Passionate Ornithology

BLACK DIAMONDS SHINING - Afro-Galactic Art and Consciousness

2011-07-03T11:26:00.000-07:00

Black Diamonds Shining is an Oakland based afro galactic black arts collective made up of Ras Terms + Safety First + Deadeyes + Antjuan Jones + AshRose + Brooks Golden (Be Golden) + Larry Dobie

This show consists of visual information overload of the best kind.This is an old/new mythos brought forth into a Now that is in sorry need of fresh world perspectives, deep positive consciousness, and a connection to older ways of Being that have almost vanished in our tiresome and empty pursuit of the material. Black Diamonds Shining is part of a broad network of like-minded, engaged people coming together with a vision of interconnectedness, effectual magic, and creative hard work.

The Black Rays Race

See how the black rays of the black race
Have touched the immeasurable wisdom
And therefore the unknown quantity
See how they are not understood
Because as they are is not understood
And as what they know is what they are
See the unlimited freedom of the black rays.

---SUN RA

These multi-layered collaborative visual works and words have the obvious connections with hip-hop culture, namely public art/graffiti, but also a heavy alliance, or at least a spiritual connection with Afrofuturism, Rastafarianism, Post-colonialism, Yoruba belief systems, the AACM, SAMO/Jean-Michel Basquiat, SUN RA & kosmik subaltern/African diaspora alienship. In other words, the significance of these artists's collective vision is unquestionable. They've built the sun ship...now get on board!

Open through the month of July at the Rock Paper Scissors Collective space.
Hours: 12 - 7 pm, Wednesday - Sunday. Closed Monday and Tuesday.

2278 Telegraph Ave., Oakland, CA 94612
510.238.9171

Thanks to the BDS collective for allowing their work to be published here. Apologies for the less than stellar photos (no flash).

Sanctuary: Veronica De Jesus and Regina Clarkinia at Martina } { Johnston Gallery

2011-06-14T15:13:00.000-07:00

As I first caught sight of Veronica De Jesus’s new work kindly exploding from the walls of the Martina }{ Johnston Gallery I swore I heard the bong of a distant gong, a sound that seemed most fitting for these large drawings that allude to prayer circles and open chakras. I followed the resounding tones from piece to piece, allowing my eye to travel through multi-dimensional spaces, lost pyramids, and all-seeing disembodied eyes. Tiny white cosmograms or vévés give the drawings the feel of magical charms, primal insignias that with the right incantation would take the viewer further through each image. A couple drawings featured Chauvet Cave-like icons, but instead of hands we’re treated to the outline of basic human figures, hand in hand, circular and inclusive. These are not joyless, static surfaces: De Jesus’s regenerative work acts as a visual conduit to a healing retreat within oneself in order to bring about much needed down-time the world of commerce seems to not understand.

Winding my way through the kitchen of the gallery and exiting onto a welcoming porch, I spied a large screen TV glowing in another room: Regina Clarkinia’s recent video (part of a larger children’s variety show project) features the joyous, unself-conscious play of various children who we watch wriggle and bounce across the screen. I remarked to a fellow attendee that it’s a shame we adults would be jailed or institutionalized for exhibiting such wonderfully freeform behavior. Off-kilter Impanema circus music soundtracks wild child movements which are interspersed with quirky scenes of paper cats, a mouse, and an owl in various discussions. Part of the charm of this video is Clarkinia’s obvious personal delight in child’s play. These children were obviously comfortable in her presence, which made for a sweetly fun viewing experience.

Kids Show from Regina Clarkinia

In the backyard of the gallery sits The Light Temple made of large pieces of fabric that have palm-side up hands sewn into them, bringing to mind Palmistry prognostication or the Chiromantic hand engraving of Robert Fludd.

As it began to rain I thought I wouldn’t be able to fully seek sanctuary within its cotton walls, but the tchotchkes of “mind-spirit” arranged inside allowed me to hold fast, creating an invisible roof that deflected each droplet as I folded into myself and disappeared.

May 28th, 2011 to August 14th, 2011
Opening Reception: Saturday May 28th, 4 to 8 p.m.
Hours: Sundays 1 to 4 p.m. or by appointment

Martina } { Johnston Gallery

1201 Sixth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
510.558.0993

martinajohnston@gmail.com

Marie Wilson

2011-04-21T16:53:00.000-07:00

There is a woeful dearth of online information for artist Marie Wilson but for this one website, plus an earlier post on this blog. The poet Richard Tagett provided the images below, which were first published in his magazine, Manroot.

I do know that Marie Wilson is still alive and living with her husband Nanos Valaoritis in Greece. She must be about 89 years old.

A recent publication from City Lights Books (Will Alexander's "Compression & Purity") features a detail from her drawing, " The Creator."

The following series is entitled "Psychograms." Click on each image for a larger view.

An interview with Marie Wilson.

Lucio Fontana - Opening of Space

2011-02-08T10:24:00.000-08:00

Lucio Fontana (19 February 1899 – 7 September 1968) was an Italian (via Argentina) artist, sculptor, and founder of Spatialism. His White Manifesto states, "Matter, colour and sound in motion are the phenomena whose simultaneous development makes up the new art."

"I do not want to make a painting. I want to open up space, create a new dimension for art, be one with the cosmos as it endlessly expands beyond the confine of the picture." (statement, 1965)

Each painting has an undeniably intuitive sense of resolution, a feeling of wholeness through negation.

Lucio Fontana catalogues and videos

Gallery

Mark Warren Jacques - Everything is Rad

2011-01-25T09:52:00.000-08:00

Vipassana Breathing

8" x 10"

The Sun Feels Great on My Naked Parts

10" x 13"

There is Nothing New, Yet Everyday We Wake Up and It's All So New

10" x 13"

The Feeling of Forgetting

36" x 36"

Suddenly We Meet

12" x 9"

Mark Warren Jacques is a Portland, Oregon based artist. His work is at once earthy and cosmic, playful and penetrating.

Interview here.

Photo: copyright hungryeyeball

Jenn Shifflet - Floating, Drifting...

2011-01-11T13:57:00.000-08:00

Emerald Realms

My work is an exploration into the inner experience of time, fleeting moments of perception, and reflections of the natural world.

Groundless Sky Drift

In the Midst

Floating Realms

Blushing Petals

Rhythmic, atmospheric, and organic in nature, my paintings rest in the pause between movement and stillness, emergence and dissolution, where time may unfold slowly through subtle interplays of color and shifting light.

Resting in a Drifting Sky

A Handful of Stardust for You

Visit Jenn Shifflet's website for more sublime images depicting the marvelous and truly enchanted.

A showing of Ms. Shifflet's work that I encourage everyone to see:

SFMOMA Artist Gallery January 13th- February 24th 2011

Reception: Thursday, January 13th 5:30-7:30pm

Images courtesy of the artist

Text in italics by the artist

Axial Art - George Quasha

2011-01-01T09:50:00.000-08:00

Axial Art in this usage stands for visual art created according to an axial principle. In the case of axial drawing, the practice involves drawing from the lower center of the body, rather than from the arm or wrist. In virtually all of the work since 2006 it also involves drawing with two hands simultaneously, where each of the hands is part of a core movement yet is an independent expression of that movement. The term axis is quite literal in that it refers to the axis around which movement occurs.

axial process from George Quasha on Vimeo.

