CULTURE

	kirkdify (2 months ago) Remove | Spam Our desires are not wrong, and only useful to separate if you understand it's all the same anyway. The universe doesn't make mistakes. We are the universe. There is no right or wrong. There is no distinction. It's neither and both and/or neither nor both. Everything is a paradox, and everything exists on a spectrum. The tension between the two poles, the constant relocation of ourselves and other things in a universe of poles, swaying, and tilting, and moving, and sliding around in the universe, in our universe. SPEAKING IS THE ORIGINAL CREATIVE ACTIVITY
	kirkdify (2 months ago) Remove | Spam I think culture is the expression of every desire. It's the universe. It's what we have in a form on this earth and it represents that universe or that part of the universe. It's a physicalized force. It's energy. And it's a constant discussion. I make culture to interact with the universe because that's where it's at and that's where i can see it. The tension between our existences is THE MATERIAL i make things out of. It's almost like an equation N = A1 + A2 N: What I Create A1: the force of the universe A2: the force of me
	kirkdify (2 months ago) Remove | Spam Everything I make, Just like everything I do comes out of a necessity. There is an inevitability to it. It is the thing that has to be done. It had to be on mac books, it had to be on youtube, it had to be on drugs or on pokey. The forces of the universe, internal and external required it. There are very small ways we can insert our hand. We can accept the truth or we can alter it. I'm never hiding when I'm inserting my hand. And this is the new art. it's very exciting. the monopoly game has taken enough money, and the jails are full. new popular culture will be created by the popular.

MEGADEATH or Interview with Christ the Lord

If you could tell me one thing what would it be?

I would tell you, you’re right, at the very bottommost absolute of your being you are right, and that’s the part that matters, because yes, as you’ve suspected, that part is eternal.

Well what should I do now?

You’re scared. People with little faith get scared sometimes. So do people with faith… but for different reasons. You’re afraid you might be right; you might be doomed. It’s hard to say, because you haven’t been doomed yet, but also you could be at any second. I doubt anyone is going to step in and save your ass, so I have a question for you: do you have faith in yourself?

Off and on

More and more. That’s how it happens.

Well what should I do now?

Wait.

You’re a shit.

Someday maybe you’ll be where you want. But it isn’t today, and tomorrow doesn’t look good either. And what comes to you. And what come out of you. They’re barely enough to keep you afloat. And that’s not good. You feel like you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop.

What a clichéd sentiment.

That’s all you are right now.

No

No

What is potential?

Well everything happens on a line, and there are lines over lines over lines over lines. A line for everything, and everything intersecting. And to meet your potential is to meet some vague endpoint on whatever line you’re on. But the endpoints are always changing. And so are the lines.

When is the other shoe going to drop?

Depends on the line.

You think you’re cute.

C’mon

Yes. C’mon. Jesus fucking Christ. Give it to me. What! I don’t think what I want has anything to do with it. So what the fuck is going on? I want you to speak! I want you to speak!

And then we’ll speak together.

Yes! And then we’ll speak together.

What if I don’t want you to speak?

I don’t think you can get rid of me

I could say the same thing

It’ll be September soon. That’s my favorite month.

What do you want me to say?

That I’ll be fine by September.

being an actor

At the beginning of his book, Stephen Callow writes a letter to himself upon entrance into drama school. “My main purpose in pursuing this course is therapeutic. Perhaps that’s what all acting is to all actors; and perhaps all acting is almost accidental, a sort of symptom, or cure, of an illness produced, like the pearl, by grit. This could be the beginning – not of a new life – but of life itself.”

At this point Callow has basically summarized the entire experience of getting into drama school complete with a perfect description of his body seizing up and his leg shaking uncontrollably during his audition. This passage seems a little psychic to me. At least I probably would have kept the insight that I was attending drama school was for primarily therapeutic reasons to myself. It seems embarrassingly self-centered and egomaniacal. But now we know it is not. We don’t work to service the ego, we work to transcend it. We don’t work to understand ourselves better for purely selfish reasons, we work to understand ourselves better so that we may understand and instruct humanity better. We center in on ourselves to experience others from this core which we all share, and hopefully to guide others to it as well.

