torsdag 31. mars 2011

Christina Hendricks

Mad Men, Paul Kinsey:
I had the idea. Then I lost it. There was nothing, and then there was it, and now it's nothing again.

Kandinsky, Blue

Phantom arm, synthesis, mirror neurons and so on

too much TED,  losing grip on reality

Ieri, Oggi, Domani (parte 1) - film completo in Italiano

Italia,

Kanskje hit?

onsdag 30. mars 2011

The Shaking Woman

quote S.H:
something is going on unconsciously in me

dropping knowledge QUESTION: Siri Hustvedt, New York

ser·en·dip·i·ty

ser·en·dip·i·ty

[ser-uhn-dip-i-tee]
–noun
1.
an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident.
2.
good fortune; luck: the serendipity of getting from unknown sources.
Hobbes writes the following “Of Man’’:
When in the mind of man, Appetites, and Aversions, Hopes, and Feares, concerning one and the same thing, arise alternately; and divers goods and evil consequences of the doing, or omitting the thing propounded, come successively into our thoughts; so that sometimes we have an Appetite to it; sometimes an Aversion from it; sometimes Hope to be able to do it; sometimes Despaire, or Feare to attempt it; the whole summe of Desires, Aversions, Hopes and Fears, continued till the thing will be either done, or thought impossible, is that we call deliberation (...).

Here is the key passage from book 3 of Seneca’s On Anger, in the section on moral therapy called “ How to Avoid the Onset of Anger’’:
We may find help in that sound advice of Democritus which points to tranquility “if we refrain from doing many things, either in private or in public, or anything beyond our powers.’’ If one runs off on many different activities, one will never have the luck to spend a day without some annoyance arising, from someone or something, to dispose the mind to anger. If one hurries through the crowded parts of the city, one cannot help knocking into many people; one is bound to slip, to be held back, to be splashed. In the same way, if one’s course of life is fragmented and always taking a different direction, many things will get in the way and there will be much to complain about—one man has disappointed us, another put us off, a third cut us short; our plans did not take the course that we intended. No one has fortune so much on his side as always to answer to his wishes, if he attempts many things. As a result, should he do so, he finds his plans thwarted and becomes impatient with people and things. At the slightest provocation he loses his temper with the person involved, with the matter in hand, with his position, with his luck, with himself. So if the mind is to have the possibility of being calm, it must not be tossed about nor, as I said, exhausted by doing many things or anything too ambitious for its powers. (...)


We can learn a good deal about the rhetoric of human nature in early modern Europe simply by asking what passions were.
When we do, we find not only that their descriptions disagree but also that the things described as passions seem incommensurable. Are passions tangible “things’’ residing in the soul, or are they dispositions of the heart, or beliefs of the mind? Is passion a matter of personal expression, or is it something essentially social that a person performs? Do they come from our interior, or from the things we perceive? Can they be measured and manipulated— their causes controlled—or do passions elude control by their very nature? Are they divine, diabolical, or human, and can we distinguish them according to their origin? Are they the enabling condition of virtue or its enemy? Are they necessary or disposable? What is their number and what do they do?

I guess with everything in life there's a place of balance

Absalon

Kurt Masur & Jessye Norman & Gewandhausorchester Leipzig – Strauss, R.: Vier Letzte Lieder

Strauss, R.: Four Last Songs, etc.
(Spotify)

tirsdag 29. mars 2011

mandag 28. mars 2011

The Other: "Rest Energy", 1980

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency Nan Goldin’s slideshow at MoMA

Ryan in the tub, Provincetown, Mass. 1976
Nan and Brian in bed, New York City 1983

 Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is one of the most enduring works in recent photographic history. What began in 1979 as slideshows for her friends turned into hundreds and hundreds of photos, a visual diary that is still being written today, 30 years later, as well as a book, first published by Aperture in 1986 and still being printed. The version of the slideshow acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 2004 contains 690 slides and is 43 minutes long. Though ongoing and including photographs taken all over the world, the heart of the Ballad lies in 1980s New York, a time and place where Goldin and her core group of friends were young and looked for all the world as though they owned it.

The past is the present: traumatizing experiences keeps repeating themself as present situations

The Method of Loci
Cicero told a traditional story about how the method of loci was discovered. A Greek poet named Simonides was entertaining a group of wealthy noblemen at a banquet. Suddenly a pair of mysterious figures called him outside. They turned out to be messengers from the Olympian gods Castor and Pollux, praised by Simonides in his poem. As soon as Simonides stepped outside, the roof of the banquet hall collapsed, squashing everybody inside. The mangled corpses could not be identified until Simonides stepped forward, pointed to the place where each victim had been sitting, and said each name in turn.

How did Simonides accomplish this feat? He mentally recreated the scene of the banquet, visualizing each reveler in his place. When he saw the places, it helped him remember the person who had been sitting there.


Cotard delusion
The Cotard delusion or Cotard's syndrome or Walking Corpse Syndrome[1] is a rare neuropsychiatric disorder in which people hold a delusional belief that they are dead (either figuratively or literally), do not exist, are putrefying, or have lost their blood or internal organs. In rare instances, it can include delusions of immortality[2] (mutually excluding the possibility of such a condition of death as an oblivion, unless regarded as just oneself to another or others).