Axial stones-- two or more stones in unattached gravitational embrace whose axis cannot be visually detected and therefore seem impossible, an unlikely expression of (non) equilibrium—are “found,” unaltered stones brought to the point of most precarious balance. They engage entropy rather fearlessly. Perhaps even sublimely, as a site of inseparable terror and ecstasy. They show “force of nature” as both a lack and a spontaneous something unknown—lack of balance in every balancing; lack of stability in something still enough to perceive as itself; apparent lack of continuance of what is not yet gone—where nature itself can no longer be sure of what it is, because it has barely happened yet.

Quasha talk on Axial Stones at PINC from George Quasha on Vimeo.

Axial Poems

MORPHIC RESONANCE

~~~

Form
sounds
name
like
sound
forms
shape
things

ALLONYM

The
name
the
other
one
you
are
knows
you
by

WHAT IS WHERE AND NOT

~~~

If creation
is out
of nothing,
nothing is
more
immanent
in the thing
than the thing is
immanent
in itself

Axial Music

Arner/Quasha perform "Axial Music / 2" at White Box, NYC, 9-7-10 from George Quasha on Vimeo.

All work reproduced with the kind permission of George Quasha.

Timothy B. Layden - The Shape of Sounds

2010-12-15T11:53:00.000-08:00

Kitchen Purr

Nocturnverd

Drawing Attention

Puro Amor

In Chimes

Winter Movement

Drawing Attention

Timothy B. Layden is an American synesthetic artist residing in London, England.

Throughout the day I let my experience of moving sound shapes flow around me like a soft breeze which is mostly pleasant and not distracting.

Each of his pieces has a sound component as "accompaniment." Visit his website for further exploration.

Here is a very interesting and informative video on synethesia:

Exactly Like Breathing from I science on Vimeo.

Mr Layden's contribution begins at the 5:10 mark.

Catalogue of Tomothy B. Layden's work

All images reproduced by permission of the artist.

John Olson - The Parrots Are Monumental On The Rue d’Orsel

2010-12-13T10:47:00.000-08:00

My wallet is cluttered with identity and lamination. I say sticks and balls to those who are about to embark. Heaven’s nails are pounded toward the impenetrable. The umber. The amber. The lumber of life. Those who kill do so because the infantry to which they belong expects it of them. There is division between the body and the soul. There is division between bone and meat. George Braque’s papier collé fondled the world more earnestly after the war. The blot below my mohair is still mated to a railroad. Army symmetry is necessarily piquant. This is so cotton and beards may occasionally pounce on a consonant and fill it with opium. Grain and cloth humor the skin. Buckle a clean belt to stir the waist with structure. Heave lightning through the trees. Invite the shine of heaven to jingle in the doctrines of lobster carnality. Circle these penumbras with lucidity and string. The hives of the library ox hum like pages in a book of endless occurrence. There is a history to being, a leaning to learning. The books further attract the light of an inner knowledge not found in any laptop. This is the introverted world of the contemplative, dabs of plaster dangled within when the world grows silent in the forests of Bohemia. Those sciences devoted to insoluble flavors will one day unravel. The concepts bend like phantoms and move down the loaf to the appliance of spoons. In subversive death the scent of life is always served with depth and understanding. Exclamation pounds with the larynx hammer just as the ship is hoisted onto the shore. The harness is expanded for jellyfish. The eggnog door exudes brightness. We propel ourselves up the Mediterranean seeking a glimpse of towering majesty. The revolt is now a firmament mosaic, a swirling design of intention and broth. The parrots are monumental on the rue d’Orsel. To go outdoors is to fulfill oneself with private thought and still remain open to grace. The squash in the market incandesces. The pumpkins culminate in plump apotheosis. There are shouts. There are shots. There are shovels. Even the shadows hiss with anticipation.

John Olson's blog.

A Poet of Excess and Expansion.

Leonora Carrington - Britain's Lost Surrealist

2010-11-22T12:01:00.000-08:00

Leonora Carrington escaped a stultifying Lancashire childhood to run off with Max Ernst and hang out with Picasso and André Breton in 1930s Paris. She fled the Nazis, escaped from a psychiatric hospital in Spain and became a national treasure in Mexico. What happened to one of Britain's finest - and neglected - surrealists?

J. Karl Bogartte

2010-11-16T15:15:00.000-08:00

Endless Reproduction of the Glance

From "The Wolf House"

To see is to mesmerize the membrane of sense into believing that there is more to be torn than meets the shape of it, more to the nearness that touches what isn’t apparent, more to taste and devour that slips pagan with light through your evidence. Rumors of unavoidable feasting make your mouth bleed, showing signs of a feverish pollination.

A tree of sight with seeing leaves, as luminous as the body relieved of its memory, unraveled by its tedious ancestors, or without sleep, its eggs spinning in the doorway. The bright air is bleeding slowly, like burning film when the dream interrupts a backward glance.

In phantom dimensions there are no rules less forbidding than the revenge of presence, and no lingering doubts analogous to the most sinister of solutions, sister-bathing, and the owl-table following you...

The Liquid of Thought is Glowing

From "Luminous Weapons" [a work in progress]

A fire of black ink with ancient birds mirroring the geometry of reflections fluctuating inside your body, deep in sinuous manes of a deserted courtyard, where the magnetic fields easily slide through with each germinating alignment of fragile attractions and endless threads... where you reach deep and spread yourself as thin as possible, as thin as a window touchingly fitted and calibrated by the exquisitely gloved hands of the mathematician, that angular echo, when he stumbles down the stairs, releasing nudes from their hiding places and pulling pigments out of each death and resurrection according to the degree of archaic abandon. Conscious thought is the moon in the jaws of the dragon’s tattoo. At 3am there is only the language of water, and she sleeps, guarding the night...

From your eyes through hers, a circle surrendered, an oval cracked open, a passageway blurred in wind, a death arranged in medieval times to reverse the refraction of light, a shadow cast across centuries like an obscure landing site that mimics the fog, a zero stained with acid and attached to a prism like an owl white as blood, like a phantom sensation that clings to you with love, a vessel of unorthodox gestures, a vessel of evening and a vessel of dawn, a vessel that covers your tracks and one that forges your hollow and radiant stone. She moves with you around the wedding night, bathing the birth of another light, another hour swarming with ocular pollination, growing hallucinations out of nothing lost, or forgotten. You follow her procession, a talisman of waking outside of yourself.

When the Veil Between Worlds is Lifted

The Perfect Crime

The prism trembles. The prism watches. The prism is grooming
itself... If you leave to others what form, however lovely or vile,
the prism will take, you will be deceived and the prism will kill you.

The sirens no longer afford the living any solace at all. They tremble with every leaf, and when the animals come near to bathe, as they often do now that the sun lingers a little longer into the nighttime, the living elect to dream themselves into invisible caverns - their shadows standing guard at the entrances.

The disordered enchantment of the world through which we prowl, effortlessly cast off from ceaselessly changing branches, nourished by ghostly roots that charm the most precious rains, is that which binds us together for reasons as different as the calm before the storm and the calm after it.

