Drawing, to see better

A new way of seeing concepts: drawings (paintings) of concepts linked to each other. I see a blue dark nightly sky, with a spheric gradient black-blue, many stars everywhere, probably white and yellow, small. Concepts appear in words, simply styled in clear type.
Shows relationships between concepts. The play between, a vision.

Example:

What Freedom Really Is, 2014

The (night) sky/background is essential to describe elements of otherness, i.e. Life and the World, what else exists.
This drawing above displays what one can think after experiencing the exilarating sensation of freedom, the excitation coming from myriads of possibilities suddenly imagined, as if they weren't there before. After that point, one realises the limits one really has to play with, the fact that one's actions are seriously limited, not by the capacity of action (the ability to perform), but by the final consequences of those actions and their rare importance, rare relevance to the actor's life.
The bullshit/random world thus oppress the small minority of relevant actions, and one gets lost in the desert of randomness, as the force to see through bullshit gets dimmed, obscured by the giant immensity it has to fight with.
The true creative moment is for one to get into an autistic mode within the Meaningful realm, the zone of repetitive creation. The capacity to navigate towards the centre of the Useful Things. Getting lost.

Night on Earth

Douwe Eisenga WIKIPEDIA     http://www.douweeisenga.nl/Douwe_Eisenga/Blog/Blog.html

Piano Concert : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gdec8es1qjM (part I...etc)

The opposite of Verklarte Nacht

   A few men operate in silence

    And the moon is not glazed at, and no women are saved

      And babies are not born there

    And nothing is forgiven

notes on Schumann

Schumann - Symphonic Etüden op.13

Taste of minimalistic repetition (he would have loved it) - non-ending spiral
The size and ending of every of Schumann's piece is always a surrendering to the human factor
Fascination of the transformation, repeated and hammered

Papillions - op. 2


Even the notes are extremely human, small, they apologize for themselves: Schumann needs a piano forte, almost a clavecin

Repetitions of a phrase (bouclage) have to sound completely different: sonority, rythm.

Richard Goode on Schumann's "Kreisleriana": Schumann always off-balance, showing irrationality and uncertainty. Division.

And yet, possible to play like Mikhail Pletnev with full round sound, confidence and no faked nervosity. The boldness of the sound to contrast with the inside anti-existent nature, the obsession of death or poesy, non-existence.
Magistral voicing.

Pieces

Idea from reading Musicophilia, by Oliver Sacks: the requirement for sound to be architectural, in 3D, in order for an emotion to happen. If not, if all sounds feel "flat", music stops provoking feelings.
Can we extend this and say that this should apply not only to sound but to all perceptions, and that "architecture", or "3d", refers to and extends to two related characteristics of a perception: 

• its richness, hence a piece of art void of complexity (e.g. pop-art) cannot provoke much feelings, and some of the most complex work of art can provoke feelings that small works can not.
• its natural fit into our human nature. Just as our ears have been created to alert us of physical dangers, hence need to match the physical world and can't naturally express such dangers and then feelings without this match, then a piece of art cannot be felt without a minimal anthropomorphic projection into a familiar scene. 

A different thought: I was missing the feeling of family and friendship this morning, so went on Facebook,  and only saw an inarticulate forum, sparse of reality, content with unrelated self-expression. A group needs a common goal to stay solid, sharing some background past isn't enough. Religion needs goals.

Fake Interview on Typography

Why is Typography so special ? Because letters are the visual atoms of language, and language defines us. We are language machines, and anything else, the physical world included, is only an unnessential accessory, a way-through, the organ/obstacle of our nature, which lies in language.

Why is the visual part of language more important than the audible part, phonems..etc ? I don't think it is. There is simply no art, studies, or ways to think about the audible side of letters. Phonetics and phonology touches into neurology, not yet into psychology or psychoanalysis. I just don't see how one can be excited about various "aaa" sounds, just yet.

Don't we use other senses to express ourselves? Body language isn't a well-formed language, analytically speaking. I love perfumes but they have the same problem.

Are letters that important? Isn't the content of a text so much more vital than the way the letters are drawn? I believe most people can understand the obvious principle of typography: that letter-shapes carry different mental "packages" or cultural assimilation: Stencil fonts feel strong and manly, Courier feels mechanical, Script faces feel classical..etc. But it takes a lot of imagination and sensitivity to feel how the emotions of shapes can be much more than a mental accessory.

Isn't typography just about the legibility/readbility issue? Typography is the mother of Text and its pedestal and its autel and its backlight. It is the hidden and invisible power that makes content shine.

