There is a patch that
was a hole.
It holds those things
of the past and
of the distant
future.
Where are those things
we believe which
do not exist
yet?
I reach
through to dog
eared wholes
dismembered.
I patch.
-
There have been few
moments. A few
ashes. I am
here to
see them spark.
-
I lose myself in
the hole. I patch
it loosely and I
paint it simply so
that I might
come along a
stranger
and see.
When I try to log in using the LOGIN&POST link at the top right, it sends me back to the main page before I’m able to type anything in the username box. Is this happening to anyone else?
If so, you should be able to login at the very bottom of the main page while I work on fixing this glitch. Just FYI.
July 10th, 2009 | #
ps. updated the rhythm to this thing. I still don’t like it though. I’m close to taking it down and replacing it with something better, which is good as it gives me impetus to make something better. I was trying to get at some sort of reverse memory.
July 10th, 2009 | #
I like it with this rhythm better. I’m also having trouble with the login&post link, but I was able to login at the bottom of the page, like you suggested.
So I was just going through some really old posts for fun while I was sitting here trying to decide what to do this lovely Saturday night, and I came across the post from about a year ago where you, Sturgeon, invited us all down to Philly for a crash. Are you still there in Philly? Because that would be fun to do this year when Jed gets back from India or something… Jed, are you back from India yet? Anyway, just an idea. I’m trying to make the most of my summer before I start grad school in September. You’re all welcome to visit me in NYC sometime, even though my apartment is a small studio!!
July 11th, 2009 | #
http://www.pinkoscopies.org/blogupload/poem.mp3
July 13th, 2009 | #
dog
eared
hole.
i liked hearing yr voice. creepy?
hooray rejoining on eastcoast!
July 17th, 2009 | #
I liked it better first, before the revisions.
July 21st, 2009 | #
Too late! I never save the originals while I’m editing. Oh well.
I just wanted to post the following, but I don’t want to detract from Jeds and TTLs posts upstairs, so into the comments it goes:
[note: I’m planning on starting a secondary personal blog of some sort on Pinkos where I will be simply posting interesting paragraphs I pull from reading material - what I’m posting here is along that trend]
[also - if you want to come crash in Philly, you should! We have a great show up at the art museum where I work - TTL has seen it, but I’d love to show you, Inga, and you, Jed - and all the spybots who are reading this should see it too - show’s coming down in September. Weekends are good for visiting.]
Ok, here goes:
I was just cleaning up and found a little Moleskine where I had put some notes from Georg Lukacs’ “Thoughts on an Aesthetic of Cinema,” 1913.
It’s an argument for medium specificity he makes by contrasting theater and film (at the time, “photo plays”). I remember thinking that the thesis was outdated and primitive, compared with late 20th century essays on the syllabus dealing with cinema semiotics and the gaze.
But, having exited the academic womb, the notes from Lukacs made more of an impression on me and I want to share them to see what you think. It’s interesting reading this with Bergman’s Creative Evolution, which expands on (debunks) the idea of “absence of presence.”
Here are some of the notes:
People see cinema as:
- “instrument of visual instruction”
or
- “new and cheap competition for theater”
(i.e. pedagogically or economically)
the cinema could replace the theater through perfection of technique (and speech reproduction)
film will NOT be a “museum of truly perfected accomplishments”
“stage is absolute presence”
Presence is fate
“The actor is doomed by fate, already tragedy, mystery, divine service”
“Essential characteristic of the cinema: absence of presence”
Characters in film are “only movements and deeds of people, but not people.”
-> the limit of the cinema “principium stilisationis”
Imades of the cinema, therefore, acquire life fantastic -
Life w/out presence, fate, reasons, motives, “with which the innermost part of the soul can never become identical.”
(but it oftens yearns for this “strange abyss”)
“Life without measure and order, essence and value, or soul - it is pure superficiality.”
“Temporality and flow of cinema: movement, eternal transience, never-resting change”
“The basic law of connection for stage and drama is inexorable necessity; for the cinema, it is possibility restricted by nothing.”
< possibility = reality > the identity of cinema
cinema depicts
- actions, not souls
- event, not fate
(empirical reality < -> extreme romanticism)
“The animate in nature here acquires artistic form for the first time.”
rushing of water
wind in the trees
tranquiliity of the sunset
raging of the thunderstorm
In the theater, before the great stage of the great drama, we gather and attain out highest moments; in the “cinema,” we are supposed to forget these, our highpoints, and to become irresponsible: the child that is alive in every person is liberated here and becomes lord over the psyche of the viewer.
…their great author who would have interpreted and ordered them, who would have retrieved their merely technically accidental fantasia into the meaningful metaphysical and into pure style, has not yet come.
Granted: a stage for recuperation of the self, a place of amusement, at once of the most subtle and refined, of the crudest and of the most primitive, and never one of edification and of elevation of any sort.
A world of intended and would-be soullessness arises, a world of the purely external.
And the amusement that was damned to crudity on the stage because its subject matter contradicted the forms of the drama stage can find an adequate form in the “cinema” that can be internally appropriate and thus truly artistic, even if it is quite rare in today’s “cinema.” And if the psychologists, refined and possessing talent for novellas, have been driven from both stages, then this can only be beneficial for the culture of the theater and a portent of clarity.
July 26th, 2009 | #