Alex Ratcliffe-Lee

wonderfulambiguity: Sandalwood by Moondog and the London...

Sun, 27 May 2012 14:36:50 -0400

Sandalwood by Moondog and the London Saxophonic, from Sax Pax for a Sax, 1994

Thanks to derkreisel and yama-bato

"Why would musical theater be the only culture that resists newness? It doesn’t make sense. Bands..."

Fri, 25 May 2012 16:17:55 -0400

“Why would musical theater be the only culture that resists newness? It doesn’t make sense. Bands become successes on tumblr. Where’s the tumblr of musical theater? [The problem is] older people are willing to pay for it, and they’re the same audience that’s not going to want something new. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’d rather go see our future than most musicals. The theater is simply not democratized in any way, and other art forms are.”

- Scott Rudin on musical theater.

Newsies is on Tumblr.

How Can Musical Theater Be Saved? Broadway Veterans Give Their Advice | Vulture

(via popculturebrain)

Relevant! Something to think about if you’re involved in the fine arts.

Something Changed.: sonder

Tue, 22 May 2012 23:49:30 -0400

Something Changed.: sonder:

n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate…

youmightfindyourself: Plant-in City is an architectural...

Tue, 22 May 2012 23:30:28 -0400

youmightfindyourself:

Plant-in City is an architectural installation that translates the environmental data of plants — changes in soil moisture, humidity, temperature, and other natural cycles — into an ongoing cycle of ambient sounds and visuals.

Plant-in City taps into the natural systems that foster plant life to give the plants themselves a voice. This revolutionary planter system contains built-in sensors that are activated by sun exposure, changes in soil moisture, humidity, temperature, and other natural cycles. Once activated, these sensors translate the environmental data into sounds or visuals.

“did you hear that plant!?”

Peter pan pirate 2012

Sat, 12 May 2012 16:55:29 -0400

Peter pan pirate 2012

"When I’m balanced on two thin wheels at 30 miles an hour, gauging distance, adjusting course, making..."

Mon, 07 May 2012 12:18:46 -0400

“When I’m balanced on two thin wheels at 30 miles an hour, gauging distance, adjusting course, making hundreds of unconscious calculations every second, that idiot chatterbox in my head is kept too busy to get a word in. I’ve heard people say the same thing about rock-climbing: how it shrinks your universe to the half-inch of rock surface immediately in front of you, this crevice, that toehold. Biking is split-second fast and rock-climbing painstakingly slow, but both practices silence the noise of the mind and render self-consciousness blissfully impossible. You become the anonymous hero of that old story, Man versus the Universe. Your brain’s glad to finally have a real job to do, instead of all that trivial busywork. You are all action, no deliberation. You are forced, under pain of death, to quit all that silly ideation and pay attention. It’s meditation at gunpoint.”

- On cycling. (via somethingchanged)

applicable over many different fields

npr: Pop Culture Nostalgia The Magic Schoolbus, The Phantom...

Fri, 04 May 2012 23:25:34 -0400

npr:

Pop Culture Nostalgia

The Magic Schoolbus, The Phantom Tollbooth, Wishbone, and Star Wars?

As their internships come to a close, several interns here at NPR decided to reflect on the pop culture they miss from their childhood (and would like to share with future generations).

Check out their picks here.

What pieces of pop culture from your childhood would you share with the next generation?

i know a couple people who might appreciate this

Fri, 04 May 2012 23:17:37 -0400

i know a couple people who might appreciate this

forgottenway: Slow Club - Two Cousins

Fri, 04 May 2012 23:11:47 -0400

forgottenway:

Slow Club - Two Cousins

Photo

Fri, 04 May 2012 01:02:59 -0400

Freedom and Art

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 17:59:17 -0400

Freedom and Art:

youmightfindyourself:

The partial freedom of, and from, meaning that is the natural result of aesthetic form is made possible by the exploitation of an inherent fluidity, or looseness of significance, naturally present in both language and social organization. This is a freedom often repressed, and attempts at repression and conformity are an inevitable part of experience. That is why aesthetic form—in poetry, music, and the visual arts—has so often been considered subversive and corrupting from Plato to the present day.

