‘“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.’
Category Archives: fourteen forms of melancholy
“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.”
“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.”
‘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.”
The flattening of specificity to make way for a verticalized generic.
A compressed and pure present.
‘Then all the screens around me started throwing footballs in unison, and it started to make sense. The future screen, the future TV, is not about cinema but about simulating presence, a carnal ultrafidelity that’s good for sports, and reality TV, and porn. I must have had low blood sugar or something—box stores do this to me—but a vague apocalyptic dread descended upon me, as I imagined these home theaters invading millions of homes and literally sucking the life out of them, like phantasmic vampires, or digitally remastered portraits of Dorian Grey. Screens that grow more lifelike in exact proportion to the ontological exhaustion of the world outside, a world flattened and set groaning under the weight of us, our distractions, our hunger for figments. A verse from the book of Ezekiel welled up from the depths: “Son of man, hast thou seen what the ancients of the house of Israel do in the dark, every man in the chambers of his imagery? for they say, the Lord seeth us not; the Lord hath forsaken the earth.”‘
“It’s hard to understand movement (moving and travel), and how, when done frequently, it changes you over time: increasingly rendering concepts of home or solid ground both desirable and impossible.”
-Laurel Halo
