Hey everyone. Here’s a new song of mine called “But Sing”. Pretty simple as usual — just flamenco guitar, overdubbed vocals and eggshaker. Made a couple other versions of this one — a raucous one, a whispery one — but this one stuck. Hope you enjoy, thanks for listening —

 

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       David Altmejd (b. 1974 in Montreal, Canada)
       Untitled, 2010, Foam, epoxy clay, synthetic hair, acrylic paint, mixed minerals including, quartz, calcite, florite

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
     Part of why this works so well for me is the sheer contrast between this artifact of disturbing ragtag viscera & the sterile museum hues of white and silvergray underneath and behind it. But no matter what the backdrop, this teratoma clump/bust would retain its disturbing & compelling aura, that of something mysteriously alive & about to telepathically mumble something to you in 15 languages at once, morel growth bulging from cranial implosion, ridgecrusts of eyebrow crystal luminescing pink or purple when it gets scared or angry. And that’s all it gets.
 
 
 
 

More images of Altmejd’s sculpture here at Empty Kingdom.

               (First appears in Poetry, August 1919)

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
     A bit overheated and not nearly oblique enough for our irony-saturated aughties needs, but I love the bluntforce trauma of the title and theme just fine. The subject never gets old — what do we gain and what do we lose the more we try to apply mechanistic thinking to all phenomena surrounding us? I once had a friend in high school, a gifted math and science-minded student whom I was very fond of, who expressed, with a kind of shy and giddy earnestness, his wish to discover the equations underlying all emotion. I remember instinctively recoiling from such an idea, and so went our debate.
      & I feel the same way now, decades later. Being human means having a mind with an affinity for categorization, pattern-finding, abstraction, quantification; we can, have and should continue to apply those faculties toward an increased understanding of ourselves and our external realities. But when we do this irresponsibly we a) miss out on ways of knowing the universe that are NOT just scientific-mechanistic, but which have more to do with ourselves as spiritual and artistic beings who crave real interaction between ourselves and what’s around us; and b) we run the risk of creating distance between ourselves and the things — be they birds, butterflies, or emotions — we are attempting to dissect & break down to component parts. It’s not so much that science is a “horrid voice”. I’d say it’s more that irresponsible reliance on science as our main (or, heaven forbid, only) way to perceive & process the universe can create a horrid void in us — the lonely void of looking around and merely observing creation as a set of deterministic processes instead of relating to it — to the bird, tree, butterfly, insect, fellow human — as a series of singularly beautiful manifestations of the universe. It’s not only our gift but duty to bring ourselves in cultivated states of mindfulness, gratefulness, feeling and spirit to the universe; not just as algebraists dissectors and technicians but also as caretakers, friends, singers, worshipers & rejoicers.

     (P.s., If anyone knows the exact date of this poem’s first publication [and, of course, which publication it was first featured in], please let me know — I’m trying to assign attribution as precisely as possible to each artwork I feature on this site)
 
 
 

For more on Lindsay, please check out the University of Virginia’s e-text of Lindsay’s poetry collection called The Congo and Other Poems here.

       Brassaï (b. 1899, d. 1944)
        from the top: Untitled [Futurist hair creation by Antoine], 1930; Culotte et bas, c. 1950;
        The Wall of Sante Prison, Boulevard Arago, Paris, c. 1932

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
     Making up for my absence yesterday with a tripledose. Oh mama but consistency’s a bitch. So anyway: Brassaï. Blessed be but I could post his work from now ’til kingdom come (I couldn’t get enough of Paris by Night, staring at those shadowy Parisian alleys and wet moonglowy cobblestones — do you know it? Isn’t it beautiful?). ————–> So, the pieces at hand. Don’t you love the brassy lustre of the hair in the topmost shot? Something about the clump of murky shadow beneath it completes the composition, maybe by virtue of its counterpoise to the brilliant stuff above it. ————> The prison wall shot (first from the bottom) is simple in its perspective and composition but man how perfect is it? The wet shadows thrown against the wall, the dense clumps of naked branches all along its top. The misty glow at the end of the tunnel. ————> And the middle shot, rapturous. The contrast of her skin against the shot’s darks. Her legs bent just so, kicked out as if the rug were a raft and the floor a black river, languid trailing of her to in the cool water. All kinds of stories could emerge from these three.
 
 
 

For more, check out this great roundup of Brassaï’s photography at Vintage Vivant.

       Robert Adams (b. 1937)
       Longmont, Colorado, 1980

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
     Sometimes you just need to let a piece stand sans text & just be. This is one of the times. Goodnight.
 
 
 
 

More of Adams’ staggering night work discussed over at ciips2010.blogspot.com.

       Helen Pynor
       Liquid Ground 1 (and detail from same), C-type photographic print face-mounted on glass, 2010

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
     These are beautiful. Everything is gentle billow and float for these river brides. Viscera don’t even suggest violence to me. They trail & hover like the pale vulnerable little crab might if it felt safe enough to crawl from its shell armor. Serene in their presence as if they were taking river rinse. Or leisurely unfurling out from the fabric to take the pulse of the current, survey surroundings, act as periscope for the shy ghost of the drowned.
 
 
 
 
 
 

More of Pynor’s work over at her site.