Choices

"Now, if a man could constantly balance on the tip of the moment of choice, it would be foolish to say it might be too late for a man to choose." - Søren Kierkegaard

The Minor Gesture*

"A museum is a place where you can look at paintings."

a dancer, a sound artist and a class from a school


Het kleine gebaar - MUS-E Belgium - een project van Joyce Denooze en Elias Vervecken from MUS-E Belgium on Vimeo.

* an exhibition at the MSK Gent

Everybody, Everybody

"This one is for the misfits, who you can see standing alone here and there, who eat under streetlights and drink to the full moon. This one is for the one you recognize everywhere, this one is for you and me cause this is our moment. And I raise the glass to your health cause you're not alone. Everybody is from the world and the world is from everybody. This one is for everybody who has passion and goes for passion. I can't see you in the dark but I know that you are standing there. And I raise...Red, black, white, yellow, young, old, man or woman I can't see you in the dark but this one is from us to you. And I raise..."



There's no denial - it takes all sorts to make a world...

Something Almost Lost

because it is far too often overshadowed by sensations and rage.



Linking it to the eye as an organ of seeing perception as contrasted with rage, which is often perceived as being blind.

Salvation

The only thing that might save us: curiosity.



Charlie Winston's album is entitled "Curio City".

Earnings

"To earn that redemption you have to go from dark to light." - Ben Kingsley

A Tribute

to Ensor and the cinema

"The language of the cinema is inseperable from the close-up." - Peter Brook

No Hard Feelings

 There's always something to hum or sing along.





And the children absolutely love the Shalalalala on the radio, we all singing in my car.

Because It Is Not Listed

I share it, so more people could be able to watch it.



There is also a DVD of the whole show, available from the Royal Shakespeare Company's online shop for example.

Imagination

"Two years later I was approached by this Art Theatre for permission to do the play (The Seagull) in Moscow. I was reluctant, you can imagine, but they said that it had the very pulse of Russian life in it, and wanted to give it a second chance. This time I went to the rehearsals but missed the opening. As a matter of fact I fell in love with the actress playing the actress. Some of the production was absurd, especially the realistic sound effects: frogs croaking, and dragonflies, which is as stupid as to stick a real nose on a painting of a face. I said to them, the next play I write, the hero will come on at the start and say, What wonderful silence! No birds, no cuckoos, owls, clocks, no sleigh bells, no crickets!" - Anton Chekhov by Michael Pennington in Are You There Crocodile? - Inventing Anton Chekhov

Unrepeatable

"The point is, the whole meaning and drama of a person lies inside, not in outward manifestations. The big outward events in life are just unrepeatable accidents." - Anto Chekhov in Anton Chekhov by Michael Pennington

Vulnerability

The Skyscraper

 "Each character is a fully developed living human being."

Like somebody said in January 2011 at the  talk after the performance of Love Is My Sin - a selection of Shakespeare's sonnets selected by Peter Brook and performed by two actors: "I could climb onto the stage and embrace him." - indicating Peter Brook.
As far as I remember he made about the same point about never being able to extract Shakespeare's personal opinion from his writings with the exception of the Sonnets.

Enjoy!

 

Badabadabababadaba

"You can't bring me down!"

Nil Desperandum

"What's the point to give in to desperation?" - This rings so true because Girls in Hawaii had to deal with the death of their drummer.

Nowadays

it even takes a great effort to uphold a calm attitude - Nil desperandum!

All Night Long

voice and glance

Blue

Some people noticing that I  painted a lot of red in the 1990s assumed that I loved it, they would even tell me frankly. - No, I answered, In fact I hate it, which is a good thing because I can do whatever I want to it.
I hated this colour so much that I finally learned to love it and today it is a favourite indeed.

My favourite colour as a child was blue.
Blue was allegedly the last colour to be given a name and therefore perceived to be distinctive.


BLUE ALCHEMY: Stories of Indigo from Mary Lance on Vimeo.



