Month: December 2016

Jason E. Hodges: “Our True Selves Should Never Be Created by Others”

 

Photographer Unknown, (The Skateboard)

“Express to our world what is alive inside us not what their world says we should be… Our true selves should never be created by others, Held in their pockets like belongings, like trinkets. We are skaters. We are artists. We are free.”

–Jason E Hodges, The Drop Off

Art with Symbols

Various Unknown Artists, Art with Symbols and Signs

Symbol. The best possible expression for something unknown.

Every psychological expression is a symbol if we assume that it states or signifies something more and other than itself which eludes our present knowledge.

Jung distinguished between a symbol and a sign. Insignia on uniforms, for instance, are not symbols but signs that identify the wearer. In dealing with unconscious material (dreams, fantasies, etc.) the images can be interpreted semiotically, as symptomatic signs pointing to known or knowable facts, or symbolically, as expressing something essentially unknown.

Whether something is interpreted as a symbol or a sign depends mainly on the attitude of the observer. Jung linked the semiotic and symbolic approaches, respectively, to the causal and final points of view. He acknowledged the importance of both.

“Psychic development cannot be accomplished by intention and will alone; it needs the attraction of the symbol, whose value quantum exceeds that of the cause. But the formation of a symbol cannot take place until the mind has dwelt long enough on the elementary facts, that is to say until the inner or outer necessities of the life-process have brought about a transformation of energy.”

– Carl Jung, “On Psychic Energy,” CW 8, par. 47

John Augustus Walker

John Augustus Walker, “Science and Invention”, Mural, 1935

John Augustus Walker (1901-1967) was a well-known Alabama Gulf Coast artist of the Depression era who was commissioned to undertake several art projects for the Works Progress Administration. Walker’s preferred subject matter ranged from Mardi Gras, fantasy and historical themes to landscapes and portraiture.

The murals are on display in the History Museum of Mobile lobby located in Mobile, Alabama.

Felix de Leon

Felix de Leon, “El Fauno y las Hadas”

“All things belonging to the earth will never change-the leaf, the blade, the flower, the wind that cries and sleeps and wakes again, the trees whose stiff arms clash and tremble in the dark, and the dust of lovers long since buried in the earth-all things proceeding from the earth to seasons, all things that lapse and change and come again upon the earth-these things will always be the same, for they come up from the earth that never changes, they go back into the earth that lasts forever. Only the earth endures, but it endures forever.”

-Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again

Mads Langer, “The Beauty of the Dark”

Mads Langer, “The Beauty of the Dark”

Mads Langer (born 1984) is a Danish singer-songwriter, who became internationally known for his cover of “You’re Not Alone” by the British band Olive. While the song is cheerful, his own songs are frequently typified as emotional guitar ballads, because many of them are in a minor scale and have a melancholic feel to them.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Music History: Montserrat Caballé,  “O Mio Babbino Caro”

Montserrat Caballé,  “O Mio Babbino Caro” by Giacomo Puccini

December 22 is the birthday of Giacomo Puccini, in full Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini, who was born on December 22, 1858, in Lucca,Tuscany, Italy, He died on November 29, 1924 in Brussels, Belgium. He has been called “the greatest composer of Italian opera after Verdi”.

Puccini’s early work was rooted in traditional late-19th-century romantic Italian opera. Later, he successfully developed his work in the realistic verismo style, of which he became one of the leading exponents.

Puccini’s most renowned works are La Bohème (1896), Tosca (1900), and Madama Butterfly (1904), all of which are among the important operas played as standards.

In 1923, Puccini complained of a recurring sore throat and sought medical advice. Though an initial consultation turned up nothing serious, during a subsequent examination he was diagnosed with throat cancer. As the cancer had by that point progressed beyond where it could be operated upon, Puccini traveled to Brussels in 1924 for an experimental radiation treatment. Too weak to endure the procedure, he died in the hospital seven days later, on November 29, 1924. At the time of his death, Puccini had become the most commercially successful opera composer of all time, worth the equivalent of an estimated $200 million.

After an initial burial in Milan, in 1926 his body was moved to his Torre del Lago estate, where a small chapel was constructed to hold his remains. An opera celebration called “Festival Puccini” is held in the town every year in honor of its most famous resident.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Cormac McCarthy: “Whose Brightness Had Set Back the Stars in Their Sockets”

Photographer Unknown, (The Heat of the Desert)

“It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog’s, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

The Color of Rust

Photographer Unknown, (The Color of Rust), Selfie

“But when oxidation nibbles more slowly – more delicately, like a tortoise – at the world around us, without a flame, we call it rust and we sometimes scarcely notice as it goes about its business consuming everything from hairpins to whole civilizations.”
― Alan Bradley, A Red Herring Without Mustard

 

Trey McIntyre, “Zach Williams”

Trey McIntyre, “Zach Williams”, Photo Shoot on Scaffolding  for Homotography, October, 2016

“That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than by concepts. There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard — of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche