THE GRAND INQUISITOR SCENE
From: THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV. By Fydor Dostoevsky and translated by Constance Garnett.
http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/philosophy/existentialism/dostoevsky/grand.html
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (The Lumière Brothers, 1895)
Suddenly a train appeared. Women cried out with terror. Men threw themselves to one side to avoid being run over. It was panic. And triumph.
George Reyes, `Chez les Lumieáre’
"The brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière created the first publicly shown movies, the first documentaries and, with this one-shot, 50-sec. film shot at a Provence railway station, the first horror picture. It is said that as the Paris spectators watched the train chug toward the screen, they believed it was about to crash out of the frame and into the auditorium, and ran out screaming. True or not, the story indicates the power the medium would wield over its audience."
TIME MAGAZINE
*From Time's top 25 Horror Movies. The Train takes number one, also on the list are Frankenstein and Bambi
The Train Effect
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Shark Week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Last week I was reading the New York Times when I found this. Damien Hirst is one of my favorite artists, but I was a little surprised to see that his work was at the Met, not the MoMA,the Whitney, nor any of the millions of contemporary galleries that call this city home. Maybe they got the Met and the Museum of Natural History, or the Central Park Zoo confused? Either way, I wasn't going to miss it, so, this past weekend I found my way up to the museum. After wandering through the Temple of Dendur, a room filled with shiny silver spoons and asking at least half the guards for directions, I finally found it:
Damien Hirst
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living
1991
Tiger shark, glass, steel, 5% formaldehyde solution
213 x 518 x 213 cm
On the other wall were these:
Watson and the Shark, John Singleton Copley, 1778
oil on canvas, 182.1 x 229.7 cm (71 3/4 x 90 1/2 in.)
National gallery of Arts, Washington DC
Francis Bacon
Head I, 1949
Oil and tempera on board
103 x 75cm.
Collection of Richard S, Zeisler, New York
The Gulf Stream, 1899
Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910)
Oil on canvas; 28 1/8 x 49 1/8 in. (71.4 x 124.8 cm)
Catherine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund, 1906 (06.1234)
It's like Shark Week at the Met!
Anyways, I couldn't stop thinking about this exhibit during our class discussion today. "The Impossibility to Imagine Physical Death in Life". And then we began talking about Edmund Burke's On the Sublime. Wasn't that the title on the information placard in the exhibit? Wasn't that Burke they quoted? This was not just about the Sharks, this was something much more.
In a time when leprechauns and unicorns were believed by the general public and alchemy can turn the most dullest of substances into gold, anything was possible, and thus anything you believed could be true. In Modern times, everything is subjective, and they only things knowable have been experienced. Hence, the impossibility to imagine physical death in life.
I remember being told by my sixth grade science teacher that the difference between living things and and nonliving things is that living things can die. The difference between living things and dead things is Death. So how can I know anything unless I have died? Is Damien's shark a reminder that only when faced with death can we even begin to imagine life? And the other three paintings, all of sharks in the final thralls of death--do they push this point further?
Maybe then, scary movies, roller coasters, driving fast on the freeway, has a draw, because in those moments, we can imagine death, and thus imagine life. We can't take our eyes of car crashes because it's like watching life. Just as Emma gains self knowledge upon the realization that she simultaneously desires Mr. Knightly and fears losing him. Knowing what she doesn't want to lose gives value to what she does want, and vice versa. Imagining death and realizing you want to live gives value to life.
Hirst naturalizes the unnatural in showing us death. And the other three paintings of sharks, not yet dead, make it so much clear how unordinary an ordinary shark may be. Maybe a dead-shark-in-a-tank is more fitting in the Met, an Art Museum chocked full of beds, bowls, and beads, than I had initially thought.
And perhaps Hirst is something of a Modern Frankenstein, and this shark, is his Modern Prometheus.
(Hirst's Shark will be there for three years, check it out.)
Damien Hirst
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living
1991
Tiger shark, glass, steel, 5% formaldehyde solution
213 x 518 x 213 cm
On the other wall were these:
Watson and the Shark, John Singleton Copley, 1778
oil on canvas, 182.1 x 229.7 cm (71 3/4 x 90 1/2 in.)
National gallery of Arts, Washington DC
Francis Bacon
Head I, 1949
Oil and tempera on board
103 x 75cm.