---> The pleasure of uncertainty. Everything is the same, can't you see it?

David Shrigley

DOGVILLE DIALOGLISTE  
Final scene

GRACE
So what is it? What is it, the thing…the thing that you don't like about me?

THE BIG MAN
It was a word you used that provoked me. You called me arrogant.

GRACE
To plunder, as it were, a God given right. I'd call that arrogant, daddy.

THE BIG MAN
But that is exactly what I don't like about you. It is you that is arrogant!

GRACE
That's what you came here say? I'm not the one passing judgement, Daddy. You are.

THE BIG MAN
You do not pass judgement, because you sympathize with them. A deprived childhood and a homicide really isn't necessarily a homicide, right? The only thing you can blame is circumstances. Rapists and murderers may be the victims, according to you. But I, I call them dogs, and if they're lapping up their own vomit the only way to stop them is with the lash.

GRACE
But dogs only obey their own nature. So why shouldn't we forgive them?

THE BIG MAN
Dogs can be taught many useful things, but not if we forgive them every time they obey their own nature.

GRACE
So I'm arrogant. I'm arrogant because I forgive people?

THE BIG MAN
My God. Can't you see how condescending you are when you say that? You have this preconceived notion that nobody, listen, that nobody can't possibly attain the same high ethical standards as you, so you exonerate them. I can not think of anything more arrogant than that. You, my child…my dear child you forgive others with excuses that you would never in the world permit for yourself.

GRACE
Why shouldn't I be merciful? Why?

THE BIG MAN
No no no. You should be merciful, when there is time to be merciful. But you must maintain your own standard. You owe them that. You owe them that. The penalty you deserve for your transgressions, they deserve for their transgressions.

GRACE
They are human beings.

THE BIG MAN
No no no. Does every human being need to be accountable for their action. Of course they do. But you don't even give them that chance. And that is extremely arrogant. I love you. I love you. I love you to death. But you are the most arrogant person I've ever met. And you call me arrogant! I have no more to say.

GRACE
You are arrogant. I'm arrogant. You've said it. Now you can leave.

THE BIG MAN
And without my daughter I suppose?

GRACE
Uhm…

THE BIG MAN
I said without my daughter?

GRACE
Hmm, yes!

THE BIG MAN
Well.

GRACE
Yes.

THE BIG MAN
Well, you decide, you decide. Grace, they say you are having some trouble here.

GRACE
No. No more trouble than back home.

THE BIG MAN
I'll give you a little time to think about this. Perhaps you will change your mind.

GRACE
I won't.

THE BIG MAN
Listen, my love…power is not so bad…I am sure that you can find a way to make use of it in your own fashion… Take a walk and think about it.

GRACE
The people who live here are doing their best under very hard circumstances.

THE BIG MAN
If you say so, Grace. But is their best really good enough? Do they love you?

NARRATOR
Grace had already thought for a long time. She had known that if she were not shot when the gangsters arrived she would be faced with her father's suggestion that she return, to become a conspirator with him and his gang of thugs and felons and she did not need any walk to reconsider her response to that, even though the difference between the people she knew back home and the people she'd met in Dogville had proven somewhat slighter than she'd expected.

Grace looked at the gooseberry bushes so fragile in the smooth darkness.

It was good to know that if you did not treat them ill, they would be there come spring as always, and come summer they'd again be bursting with the quite incomprehensible quantity of berries that were so good in pies, specially with cinnamon.

NARRATOR(cont'd)
Grace looked around at the frightened faces behind the windowpanes that were following her every step, and felt ashamed of being part of inflicting that fear. How could she ever hate them for what was at bottom merely their weakness? She would probably have done things like those that had befallen her if she'd lived in one of these houses, to measure them by her own yardstick as her father put it. Would she not, in all honesty, have done the same as Chuck and Vera and Ben and Mrs. Henson and Tom and all these people in their houses?

NARRATOR(cont'd)
Grace paused. And while she did, the clouds scattered and let the moonlight through and Dogville underwent another of those little changes of light. It was if the light, previously so merciful and faint, finally refused to cover up for the town any longer. Suddenly you could no longer imagine a berry that would appear one day on a gooseberry bush, but only see the thorn that was there right now. The light now penetrated every unevenness and flaw in the buildings… and in… the people! And all of a sudden she knew the answer to her question all to well:

If she had acted like them, she could not have defended a single one of her actions and could not have condemned them harshly enough. It was as if her sorrow and pain finally assumed their rightful place.

No, what they had done was not good enough.

And if one had the power to put it to rights, it was one's duty to do so, for the sake of the other towns. For the sake of humanity, and not least, for the sake of the human being that was Grace herself.

søndag 27. mars 2011

Eugène DELACROIX, Jeune orpheline au cimetière, vers 1824

Louvre,

Hamlet - David Tennant, Patrick Stewart, Penny Downie. Act 1, Scene 1.

Francisco Zurbarán


MQ.
 A moment of clarity
The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

fin

Salvador Dali - Lanvin Chocolate

La solitude -Barbara- (avec sous-titres)

Brenda Lee - Break It to Me Gently (Single)

søndag 13. mars 2011

søndag 6. mars 2011