[Cravan]

[…] “Let me say right at the start that in my opinion the first requirement for an artist is to know how to swim. I also feel that art, in the mysterious state corresponding to form in a wrestler, is situated more in the guts than in the brain, and that is why it exasperates me when, in the presence of a painting, I evoke the man and all I see is a head. Where are the legs, the spleen and the liver?
[…] “A bit of good advice: take a few pills and purge your spirit; do a lot of fucking or better still go into rigorous training: when the girth of your arm measures nineteen inches, you’ll at least be a brute, if you’re gifted. […] Do me a favor and get rid of that dignity of yours! Go and run in the fields, gallop across the plains like a horse; jump rope, and when you’re six years old, you won’t know anything any more, and you’ll see mad things.”
   

         Arthur Cravan, from Exhibition at the Independents [1914], translated by Ralph Manheim

   
   

          [Bolano]
   

“Listen: I don’t have anything against autobiographies, so long as the people writing them have penises that are at least a foot long when erect.”

         Roberto Bolano, “Derivas de las pesada,” 2004, trans. Natasha Wimmer
   

“While we search for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, […] we must continue to turn to sex, books, and travel, even knowing they will lead us into the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place we can find the cure.”

         Roberto Bolano, “Literature + illness = illness,” 2003, trans. Natasha Wimmer
   
   

——****——
   
Nearly a century separates the authors’ quotes, but nothing’s changed. This is how we shore ourselves up: the absurd boast that starts with spicy laughs and playful shoves and somehow, before you’ve had a chance to mark the change, ends in cold, unblinking gaze.

There are seasons in our lives when all is ugly, within and without; when nothing comforts and seems real — not art, not mind, not spirit — when nothing but flesh — and what we can know through flesh — seem able to save us. We raise our voices in its honor, we make vast claims for it, we cast everything else aside, we grow desperate, we toast and break glasses, we laugh a little too loudly, we avoid each other’s eyes.
   

All laughter is proof against death.

   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2009

   

A Message to the Universe
by Kazuo Ohno, 1998

“On the verge of death one revisits the joyful moments of a lifetime.

One’s eyes are opened wide-gazing into the palm, seeing death, life, joy and sorrow with a sense of tranquillity.

This daily studying of the soul, is this the beginning of the journey ?

I sit bewildered in the playground of the dead. Here I wish to dance and dance and dance and dance, the life of the wild grass.

I see the wild grass, I am the wild grass, I become one with the universe. That metamorphosis is the cosmology and studying of the soul.

In the abundance of nature I see the foundation of dance. Is this because my soul wants to physically touch the truth ?

When my mother was dying I caressed her hair all night long without being able to speak one word of comfort. Afterwards, I realized that I was not taking care of her, but that she was taking care of me.

The palms of my mother’s hands are precious wild grass to me.

I wish to dance the dance of wild grass to the utmost of my heart.”
   

———————————* * * * ——————————–

   
   

I think about what Ohno meant. The wild grass dance: can this be where we converge, if we are able, with mother of womb and mother of soil; with both at once? Where we creatively express (in dance, art, smile, love, song) so joyously in life — “joy” not as a function of happiness but simply of pure coursing blood & exhalation — that we merge with the core within us [our past, our genes, our biology] and outside us [our partners in soil, in air, on land, in the tiniest cells of the smallest motes; all of which are also us, comprised of the same stuff as us]?

Creativity and expression as acts of radical reconciliation between ourselves and ourselves.

Ohno talks of stroking his dying mother’s hair. Is it so with our planet? We tend as best we can in her Autumn, already having grieved her to collapse after the Spring and Summer of our human life with her, stroking her in a comfortless set of gestures. In reality, she is the one caring for us, still allowing us to live and breathe, and eat, and enjoy & survive by the still-interwoven but slowly-fraying web of vitality connecting bees to flowers to birds to wind to soil to sun to leaf to oxygen to us, to us.

There is nothing to do but feel this to root.

Be wild grass even as it dies back, falls back to cracks in pavement, roots slow-buckling slabs of it up in joyous revolt.

   

(More about Kazuo Ohno here)

Advice to my friend Jess on drawing and sketching:

* Draw like you sing — from your gut, freely. Just let the hand guide the pen wherever the spirit wants. Let loose with line and form until recognizable Things emerge — or not. And be content even when they do not.

* Color opens up worlds. It blesses line and form. It makes so much possible. Big bold color, like a voice filling up a silent room.

* Draw what you can draw well when you feel stuck. For instance, I can only draw faces and bodies. And rooms. Everything else is very hard for me. So when I get stuck, I just draw what I know over and over, ignoring narrative or theme or logic.

* Let feeling over-ride logic … this will free your pen. If you draw an arm or eye strangely, don’t judge it; Let it flow. It’s a clue that what you’re feeling inside wants to come out through that bent, long mutant arm or bizarro, wonky eye.

* Try out, sometimes, thicker pens & even ink & brush drawing. This will help you sing your line out more clearly and the boldness imparted makes your expression all the more uncompromising.

* Be content with doodles, scribbles and repetitive shapes if that’s what your heart and head needs at the time. Unless you’re staggeringly gifted, 90% of what you draw isn’t meant to be seen — it’s just for you and your own soul.

