad.
Current Music: "Canzone di maggio," Giacomo Balla (1914)
11:53am: Time Machine Argot: Sexing the Cube
I'm interested in outcomes. Generate a cubic environment. To the extent to which your space mirrors the world -- that is, to the extent to which you will avoid the autodidact's embarrassment -- it will conform to the right-hand rule along with other fundamental principles. This is why, for example, your cube should resemble a die even when rolled. It is also why a cabalist may find "God" in "a dog," but why "God" and "dog" remain two separate entities in a handed universe. On a higher level of complexity, this is why you will not find "dogs" in "heaven," although this is where Dharma is said to reside.
Your cube requires three axes and an overall polarity that points toward a fourth dimension. This last factor is what determines the handedness or gender of your resultant in the world. Note that this is a "moral" dimension only incidentally, in the sense that history may be made by the winners of the current iteration but written by the losers of another. In parable, you have won -- but in parable only. There will not be a New York series this year, for example. Or in the terms of the counter-canon, the ascending hack hits the wall and your cube achieves its gender.
For our purposes, call the axes A, B and C and give them their masks to wear. Sorastro, Tamino, Papageno and their dates; those work. Tradition, history and the modern. Grandma, woman and daughter. Call the tip of the arrow "inflation." We began as a bit of dirt attached to a word, and all the rest of our stuff -- from our faces on out -- accrued. Certain contexts are inflationary and others are not. We see this in the relationship of sigilistic construction [or archaic "poetry"] to the broad field of language, and vice versa. Much is said but little actually made, for example, of Ferdinand de Saussure's intense late interest in archaic Latin poetry as an exercise in the anagrammatic reinflation of "sigilized" text.
6:22pm: Time Machine: Argot! (Prelude & Fugiens)
The dew [ros] keeps flowing this year, a good three weeks after the calendrical equinox should otherwise have rung the bell on the season. Naturally, I find this not only interesting but very funny. Weather is water's politics.
At one point memory training was as widespread as piano lessons were recently -- or HTML today.
ON ONE QUESTION, people of all shades of enlightened XVIII Century opinion were agreed: they did not approve of fairy stories. The humble folk-tales had indeed been kept out of respectable print ever since printing began. In Tudor and Stuart times, the literate part of the population had looked on them as peasant crudities. The Puritans objected to them because they were untrue, frivolous and of dubious morality. To the Age of Reason they appeared uncouth and irrational [...] in general, anything that smacked of impossibility, absurdity, unbridled fancy was alien to XVIII Century ways of thought. The lady writers at the end of the century were at pains to dissociate themselves from the idea of any such license. Their literal-mindedness indeed could be formidable. Mary Jane Kilner, in her foreword to THE ADVENTURES OF A PINCUSHION (late 1780s), pointed out to her young readers that inanimate objects 'cannot be sensible of any thing which happens, as they can neither hear, see nor understand.'( Read more... )
7:16pm: Birds for the Mind
THERE WAS ONCE an old swan who, it is said, was "ever speaking of morality, but otherwise in his conduct." He would instruct the birds and they would fish in the sea for food to repay his teaching. When they were gone, their eggs disappeared, first one and then another and so on. One bird who noticed that stayed behind, only to discover that the old swan was eating the eggs. "In great sorrow," our bird told his fellows, who, seeing the crime for themselves, "approached that wretch of false conduct and slew him."( Read more... )
my truth, your truth and the truth
II. OLD MAYA, supreme architect of the sidereal entities, he whose name means illusion, occasionally suffers a really bad day. Once, for example, he was aboard his people's great triplicate city of iron and silver and gold (he'd built it himself) when Siva shot it down with a single arrow. Crafty old Maya only survived that one because a little bird had told him to get out of dodge. Another time, he had set up shop in the forest of the king of the snakes when the five brothers of six fathers intervened on the side of fire against rain and burned the place down. That time, it was Krishna who got the drop on the illusion of the world, but Arjuna stopped him from ending it then and there.( Read more... )
my truth, your truth and the truth
III. THE ONLY OTHER CREATURES to survive the burning of the forest were a clan of fledgling birds whose mother quite sensibly ran away (after an argument). The chicks survived by hiding in a hole and praying. Their father was a holy man who had become a bird in order to have children by one form or another, for it is written that there are no childless men in heaven. His name was not Bhisma. When he heard about the fire, he left his second wife (also a bird) and came running.