We all bear within us the potentiality for every kind of passion, every fate, every way of life. Nothing human is alien to us. But inheritance and upbringing foster individual experiences and develop only a few of our thousands of possibilities. The others gradually sicken and die. Life today is narrowly circumscribed, and poor in feeling. The normal man generally feels once in his life the whole blessedness of love, and once the joy of freedom. Once in his life he hates bitterly. Once with deep grief he buries a loved one, and once, finally he himself dies. That gives all too little scope for our innate capacity to love, hate, enjoy, and suffer. We exercise daily to strengthen our muscles and sinews that they may not grow feeble. But our spiritual organs, which were made to act for an entire lifetime, remain unused, underdeveloped, and so, with the passing years, they lose their vitality. – Max Reinhardt

I’ve found to that when we can do the work for ourselves improves it enormously. Besides being more satisfying, the results are better when I can weld my own ideas, feelings, experiences, and fancies to the technique that is being given or the method being taught. It’s a constant battle - hard to fight, but necessary – to bring as much of yourself into the work as you can, to make it your own, and to own it.

Callow describes our scholastic experience even more when he talks about the students’ sense of being involved in a uniquely important and secretly special work. He compares it to working in intelligence during the war. He describes the insecurity of being surrounded by a group he sees as superior at everything dramatic. He describes how easy it is to work tremendously hard, but not be doing well due to a miscomprehension of the work. He stayed up late to “think of droller and droller quips to use in improvisation.” It was like losing my virginity, he says. Only it wasn’t Simon Callow (his ego) who had to lose his virginity, it was something deeper. “My devotion of Outer Man – putting him through his paces, making him do this funny voice or that, or indicate this emotion or that – was total”

What his school was first asking for was simplicity based on action because everything in a play is done in order to achieve a want of some kind. This resolves to the formula of objective, action, obstacle, activity, and super objective that we are dealing with now. They had the same problems in his class that we are having in ours: confusion, lack of specificity, absence of meaning. I though this was profound: “For me, the biggest problem was to show myself wanting something. To want something is to put oneself into a position of frightening vulnerability and then to pursue a course of action to achieve that want is to show oneself at one’s most naked. It can be very ugly.”

“Follow your impulse,” his teacher would say, “as if you may never have another.” The teacher was Doreen Cannon, a student of Uta Hagen. “Emotional truth, she demanded. Oh, did she ever.” Later on I love when he explains how, “suddenly, for the first time, I was acting. Not performing, or posturing, or puppeteering. I was being in another way.” Giving in was the essential experience for him, and I agree. “Leave yourself alone” they’d been telling him since he got there. “It was here, if anywhere, that any talent for acting that I might possess had resided: the knack of throwing off self-consciousness and finding, however briefly, a pool of liberated energy which was nothing to do with how I presented myself in life.”

He talks about his movement work, with the purpose of exploring sensations, as the heart of acting. The sensory work we do with Nate never ceases to amaze me. I never would have imagined such depth was available, and now that I know I want it all the time. The beautiful work that we’re doing now as we move into the DRUNK project is so exciting. To explore the basis, the foundation of our humanity, to think that everything else about us was built on top of this, and how unexplored it is. How unfamiliar to be sensual, to crave touch so desperately, to be overwhelmed by the simplest of sounds, movements, or sights. How utterly everything can affect us when we drop the guards we didn’t even realize inscrutably surround us for lengths a universe could fit into. That’s what it often feels like when I’ve dropped those defenses. It feels like there is a universe between my mind and anywhere else on my body. I love that feeling.

A genius quote from Ruth Gordon, “it’s not enough to have talent – one has to have a talent for having a talent.”

