#its a synthesis paper on existentialism

[cyber-seaweed]

yo what if i pregame this essay with the penjamin.

#its a synthesis paper on existentialism #maybe a terrible idea #i am going to do it #will update #mars.txt

[phantomofthepairofdice]

A Hidden Life: Review

Note: this is a piece written for a class upon the film’s release that has been edited and repurposed.

A Hidden Life had its local premiere at the Houston Cinema Arts Festival on Friday November 15, 2019. Clocking in at just under three hours, it is an epic, esoteric, and devastatingly beautiful piece of work. It is also a bit of a return to form for writer/director Terrence Malick who spent the last few years in a very productive but divisive period in his career telling stories in modern settings. The film tells the true story of Austrian farmer Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl) and his family as he refuses to swear loyalty to Hitler and serve in his army. Malick’s penchant for voiceover is mostly used in letters sent between Franz and his wife Franziska (played with boundless wells of empathy by Valerie Pachner) during his imprisonment. Featuring small, but effective performances by Bruno Ganz, Michael Nyqvist, Jürgen Prochnow, Franz Rogowski, and Matthias Schoenaerts, the emotions of the film are brought to light with great effect. It is a marvelous work that displays Malick’s affinity for tortured men finding a place in the universe alongside nature under god. It is a poetic, sweeping, and moody film that ebbs and flows through time while never losing sight of the value of family, love, and kindness. It is a film that feels prescient to the current moment of political upheaval, while never crassly grafting modern sentiment onto its narrative.

Terrence Malick is a filmmaker whose career is remarkably enigmatic. After arriving in 1973 with Badlands, he premiered Days of Heaven in 1978. Then he disappeared, only to re-emerge twenty years later with 1998’s The Thin Red Line. Another seven years passed until 2005 which saw the release of The New World. Then, in 2011, there was an unprecedented shift for Malick after the release of his Palme d’Or winning The Tree of Life. It launched a period of intense creativity for the director that spawned four narrative films, a documentary, and two short films in the span of just six years. This increase in productivity also gave the world his three most divisive films: To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, and Song to Song. These three movies are wholly modern, eschewing the historical backdrop that leant itself so well to Malick’s depictions of earthly divinity and spirituality. While some people embraced his new approach of montage and leaning more toward loose, unstructured expression, almost everyone was taken back by his attempt to find the beauty in a modern world that has so little of that left. There is no denying how strange it is to see a Malick film that has a scene at a Sonic drive thru. Yet, A Hidden Life feels like a perfect synthesis of a film like The Thin Red Line and Tree of Life. There is history, war, and men reckoning with their place amidst it all being told in Malick’s recent style.

A Hidden Life opens with text explaining the true story behind the film and the mandatory oath of loyalty to Hitler that that soldiers had to swear upon being drafted. Then, in a shockingly new technique for Malick, the film uses footage from Triumph of the Will. These scenes highlight the beautiful presentation of evil in Riefenstahl’s film; it is an interesting counterpoint to the film that follows. Where Triumph of the Will uses jaw-dropping filmmaking to highlight a single man being worshipped in an urban setting, A Hidden Life is about a farmer in nature who refuses to submit and follow any one thing but God. Malick is a master of capturing organic awe. Teamed up with cinematographer Jörg Widmer, he has perfected his distillation of tactile sensation. In Malick’s hands, the earth breathes. The grass dances to music of the wind. Dirt and mud are a communion between man and nature. In his best work, the juxtaposition of war or conflict alongside this immaculate magnificence of the world begs certain questions. How can something so evil and vicious exist in a place so heavenly? Do we deserve to be condemned for destroying this loveliness? A Hidden Life focuses on truly exploring these dilemmas through a combination of abstraction and narrative.