2:14pm: Anyhow Stories, Moral & Otherwise
Canon and counter-canon. Early on, the work of Hans Christian Andersen inspired much the same urge to panic in me that department store mannequins did. Later on, of course, my baby sister and I could spend a happy Saturday morning laughing it up at the expense of a campy early '70s TV version of "The Little Match Girl," and who wouldn’t enjoy the comic touch of Danny Kaye, but initially there was something about the Andersen stories that disturbed me on a visceral level: the Snow Queen. The Mermaid. The Red Shoes. Not so much the Steadfast Tin Soldier, since he was more of a can-do type despite being you know, horrifically maimed and all. But the Nightingale, the Duck, those people. What strange narcotic power did they represent?
No need to accomplish anything is expressed in "The Ugly Duckling." Things are simply fated and unfold accordingly, whether or not the hero takes some action, while in the fairy story it is the hero’s doing that changes his life.
OPTION ONE. Now, Louis Pauwels was no shrieking modern, having given Alain de Benoist a job, coughed up some francs for Nouvelle Ecole and, in the words of an admirer, "se prononce, sans haine et sans crainte, pour la hiérarchie des capables." And yet this notorious traditionalist, this magician's midwife, once wrote:
6:29pm: Mud Doctors
One of the things that delights me about the Magic Flute is the way it is organized around the cursus hominum as an ordered series with its root in the womb and its octave in death. Along the road through adulthood, there are decisions, but the road itself was still wide enough then to get almost everyone where they're going. This is one of those things that moderns forget, and one of the things that the true canon should make us remember. Time like other rivers only appears to run backward when the weather is especially bad, and even among the twiceborn you can't renounce it until you've been there.
Canon. The commedia reflects this too: you can always cast a harlequin but innamorati are in short supply -- they were twice as funny without Zeppo but what was lost? This is not their story. ( Read more... )
The man who knows his Millet knows his creed.
I been thinkin' what to do with my future. I could be a mud doctor, checkin' out the earth underneath.
HOMAGE TO: Mark Twain, "Is He Living or Is He Dead?"; Martin Heidegger, "Origin of the Work of Art" and "The Question Concerning Technology"; Salvador Dali; Walter Benjamin; Terrence Malick; Walt Whitman; Vincent Van Gogh; Jean-François Millet
Current Music: Camera Obscura, "Come Back Margaret"
AICHER: When I have to stand -- that is, when the figure must simply stand still -- I must imagine what comes next. And this must be so strong, my thoughts must be so strong, that they carry over into the figure itself and breathe life into him, even though he must not move. It is not I who has to breathe; rather, the figure must breathe. Otherwise it is without life. It is the marionette that must breathe.
Do you breathe in when the singer breathes?
Absolutely. Because I must fill my lungs in order to sing.
9. United Technologies [UTX]. Boeing's blind twin. They invented the safety elevator (and thus the skyscraper as we know it, and thus the modern metropolis), air conditioning (and thus the southwest as we know it), the air-cooled airplane engine, the pressurized cabin and the helicopter. From the mills of anonymous Hartford, UTX collected mad engineers: Otis, Sikorsky, Carrier, Rentschler, Pratt, Whitney, the list goes on. They really truly seem to want to build that orbital elevator, which I still think is nuts -- but maybe it's just a PR scheme, some way to breathe a face into what is ultimately an empire of more or less smooth machine parts. They remind me of my grandfather, the smell that lingers when gin's evaporated off beechcraft. And the flowery acetone perfume of rocket summer.
Irony: Turning off Mysterious Skin to catch the revival of Picnic at Hanging Rock.
Sarcasm: Taking CF Russell along in case there's dead time before the show starts.
The usual adventures. A "Vile Bodies" moment or two (oh nina, all that succession and repetition of massed humanity). Now still on the wedding list. Among other things. The lilacs are finally up. And I still can't find my sunglasses.
10:22am: Strawberry Alarm Clock
This morning the Ebony Hillbillies were trying something different, a more abstract banjo-and-fiddle arrangement that sounded like something Steve Reich would have turned in for a Coen Brothers movie -- or actually a lot like Paul Giger's "Tropus" [RealAudio; jump to 48:10]. Gigantic and panoramic music if you could listen to it up close, but from so far away it sounds muted and small, separated from the Times Square morning by a vast gulf of time if not perspective. Like someone chasing the horizon, you approach, but until you stop you'll never actually get there. It's interesting that this sort of ancient music should re-emerge out of the train station where normally the Scientologists and the crunk swim uninterrupted. These old faces can haunt a family.