Collection of Richard S, Zeisler, New York
The Gulf Stream, 1899
Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910)
Oil on canvas; 28 1/8 x 49 1/8 in. (71.4 x 124.8 cm)
Catherine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund, 1906 (06.1234)
It's like Shark Week at the Met!
Anyways, I couldn't stop thinking about this exhibit during our class discussion today. "The Impossibility to Imagine Physical Death in Life". And then we began talking about Edmund Burke's On the Sublime. Wasn't that the title on the information placard in the exhibit? Wasn't that Burke they quoted? This was not just about the Sharks, this was something much more.
WHATEVER is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.
-Edmund Burke, "On the Sublime and the Beautiful"
In a time when leprechauns and unicorns were believed by the general public and alchemy can turn the most dullest of substances into gold, anything was possible, and thus anything you believed could be true. In Modern times, everything is subjective, and they only things knowable have been experienced. Hence, the impossibility to imagine physical death in life.
I remember being told by my sixth grade science teacher that the difference between living things and and nonliving things is that living things can die. The difference between living things and dead things is Death. So how can I know anything unless I have died? Is Damien's shark a reminder that only when faced with death can we even begin to imagine life? And the other three paintings, all of sharks in the final thralls of death--do they push this point further?
Maybe then, scary movies, roller coasters, driving fast on the freeway, has a draw, because in those moments, we can imagine death, and thus imagine life. We can't take our eyes of car crashes because it's like watching life. Just as Emma gains self knowledge upon the realization that she simultaneously desires Mr. Knightly and fears losing him. Knowing what she doesn't want to lose gives value to what she does want, and vice versa. Imagining death and realizing you want to live gives value to life.
"One man's (or shark's) life or death were but a smallhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought for the dominion I should acquire and transmit over the elemental foes of our race"
-Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Hirst naturalizes the unnatural in showing us death. And the other three paintings of sharks, not yet dead, make it so much clear how unordinary an ordinary shark may be. Maybe a dead-shark-in-a-tank is more fitting in the Met, an Art Museum chocked full of beds, bowls, and beads, than I had initially thought.
And perhaps Hirst is something of a Modern Frankenstein, and this shark, is his Modern Prometheus.
(Hirst's Shark will be there for three years, check it out.)
nada y pues nada y pues nada
"What may not be expected in a country of eternal light?" -Frankenstein (Letter 1) Mary Shelley
This idea made me think of the importance of light in life. "What is an hour?" And this left me thinking of one of my favorite Hemingway stories: A Clean Well Lighted Place.
This idea made me think of the importance of light in life. "What is an hour?" And this left me thinking of one of my favorite Hemingway stories: A Clean Well Lighted Place.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
The State of Music/The State of Pop Culture
Entertainment Weekly: On Amazon.com, all these user reviews say...
Carrie Underwood: ''She's not country.'' [Makes raspberry noise and sticks her thumbs down] Okay, here's my thing: On Top 40 stations, nobody cares that you'll have Fergie next to 50 Cent. They're different. Why can't you have me next to somebody that's more traditional country? You can call me ''not country'' until your face is blue, but I sing country music."
Carrie Underwood: ''She's not country.'' [Makes raspberry noise and sticks her thumbs down] Okay, here's my thing: On Top 40 stations, nobody cares that you'll have Fergie next to 50 Cent. They're different. Why can't you have me next to somebody that's more traditional country? You can call me ''not country'' until your face is blue, but I sing country music."
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Weegee- On Human Condition
“Voyeurism and surveillance are strangely and often uncomfortably allied."
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
I am contented and happy, and there for not a good historian.
((a spattering of initial thoughts, left to be sorted and edited in the morning))
"Loving who sustains us, floating in eternal bliss--my friend, when everything growns dim then before my eyes, and sky and earth rest in my soul like the image of a beloved being--I am often overcome by longing and by the thought: could you only breathe upon paper all that lives so full and warm within you, so that it might become the mirror of your soul as your soul is the mirror of the infinite God! --My friend--but it is more than I can bear; I succumb to the power and the glory of these visions."(9 Goethe)
This feels totally modern. If modern is that which is not "old" or "futuristic," what could possibly be more modern than a story that appeals only to the present? Seaped in passion, emotion, and authenticity, Werther's letters (although dated) throw away all time, as he drags you into his presence. Just as Lotte is able to entrance him with her "melody" ("Not one word about the magic power of music in antiquity seems to me improbably when I am under the spell of her simple melody" (47).), Goethe entranced me with his genuine love for Lotte. His experience became mine, his pain, his love, his frustration and his joy, and like Werther, "The author whom I like most of all is the one who takes me into my own world, where everything happens as it does around me, and whose story, nevertheless, becomes to me as interesting and as touching as my life at home, which is certainly not a paradise but is, on the whole, a source of inexpressible happiness to me" (25).
