Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Moby on LA Architecture

Moby Los Angeles Architecture Blog
This is pretty cool!  Not only is this good photography of cool architecture, its awesome to just hear Moby think on random tangents: 
 l.a has a lot of generic, cheap, and seemingly uninspired/uninspiring apartment houses. they’re generally pretty ugly ‘(pretty ugly’ is a funny expression, like ‘civil war’, or ‘soluble fish’. not that anyone every says/uses the expression ‘soluble fish’. except for maybe man ray or andre breton or frances picabia or antonin artaud. my dead surrealist friends.)

One Year Old Poems


1.
In my dreams I’m running red lights
After nights of sex telepathic fights
I’m shunning mostly; intermingled, fingering
New heights in masturbatory thinking
Awake I’m rubbing against the substance
Its different from the
Metaphysical intermingling of
The laugh track men who hold me
Into sleep. It pivots on that one word just
I keep on missing exits
The street nexus, just a real trance
I’m coming back to the thing you lost
Coming hard
We just wanted to dance



 2.
The echos of my self
Cast shadows on the roof.
Drawn into a homily,
They drop softly on the doors

Even I begin to sigh
And rub my eyes for rest.
If I could just lie
And say here in my chest
 
That time beats slow,
And forget in sleep what's left;
But the murder of my soul
Reaches back to bother me.

It mumbles without sign.
My heart resigns in anger
And again I harden and enshrine
The clutter in my chest.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Monday, February 20, 2012

Levels and Waves

Soon I'll post some photos from Big Sur. It was a good weekend. On the way down the mountain Caleb pointed out we were in a whole new ecosystem. Connor called them topography changes and Adena started counting "levels." I thought of it more like waves. But the way they talked about it changed the way I saw it. So it was more like a record slowly skipping forward. Sometimes I was afraid we would get stuck. Especially when it seemed like we had gone past this one sharp z shaped turn like 8 times. But overall it was pretty cool. I have a good vision for my star painting for Connor. There will be many levels of paint with (hopefully) the overall fluidity of a wave.


Thursday, February 16, 2012

Two Parts of an Atom: In Dialogue

     Last night I saw a discussion between my two favorite English professors, Altieri and Blanton, on one of my favorite poems, T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland. Altieri used this wonderful analogy to describe their respective approaches to the poem. His understanding is through 'the concentrated center of reason' in the poem, something like the core of an atom. Blanton's is through the 'outer horizons of all possible meaning,' like the electron cloud. I will never understand how such poetry just falls out of his mouth.
    They reminded me why I make art. Its been a long time since I've asked myself what needs to come next in painting. I did again, and it felt good ( :

Some key moments of brilliance from the night:

"Reality is a matter of degrees." A

"The three most important English words in the last century:
Heidegger's 'is'
Hegel's 'not'
Wittgenstein's 'as'"   A (I need to read more on this 'as')

"The voices in the poem make it, undeniably, a social space." A

"The impersonality of the poem is a confession of the limits of the I (eye?). It is the fabricated organ of experience that is better than the peot. The poem is able to know more than the poet." B

"Eliot's problem was not that he wanted to say something original, but wanted to give old words new life. He was driven by the staleness of the words-- the fact that the language in our mouths has been recycled for generations. Instead of creating new words, he dug through etymologies to find and employ all possible meanings. Its re-activation over creation." - B

"The success of the impressionists was the intelligence with which they backed up their 'No's" -A