work pieces series by simon taylor
{ Category Archives }
is
and I found this:
. . . the sacred—the cut off (etymology: sacer, “the power, being, or realm understood by religious persons to be at the core of existence” that is cut off, set off or apart, restricted . . . “to have a transformative effect on their lives and destinies.” [source])
. . . the sacred shot = the mystery of the shot.1
The shot, sacred through delimitation, cut or duration.
“The sacred is not a sanctuary, I’m moved to remember; it’s a force field. In many ways a forest fire. You can try controlled burns or back burning, you can walk towards the heat, but its power comes from the fact that it can’t begin to be controlled, or anticipated.”
— Pico Iyer, from the book pictured below, with the slippage afflicting the title:
. . . the surface of the text.” the review excerpt continues, below which, the murmur. . . science learning from silence.
…
hang on, why “too obvious”?
And yet, we still might ask about the affinity of things and bodies and different kinds of love,
Isn’t it into the discourse of things that we enter when considering our love for things?
(And then, a general thingification, a quantification whereby uncountable qualities,
become numbers.)
Further to the following lithograph, A cloudburst of material possessions by Leonardo da Vinci
. . . the question arises of what is material and what immaterial, our
Neill Duncan (see “for Neill” here): In a funny sort of way, the Primitive Art Group opened my horizons musically, but in other ways it made me narrow-minded. . . . We were doing this edgy music and that other stuff’s so straight. Everything else was shit. We had that attitude. We were reacting against the status quo. We were very insular. We were focused on the idea that the only good music in New Zealand right now is what we’re doing. I always remember Anthony, . . .
— Future Jaw-Clap, Daniel Beban, 2024
— Susan Hauptman, Line Drawing #12, 1970
Today we use the word only in its political sense, and how unfortunate for us. For I fear that those who see freedom solely as a political concept will never grasp its meaning. The political pursuit of freedom can lead to its eradication on a grand scale—or rather it opens the door to countless curtailments. It seems that freedom is the most coveted commodity in the world: for just when one person decides to gorge upon it, those around him are deprived. Never have I known a concept so inextricable from its antithesis, and indeed entirely crushed under its weight.
. . .
Where does it come from? And how does it vanish with such stealth? Are those who bring us freedom the very ones who snatch it away? Or do we simply lose interest from one moment to the next, . . .
. . . no one really needs such a thing in the first place. This love of liberty . . . is nothing more than a kind of snobbism.
The freedom I knew as a child was of a different kind. First, and I think most significantly, it was not something I was given. It was something I discovered on my own one day—a lump of gold concealed in my innermost depths, a bird trilling in a tree, sunlight playing on water. There was no going back; from the moment I discovered it, everything changed: my humble existence, our humble home, the very world in which we lived. In time I would lose them all. Nevertheless I owe all the most precious things in my life to freedom. It has filled my days with miracles that neither the miseries of my early years nor the comforts of today could ever take from me.
— The Time Regulation Institute, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, 1962, translated by Maureen Freely & Alexander Dawe, 2013
— Susan Hauptman, Untitled, 1970
. . . the Nuclear Horror Show became part of the pressure that eventually led to New Zealand becoming nuclear-free. The zealous horizontal organising of school groups, university groups, religious groups, professional groups and others, of which the artists and musicians were a part, paid off. “That time was just a perfect example of art, unions, churches, everybody in unison. That’s why it worked. That’s the only reason it worked,” says [Nicky] Hager. “It was a time of energy and vigour for everyone, that why they could put together such an incredible show, all those artists just throwing themselves into it. It was the right time for it. There was energy to burn, everywhere.”
“You can’t even get people out of bed these days,” says Debra Bustin.
— Future Jaw-Clap, Daniel Beban, 2024
— Susan Hauptman, Line Drawing #101, 1972
e.e. cummings:
It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my “poems” are competing.
They are also competing with each other, with elephants, and with El Greco.