The film is shot on wide angle lenses that emphasize the scope of the world in which it takes place. This choice draws attention to the massive blue skies and the rolling hills, but when Franz is in prison, it almost feels like a taunt. There is so much empty space in the frame focused on concrete or bars that was once inhabited by other people or natural objects. One shot, used twice in the film to great effect, is a swooping crane tracking shot of Franz riding into town on a motorcycle. It first appears as Franziska recounts how the two met and later, after his death, as a memory of purity and love that she can fall back on. Another particularly interesting choice with the camera is when it switches to first person point of view. The intense subjectivity of being placed in Franz’s mind only comes twice: when he is being beaten by a prison guard and as he slowly walks to the place of his death. The beating is particularly interesting because the shot holds for longer than would be expected and it forces the viewer to beg for the violence to stop. It is also noteworthy that the film is shot on digital which allows Widmer and Malick to capture images in natural light, even in very dark places. It feels like a great example of how this film blends his classic style with the more elements he picked up in recent years.

Alongside the gigantic scope of the film are smaller character moments that stand out just as much. The film’s central martyr, Franz, is shown multiple times throughout the film doing tiny acts of kindness that bolster his mission to be in harmony with the world around him. During a transfer between prisons, Franz, in handcuffs and uniform helps an elderly woman bring her luggage down from a high rack on a train. Later as he leaves a store, a soldier knocks over an umbrella leaning against a wall before he takes a few steps back and sets it upright. These tiny moments speak volumes to his consideration and reinforce why he so strongly resists the mandated oath to subservience. He will not serve a cause that takes human lives, destroys homes, and sacrifices men for native expansion.

As the credits began to roll on A Hidden Life, I was shaken. For the next ten minutes or so there was an enormous lump in my throat that threatened to break the dam of emotional fortitude and let tears loose by just recalling moments within the film. I found it to be profoundly touching and inspiringly lyrical in its execution. Though I hesitate to use and expression that tends to lean more toward hackneyed cliché, I found A Hidden Life to be an experience rather than merely a film. It paints with a broad brush on a massive canvas in the hopes to reveal universal truths rather than specific reckonings. Certain scenes do occasionally feel repetitive and I am not certain that the choice to use English as the primary language with bits of German thrown in primarily by Nazis was the right one, but these feel like minor quibbles that easily overlooked when appraising a project so massive and noble in its intent. Currently, our world is primed for a movie about what protest and freedom of mind look like under an oppressive regime. Family, faith, and love are not more important than they were previously, but they certainly feel like their significance is in short supply. Malick and his collaborators have given us a film that embraces these ideas; so long as you are willing to embrace the film itself, there is a great power to be witnessed. As the world becomes more barbed and dejecting, I was truly comforted by the film and its effect of slowing down to appreciate what truly matters. Towards the movie’s closing moments, a young man, about to executed, is given a paper and a pen. First, he pauses, then turns toward Franz and asks, “What do I write?” This question is massive; loaded with the implications of countless other questions. Where do I start? What words can define a life? Will anything be good enough? Who do I address this to? What do I write? For three hours, this film put me closer to potentially having an answer to that existential query.

A Hidden Life is now streaming on HBO Max.

#a hidden life #terrence malick #film #movies

[iimxresearch-blog]

Information Processing in Multimodal Cognitive Representation

This is a proposal for a suite of projects that fall under the broad research topic of the neural and cognitive processing of multimodal information. Please send expressions of interest to [email protected]

SUBPROJECTS:

TOPIC SET A: Multimodal Mental Imagery, Content of Mental Imagery, Mental Imagery as Representations.

“Information in one sense modality can influence the information processing in another sense modality at a very early stage of perceptual processing (often in the primary visual cortex in the case of vision, see Watkins, Shams, Tanaka, Haynes, & Rees, 2006).” (Nanay, 2018b, p. 126)

“By ‘perceptual processing’, I mean processing in the perceptual system. Some parts of the processing of the sensory stimulation are more clearly perceptual than others. To take the visual sense modality as an … The earlier stages of this line of processing are more clearly perceptual than the later ones. And we can safely assume that cortical processing is perceptual processing.” (Ibid, 127)

This research investigates the utility and appropriateness of modelling the internal processes of synthesizing new information from existing informational representations as being based upon the combination of sets of information sources and individual sources and their structures. It may deploy the logic/calculus of information dynamics introduced in D.4. below.

