I used the same Whitman recording from the Levi's ad (see last post) on my first sound project two years ago. It uses live recordings of a Moroccan adhan, Whitman's "America," William Faulkner's Nobel address and deconstructed audio from Brian Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts Project and Craig Armstrong's "Sunrise." I've since made much better pieces for productions, but I don't think it was a bad start.
It was made when I was weary of the dehumanization and fear of the political atmosphere. I needed a reminder that joy and compassion, which require a courage of their own, are truly traditions worth fighting for.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Is this blasphemy?
I'm torn. A beautiful wax cylinder recording of Walt Whitman's voice is being used to sell merchandise, but I can't help loving the art direction.
Friday, November 27, 2009
Reading : Wilderness and the American Mind
by Roderick Nash
I just survived a nearly four hundred-page marathon on the history of wilderness philosophy in America. Published in 1967, Wilderness and the American Mind is no longer exhaustive, but still covers a vast amount of intellectual territory. It includes the contributions of individuals (Emerson, Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, Marshall,) and intellectual, spiritual, and artistic movements (Romanticism, Deism, Transcendentalism, Darwinism) to the shifts in wilderness’s role from adversary to divine paradise and commodity in American thought.
I found the final chapter’s discussion of the exportation of the wilderness experience in colonial Africa particularly interesting in light of an article I read a few months ago on the impact of western land management practices on East Africa’s Maasai rangelands. [“Top-Down Solutions: Looking Up from East Africa’s Rangelands,” Environment Magazine, Jan/Feb 2009.] Granted, there’s a big difference between the preservation of colonial parks (designed to exclude native hunting) and the active use of rangelands, but in both circumstances the application of western models have had lasting effects on the health of the local environment and culture.
I just survived a nearly four hundred-page marathon on the history of wilderness philosophy in America. Published in 1967, Wilderness and the American Mind is no longer exhaustive, but still covers a vast amount of intellectual territory. It includes the contributions of individuals (Emerson, Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, Marshall,) and intellectual, spiritual, and artistic movements (Romanticism, Deism, Transcendentalism, Darwinism) to the shifts in wilderness’s role from adversary to divine paradise and commodity in American thought.I found the final chapter’s discussion of the exportation of the wilderness experience in colonial Africa particularly interesting in light of an article I read a few months ago on the impact of western land management practices on East Africa’s Maasai rangelands. [“Top-Down Solutions: Looking Up from East Africa’s Rangelands,” Environment Magazine, Jan/Feb 2009.] Granted, there’s a big difference between the preservation of colonial parks (designed to exclude native hunting) and the active use of rangelands, but in both circumstances the application of western models have had lasting effects on the health of the local environment and culture.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Reading : The Woman in the Dunes
by Kobo Abe
In place of a long-winded examination of my conflicted opinion of existentialism, I instead offer this: Kobo Abe hides a grain of warmth in the bleakness of his novel and somehow manages to give lushness to desperation.
From p. 160
"He sat down on the shovel and lit a cigarette. The flame caught at last with the third match. His fatigue spread out into a sluggish circle, like India ink dropped in water - it was a jellyfish, a scent bag, a diagram of an atomic nucleus. Some night bird had found a field mouse and was calling to its mate with a weird cry. An uneasy dog bayed deeply. High in the night sky there was a continuous, discordant sound of wind blowing at a different velocity. And on the ground the wind was a knife continually shaving off thin layers of sand. He wiped away the perspiration, blew his nose with his fingers, and brushed the sand from his head. The ripples of sand at his feet suddenly looked like the motionless crests of waves.
Supposing they were sound waves, what kind of music would they give? he wondered. Maybe even a human being could sing such a song... if tongs were driven into his nose and slimy blood stopped up his ears... if his teeth were broken one by one with hammer blows, and splinters jammed into his urethra... if a vulva were cut away and sewn onto his eyelids. It might resemble cruelty, and then again it might be a little different. Suddenly his eyes soared upward like a bird, and felt as if he were looking down on himself. Certainly he must be the strangest of all... he who was musing on the strangeness of things here."
