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inspiration

We use the pain

18/08/2011
inspiration
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For a long time now ritual scarification has been used as an initiation rite. One have to endure pain  in order to become a full member of society. In this case marks on the body are an evidence of strength and self-discipline. At the same time for these people making scars on the body is the way to beautify themselves. Also, there is an observation that scarification has been most-used among equatorial nations because it would be difficult to see a tattoo on a dark skin. So we could see that all these cultural/religious matters are closely entwined with the different aesthetic principles making the subject of ritual scarification so interesting and complex - I really wish I had a deeper knowledge of it.

On a side note – when searching for the images I just found out that Louis Vuitton once made a bag inspired by the African rituals of scarification. Maybe it’s just me being snobbish and all but somehow for me it seems to be so wrong that such sophisticated and controversial concept has been used to produce just another logo-stamped luxury bag.

Let it come with all its horrors

18/07/2011
literature
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I just remembered a book I read a few years ago when doing a research for my graduate collection. It’s a novel by swedish writer Karin Boye called ‘Kallocain’. Of all the things I read and watched back then this one perhaps made the strongest impression on me. Two and a half years ago I quoted in my sketchbook:

“I have wondered for years where that place might be. If we will reach it after we have devoured our neighbor-state, or the neighbor-state has devoured us? Will roads then spring up as easily between human beings as they grow between cities and districts? Let it come soon then! Let it come – come with all its horrors! Or wouldn’t even that be enough? Will the armored tank have grown so strong before that time that it no longer can be transformed from a god into a tool? Can ever a god, even if he is the deadest of all gods, surrender his power voluntarily? – I wanted so to believe there was a green depth in the human being, a sea of undefiled growing-power that melted all dead remnants in its crucible and healed and created in eternity. . . .  But I have not seen it. What I do know is that by sick parents and sick teachers still sicker children are being brought up, until the sick has now become the norm and the healthy a horror. From lone beings are born even lonelier, from the frightened come more frightened ones. . . .  Where might even one seed of health be hiding away, that could grow and burst through the armor? . . .  Those poor people whom we called lunatics played with their symbols. It was at least something, at least they knew there was something they missed. As long as they knew what they were doing at least something was left. But it doesn’t lead anywhere! Where can anything lead! If I should shout at a Metro station when the multitudes emerge, or at a great festival with a loudspeaker in front of me – yet my shouts would only reach a few eardrums in the million-mile Worldstate, and would bounce back as a vacuous sound. I am a cog. I am a being who has been robbed of life. . . . And yet: just now I know it is not the truth. It must be the Kallocain, I guess, that makes me unreasonably hopeful – everything seems easy and clear and peaceful. I am still alive – in spite of all they have robbed me of – and just     now I know that what I am goes somewhere. I have seen the powers of death spread through the world in ever widening waves – but then must not the powers of life also have their waves, even though I have been unable to discern them? . . .  Oh well – I know it is the effect of the Kallocain, but even so – why couldn’t it be the truth?”

CPU

08/06/2011
literature
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re-reading (and not for the first time) ‘Pattern recognition’:

‘ CPUs. Cayce Pollard Units. That’s what Damien calls the clothing she wears. CPUs are either black, white, or gray, and ideally seem to have come into this world without human intervention.

What people take for relentless minimalism is a side effect of too much exposure to the reactor-cores of fashion. This has resulted in a remorseless paring-down of what she can and will wear. She is, literally, allergic to fashion. She can only tolerate things that could have been worn, to a general lack of comment, during any year between 1945 and 2000. She’s a design-free zone, a one-woman school of anti whose very austerity periodically threatens to spawn its own cult.’

I know I have an enemy

05/03/2011
inspiration, literature
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‘Somewhere in the world I have an implacable enemy although I do not know his name. I do not know what he looks like either…

The fact that I know absolutely nothing about him makes life intolerable, for  I am obliged to look upon everybody with equal suspicion. There is literally not a soul whom I can trust. As the days go past I find that I am becoming more and more preoccupied with this wretched problem; indeed, it has become an obsession with me. Whenever I speak to anyone I catch myself scrutinizing him with secret attention, searching for some sign that would betray the traitor who is determined to ruin me. I cannot concentrate on my work because I am always debating in my mind the question of my enemy’s identity and the cause of his hate. What act of mine can possibly have given rise to such a relentless persecution? I go over and over my past life without finding any clue. But perhaps the situation has arisen through no fault of my own but merely on account of some fortuitous circumstances that I know nothing about. Perhaps I am the victim of some mysterious political, religious or financial machination – some vast and shadowy plot, whose ramifications are so obscure as to appear to the uninitiated to be quite outside reason, requiring, for instance, something as apparently senseless as the destruction of everybody with red hair or with a mole on his left leg.

Because of this persecution my private life is already practically in ruins. My friends and family are alienated, my creative work is at a standstill, my manner has become nervous, gloomy and irritable, I am unsure of myself, even my voice has grown hesitating and indistinct.