Less than transparent, when she sees herself less than perfect, she charges the atmosphere around her with the unexpected DESIRE FOR THE WHIRLWIND... When she talks in her sleep, there are slight tremors in the earth, enough to rustle the sheets, enough to wake me: the windows are haunted by owls...

In the forests, along the terraces, fires are still plagued by humans who have not yet learned the terrible knowledge that only fire can interpret dreams.

The astonishing difference between a bird of prey and a crystal is the sound of a woman's breathing after a making love...

Her spirit quickens under a veil of constellations, her breasts of shimmering space are hungry animals devouring time. At this moment, with all the Magic Arts thrashing at the outer door, she is etched with stars and her flesh is timeless.

Always: what was there before you? What will there be after you are gone? For the moment, primordial and far-reaching, swimming takes on aspects of a revelatory sign and becomes myth. Water is our language and the scintillating source of all our gestures. We gradually light up and become soluble at dusk...

In front of the mirror she enacts the historical seduction of the winds. The aching machinations of reflection spill out all their glowing tales... In the center of the city, an aboriginal tribe wanders among us, successfully resisting all efforts of the anthropologists to locate them - their powers of teleportation are kept secret. They are raptors of the wind...

The great indigo moth that resembles a forest fire does not look like the moon when it closes it's eyes.

The skeleton of a loved one is enough in itself to keep the very last spark from turning into a forest.

After the death of Abstractions, it became fashionable to build great cities inhabitable only by skilled somnambulists. It has likewise become mandatory to kill for the sanctity of love.

The wolf has taken the place of the sundial.

JKB on a street corner in Ecuador.

Publications

Trilogy

Online Texts

The Wolf House

Secret Games

The Mirror Held Up in Darkness

Cover by JKB ("The Wedding Guests Have Arrived")

2010 Interview

Texts and images reproduced by permission of J. Karl Bogartte.

Jeremy Coleman - 16mm films

2010-11-03T10:11:00.000-07:00

Walking the Tundra (1993)

I, Zupt 49 (1994)

Jeremy Coleman (born 1971) is an artist, filmmaker, and photographer living in Daejeon, South Korea. His work has been shown in art galleries and film festivals throughout the world, including the San Francisco Cinematheque, Canyon Cinema, The Athens Film Festival and the Lee Gong Gallery.

Isaac Abrams

2010-10-24T09:33:00.001-07:00

Blue Bird

An Explosive Sky

A Gathering in the Forest of Dreamers

Shaman

A Walk Through Oneness

Isaac Abrams

Images reproduced by permission of the artist.

Dane Rudhyar

2010-08-26T09:47:00.002-07:00

Dane Rudhyar, composer, artist, theosophist, writer & astrologer will be honored by Other Minds.

Rudhyar was American modernism's proto-multiculturalist. He connected dissonance to his studies in comparative religion, theosophy, and metaphysics, was a leader and mentor to fellow composers Henry Cowell, Ruth Crawford Seeger and Carl Ruggles, and later influenced a new generation including John Cage, Lou Harrison, James Tenney, and Kyle Gann.

Now, 25 years after Rudhyar's death (9/13/85 in San Francisco), Other Minds presents a celebration of the work of this "seed man" of the avant-garde.

Antiphony

Storm Gods

Creative Man

Images courtesy http://www.khaldea.com/rudhyar/

Italicized text excerpted from Other Minds

Download his works for piano here.

Gordon Onslow Ford: Video Interview

2010-07-12T16:04:00.000-07:00

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Interview by Lyn Kienholz

O Light
Acrylic on canvas 48" x 18" 1999

Images courtesy of Weinstein Gallery

Peter Lamborn Wilson, "Communities of Resistance" and beyond...

2010-07-10T16:37:00.000-07:00

On Irish SOMA

The Caravan of Summer

Sumerian Economics

Link to video interview, COMMUNITIES OF RESISTANCE, Parts 1-6

A video from World-Information Institute

Green Hermeticism

Philip Taaffe

2010-06-21T17:09:00.000-07:00

Andalusian Panel II

Composition with Ornamental Fragments

Portal, 1994-1995

Radiant Study

Essentially, everything in my work is about a process of description. My attitude towards repetition has to do with the cumulative effect of continuous applications of line and color. If we focus on that, and see them as crystallized into patterns or marks, what do they add up to? They become some kind of actively structured field. I see that as being an entrance to a trance-like state. I'm interested in inviting the possibility for ecstatic experience, for getting outside of stasis. My roots are from Ireland, and I suppose a subtext to my work must relate to these Celtic shamanistic traditions. The work is also about movement, or how we see in a constant series of glimpses. What do I want my art to accomplish? What do I expect it to be like as a physical encounter? I think the best thing one can hope for is to be able to enter into another world.

-- Philip Taaffe, "Confluence Statement"

Temples of Transition: Bryan de Roo and Gina Borg

2010-06-18T14:34:00.000-07:00

The Passionate Ornithologist recently caught the brilliant Bryan de Roo and Gina Borg show, Temples of Transition at Gallery Extrana.

Needless to say, the two artists' works are mesmerizing in their visual interplay.

Ms. Borg's ethereally subtle kaleidoscopic images barely materialize on the surface, suggesting the fleetingness of sensation and experience. There is a soft geometry in the mandala-like shapes and topographic points of interest.

Mr. de Roo's work features an almost unending and interlocked xenolinguistic calligraphy that accumulates into domiciles, domes, and dolmens of anachronistic symmetries and "thought bubble" artifacts.

Images courtesy of Gallery Extrana (used w/o permission)

Bryan de Roo

Gina Borg

Conversation with the artists.

East Bay Express review

Big City Orchestra: Live June 9, 2010 (Part One)

2010-06-14T10:30:00.000-07:00

Big City Orchestra: Live, June 9, 2010 (part 2)

2010-06-14T10:29:00.000-07:00

On Hiatus....

2010-04-19T19:43:00.001-07:00

The Passionate Ornithologist will be on hiatus until further notice....possibly mid-summer.

There are plenty of older posts now for you to sift through.....

Sincerely,
P.O.

Seraphine de Senlis

2010-04-04T20:03:00.000-07:00

Seraphine Louis (Seraphine de Senlis) video.

Morris Graves: Meridian Gallery

2010-03-31T16:58:00.000-07:00

The Passionate Ornithologist paid the Meridian Gallery (San Francisco) a visit in order to soak in the work of Taoist Owl, Morris Graves.

The show runs from now until May 15th, 2010

Waning Moon (in the exhibition)

Walking Waking Singing in the Next Dimension

Mid-Century Hibernation

Chalice Missing Pure Water Libation (in the exhibition)

photo: Imogen Cunningham

"I paint to evolve a changing language of symbols and language with which to remark upon the qualities of our mysterious capacities which direct us toward ultimate reality."