* Draw for yourself, to amuse yourself, first and foremost. If others take pleasure in your work, so much the better. But look at that as a bonus and not an end to what you do.

   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

                  

   

It has become evolutionary at this point to admire and worship our man-made, synthetic versions of nature and ourselves — while also denigrating/ignoring the original reality from which they came.

As animals and plants become extinct, our fascination and even preference for artificial representations of them [stuffed animals, cute photoshopped hallmarky dogs and cats, remarkably life-like fake plants] dominate. It’s easy to see why — we can extract from the originals all that makes them safe and easy and forgo the figurative thorns (fake plants that don’t stink, rot, have imperfect petals, aphids; stuffed animals or robo-animals that aren’t temperamental, biting, are perfectly obedient, have no excretory functions, are docile, and are able to receive passively all our fantasies and projections).

We weren’t content to extend absolute mastery over nature. Now, annoyed with captive nature’s occasional recalcitrance, or just plain annoying Otherness, we scrap it and make it in our own image, like Gods.

The most fascinating aspect of all this is how it turns inward, upon ourselves. Unable to accept the beauty of variation and imperfection, we will turn to human simulacra more and more — there are already on the market incredibly expensive and highly-lifelike female sex-dummies. Genetics, cosmetic surgery, these aren’t innocent practices, over time they embed this idea in the collective unconscious: “we will not tolerate our own variation and that of others. we will airbrush ourselves and others to make everyone safer to everyone else’s eyes and sensibilities. there is something ugly and frightening about people who don’t conform to our safe expectations, and it’s our duty to remedy this”. And the more people internalize this script, the more they seek to externalize it and inflict it on others.

This is all born of fear. It is a kind of self-directed fascism, an inability to tolerate nuance and variation, a hunger for the imposition of strict standards for what is appealing and what is not.

Essay by C. Way - Copyright © 2008 SnailCrow.com

   

The paintbrush shown in the above video is a remarkable piece of technology. It’s eerie but breathtaking to watch a human being capture complex, varied patches of color, texture and motion and reproduce it all with a flick of the wrist.

At the same time this is essentially just another sampling technology, taking the camera to its next logical evolutionary stage: not only snap the world out of context, but repurpose it in real-time.

As sampling technology then, it has the same potential to be used to honor its medium (I think of Edgar Varese’s musical compositions, or some of the soundscapes in a Public Enemy song) or debase it (contemporary pop which lifts entire melodies and motifs from older artists, slaps on a new lyric and calls it a new composition). It all depends on who handles the technology.

Still, at the risk of seeming all Ludditish, all I see are people creating more distance (or having distance inserted) between themselves and life through technology like this. I think of all the concerts and live music I’ve been to in recent years where, more and more, the audience is content to view everything through a lens, snapping away, only occasionally putting aside the camera to experience the event unmediated.

Or botanical gardens I’ll go to where people rush up to a bonsai tree, or orchid, or kiku flower, snap a few strained photos and hurry off to the next shot, never pausing to experience the subject in its immediacy, apart from the impulse to contain and preserve — and sample.

People are being conditioned to relate to the world outside of them as opportunities first & foremost for sampling and capture, whether by camera or this new LED-paintbrush, & not as opportunities for real, developed, fully-rounded experience.

Many will answer a concern like mine with: “Well, um, doesn’t it amount to the same thing?”
 (Read More . . .)

C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

   

The following are excerpts from an interview with Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1995, where he weighs in on his career and the works of modern artists influenced in part by him (Aphex Twin among them). Interview is found here:

http://www.stockhausen.org/ksadvice.html

“I heard the piece Aphex Twin of Richard James carefully: I think it would be
very helpful if he listens to my work Song Of The Youth, which is electronic
music, and a young boy’s voice singing with himself. Because he would then
immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions, and he would look
for changing tempi and changing rhythms, and he would not allow to repeat
any rhythm if it were varied to some extent and if it did not have a
direction in its sequence of variations.”

“The beginning of every art music development, in China, or in India or in European monasteries was always to relate the art of shaping composing sounds with the art [by which] the stars are shaped and composed. Astronomy, mathematics and music were the highest disciplines throughout the centuries since the beginning of European art music in the monasteries, let’s say in the tenth until the 14th, 15th century… I have studied all music of Europe as a student - I had to - and I at a very early age became aware, also naturally, [that] certain music, like the Art Of The Fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach or the Musikalishe Opfer, [has] always known about this relationship between the laws of the universe, astronomical laws, and the laws of the music of this Earth. “

I absolutely love the premise — have an establishment-throned, grumpy old-guard composer address the works of his progenitors (Aphex Twin, Scanner, etc). And I doubly love that the ‘children’ of the article got the chance to weigh in on old Stocky’s recommendations afterwards — famously Aphex Twin’s flippant (but unquestionably disappointed) rejoinder where he basically says “Stock, fuck off, you ain’t got no SOUL.”

So right after reading the interview I checked out some of the Stocker’s music, the first time I’d heard him since college. With all due respects to the now-deceased composer — I didn’t care much for him then (though I think as an idealistic 20-something it was easier for me to feel I wasn’t ‘up to’ the lofty sublime peaks of his craft) — & I realized quickly that I sure as hell don’t care for him now.
 (Read More . . .)