Derek Jarman's book  Chroma is an interesting encounter with the world of colour.

Eccentrics

Highly recommended "The English Eccentrics" by Edith Sitwell

Taugenichts - Never-Do-Well

Songs in which to whistle and about whistling - carelessly trusting, stubborn and frightening - whistling being the antidote to fight the one and keep up the other.




Charlie Winston | LATELY from Ellis Bahl on Vimeo.

Two Great Humanitarians

An encounter of two people who love humanity a lot - Rudi Vranckx, a Belgian journalist and sometime war correspondent, and Henning Wallander, a crime writer and Africa lover, meet at Ingmar Bergman's (Mankell's father-in-law) house or rather in front of it and have a wonderful conversation. Though the introduction is in Flemish, the interview is conducted in English: http://deredactie.be/permalink/1.2461589 - highly recommended.

Simply, Do the Right Thing!

I like the fact that in fairy tales virtue is always rewarded. It feels like the hero or heroine has only to excell in certain virtues like gratefulness or helpfullness to surely be saved and rewarded.

And Lose the Name of Action

 "Die Maaslande '95"( the lands of the Meuse '95)

And Hearing Leonard Cohen Sigh

is as deep as it will get. - dEUS - Smokers reflect

Teufelsküche - A Hell of A Mess

It sometimes feels like telling the truth can get you into a hell of a mess, because I suppose that most people do not like to be told, especially because they know it to be true. Though exposing something and finding the courage to, can also be the hell of a fun. How dare you ;)?!

Shading Shadow

"Rosencrantz:..., and I hold ambition of so airy and light a
quality that it is but a shadow's shadow.
Hamlet: Then are our beggars bodies, and our monarchs and 
outstretched heroes the beggar's shadow..."

Stamina

"I was raised on meat and alcohol...."

 "It's amazing how only a little faith
Can point someone in a peculiar direction
But how much it takes for people to admit
They were wrong
And to renegotiate their intentions
Or how quickly they irritate
If you only mention
That only two, three, five changes
To their daily ways
Could make a whole lot of a difference
In the chain of days
In time and space"

Patience

"I've got time, time's on my side."



"Give it time."

 


And this one because Johannes Genard is such a great musician and surely  epitomises 'liefde voor muziek/love for music'.

Manntje, Manntje, Timpe Te*

*The Fisherman and His Wife

 


"...but whate'er I be,
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing..." Richard II, William Shakespeare

Ecce Homo

"And it's easier to trust if it comes down to this my friend, I will help you if I must, I will kill you if I can. Experience is cheap and you know that in the end, I will kill you if I must, I will help you if I can."




"Everybody's weird and they all think they're god."

Dialogue

"Peace is produced as this aptitude for speech." - Emmanuel Levinas - Totality and Infinity

Multilayered Manifestation

Man is such a wonderful and complex being

Madly unfolding these images, it helps to be alone while being immersed in something odd and whimsical.

Defining Experiences

dating from November 1987 to October 1988 - Today the "Schirmfabrik Brauer" is a museum.

Hot And All-Consuming

this fire deep down in your chest


Charles Bradley "Change For The World" OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO from Daptone Records on Vimeo.

Embarrass all those big-mouthed cowards and let us be courageous

"I ain't afraid to love ya"

Hungarian Humour

In October 2012 my husband and me went to a so-called book event, which actually was a sort of book and audiobook presentation with the writer and the actor, who has read the audiobook, present, in Cologne. The book was entitled "Er ist wieder da" and there is an English translation: "Look Who's Back". It was to cause a big controversy in Germany and be a huge bestseller for the publishers, who were also attending. Basically it is about Adolf Hitler having been somehow resurrected and commenting on present-day Germany. And which is even worse, it is written in the first person and this first-person narrator is the man himself, so the satire is at times very harsh because eventually one has to realise that one is laughing with Hitler about present-day shortcomings. There is a German idiom that says that one's laughter gets stuck in one's throat, meaning that though one laughs, one realises that whatever one is laughing about has ceased to be funny, a sensation felt by a lot of people while reading this book.
There was one question I asked Timur Vermes, its author, whose father is Hungarian, on this occasion: "Is it your Hungarian side that enables you to laugh at all these things. You see, I've read Michael Powell's autobiography and in it  Powell states that his partner, Emeric Pressburger, was able to laugh about everything and Powell credited his being Hungarian for this."- I've never gotten an answer but instead Vermes wanted to know who Pressburger was and as I began explaining about The Archers the actor, Christoph Maria Herbst, got interested.