PRINCE Oƒ PARADOX

Kirk Duval

G.K. Chesterton was born a Gemini on May 29^th 1874. He was a contemporary of fellow Gemini George Bernard Shaw and Libra Oscar Wilde, and along with these artists and many other artists of that time, he represents a turning point. The century, the aesthetic, the science, the technology, and the art were all in flux and the artists that emerged from this period are forever remembered for shaping what is now contemporary thought.[1] We are currently experiencing a similar paradigm shift in our society. I’d like to explore the ways in which G.K. Chesterton contributed to his culture, in order that I may better understand how to contribute to mine.

Chesterton is considered a member of the Avante-Garde for many reasons. By simply adjusting with and reacting to the times in which he worked, he is granted enormous credibility as regards his industriousness. He was able to see possibilities for expressing himself and for utilizing his skills in almost every medium of the time, many of which involved the written word. He didn’t limit himself to a specialized genre, but instead chose to follow his desires across various platforms, mastery be damned. Although, master many he eventually did.

His dexterity in function and form reflect importantly on his dexterity of thought. Coined “The Prince of Paradox,”[2] Chesterton’s art lied in the way he could hold two opposing beliefs in his mind and turn each on it’s head while still examining the disparate truths of either and/or both. The paradox, or rather the spectrum of tensions created by paradox, was Chesterton’s artistic and intellectual fuel. He loved exposing the cultural hypocrisy that seems inevitable in a modern society.

This simple foray into differentiated aspects of culture and his diverse use of mediums is already very avant-garde. The established knowledge and popular wisdom of the time would suggest that specialized skills were highly valued. Hard work in one discipline was the gold standard. Professionals in every field were formalizing their profession. That period seems to be the time when people’s pursuits became more and more individualized.[3] It was the study of this or that, not this and that. By overthrowing these traditions of popular culture in his work, Chesterton participated in a cultural liberation from the passivity that capitalism encourages.

In his weekly publication G.K.’s Weekly, and along with the poet and essayist Hilaire Belloc, Chesterton espoused the economic system of distributism. This system, a balance between the two poles of capitalism and socialism, is based on the idea of increasing the owners of production as much as possible. Whereas in capitalism the means of production becomes inevitably centralized, and in socialism it’s under the control of the state, distributism “seeks to ensure that most people will become owners of productive property.”[4] This system reflects many of Chesterton’s artistic principles as well.

As owner and publisher of his own weekly magazine he produced and distributed his own artistic content at will. He provided an example for an emerging society of artists who had advanced technology and tools at their disposal. On politics he is quoted as saying, “The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.”[5] Chesterton seems to be providing a creative blue print for the more typical modern man to make his own work. Become owner and producer of your own artistic property. Ignore the political polarization of popular discourse; it doesn’t affect all public points of view. There is no wrong or right way. “Mistakes” are welcome. It is dogma that seems to be the enemy; the mutual presence of contradictions is encouraged here.

Chesterton put into popular forms many complicated theories and philosophies, making them at once more accessible while also exposing their inflated importance. He said, “Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.” And about George Bernard Shaw:

After belabouring a great many people for a great many years for being unprogressive, Mr. Shaw has discovered, with characteristic sense, that it is very doubtful whether any existing human being with two legs can be progressive at all. Having come to doubt whether humanity can be combined with progress, most people, easily pleased, would have elected to abandon progress and remain with humanity. Mr. Shaw, not being easily pleased, decides to throw over humanity with all its limitations and go in for progress for its own sake. If man, as we know him, is incapable of the philosophy of progress, Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for a new kind of man. It is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a new baby. 5

He reconciled catholic thought with liberal thought.[6] He addresses Kant, Darwin, Materialism, Orthodoxy, Ontology. “He was a literary and social critic, historian, playwright, novelist, Catholic theologian and apologist, debater, and mystery writer. He was a columnist for the Daily News, the Illustrated London News, and his own paper, G. K.'s Weekly; he also wrote articles for the Encyclopædia Britannica, including the entry on Charles Dickens and part of the entry on Humour in the 14th edition.”[7]