Humboldt Arts

Woodside Braseth Gallery

Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art

Essay by Kenneth Rexroth

Jacques Caux

2010-03-11T14:22:00.000-08:00

Sempre Libera

L'Androgyne

Danseur

Hecate

Jacques Caux

Alain Satie: REDISCOVERED AVANT-GARDES IN PAINTING

2010-03-08T17:07:00.000-08:00

Two constituents of society face each other: on the one hand the creative artists who are little known, rejected, too far out of step with a society that has trouble accepting innovation; and on the other hand the media-hyped Neo-borrowers who dilute creation with an amalgam blended of true creation and of retarded familiar forms. These Neos reflect the contributions of the creative artists through the bias of fashion, making them easier to assimilate for people who are more particularly preoccupied with the superficiality of things; then long after, they take the innovations back into their account and hide the unique creators of these new forms and pass themselves off as the ones who made these contributions.

beginning

Entassement - 1966 (encre de chine sur toile) 35 x 27 cm

Brian Lucas

2010-03-06T15:27:00.001-08:00

The "Maps of Mirabilia" paintings are explosive micro/macro-cosmic space dust portraits of a mind seeking to go beyond the purely phenomenal and into areas containing a multiplicity of meaning and sensation. These are paintings that beg one's eye to slow down and travel into each image.

Universal Mind Decoder

Breaking the Language Barrier

Illiminal

A Worthy One

Possible

Cover for Andrew Joron's Trance Archive (selected and new poems) just out from City Lights Books in San Francisco.

Web: www.notabove-notbelow.blogspot.com

Interview: http://obikaufmann.blogspot.com/2010/03/brian-lucas-light-house.html

On show at The Hive Gallery, Oakland, CA until March 26th. Email for more info: earinsoundATyahoo.com

Alberto Di Fabio

2010-02-21T21:05:00.001-08:00

Nimesulide

Sinestesia

Untitled, 2001

Untitled, 2002

Alex Grey Has Lost the Plot

2010-02-12T14:54:00.000-08:00

Even though a lot of Alex Grey's work I find to be kitschy and a little too New Age, I found through his writings that he has what seems to be a very penetrating, inclusive, and exploratory take on life, art, and the cosmos--much of which I am in agreement with. However, I must say that I consider his portrait of Barack Obama (and the thought behind it) to be highly ridiculous and misinformed. Although Grey preaches from a transcendentalist perspective this portrait reveals him as yet another well-intentioned and optimistic person who has been duped (yet again) by the promises of another American politician. I needn't go into details as to why Obama isn't worthy of such an adoring gesture...all one must do is open a newspaper, even one published by the mainstream media, to see that Obama is a corporate/banking/military puppet who, if he really had good intentions, wouldn't be operating business as usual.

Julian Cope

2010-02-12T14:33:00.000-08:00

Stephen Mueller

2010-01-18T10:50:00.000-08:00

Shapeshifter

Madrugada 2

Migration

Indo-European

Dawn Index

All images courtesy of Bill Maynes Gallery.

Interview from 2002.

William Blake: Visionary Anarchist

2010-01-18T10:00:00.000-08:00

Peter Marshall talking about Blake as proto-anarchist and green ecologist:

The fascinating talk continues:

Pt. 2

Pt. 3

Pt. 4

Pt. 5

Pt. 6 (includes a Q&A)

Culture is Not Your Friend-- Terence McKenna

2010-01-15T18:07:00.001-08:00

Joseph Noble

2010-01-11T10:07:00.000-08:00

The poet and musician Joseph Noble sends these....

"Notations"

"Each Light"

"Eye Lines"

Paul Laffoley

2010-01-10T19:24:00.000-08:00

Laffoley's Odyssey

http://www.laffoley.com/

http://paullaffoley.net/

Origins, etc.

An Afternoon with Paul

Asemic Writing

2010-01-03T15:28:00.000-08:00

After several years of spontaneous glyph making, as well as looking intently at Tobey, Gysin, Michaux, and Onslow-Ford's works, I came across the term for it, "asemic writing." I was electronically introduced to the works of Tim Gaze (www.asemic.net) and the blog, The New Post-literate: a gallery of asemic writing (http://thenewpostliterate.blogspot.com/), whose editor Michael Jacobson interviewed Gaze here: http://common-line.com/2008/12/interview-tim-gaze.html .

Vugg Books also has some interesting work in the field of asemic writing, most notably Gaze's journal "Asemic Movement." They also feature the works of Jim Leftwich, Spencer Selby, and John M. Bennett (all of whom I published in my xerox poetry mag, ANGLE in the mid-1990's)

Asemic Movement #1 PDF

Asemic Movement #2 PDF

Asemitic writing is much more compelling to me than visual poetry.

Tim Gaze, from "Ancient, Modern, and Pseudo-Chinese":

courtesy: The New Post-literate

A Love Letter to June by Morgan Taubert:

Courtesy of The New Post-literate

An excellent blog entry on Tim Gaze and his Asemic Magazine. Link

An article exploring a possible link between alien glyphs and asemic writing:

http://www.ufomystic.com/2009/07/21/asemic-texts-alien-writing/

See the Passionate Ornithology , Oct. 2008 for samples of alien glyphs. Or here: >>>

Fred Tomaselli

2009-11-30T10:49:00.001-08:00

"I do consider myself a 'maximalist' artist...'

'Before and After Echo, Wow and Flutter'
Leaves, pills, photocollage, acrylic, resin on wood panel
24x30 in.

'Abductor'
Leaves, Photocollage, Acrylic and Resin on wood panel
96 x 78 in.

Ustad Ali Akbar Khan....RIP

2009-06-21T10:20:00.000-07:00

Rikki Ducornet's Desires

2009-03-29T20:37:00.000-07:00

Desirous 1

Desirous 5

RD photo by Forrest Gander
Images courtesy of the Pierre Menard Gallery

The Mazzariello Labyrinth

2009-03-29T19:51:00.001-07:00

Created by Helena Mazzariello, a Montclair sculptor and psychic, as "a gift to the world".... The labyrinth was built during spring equinox in 1990 in an area Mazzariello routinely took her goats to graze...

Re.: Sibley labyrinths:

http://www.druidry.org/obod/sacred_sites/ca_mazes.html

http://sanfrancisco.about.com/od/artsentertainment/tp/bayarealabyrinths.htm

All photos by the Passionate Ornithologist

Zoviet France

2009-03-11T18:05:00.000-07:00

A 1996 live performance from Zoviet France.

Up in the Hills Near Home

2009-03-09T14:15:00.000-07:00

Richard Tagett (Canessa Gallery, SF)

2009-01-26T08:27:00.000-08:00

Born on the 14th of February 1936, I began writing poetry in earnest with the emergence of Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry, 1945-1960.

(...)

By Columbus Day 1961 we were in San Francisco where I was dying to meet Jack Spicer, and I soon found myself in a workshop with him and Robin Blaser, Stan Persky, and George Stanley on Sunday afternoons at Stan’s place in North Beach.

(...)

http://diogenessf.blogspot.com/

Forrest Bess

2009-01-11T17:54:00.000-08:00

Born October 5, 1911, in Bay City, Texas, Forrest Bess lived his life there in virtual isolation, on a strip of land accessible only by boat.

