fine art

Serving the Muse



The guitarist is back, open-
tuning outside my office door:
hallway work on her tremolos
& redundant vibrato-resonance
hammering on & pulling off
pieces of a whole song,
getting parts right.

Listening: practicing her work
program so that in performance
she’ll be swept away, lost in a
service project to the whole muse
& when the song is over, melody
lingers on a very fine art.

Sacred Cow Consideration (or what's a FAH! for?)

To Sustainability Club

“The senses interfere everywhere
and mix their own structure with
all they report of.” (R.W.E.)

Common Sense can’t cut it.
Common Sense covers up,
in denial, illusion: pandering
to itself.

Just describing. How could
Common Sense not validate
itself, verify & confirm its
common sensibilities: always
getting what it preys for in
some form or other—like it
or not?

Sealed-in & salved: our collective
Directional Navigational Algorithms,
what we could call solipsism and
narcissistic if common sense
didn’t object. Deny.

Who’s a solipsist?
Raise your hand.
Narcissist?
We’ll talk.

Confessions of
an EngMajor:

Gong Show of My Self,
Leaves of Clanging Brass

How Hard & Social Science majors
talk about these things: that’s a course
of another color. This is FINE ARTS
& ah! Humanities Kind of Talk.

Diversity. Turn up our differences and
Put Us in Play.
Other wise we’re all simply Courses:
Aims & Objectives & Outcome
Assessments

We rightly accuse
the critic who
destroys too
many illusions.

Society does not
love its un-maskers.
(R.W.Emerson: EngMajor)

Sustain Ability


The challenge is to find decent description
without disturbing too much the sensibilities
of The Common Sense. Have to build an
Environment for it: frame-work & context—
a shared attitude willing willfully to suspend
common sense belief and disbelief so that
Sustainability Issues don’t merely sustain
our seductive un-sustainable sustainables so
seemingly sustain-able they got us into the
sustainability pickle in the first place.

In public I salute sustainability,
admire Al Gore, support the local
food initiative, view The Dark
Knight as tragic tribute to one of
our most promising actors, prefer
Obama to John McPain—though
I understand his arthritis and
appreciate his heroism.

In private (“idios”): always besieged
by pressing personal issues not even
close to greening or polar bears, off-
shore drilling, plug-in automobiles,
Virgin flights to outer space, runs on
banks, Freddie & Fannie, universal
health care, terrorism, axes of evil, 4
dollar gas, stay-cations, earthquakes
and fire in California, on-line degree
programs…the pour I have with
me always.

Beyond me, I say.
IT’s beyond me.
Does this make me a bad person?

My eyes & ears occlude truth-of-the-
whole, my terms of desire, my good
& evil, my likes & dislikes, my
privileging & under privileging,
discrimination & explanation,
reasons why, interpretations,
escape-goating: all block,
pre-vene, prevent & seal
me in my cave, culture,
convention, market
place, theater &
I am powerless
to prevent it:
addicted
to me.

If you accuse me of this,
I’ll deny. Cover. Pander.
Makes good common sense:

Save the Appearances.

To sustain as I am sustained.

Fine Art: to unsustain the sustainabilites

Teach us how to think
how to think.

It’s got to be as “ cool” as cocaine.
Deadly rather than dead and
deadening. Powder over
groomed slopes.
X-treme.

Does global warning wake me in
the middle of the night? Sustain
ability? Maybe. Mountain slope
ordinances, plastic bags and
trans-fats: sure, in the day time
when I’ve got my suit on, properly
appalled. Sunday school all around
and gold stars for appropriate
shared concerns.

An enemy is as good as a “christ.”
Does grad-school prepare me
to kill the Buddha on the
road, if I meet him?

To unsustain my
sustainablities?


xxxooo, Sam.

Sustainable Anxiety

Dear Colleagues,

Anxiety faces new classes like
Jone’s Mt. katy-dids: cranking
all night short circuiting the
manic mockingbird braying
unceasingly since May.

Irrational, of course: my fears.
Beyond reason; primordial.
Viscerally: millions of small
legs rub against each other
fiddle-de-de nd no cracking
morning yawns breaking
the tension.

A class full of students
stunned stupid, yearning
to study what I got to give,
missives impossible—
liberal art of language
and fiction.

All that already knowing
experience, wit, savvy,
juggling calculus & bio.
art & women’s studies,
physics & Appalachian
culture, philosophy &
the psychology of creativity:
acting in plays, pursuing
piano, statistics & environ-
mental economics knowing
much more than I do &
young—negotiating relation
ships: status & strokes &
ah! sustainability.

I’m boss.
Sustain THAT!

They do what I say.
Come to class. Listen (obey).
Some take notes. Prepare them
selves to identify random quotes
from various texts & tell the
textual significance of
parts to wholes.

They will remember titles
and characters and themes
related to ah, humania:
its fine arts.

And adopt the terms of
linguistics & literary
criticism so as to be
able to talk like an
Egyptian.

“Privilege” for example: to prefer
one side of a binary pair.
Good over Evil, say
Order over Random.

Just like it always was.

I throw a black plastic sheet over
them so to speak: holes in it allow
only talk-about-literature-&-language
going on and nothing about all that
other stuff they study from them
other COURSES.

I got this idea walking thru
the garden: our local food
source. A strawberry patch
covers up and denies any
thing but strawberries.
NBS: other wise a weedy
riot of uncontrolled growth
and random noise.

Thank god for the grade-gun
& its ex-officio institutional
authority. Hard balls & mallets
croquet. Totalitarian. Benevolent.
Enlightened: this spot!

My personality?
Enthusiasm,
Charisma,
Sparking wit &
flaming intelligence?
Vox de Auctoritas.
Would that attract them
otherwise like moths to a
back porch light jamming
old-timy fiddle tunes with
an intellective gleam: the
love of yearning & a
Swannanoa gathering?

Lasso Fair.

I have to compete against
the common rigor. This
makes me anxious once
katy-dids start cranking,
Bele Chere, & the end of
another summer.

Sustainable?

Sam

Dear Sam: Noooo!