Written more than two decades before my life time, the story has not aged one bit, as it resonates so clearly and so perfectly, as it is not a story about a man hopelessly in love with a woman, but a truly romantic work of love. In life, we often strive to find understanding or impose meaning on a world made absurd by inevitable death (doom?) with a higher power (i.e. God) or a system of measuring its distance (time). Yet, when asked to explain these pillars of certainty/understanding, one finds that both are unidentifiable. Time may lead one to believe that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west "every day,"
but what is every day? Today is not yesterday, yesterday not today, nor tomorrow, nor three days from now. These systems of order only act to create a false sense of comfort. "There is a certain monotony about mankind. Most people toil during the greater part of their lives in order to live, and the slender span of free time that remains worries them so much that they try by every means to get rid of it. O Destiny of Man!" (9), proclaims Werther, echoing this futility. "...does it make any real difference whether I count peas or lentils? As everything in the world amounts after all to nothing to speak of, a person who drudges for the sake of others, for money or honors or what not, without following his own ambition, his own need, is always a fool" (49), he continues. While justice, order and stability may be provided by these constructs, true freedom and understanding can only result from that which can be known: the present. By turning inwards to what he knows, Werther, although seemingly tormented by an impossible love, was embrassing the absurdity in life, and forming a compainionship with what is, rather than building expectations and hopes upon what may be or what could be. And with this he finds that, "however confined he may be, he still holds forever in his heart that sweet feeling of freedom, and knows he can leave his prison whenever he likes" (13). And he does, as he takes ultimate control over his life by ending it with his own hands.
Werther begins this epistololary by writing, "I am so happy, dear friend, so completely sunk in the sensation of sheer being that my art suffers. I could not draw anything just now, not a line, and yet I have never been a greater painter than at the present moment" (5). Art is not a dead object, it is alive. It is an experience, not an tangiable aesthetic. And in the presence, the moments of "sheer being," he is able to unknow "art" as it was, should be or could be, and paint what is. This carries over into his life, it is not anything that can be understood or measured, it simply is. The world is forever changing, "alive," if you will, and knowable. Werther tried not to tame the absurdity that abounds, but rather find the rhythm, the flow, and form a compainionship between the world and the mind that was totally organic, bonding the world and the mind. Fore, "what would the world mean to our hearts with out love" (47)! And what can we know in the world that is not our hearts? And because of that it was, is and will forever be "modern."
"Loving who sustains us, floating in eternal bliss--my friend, when everything growns dim then before my eyes, and sky and earth rest in my soul like the image of a beloved being--I am often overcome by longing and by the thought: could you only breathe upon paper all that lives so full and warm within you, so that it might become the mirror of your soul as your soul is the mirror of the infinite God! --My friend--but it is more than I can bear; I succumb to the power and the glory of these visions."(9 Goethe)
This feels totally modern. If modern is that which is not "old" or "futuristic," what could possibly be more modern than a story that appeals only to the present? Seaped in passion, emotion, and authenticity, Werther's letters (although dated) throw away all time, as he drags you into his presence. Just as Lotte is able to entrance him with her "melody" ("Not one word about the magic power of music in antiquity seems to me improbably when I am under the spell of her simple melody" (47).), Goethe entranced me with his genuine love for Lotte. His experience became mine, his pain, his love, his frustration and his joy, and like Werther, "The author whom I like most of all is the one who takes me into my own world, where everything happens as it does around me, and whose story, nevertheless, becomes to me as interesting and as touching as my life at home, which is certainly not a paradise but is, on the whole, a source of inexpressible happiness to me" (25).