Chesterton’s work in popular culture is one of the reasons he was more appreciated in his time rather than posthumously, as was the case with many of his contemporaries. Although, it is still curious as to why he’s not as studied as several other turn oƒ the century artists. Perhaps he was too uniquely of an age, perhaps too prolific and diverse to be studied in our traditional way. Maybe his temperament as a Gemini produced work that, though quotable and funny, seems superficial. And maybe still, his work, involving paradox, and his tongue in cheek turning of conventional wisdom on its head, might put the average reader ill at ease:

I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the mind. At least a man must make a double effort of moral humility and imaginative energy to prevent it from narrowing his mind. Indeed there is something touching and even tragic about the thought of the thoughtless tourist who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen, and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead or Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what they looked like. This is not meant for nonsense; still less is it meant for the silliest sort of nonsense, which is cynicism. The human bond that he feels at home is not an illusion… But to travel is to leave the inside and draw dangerously near the outside. [8]

As a student of astrology this subject, and his sense of humor about it, strike me as particularly funny. “Mercury is connected with travel because travel is a means by which one fills in the details of one’s map oƒ reality. Mercury signifies travel of the routine, day-to-day variety, however, not long journeys, which are discontinuous with normal experience and hence expand the mind.” Mercury is of course the ruler of Chesterton’s sun sign, Gemini. “Often underplayed in astrological writing... Mercury signifies the gap that exists between separate entities. The world as seen in normal human consciousness is a world of divisions. The first of these is the division between subject and object... We can never fully occupy another’s point of view, yet we are not wholly cut off. We can communicate, and communication is one of the chief mercurial functions.” [9]

Still Chesterton seems content with the confusion he causes. Rather than explain himself, he lets the work speak for itself. And though it may appear so, his work is not easy. It unfolds and explains itself over “around 80 books, several hundred poems, some 200 short stories, 4000 essays, and several plays.”[10] This idea of allowing not just the work, but also the whole body of work, to speak for itself seems very modern to me. We live in an age where very little that’s created in or for the public sphere is truly lost. This easy proliferation of easy product is becoming and has been becoming since Chesterton’s time it seems.

Nowadays, consistent and unfettered access to online materials seems to be promoting more and more the vision of art that Chesterton propagated. The means of production are more so than ever in the hands of the producer, and unlimited access to the art consumer allows for work that can endlessly refer to itself (or, at this point, even Others). In our digital age, Lady Gaga acknowledges this new system of distribution in her work by creating pieces that are layered, symbolic across levels, and that expand on a narrative begun with her earliest underground and online work in New York City. This system seems appropriate to our modern age and correlates nicely with what appears to be G.K. Chesterton’s point of view: everything exists on a spectrum between two poles, nothing exists without its opposite, the process is the product, and the paradox is the solution.

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[1] Wikipedia contributors. "G. K. Chesterton." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 30 May. 2010. Web. 2 Jun. 2010.

[2] Douglas, J.D.G.K. Chesterton, the Eccentric Prince of Paradox, 24 May 1974.

[3] Wikipedia contributors. "Modern history." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 1 Jun. 2010. Web. 2 Jun. 2010.

[4] Wikipedia contributors. "Distributism." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 24 May. 2010. Web. 2 Jun. 2010.

[5] Wikipedia contributors. "Distributism." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 24 May. 2010. Web. 2 Jun. 2010.

[6] Victorian Periodicals Review, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring, 1989), pp. 44-45. Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

[7] Wikipedia contributors. "G. K. Chesterton." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 30 May. 2010. Web. 2 Jun. 2010.

[8] Royal, Robert. Our Curious Contemporary, G. K. Chesterton. The Wilson Quarterly. Vol. 16, No. 4 (Autumn, 1992), pp. 92-102

[9] Hand, Robert. Horoscope Symbols. Whitƒord Press. 1981. pp 54-58

[10] Wikipedia contributors. "G. K. Chesterton." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 30 May. 2010. Web. 2 Jun. 2010.

WHAT A DEBUT!!! good work team:)