dog rose
we are dog roses flourishing but our fragile flowers are quick to fall.
(apologies to derwent may)
patti (falling)
this article claims this is patti smith at the rock garden in 1977 but i have my doubts. it's patti, yes ❤️🙃🐓 ok, and it may or may not be the rockgarden, but 1977? i'd say early 1976, but i might be wrong, although i never am. did she fall?
Before the Fall
Being convinced, by a careful observation, that the human understanding perplexes itself, or makes not a sober and advantageous use of the real helps within its reach, whence manifold ignorance and inconveniences arise^ he was deter- mined to employ his utmost endeavours towards restoring or cultivating a just and legitimate familiarity betwixt the mind and things.
On April 25th 1940, five months and two days before he killed himself in Portbou on the French-Spanish border, Walter Benjamin (10 Rue Dombasle, 15e) borrowed The Physical and Metaphysical Works (the edition by H.G. Bohn of Covent Garden from either 1853 or 1891) by Lord Bacon who died in 1626, aged 65 years, of pneumonia contracted while studying the effects of freezing on the preservation of meat.
Lord Bacon's project was mega and meta, not to mention a contradictio absurdis. He advocated using a reductive method to understand ever expanding complexity and he wanted, by advancing knowledge, to return humanity to the perfect understanding it had enjoyed, albeit briefly and in very small numbers, before the Fall.
eternal life
on the way over there, there was a big billboard on the side of the road which read : hij die in jezus gelooft heeft het eeuwige leven.❊
how odd to put up a billboard like that, he said looking at her momentarily, do they really think that eternal life is a product which still has appeal for people? are they not going to immediately ask, oh yeah... what's the catch? like the emails from melinda or melissa who lives only 1.3km away and who wants to be your F❤️CKBUDDY!!! or about the millions you've won in a lottery you never bought a ticket for?
do you mind keeping at least one of your hands on the steering wheel, she said, drily.
❊he who believes in jesus has the eternal life
mu
in a show on dutch tv called tokidoki made by paulien cornelisse, she encounters a garden in a zen monastery and talks with the grandson of the man who made it. they are sitting in the garden on the south side of the monastery and paulien says : this garden seems to have nothing it it, and he tries to explain the concept of 'mu' by telling the story of the monk who is asked by the abbot to explain 'mu', which literally means 'nothing' and the monk explains it. well, says the abbot, i see it differently. paulien pretends not to get it, and says : most people would need to have that explained to them, and he says, yes.
cut to the next scene where paulien is seen from the back contemplating the empty garden.
in europe (and i mean 'europe' in a cultural/historical sense, so that includes places which are not 'in' europe, eg australia ha ha and it also includes places where it has been decided that they don't want to be part of europe in a legislative/financial sense, like britain) the idea of leaving an empty space empty is kind of abhorrent.
but the idea of 'mu' is that of a space that is in relation to another space which is not empty (and indeed, the garden on the north side of the monastery has plenty of stuff in it, rocks mostly, and sand raked in an interesting way) and 'mu' is not nothing actually, because of that.
Karen Horney
Karen Horney radically departed from Freud in emphasizing the power of environmental forces to shape our enduring personality. Horney includes a long list of adverse environmental factors that influence the development of our neurotic trends, from well-meaning parents who exert too much pressure on the child to succeed; to parents who are unpredictable and constantly shift back and forth between smothering love and intimidation, tyranny and glorification, comradeship and authoritarianism; to parents who force the child to take one parent’s side over another; to parents who make a child feel that his or her entire purpose on the planet is to live up to their expectations, enhance their prestige, or blindly serve their needs—keeping the child from recognizing his/her existence as an individual with distinct rights and responsibilities.
god's country
if like me and a lot of people you are a sucker for classic french cinema (RIP michel piccoli) MUBI is your friend, although i am not sure if it's available in australia but you have SBS so stop whinging.
i'd started cancelling MUBI because their app on my samsung TV is so shitty. but after jumping through various hoops it offered me a 40% discount for a year so instead of 10EU it costs 6EU per month so i gave in and kept my subscription.