Every time I read this [writes Daniel Handler aka Lemony Snickett] I find it bracing—the giddy admission that the poet finds his own work just crowding together with all of the other stuff—bits of nature and culture just barging in, so haphazardly and intrusively that almost as soon as he closes parentheses full of them, in come elephants and El Greco, along with the same poems themselves. It shrugs off the deep fantasy of art: that it is given a rapt, focused audience, and in turn has a real, traceable effect. This is easily discarded because we knew it was wrong all along. Nothing makes the mind wander than someone telling you they need you undivided attention. Even in your most fiercely focused hours of reading, when you lose complete track of your immediate surroundings, when your coffee gets cold while you finish the chapter, you are still not alone with the book, because everything in your mind, every memory each word prompts, every pressing concern, even as the book turns your eyes in a different direction, clouds the sun of your attention. You might lose track of time, but time does not lose track of you. Your life continues, with all of its trappings and wanderings competing with everything else, and as far as how the book affects you, it is no more traceable than a grain of salt in soup. The effect is real, but there’s no mapping it, because the map is not the territory and the territory is the changing landscape of your mind and the changing world it observes and inhabits. I have a basement filled with boxes filled with letters from children filled with questions, and the one they ask most is, is it real? I know the answer isn’t, “No, the real thing is a man sitting at a table with a legal pad.” My work has not led them astray, even if they are confused; it has not harmed them, even if they are upset. The landscape is too enormous for anything as stupid and square as that. The story is real, even if it’s not true—they are living in the space it provides, thinking about what they like, not what people hope they are thinking. This is how literature works, freely offering itself, or failing to, every which way along with everything else in the world. Just this paragraph alone is competing with everything else in the world. Just this paragraph alone is competing with everything I thought I would write about here, and didn’t—a story about Odetta, a mistake in my favorite Virginia Woolf novel, a poem by a South African about guilt and reading, what a jazz musician said about a long-ago funeral he watched online—not to mention everything already crowding in your brain, elephants and El Greco.
So let me say to you now, if you can hear me over all that, what I think about the curtailing of literature, and I’ll say it like the punk I’ll never be. Fuck what the author says, and fuck whatever terrible thing may be found in their words. Fuck removing the book from view, and fuck snatching it from someone else’s hands. Fuck separating the art from the artist, and fuck forgiving any author for anything. All these actions, the motivations behind them, are not just improper about literature, but predatory toward it. A book moves in the world.
. . . Books are like people in this way. And if you find yourself feeling that the book is problematic, all that means is that you have a problem with it, and that’s easily solved. Leave the book behind, put your clothes back on, and go home.
. . .
Yes, it’s true. At last we have it. Not a policy from Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage (something new, something divided and something colonial), but, for this “unique and intoxicating mix that is [or has been] rooted in the past but [is] constantly evolving and surprising”, what the Hon. Goldsmith calls a “draft strategy”, setting out “goals and a series of proposed actions to help us make progress towards them.” [source, here and hereafter]
That is, what, although he alleges creativity abjures “tidy strategies” (raising the possibility that his government’s is characteristically messy), he also calls, “a sense of direction”. Not, then, a roadmap, but a series of confusing mixed metaphors under the inappropriate title of Amplify, appropriated from Amazon Web Services,
just like NZ Arts, Culture and Heritage. A large Nota Bene:
Wouldn’t it be good to see our country rank among the top 25 globally for culture and heritage soft power?1
— asks the Hon. Member, before the statement:
Amplify sets out how Government will use the existing level of its funding for maximum impact, purposefully leveraging further investment from other actors.
Presumably this means advertising, using the existing level of government funding purposefully to advertise the intoxicating mix of soft power that is NZ creativity to investors.
These are he says actors. In NZ Aotearoa actors have been subsidising their creative activity for many years, but asking them now to invest. . . !? unless those referred to are what economics calls irrational actors?
Rational economic actors are those who make decisions based on calculated expected benefits. We can expect Government considers itself a rational economic actor. What are then the expected benefits, apart from the minister’s hyperbolic advertisement,
Our vision is for New Zealand to be regarded as a global creative powerhouse.