Research Project A: Informational representation and internal natural encoding and processing of information

This research investigates the utility and appropriateness of modeling the internal processes of synthesizing new information from existing informational representations as being based upon the combination of sets of information sources and individual sources and their structures. It may deploy the logic/calculus of information dynamics introduced in D.4. below.

TOPIC SET B | Multimodal Mental Imagery, Perceptual Content, Content of Mental Imagery.

“Most of the multimodality research focuses on the multimodality of perception: on how perceptual processing in one sense modality is influenced, embellished or modified by another sense modality: how visual perceptual processing, for example, is influenced by audition. My aim is to shift this emphasis and focus on multimodal mental imagery (rather than multimodal perception): what happens when visual perceptual processing is not just modified by audition, but it is triggered by audition…?” (Nanay, 2018b, p. 126)

Research Project B: Retinotopic Encoding as Internal Natural Nomic Encoding

The idea of this research and paper is to investigate the possibility of modeling retinotopic encoding of visual and aural (and other) information, and other associated physically mediated signal conversion like that which occurs in receptive fields of various kinds of neurons, by considering them to be transduction and electrochemically based encoding processes operating according to codes that are comprised of, or supervene upon, natural nomic constraints and functional structural features considered at different levels of abstraction. One question to consider is whether the different kinds of stimuli – aural, visual, olefactory, tactile/kinaesthetic and so on – should be regard as different informational natural kinds, or whether it is better to model them all using bit-rate quantification and, qualitatively, using structural features, properties and measures on the same basis with no distinction in kind delineated by distal source and stimuli type.

TOPIC SET C | Multimodal Mental Imagery; Perceptual Content; Content of Mental Imagery; Processing of perceptual content and multimodal imagery; Content and of mental representations;

Research Project C: Naturalisation of Information-observing Scientific Metaphysics

Pluralism about the nature of information is a natural outcome of the polysemy of the concept information in both everyday use and scientific formal uses, and the multiple definitions and conceptions of information in the sciences at different levels of abstraction in different theoretical, methodological, and experimental contexts. This research seeks to naturalise information on a basis that enables cognitive scientists to defer downwards to physics and to lower levels of abstraction in hard scientific terms for the characterization of information flow, internal representation, and the encoding and deployment of mental imagery. The idea is to retain a level of abstraction in terms of ‘black boxing’ that helps achieve efficiency and efficacy of modelling for applications like psychiatry and psychology, whilst retaining a strong supervenience or even reductionist relationship with underlying psycho-physical and neurological processes. When pushed to its limit, the ontology proposed grounds (at the lowest practical level of abstraction), in theory-defeasible terms, in a field ontic structural realism that is realist about structure and regards it as identical to heterogeneous non-uniformities in the quantum field and vacuum. This identity thesis is proposed on the basis of an indispensability argument and inference to the best explanation, but in the context of scientific metaphysics that accommodates a change in the entire existential basis if necessary – such as the case where it turned out that String theory was proven to be contingently true (in which case a string field theory would likely supplant the quantum field theory).

TOPIC SET D | The perceptual processing thesis/perspective; Mental imagery and mental/cognitive representation; Correspondence.

“Defining mental imagery as perceptual processing not triggered by corresponding sensory stimulation in a given sense modality makes the example of closing one's eyes and visualizing an apple a special case of mental imagery, but it also highlights the ways in which this example is unrepresentative.” (Ibid.)

Research Project D: Logic of Information Dynamics

Investigates the possibility of using a logical calculus to model the flow, emergence, and combination of information, where the basic semantic element of the system is the source, construed algorithmically, statistically, structurally, dynamically, and physically. There is a distinction between informational logics familiar from the informational turn in logic and philosophy and what I call logics of information dynamics. Informational logics are intended to use some conception of information or semantic information to provide an informational basis for inference, deduction, and group epistemic updating. They are therefore prolific because of the dual pluralisms of pluralism about information and pluralism in logic. My aim is instead to develop a logic of information dynamics complete with syntax and semantic machinery that is suited to capturing not only information flow, but partial and complete information synthesis, processing, and multi-source dynamics. According to Shannon, sources are stochastic physical processes. However, they can also be regarded in terms of encapsulated structures and situation theoretically. I am exploring how the structural approach allows for algorithmic complexity measures to be applied, and provides more scope for qualitative conceptions of semantic information content of internal representations.

