Claude Levi-Strauss

"...during the brief intervals in which our species can bring itself to interrupt its hive-like activity, let us grasp the essence of what it was and continues to be, below the threshold of thought and over and above society: in the contemplation of a mineral more beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that can be smelt at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books; or in the brief glance, heavy with patience  serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat."

Claude Levi-Strauss "The Kyong," Tristes Tropiques

Josef Albers as Teacher

"Did a preoccupation with the past, as Albers claimed, produce imitation and prevent creativity? Did a hankering for individuality lead to conformity? Was fashion the enemy of honesty? Did words betray feelings and introspection atrophy the senses?" (61-62)

It's "like people," Albers would say: "no one person is continually most important."  An individual, like a color or a line, could dominate temporarily but "perceptual ambiguities" soon shift and mix, someone or something else emerging into the foreground; "when you really understand that each color is changed by a changed environment, you eventually find that you have learned about life as well as about color." (56)

"Very few of us can own things without being corrupted by them, without having pride involved in possessing  them, gaining thereby a false security.  Very few of us can resist being distracted by things.  We need to learn to choose the simple and lasting instead of the new and individual....This means reducing instead of adding, the reversal of our typical thinking." (55) [Anni Albers]

"The past has led us to the present. Whether the past will be a help to us or a hindrance, depends on how we respect the present" (50)

All education, Albers believed, is self-education, but self-education best proceeds through comparison.

"Every day was a new revelation...I have always said in my saying or teaching, 'Make the result of teaching a feeling of growing.' That is the greatest incentive to continue developing yourself.  The feeling of growing. And today a little bit more than it was yesterday. And a little bit more than it was last year. You see? That you feel: I'm getting wider and deeper and fuller...I have made a sport of growing myself. That was a big sport, and therefore helped me with the sport to make others grow." (49)

"I had to be careful not to learn English to well because it would have interfered with my communication." (46)

Art, he believed, "is concerned with something that cannot be explained by words or literal description...art is revelation instead of information, expression instead of description, creation instead of imitation or repetition....Art is concerned with the HOW, not the WHAT; not the literal content, but with the performance of the factual content.  The performance--how it is done--that is the content of art." (47)

John Erskine - "The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent"

The disposition to consider intelligence in peril is an old Anglo-Saxon inheritance...  [There exists an] assumption that a choice must be made between goodness and intelligence; that stupidity is first cousin to moral conduct, and cleverness the first step into mischief  that reason and God are not on good terms with each other; that the heart and the mind are rival buckets in the well of truth, inexorably balanced—full mind, starved heart—stout heart, weak head.

...
"To be as intelligent as Richard or Iago or Edmund seems to involve some break with goodness; to be as wise as Prospero seems to imply some Faust-like traffic with the forbidden world; to be as thoughtful as Hamlet seems to be too thoughtful to live.  In Shakespeare the prizes of life go to such men as Bassanio, or Duke Orsino, or Florizel--men of good conduct and sound character, but of no particular intelligence...

"In Paradise Lost Milton attributes intelligence of the highest order ot the devil....Milton makes his Satan so thoughtful, so persistent and liberty-loving, so magnanimous, and God so illogical, so heartless and repressive, that many perfectly moral readers fear lest Milton, like the modern novelists, may have known good and evil, but could not tell them apart.

"Honor lay in a man's integrity, in his willingness and ability to keep his word; therefore the man became more important than his word or deed.  Words and deeds were then easily interpreted, not in terms of absolute good and evil, but in terms of the man behind them.  The deeds of a bad man were bad; the deeds of a good man were good....But as a race we seem as far as possible from realising that an action can intelligently be called good only if it contributes to a good end; that it is the moral obligation of an intelligent creature to find out as far as possible whether a given action leads to a good or a bad end; and that any system of ethics that excuses him from that obligation is vicious."

"We curse the obstacles of life as though they were devils.  But they are not devils. They are obstacles."

"The faith that needs the fewest altars, the hypothesis that leaves least unexplained, survives; and the intelligence that changes most fears into opportunity is most divine."

"But the lover of intelligence must be patient with those who cannot reaidly share his passion...It is a mistake to think that men are united by elemental affections. Our affections divide us. We strike roots in immediate time and space, and fall in love with our localirty, the customs and the language in which we were brought up.  Intelligence unites us with mankind, by leading us in sympathy to other times, other places, other customs; but first the prejudiced roots of affection must be pulled up.  These are the old pangs of intelligence...Yet, if intelligence begins in a pang, it proceeds to a vision. THrough the measureless time its office has ben to make of lfie an oppotunity, to make goodness articulate, to make virtue a fact.  In history at least, if not yet in the individual, Plato's faith has come true, that sin is but ignorance, and knowledge and virtue are one...  Beholding this long lbieration ofhte human spirit, we forsee, in every new light of hte mind, one unifying mind, wherein the human race shall know its destiny and proceed to it with satisfaction, as an idea moves to its proper conclusion; we conceive of intelligence at last as the inifinte order, wherein man, when he enters it, hsall find himself.

