portraits – autoportraits – le projet

Children’s drawings have always fascinated me. ‘Autoportraits’ is a little project of Arte and TV5 Monde where children from all around the world paint how they see themselves. A simple but lovely idea in one minute time.

Image by Louviere and Vanessa.

In Blanchot’s “The Unavowable Community”, he said, there is an effort to separate the term of communism from the politic use of it, this term so wrongly used (and abused) in history. Communism comes from community and the idea that a man finds a meaning only when in touch with the community, whenever a man shares a common space with someone else. Sometimes this shared common will have to remain quiet, far from speeches or intellectualisations, to be fully preserved. Because once you start talking about it, you are simplifying the truth of it and stealing its real meaning.

Blanchot uses a beautiful example: the language of lovers, that is created in a silent complicity between two bodies who learn one from another without having to say much. And how whenever someone tries to translate this into verbal language it loses its beauty, it sterilises its meaning, turning something unique into something vague.

And so that’s why I love silence, because it can only contain truths. Words can translate our world but there’s a point where it reaches an end. Yet it’s not sad to meet these limits, because it’s only in this way that mistery will be safe.

[Arve Henriksen - myspace]

Photo project by iamaustin

My grandmother is saying goodbye. She’s as strong as all her family put together but she’s already 92 and thinks life’s counting down. So she’s trying to smile. And to give back to life all that she’s learnt and fight. Because, she says, there’s no need in taking all the wisdom to the grave.  So she’s becoming a real life activist. Among her 22 grandchildren and 15 grandgrand children, I’m one of her main targets, to spread her words on useless sadness and the benefits of optimism. So she touches my legs, in disguise, whenever I argue with my dad, or makes a fake smile to turn my blank face into something else. Sometimes she holds my hand and talks talks talks, while growing deaf. And so I get to like old people more than those of my age. It’s only that this sense of finiteness makes them more fragile and, at the same time, deeply alive.

Shirley MacLaine and her daughter by Allan Grant, 1959

sóc cursi sóc cursi sóc cursi sóc cursi sóc cursi sóc cursi sóc cursi sóc cursi sóc cursi sóc cursi sóc cursi sóc cursi sóc cursi sóc cursi sóc cursi sóc cursi sóc cursi sóc cursi sóc cursi sóc cursi sóc cursi sóc cursi sóc cursi sóc cursi sóc

Image by Ananda Serné.

Today I feel the presence of a few, some closer than others in reality but so dearing to me, in one way or another.

Thank You so much. There’s no need to say names, You already know it.

[Arborea - myspace]

Eroticism and claustrophia, hand in hand.

Suna No Onna, a film by Hiroshi Teshigahara (1964)

Image by Ananda Serné.

Life in Paris was a sweet and endless nothing, which I adored. It’s only that you can’t keep postponing. For that’s what I love to do. Procrastinating, and filling the gaps meanwhile. I said to myself I’d not write here anymore, but I may not be reliable, after all. Today I felt the urgency to come back, even if I can only write whenever I’m down. Greta once said: there’s something we maybe have in common: a certain pleasure of  “depression”. That sentence was quite devastating at the time, probably because it’s true. I find in sadness some beauty that I can’t tell. Meanwhile, Andrea recommended me to read Henri Laborit, so it all headed one direction. Accept. And yes, to escape is part of me, and it may not be the devil I always expected it to be.

“Quand il ne peut plus lutter contre le vent et la mer pour poursuivre sa route, il y a deux allures que peut encore prendre un voilier : la cape (le foc bordé à contre et la barre dessous) le soumet à la dérive du vent et de la mer, et la fuite devant la tempête en épaulant la lame sur l’arrière avec un minimum de toile. La fuite reste souvent, loin des côtes, la seule façon de sauver le bateau et son équipage. Elle permet aussi de découvrir des rivages inconnus qui surgiront à l’horizon des calmes retrouvés. Rivages inconnus qu’ignoreront toujours ceux qui ont la chance apparente de pouvoir suivre la route des cargos et des tankers, la route sans imprévu imposée par les compagnie de transport maritime. Vous connaissez sans doute un voilier nommé “ Désir ”.”

Henri Laborit/ Éloge de la Fuite.

Today I dived into John Cage’s world.

Without help of any explanation and too many misteries unsolved.

Dreams that money can buy, by Hans Richter and music by John Cage.

