is, was

Video

Sun, 05 May 2013 20:45:21 -0400

John Cage’s January 1960 performance of “Water...

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 09:28:57 -0500

John Cage’s January 1960 performance of “Water Walk” on I’ve Got a Secret.

the movements at the end of this

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 16:13:00 -0500

the movements at the end of this

Anders Petersen

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 10:14:12 -0500

Anders Petersen

The Country Wife (Dana Gioia)

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 21:22:59 -0500

She makes her way through the dark trees
down to the lake to be alone
following their voices on the breeze
she makes her way. Through the dark trees
the distant stars are all she sees.
They cannot light the way she’s gone.
She makes her way through the dark trees
down to the lake to be alone.

The night reflected on the lake
the fire of stars changed into water.
She cannot see the winds that break
the night reflected on the lake
but knows they motion for her sake.
These are the choices they have brought her:
the night reflected on the lake
the fire of stars changed into water.

(Edvard Munch, Young Woman Weeping by the Bed, 1930) The male...

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 18:33:00 -0500

(Edvard Munch, Young Woman Weeping by the Bed, 1930)

The male dread of woman, which so deeply branded the Zeitgeist at the turn of the century, from Edvard Munch and August Strindberg up to Franz Kafka, [reveals] itself as the dread of feminine inconsistency: Feminine hysteria, which traumatized these men (and also marked the birthplace of psychoanalysis), confronted them with an inconsistent multitude of masks (a hysterical woman immediately moves from desperate pleas to cruel, vulgar derision, etc.). What causes such uneasiness is the impossibility of discerning behind the masks a consistent subject manipulating them: Behind the multiple layers of masks is nothing; or, at the most, nothing but the shapeless, mucous stuff of life-substance.

—Slavoj Zizek, The Metastases of Enjoyment

Miriam Cahn, “Roh” (oil on canvas, 1998)

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 16:39:34 -0500

Miriam Cahn, “Roh” (oil on canvas, 1998)

Experimental photography and photomontage by Eduardo Chicharro...

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 10:57:49 -0500

Experimental photography and photomontage by Eduardo Chicharro and Gregorio Prieto (1928–1930)

All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable. See Proverbs xxx: There are...

Sat, 08 Dec 2012 18:16:31 -0500

All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable. See Proverbs xxx: There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, a fourth thing which says not, It is enough; that is, the mouth of the womb. Wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lusts they consort even with devils…

—The Malleus Maleficarum (1484)

On account of the fact, he said gentlemanly, that I have at all times purposely refrained from an...

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 10:38:00 -0500

On account of the fact, he said gentlemanly, that I have at all times purposely refrained from an exhaustive exercise of my faculty of vision and my power of optical inspection (I refer now to things perfectly palpable and discernible—the coming of dawn across the mountains is one example and the curious conduct of owls and bats in strong moonlight is another), I had expected (foolishly, perhaps) that I should be able to see quite clearly things that are normally not visible at all as a compensation for my sparing inspection of the visible.

—Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds

fun w wine and pictors / divine animals / fl glamour fall...

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 11:22:00 -0500

fun w wine and pictors / divine animals / fl glamour fall fotoshoot 2012

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth...

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 20:31:01 -0500

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream… Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you should not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

—Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

Huda Lutfi, Democracy is Coming!, 2008, Mixed-Media...

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 21:48:55 -0400

Huda Lutfi, Democracy is Coming!, 2008, Mixed-Media (—inneroptics)

Errol Morris, on the "wilderness of error"

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 12:48:00 -0400

There’s a Supreme Court case about involuntary commitment, O’Connor v. Donaldson, and the man at the center of it, Kenneth Donaldson, wrote a book about being involuntarily committed for 20 years. He keeps going back to this expression: “Give a dog a bad name and you might as well kill it.” I always took that to mean that once you label something in a certain way, an infernal logic takes over. There’s very little you can do about it. Once you label someone crazy, or once you label somebody guilty, usually you can find evidence to support that a priori conclusion…

In general, evidence never speaks for itself, in spite of all the doctrine that says it does. Evidence always becomes part of an argument, a narrative.

(from here)

Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels (Jean Fouquet, c....

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 20:18:00 -0400

Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels (Jean Fouquet, c. 1450)

“According to tradition, the Virgin is here represented with the features of Agnes Sorel, the favourite of Charles VII. Richly dressed in an ermine robe and a crown of pearls, her forehead shaved according to the courtly fashion of the day, the Virgin meekly lowers her eyes and offers the Child her breast.” (from here)

“At the end we have no firm ground under us, no principle to hold on to, but a suspension of...

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 14:41:00 -0400

“At the end we have no firm ground under us, no principle to hold on to, but a suspension of thought in infinite space—”

—Karl Jaspers

Birthe Piontek

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 11:17:00 -0400

Birch Pond

Trailer

Wolf

Covered

Entrance

The Lawn

Birthe Piontek

There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, with many rungs; but three of these are the most...

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 11:16:00 -0400

There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, with many rungs; but three of these are the most important.

Once one sacrificed human beings to one’s god, perhaps precisely those whom one loved most: the sacrifices of the first-born in all prehistoric religions belong here…

Then, during the moral epoch of mankind, one sacrificed to one’s god one’s own strongest instincts, one’s “nature”…

Finally—what remained to be sacrificed? At long last, did one not have to sacrifice for once whatever is comforting, holy, healing; all hope, all faith in hidden harmony, in future blisses and justices? didn’t one have to sacrifice God himself and, from cruelty against oneself, worship the stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, the nothing? To sacrifice God for the nothing—this paradoxical mystery of the final cruelty was reserved for the generation that is now coming up: all of us already know something of this.—

—Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future

Temple in Wat Sampran, Thailand

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 20:53:29 -0400

Temple in Wat Sampran, Thailand

Georgia O’Keeffe, “Red Hills and Bones” (1941)

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 11:27:52 -0400

Georgia O’Keeffe, “Red Hills and Bones” (1941)