They are acknowledged soberly to be:
It can be seen from the above that Government has no interest in sustaining grammatically correct outcomes.
Amplify is not a policy document. It is a business document, a business strategy for NZ Arts, Culture and Heritage. The targets for 2030 include Soft Power ranking, a business and trade ranking drawn from cultural (culture as a brand) recognition and reputation; and contribution to GDP, “with a focus on exports”; and the “median income for creative professionals” matching more closely the median for NZers “earning a wage or salary”. To be inferred is that creative professionals are not on a wage or salary. (Were they, it might further be inferred they work for CNZ and that funding is the focus of their creativity.)
Amplify gives a figure of $37,000 for the median total income of creative professionals in 2023.
This government’s approach to the arts marks a departure inasmuch as it is not about funding or value-for-money (over which successive governments have toiled in vain), not about internal recognition of the value of arts, culture and cultural heritage, but about external recognition, and so funding is only for reputation, for the international recognition of NZ Aotearoa’s “unique and intoxicating” brand and for its dollar-value being realised primarily in external business and trade.
. . . called away to the toilet . . . a member of the public had missed the bowl and shat all over it. Thanks, said a colleague, when, having cleaned it up, I returned.
It’s nothing, I said. I’ve been reading the government’s art policy. (It’s not, but it was too difficult to explain.) I didn’t outsource the loo-cleaning, but I did the summary of this, because it seemed like AI could’ve written it.
I like the elision of Amplify with the object of the strategy.
AI GENERATED THIS SUMMARY:
New Zealand's draft strategy, Amplify, aims to become a global creative powerhouse, focusing on ngā toi Māori and diverse traditions from Europe, the Pacific, and other countries. The strategy aims to increase New Zealanders' engagement with arts, culture, and heritage, drive economic growth, and exports. It outlines how the government will use existing funding for maximum impact, support New Zealand's creative and cultural talent pipeline, and modernize government regulation. The strategy aims to foster collaboration and complement existing strategies, aiming to encourage and support all types of creativity and culture. The government's Amplify strategy aims to enhance the creative and cultural sectors in New Zealand, including arts, museums, heritage, music, screen, gaming, fashion, architecture, and design. It acknowledges the importance of creative practitioners in shaping New Zealanders' identity, language, and culture, and preserving their unique identity and history. The strategy is informed by sector feedback and priorities, and aims to make New Zealand a global creative powerhouse. The government values the expertise and experience within these sectors and sees Amplify as an opportunity to support their ambitions.
I also asked AI:
Government’s Amplify strategy, amplification without an increase in funding, can be summarised as being to direct arts, culture and society towards attraction of business and trade, and the persuasion of investors, for no more than the $450m investment it has already allocated in the 2024 budget.
……………………….
Wright explored his own “dark landscape,” describing two experiences that lay behind the creation of the novel. The first–an encounter with the “strangely familiar,” an idea that recurs throughout the book–took place in Chicago, shortly before his grandmother’s death in 1934. … he read a book that “miraculously linked my grandmother’s life to my own ijn a most startling manner”: Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives. Reading Stein’s story “Melanctha” in black vernacular speech at his grandmother’s flat,
“I suddenly began to hear the English language for the first time in my life! … But more than that; suddenly I began to hear my grandmother speak for the first time.”
Later, he read the story aloud in a basement on the South Side to a “group of illiterate, class-conscious Negro workers … and there were such howls of delight, such expressions of recognition, that I could barely finish.”
pp. 188-119
In an artful series of moves, he connects the “quality of my grandmother’s living” to a form of
music
she loathed as a
sinner's genre, the blues,
with their manner of
“freely juxtaposing totally unrelated images and symbols and then tying them into some overall concept, mood, feeling,” “a trait of Negro thinking and feeling.”
By imposing order, a strange order, on the fragments of a chaotic, ungovernable, intolerable reality,
the blues marks
“the advent of surrealism on the American scene.”