+++

In Bess' study of mythology, alchemy, archaeology and religion he perceived the recurrence of many of the symbols in his own work; he became obsessed with investigating the mystery of this universal language. Eventually he concluded that this shared symbology held the key to the alchemists' quest for eternal life. Unlike others—Jung and the alchemists, for example—who had considered these images only in spiritual terms, Bess applied a physical interpretation to them. Beginning in the early fifties he came believe he had discovered the secret of immortality—androgyny, the conjunction of male and female, through actual physical transformation. Believing in the magic of symbols to stimulate the unconscious, Bess felt he could communicate this secret through the depiction of pertinent symbols; a vocabulary of images relating to his own interpretation of how this life-prolonging union of opposites might physically be effectuated appeared frequently throughout his work.

No. 40

The Crowded Mind

The Greek

Images and information courtesy of www.forrestbess.org

Jay DeFeo

2009-01-11T17:35:00.001-08:00

The Rose

photograph by Marty Sacco

Estate: www.jaydefeo.org

Enzo Cucchi

2009-01-02T16:41:00.000-08:00

Sottunghia

Piedra de la inteligencia

"I strive to give others a sense of sacredness..."

Enzo Cucchi

Psychedelic Origins of Santa Claus

2008-12-15T15:12:00.000-08:00

Fly agarics appear on Christmas cards and New Year cards from around the world as a symbol of good luck.

S haman Claus

Although most people see Christmas as a Christian holiday, most of the symbols and icons we associate with Christmas celebrations are actually derived from the shamanistic traditions of the tribal peoples of pre-Christian northern Europe.

Rapoon

2008-12-04T18:41:00.000-08:00

"Alien Glyph Morphology, a DVD featuring the music and visuals of Rapoon, the musical moniker of Robin Storey, an ex-original member of the UK ethno-ambient group, Zoviet France.

The video states that this is a Zoviet France video--it is not.

MIRROR MAGNETIK INTERVAL by Douglas Abdell

2008-12-04T17:40:00.000-08:00

Who is Douglas Abdell I hear you ask? I only know what I found online at Ask Art:

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, he earned a B.A. in sculpture from Syracuse University in 1970. His sculpture mediums are cast bronze and welded steel, and they are widely exhibited including the Corcoran Museum in Washington D.C. He lives in Madrid, Spain.

Here is a sculpture of his entitled, "Pnauxae Aekyad":

The one below is called "Qurefe-Aekyad" and it is located in the sculpture park, Quadrat Bottrop (Moderne Galerie) in Bottrop/Germany.

"Aekyad," I assume, is a neologism of Abdell's, the name he has given these objects he sculpts into metallic being. Here is an article on the piece he has at Stanford University (USA):

http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/tip/2004/aug20/sculpture.htm

"In 1973 Abdell moved to South Strafford, Vermont and created his first in the Kryad sculpture series. Abdell’s geometric sculptures, painted black, are the three-dimensional embodiment of calligraphic sketches. He has compared his work to the components of language, and his forms, as well as the titles of his sculptures, relate to this alphabetical metaphor."

In 1999 I found a xerox handwritten/drawn/colored booklet by Douglas Abdell and co-author Begonia Korta-Zaharra (of whom I've found nothing online) for sale. The title?

MIRROR MAGNETIK INTERVAL

The copy I first bought was lost years ago, but I recently purchased another copy from the same dealer in New York. It seems to be Issue oo (infinity). The colophon states that following issues will include the writings of others. There's also a lower Broadway (New York) address listed.

The subjects of the text are the number 8 (and the glory of 9), sacred geometry, musical intervals, "phonetic energy," the mechanics of sound, and the New York Lotto among other things that I am still trying to decipher.

Following are select pages from the booklet:

Cover

Abdell-ian Terms

The Star Mekanics of 8

On page 20 we find the Infinetely Develooping the 8 (sic)

This one is located in John Jay Park in New York

"Octaves of vibration"

back cover

A 1980s article in Italian on Abdell's contribution to "Gothic Futurism":

LINK

Gordon Onslow Ford

2008-11-23T21:27:00.000-08:00

Contemplation

A spontaneous manifestation of lines and marks
is an impersonal phenomenon that,
like a tree in the outer world,
invites contemplation so that it can be seen
and make a contribution to consciousness.

Contemplation, in this context, is
being in the presence of a spontaneous manifestation
with the mind open to the MIND.
In this way there is a chance that the painter will see anew
or be inspired to paint spontaneously.

Gordon Onslow Ford at Bishop Pine Preserve, Inversness, California, 1983.
Photo: Nata Piaskowski..

www.lucidart.com

I Like America

2008-11-23T10:36:00.000-08:00

"To make people free is the aim of art, therefore art for me is the science of freedom"

"Art is a genuinely human medium for revolutionary change in the sense of completing the transformation from a sick world to a healthy one."

--Joseph Beuys

Enrico Donati

2008-11-14T18:48:00.001-08:00

It escaped my attention that Surrealist artist Enrico Donati died this past April at the age of 99 years.

Untitled

Oil on canvas 25 x 30 inches 1946

Untitled (Decalcomania)

Frottage on paper 11 3/4 x 9 3/4 inches 1946

Photos courtesy : www.weinstein.com

Beyond Jobs

2008-11-14T16:07:00.000-08:00

"My goal is to create a situation of full unemployment--a world in which people do not have to hold a job. And I believe that this kind of world can actually be achieved."

--Robert Theobald

Wilfred Sätty

2008-10-30T15:38:00.000-07:00

There is a time in the span of civilizations when creative energy and the human spirit are wholly, if briefly focused. When this occurs culture in all its manifestations reaches its zenith. The moment passes; civilization declines, only to be replaced by others. This process of life appears cyclic. Communities become tribes, turn into nations and become empires which, like suns, radiate their energy to the limits of their power, then decay and finally vanish leaving behind only traces.

Chaos Myths

2008-10-18T16:51:00.001-07:00

Unseen Chaos (po-te-kitea)
Unpossessed, Unpassing
Chaos of utter darkness
Untouched & untouchable
--Maori Chant

Chaos perches on a sky-mountain: a huge bird like a yellow bag or red fireball, with six feet & four wings--has no face but dances & sings.

Or Chaos is a black longhaired dog, blind & deaf, lacking the five viscera.

Chaos the Abyss comes first, then Earth/Gaia, then Desire/Eros. From these three proceed two pairs--Erebus & old Night, Aether & Daylight. Neither Being nor Non-being
neither air nor earth nor space:
what was enclosed? where? under whose protection?
What was water, deep, unfathomable?
Neither death nor immortality, day nor night--
but ONE breathed by itself with no wind.
Nothing else. Darkness swathed in darkness,
unmanifest water.
The ONE, hidden by void,
felt the generation of heat, came into being
as Desire, first seed of Mind...
Was there an up or down?
There were casters of seed, there were powers:
energy underneath, impulse above.
But who knows for sure?
--Rg Veda

Tiamat the Chaos-Ocean slowly drops from her womb Silt & Slime, the Horizons, Sky and watery Wisdom. These offspring grow noisy & bumptious--she considers their destruction.

But Marduk the wargod of Babylon rises in rebellion against the Old Hag & her Chaos-monsters, chthonic totems--Worm, Female Ogre, Great Lion, Mad Dog, Scorpion Man, Howling Storm--dragons wearing their glory like gods--& Tiamat herself a great sea-serpent.