Dear Sam,

So my first response is NO! Making a play "about sustainability" is not a productive way to make good art. I'm not even sure it's a way to make "inert" art. If a play is a story, or a collection of visual and auditory impressions, or a collective ritual or event of some kind, then pick-a-theme-and-develop-it sure ain't the way to go. I guess Brecht got away with it to a degree, with play-as-demonstration. But don't most writers/composers/artist (Brecht included) start with a quick image, moment, glimpse of memory, sequence of notes, color or line, and begin to play with it? Art as a process of painting yourself into a corner and then figuring a way out? (Or just busting out.) Getting into trouble? Then you guys come along and tell us what it's about.

But I know that's not really what you're talking about. And I think the distinction between "inert" and "ert" art is valuable--though, if we're categorizing, then your point that "in-ert" literally means "un-art" says to me that "inert" art is the opposite of art, which is never comfortable, which is always transgressive in some way--but I guess that's my bias showing.

Back to sustainability:

how to distinguish sustainability
that is unsustainable from unsustainable
unsustainability that is unsustainable

(sounds like a line from Rosencranz & Guildenstern Are Dead--or Donald Rumsfeld)

There's definitely a play or dance or something in that question. So maybe I'm wrong, and you can go from an idea to a piece of art (you can do anything, for crying out loud--no rules). But it has to spark an image. Then you can begin. Then you've got a place to jump away from. As long as the final piece doesn't have to be consistent or obvious or have one clear point of view ("transparent" in the most boring sense). As long as it doesn't become propaganda (inert). As long as I can be Jane Goodall and the monky, as you say.

Got me thinking. Damn you.

Graham

Sustain Ability: A Fine Art

Dear Graham,

If you were to write a play on
Sustainability—so as to turn
UP the sustainability concern: get
people thinking and talking about
sustainability: dramatize (the play’s
the thing) sustainability across the
curriculum….

How would you proceed?

Is this a stupid question?
Or smart?
Academic?

Does IT work this way in Fine Arts:
going from a popular theme or topic
to a production? Like having a clear
thesis: saying what your going to say,
saying it and then saying what you said
as we like it in Humanities.

Art Art Art Art Art Art Art

* inert art on the one hand
* ert art on the other hand.

Is this distinction clear? Worth
polarizing so as to relate?

Inert art is “symbolical” in the original
sense: to throw IT together, get IT together,
reinforcing the ethos & demonstrating the
traditions.

Inertia (literally: un-art) sustainability as we
know it inside traditions and systems and
status quotidian.System homeostatic
self-correcting cruise control kind
of art. Ouch, ooo, damn--whenever
a tolerance is crossed.

Ert art is “dia-bolical” in the original
sense: to throw IT across and apart—
reconfiguring recalibration of tolerances,
demoralization of course (ooo myyy
gawd) and any system will resist Ert Art
like anything, naturally. You can’t blame
anyone for putting up a defense..

The question: how to distinguish sustainability
that is unsustainable from unsustainable
unsustainability that is unsustainable:
while working inside the inert
naturally self-preserving
convention? Where is
the ground for
leverage?

I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to frame
this question but it swallows my own tail
& I feel like Epimenides trying to disconnect
from Crete and make wise loving
remarks, too.

It calls for a very fine artist.

But what I’m asking: how do you DO this?
Be a Cretan and Not a Cretan Too? Like
being a monkey and a Jane Goodall TOO.
Bite the very hand that feeds you and
have them love you too? Good Dog!
Good Dog!

This is Fine Art territory. You can do it better.
You guys north of the gazebo have
responsibilities we can’t imagine
south of the border.

Can we at least talk about IT?
(IT, I said: do I have to keep
spelling IT out?)

Or is IT one of those deals where
talking about it just confuses
the issue? Stirrs IT all up.

xxxooo, Sam—Humanist among
the Jensensualists

2 B r n't 2 B a Fine Arts Major

I feel conflicted:

I must be doing something wrong.
Or: I must be doing something right.
The feeling’s the same on the edge.

To be doing something right
entails neglect if not the
doing-something-else-wrong
in some other parallax just as
in the same way paying
efficient attention generates
massive amounts of attention
deficit where attention might
rightly be paid. No no-doubt.
Doubt!

Attention Deficient?
But of course: how
else focus, efficient
for awhile?

I feel conflicted:

Is it because I am doing something
wrong or because I’m doing some
thing right? Feeling’s the same
either way. .

A phenomenologism of a former
student, artist & piano player again
and again recorded in class: I feel
conflicted she would observe, caught
in some double bind of on-the-one-
hand and on-the-other.

She wasn’t complaining: merely
acknowledging the agon (y): as a
fine arts major.

Righting/Wronging .
Writhing /Wrangling:
life along the edge:
what Melville
calls “wrestling with the angel Art.

I feel conflicted:
I must be doing it right/wrong—
where it was right, now wrong;
where wrong: now right, and
so it goes and goes. Right.
Wrong.

Any fine artist or athlete will find
this description candid and clear.

“I feel conflicted!”

Exactly.

To the Howard Cosells: a seeming
betrayal of levels, sacrificing rock
for the hard pace and who can say
if that’s right or if that’s wrong?

These distinctions aren’t transparent
and the feeling of conflict makes
perfectly good sense if the rush
to determine, blame-explain,
lay down reasons why,
scapegoat because &
affect is deferred—
suspended..

Put off as long as possible.

Power & Convention

Dear Graham,

The 2 cultures:

C.P. Snow called them Science
and Humanities and claimed the
inability to communicate between
the 2 hindered world affairs in 1959.

I call them Tidy & Muddle, the
cultures of Clarity & Confusion,
Keep it Nice & Turnup Controversy.
Peace by Any Means & No Way...

...polarizing the characterization so
as to consider relationship between
Symbolism (the habit of throwing
IT together) & Diabolicism (the
need to throw it across: apart.):
the 2 cultures.
.
Linear & Constellational.
Sequential & Simultaneous.
Digital & Analogue.
Discontinuity & Continummmm.
Individual Genius & Collaborative.
Alma Matrix (no country for old
men) & Byzantium—allo-variants
on the same theme: minimal
contrastive pairs.

Jerry Godard, the dean who succeeded
Henry Jensen told me, “look, every good
institution I know has been split in half
by polarizing differences” (me: whining
over the way work & academics here
were tripping over each other).

