I've just turned off the lights on the tree, and tiptoed upstairs by the light of the window candles. The house is warm and my stomach is still quite full. Still, it feels right to try to make a few sentances produce themselves, or the holiday doesn't really feel solid.
The homily at the service last night was about the five words, "And the Word became flesh." Becoming flesh seems pretty obvious to me, but i can see where it might be a big step from being deity. :>
So, this Christmas i am thinking about my flesh becoming a little more Word - as i write with leaden fingers and sleepy brain. My Christmas wish is that we all become a bit more made of light, and Words, and beauty, and love, and creation. May you move towards the grandness of the huge, fantastic universe and expand your ways of being this year. May you encompass not just your self and your fleshy needs, but to reach out when you are tempted to be small.
May the largeness of the universe be a delight and a challenge you
willingly take on, and may your heart expand to cherish all you encounter.
Much love, and merry christmas,
susanargus
Since no one reads my weblog, I swore I'd put up present information here and keep the information safe and sound until Christmas.
As promised, here are the packages you are getting:
Papa - you are getting a 6-CD set of Bill Bryson's _A Short History of Everything_ for a belated Father's Day present, and an autographed book.
John - You are getting a leather office chair.
Bat - You are getting the latest Neal Stephenson book.
Mimsa - You are getting a seed saver to collect flower seeds in.
:)
Sneakily in broad daylight,
susanargus
Once again, our perimeters are shakier than we think.
Mono sent these links on theories of how the old masters painted their amazing works:
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS: Further adventures in opticality with David Hockney
Hockney Completely Refuted, by Fred Ross
I vividly remember the image of Ingres' seated lady, forearm absurdly mistaken, beatific smile, from art school. Hockney's theory (or the article describing it) is incredibly pleasing to me.
The "refutation" offered by the second link is useless, because it does not address the numerous vector-point and math analysis techniques that the scientific gaze buttresses Hockney's theory with. What about those damning lines on the table rugs? The double-jointed elbow? Where are these coming from if it isn't optics? I really doubt Ingres didn't notice his model had hideously long arms if he was so good at all the other details ARC is saying he was.
Emotive response to theories only make for vague refuation. Tone matters, and ARC obviously dislikes Hockney (I don't like many of his works myself, though I might look at them more closely now). Their cause - photorealistic skill in producing works of painting - is entirely what Hockney's theory refutes, because his theory says we need to get back to emotive, not photorealistic, portrayals.
Whether or not we need photorealistic art when we have cameras of all kinds depends on what photorealism brings to us. The "new glasses" feel of hyperrealism expressed in a non-photographic medium is a type of onanism, since we in fact see those things daily with our eyes, which have been trained to see things in that way somewhat by movies and photos. It all depends on how agile the "reader" of the painting is. A patron untrained in following brushstrokes and studying meaning in a painting might prefer seeing their kitty or family member frozen for all time, because they see the subject matter, not the painting. On the other hand, replication of this sort doesn't *evoke* anything. It stands in for the actual subject. It is a cloning process.
My theory of art is that art *evokes* emotion - it doesn't create it. This answers every question about "Is it art?" that has plagued modern times. Evoking means that by creating an item, an emotion is conjored that is not equivalent to lived experience. There is a transformation, a function, placed between lived lives of humans and the emotions caused by art.
For instance: my mother yelling at me is not art. My emotional response (anger, sorrow, sarcasm) is due to the situation. Direct effects on my emotions cause lived experience.
Instead, when I stand in front of a painting, I am not living the experiences of those in the painting. Instead, there is a shifted effect, that of gazing at a painting about a subject. As I look at a painting of the Last Supper, I see the human figures, the anguish, the complexity of our species, and I contemplate that within the format of paint, color, light, and revealed expression. The artistic response I get from the painting come not that of having been teleported into the last supper of a diety, but from my thoughts and musings, looking into this scene through a filter of art.
The line I draw is best express by an art show in the DC area I read about. A work on Homelessness, it allowed patrons to sleep on a park bench under a newspaper, sit on a recreated street corner, etc.. This merely let them live an experience which caused emotion - it did not evoke emotion. So, too, Thomas Kinkdaid mainly tries to offer an imaginary space of beauty to his patrons, but does not evoke.
In another theory's terms, art is a communication of emotion. Where there is a sender, message, and receiver, the art constructs a emotive message which is processed, and the noise of the centuries sometimes alters our receipt.
The submlime and the weird are both held comfortably in this definition of art. From DaVinci's Lady with Stoat to Henry Darger's traced fairy kingdom, our experience comes not in being in the plot of the image, but through the transformed emotion the images evoke.
I thought a lot about the HIV/AIDS crisis since World Aids Day, and have increased my paycheck donation to $100 a month. I simply can't justify less.
Two adults who love each other and want to commit to each other for a lifetime should be allowed by the state to marry. Period.
There is nothing natural about committed love. In fact, the majority of people in the world do not practice monogamy between one man and one woman for their whole life. For people to seriously agree to join their lives *forever* and nurture the relationship between themselves is fantastic, amazing, and should be encouraged, no matter who the people are.
I can't believe the hypocrisy of letting heterosexuals get married without a waiting period in an Astroturfed church in Vegas, and not letting earnest, serious homosexuals get married at all.
I sound so heavy because I am ashamed to say that when the Massachusetts ruling came out, my first instinct was to want to quiet the issue, as many of the presidential candidates did, since it felt so divisive. There is nothing divisive about equal rights. They unite us as humans.
Today is World Aids Day. I know this thanks to BBC, since this isn't being much publicized here in DC. BBC and NPR are picking up a lot of stories in the last week about HIV/AIDS.
This epidemic tears the world apart, tears families apart, tears lives apart. Secretary-General Kofi Annan termed it "the genocide of a generation." Entire continents are losing stability from this disease that does not discriminate.
Currently I have picked the largest AIDS charity with a US address for donations. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is a grant-making entity that funds other programs. Right now I send 1.5% of my takehome pay biweekly to them, which according to the nice woman I talked to at the fund, is not annoying at all to them, even though it is so many tiny checks. They send me a snail mail thank-you after each donation for my records.
I've put the pictures up from the Act Up Demonstration in DC on November 24th (2003). I particularly liked this sign.
There was a point where it seemed like we could sink this disease by just getting everyone to use protection. (Of course, the Vatican and many other brilliant world powers haven't helped that goal.) Now, it looks like we need to put 41 million people on retroviral therapies in order to keep their societies from collapsing.