Marduk accuses her of causing sons to rebel against fathers- -she loves Mist & Cloud, principles of disorder. Marduk will be the first to rule, to invent government. In battle he slays Tiamat & from her body orders the material universe. He inaugurates the Babylonian Empire--then from gibbets & bloody entrails of Tiamat's incestuous son he creates the human race to serve forever the comfort of gods--& their high priests & anointed kings.

Father Zeus & the Olympians wage war against Mother Gaia & the Titans, those partisans of Chaos, the old ways of hunting & gathering, of aimless wandering, androgyny & the license of beasts.

Amon-Ra (Being) sits alone in the primordial Chaos-Ocean of NUN creating all the other gods by jerking off--but Chaos also manifests as the dragon Apophis whom Ra must destroy (along with his state of glory, his shadow & his magic) in order that the Pharoah may safely rule--a victory ritually re-created daily in Imperial temples to confound the enemies of the State, of cosmic Order.

Chaos is Hun Tun, Emperor of the Center. One day the South Sea, Emperor Shu, & the North Sea, Emperor Hu (shu hu = lightning) paid a visit to Hun Tun, who always treated them well. Wishing to repay his kindness they said, "All beings have seven orifices for seeing, hearing, eating, shitting, etc.--but poor old Hun Tun has none! Let's drill some into him!" So they did--one orifice a day--till on the seventh day, Chaos died.

But...Chaos is also an enormous chicken's egg. Inside it P'an-Ku is born & grows for 18,000 years--at last the egg opens up, splits into sky & earth, yang & yin. Now P'an-Ku grows into a column that holds up the universe--or else he becomes the universe (breath-->wind, eyes-->sun & moon, blood & humors-->rivers & seas, hair & lashes-->stars & planets, sperm-->pearls, marrow-->jade, his fleas-->human beings, etc.)

Or else he becomes the man/monster Yellow Emperor. Or else he becomes Lao Tzu, prophet of Tao. In fact, poor old Hun Tun is the Tao itself.

"Nature's music has no existence outside things. The various apertures, pipes, flutes, all living beings together make up nature. The "I" cannot produce things & things cannot produce the "I," which is self-existent. Things are what they are spontaneously, not caused by something else. Everything is natural & does not know why it is so. The 10,000 things have 10,000 different states, all in motion as if there were a True Lord to move them--but if we search for evidence of this Lord we fail to find any." (Kuo Hsiang)

Every realized consciousness is an "emperor" whose sole form of rule is to do nothing to disturb the spontaneity of nature, the Tao. The "sage" is not Chaos itself, but rather a loyal child of Chaos--one of P'an-Ku's fleas, a fragment of flesh of Tiamat's monstrous son. "Heaven and Earth," says Chuang Tzu, "were born at the same time I was, & the 10,000 things are one with me."

Ontological Anarchism tends to disagree only with the Taoists' total quietism. In our world Chaos has been overthrown by younger gods, moralists, phallocrats, banker- priests, fit lords for serfs. If rebellion proves impossible then at least a kind of clandestine spiritual jihad might be launched. Let it follow the war-banners of the anarchist black dragon, Tiamat, Hun Tun.

Chaos never died.

--Hakim Bey

Alien Glyphs (Xenolinguistic)

2008-10-02T18:10:00.000-07:00

Some examples of alien glyphs and charts that were either dictated or taught to humans:

Sherlock Hynotized!

2008-09-22T13:31:00.000-07:00

Duchamp said:

2008-09-22T11:39:00.000-07:00

... since a three-dimensional object casts a two-dimensional shadow, we should be able to imagine the unknown four-dimensional object whose shadow we are. I for my part am fascinated by the search for a one-dimensional object that casts no shadow at all.

-- Octavio Paz
(trs. Helen R. Lane)

Richard Wright of Pink Floyd-- -RIP

2008-09-15T10:58:00.000-07:00

Wright on far right!

LONDON - Richard Wright, a founding member of the rock group Pink Floyd, died Monday. He was 65.

James Bloodbeard-- Live in L.A.

2008-07-17T08:27:00.000-07:00

A few seconds of James Bloodbeard playing in a Hollywood
living room, August 2007.

Featuring former members of Mirza and Knit Separates .

John Anderson

2008-07-12T18:28:00.000-07:00

I met John Anderson about 10 years ago in an art gallery in Point Reyes, CA after coming across a flyer for his exhibition that included a photo of one of his paintings. At the time I didn't know his work, but I was familiar with his mentor Gordon Onslow Ford's paintings and writings. We met and spoke briefly about how he met Onslow Ford and about his work in general. Unfortunately I don't recall any details of the conversation.

Two days ago I happened to walk into the Weinstein Gallery in San Francisco and saw that besides having an amazing collection of Onslow Ford's work, they also are now representing Anderson. There is a whole floor dedicated to both of their work. The visual electricity in that room is overpowering!

(Images courtesy Weinstein Gallery)

See also: www.lucidart.org

Bruce Conner (November 18, 1933 - July 7, 2008)

2008-07-12T17:04:00.000-07:00

Conner's work is so varied it runs against the common notion that if an artist is to be successful or recognized they must have a consistent style that identifies him/her to the viewer (or listener). His work in assemblage, film, and drawing is unparalleled --something I'm certain Conner was aware of. His legendary prickliness or suspiciousness could be due to self-preservation; his desire to survive materially as an artist without having to succumb to commercialization or being turned into a commodity as he could so easily have become. He was a true maverick.

--P.O.

Andrew Chalk

2008-07-05T13:01:00.000-07:00

A musician whose solo work and collaborations with Christoph Heemann (as Mirror), Andrew Chalk's organic ambient tones are some of the most compelling, eerie, and deeply engaging music I've heard in awhile. His releases are very limited editions and always include original artwork.

Vega

Fall In The Wake Of A Flawless Landscape

The River that Flows into Sands

Agnes Pelton, Desert Transcendentalist

2008-06-16T20:27:00.001-07:00

These pictures are conceptions of light - the essence of fire, not as we see it in the material world but as the radiance of the inner being. They are produced from that state of consciousness from which the creative impulse is a unified expression and solidified to the presentation of the material forms of the natural world.

Agnes Pelton, December 7, 1930

Mount of Flame

The Voice

Messengers

Wells of Jade

Fire Sounds

Nurture

Lee Mullican

2008-04-24T16:41:00.000-07:00

Lee Mullican, along with Wolfgang Paalen and Gordon Onslow Ford, was known as a member of “the Dynaton.” This group of artists named after the Greek word for “the possible” acted as a bridge between the European Surrealist and American Abstract Expressionist schools. Disbanding shortly after its seminal exhibition in 1951 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Dynaton explored the subconscious mind, mysticism, automatism, and the influences of ancient cultures. Mullican remained true to these ideas but went on to develop his own highly personal imagery.

Paintings from the 1970's

April 26 - June 7th, 2008

Opening reception: Saturday, April 26, 2008 6:00 - 8:00 pm

Marc Selwyn Fine Art
6222 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 101, Los Angeles, California 90048

Earliest Oil Paintings Discovered

2008-04-22T13:09:00.000-07:00

Oil paintings have been found in caves behind the two ancient colossal Buddha statues destroyed in 2001 by the Taliban, suggesting that Asians — not Europeans — were the first to invent oil painting.