Conventions are the bulwark of civilization, a guarantee of social protection. They can also be a prison cell. Of course, any art has its conventions, too, just like every other activity, and an artist is expected to fulfill them. Traditionally, however, for at least three millennia and possibly longer, the artist is also expected paradoxically to violate conventions—to entertain, to surprise, to outrage, to be original. That is the special status of art among all other activities, although it may indeed spill over and make itself felt throughout the rest of life. It is the source of freedom, prevents the wheels of the social machine from locking into paralysis. From our artists and entertainers, we expect originality and resent it when we get it.

Ideally we expect style and idea, form and matter, to be fused, indistinguishable one from the other. Friedrich Schlegel observed that when they are separable, there is something wrong with one or both of them. Nevertheless, the liberty of the artist rests on the ever-present possibility or danger of their independence. The Erasmian principle that style is, or should be, always subservient to idea is essentially naive. It takes little account of experience. Style can define and determine matter. We can see, for example, how the virtuosity of style in La Fontaine profoundly altered the morals of Aesop’s fables. The tension between style and idea, their friction, is a stimulant.

foldingthemaps: Michael Kiwanuka | I’m Getting Ready sunday...

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 16:44:22 -0400

foldingthemaps:

Michael Kiwanuka | I’m Getting Ready

sunday soul

kqedscience: You’ve got some company, my friend.

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 23:21:01 -0400

kqedscience:

You’ve got some company, my friend.

spiegelman: minusmanhattan: Yesterday Google announced they...

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 23:20:01 -0400

spiegelman:

minusmanhattan:

Yesterday Google announced they had mapped out parts of the Amazon that you can now navigate on Google Street View.

Check it out.

Google, taking the mystery out of the world since 2000.

globes-maps: Lions - I Can Make A Mess Like Nobody’s...

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 18:56:52 -0500

globes-maps:

Lions - I Can Make A Mess Like Nobody’s Business

Wait - what ?: “If you abandon intention, the birds will not be suspicious. If your...

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 18:37:56 -0500

Wait - what ?: “If you abandon intention, the birds will not be suspicious. If your...:

dreaminginthedeepsouth:

“If you abandon intention, the birds will not be suspicious. If your intention is stirred, the birds will fly away. Why? This is because you can fool the form but not the spirit. Even if your spirit moves slightly, the other’s spirit will know. This is the way things are: nothing can be hidden…

theformofbeauty: jessiethejazz: Manteca by The Red Garland...

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 18:14:38 -0500

theformofbeauty:

jessiethejazz:

Manteca by The Red Garland Trio from Manteca (1990, Fantasy) album

track #1

“Manteca” was co-written by Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo in 1947. It was one of the first examples of Afro-Cuban influences being incorporated into mainstream jazz. The piece referred to racist tensions in America when Dizzy Gillespie is heard singing, “I’ll never go back to Georgia”. -quoted from wikipedia

Red Garland, piano

Paul Chambers, bass

Arthur Taylor, drums

Ray Barretto, conga

Recorded in Hackensack, NJ; April 11, 1958

"The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings...."

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 16:15:27 -0500

“The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it. This holds true for all creative people to a greater or lesser extent, but it is especially obvious with the artist. Existence becomes a problem that needs an ideal answer; but when you no longer accept the collective solution to the problem of existence, then you must fashion your own. The work of art is, then, the ideal answer of the creative type to the problem of existence as he takes it in —not only the existence of the external world, but especially his own: who he is as a painfully separate person with nothing shared to lean on. He has to answer to the burden of his extreme individuation, his so painful isolation… His creative work is at the same time the expression of his heroism and the justification of it. It is his “private religion,” as [Otto] Rank put it.”

- Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death, the thesis of which can perhaps be summed thusly: humanity sublimates its fear of death through the causa sui project: the construction of meanings which are enduring and non-contingent despite our mortality and ludicrous, creaturely contingency. Society, culture, and the illusions on which we depend are the fruit of this “immortality project”:

The fact is that this is what society is and always has been: a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism. Each script is somewhat unique, each culture has a different hero system… It doesn’t matter whether the hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value…

Heroic roles might include “breadwinner,” “mother,” “shaman,” “scientist,” “hedonist,” or any other designation which indicates how a person justifies their exertions and sufferings, pleasures and triumphs. Even to claim total purposelessness is a kind of assertion of meaning: a modest refusal to participate in hero-systems is a kind of heroism, a sought-out exceptionalism to this organismic problem of individuation and death. Indeed, when we talk of meaning as such, perhaps we are merely describing those symbols which exceed the individual but do not disappear into the inhuman cosmos, those ideas which are not organismic, will not die with the matter or, if they do, will somehow still suffice to justify its existence.