Or as Blake says, & I quote a lot:

Without Contraries
is no Progress

Fundamental to dialectic: Loving the enemy
—don’t be banishing opposition to cellar
or attic.
@@@@

Thinking about conventions (transparent
& opaque) and how they shape action within
and how some are obviously arbitrary &
artificial like fashion & style and I conform
or rebel; and some are sanctioned so that even
me knowing they are conventional, I can’t
ignore without risk.

And then the ones that COUNT: conventions
that are hidden, opaque—transparent like glass
ceilings: invisible worms that fly thru the night:
sphinx-like: I don't even know I'm enthralled—
fascinated, stunned stupid convinced I’m smart.

Is Convention-Consideration
(structure-savvy: knowing
sensitivity to what shapes
context and environment),
the domain of Fine Arts? Or Humanities?
Social Sciences? Hard?

A meta-disciplinary issue?

To twiddle and tweak with Convention necessarily
runs against business-as-usual exposing the invisible
transparency of the very conventions we are working
out our projects in fear & trembling. An antagonism:
mixing convention-questioning with convention-compliance!

Is this concern Fine Arts Territory? Something like
building an ice cream parlor in hell with all due respect
for hot and cold. I call it "the liberal art."

@@@@@

Ron B___ wonders about “power” and analogies
between putting on a play and playing/working
in institutions. He suggests power might run neither
top-down nor bottom-up but both and thru some
expanding middle with no center.

Looking for an image that does justice:
puts IT in play—power & convention:
their difference and their relationship.

Power as a reservoir of possibilities (on the
upper hand)— potent potential: potentate-like

Power as kinetic flow and impact, dam busted,
sweeping down the valley carrying off chicken
coops, dogs, old cars….a powerful impotence:
once the dam breaks it can’t flow nowhere but
down.

Ex Officio Power, the power of organizational
chains of command and flow chart: office power.

Vox de Auctoritas Power: voice of genuine
authority independent of officiousness: power
of attraction and mimetic desire. Hark! Who
wouldn’t obey voluntarily?

Power of the “pen”—supposedly powerful
but considerably disseminated these days of
universal media saturation, youtube, cell
phonics and everyone a walking library
and commentator. .

Enviornmentalism

2 cultures:

Calm on the one hand
Turmoil on the other hand.

2 other cultures:

Calm OR Turmoil on the one hand
Calm AND Turmoil on the other hand

What are the environmental differences
in value-sets? The values of calm? The
values of turmoil? The values of their
exclusion? The values of their relationship
& how they just get along or do not?

Science on the one hand
(hard & soft)
Humanities on the other hand
(howard cosells & the muhammad alis):

What are the differences & the relationships
in the Power & Convention differences &
relationships in these cultures? And our
cross cultural communications: the
clear-to-confused ratios?

Are these smart or stupid questions?
What's the difference? The
relationship? IT just goes
on & on & on.

xxxooo, Sam

Can a Fish Conceive of WET?

Can a Fish Conceive of WET?

He labeled performances "opaque" when
the spectator had difficulty seeing beyond
the surface/convention/form, or perhaps
when the piece was about the
surface/convention/form.

Anyway, obviously I'm drawn toward the opaque.
Which is what you keep drawings us toward in
these conversations, right?

Dear G____.

Etymologically INERT literally means not
art. Un-art, say, which supports the inertia
and the always necessary status quo.

ERT, on the other hand (art), if we’re “pure”
in our distinction (let’s be academic for a
moment) would feel like holy hell, apocalypse
now, big bad wolf, the stranger, joker,
Kansas tornado from inside the
inert convention.

I like setting up the opposition as polarized
extremes—hostile and incommensurate, so
THEN a consideration of relationship and
dialectical synthesis might emerge.

I’m a sucker for conversation—I admit it,
though the more I push for it, the more
it blows away.. Chasing a balloon..

Conversation is normally considered
instrumental: trade and exchange and
blow-it-off expression too.

But conversation-for-conversation’s sake is
the liberal art (I use that designation loosely,
to stand for all that is good-for-good’s sake in
the whirl): It’s DIFFERENT than conversation
for getRdone.

Different in kind, different in values.…

For one thing: converse-action ( I call it that,
hoping it may gain status close to all the other
action we salute around here: work-action,
service-action….) generates what Lou Weber
and the biologists call emerging phenomena.

Stuff rises up as a result of the back & forth
which doesn’t emerge when the conversation is
essentially instrumental.

The possibility of News out of Noise.

(Steven Pinker says every utterance has 2 agendae:
the obviously utilitarian one & the hidden one which
he calls Negotiating Relationship. That second
agenda can barely be talked about—seeing as the
first pretty much eclipses it, non-transparently
transparent.)

Our (X) fix-it and housekeeping duties, taking
care of this business and (Z) relationship:
strokes and status, fitting in and not so much—an
embarrassment: (Y) the gap and cognitive/affective
dissonance between these two levels: surface and
deep ecologic, say.

How to do justice to all 3—that triad? Well, I call that
the “liberal art”—but I need help, that’s for sure. What
I’m talking about always eclipses what I’m talking about:

IT’s kind of like the forest and trees conundrum:
General Truth and the Devils in the Details.
My Attention Efficiency at the cost a
of My Attention Deficit—
like that.

It takes a fine artist who can negotiate transparent
transparency as well as non-transparent transparency
and, of course, transparent non-transparency &
non-transparent non-transparency, and not many
have the stomach for it.

Usually a sustained converse-action serves to work out
all the kinks & level jumps so that the players (assuming
they are agree-able) end on the same page as it were—
mix of metaforce notwithstanding and actually
necessary to the venture.

xxxooo, Sam

Transparent/Opaque

Sam,

Just a quick thought: Your twistings and turnings around the idea of transparent conventions remind me of a seminar I took hundreds of years ago when I was in grad school from Bernard Beckerman about his ideas of performance theory. He labeled performances "transparent" when the meanings were clear--which I take to mean they were, in your terms (I think), "inert". Situated comfortably within their conventions, and so the form, or at least the theatrical convention, could be safely ignored (fish unaware of "liquid"?). He labeled performances "opaque" when the spectator had difficulty seeing beyond the surface/convention/form, or perhaps when the piece was about the surface/convention/form. About the liquid, I guess (I'm sure I'm getting Beckerman all wrong). Anyway, obviously I'm drawn toward the opaque. Which is what you keep drawings us toward in these conversations, right?

