Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Monday, October 26, 2009

blank

count me in for architecture inspired anything..
OMRs opening for the jorge mendez blake´s 3 bibliotecas.

architecture, the space that contains, books, and trees..
such coherent elements in a chain of imperfect ideas.

how fitting to see the clear imposition of the "artificial" in nature.
yet nature returns with such artifice as the death of the author mr. roland barthes so wisely stated in his essay.
the author exists only by his text, there is no author without a text, thus there is no creator without a creation. & vice versa.
all this left in the hands of the spectator.
"readers must separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate it from interpretive tyranny"...
i would ask barthes to please give me the formula on how to liberate myself from my subconscious.

art tends to stray far from subtracting the creator from the creation, even if some claim to do this in a noble manner, i have not yet met the artist who has successfully denied his ego, barthes just points us in the right direction.
a process maybe.

another discourse that also came to mind was foucault´s text on the panopticon, blake did these drawings with charcoal picturing a tall tower in the middle of the forest..
the tower, watching over the forest in an "omnipresent" manner, the artificial, the man made, serving as the obliteration of the organic...
the weight of structures constructed upon a space that has no physical words in response.

i saw a full circle assembled in this short but complete exhibition of work; the library, infinite texts that have been written, all sculpted out of a tree... forming an intrinsic, yet subtle whisper of our future movements that irrevocably will have a profound effect on the world around us.

hard to find some type of catharsis amidst the spectators, a note worthy experience, and i found myself, hungover ameliorated, continuing the dialogue in my head...
my head was saying this..
searching for the interesting title, a captivating preface, a pretty cover...
the endless works and words written all contained under a single roof, circular walls forming a cycle, mirror making shapes, sentences waiting to be chosen, or forever lost in the decay of time over a page of once white paper.

a cleaver way of saying everything is giving a book a blank cover..

blake did it right.



GALERIA OMR
Plaza Río de Janeiro 54
Colonia Roma
México 06700 DF
T +52 55 /5511 1179/5207 1080
F +52 55 /5533 4244

Horarios de atención y visita a la galería:
Martes a Viernes de 10 a 15 hs. y de 16 a 19 hs.
Sábado de 10 a 14 hs.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

skyscraper

what an adequate name for something.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

guilty pleasure

· not sleeping.
· sleeping.
· being a geek.
· finding amazing things for less than 100 pesos.
· taking wayyy too many pictures of sunsets/sunrises/sky.
· having wayyy too many pictures of myself on facebook (thanks mr. drama for pointing that out./ he´s just jealous because he wants more photos of himself).
· over conceptualizing.
· bear grylls.
· hooters buffalo chicken sandwich (best hangover food).
· showering at 1 am.
· dos equis ambar.

Monday, October 12, 2009

"cogito, ergo sum"

chapter 1 of "cosmos & psyche" by richard tarnas quotes descartes, "i think, therefore i am". undeniable building block of western philosophy and origin to a new perspective.. thus spouts forth a 569 page analysis into the understanding of our universe and our existence.
seems like this will be a transcendental and revelatory walk/jog/run into fathoming a complex yet diminutive period of the human timeline.
can´t wait.

in the meantime...
an exert from cosmos & psyche by r.t

preface

skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, santayana declared and the metaphor is apt. the mind that seeks the deepest intellectual fulfillment does not give itself up to every passing idea. yet what is sometimes forgotten is the larger purpose of such a virtue. for in the end, chastity is something one preserves not for its own sake, which would be barren, but rather so that one may be fully ready for the moment of surrender to the beloved, the suitor whose aim is true. whether in knowledge or in love, the capacity to recognize and embrace that moment when it finally arrives, is perhaps in quite unexpected circumstances, is essential to the virtue. only with that discernment and inward opening can the full participatory engagement unfold that brings forth new realities and new knowledge. without this capacity, at once active and receptive, the long discipline would be fruitless. the carefully cultivated skeptical posture would become finally an empty prison, an armored state of unfulfillment, a permanently confining end in itself rather than the rigorous means to a sublime result.

first, the profound metaphysical disorientation and groundlessness that pervades contemporary human experience: the widely felt absece of an adequate publicly accessible larger order of purpose and significance, a guiding metanarrative that transcends separate cultures and subcultures, an encompassing pattern of meaning that could give to collective human existence a nourishing coherence and intelligibility.

second, the deep sense of alienation that affects the modern self: here i refer to not only the personal isolation of the individual in modern mass society but also the spiritual estrangement of the modern psyche in a disenchanted universe, as well as, at the species level, the subjective schism separating the modern human being from the rest of nature and the cosmos.

and third, the critical need, on the part of both individuals and societies, for a deeper insight into those unconscious forces and tendencies, creative and destructive, that play such a powerful role in shaping human lives, history, and the life of the planet.

these conditions, all intricately interconnected and interpenetrating, surround and permeate our contemporary consciousness like the atmosphere in which we live and breathe. from a longer historical perspective, they represent the distillate of many centuries of extraordinary intellectual and psychological development. the compelling paradox of this long development is that these problematic conditions seem to have emerged from, and be subtly interwoven with, the very qualities and achievements of our civilization that have been most progressive, liberating, and admired.