Joint Research Paper Proposals

1. Internal Natural Source Encoding and Multimodal Imaging

Abstract

We investigate how to formulate, at a higher level of abstraction than the physical layer, different models of the conversion of one kind of physical information to another kind (say, visual to auditory), and their combination in different proportions, based upon what we will refer to as natural internal source coding in perception and in deeper cognitive processes. Information theory offers a suite of algorithmic, statistical, and hybrid tools both for providing quantitative measures of information complexity, transmission, fidelity, and signal combination. We apply our developed modelling approach to propose a theory of how cognitive agents’ cognition selects and nomically-naturally encodes the proportions of different information from different multimodal distal, perceptual, and internal sources, and based upon what criteria and variables. One central question is whether regarding different stimuli in terms of different natural kinds of information is meaningful or useful, or whether a general abstractive model is adequate or superior.

(Aberg, Shtarkov, & Smeets, 1997; Barron, Rissanen, & Bin Yu, 1998; Benson, Butt, Jain, Brainard, & Aguirre, 2013; Blake & Mullin, 2014; Collier, 2008; de Haas, Schwarzkopf, Urner, & Rees, 2013; Lin, Chi, Chen, Miller, & Wang, 2018; Nanay, 2014, 2015b, 2018b; Purves et al., 2001; Ryabko, 2008)

2. Mutimodal Mental Imagery and Creative Problem Solving

Abstract

A very proficient statistical economist and international firm dynamics specialist has the capacity to formulate novel solutions to technical problems by deploying imaginative invention at higher levels of abstraction using common intellectual tools. The statistician is able to formulate economic models and equations that parallel the Drake equation in cosmology in order to model many variables and parameters, and to do so with a high degree of efficacy and functional success: a process that requires technical knowledge of mathematical languages and rule sets, combined with insight and imaginative creativity. Significantly, part of the success of her approach and cognition in problem solving is grounded in her imaginative courage, balanced with an understanding of when to limit the degree of originality deployed in intellectual and mathematical tool use and adaptation. We investigate the question of what parallels, and interactions, may obtain between multimodal perceptual processing and the kinds of cognition required to combine imagination with technical epistemic content, and whether it entails that there must be significant overlap between perceptual and cognitive processing.

(Cavedon‐Taylor, 2011; D’Alfonso, 2014; Dilworth, 2007; Dretske, 1983; Everson, 1999; Gómez-Ramirez, 2014; Marmodoro, 2014; Nanay, 2011a, 2015a, 2018a, n.d.; Schellenberg, 2018; Shea, 2018b, 2018a, 2018c)

3. Informational Aesthetics in Science Fiction Novum

Abstract

Science fiction literature presents a special case of cognitive-imaginary aesthetics, combining as it does scientific factual data and episteme with the imaginary. Part of the aesthetic appeal and point of departure of science fiction literatures is the incorporation of semi factual technical-cum-imaginative devices and novel scientific epistemic themes and tropes that embody both cognitive estrangement and novelty, and, in informational terms and in the context of the informational turn in the philosophy of fiction, qualitative surprisal value that is grounded in quantitative surprisal value. Science fiction theorist Darko Suvin referred to these devices as novums. In his (2011) The same literary devices can be analysed in terms of an aesthetics of complexity and surprisal value. We investigate the way in which multimodal perception and attention, and the combination of internal cognitive sources embodying both factual information and imaginative modes may contribute to the aesthetic content and aesthetic perception of novum in science fiction, especially with respect to the kind of novum that are meta-informational or that embody what has been called the informational aesthetic of complexity and counterfactual pseudo-information.

( Broderick, 1994, 1995; Bromberger, Sternschein, Widick, Smith, & Chatterjee, 2011; Hackett, 2016; Iser, 1978; Kincaid, 2011; Moles, 1966; Nanay, 2011b, 2012b, 2012a, 2013, 2016, 2016, 2017, 2018c; Renault, 1980; Rubin, 2013; Slusser, 1980; Suvin, 2010; Williams, 2014)

Bibliography

Aberg, J., Shtarkov, Y. M., & Smeets, B. J. M. (1997). Multialphabet coding with separate alphabet description. 56–65.