The train itself was reasonably competent today, a pleasant change from weeks of unmitigated amateur hour. If the yellow and red lines are any indication, the entire city is distracted almost beyond the point of functioning. Maybe allergies, maybe the weather, maybe politics: if there's a difference. Either that or everybody's becoming a tourist, which is an interestingly eschatological image. And yet today there was a huge ripe strawberry on the platform and the commuters stepping efficiently over it.
Here in the city for a while to come it reminds me of the forest and this bit from Heinrich Zimmer again: ( Read more... )
And I'm reminded that hell and heaven are both cities.
8. 3M Co. [MMM]: Something of an underdog, the nice-guy "penny candy" maker among the giants, which leads many Wall Street boys (and the occasional starry-eyed engineering type) to develop a certain ticker crush on this perennial next big thing. It was born in 1902 as the "Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Company," but this was eventually abandoned for both efficiency and accuracy, since they haven't actually done any "mining" in at least a human lifetime. In fact, MMM was originally formed to dig up grit for sandpaper. The grit wasn't any good (they'd hoped it was the full corundum) and they struggled to do anything right until they fixed their glue a full dozen years later. After that, they were in the inventing business, especially where adhesives were concerned. They invented tape and teased Scotchgard, recording tape, the thermofax and Post-Its out of it. They're taking it into the realm of weird photosensitive textiles and other things I haven't adequately digested, plus they've got a foot in plenty of other areas as befits a real diversified conglomerate. At one time I recall they were investing half their profits in R&D and, remembering the secret origins of tape, encouraged everyone to tinker in their spare time. An assistant bookkeeper named William McKnight was deified not only as a gifted salesman and manager but because he was on hand when they invented a better emery cloth. He always wore a suit in the office. His parents hoped he'd become a farmer. For their hundredth birthday they got their first CEO ever who hadn't grown up among the lab rats; he was from GE and taught them Six Sigma. History will decide.
Current Music: Ensemble Unicorn, "Mariam Matrem Virginem"
11:51am: Carabas
This morning there was a pigeon roosting outside one of the bedroom windows and the world smells faintly like rising bread. Yesterday at the office was reasonably triumphant so I walked across the park to take in the green, the light after the storm, and the whiff of carriage horses. They've revived Belle de Jour again so I figure what the hell, I like Deneuve, I like carriage horses, I'm especially excited by bells lately (Pavlov was right) and haven't been to the Paris since I saw the Branagh Hamlet, which dates my ass.
CE QVE FEMME VEVT DIEV VEVT
Longtime readers will remember that the "art house" industry today is basically an amalgam of three constituencies divided into two primary market segments (1=3=2). There's the indie hipsters, who have largely been routinized into niche mainstream venues, the Sundance screen found in most mall town multiplexes. Good night and good luck, as they say. And then there's the alliance between the New Wave nostalgia buffs and today's devotees of kino as ethnography or "liberal world cinema," who collect pedestrian movies from "exotic" locales in exactly the same way I collected triangle stamps when I was what, seven?
I bring this up because, like Belle de Jour herself, all are tourists but some are also pilgrims.
1:08am: How I Broke Away From Wagner Nie sollst du mich befragen, noch Wissens Sorge tragen, woher ich kam der Fahrt, noch wie mein Nam und Art!
Every art, every philosophy, may be considered a remedy and aid in the service of either growing or declining life: it always presupposes suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers: first, those who suffer from the overfullness of life and want a Dionysian art as well as a tragic insight and outlook on life -- and then those who suffer from the impoverishment of life and demand of art and philosophy, calm, stillness, smooth seas, or, on the other hand, frenzy, convulsion, and anesthesia. Revenge against life itself -- the most voluptuous kind of frenzy for those so impoverished! . . . Wagner responds to this dual need of the latter no less than Schopenhauer: they negate life, they slander it.( Read more... )
10:41am: The Gods of Capital No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals or, if neither, mechanized petrification embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. - Max Weber
Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, long before the looming gigantomachy, when the state cult of capital supported the complex interactions of corporate entities, together with their myriad subsidiaries and allied forces, that create something like but not exactly the world: the "market." The capitaline gods had ticker-symbol names of one to four letters (plus extensions) and their movements were closely recorded in increments of the dollar. Like all false gods, even the greatest companies were fundamentally mortal: they were born, competed for finite resources, rose and fell, were lionized and demonized, reproduced, died and their corpses in their season generated new life. In the meantime the corporate entities provided the organizing principles on which citizens of the empire increasingly patterned their own activities.