........

cosmological situation today

in the course of the past century, the modern world has both seen its greatest ascendancy and its unexpected breakdown. every field and discipline, from philosophy, anthropology, and linguistics to physics, ecology, and medicine, has brought forth new data and new perspectives that have challenged long-established assumptions and strategies of the modern mind. this challenge has been considerably magnified and made more urgent by the multitude of concrete consequences produced by those assumptions and strategies, many of them problematic. as of the first decade of the new millennium, almost every defining attitude of the modern world view has been critically reassessed and deconstructed, though often not relinquished, even when failure to do so is costly. the result in our own, postmodern time has been a state of extraordinary intellectual ferment and fragmentation, fluidity and uncertainty. ours is an age between world views, creative yet disoriented, a transitional era when the old cultural vision no longer holds and the new has not yet constellated. yet we are not without signs of what the new might look like.

recently there have been emerging from the deconstructive flux of the postmodern mind the tentative outlines of a new understanding of reality, one very different from the conventional modern view. impelled by the developments in many fields, this shift in intellectual vision has encompassed a wide range of ideas and principles, among which can be identified a few common themes. perhaps the most conspicuous and pervasive of these can be summed up as a deeper appreciation of both the multidimensional complexity of reality and the plurality of perspectives necessary to approach it. closely related to this new appreciation, both cause and effect, is a critical reappraisal of the epistemological limits and pragmatic consequences of the conventional scientific approach to knowledge. this reappraisal includes a more acute sensitivity to the ways in which subject and object are mutually implicated in the act of knowing, a revised understanding of the relationship of whole and part in all phenomena, a new grasp of complex interdependence and subtle order in living systems, and an acknowledgement of the inadequacy of reductionist, mechanistic, and objectivized concepts of nature.



_gracias a alejandro por compartir su insight a este libro.

Monday, October 5, 2009

short circuits

on another and less ephemeral note, my fingers, eyes and ears bumped into the bugged out/bugged in remixes by hot chip, released earlier this year. it´s about as random as it gets, ranging from techno, downtempo, experimental, dubstep, calypso, 80s classics, expected r&b, rap, & other additions.
what glues this pastiche all together is hot chip´s almost unmistakable electro sound and alexis taylor´s beautiful honey producing mouth... evidently, not a whole lot of glue.

as 42 tracks poured into my itunes, i must admit i got pretty excited. a part from my brief and vague chat a few months ago with al doyle, telling me he likes INXS and his wife works at commes des garçons, that was pretty much it for 09... i needed more, made in the dark seemed so far away, and haven´t been able to listen to ABOUT...
so i wondered off into hot chip´s psyche. (here is where i would like to point out that i consider myself the over-analytical type of fan that doesn´t get enough with a plain "hot chip is a british electropop band...". but i guess most of you already deduced that.)

i felt like bugged out totally redounds on the instrumental, then gradually and painfully turns ibizaesque (a mistake i tend to do myself on my mixtapes, the instrumental not the ibizaesque part)...
disc 1. finally vindicates itself on its "intermission" (track 13-14) with hot chip´s take it in, then continues on flatlining up until ican´s chiclet´s theme, ending on max cooper´s i.
formula = putting three of their favorites at the beginning, one in the middle and two at the end = everything else has a hard time keeping up.
it begins and ends well, burning in the middle (i´m not referring to the good type of heat, but the bad one, the one that actually makes things turn into ash).
a part from that, no noteworthy punch.
bugged out could be characterized as a DFA/LCD soundsystem dj set, infinite sound alliteration, which made me yawn and if i hadn´t had a bit of peace of mind, i would not have been able to go through with it
what i could say is that hot chip (in this series) definitely has the ability to weave a very long thread and make it seem like it is made out of the same material, you hear the first 24 tracks and each song flows and fits like a puzzle into the next. chronologically shameless. its shame resides in the lack of spark that could make my mind flare (now i´m referring to the good type of heat).

i found the alluring, the aesthetic and admirable on bugged in, a far less club inspired compilation, which to me was the interesting part, it´s all over the place, chaotic and entertaining. totally nerdy, dorky and beyond, a retake on the kinks apeman, was the dork epitome for me.
it still flows, but a creative flow, not the boring and repetitive. seems like they´re making fun of everything. i can picture them doing the whole "i feel so cool listening and dancing cheesely to luther vandross and terrence trent d´arby".

favorites range from the exquisite winter home disco by the pictish trail, chiclet´s theme by ican, nah und fern by gas, which is perfectly layered into the first three tracks of bugged out, (this is the hook, at least this was mine), osborne´s 16th stage, hall & oats classic i can´t go for that, which is a bit predictable, but efficient, cheeky lyrics presented in shake a puddin´by dub narcotic sound system make me love this group, london town by man like me saying "get out your matching moschino´s and your gucci loafers oh/yo...", jaja, biz markie´s just a friend "have you ever met a girl that you tried to date, but a year to make love she wanted you to wait" is priceless. and an inevitable flashback to my childhood growing up in texas with zapp & roger´s i wanna be your man.

this piece of faded wisdom pretty much sums up the remixes.
"i´ll wine you, dine you, and then leave you, all in one motion"
technically 42 motions, and yes, i still want more hot chip.

aetiology

yesterday afternoon, on my way to dinner, turned the radio on to hear a somewhat interesting interview with MURCOF, well to be honest the music did most of the talking.
it happened to be one of those moments when you´re hearing the precise song in the precise moment.
one begins tripping out and all of a sudden the surroundings dilute in a bleached out manner.
the funny thing was that i wasn´t even in "that" mood, i was simply driving, as my head was filled with a ton of involuntary and recurring thoughts.

texture out of sound
texture out of invisibility
touch to the unstructured
structure to the untouchable
abstraction of a reality,
to be heard on a roof.