“My name is lisa kalvelage, i was born in nuremberg
and when the trials were held there 19 years ago
it seemed to me ridiculous to hold a nation all to blame
for the horrors that the world did undergo

a short while later when i applied to be a gi bride
an american councilor official questioned me
he refused my exit permit, said my answer did not show
that i learned my lesson about responsibility

then suddenly i was forced to start thinking on this theme
and later when i was permitted to immigrate
i must have been asked a 100 times where i was, what i did
in those years when hitler ruled our state

i said i was a child, or at most a teenager
but that only continued the questioning
they’d ask where were my parents, my father, my mother
and to this i could not answer a thing

a seed planted there in neurenberg ‘47
started to sprout and grow
gradually i understood what that verdict meant to me
when there are crimes that i can see and know

and now i also know what it is to be charged with mass guilt
once in a life time is enough for me
no i couldn’t take it for a second time
and that’s why i’m here today

the events of may 25th, the day of our protest
put a small balance weight on the other side
and hopefully some day my contribution to peace
will help just a bit to turn the tide

perhaps i can tell it to my children 6
and later on, their own children
and at least in the future they need not be silent
when they’re asked, where was your mother when

my name is lisa kalvelage
(i wonder, where was my mother then)”

Lyrics by Pete Seeger,
inspired on anti-Vietnam activist Lisa Kalvelage.

_______________________________________________

“Lisa Kalvelage was a German immigrant from Nuremberg who moved to the United States when she was 22, just after theSecond World War. Upon her arrival, she was repeatedly asked what her parents, friends, and teachers had done tostop the atrocities of the Nazi regime. The questioning had an effect on her: when she began to see atrocities beingcommitted again, this time during the Vietnam War, she took action. She and her friends engaged in civildisobedience to try to stop a shipment of napalm and to raise consciousness about the issue.” [Democracy Now]

Picture: Chadwick Tyler.

You always meet someone twice, he said. How beautiful to believe it may be true. Cos tonight I’ve missed you and you came to embrace me like the first time you did. Out of the blue, your strong body and your gentle hands. Tonight it wasn’t so, but I know if I saw you for a second time, oh, I’d cry, cry, cry. And I’d smile.

“The perception of beauty is a moral test”
Henry David Thoreau.

art by Leigh Wells.

Fellini’s Amarcord poster

Maybe the success on this explosive couple lied in the fact that neither Fellini nor Rota understood each other’s work. Strangely enough, Nino Rota would always fall asleep when watching Fellini’s movies and Fellini was a music analphabet to the extremes. But their results were and will always be the most astonishing musical moments in film history, as they managed to melt cinema and music like no-one ever did.

This afternoon, I saw little black spots in the sky. They were all over, flickering in black and white. Round, all round. Dancing, fading in and out.  As if old celluloid was being burnt.

Almost not-there bedroom folk-pop from a Japanese singer-songwriter who makes Vashti Bunyan sound like Lemmy. So fragile you would think you’ve dreamt it. [Sloow Tapes]

   Patrick Watson – The Great Escape

Hey child, things are looking down.
That’s okay, you don’t need to win anyways.
Don’t be afraid, just eat up all the gray
and it will fade all away.
Don’t let yourself fall down.

Picture by Chema Madoz.

Don’t pretend you are an example to follow when you earn your money by playing with it in the bourse and winning out of nothing, because I don’t buy your goodness. Nor I don’t buy your capitalism anymore. You can send a useless prince to the new world to make your business look even greater, for what? To pay him more money than ordinary people get in one full year. You’ll pay him in a month.

Great, then keep helping the poor. Keep going to the suburbs for visit, and remember to make sure that in the end you’ll be back to the top, where you belong [that is a must]. They will, indeed, thank you for your act of benevolence and good manners. That will keep you thinking you are doing good. Fine, but don’t glorify your human cause. Because I don’t buy it. I don’t buy your empty palace, I don’t buy your money, and I won’t buy your help.

PS. Keep being religious. Yes, but did you ever notice that Jesus was a revolutionary man? No, he would not buy your fierce capitalism at all: he would only despise it. How sad it is that history managed to make him fit the benefits of a few, like you. Those that make the rest believe that’s just natural laws.

Picture by April Gertler.

“Rosas danst Rosas is a prefiguration of the tensions that characterise Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s work, these being the contrast between rational structure and meaningful emotion, the dialectic between aggression and tenderness, the interaction between unison and counterpoint, and between uniformity and individuality.” /Kaaitheater.

Picture by Jon Edwards.

Yes! New Joose Keskitalo music came to my hands!

‘Death finnish folk’, someone else defined.

‘Tule Minun Luokseni’ is bitter, grotesque, ironic, cool, sweet. His voice can walk in opposite directions, but never lose its core.

Oh, how I love Finland, and the sound of their tongue.

Werckmeister Harmonies (Opening Sequence). Film by Béla Tarr.

The music in Bela Tarr’s movies turn the darkness and rudeness of its world into light and peace. A momentary light that will make it easier to cope with all the asphyxia that may come next.

Art by William Anastasi.

The angels in your palm
Sing gentle worried songs
The sweetness of our dreams
Like mountains made of steam.

When I was a kid, my mom used to tell me how she knew her angel was by her side. She believed it was her father, dead, watching out all the way from the skies. If there was ever one, my guardian angel went missing too long ago. The strength of my mom is not written in my palm.