Gao Xingjian

2008-04-11T17:08:00.000-07:00

The hunter is already myth. To talk about a mixture of history and legend is how folk stories are born. Reality exists only through experience, and it must be personal experience. However, once related, even personal experience becomes a narrative. Reality can’t be verified and doesn’t need to be, that can be left for the reality of life experts to debate. What is important is life. Reality is simply that I am sitting by the fire in this room which is black with grime and smoke and that I see the light of the fire dancing in his eyes. Reality is myself, reality is only the perception of this instant and it can’t be related to another person. All that needs to be said is that outside, a mist is enclosing the green-blue mountain in a haze and your heart is reverberating with the rushing water of a swift-flowing stream.

--from "Soul Mountain"

Let the Games Begin!

2008-04-07T09:10:00.000-07:00

Do not expect the police to do anything other than protect the interests of those in power.

A wonderful example of how it takes six policemen to tackle one real human.

According to AFP this is "a protester arrested by police after attempting to grab the Olympic torch (...)" I don't see any police, only Chinese Gestapo agents.

Five policemen needed to subdue one real human.

The man on the ground is an advocate for human rights.

Mr Hendershot

2008-03-25T19:38:00.000-07:00

During the period 1925 to 1928, an unknown backyard inventor by the name of Lester Hendershot constructed a device that could be utilized either as a motor or to supply electricity without the use of any known conventional fuel...Within a few days of national prominence, Hendershot was to suffer a debilitating injury from electric shock, threats to his life and humiliation in an attempt to brand him as a fraud. Finally, he was to be silenced by the powerful vested interests who wished to retain the status quo.

Rapoon

2008-03-25T19:32:00.001-07:00

Jacob Bohme, Theosophia Revelata

2008-03-25T19:20:00.000-07:00

Aurora

Supersensual Life

TAU by Philip Lamantia

2008-03-22T21:03:00.000-07:00

I've spent this afternoon and evening reading a "lost manuscript" of Lamantia's entitled, "Tau," now available from City Lights Books. The editor Garrett Caples surmises it was written in the early-mid 1950s, thus making it a bridge-of-sorts between his early work and the publication of "Ekstasis" in 1959. Thanks to City Lights Books and the Estate of Philip Lamantia for making this work available--it may even attract more readers to Lamantia's explosively ecstatic work. His work is monumental, a purely transcendent experience.

Included are the poems of John Hoffman whose work Lamantia read at the famous Six Gallery Reading.

"(...) despite its literary and historical importance, Hoffman's work has never before been published.:

http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100220120

Spearman!

2008-03-09T14:40:00.000-07:00

THE SAME SOUND IN
DIFFERENT PLACES, THE TENSION OF
RHYTHMIC OPPOSITION, CHANGING
PARTS, DISORDERING THE MUSICAL
SYNTAX, A MOVING SURFACE OF
MUSICAL MEANING MUSICAL
FREEDOM THE MANIPULATION OF
CREATIVE DISRUPTION ENHANCING
TRANSFORMATIONS OF MUSICAL
INVESTIGATION.

--Glenn Spearman
from "The Musa-Physics:
Myth - Science - Poetics"

RA!

2008-03-09T14:36:00.000-07:00

The Outer Bridge

In the half-between world,
Dwell they: The Tone Scientists
In notes and tone
They speak of many things...
The tone scientists:
Architects of planes of discipline
Mathematically precise are they:
The tone-scientists

--Sun Ra

michaux, gysin

2008-03-08T16:01:00.001-08:00

New Artist of Light...

2008-03-01T10:57:00.000-08:00

'Some people never see the light until the day they die'

(sung by an elderly woman from across the room while she accompanies herself on the piano)

++

photo: Gilbert Tremlay
http://www.firstscience.com/home/photos/light_69.html

The P.O. can be found here...

2008-02-25T09:37:00.000-08:00

....more at a later date

Nurse With Wound

2008-01-19T09:49:00.000-08:00

"I've Plummed this Whole Neighborhood"

The Dreamachine

2008-01-19T09:41:00.000-08:00

Ganesha

2008-01-18T08:12:00.001-08:00

...destroyer of obstacles...

From "The Call of Cthulhu"

2008-01-12T18:46:00.000-08:00

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

--H.P. Lovecraft

Sherlock Duchamp

2008-01-11T08:13:00.001-08:00

The Lake of Enchanted Silence

2008-01-06T09:02:00.001-08:00

It lies within a land that is only seen by the sun and the moon and the horizon-questing stars. The sky-wrestled mountains, like sentries of Eternity, surround with their immemorial zone of azure-shadowed snows the serenity of the lake's unfathomable dream. They bar therefrom the sounds of the aeons that thunder on the shores of Eternity, and the winds that ring with the rumour of iron years, and shut from all save the azure infinite, and the fires and clouds and shadows of the sky.

The lake is feed with the snows of the mountains, and with silence that flows from the mien of space, and is filled with the blue splendour of the sky. Infinitely finds itself doubled herein.

On the shore of the lake grow the blue and white amaranths of a perennial summer, and there is no life save that of butterflies and the most beautiful birds. He who penetrates this land may drink the silence of the lake, and look upon it till the image of infinity fills imperturbably the depths of a mind that has become as calm and smooth as the waters.

--Clark Ashton Smith

Aztec Ruins Unearthed....

2007-12-30T17:18:00.001-08:00

The most significant archeological find in many decades has been made this month in Mexico City. Archeologists have unearthed in the capital a gigantic 12 ton stone slab at the site of the ancient Aztec Templo Mayor, and many think the monolith may in fact cover a burial chamber where artifacts of great importance will be found.

Marie Wilson

2007-12-28T16:24:00.000-08:00

Marie Wilson is a name very rarely heard in the art world or in the history of Surrealism in particular. An interview here helps.

To be free....

2007-12-27T10:36:00.001-08:00

To be free is possible in the mode of like-being-free; to be free is affirmed in an experience similar to that of anyone found in the special case of that metamorphosis which is to get out of prison, to enter a new life (however fleeting), determined essentially thanks to the testifier: liberation. This latter consists in knowing oneself to be as in prison, that is, in quest of a liberation rigorously comparable to freedom.

“Promise of happiness?” To look for the way out by going upward, by way of the “summit,” where there is no way out. To act as though the direction of the summit pointed toward a way out. The elevated point is the one whence I perceive the promised land (as land) with an awareness of the as. He perceives the promised land as the one that one cannot enter; the revelation, upon “dying,” of a freedom which will not take place as a possession, but consists in the “liberation” of relating oneself to what there is as unto the promised land. In turn they shall understand only upon dying, and bequeathing in turn this music. Music gives through movement the schema of a movement of “sublime” revelation. The revelation is that of the as; to relate oneself to what is by means of the as. What is, is the testifier for what is.

Art is always about a transformation principle; and it is about transforming so that in the operation of transformation freedom takes hold of itself in a movement whereby the world appears in the self-image it conceals, and whereby the possible is less a project of fulfillment than the appearance of a figure not to be confused with the “dream to fulfill.” The difference between a painting and a house makes the house habitable; and it is about not eliminating one or the other through erasure of their relationship of similitude, but pursuing their difference, a relationship as such, which connects the two through the noted articulation of the as, that makes the world livable. The belief required by the work is a belief in the promise of the world’s relation to its figure, not in the fulfillment of a paradise based on the model of fiction.