… a surrealism born of necessity, not from theory …
— p. 119
Richard Wright: The “young man who spurned the fetish religion of his people returns and finds that the religion is the only thing that he has to work with . . . So, not believing in the customs of his people, he rolls up his sleeves and begins to organize that which he loathes.”
Western imperialism’s great legacy among its former subjects,
[Wright argued]
was an intense racial consciousness.
— p. 127
“My positions is a split one. I’m black. I’m a man of the West . . . I see and understand the West; but I also see and understand the non- or anti-Western point of view. How is this possible? The double vision stems from my being a product of Western civilization and from my racial identity.” Wright did not see his “double vision” as a source of torment, as Du Bois had described “double consciousness” in The Souls of Black Folk. He considered it an intellectual asset, allowing him to “see both worlds from another and third point of view,” and to see the colonized as both “victims of their own religious projections and victims of Western imperialism.”
to which Fanon indirectly replied:
“It is true . . . that the drama of consciousness of a westernized Black, torn between his white culture and his negritude, can be very painful; but this drama, which, after all, kills no one, is
too particular to be representative:
the misfortune of the colonized African masses, exploited, subjugated, is first of all of a vital, material order; the spiritual rifts of the ‘elite’ are a luxury that they are unable to afford.”
— p. 129
from William Gardner Smith’s exile in Paris:
In the summer of 1946 Smith went to occupied Berlin as a clerk-typist with the 661st TC Truck Company. He spent eight months in Germany, and by August 1947 he had completed a draft of a novel, Dark Tide over Deutschland. Farrar, Strauss & Company paid him $500 for the manuscript and published it in 1948 under the title Last of the Conquerors. A review in the New York Times described the novel—the story of a love affair between a black soldier in Berlin and a German woman, with strong echoes of A Farewell to Arms—as
"a revealing example of the tendency of minority groups . . . to project themselves into a fantasy world in which they enjoy rights that are inherently, if not actually, theirs."
–p. 155
[Roland Barthes]
dedicated the first volume of his Critical Essays, published in 1964, to his lover François Braunschweig, an eighteen-year-old law student— but the “political liberation of sexuality” struck him as “a double transgression, of politics by the sexual, and conversely.” His own morality, he wrote, was “the courage of discretion”: “It is courageous not to be courageous.”
— p. 208
Barthes had fallen in love with Japan after his first visit in 1966. But he was the first to acknowledge that the “country I am calling Japan” was an imaginary country, and he was happy for the actual place to remain elusive. (As he confessed in a letter written in 1942, “I have no curiosity about facts, I am only curious—but fanatically so—about humans.”) Nothing pleased him more than the “rustle of a language he did not understand: at last, language was freed from meaning, from the “stickiness,” and converted into pure sound. Not surprisingly, Barthes’s favorite contemporary artist was Cy Twombly, whose paintings resembled illegible scribbles—a style that Barthes, an amateur artist, emulated in his own drawings.
— p. 209
. . .
Religion only reinforced the notion that everyday problems were in the hands of a higher authority. "Our ecological problems are also metaphysical," he said. "People who are waiting for the end of the world can't be bothered with the present."
--p. 41
…
The idea that education is “best advanced by focusing principally on our own separateness, our own ethnic identity, culture and traditions” struck [Said] as a kind of apartheid pedagogy, implying that “subaltern, inferior or lesser races” were “unable to share in the general riches of human culture.” Identity was “as boring a subject as one can imagine”; what excited him was the interaction of different identities and the promise—the “risk”—of universality. This vision lay at the heart of the youth musical ensemble he helped to establish, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. The name alluded to Goethe’s West-östlicher Diwan, a collection of poems inspired by the Persian poet Hafez. The orchestra’s co-founder was the conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim, an Argentine-Israeli Said had met by chance in London in 1993, just as his relationship with Arafat was falling apart. Said described the meeting as “love at first sight.”