Graham

Hidden Representations & Transparencies

Dear Graham,

The conventionality I would presumptuously reveal
(Emperor's Bare Butts where the conspiracy for cover-
up is systemic & "moralizing" and me, so proud) probably
isn't the conventionality I'm submerged in like Joe Fish
all wet thinking he can talk about fluid drive.

And I guess the same with Sustainability: what I want
to sustain probably is not the sustainability-that-needs-
sustaining. This is a bind I like to consider but can't escape. It
seems somehow worthwhile to wallow in it. Otherwise:
I’m in-denial, illusion, and pandering, as Frank K.
points out.

Those actors I mentioned: all great actors. Looking backward
we see a conventionality (arbitrary, artificialness) that we
couldn't see at the time. Is that fair to say?

I don't know about the power to change.
What I can change probably isn't what
I most need to change.

This is the interesting thing about Convention
—a matrix, a whelm: Bacon describes them as
“idols of the mind”: Cave, Tribe, Marketplace,
Theatre—the four varieties of Conventions-We-
Don’t-Feel-as-Conventions and so—don’t know
the nature of our conventionality. Closet.

It always feels like we’re getting real, keeping it
real: does it ever feel like an illusion—no matter
how we talk?

Last year I tried to draw a distinction between inert art and
ert art: art that fits into the convention, and art that doesn't;
and got into trouble with my language--proving my point,
I guess, or probably not: not sufficiently transparent.

The possibility of discerning and relating INERTIA and
ERTIA without demonizing one or the other but doing
justice to both: like building ice cream parlors in hell &
everyone happy about the necessary agony generated--
that would be a shared frame-of-mind worth sustaining,
if ever achieved.

Re TRANSPARENCY.

IDOL: A transparent representation is NOT transparent
because it IS transparent and therefore NOT.

ICON: a non-transparent representation IS transparent
because it is NOT and therefore IS.

You need a fine artist to do justice to this without
tripping over contradiction, paradox and
limitations of double-edged language.

If I can SEE the transparency of a convention,
than it’s not transparent because it is. On the other
hand: if I can’t see it, then it’s transparent, damnit,
because I’m not aware of it.

Briar patch. Got to be fool or fine artist to delight in
this cat scratch fever: levels of logical hierarchy &
language that has to bend over backward to indicate
the differences if not the relationships.

No country for Old Composition Teachers.

conventionally yours....

Dear Sam,

Seems to me that part of the point of good theatre/good art (the kind I like anyway) is to reveal the conventionality of the conventions we are locked within. I guess that makes them "transparent"/ That's why I like art that focuses on the outside, the form. Formalism, I suppose. Once we start seeing the artificiality, the constructed-ness of our behavior/institutions/societies, we gain the power to change them, right? What Brecht was saying & stealing: defamiliarization; alienation.

So, right: We're all inside the convention. Only I'm not so sure about the really good actors. Some of those folks you mention were, I think, superbly aware of their falseness. It did occur to them. They consciously created their image/style/convention and then made us believe it because it rang true. For me, some of that stuff still rings true, even outside the historical context. Of course, I guess you'd say "ringing true" might be an indication of how just far inside the convention one is. But real art is inside/outside, right? Conscious & unconscious at the same time.

Did I tell you this already? I watched part of a ridiculously "violent" Charles Bronson movie the other night, then watched a bit of "Singing in the Rain" (including the title number). They were both fabulously conventional and contrived. Terrifically entertaining as pure form (I think I prefered Bronson).

My student Ben Pounds pointed out awhile back the interesting fact that we (some of us?) related more completely to cartoon characters than "realistic" characters.

All connected, right?

And where does that stupid New Yorker cover fit into all this?

Graham

Hidden Conventions (non) Transparent Representations

Hidden Conventions
[(non)-transparent representations]



Dear Graham,

When film actors in 40’s & 50’s
even early 60’s strut their stuff
and smoke cigarettes, talk loud
and fast, staccato-clipped, wear
jerky hats: they don’t know any
better, true?

That’s what it is to act in those days.
Loud. Unsubtle. As if still on a stage
and have to swell a scene, get it out,
out: tableaux across the theater.

Fire! Fire!

It doesn’t occur to them but does
to us looking later: how artificial.
Fee. Fie. Faux. Because they are
inside the convention.
That’s how it’s
done.

Jimmy Stewart
Ava Gardner
Humphrey Bogart
Lana Turner
not with standing.
Paul Newman & Lizabeth
Taylor, Nim Novak and Frank Sinatra.

Stagy. Dramatic. Fake.

They couldn’t think they are.
Confirmed. Validated. Reinforced.
Hermetically sealed into the way-it’s-done,
representing reality, but who thinks of it as
mere representation? Arbitrary. Artificial. A
shared way to skin a cat and if it’s skun some
other way: well, who do they think they are
anyway!

It would take something like an immaculate
conception to penetrate the rhino-hide of
how-it’s-done on stage so as to see it as
merely convention—convenient.

How-conventional-I-am
busting thru to signal me
as arbitrary: artificial
Holy smokes: an
apocalypse!

It only looks silly now looking backward
like silent moves and model Ts: histrionic
body language, clown-like: meat puppets
of the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s and—really:
60’s and 70’s, too. Bonnie & Clyde
excepted.

Dated. Old fashioned.
Not at all like the realism
of anorectic binge&purge
bulimic cutting hyper attention-
deficient restless legs jogging viagra
pumping bottle-water-carrying cosmetic
esteem salvaging health addiction narcosis
we got now to do justice to how-it-is: the
conventions of in our time, sound & fury polite
policed theatrical correctness: few smoke any
more on screen and if theyvdo it affects the ratings.
.

Collaborative rehearsal as model

Ron & Sam--

Great exchange (last couple of posts). Knee-jerk response: seems like to pressure to jump right in with a hierarchical (whoa, my spelling!) approach is fear of messiness. "Get er done" in Sam-speak. Time's a wastin. For instance, my tendency to engage in long, rambling conversations when I know I should be creating an agenda and sticking to it. Limited amount of time (in a meeting, in a rehearsal) to Get Things Done. That's a fact, right?

So I guess I'm wondering, what does the "middle spreading outwards" idea look like in action. I can really see what you mean in a rehearsal setting more than in, say, a discussion of what FAH should be or do.