the problem on the samsung TV is that, although some movies play fine, sometimes a movie just refuses to play all the way through. so you get to a certain point, usually just as its getting interesting, and it just stops and try as you may it will not play that movie beyond a certain point. it would make you nostalgic for the day when you used to rent DVDs in the 90s and when you were watching the movie there was a scratch on it somewhere and the picture would start to shudder and then it would freeze. i did have a girlfriend once who had magic powers to make the DVD player go beyond that point where the movie got stuck with a combination of spittle and judicious use of fast forward and rewind buttons but i reckon even she would have been stumped by the stupidity of the MUBI app.
so i couldn't watch several of the obscure films by a director whose work i like very much, louis malle who has been featured on MUBI recently, like 'calcutta' and 'the human condition'. on the other hand, the visually and aurally sumptuous 'ascenseur pour l'échafaud' (1958), the whimsical, beautiful 'zazie dans le métro', the bleak and thought provoking 'the fire within', and a number of others, play perfectly.
last night i hit the jackpot with a great documentary by louis malle from 1980s called 'god's country'. apart from one frozen moment, it was the first louis malle doco i've tried to watch which played all the way through on MUBI.
filmed in 1979 it is a format that has been copied numerous times since : send an affable foreign filmmaker to an obscure place and let them loose on the locals, in this case a little town in the middle of minnesota USA where almost everyone is of german origin and is either a farmer or the wife of a farmer. the only two that are not are the most interesting but they are all intriguing in one way or another, like a different species of human. six years of reaganomics later louis goes back for a reprise and finds almost everyone despondent.
index
the idea of an index is attractive : here you'd find all the things arranged, probably in alphabetical order, or a timeline, which you could skim and from which you could select items to consume, according to your interest and/or desire.
but the systematic ordering of things has never been amongst my talents. i have sometimes been somewhat suspicious of the order of things, by whom and for what purpose was this order imposed?
whenever i type 'always' my computer substitutes 'sometimes' and when i read back what i've written, i am often surprised to see it say 'sometimes'. sometimes i change it back to 'always' but not always. sometimes is sometimes better.
one of the reasons i was attracted to art was that it was one place (music was another) where it was legitimate to just keep throwing things onto a pile and see what kind of form emerges, to allow the things to speak for themselves and with each other.
and so it is with my websites and blogs dearest reader. i gaze in wonder upon those who, like me, watched the birth of the internet and began making stuff for it in the early to mid-nineties and who have maintained the space/s they created and there, neatly arranged, are all their things, and you can click on them.
i guess i am just not focussed on making the content consumers want most and delivering in the way they prefer to consume it and monetising that content in the most optimal way across all platforms.
the first thing i made for computers was for my graduating exhibition in 1990, i would like to think it had a simple title like 'file' but i probably felt the need to call it something more evocative like apostasy. it was a clickfest : thousands and thousands of folders, each containing thousands and thousands of folders and each of those folders containing thousands of folders. it took a long time to make. much more time than the audience was prepared to invest in engaging with the work.
this is one of the reasons why i gave up on making art in the end. the audience was never as hungry as the artist was.
when i played in a punk band what was so great was that no one cared about the quality of what you were making and also : disorder was desirable. there was one song we played, if it deserves that epithet, which consisted of only one chord E. we would turn up all the amps as well as the volume on our guitars and bash the living daylights out of the strings until they broke and/or our hands bled and we would all yell RAW into the microphones. that is how martin blew the bass amp we'd rented and, at another gig, the amp we borrowed from the headlining band — and when they went on stage it only made a loud farting sound.
ah happy days.
i should write something about the history of my blogs here, like how i began with a blog on diaryland in 1995 and since then i have used many and varied platforms, most recently, blot, paper, and github.
if i had the energy and time i could try listing them all and/or attempt to find them on archive.org and in my own archives.
but life is short. and now it's shorter than ever.
and then i decided, as an experiment, to have not one, but ten blogs, each with ten tags — so in effect, one hundred blogs, on write.as, such a great minimalist publishing platform.
ha ha ... i am an idiot.
you can subscribe to these blogs and receive all the posts as an email. how quaint!
like most things, even quarks, this has an up side and a down side, or light and dark if you prefer. on the up side : you get an email notification with the content of a post when i publish it. the down side : most of the things i write are edited and re-edited endlessly. so it is unlikely that the content of the email is the latest and best version of the post. to get to that click on the link in the email.
please note : you can't subscribe to the 'now' page for reasons which are not interesting enough to list.
the human condition
if i was publishing a book called the human condition i would ask erwin orlaf if i could license this picture for the cover. (i cropped the camera out of it. he might not like that.)