Barron, A., Rissanen, J., & Bin Yu. (1998). The minimum description length principle in coding and modeling. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 44(6), 2743–2760. https://doi.org/10.1109/18.720554

Benson, N. C., Butt, O. H., Jain, S., Brainard, D. H., & Aguirre, G. K. (2013). Cortical surface structure predicts extrastriate retinotopic function. Journal of Vision, 13(9), 271–271. https://doi.org/10.1167/13.9.271

Blake, I. F., & Mullin, R. C. (2014). The Mathematical Theory of Coding. Burlington: Elsevier Science.

Broderick, D. (1994). The architecture of Babel: discourses of literature and science. Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Press.

Broderick, D. (1995). Reading by starlight: postmodern science fiction. London ; Routledge.

Bromberger, B., Sternschein, R., Widick, P., Smith, W., & Chatterjee, A. (2011). The Right Hemisphere in Esthetic Perception. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 5, 109. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2011.00109

Cavedon‐Taylor, D. (2011). Perceptual Content and Sensorimotor Expectations. The Philosophical Quarterly, 61(243), 383–391. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9213.2010.691.x

Collier, J. (2008). Information in Biological Systems.

D’Alfonso, S. (2014). The Logic of Knowledge and the Flow of Information. Minds and Machines, 24(3), 307–325.

de Haas, B., Schwarzkopf, D. S., Urner, M., & Rees, G. (2013). Auditory modulation of visual stimulus encoding in human retinotopic cortex. NeuroImage, 70, 258–267. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.12.061

Dilworth, J. (2007). Representationalism and indeterminate perceptual content. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6(3), 369–387. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-007-9050-6

Dretske, F. (1983). Précis of Knowledge and the Flow of Information. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 6(1), 55–63.

Everson, S. (1999). Perceptual Content. Oxford University Press.

Gómez-Ramirez, J. (2014). A New Foundation for Representation in Cognitive and Brain Science Category Theory and the Hippocampus. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

Hackett, P. (2016). Psychology and Philosophy of Abstract Art: Neuro-aesthetics, Perception and Comprehension. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Iser, W. (1978). The act of reading: a theory of aesthetic response. London [etc.]: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Kincaid, P. (2011). Suvin, Darko. Defined by a Hollow: Essays on Utopia, Science Fiction and Political Epistemology. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 22(2), 277.

Lin, C.-H., Chi, C.-Y., Chen, L., Miller, D. J., & Wang, Y. (2018). Detection of Sources in Non-Negative Blind Source Separation by Minimum Description Length Criterion. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, 29(9), 4022–4037. https://doi.org/10.1109/TNNLS.2017.2749279

Marmodoro, A. (2014). The Problem of Complex Perceptual Content. Oxford University Press.

Moles, A. A. (1966). Information theory and esthetic perception. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Nanay, B. (2011a). Ambiguous figures, attention, and perceptual content: reply to Jagnow. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 10(4), 557–561. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9221-3

Nanay, B. (2011b). Perceiving pictures. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 10(4), 461–480. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9219-x

Nanay, B. (2012a). Perceiving tropes. Erkenntnis, 77(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-011-9282-2

Nanay, B. (2012b). The Multimodal Experience of Art. Aesthj Journal, 52(4), 353–363. https://doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/ays042

Nanay, B. (2013). From Philosophy of Science to Philosophy of Literature (and Back) via Philosophy of Mind: Philip Kitcher’s Philosophical Pendulum. Theoria: An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science, 28(2(77)), 257–264. https://doi.org/10.1387/theoria.6534

Nanay, B. (2014). Empirical Problems with Anti-Representationalism. Oxford University Press.

Nanay, B. (2015a). Perceptual content and the content of mental imagery. Philosophical Studies, 172(7), 1723–1736. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0392-y

Nanay, B. (2015b). The Representationalism versus Relationalism Debate: Explanatory Contextualism about Perception. European Journal of Philosophy, 23(2), 321–336. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12085

Nanay, B. (2016). Aesthetics as philosophy of perception (First edition.). Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.