But a mess is usually what we need. Maybe what's missing is the confidence that out of the mess something will cohere without it being forced. It's pretty scary, whether you're facing an opening night or an institutional problem, to trust that structure will emerge out of chaos, signal out of noise.

Ron, seems to me that Adrianne Mnouchkine and her Theatre de Soleil work in the way you're describing--know about her process?

Gotta run,

Graham

Theater! Theater!

I wonder now if approaches that create innovation and
community in the creative space of a rehearsal can be
applied in areas that are more oriented toward
management and evaluation....?

In other words, is there room for open creativity in
a shared administration? Could this be way for the
"meaning" of arts & humanities endeavors to emerge?

Not top-down or bottom-up, but from the middle
outward, and the center is always shifting...

Dear Ron,

You’ll forgive me if I jump to a response. Conversation is
the model here— back and forth. Ping and then Pong.

Bell Letters, too—as opposed to lunchroom converse
(bottom-up) and publication/convention (top-down?).
This right here now is the media that captures the
“middle outward, and the center always shifting.”

Do you know the letters between James Hillman and
Michael Ventura (We’ve Had a Hundred Years of
Psychotherapy and the World is Getting Worse)?
Beautiful example of the kind of dynamic information
generated through informal, conversational exchange of
letters. And that was before e-mail.

Middle-Outward and the Center Always Shifting.

It seems to me the analogy between putting on a performance
and managing an institution for product is appropriate & tight.
Always a power struggle going on. How it's channeled is what
makes performance. "Struggle” is a fair word—good and
descriptive.

AGON. Protagonist/Antagonist & without contraries is no
progress. Power is key, crucial: we don’t want it frozen up
or down—but something like In the Middle Outward and
the Center Always Shifting. Local Foodback Circuitry.

What would that mean in play?

“Governance.” “Regulation.” Thermostasis. Homeostasis.
The nature of auto-poetic self-corrective systems. Ways
to talk about this from different disciplines.

Here are two images:

Upside Down Flamingo Croquet on the one hand.
Hard Balls & Mallet Croquet on the other hand.

And then something of In the Middle Outward and The
Center Always Shifting: how to image that? The more
images and ways of talking about it, the better?. I presume.

What’s the difference, then, between putting on a PLAY
that generates Putting on an Environment That Generates
Individual Genius? and Putting on a PLAY that generates
Putting on an Environment That Generates Collaborative
Genius? How to characterize the In-the-Middle-Outward-
and-The-Center-Always-Shifting?

Maybe you’ll forgive me for shifting this potential conversation
from FAH! to The Committee of the Whole. That’s where all
the potential (if not kinetic) power lies—true? Great dammed,
reservoir: resource of all our possibilities, don’t you agree?

xxxooo, Sam

Analytic & Intuitive

I did a little exercise a while back. I had been noticing that the hierarchy of rehearsals oriented folks toward analytical conversations, more talking than doing, and more self-censored individual action than open-ended ensemble... Eventually this orientation becomes an obstacle that must itself be overcome, usually simply because of the pressure of performance...

So I thought how do I change this? Delay analysis and de-emphasize the hierarchy of director/lead actor/subordinate actors.

How to delay analysis? Make only very broad observations. Do not encourage discussion but do not inhibit it -- do not validate or invalidate anyone's words or actions. Do not assign roles. Do not intervene in anyone else's action while they are at work, but rather participate. Know the distinction between intervention and participation. Do not act on the expectation of what has happened before. Stay quiet.

Understand that you may reintroduce an analytical or heirarchical component at anytime and people will respond if they know it's not a power play -- so see how fruitful it is to delay it as long as possible. Don't "make" choices. Let choices adhere to the emerging endeavor as those choices re-emerge.

Got excellent "results." The group clarifies the goal as they go along, and I am part of the group, even though I'm sitting in the leader position. Just being in a different position is enough.

I wonder now if approaches that create innovation and community in the creative space of a rehearsal can be applied in areas that are more oriented toward management and evaluation....? In other words, is there room for open creativity in a shared administration? Could this be way for the "meaning" of arts & humanities endeavors to emerge?

Not top-down or bottom-up, but from the middle outward, and the center is always shifting...

Ice Cream in Hell

Ice Cream in Hell

Toward a Framework
for the Practice of Liberal Art &
Offspring & Symptoms: The Liberal Arts

Dear Graham,

Do you wonder how many people who hate
Political Correctness are politically correct
themselves—or love it and then ooops:
politically incorrect their own self,
damnit.

I’m thinking appreciatively of Rev. Jesse Jackson
these days: career built on PC and then hoist by
his own petard. Double whammy.

Momentary. No big deal. Says more about US
and our reservoir-dog Mexican stand-off mutual
blackmail “gotcha”-unavoidability always quibbling
over the contentious bottom-line: aHA now your
goose is cooked—then it says about Rev. Jackson.

Or you describe IT your way.

Describe Mode:

Damaged and damaging if I do and damaged
and damaging if I don’t, damnied, damned.
Or call it “vulnerable” if you’re politically correct.
Walking wounded. Any one not: throw the first
stone.

Don’t you love it? Come on admit it. Or NOT?
We can argue. Political Correctness. Can’t live
with it, can’t live without it—pervasive, permeate,
the amnion in which I swim—all soaking wet
thinking dry thoughts: Joe Fish with immaculate
theories of absolution.

Walk on Eggs (w.o.e.) or Walk on Water (w.o.w.)
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either
fire or fire.

I mix meta force: poetically incorrect. Do you have
a problem with that? It’s our Double Bind that I
would turn up and put in play.

Can’t quite put my finger on it: the beauty, irony,
pathos, horror, hilarity, hysteria of my human
condition. Can you? We could compare.
Is it Comic? Tragic? Some ratio of
the two? In the eyes of the beer
holder?

I have this summer adopted Dr. K’s triad:

in-denial
under illusion
pandering

his structure for considering how to talk about the nature
of our Energy Crisis. I think it works well descriptively.
I have scrubbed these words clean & pure and they
happily represent me and of course I project:
Samize the whirl. No doubt.

Lewis Hyde, in The Trickster Makes the
World, offers a variant:


Hunger
Lying
Thieving

Ought to be a third triad out there somewhere.
Political Correctness, of course, denies this fundamental
dynamic structure—whatever token terms manifest and
embody it; the whole point of P.C. is to cover our
Emperor Butt in illusion & pander like a sonofagun.