— p. 97
Zelenskyy's adviser Mykhailo Podolyak claims them to be a fiction: “Putin doesn’t understand military stuff. He’s a guy that people come and show him some cartoon about how the missile will fly, how nobody will be able to shoot it down. He said the same thing many times about their Kinzhal missile. And then when it turned out that Patriot, even the not-the-latest-generation systems, can comfortably shoot it down, he stopped talking about it.” I will also say, the Guardian has him say, There is no such thing as a hazelnut tree. The question arises as to the existence of the ICBM named after it, the 'oreshnik,' to establish which, we can do no better than refer to Reuters: Enter ‘Oreshnik’ On Nov. 21, a new kind of Russian missile carrying six warheads struck Dnipro, Ukraine. Senior officials said it caused limited damage. But the first combat use of such a design — which Russian President Vladimir Putin called unstoppable — has drawn scrutiny from Western military experts. By Gerry Doyle, Tom Balmforth and Mariano Zafra Published Nov. 28, 2024 07:00 PM GMT+13 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>supported by TIMESNOW<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
6 days ago [today 29.11.2024], the bbc:
On Thursday [21.11.2024],the Ukrainian city of Dnipro was hit by a Russian air strike which eyewitnesses described as unusual, triggering explosions that went on for three hours.
Putin said that the weapon travelled at a speed of Mach 10, or 2.5-3km per second (10 times the speed of sound).
... there seems to be no clear consensus about what it actually is.
Ukrainian military intelligence maintains that the missile is a new type of ICBM known as Kedr (cedar). They say it was travelling at Mach 11 ... They said the missile was equipped with six warheads, each with six sub-munitions. (Confirmed by Reuters's looking at the pictures. See above.)
Ilya Kramnik, Russian military expert, said that it could be a reduced version of the Yars-M missile complex, which is an ICBM.
......... The attack on Dnipro amounted to prototype testing .........
nothing I write can satisfy me today
so I read some Breyten Breytenbach
shut up
Breyten Breytenbach
shut up
in Paris where the women chant
life
woman
liberty
and bare their breasts
the
life the
woman the
liberty
the end cannot satisfy me neither
can the beginning
you are the same age as my mother
and two years younger than my
father
would be
I learnt from you the terms of exile
the émigré
a play set in a prisoncell
teeth crack on a toilet bowl
the jolt of a good poem
in memoriam Breyten Breytenbach
16 September 1939 - 24 November 2024
[26.11.2024]
who does? the violent man-emperor
who is? that for whom the merchants weep . . . in the porno of the human condition, the market where it is traded as commodity . . .
John lists 29 luxury products of Roman world trade from gold, wine, olive oil — to slaves. If the beast signifies imperialist politics, Babylon signifies not the consuming debauchery of neoliberal capitalism, but of its ancestor, the imperial global economy. He suddenly turns on her, devours her, bringing down the whole system. The “merchants weep” at global economic collapse.
— Catherine Keller, here
who’s the John?
Jesus, hanging there, captive audience, says, John, tells him, the youngest disciple, son of Zebedee and Mary Salome,
possibly Jesus’ mum’s sister, so this is Jesus telling his cousin and his mum’s nephew, that he’s to look after Mary, Mum.
Which he does. In a little house outside of modern Selçuk, a long walk, a shorter drive, from Ephesus, both Mary’s house and Ephesus sites of hyperindustrial tourism (see here and here [for the miracle of Para Para Para and the miraculous snap]).
This is also John who is granted a vision on Patmos where he’s been sent into exile and writes The Book of Revelation, The Book of the Apocalypse, which Keller is talking about, saying that apocalypse includes the revelation that the beast-violent-man-emperor turns on the market (feminised and commodified and so personified) and eats her.
As Keller points out, it’s not prophecy. It’s the perennial production of the cause of its downfall from the conditions which produced the state form, in the figure who, although the stress is put on the more colourful sexy market, couldn’t be clearer, the Violent Man-Emperor.