You would think that my enemy might take pity on me now; that, seeing the miserable plight to which he has reduced me, he would be content with his vengeance and leave me in peace. But no, I know perfectly well that he will never relent. He will never be satisfied until he has destroyed me utterly…

…I am only writing this down so that when you do not see me any more you will know that my enemy has finally triumphed.’

fragments of ‘The Enemy’ from ‘Asylum piece’ by Anna Kavan

Basic shapes & systematic forms

16/08/2010
art, inspiration, literature
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‘Crystalline form, sphere, plane, rod and strip, screw and cone, those are the basic technical shapes of the whole world. These are enough for all events of the whole world process, to lead  them to their optimum. All things that exists are combinations of these seven primal forms, but never more than the holy number seven. Nature has produced nothing else, and the human spirit may do whatever it wants, but it will always only result in combinations and variations of these seven basic shapes.’

‘… for every thing, whether it is an object or a thought, there is only one systematic form that corresponds to the essence of the thing and which, if it is changed does not cause the position of repose, but which causes processes. These processes work compulsively, systematically by continually renewed disruption of form, until the optimal, essential position of repose has again been reached and form and essence are again one.’

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

Flying city

12/08/2010
inspiration
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‘Flying city’, russian architect Georgy Krutikov’s graduate project, 1928.

It reminds me of the Soviet science fiction 0f 30s-40s ( esp. Belyaev’s ‘Jump into the void’), Zamyatin’s dystopia ‘We’ and Svift’s the flying island of Laputa. But most of all I like the boldness of ‘the flying city’ project – to think of such things when even simple air flight was a huge risk.

Chemistry

28/07/2010
inspiration
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Stills from amateur low-quality videos of chemical experiments, which I found on youtube. Insanely beautiful.

I’m trying to learn french now and since for me this blog is a chance to practice my language skills I will post some keywords in french in order to expand my vocabulary.

/Chimie, expérience, flamme, couleur, fumée, vidéo, image, briller, de rose, aveuglant, de couleurs variées

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Any color you like

21/07/2010
inspiration
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It seems that everybody is bored to death with the black-grey-nude-white palette of the last few seasons. Now is the time for colors- neon, fluorescent, sickly and exotic, pale and rotten, rich and warm, glowing and cold. The colors of gems, fruits, flowers and chemicals, galaxies, minerals and fireworks. The brighter- the better.

p/s this post is dedicated to frost)

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Friedrich Nietzsche and women’s fashions of 1870

17/06/2010
literature
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from Hermann Hesse’s ‘The Glass bead game’

‘Thus those struggles for the “freedom” of the human intellect likewise “happened,” and subsequently, in the course of the aforementioned Age of the Feuilleton, men came to enjoy an incredible degree of intellectual freedom, more than they could stand. For while they had overthrown the tutelage of the Church completely, and that of the State partially, they had not succeeded in formulating an authentic law they could respect, a genuinely new authority and legitimacy. Ziegenhalss recounts some truly astonishing examples of the intellect’s debasement, venality, and self-betrayal during that period.

We must confess that we cannot provide an unequivocal definition of those products from which the age takes its name, the feuilletons. They seem to have formed an uncommonly popular section of the daily newspapers, were produced by the millions, and were a major source of mental pabulum for the reader in want of culture. They reported on, or rather “chatted” about, a thousand-and-one items of knowledge. It would seem, moreover, that the cleverer among the writers of them poked fun at their own work. Ziegenhalss, at any rate, contends that many such pieces are so incomprehensible that they can only be viewed as self-persiflage on the part of the authors. Quite possibly these manufactured articles do indeed contain a quantity of irony and self-mockery which cannot be understood until the key is found again. The producers of these trivia were in some cases attached to the staffs of the newspapers; in other cases they were free-lance scriveners. Frequently they enjoyed the high-sounding title of “writer,” but a great many of them seem to have belonged to the scholar class. Quite a few were celebrated university professors.

Among the favorite subjects of such essays were anecdotes taken from the lives or correspondence of famous men and women. They bore such titles as “Friedrich Nietzsche and Women’s Fashions of 1870,” or “The Composer Rossini’s Favorite Dishes,” or “The Role of the Lapdog in the Lives of Great Courtesans,” and so on. Another popular type of article was the historical background piece on what was currently being talked about among the well-to-do, such as “The Dream of Creating Gold Through the Centuries,” or “Physico-chemical Experiments in Influencing the Weather,” and hundreds of similar subjects. When we look at the titles that Ziegenhalss cites, we feel surprise that there should have been people who devoured such chitchat for their daily reading; but what astonishes us far more is that authors of repute and of decent education should have helped to “service” this gigantic consumption of empty whimsies. Significantly, “service” was the expression used; it was also the word denoting the relationship of man to the machine at that time.

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The Bell jar

05/04/2010
inspiration, literature
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‘Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.’

‘ The reason I hadn’t washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly. I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue. It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next. It made me tired just to think of it. I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.’

‘I brought it up next to the smudgy photograph of the dead girl. It matched, mouth for mouth, nose for nose. The only difference was the eyes. The eyes in the snapshot were open, and those in the newspaper photograph were closed. But I knew if the dead girl’s eyes were to be thumbed wide, they would look at me with the same dead, black, vacant expression as the eyes in the snapshot.’

‘I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people’s eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.’

‘The Bell jar’ Sylvia Plath

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