Right there is where the psychic toxic waste clogs up
the bozone level and we got globule warming like
anything. Frank’s right.

But IT needs Fine Arts treatment. Otherwise it’s
like throwing rice at a rhino—that and surgeon
general warnings. Or what’s a college for?

ah humanities! where's our fine artists
when we need them? The world
awaits its lovers.

Frame Discourse

Frame Discourse

Dear Graham,

Talk aimed at constructing a context, an
environment really, that shapes the play &
plays the shape of converse-action the way
a tennis court, net, lines & conventions bracket
possible moves & occlude those that might
could occur but won’t because they wouldn’t
be “in-game.”

Frame Discourse: discourse about what kinds
of ENVIRONMENT we might want to generate
—and how? Matrices for the various kinds of
lusory-to-illusory ratios we might want to sustain.

We both know the play’s the thing.

But I can’t force the issue: make any
one Put IT in Play damnit



BE A LIBERAL ARTIST!

It takes an certain kind of environment
to grow players.

“TOPIC” initially meant a place or common place for
conversation and not just the course subject matter it
now means. A TOPIC about topics: environmental
studies talking about environments for mental studies:
what kinds grow individual genius, say; and what kinds
grow collaborative genius, and what kinds grow a
relationship between the 2: 3 different contexts,
3 different games?

Questions like these = Frame Discourse.
Contextual Harassmental Studies:
a level jump above the Taking Care of
Business-as-Usual: window screens in Jensen,
student-to-classroom course ratios, discipline-
specific pedagogical concerns, study skill
remedial programs to straighten-out the odd
ball bunch of learning disabled and variously
dysfunctionally diagnosed: how to take notes,
manage time and make normal students out
of them. De-marginalize.

To Educate
To Inform
To Edify

3 different environments maybe all sub-ordinate to
a larger environment: or call it 3 different contexts;
I’d call it 3 different games—as different as ping
pong, rugby, and theater.

Talk Like This = Frame Discourse.
Meta-Pedagogical

To Put IT in Play: PIIP. What do you mean Put it in
Play, Sam?—all the time saying it for crying out loud:
redundant, monotone, Jonny One Note— boring, really,
I don’t get it, students have told me.

In Play: Desporting life! Mutate crying out loud;
risky business like any x-treme sport I don’t
know but I’ve been told…

Right there: you saying
What?
What the? =
putting it in play.
Questioning.
Questioning authority.
Questioning everything.
You’ve seen the bumper stickers.
Don’t be postponing joy. It’s all up for
grabs, or what’s a college for? School Mode.

Look around round round: all the lonely people where
do we all come from? Walk on Eggs or Walk on Water:
Got to choose our Mission Impossible & environmental
studies.

Who then devised the torment?
Love.
Love is the unfamiliar name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power can not remove
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire. (T.S.E)

You can improve my terms & images, Graham.
Fine Arts do it better! I believe it. A different
environment all together from Humanistic Studies.
Could we turn it way up? The difference? Put it
in Play? See what there is to see just by fooling with
it?

It, I said.

Jensen & the Howard Cosells

Power (potential as opposed to kinetic)

POWER

Dear Graham,

I address and re-address these missives
impossible to you as my new boss, or meta-
boss really—Professor Mycoff, my immediate
superior.

And in the hierarchy of logical and organizational
levels, there’s also Dr. Howard (meta-meta boss)
and Dean Garrett (meta-meta-meta boss) and
finally, at least in this circum-scribed system,
BOSS of Boss of bosses of boss: President Pfeiffer.

Political Ex-officio authority:
chain of command and responsibility.

In the middle ages these levels had their
counter-part or were inspired, say, by
spiritual organization (Psyche) and the
natural need by naming to limit infinite
regress: Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones
of the first realm, Dominions, Virtues, and
Powers, of the second, and then Principalities,
Archangels, and Angels in the third: A TRIAD
of triads of angelic (messenger: news bearing)
responsibility.

Has to be a name, tag, designation for
these essential psychic and political
differentiations other wise all we
have is a flat-line flatlander sense
of organization and people saying
“IT’s all RELATIVE, SAM” meaning
quit being so picky ( rather than it’s all
related. )

Nothings change but titles and
connotations & IT’s still necessarily
hierarchical. I have women’s studies
students in class who object to the
word HIERARCHY (and hegemony)
—but they’re just being political and
not academic.

Without Levels is No Organization:
psychological or political—and the
collapse, conflation, and confusion
of organizational levels (psychological
or political) is a form of heat-death,
& entropy: an equilibrium no body loves..

So I find it appropriate to address you
with my sub-ordinate issues, with apologies
to Dr. Mycoff whose level of authority I confess
I am violating—but now, as no time in the passed:
a hierarchical conversation is no longer
necessarily privy but available to the
WHOLE institution.




And this is a difference that makes a difference.
Courses without Borders; Frontiers Yet Unknown.
Hierarchical & Horizontal incommensurate values
and can they Just Get Along? The medium is the
message.

Power

Thanks to the enabling power of David Harper,
J.T. Wagner and the student Computer Crew—the
proper dialectical antithesis and counter to hierarchical
authority is simultaneously present and accessible for
the first time in our evolution-of-the mass of men
leading lives of quiet desperation..

VOICE. We live in a community of the whole, a
collaborative genius more and less explicit, articulate
and manifest than at any earlier point in time —eternal,
really: one can access any one else 24/7/365 regardless
of when & where some mindful part has leaned in to let
fingers meet the keyboard and tappety tap tap-out mind
onto screen & page: clickety click—I can hear it in the
computer lab surrounded by MFA students: the sound
of constellational all-at-once-ness reduced to the digital
logical linear, sequential and thesis driven, intentionality
of time/space use & abuse & particulate purpose.

Parts to WHOLE relationship: a sacramentality.

I’m talking here! Space and time, where & when
don’t make no never mind & momma don’t like no
banjo picking going on round here but we can play
our banjos any old time plink and plunk etc.& it’s
OUT THERE, you got a problem with that? Deal
with it. The media is the Message—not the
message.
.
Power: a “posse” - possibility.
Potential. Potency. Every one:
a Potentate: constellations of
spiral nebulae & solar system
permeate one’s noggin and we
got to be reducing it to a line
of discourse: a kinetic impotence:
just pit it out in poppa’s hand
as Twain told Henry James.