Let’s come back to utopia in the sense of that place in the place beyond place which distends and hollows our timespace in keeping with the as, in keeping with the “poetic” relation to it which allows one to be there, to refer to our condition whereby it is like a prison and a liberation. Start again from the difference between representation (theater within the theater: reiteration of the as, not indefinitely, but once) and a policy of taking metaphor literally in ignorance of the value of metaphor. The play must be performed in order to avoid dictatorship. The deadly misinterpretation is when power takes Wagner out of the theater for a “Wagnerian” staging of the city, of life; reality becomes a nightmare when the “dream” invades the real. It is in the other direction one must go.

Münchhausen paradox . . . Can a poem all by itself: a) figure the prison, the “alienated” condition, by revealing it to the reader as a figuration of this world; b) meanwhile therein figure itself as a prison “of words,” through what setting in abyss? c) be at the same time a lever for getting out, and the movement of a liberation toward a salutary “outside” . . . that is a lot to ask.

Is it the question of the sublime, or search for a point whereby to uplift oneself? A point in discourse which is not merely discourse? Would there be a possibility of connecting sublimation with that point of detachment which sees the figure as such: the “as as as”? Reaching that point through rhetoric, that loftiness of speech which is a point of transformation of the subject, therefore, into thought: indeed into language, but inasmuch as it is my language, my word. Hence at once “of language” and other than “verbal”; no difference between thought and language, to be sure, save what the term “my” suggests and all words that refer to the speaking subject.

--Michel Deguy (trs. Wilson Baldridge)

Julien Gracq

2007-12-24T16:33:00.000-08:00

On December 22, 2007 Surrealist-inspired writer Julien Gracq died at the age of 97.

Hertta Lussu Assa

2007-12-20T16:58:00.000-08:00

The Misapplication of Darwin

2007-12-16T15:37:00.000-08:00

The theory of evolution has been culturally appropriated and misapplied in the mytho-economic realm of everyday life. This misapplication has resulted in enormous industrial and consumer waste, not to mention substandard goods and built-in obsolescence. The "survival of the fittest" mentality is the ultimate rationalization for cutthroat business practices and leveraged buyouts.

Inherent in our misapplied Darwinism is a latent racism towards "primitive" cultures, even though the cultural realm is almost completely outside the scope of evolution. At the same time, our relation to our own "primitive" human ancestors is skewed. "Cavemen" are portrayed in our media as functional retards instead of the highly evolved hominids they actually were.

--Christopher Dewdney, The Secular Grail

Musil's Piano

2007-12-07T15:24:00.000-08:00

'The piano hammered iridescent notes on a wall of air. Although this occurrence was wholly and completely real in origin, the walls of the room disappeared, and in their place arose the golden wrap of music, that mysterious place where self and world, perception and feeling, inner and outer collapsed in indefiniteness upon one another and itself consists wholly and completely of sensation, definiteness, exactness, indeed of a hierarchy of the sheen of ordered details. Attached to these sensual details were threads of feeling running out of the heaving vapour of souls; and this vapour was mirrored in the precision of the walls and seemed to itself clear.’

--Robert Musil

Karlheinz Stockhauen, RIP

2007-12-07T13:03:00.001-08:00

German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, one of the world's most influential 20th century composers and renowned for his pioneering work in electronic music, has died aged 79.

Gordon Onslow-Ford and DYN

2007-12-06T19:56:00.000-08:00

I received a reprint of Dyn collected in book form this afternoon.

Wolfgang Paalen was the chief theorist behind the magazine. Archeology, dissident surrealism, art, science, various musings, poetry, polemical writings on the imagination and the artist's position in 'primitive' and contemporary (mid-1940s) world featured prominently.

Gordon Onslow-Ford's writings also appeared.

A synchronicity of sorts: tonight I came across the announcement of Gordon Onslow Ford's exhibition at the Weinstein Gallery in San Francisco. Ford was instrumental in the context of Dyn. His work and writings are an inspiration.

Breath in Landscape

Alas, San Francisco is too far away to make the journey...

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

2007-12-06T17:04:00.000-08:00

"When a book and a head collide and there is a hollow sound, is it always from the book?"

"To make brandy out of sparrows would soon destroy them."

"I once had a startling proof of how little honor it does a painter to delude animals with his paintings. My Robin mistook the keyhole of a chest for a fly, flew several times to catch it, and in doing so almost broke his head."

--Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

The Sacred and the Profane

2007-12-04T17:01:00.000-08:00

"The man of archaic societies tends to live as much as possible in the sacred or in close proximity to consecrated objects. The tendency is perfectly understandable, because, for primitives as for the man of all premodern societies, the sacred is equivalent to a power, and, in the last analysis, to reality. The sacred is saturated with being...(R)eligious man deeply desires to be, to participate in reality, to be saturated with power...(T)he completely profane world, the wholly desacralized cosmos, is a recent discovery in the history of the human spirit...(D)esacralization pervades the entire experience of the nonreligious man of modern societies and that, in consequence, he finds it increasingly difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man in the archaic societies."

Mircea Eliade

Brian Strang, Chinese Landcape Artist

2007-12-04T16:32:00.000-08:00

There are most certainly some parallels between the flora/text paintings of Brian Strang and various Chinese landscape/text artists. There are a few differences as well.

The Abolition of Work

2007-12-03T19:02:00.000-08:00


No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly 
all the misery in the world.  
Almost any
evil you'd care to 
name comes from working 
or from living in a world
designed for work.  
In order to stop suffering, 
we have to stop working.

--Bob Black

Who Believes...?

2007-12-03T17:08:00.000-08:00

“Idiosyncratic belief systems which are shared by only a few adherents are likely to be regarded as delusional. Belief systems which may be just as irrational but which are shared by millions are called world religions.

i.e. When a man suffers from delusions he is described as mad but when a million do so they belong to a world religion.”

--Anthony Storr

Io, At Land, Jonas Laster

2007-11-26T20:06:00.000-08:00

Io live at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art (Santa Ana, CA)

Io brings a high order of dream weaponry to the perceptive listener via guitar, loops, and cosmic syllabics. Films pulsate, flicker, and follow their own morphologies simultaneous to the sounds generated by Jonas Laster and his magic buddha boxes. The music is akin in some ways to Thomas Koner's remixing of Experimental Audio Research but warmer and less distant. Think "Tahitian glacier" and you may be getting closer to what Io is all about, to this listener anyhow.

Mr. Laster's first cd-r/dvd as Io is entitled "At Land." The two discs sit snugly in a handmade wooden box with burlap strip holding in the goods. The music consists of the entire live performance excerpted in the video above, and the dvd features the entire aural performance plus the self-made film Laster has projected behind him. 68 copies have been made at $6 apiece: http://www.raashrecords.com/shop/

Reference this Dave Segal article in the OC Weekly for further elucidation: http://www.ocweekly.com/music/music/sprawl-of-sound/28043/

Io, as well as the other projects Laster has a hand in, may be accessed here: www.io-audio.com