Becker’s work fascinates with its elucidation of how death drives this search for meaning and how the accidentally-developed and arbitrary illusions which provide meaning can both support the transcendence we require and enslave us. Indeed, Becker devotes much of the book to neurosis, which he suggests occurs when illusions fail, when hero-systems malfunction, and when the creature cannot escape his mortality:

What we call the well-adjusted man has…the capacity to partialize the world for comfortable action… [T]he “normal” man bites off what he can chew and digest of life, and no more. In other words, men aren’t built to be gods, to take in the whole world; they are built like other creatures, to take in the piece of ground in front of their noses… [A]s soon as a man lifts his nose from the ground and starts sniffing at eternal problems like life and death, the meaning of a rose or a star cluster, he is in trouble. Most men spare themselves this trouble by keeping their minds on the small problems of their lives just as their society maps out these problems for them. These are what Kierkegaard called the “immediate” men and the “Philistines.” They “tranquilize themselves with the trivial” —and so they can lead normal lives.

What we call neurosis enters at precisely this point: some people have more trouble with their lies than others. The world is too much with them, and the techniques they have developed for holding it at bay and cutting it down to size finally begin to choke the person himself. This is neurosis in a nutshell: the miscarriage of clumsy lies about reality.

Both the neurotic and the artist are people for whom society’s hero-system and culture’s roles and meanings have failed in some measure, but whereas the former responds with ineffectual or destructive compulsions —misguided efforts to control and organize the terrors of organismic life, or to imbue them with specious meanings— the latter attempts to ”justify his heroism objectively, in the concrete creation.” But the two are not so far apart, as everyone familiar with the association between neurosis and creativity knows:

The neurotic exhausts himself not only in self-preoccupations like hypochondriacal fears and all sorts of fantasies, but also in others: those around him become his…work; he takes out his subjective problems on them… The neurotic’s frustration as a failed artist can’t be remedied by anything but an objective creative work of his own. Another way of looking at it is to say that the more totally one takes in the world as a problem, the more inferior or “bad” one is going to feel inside oneself. He can try to work out this “badness” by striving for perfection, and then the neurotic symptom becomes his “creative” work; or he can try to make himself perfect by means of his partner. But it is obvious to us that the only way to work on perfection is in the form of an objective work that is fully under your control and is perfectible in some real ways. Either you eat up yourself and others around you, trying for perfection, or you objectify that imperfection in a work on which you then unleash your creative powers. In this sense, some kind of objective creativity is the only answer man has to the problem of life… He takes in the world, makes a total problem out of it, and then gives out a fashioned, human answer to that problem. This, as Goethe saw in Faust, is the highest that man can achieve.

I am partial to that definition of art, incidentally: a fashioned, human answer to the problems of the interiorized world of a given artist. Becker continues with a cold, obvious, and sadly persuasive point:

From this point of view the difference between the neurotic and the artist seems to boil down to a question of talent… [The neurotic] can glorify himself only in fantasy, as he cannot fashion a creative work that speaks on his behalf… He is caught in a vicious circle because he experiences the unreality of fantasied self-glorification. There is really no conviction possible for man unless it comes from others or from outside himself in some way —at least, not for long. One simply cannot justify his own heroism in his own inner symbolic fantasy, which is what leads the neurotic to feel more unworthy and inferior.

And what gives you your sense of meaning? Into what role do you pour yourself, and by what sort of creation are you satisfied? Do you, like me, sometimes notice with horror that your idle time is spent trafficking in the most pitiful and empty fantasies —shortly to be forgotten, a waste of daydreams— and your working hours pass with your nose to the ground before you? Have you a causa sui project, or have you found your meaning on a shelf, readymade for you? Are you quick to critique the hero-systems of others, or do you feel a kinship with all who seek meaning, who at least talk of purpose, love, death, as opposed to the goddamned news?

Worth the read

“Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of...

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 22:04:54 -0500

“Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.”

—Gary Snyder

apoetreflects:

wonderfulambiguity: Bach: Viola da Gamba Sonata No. 3 in G...

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 21:41:26 -0500

wonderfulambiguity:

Bach: Viola da Gamba Sonata No. 3 in G minor BWV 1029 - 3. Allegro (03:36)

(thanks to oranc)

maybe, just maybe