Aesthetic Fooling Around

There might be some good aesthetic reasons to tamper with the facts a little bit.



Just like Joseph Beuys in a handwritten note: "19. Juli 1964: Beuys empfiehlt Erhöhung der Berliner Mauer um 5cm (bessere Proportion!)/ July, 19th 1964: Beuys advocates raising the Berlin Wall by 5 centimeters (better proportion!)"

One of the funniest movies ever, One, Two, Three, and it deals with the divided Germany. On the other hand it also illustrates the greatest loss to German culture ever, since both the director, Billy Wilder, and the writer, Ferenc Molnar, had to flee from the Nazis.



"Oh My God!", obviously some fan of One, Two, Three!

There is always hope *

The Divine Image - William Blake

To Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love
All pray in their distress
And to those virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness

For Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love
Is God our Father, dear
And Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love
Is man, His child and care

For Mercy has a human heart;
Pity a human face
And Love, the human form divine
And Peace the human dress

Then every man of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace

And all must love the human form
in heathen, Turk or Jew
Where Mercy, Love and Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too



* Caritas on facebook

And Maurits Pauwels aka Mauro Pawlowski dedicating his version of Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" to God.

Impressions

"This plain infinitely huge, this long drawn-out plain, that begins in Flanders and only ends in the direction of Poland, with its long rows of poplars and beeches, its fat fattening meadows, its marshes. And then finally a river, the Rhine." - Jean Clair

Rheingold

Tausendsassa - Jack of All Trades

"You used to think of me as such a weird young man, with my nose stuck in a book."

There is true opposition as opposed to all these cowards, who apparently never actually believed the things they are campaigning for. Here an escape is something well deserved. So: "How are you, lost angels?"



MY ESCAPE _ Bent Van Looy (official video)_ by Lionel Mougin from lionel mougin on Vimeo.

 For some reason I wouldn't fret - if there is a person who can fly, here is one.

Anstandswauwau - Chaperon

Sometimes I need an 'Anstandswauwau', a 'decency bow-wow' or rather chaperon to guard my common decency. Once I invited two, a male and a female one, to a dinner for four. The outcome was that in my living-room later at night the female one and me were rather insanely laughing at each other, with her telling me that this had been one of the most wonderful nights of her life. I'm deeply sorry that the emotional tension was so highly charged that she obviously got her fair share as well.
One of the saddest things I've ever encountered was a gigantic poster that covered almost the entire facade of a house. It read 'To so and so for your first communion, the best day of your life - your grandparents'. The child was presumably eight or nine years old and already was facing the best day of her life. Then there was this relative of mine, who used to celebrate her first communion's anniversary by lighting a candle and her and her mother crying a little bit. But this again was so silly that it made me laugh.
I had another highly emotional encounter with the person from the dinner, this time in Berlin and this time my husband was present and he soothed the situation a little bit and later back at our hotel he reaped what he maybe hadn't sown - at least not all by himself...

Water

Oh teach me poetry, teach me to cry.
I can tell the impossibility of this utopia, though I'm thirsting for it, and though I want to be a source.
The only thing I'm asking for is an answer, one that does manifest itself in our (mutual) smile.

