Posts labeled Art
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"Coolness, then, is a part of character, and character objectifies proper custom. To the degree that we live generously and discreetly, exhibiting grace under pressure, our appearance and our acts gradually assume virtual royal power. As we become noble, fully realizing the spark of creative goodness God endowed us with... we find the confidence to cope with all kinds of situations. This is ashe. This is character. This is mystic coolness."
--Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philososphy (1983)
"The Yoruba assess everything aesthetically--from the taste and color of a yam to the qualities of a dye, to the dress and deportment of a woman or a man. An entry in one of the earliest dictionaries of their language, published in 1858, was amewa, literally "knower-of-beauty," "connoisseur," one who looks for the manifestation of pure artistry."
--Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (1983)
"No sharp dichotomy exists, but a kind of sacred-secular circular continuum.... There is very often a sacred quality surrounding the verbal rituals of the secular style, with all gathered around the rapper, listening attentively, looking idolizingly and lingering on his or her every word, mystically engrossed in the rap."
--Geneva Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America (1977)
"Dante in meditation"
"The Divina Commedia contains a large number of cryptograms which have never, so far as I know, been noticed.... A cryptogram, or hidden writing, is a deliberate arrangement of words, letters, numbers, or other signs, which is intended to conceal as well as express a meaning.... Among the cryptograms which I have discovered in the Divina Commedia are acrostics, telestics, interior sequences, anagrams, irregular letter clusters, string ciphers, and cabalistic spelling devices.
I am far from assuming that the cryptograms which I have discovered are all that Dante made.... The announcement that the Divina Commedia is teeming with cryptograms is likely, I am aware, to be met with incredulity."
--Walter Arensberg, The Cryptography of Dante (1921)
#drewdellingersluminouslibrary
Stories reflect the ecological nature of reality. Each story is an ecosystem, a galaxy of its own, a holographic microcosm that contains and mirrors the One Story that is the cosmos.
(Nod to Susan Griffin and Thomas Berry.)
"The attention of the audience is gained through a willingness of the performer to involve himself totally in the performance and to call for the audience to do so as strongly. This the artful talker does by 'dancing' his talk, by dramatizing himself and his argument in physical ways."
--Roger Abrahams
"Sgt. Pepper hit a nerve in popular culture as nothing before had.... 'For a brief while,' critic Langdon Winner famously wrote, 'the irreparably fragmented consciousness of the West was unified, at least in the minds of the young.'
This was seen -- and is still remembered -- as a call to community. In some ways, the Beatles had represented this ideal all along: Through them, we witnessed the cultural power that a pop group and its audience could create; with Sgt. Pepper, possibilities of all sorts that felt boundless. Rock & roll became collusive with the social and political disruptions of the 1960s."
--Mikal Gilmore,
Rolling Stone magazine,
The Beatles: The Ultimate Album-by-Album Guide
"A Day in the Life" exists in the space between unawareness and disenchantment -- the space that the times now moved in -- and it closes with the most famous moment in 1960s music: a single chord played by Lennon, McCartney, Ringo Starr, [George] Martin and Mal Evans across several pianos at once, reverberating on and on, like a possibility without resolution. It was the abyss at the end of the dream, the void that the dream had to somehow surmount. As that eventful chord lingered and then decayed, it bound up an entire culture in its mysteries, its implications, its sense of providence found and lost. In some ways, it was the most stirring moment that the culture would ever share, and the last gesture of genuine unity that we would ever hear from the Beatles."
--Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone magazine,
The Beatles: The Ultimate Album-By-Album Guide (2011)
#drewdellingersluminouslibrary
same moon
the same moon
that shone in the New
Mexico sky, shimmering
into silvery existence
in a tray of Ansel Adams' developer
the same moon that illuminated
the apples of Eden,
the same moon that shines upon my
lover in Bolinas
that inspired poet-monks
to drink and write
the same moon that rose for the goddesses and heroes
climbs the sky
above the bay
outside my door.
--Drew Dellinger
July 13, 2011
"All sorts of people can write a great song. It took Bob Dylan to rewrite our idea of what a great song can be."
--Jon Pareles
U.S. in a nutshell: People cheer when Carlos Santana speaks the truth through his guitar; people boo when he speaks the truth about racism.
"I write because of my fundamental faith in the transformative power of narrative; not in the notion that simply by telling stories one might come to transformative truths, but rather that in unearthing the silences of the past we are necessarily involved in understanding the forces by which those silences were created and are maintained."
--Jennifer Morgan,
in Why We Write: The Politics and Practice of Writing for Social Change
"It's like I was a fictional character in my own life until I became real to myself by putting it on the page."
--Wendy Merrill
"Archetypal metaphors seem to have a special rhetorical potency.... According to [Michael] Osborn, the primary sources of archetypal metaphors are derived from the fundamental human experience of water and the sea, light and darkness, the human body, war and peace, animals, the family, mountains, sexuality, and the relationships between above and below and forward and backward."
--John Louis Luciates & Celeste Michelle Condit
"You cannot tell people what to do, you can only tell them parables; and that is what art really is."
--W. H. Auden
Check out this amazing clip of Al Jarreau's cover of "Your Song." (The song starts at about 1:15.)
"Repetition is the fundamental phenomenon of poetic form... All the principles that have been or may be used to generate formal structure in poetry are describable in terms of the repetition of either a certain physical feature of language--as in rhyme and alliteration--or a relationship among such features--as in stress patterns and syllable counts."
--Barbara Herrnstein Smith
The Starry Night (1889) "First of all the twinkling stars vibrated, but remained motionless is space, then all the celestial globes were united into one series of movements....Firmament and planets both disappeared, but the mighty breath which gives life to all things and in which all is bound up remained."
--Vincent Van Gough
"The moment I feel that I don't have anything more to give musically, that's when I won't be found on this planet. I'm not sure I will live to be 28 years-old, but then again, so many beautiful things have happened to me in the last three years, the world owes me nothing."
--Jimi Hendrix
Drake, "Forever," featuring some guys, and Eminem who KILLS IT (starting at 4:54). There's a reason that Shady raps last on this song. Nice track.
What are some of your favorite songs of 2010?
"Those who restrain their passions do so because theirs are weak enough to be restrained."
--William Blake
"The Little Drummer Boy." The "me and my drum" breakdown at the end is phat!
Check the video.
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