Posted on: December 31, 2011
Golden Pavilion, Kyoto, Japan. Photo by Keith Pomakis
Nothing to learn
Sitting still and awesome like a mountain
No-I thought of nothing
Half-way home
Master Hsueng asked No-I
“Why do you think of nothing
With great intent?”
And No-I said
“Through concentration on nothing
I am liberated.”
Thwack came the bamboo stick
Gong gong gong rang the bell
Birds cawed as they fled into the blue sky
Their sky their home
“Master, why did you strike me!“
No-I asked in great pain
No longer still or awesome like a mountain
And Master Hsueng answered:
“When you grasp after nothing
You make it an object
Outside Mind-Body
You break the flow between void
And form
Form and void
You categorize nothing!”
Thwack came the bamboo stick
Back down on No-I’s shoulders
No-I did not Awaken
For two more years
by Douglas Pinson
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Posted on: December 13, 2011
This 21-year-old singer has “it.”
Plain Gold Ring
Explosively controlled jazz. Volcanic scat and soul. She bobs and weaves and falls victim to the depths of her emotional possession, as all great artists do. But she rises from those depths and expresses the journey upward and outward, without losing her courage or her conviction.
Aside from her wonderful voice, running parallel with it, she moves in interesting, idiosyncratic ways to her own song. A refreshing change from all too many pop singers who dance in cookie cutter ways, pushed into narrow corporate forms to look like every other pop singer. Joy Williams of The Civil Wars is similar in her physical originality.
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Kimbra Johnson was born in New Zealand, grew up there, but now makes her home in Australia. She has been compared with singers like Nina Simone, Amy Winehouse and Bjork.…
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Posted on: November 16, 2011
Melancholia, by Lars Von Trier
Melancholia is Lars Von Trier’s conflicted ode to German Romanticism, Wagner, Depression and life itself. It starts off with one of the most beautiful openings of any movie I’ve seen in recent times, with Wagner’s prelude to Tristan and Isolde merging with stunning, slow motion images. They look like paintings come to life, moving incredibly slowly, awakening to new shocks, new horrors.
The beginning prefigures the end beyond the usual trajectory of Hollywood films. It in fact gives away that ending in the first few minutes. But we don’t care. Because the journey is everything, and we don’t even mind that this is a cliché. Coming full circle seems poetic and right, and circles dominate the night and day skies. We don’t feel cheated, even after an apocalypse.
The movie is told in two parts after the intro, matching planet with planet, sister with sister.…
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Posted on: November 8, 2011
Georges de La Tour’s Magdelen and the Smoking Flame. 1640
I’ve always been fascinated with high contrast. Baroque painters, building on the legacy left them by Da Vinci, among other Italian Renaissance heroes, experimented with cast light and its effects in a way not yet seen before the 17th century. The best of them was Caravaggio, and he had many followers, among them one Georges de La Tour.
The painting above is a meditation on mortality, on life, on death, on the miracles one witnesses with or without a messiah in the picture. It is one of La Tour’s finest, and shows a tremendous growth from his early, rather clumsy and derivative work. In this painting he demonstrates his mastery of shadow and light, of the human figure and the drama a simple candle can create. He makes us think of opposites, the play of opposites — eternal conflicts and their necessity.…
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