"Free Flight"

"FREE FLIGHT" ♫ Shawn O'Sullivan [~] Farley Gwazda from Farley Gwazda on Vimeo.


Done by Farley Gwazda, an old art teacher of mine. Using the film Experiments in the Revival of Organisms.

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

I was a part of this today:

 

My first time in the Rose Parade  (sort of)

I also spent a lot of time thinking about this line from Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace:
"Everyone is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. This isn't necessarily perverse."

Resolutions

Hello Two Thousand and Twelve,
I resolve to etch you into my memories.

I resolve to work for Volta Press, one way or another.
To take Japanese and read all of the epics for class.
I resolve to play dress up every day and exercise enough to look good doing so.
I resolve to photograph beautiful things and put them on my blog.
To make a website and intern with the SF Bay Guardian.
And I swear on my grave that I will not paint a single landscape.