In place of a long-winded examination of my conflicted opinion of existentialism, I instead offer this: Kobo Abe hides a grain of warmth in the bleakness of his novel and somehow manages to give lushness to desperation.From p. 160
"He sat down on the shovel and lit a cigarette. The flame caught at last with the third match. His fatigue spread out into a sluggish circle, like India ink dropped in water - it was a jellyfish, a scent bag, a diagram of an atomic nucleus. Some night bird had found a field mouse and was calling to its mate with a weird cry. An uneasy dog bayed deeply. High in the night sky there was a continuous, discordant sound of wind blowing at a different velocity. And on the ground the wind was a knife continually shaving off thin layers of sand. He wiped away the perspiration, blew his nose with his fingers, and brushed the sand from his head. The ripples of sand at his feet suddenly looked like the motionless crests of waves.
Supposing they were sound waves, what kind of music would they give? he wondered. Maybe even a human being could sing such a song... if tongs were driven into his nose and slimy blood stopped up his ears... if his teeth were broken one by one with hammer blows, and splinters jammed into his urethra... if a vulva were cut away and sewn onto his eyelids. It might resemble cruelty, and then again it might be a little different. Suddenly his eyes soared upward like a bird, and felt as if he were looking down on himself. Certainly he must be the strangest of all... he who was musing on the strangeness of things here."
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Reading : Smilla's Sense of Snow
by Peter Høeg
a
Smilla is a navigator, a scientist, and a reader of snow. She lives in Copenhagen as an outsider, the daughter of a Greenlandic Inuit and a wealthy Danish anesthesiologist. Her life and the coldness with which she regards the world are rooted in Denmark’s colonization of Greenland. Yet, despite her cynicism and self-admitted faithlessness, Smilla believes in science and that “deep inside us is geometry” and the knowledge of perfection. Of the body she says:
“The rib bones are the closed ellipses of the planets, with their focus on the sternum, the breastbone, the white center of the photograph. The lungs are the grey shadows of the Milky Way against the black leaden shield of space. The heart’s dark contour is the cloud of ashes from the burned out sun. The intestines’ hazy hyperboles are the disconnected asteroids, the vagabonds of space, the scattered cosmic dust. […] In the technical reduction of photon photography it’s more apparent than ever that the human being is a universe, a solar system seen from another galaxy.” (p.239)
Smilla's Sense of Snow is as much an ode to science as it is a censure of its darker side. It discusses the parallel between science’s collusion with colonization and its capitalistic corruption in the 90’s . Yet, it would be a terrible reduction to define such a deeply philosophical and beautifully written mystery solely as an indictment. Ultimately, it explores the endlessness of self-knowledge and what happens when a fierce intellect, fighting tooth and nail for understanding, realizes that some things, sometimes the most important things, are unknowable. That there is no answer and “there will be no resolution.”
a
Smilla is a navigator, a scientist, and a reader of snow. She lives in Copenhagen as an outsider, the daughter of a Greenlandic Inuit and a wealthy Danish anesthesiologist. Her life and the coldness with which she regards the world are rooted in Denmark’s colonization of Greenland. Yet, despite her cynicism and self-admitted faithlessness, Smilla believes in science and that “deep inside us is geometry” and the knowledge of perfection. Of the body she says:
“The rib bones are the closed ellipses of the planets, with their focus on the sternum, the breastbone, the white center of the photograph. The lungs are the grey shadows of the Milky Way against the black leaden shield of space. The heart’s dark contour is the cloud of ashes from the burned out sun. The intestines’ hazy hyperboles are the disconnected asteroids, the vagabonds of space, the scattered cosmic dust. […] In the technical reduction of photon photography it’s more apparent than ever that the human being is a universe, a solar system seen from another galaxy.” (p.239)
Smilla's Sense of Snow is as much an ode to science as it is a censure of its darker side. It discusses the parallel between science’s collusion with colonization and its capitalistic corruption in the 90’s . Yet, it would be a terrible reduction to define such a deeply philosophical and beautifully written mystery solely as an indictment. Ultimately, it explores the endlessness of self-knowledge and what happens when a fierce intellect, fighting tooth and nail for understanding, realizes that some things, sometimes the most important things, are unknowable. That there is no answer and “there will be no resolution.”
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