It’s a rip-off, of course, and a violation of the whole and so
no wonder the anxiety that surrounds our transactions.
Never doing social justice & it helps to admit it: no
in denial cover up illusion and pandering necessary
these days.

Ah, humanities. Fine Artists do it so much better.

xxxooo, Sam

Fiddling While Rome Yearns

This here back&forth we’ve been
having this summer, Graham:
that’s IT, damnit. Somewhat
sustainable converse-action:
on going prerequisite to
ah, humanities and
fine art

Admit it: you love it—I bet you
five dollars: declaring, exposing,
claiming, decrying, emphasizing,
posing, surmising, guessing—all
for the sake of argument, of
what’s a college for?

To cry Theater! Theater
in a crowded fire!

Dear Graham,

This kind of cerebral and affective back&forth,
rope pull, 3-legged race & trivial pursuit: fooling
around with ideas, wonder, possibility = a certain
amount of un-postponed joy, surely, among the
academically inclined when they aren’t caught
up in work-program, service-project obligation
and can indulge the guess & mess that mothers
invention (how else?).

But of course there’s no guarantee except for
muddle —we can count on muddle—and if tidy
emerges, well. didn’t we assist in the emergency?
Joyful! Joyful! Beep if you love School Mode!

Anyway, I meant to be saying:

This kind of academic tom-foolery you & I
have been indulging this summer of leisure
time & slow recreation does not advance the
understanding of German immigration in the
19^th century nor the implications of Islamic
ghetto populations in 18^th. c Europe; shines no
light on magical realism or cognitive models
in linguistic study, stochastic process: it’s
cultivation of noise; nor the understanding
of string theories I’ll be darned if I can wrap
my mind around that…

Nor does it advance our concern with bugs and
screens and such like samples of ongoing house-
keeping (eco-logic): the scheduling of transition
sessions and service dates and stuff like that: eco-
concerns always with us, Mazlovian bottom-line
neediness, necessary & unceasing joy postponers
—let me just take care of business first: &
THEN joy to the whirl, you’ll see. .

Nor does it address the fall of banks & long lines
of people determined to get theirs, fires, floods,
draught and tornado damage, the rising cost of
gas & everything else—our kalinowskian in-
denial illusory pandering in the face of environ-
mental systemic paradigm shifts, sustainability
adjustments and environmental recalibrations
help help this guy is falling, plow under your
tomato crop: there’s no more market for them
when salmonella rears its ugly head.

Be Not HERE Now
but be anywhere everywhere
ELSE: the media saturating us
with our global village idiocy
and so this fooling-with-thought-
&-image and hmm….seems to
me & what-if and say have
you ever…& you know: it
just struck me stunned stupid…
feels like fiddling while Rome Burns
and all hands should be on desk
putting bread on the table & you
can fix them holes in the roof when
it stops raining and the sun comes
out when it won’t be necessary and
then of course they’ll be other things
to do to tend to to get R done…

First Year Seminarian Prompt

Liberal Art Transition Exercise & Prompt
For Novitiate Seminarians: Their
Orientation to Humanities and Fine Arts.




SAMPLE Cognitive & Affective
Dissonance.s

Put these items in play while Joseph Campbell
urges you to follow your bliss:

“Imagination is more important
than knowledge.” Einstein.

In an interview with jailhouse reporters,
Charles Manson points to his swastika
forehead and says: “You people don’t
know where I live—places you can’t
even imagine.”

“The doctrine of hatred must be
preached, as the counteraction
of the doctrine of love, when that
pules and whines,” says Emerson:
“I shun father and mother and wife
and brother when my genius calls
me,”

Kids in class quote Nietzsche:

“It’s Beyond Good & Evil,”
Sam!

“How can we wait without idols?”
asks Auden Without representation,
without standing-for’s, signs and
symbols? Without Reasons Why?
Explanations? Blame-ations: e-
scapegoats carrying the burden
of our becausality and affect?

Do not think that I came to
bring peace on the earth;
I did not come to bring peace,
but a sword. For I came to
set a man against his father,
and a daughter against her
mother, and a daughter-in-law
against her mother-in-law; and
a man’s enemies will be the
members of his household. He
who loves father or mother
more than Me is not worthy of
Me; and he who loves son or
daughter more than Me is not
worthy of Me. And he who does
not take his cross and follow after
Me is not worthy of Me. He who
has found his life will lose it, and
he who has lost his life for My
sake will find it," says Jesus,
as far as I can tell: a gospel
in a nutshell.

“I write every day
without hope
and without
despair,” claims
Isek Dinesen.

Wait’ll they get a load of this!
says Sophocles: It’ll purgem
of fear and also pity & it’ll
separate pain from suffering
so they don’t keep collapsing,
conflating, & confusing them.
no more..

I won’t budge from under
this tree until I’m
enlightened.
Gautama.

Every kid with a laptop is the
smartest kid in class. It’s not
what you know that counts,
it’s whether you can put it
in play.

In the shower

Some of my best thinking is done in the shower (I don't think I'm alone in this, though I am alone in the shower...). So I was thinking about how the Fine Arts and Humanities faculty and students might get together in ways other than sitting in meetings. Have some fun. Fool around. And I was thinking about how we might play out our differences.

• Tug-of-war between Fine Arts on one side and Humanities on the other (and just what does the rope represent? Or the mud hole in the middle, for that matter?).
• Spelling bee using each others' jargonisms.
• Trivial Pursuit sudden-death tournament between departments leading to Division Champs--but questions can only come from outside our respective fields.
• Three-legged sack races with a Humanities major or faculty member in the sack (so to speak) with a Fine Arts major or faculty member.
• Dionysus vs. Apollo in a duel to the death, with commentary over loudspeakers and hords of fans, ending in a fine melee for all.
  

Surely other, more imaginative people can come up with better ideas than these! Anyone?

(I'm deadly serious about all this.)