Charles Dow was the prophet who codified the rites. He is depicted as a composite two-headed figure, half bear and half bull, or else as a bearded man constructed out of zipatone. He lived from 1851 to 1902, and when he was done he had given his disciples the Wall Street Journal [DJ] and the black art of market analysis. Even the laity remembered him as the guy who arranged the then-scattered titans of industry into an authoritative (thus imperial) pantheon, so that a century later anyone with Internet access could consult his "index" [DJI] and say the gods were smiling or stern in the way that previous diviners gauged the fortunes of empire from the activity of wind, water and chicken parts. The list of companies on the index ebbed and flowed, but the index itself harbored aspirations to eternity. In the years before the gigantomachy, the Dow 30 collectively represented one out of every four dollars held in the U.S. stock market.
Now when occupying an empire that hath such giants in it, one can join the other citizens and participate in the state cult. Those who are more ambitious can, with a little luck and talent, squeeze personal advantage out of the activities of the giants and so become moderately wealthy. Still others study the giants to better emulate or fight them. Novice analysts and other relatively innocent people disdain conversation with the Dow 30, preferring to align themselves with the novelty names that have growth potential, the little new things ready to explode. But it's the giants that draw the map of the world, who ride the cloud of smaller corporations like the corporations ride us, and it's their trajectories the adults watch, hunting the management secrets of the past, a competitive edge on the present and the shape of things to come.
1:18am: Overture: Coming Attractions
Been busy. Good news is I think I'm an honorary Pole now -- who knew there was an "almost kosher" vodka bottled with actual leaves of grass? And who knew Poland had gotten so into chakra theory? Although I have to admit it's a shame that at least two of my Brooks Brothers shirts have been destroyed.
1. PLACE A ROUND WHITE CARD with black centre against the wall and gaze at it calmly and steadily one minute, willing at the same time to increase the Attention, Concentration and Abstraction; then slowly turn the eyes to the blank wall. The optical effect will be an apparition of the card -- colors reversed -- passing slowly across the line of vision ... when the eye is taken from the card, remember that object has become a thing of the past; reproducing it again in the phantoms on the wall is in reality REPRODUCING THE PAST vividly before you. (T.H. Burgoyne, The Mysteries of Eros, 1886-7)
2. SELL YOUR LANDS, your house, your clothes and your jewelry; burn up your books. On the other hand, buy yourselves stout shoes, travel to the mountains, search the valleys, the deserts, the shores of the sea and the deepest depressions of the earth: note with care the distinctions between animals, the differences of plants, the various kinds of minerals, the properties and mode of origin of everything that exists. BE NOT ASHAMED to study diligently the astronomy and terrestrial philosophy of the peasantry. Lastly, PURCHASE COAL, build furnaces, watch and operate with the fire without wearying. In this way and no other, you will arrive at a knowledge of things and their properties. (Peter "Severinus" Soerensson, Idea Medicinae Philosophiae, 1571)
3. IN 1930, James W. Gerard, formerly ambassador to Germany, made a national sensation -- it will seem very tame now -- by listing the 64 men who "ruled the United States." ( Name names! )
2:11am: This old moon wanes
Ernest Thompson Seton, who looked back about a century ago to a time when we all lived in the forest, called this the "hunger" month and recommended that his students spend the long evenings making their war shirts and in the study of signaling "by semaphore, Myer, Morse, etc. Also by blazes, stone signs, grass signs, smoke fires." Daylight was for gathering rock tripe (hungry!), studying the scars on local aspens and practicing one's snowshoe; the game was "Watching by the Trail."
Certainly February resists the digital calendar. Oracular rodents, quarter days, hearts and cherry trees and unexpected weather. It's the opposite of a clockwork bird.