Written more than two decades before my life time, the story has not aged one bit, as it resonates so clearly and so perfectly, as it is not a story about a man hopelessly in love with a woman, but a truly romantic work of love. In life, we often strive to find understanding or impose meaning on a world made absurd by inevitable death (doom?) with a higher power (i.e. God) or a system of measuring its distance (time). Yet, when asked to explain these pillars of certainty/understanding, one finds that both are unidentifiable. Time may lead one to believe that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west "every day,"
but what is every day? Today is not yesterday, yesterday not today, nor tomorrow, nor three days from now. These systems of order only act to create a false sense of comfort. "There is a certain monotony about mankind. Most people toil during the greater part of their lives in order to live, and the slender span of free time that remains worries them so much that they try by every means to get rid of it. O Destiny of Man!" (9), proclaims Werther, echoing this futility. "...does it make any real difference whether I count peas or lentils? As everything in the world amounts after all to nothing to speak of, a person who drudges for the sake of others, for money or honors or what not, without following his own ambition, his own need, is always a fool" (49), he continues. While justice, order and stability may be provided by these constructs, true freedom and understanding can only result from that which can be known: the present. By turning inwards to what he knows, Werther, although seemingly tormented by an impossible love, was embrassing the absurdity in life, and forming a compainionship with what is, rather than building expectations and hopes upon what may be or what could be. And with this he finds that, "however confined he may be, he still holds forever in his heart that sweet feeling of freedom, and knows he can leave his prison whenever he likes" (13). And he does, as he takes ultimate control over his life by ending it with his own hands.
Werther begins this epistololary by writing, "I am so happy, dear friend, so completely sunk in the sensation of sheer being that my art suffers. I could not draw anything just now, not a line, and yet I have never been a greater painter than at the present moment" (5). Art is not a dead object, it is alive. It is an experience, not an tangiable aesthetic. And in the presence, the moments of "sheer being," he is able to unknow "art" as it was, should be or could be, and paint what is. This carries over into his life, it is not anything that can be understood or measured, it simply is. The world is forever changing, "alive," if you will, and knowable. Werther tried not to tame the absurdity that abounds, but rather find the rhythm, the flow, and form a compainionship between the world and the mind that was totally organic, bonding the world and the mind. Fore, "what would the world mean to our hearts with out love" (47)! And what can we know in the world that is not our hearts? And because of that it was, is and will forever be "modern."
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
A Modern Morality?
Is ‘Do Unto Others’ Written Into Our Genes?
by Nicholas Wade
New York Times September 17, 2007
Morality like an elephant and it's mahuot?
by Nicholas Wade
New York Times September 17, 2007
Morality like an elephant and it's mahuot?
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Unknowing
"All general ideas are purely intellectual: if the imagination intervenes to the least degree, the idea immediately becomes particular".
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
A Discourse on Inequality
A mirror: something that reflects my image back to me. A generally accepted concept, one that time and time again has proven true to me. Does this past experience mean it will continue to be true?
"What is possible can never be demonstrated to be false; and it is possible the course of nature may change, since we can concieve such a change...All probable arguments are built on the supposition that there is this conformity betwixt the future and the past, and therefore can never prove it".
- David Hume
From "A Treatise of Human Nature"
Probable argument is dependent on past experience, yet, past cannot predict the future with any certainty, and thus, reason is little more than a "good guess". Because I cannot say with certainty, that the mirror will continue to reflect my image back to me, is my concept of a mirror false? Is it possible to "know" without this sense of "knowledge"?
"In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue".
- Karl Marx
From "Reflections on the Revolution in France"
Is the only way to know, to unknow? Is the only way to experience to forget? (To unknow must one first know? To forget must one first experience?)
"The soviergn begins when, with the necessities ensured, the possibility of life opens up without limit".
- Georges Bataille
The Accursed Share
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
A Discourse on Inequality
A mirror: something that reflects my image back to me. A generally accepted concept, one that time and time again has proven true to me. Does this past experience mean it will continue to be true?
"What is possible can never be demonstrated to be false; and it is possible the course of nature may change, since we can concieve such a change...All probable arguments are built on the supposition that there is this conformity betwixt the future and the past, and therefore can never prove it".
- David Hume
From "A Treatise of Human Nature"
Probable argument is dependent on past experience, yet, past cannot predict the future with any certainty, and thus, reason is little more than a "good guess". Because I cannot say with certainty, that the mirror will continue to reflect my image back to me, is my concept of a mirror false? Is it possible to "know" without this sense of "knowledge"?
"In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue".
- Karl Marx
From "Reflections on the Revolution in France"
Is the only way to know, to unknow? Is the only way to experience to forget? (To unknow must one first know? To forget must one first experience?)
"The soviergn begins when, with the necessities ensured, the possibility of life opens up without limit".
- Georges Bataille
The Accursed Share
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