Manhatta

I think this is the best music video I've made, though the YouTube masses have decided that my video of The Blood of the Poet wins.  I like 'em both.  Some guy on YouTube working for The Cinematic Orchestra actually filed a copyright claim against my video... The Cinematic Orchestra actually thought they owned the rights to the original film Manhatta by Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand from 1921.  I politely let them know that just because your band calls its tepid album "Manhatta," that doesn't mean you have the exclusive rights to anything from the 1920s.  Copyright nazi's can bite my celluloid behind.

There are three songs on this video, each from a different album by The Books, (in order: Lemon of Pink, "Take Time;" Thought for Food, "Thankyoubranch;" and Lost and Safe "smells like content")  a subtle and profound band that makes aleatoric music .  (By the by, The Books made their own music video for this song which is also amazing).  Some of the lines in their music aligned particularly well with the video, particularly the opening lines in which we hear a man explaining in Italian:

Tutto è santo! Tutto è santo! Tutto è santo! Non c'è niente di naturale nella natura, ragazzo mio.Tentilo bene in mente. (All is sacred! All is sacred! All is sacred! There is nothing natural in nature, my lad. Keep that well in mind)

These lines fit in nicely with the 1920's NYC skyline and the poetry of Walt Whitman.  This is followed a little later by the voices of a group of women gossiping about sex. They laugh and one woman explains "Ce n'est pas la longueur qui fait la puissance;" in English, "It is not the length that makes the strength!"  There is a pause as the video switches over to images of tremendous phallic skyscrapers and we hear the women burst our laughing again.  The rest of the lyrics are in English.

The entire movie, a gorgeous tribute to New York City, is interspersed with quotes from Walt Whitman's ecstatic poetry about the city, specifically: "City of Ships;" "Mannahatta;" "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry;" "A Broadway Pageant;" and "Song of the Broad-Axe." All of these poems are worth reading.  There is something so wonderful about this film: its joyous celebration of the modern New York, its fixation on the gridded, vertiginous perspectives of the whole and the chaotic movement of the masses, the bigness and smallness of everything, the abstraction of photography into the movement of film, the momentariness of every scene compounded with the eternal monumentality of the city (and film), the idea that everything we see is completely unique to its time, yet the striking realization that what we see in the film is almost exactly what you might see today, the newness of these perspectives.

I made this film to say goodbye to New York City when I set off for graduate school.  But I'll be back.  And you'll still be there waiting for me, NYC, city of paradox, then and now, to be as always, shifting eternally into something new, that which you already were.  This one's for you.

Teaching Moby-Dick

I'm likely going to be teaching a course on Moby-Dick to high school students this summer.  I was told I needed to get my potential students pumped.  Here's what I got:

Title: Moby-Dick and Modern America

 Abstract: A multidisciplinary reading of Moby-Dick with particular consideration of its relevance to modern day America and to each of us as readers.

Description: 

“I have written a wicked book, and feel as spotless as a lamb.” 

–Melville in a Letter to Hawthorne, July 1851 

This class is an introduction to Herman Melville’s famous epic, Moby-Dick; we will read the book in its entirety. This course explores a wide range of subjects, such as: philosophy, metaphysics, ontology, World/American/Scientific/Maritime history, art, mythology (Greek and otherwise), cetology, geography, popular art/culture, justice, poetry, environmentalism, etymology, civilization, savagery, Shakespeare, heroism, war, nothingness, evil, darkness, hell, the abyss, god, death, race, religion, nihilism, monstrousness, genius, madness, wisdom, ethics, eschatology and some slice of the complexity of existence within the human condition.

 We will embark on this literary ship of the past as it winds its way from the world’s beginning to the present day, beginning at page one with Ishmael, a young man who, contemplating suicide, instead decides to commit himself to sea. You can expect to finish this class with no answers, but rather, a firm grasp of the magnitude of the questions. You can expect to improve enormously as a reader, to be mind-blown, blubber-brained, and equipped with a whole new set of philosophical and analytical tools to approach any daunting work of great literature you may read in the future. Have no fear: we will work together as a crew to harpoon this evil book. Join me on a whaling voyage around the world!

Lionel Trilling: Kindred Spirit

I asked them to look into the Abyss, and, both dutifully and gladly, they have looked into the Abyss, and the Abyss has greeted them with the grave courtesy of all objects of serious study, saying: 'Interesting, am I not? And exciting, if you consider how deep I am and what dread beasts lie at my bottom. Have it well in mind that a knowledge of me contributes to your being whole, or well-rounded, students.

The Castaway

"The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God." (Moby-Dick, Ch. 93)