A "duh!" moment

Sam, I was walking around on Sunset Mountain above the Grove Park Inn the other morning when I had a real "Well, duh!" moment, a blazingly obvious realization. Here I've been going over in my head what it really means to "turn up the difference", to hold two diametrically opposite concepts in my head at one time without letting one obliterate the other--thinking that I just didn't get it. Not a dialectical thinker, me. And then I realized that my whole attitude toward acting and theatre is exactly that. Theatre is full of promising paradoxes, but surely one of the most obvious and enduring is masks vs. faces (most famously in Diderot's "The Paradox of the Actor" but going back at least to Plato) or outside vs. inside. Maybe all the other paradoxes are just reflections of this one. For Diderot, the question was (as for many people it still is): Is it necessary for an actor to really feel the emotions being portrayed in order to give the audience an authentic, truthful experience, or can an actor just display the outward signs to do the job? In fact, if the spectator can't tell the difference, what difference does it make?

The more interesting question, for me, has to do with whether theatre is most productively approached (and taught) via form or content, movement or language, passion or gesture, ritual or narrative. Are we who do it storytellers trying weave a story with a beginning, middle, or end, or are we communally engaged in an immediate, immersive, transcendent experience, a succession of "now" moments? As directors, designers, and actors, are our most important tools the story and its characters and dramatic action, or are they the shapes, tempo, images, sounds, and other stimuli which I present to the spectator/auditor in an experiment designed to determine (among other things) whether her or his reaction to these stimuli have anything in common with my own?

The answer is, of course, yes. But these different approaches or aspects or ways of thinking about theatre are not equivalent or different ways of saying the same thing. They're different, which is not to say, of course, that they're mutually exclusive. For me, the most interesting moments happen when the differences are turned up, made to contradict each other, creating dissonance, cognative and otherwise. When all the elements complement each other, working together in harmony to support the story, say, for me the result is often boring predictability. When they don't, sometimes it's boring cacaphoney. But when they're juxtaposed with something like artistry (whatever that is), then the sparks fly. Then the outside is inside and the inside is outside, like alternating current. Then I'm electrified. Shocked. Stupfied.

So: Duh. Feel like a freshman.

re: Liberal Art from a FAH perspective

Sam, you devil, you're great! Working revising the mission statement for Theatre, trying to get somewhere with that oh-so-interesting exercise. Think we should just adopt this morning's post verbatim (illustrations and all). To say nothing of putting it in the viewbook.

Keep crying "theatre" in a crowded fire(station)--so will I, in my way.

Graham

Liberal Art from a FAH perspective

View Book Possibilities:

"Give us your children;
We will teach them how to suffer"
(aka: to stand-up-from-under, carry on
you wayward pilgrims: no whining necessary)



theatre! theatre!

Pray for Disillusionment.

& the Liberal Art:
that you might be
transferred from
illusion (literally:
“not in game”) to
ludic mode:
“in play.”

Disembarassmental Studies &
Leadership Programs



YOU: behind bars, praying for
disillusionment

Mission Impossible:
/ \
Walk on Eggs Walk on Water
(WOE) (WOW)

Got to choose yr Magistery.

Bohr-ean Economics:

“Here comes Paradox:
we must be making
progress! Ah! Contra
Addiction: now we’re
getting some where!.”

Cram people with your books,
furnish them with a constant river
of books and journals, and you may
be sure they will remember as little
as if they read none. (RWE 1848)

Theatre!
Theatre!



“All Cretans are in denial,
under illusion and pander
like a son of a gun” says
Epimenides, Cretan.

xxxooo, Presbyter

Our Current Policy

Humanities and Fine Art



OUR CURRENT POLICY
(Polite, Policed, Political)
is based on
Denial
Illusion
Pandering.

I lifted this sentence (modified,
reconfigured, reformatted) from
my humanities colleague, Dr. K.
—out of the Asheville Citizen
Times (July 6): his fine estimation,
analysis, & recommendations re: .
energy.

Imagine:

if I could read that, construe that,
in my own terms as mere
description
no Judgment here;
no condemnation.

I’d have to rub-a-dub scrub those words:
wash that scam right out of my hair. Hose
down them negative connotations: scour
the stigma, purge & purify till they were
sweet as a baby’s but squeaky clean:

DENIAL? ...sure, of course.
ILLUSION? well, duh!
PANDERING? how could it
be otherwise—you got a problem
with that?

Wouldn’t that make a difference that
made a difference in my converse- action?
Could I talk with any body? Walk?

Ingredients

To make some Describe Mode:
you need Brillo, Old Dutch Cleanser
& old fashioned Elbow Grease



I’m here to Wash Off the
“damned moral sense”
so as to inaugurate
Pure Aesthetics
for crying out loud:
“the view”
a fine art!

@@@@

IT’s A GOOD THING
our energy crisis.

Wrestling, wrangling, writhing, wretched: me
caught in Mother Earth’s Economics Summit,
damnit —her version of sustainability imposing
itself on my own received traditions & I got to
be saying: what? what the…? what the hell?
UNCLE!
UNCLE!.


That’s me in denial;
That’s me in illusion—
pandering like a son of a gun:
abusing my religion..
Gnosis
“Men go through the world each musing
on a great fable, dramatically pictured
and rehearsed before him. If you speak to
man, he turns his eyes from his own scene,
slower or faster endeavors to comprehend
what you say. When you have done speaking,
he returns to his private music.
…All parties: in a private box with the
whole play performed before himself
solus. (RWE)

The Narcissus who knows he’s a narcissist
is no longer narcissistic in the common sense,
well: narcissistic, sure, but not Narcissistic.

Sisyphus knowing better is not the Sisyphus
who doesn’t—but he’s still pushing his stone.

Procrustean hospitality is always hostile even
after I know it & will still cut & stretch
accordingly but no longer not that
innocent, knowing better.

Cement of Inertia. –Is it not a rare contrivance
that lodged the due inertia in every creature,
the conserving, resisting energy, the anger
at being waked or changed? (RWE)

I used to not know I was deaf, dumb and blind.
Now I do: all 3. I didn’t know I was solipsistic,
but I do now: solipsist like any thing. I don’t
deny I deny I’m in denial, damnit: under an
illusion thinking I’m ludic. I admit it.

Panderer? But of course—pimp,
procurer, catering to my
lower tastes

Altogether independent of the intellectual
force in each is the pride of opinion, the
security that we are right. Not the feeblest
granddame, not a mowing idiot, but uses
what spark of perception and faculty is left,
to chuckle and triumph over the absurdities
of all the rest. Difference from me is the
measure of absurdity. Not one has a misgiving
of being wrong… (RWE Sept, 1845)

xxxooo, Presbyter