An absolute treasure trove!

Dear Art Lovers,

There is an artist (William Kentridge), and he has a place (The Centre for the Less Good Idea*), and his place is filled with interesting projects.  Enter at your own risk, there is much to explore.  Don't open the link if you are in a hurry, at a stoplight, waiting for a subway; you will need more time than that!  If you are waiting for a bus, then try just this one minute of interesting art film.

*  I know; pure frisson!  The name is so wunderbar, so perfect, so just what I want in an arts/idea space.

365.

Dear All,

That is it.  One year.  365 days of roller skating at least once each day. 

So, now what?  It's a bit of an issue isn't it?  This might be the root of fear of failure, because really, if you set out to do a thing and you do it, then what do you do?  There's a lot of drama in the trying, a lot of suspense, but there isn't much in the completion of it.  I would worry, for instance, about an injury or illness that might prevent me from chalking up another day.  I imagined myself in traction, like the cartoons, with my leg in a cast, hanging from a bar over the bed, and I would have to beg the nurse to please just put my skate on over it, just for a few minutes.

I have decided, and I have been considering what it means for the entire time, but I have more actively wrestled with it for the last 5 months or so, as this milestone approached, that what I will do is keep at it, but not because it is a goal now.  Which means you can't complete it, and you can't fail at it either, if you decide, say, not to take your roller skates to Maine and use them for a few minutes in hotel bathrooms or the potholed parking lots of roadside rest areas.  I think this is the part I will miss the most, the absurdity of doing it everyday no matter how small an effort or how ludicrous the surface.  I will miss the counting, which I did by hash marks in pencil on paper at the end of the day.  It's gone by so fast.  In many ways I am not sure I recommend it.  It's a sad sort of an endeavor, except for the few times you tell someone what you are doing and they cannot even imagine doing such a *thing; but that is a very cheap way to get your self-esteem, and I told only a dozen or so people what I was doing.  In that sense, it barely existed as a project at all.

It is best understood perhaps as a performance, or a ritual.  Which has now ended, and I must devise a new way to mark time, or I must extend this one further, indefinitely.









* Like, for example, brushing one's teeth everyday, or feeding a goldfish, or drinking a cup of coffee, or looking into a mirror in the morning. 

Parapluie.

Pelican, a dance performance by Robert Rauschenberg.

Dear Curious,

Today, I am hoping to send you searching for a small piece of writing, a prose piece that I am mad for: see a smattering of it below.  You won't be able to read it on the big bad internet; I already tried to find it for you.  You will have to visit a bookshop, or library, and even then, you will probably have to special order it.

I got mine from this good place for getting things, in a collection of essays called On Dolls.


*  *  *  *





The Marionette Theatre
by Dennis Silk

Part One

I

"Shutters shut and open.  So do queens."
- Gertrude Stein.

The Japanese writer, Saikaku, has a tricky story about umbrellas.  Twenty of them hung outside the temple at Kwannon.  People borrowed them in bad weather.  In spring, 1649, an unlucky umbrella-borrower had it blown out of his hand by a divine wind.  Travelling further maybe than Saikaku, the umbrella landed in the village of Amazato.  No one there had seen an umbrella.  But from its ribs, numbering forty, and the unusual luminosity of its oil-paper, they knew the sungod had landed at Amazato.  They built a shrine to the umbrella.

Saikaku does not describe the landing of the umbrella.  But it must descend slowly on Amazato from up there, slowly and in considered spirals, as a god should.  After the vigorous theophany of its descent, it lies stranded in the market-square.  Yet everyone understands the umbrella is latent.  A farmer closes his fingers around its handle as around a staff-hook.  They travel gingerly up the limb of this god, they feel a metal obstruction then a yielding.  The umbrella shuts.  Deus absconditus.
But what shuts opens, like fingers.  Open shut.  This farmer becomes the attendant of the opening and shutting god.




*  *  *  *


For some footage of Pelican, and two other Rauschenberg performances, go to the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

Right place, right time: Again?!

Dear Kindred,

I know, I can scarcely believe it myself, but yes, I have been, again, in the right place at the right time.  It doesn't seem possible for this to occur as often as it does;  I know, however, very little of the study of probabilities, and perhaps if I did know something about it, I would find that actually, I am right on par.

The place I was in was a lecture by some artists and a poet and a geologist, too, but that is hardly the point- what matters, I found, is the pataphysical.  If you know this word and its meaning, you are a very learned and lucky one.  It was my first contact with the word, and I fell completely in love with it and its meaning instantly.

I offer this short film of the making of a pataphysical cup of coffee first, and then, a link, to a more detailed unpacking of the term.  I know, I know!  What absolute luck to find a word like this! 









Here is a place to learn more, and if you feel you need to know all the details of my encounter with this marvelous concept, then watch this film of the lecture.