Do you remember the sight we saw, my soul,
that soft summer morning
round a turning in the path,
the disgusting carcass on a bed scattered with stones,
its legs in the air like a woman in need
burning its wedding poisons
like a fountain with its rhythmic sobs,
I could hear it clearly flowing with a long murmuring sound,
but I touch my body in vain to find the wound.
I am the vampire of my own heart,
one of the great outcasts condemned to eternal laughter
who can no longer smile.
Am I dead?
I must be dead. Charles Baudelaire
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
Robert Oppenheimer: Interview about the Trinity explosion, first broadcast as part of the television documentary The Decision to Drop the Bomb (1965), produced by Fred Freed.
Jul 22, 2018 | Categories: Speculation | Tags: Palo Alto | Comments Off on She Bomb – Science Exchange
She made beauty all round her. When she trod on mud, the mud was beautiful; when she ran in the rain, the rain was silver. When she picked up a toad – she had the strangest and, I thought, unchanciest love for all manner of brutes – the toad became beautiful. C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
Jul 18, 2018 | Categories: Adventure | Tags: Kauai, Lindsey Dillon | Comments Off on She made beauty all round her
The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall. The waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move. The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping. Virginia Woolf, The Waves
My childhood landscape was not land but the end of the land – the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic. I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own. Sylvia Plath
Jun 16, 2018 | Categories: Industries, The City | Tags: Sutro | Comments Off on the end of the land
Nature is imagination itself: Alonzo King LINES Ballet: Site Specific Dance in the trees at Lands End…
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. William Blake, Letters
At night I dream that you and I are two plants that grew together, roots entwined, and that you know the earth and the rain like my mouth, since we are made of earth and rain. Pablo Neruda, Regalo de un Poeta
Two hands rise, separating into yīn and yáng Left and right like a yīn and yáng fish Movement springs from extreme stillness, opening then closing Relax the shoulders and sit on the leg as if embracing the moon
Two hands form into yīn and yáng palms Two palms crossed over for locking joints
Wait for opportunity before moving, watch for changes Create opportunity by following the opponent’s force
Wu Jianquan, son of Wu Quanyou (from a didactic poem quoted by his son Wu Gongzao in Wu Family T’ai Chi Ch’uan (吳家太極拳)), Hong Kong, 1980 (originally published in Changsha, 1935)
San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth. William Saroyan
The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence … The Photograph then becomes a bizarre (i)medium(i), a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest (o)shared(i) hallucination (on the one hand ‘it is not there,’ on the other ‘but it has indeed been’): a mad image, chafed by reality. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
The weather was sunny, with a temperature of 64℉. The duration of the performance was 5 minutes for an audience of 4, maybe 6.
The Fragment The man on the path of steady success should not think that he will enjoy the same luck for ever, for the god— if one should use the name ‘god’— seems generally to grow weary of supporting always the same men.
Mortal men’s prosperity is mortal; those who are arrogant and assure themselves of the future from the present get a test of their fortune through suffering.
Rhone-Poulenc, Inc., formerly manufactured pesticides containing arsenic at a plant at 1990 Bay Street . Zoecon Corp., which purchased this site in 1972, produces agricultural chemicals, but no contamination has thus far been traced to their operations. The other site at 2081 Bay Road was a chemicals processing plant called Romic Environmental Technologies Corp. The 12.6-acre site where the plant stood was used for recycling toxic waste, from companies such as Hewlett-Packard, as early as 1956. The facility was closed in 2007 after a series of environmental and safety violations.a
Monitoring wells in this area are contaminated with arsenic and metals such as lead, cadmium, mercury, and selenium. Approximately 58,000 people depend on wells within three miles of the site as a source of drinking water.
RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then, try trusting it for awhile.
RULE TWO: General duties of a student — pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.
RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher — pull everything out of your students.
RULE FOUR: Consider everything an experiment.
RULE FIVE: Be self-disciplined — this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
RULE SIX: Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.
RULE SEVEN: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.
RULE EIGHT: Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.
RULE NINE: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
RULE TEN: We’re breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.
HINTS: Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully, often. Save everything — it might come in handy later.
John Cage Ten Rules for Students and Teachers originates not from John Cage, but artist and teacherCorita Kent who created the list as part of a project for a class she taught in 1967-1968 at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles.
May 08, 2018 | Categories: Industries | Tags: Artists, Los Angeles | Comments Off on John Cage Ten Rules for Students and Teachers