I  wonder when and in what context I wrote this, it came back in a sketchbook this morning. My wild guess is that I wrote it after reading Derrida's Memoirs of the Blind because it was - especially the ending - an overwhelming experience. One that made me wonder a lot. And thinking about it these few lines give away a lot about what is/was going on, maybe even the exact culminating point, but really I do not care, because it will be obvious only in retrospect anyway. An experience is something that needs to be experienced by oneself, though of course there is never a guarantee that anybody would feel the same as I did. If it happens and you can relate, great, if it doesn't, it wasn't meant to be.

Once There Were Villains And Heroes

People who made choices and suffered the consequences of their actions. Tragic heroes making terrible mistakes that pretty often lead into destruction and the greater art of the tragicomedy where the tragic choices are in the end redeemed, but never without letting the perpetrators realise what they have done. And I'm afraid redemption was/is closely linked to taking responsibility.

"I Want My Life Back"*

After a lifetime spent in opposition and (perceived self-) denial (of what?), at the moment of victory, he wants his life back. Yet the only remedy against this victim playing might be taking some responsibilty for once. Yet again, being constructive and trying to control those powers one has summoned might prove so much harder than simple destruction.



Wimp!

*Nigel Farage 

Irresponsible

Laughter

can be liberating, common and including
or patronizing, aloof and excluding

Mercury

"Sich den Schuh anziehen" literally "to put on the shoe" meaning "to take something personally"
Once there was this journalist, Paul Allen, who took a reference to Mercury by Peter Brook  quite personally and felt that was the part allotted to him and maybe his colleagues. So what is there about journalists that would link them to the god of merchants and thieves? Selling news and making them up, telling lies, scheming and then leaving the sinking ship. Who needs to play the part of the villain in any given situation? Yet there is a saving grace as Mercury was also the patron of the poets.

The Emperor's New Clothes

or what I dislike about Peter Sloterdijk.
He hardly ever explains any of his theories and establishes them by stating that some principle or the other is generally known. Introducing a sort of general 'we all' who seem to know it all - of course - and thus it would be evident that a potential enquirer does not belong or worse isn't inaugurated, probably because of lack of learning. It's a quite patronizing and manipulative attitude and this is exactly the point where Derrida praises American universities: Elaborate!



And what a flirtatious gaze at the end, but then after all he was a ladies' man. If I can believe my friend's mother - right to the end.

Der Sündenfall - The Fall Of Mankind - PS

Interesting that Roger Ebert criticises a certain kind of mercantile attitude as well. For the rest I would agree, love is not about attractiveness, though attractive people are of course nicer to watch. And bringing out some person's better side through  love is certainly better than merely watching people who are attracted to one another. I like those actors better who are able to express emotions, who make me feel like something's going on, and I do not mean this awful grimacing that some actors exhibit.

Der Sündenfall - The Fall Of Mankind

Interesting choices when it comes to the example, probably somebody pretty fond of moving images, especially the silent variant.

Robert Musil - Über die Dummheit
"...Und sobald in der Dichtung ein Mann die Augen aufschlägt, sieht er sich überdies einem kaum beschreiblichen Widerstand gegenüber, der alle Formen annehmen zu können scheint:...; sei es luftartig allgemeine, wie die Umwandlung des kritischen Urteils durch das kaufmännische, seit Gott in seiner uns schwer begreiflichen Güte die Sprache des Menschen auch den Erzeugern des Tonfilms verliehen hat..."

Robert Musil - On stupidity

"...And as soon as in poetry a man opens his eyes, he finds himself confronted with an almost indescribable antagonism, that seems capable of taking any form:...; be it aerially common, like the transformation from the critical verdict into the mercantile, since God, in his to us hardly understandable benignity, has granted the human language also to the producers of sound film..."

1937

Women

Women ;)!
I like Hans-Peter Feldmann's view a lot. There is a lot of advice that should be heeded in this interview, like the fact that art should be part of everyday life, that it might be therapeutical. And the most important that death - especially the death of the other person - is the ultimate line one shouldn't cross, it discredits a lot or everything.



And I like his idea of how and when art happens, though - and this is the funny thing - I've been always sort of critical of conceptual art.