Today however I get a note from Salzburg that's got me thinking ahead to midsummer. They do a really eye-opening Rackhamesque version of the Dream, which I actually had no patience for as a boy -- the fairy plot drew a dubious crowd at best, while the confused lovers are Shakespearean common stock and the rude players were always most interesting as a preemptive parody of the Fantasticks. Carve all that away, and you've got Joe Theseus on his foredoomed honeymoon, barely a masque. On those terms, it's no wonder that Mendelssohn's take on the play was a Victorian favorite, gilding its pastoral romantic farce exactly like Meissen would turn out shepherdess kitsch.
One of the many interesting "grace" notes the puppetmasters add is a very simple descending synth horn fanfare that cycles through the forest scenes -- usually to accompany wordless passages of the lovers tramping around, sleeping or waking. It's not in the Mendelssohn; they admit that his score is kind of slender, so they had this composed special. It's an incredibly tender and artless motif and like moonlight it works by really not working at all. Hunger Moon knows the play is ridiculous. June takes it seriously with wide eyes, sighs and declamations. It's terribly important to them. For whom are we composing? Who are the fairies . . . really?
Current Music: "Forest of Arden," Salzburg Marionette Troupe
10:02am: La Terza Madre (little blinks and links)
"The most beautiful thriller and horror films were made by adult directors for an adult audience. Adolescents and kids did see these films, but they were not made for children. So to make a good film you have to commit seriously to the work itself, without thinking of the existence of an adolescent public, without giving them all the little blinks and links to their age, the school, etc." -- Dario Argento
What differentiates the "adult" audience from the adolescent public? Do you think il maestro is telling the truth here, or is he actually apologizing for a life spent in genres that "adult" audiences (such as they are) have largely abandoned to fans (insiders) and children?
Do we in fact call insider behavior "fannish" in an adult, but expect it from adolescents? Teen-agers love their tribes with all the secret signs and grips, superficially fixed ritual of blinks and links as a counterpoint to the volatility of their age, the school, etc. An "adult" has more superficially nebulous and cosmopolitan tastes, but the core is ostensibly fixed, the cake is baked so we turn to decoration. No?
Meanwhile, to make a good film, commit seriously to the work itself.
9:47am: odor of sanctity
Between the rain and the dew you'll mine your salt.
-[]-
Ordinarily a Jesus shouter receives the opposite of a response. The crowd is embarrassed, annoyed, in a hurry anyway. This actually reinforces the Jesus shouter's phatic intent; the proselytizing is an excuse and the crowd is a distraction.
Today, the shouter got off a particularly resonant line ("EVEN A BLIND MAN CAN FEEL THERE'S A CHANGE IN THE ATMOSPHERE") and the crowd, like a hit dog, barked to concur. A change in the atmosphere. Can you "feel" it?
Naturally, this threw the shouter off his rhythm so he repeated the line with a weak variation, and now even the blind man can SMELL the change. And you wonder whether it smells like acetone or like the uncanny stink of St. Lidwina's gangrenous flesh, worth noting in either event. A change in the atmosphere.
11:39am: Still & Stijl
STILL OR STIJL is a game that numberless sentient beings can play to clarify their own relationships to various strands of "tradition" and its opposite while gauging their ultimate success or failure. It is also prescribed as an emetic. All participants have been very gracious and their contributions to this demonstration have been most welcome.
The scenario pack provided (Our 20th Century, Western Masterworks Edition) tempers the clavier of "modern" artistic strategies by assigning a full chromatic octave (12) of images to represent the continuum of postures (or arguments) toward space, temporality and consciousness explored in the electric era, along with the associated technologies of color, cash, shape and line. While beginners will find these elements contain everything they need for hours of educational play, advanced players may create their own scenarios to fill perceived gaps or achieve unusual effects.
No "official" supplements from FREE GULLIVER are planned at this time. Those who wish to investigate these themes further are invited to extend the core material backward (into the 19th or previous centuries, for example), forward (approaching now), inward (toward increasingly fine distinctions within a school or artist's production) or outward (away from the West). The patterns generated may surprise you! "Male" and "female," "left" and "right," and various "high" and "low" variants (including the popular "big/small") have also generated interest among specialist groups.
Why does something stay with you and not your fellow players? What lasts? What doesn't? And how do you know?
WE ARE NOW LEAVING THE XX CENTURY. KINDLY SWALLOW WHAT YOU LIKE, SPIT THE REST INTO THE RECEPTACLE AND TURN OFF ANY ELECTRONIC DEVICES YOU MAY HAVE BROUGHT WITH YOU.
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