Posted on: April 18, 2012
Ophelia, by John William Waterhouse. 1894
And so I thought …
That Art which appears as a foreign nation over the sea, with a language all its own, with signs that point to something just hidden, just out of reach. For now.
It has an edge to it. It calls to us, but is never pretty. It must be followed. We must take the leap, take the voyage, depart for the other side. Its foreignness draws us like a sublime magnet, a masked pied piper who tugs at us like a thief of love. We go anyway.
Never pretty, never sweet, never soothing, it strikes at us, slaps us in the face, stuns us with a kind of delayed violence, both intellectual and physical, cerebral and primitive.…
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Posted on: April 17, 2012
My Valentine, by Paul McCartney.
The video is simple, basic, but yields a melancholy paradox. Those of us who can see and hear lose and gain something mysterious, wondrous and poetic. The translation of signs into words, into emotions and meaning escapes us, if we can’t sign. We just watch Natalie Portman and Johnny Depp move effortlessly, brilliantly, to the song, to Eric Clapton’s guitar, to the ever youthful former Beatles’ sad refrain. We also may wonder how the video affects those who can see but not hear. What goes through their mind/body when they “read” the hands and limbs of the two actors?
Waiting for signs. The song is about that. The video is about that. We all wait for signs, parse them, decode them, depend upon them and hope for them.…
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Posted on: April 13, 2012
Spinozablue welcomes the fine Haiku of Virginie Colline, and the poetic works of Dan Corjescu and Neil Ellmann.
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As long as we are alive, nothing is complete. We define this or that aspect of art, music, religion, life itself, and we kill it. In some way, small to great. Yes, poetry can lift art; art poetry. But neither can define or limit or stifle the other. There is always more. Much more. And the best critics know this. The most attentive, aware, tuned-in admirers of all the arts know this.
Nothing is written in stone, literally and metaphorically. The stone does not last. It crumbles and becomes something else. The metaphors are a bridge to another place and time, another way of seeing.…
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