What is the Graal, the aim, the god, the dream of typography? I see a mirage, an idea, of words on the page. I believe there can be letter-shapes that transcend their content because their shapes capture the full attention of the eye, of the brain. And the meaning of words would flow in the mind, invisibly, as in a mutual endeavour of the outside/inside. I believe and dream in the resolution of the brain/mind issue. There is a light coming out of a shape that fits its content, and we are still in the infancy of creating such shapes.

Ok... let's take a step back. Design has an influence on how we think, so isn't typography a cousin of architecture, or industrial design? Yes, but objects and walls are only doors to memories, images and sensations. Letter-shapes, and only them, are also doors to the logical mind.

So typography is the supreme Art of design? Yes.

What do you think other designers would say about that? They would not like it, but I cannot convince them. Like I said, it takes a peculiar mind to see why typography rules.

Mornings, fan club

Thoreau understood what Mornings are. Remix:

The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. 

I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere.There is something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. The Vedas say, "All intelligences awake with the morning."

Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour.

All poets and heroes are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise.

Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, by our own newly acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial music and a fragrance filling the air--to a higher life than we fell asleep from; and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good, no less than the light. 

That man, 
 who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he .. has .. yet .. profaned
   has despaired of life
and is pursuing a descending and
darkening way.

Morning brings back the heroic ages.

To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.
It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men.

Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.

To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

Cléo de 5 à 7, l'année dernière à Marienbad

2 masterpieces:
"Cleo de 5 a 7" (Cleo from 5 to 7) by Agnes Varda, french film. The sweet comfortable beauty of things where the drama is inside. That's the key to make a story where everything appears right, where everything is made to appeal to the audience and avoids obvious dramatic items: hide them, make the drama hidden (here it's laying in the head of the main character, or it's even hidden from the scenes, we *don't know* if there's a drama. No murders, no bloods and screams or sex or war, yet we're captivated, and everything is light and fair.

"L'année dernière à Marienbad" (Last year in Marienbad) by Alain Resnais. For once a movie that glorifies human beings! A movie that's all about transcending beauty, where rococo architecture becomes humans and vice-versa, where persons become statues and luxuriance is voluptuousness. No more people personified as people. A work that reminds me of Andre Breton's Nadja with how it pays attention to details, and how it makes me feel like every little object is worth a lot of attention, and every human, me first, is a god - perfect sensation of calm and meditative contemplation, with the absence of usual anxiety.

Gaudi

I want to explain how the works of Antonion Gaudi impacted me. Gaudi was inspired by Nature, it feels classical and to me evokes Rococo, at least compared to the surrounding minimalistic and inhuman architecture and industrial design of our times. Gaudi feels natural, to the point of obviousness, it's the feeling of the architecture and design that just fits, it's human design. I think we have lost even the desire, the classical will to reach nature back into our civilized worlds. We have forgotten this, maybe since the 70's, with the obvious failure of the hippies and associated movements, who tried to reach Nature too bluntly, too literally. We all became a little bit Republican after that, and forgot the need for humanology. Less became more, Small became beautiful, straight lines became the norm and anything else was purged out off everything. The Japanese in their genius have been trying to reinvent natural, ergonomic shapes however with not a big enough success that it would regenerate the old spirits that Gaudi shouted in my head each time I saw his works.
Gaudi means "it's OK, it's necessary to create more, to get more in touch with what feels right. It's OK and necessary to create curves and rounds and ellipsoid windows. It's OK and necessary to be fun, and it certainly is OK and necessary that it takes much, much more work to create the objects that support that fun, because that's what feels right and the fun is not only about the fun, it's also what works for humans and what is good. It's absolutely and seriously OK to experiment with decorations, until the decorative aspect of things reaches the point, the balance when it's no longer unessential." We have mired our vision with the opposite of superfluous rules, we have accepted straight cubes and flat worlds that felt wrong for the sake of a short-term efficiency which faked being durable.
I link this to the current disaffection of our school system and thereby of our intelligentsia, of our social conscience (our superego), in social sciences, what the French also call human sciences. It is the same false belief in the need for utilitarian economical viewpoints that creates for a big part the falsehood of people's perceptions.
What is terrible with such a fantastic idea is the simplicity to deny its truth, to answer "no, this is not needed" in front of Gaudi's exorbitant greatness. To say "his work does not contain anything specially human" because we cannot prove or define what feels right. It would be wrong to respect or celebrate Gaudi as a cerebral artist, to define round shapes as conceptual design. However we can complain about straight lines being inhuman, as they shout their fakeness with perhaps the same obviousness (at least to me) that Gaudi's work implies about what humans are all about.