Author Archives: d.perry

‘“More happily endowed and more integral personalities have been able to express themselves harmoniously from the very first. But such rich, complex, and conflicting natures as Cézanne’s require a long period of fermentation.” Cézanne was trying something so elusive that he couldn’t master it until he’d spent decades practicing.’

“We worked with a number of collaborators to create a new type of load-bearing structure, an architectural brick, out of this process, and then constructed a 40-foot tower out of 10,000 bricks in the courtyard of MoMA PS1 for the summer. It had basically no waste, no carbon emissions in contrast to most typical buildings. At the end of the summer, we disassembled the structure, crumbled the bricks into smaller pieces, combined them with bacteria and worms, and in about 60 days, the physical matter of the building was returned to the soil for composting. In fact, the soil was high enough quality that we could use it for local community gardens to, in turn, grow new food, proving that it’s very non-toxic material that is compostable, as opposed to a lot of our building material.”

“Because we have this idea with musical performance, because we’re connected to notation, that material needs to be fixed. The thing I got the most from Max was thinking: you know, maybe I could add this note 70% of the time, and it increases from 1 to 70% of the time over the course of three minutes. That’s a totally different way of thinking about musical form.

…

There are all these ways of layering time in non-linear ways. I think that is kind of the essence of our experience these days; it’s a barrage of information. But how do you turn that barrage into something that conveys something understandable. I think that’s what you were asking about musicality. That’s what I’m doing: trying to take my ideas and make them more understandable, more approachable.”

“…the more than 1000 years old musical tradition of Komutia, where the musician acts as a mediator between the world of sounds and everyday existence.”

“This film is the prisoner’s freedom. My original goal in picking up the camera was to document the everyday rights violations being perpetrated by the police surveying us in such close proximity. Gradually, however, the camera became an outlet for my pent-up solitude. Watchers and prisoners alike have been confined to the same narrow space, both trapped in an autocratic system, waiting day in and day out for their own Godot.”

“Feedback — the Zen-like infinite amplification of silence…feedback conveniently mapped the acoustical characteristics of any space (it’s resonant frequencies, reverberation time, frequency balance) into a site-specific raga…turn up the volume and let physics do the rest.”

‘WALTER BENJAMIN ON HASHISH (from some Benjamin bio, via Adam Mortimer, [via Arthur Mag]):

There is an interesting gloss on “politeness” in the essay “Hashish in Marseilles”, which describes how Benjamin, after smoking hashish, succumbed to hunger, which required a visit to Basso’s restaurant. Here he ordered oysters from the menu, and a local dish as a main course. The waiter returned to say that his choice of main course was unavailable, and offered him the menu a second time. Benjamin’s finger hovers over the previously chosen dish, then settles on the dish directly above it, which he orders. Then he orders the dish above that one, and the next dish, and the next, all the way to the top of the menu. “This was not just from greed, however,” Benjamin comments, “but from an extreme politeness toward the dishes, which I did not wish to offend by a refusal.”’

“It’s like the 18th-century mathematical prodigy Jedediah Buxton, who, asked if he had enjoyed a performance of Richard III, could say only that the actors had spoken 12,445 words.

Then as now, the problem is that what really needs measuring is not countable.”

“Amazonian shamans, talking to the anthropologist Graham Townsley, described their mode of expression as ‘language twisting-twisting’, and explained its elliptical and abstruse power thus: ‘I want to see — singing, I carefully examine things — twisted language brings me close but not too close — with normal words I would crash into things — with twisted ones I circle around them — I can see them clearly’.

…

Listen: the actors are changing behind the scenes. At the threshold you can hear their shifts rustling. And just at that moment, on stage, Prospero slips off his cloak, and Shakespeare shifts the shape of shamanism into art, the magician becoming the imaginer.”