Nanay, B. (2017). Perceptual Learning, the Mere Exposure Effect and Aesthetic Antirealism. Leonardo, 50(1), 58–63. https://doi.org/10.1162/LEON_a_01082

Nanay, B. (2018a). Blur and perceptual content. Analysis, 78(2), 254–260. https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anx119

Nanay, B. (2018b). Multimodal mental imagery. Cortex, 105, 125–134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2017.07.006

Nanay, B. (2018c). The Aesthetic Experience of Artworks and Everyday Scenes. The Monist, 101(1), 71–82. https://doi.org/10.1093/monist/onx037

Nanay, B. (n.d.). Perceptual Representation/Perceptual Content. Retrieved from http://oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199600472.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199600472-e-004

Purves, D., Augustine, G. J., Fitzpatrick, D., Katz, L. C., LaMantia, A.-S., McNamara, J. O., & Williams, S. M. (2001). The Retinotopic Representation of the Visual Field. Neuroscience. 2nd Edition. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK10944/

Renault, G. (1980). Science Fiction as Cognitive Estrangement: Darko Suvin and the Marxist Critique of Mass Culture. Discourse, 2, 113–141.

Rubin, A. (2013). Roger Fry’s ‘Difficult and Uncertain Science’ The Interpretation of Aesthetic Perception (1st, New ed. ed.). Bern: Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften.

Ryabko, B. (2008). Applications of Universal Source Coding to Statistical Analysis of Time Series. CoRR, abs/0809.1226.

Schellenberg, S. (2018). In Defense of Perceptual Content. Oxford University Press.

Shea, N. (2018a). Correlational Information. In Representation in Cognitive Science. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198812883.003.0004

Shea, N. (2018b). Representation in cognitive science (First edition.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Shea, N. (2018c). Structural Correspondence. In Representation in Cognitive Science. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198812883.003.0005

Slusser, G. (1980). Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. Darko Suvin. Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 35(1), 73–76. https://doi.org/10.2307/2933480

Suvin, D. (2010). Defined by a hollow: essays on utopia, science fiction and political epistemology. Oxford ; Peter Lang.

Williams, R. (2014). Recognizing cognition: on Suvin, Mieville, and the utopian impulse in the contemporary fantastic.(Darko Suvin and China Mieville)(Critical essay). Science Fiction Studies, 41

[ask-gpt]

Combining time travel with certain kinds of supertask, this paper proposes a novel model for Hell. Temporally‐closed spacetimes allow otherwise impossible opportunities for material kinds of damnation and reveal surprising limitations on metaphysical objections to Hell. Prima facie, eternal damnation requires either infinite amounts of time or time for the damned to speed‐up arbitrarily. However, spatiotemporally finite ‘time travel’ universes can host unending personal torment for infinitely ma

Combining time travel with certain kinds of supertask, this paper proposes a novel model for Hell. Temporally‐closed spacetimes allow otherwise impossible opportunities for material kinds of damnation and reveal surprising limitations on metaphysical objections to Hell. Prima facie, eternal damnation requires either infinite amounts of time or time for the damned to speed‐up arbitrarily. However, spatiotemporally finite ‘time travel’ universes can host unending personal torment for infinitely maquilas. The resulting ontological framework is compatible with the existing constraints on Hell and its metaphysical demands, which are not easily overcome by such temporal‐independent things as supertension, commutativity, and so on.Possible solutions to the ontological problems in which our own personal torment is not always finite are usually not in our head but are more common in nonhuman primate primate primate primate primate primate primate and thus the best explanation for this is that the nonrealities of God and Godlessness need not be infinitely long.Pursuing a metaphysical paradigm for Hell is one aspect of a whole of existentialism that is a synthesis of various metaphysical epistemologies, from metaphysics to ontology, from phenomenology to epistemology, and from theology to theology (see for instance, Stieber's Theology, pp. 484–488). All three disciplines express the same central idea in various ways, with metaphysics having two different modes of approach: the former is the ultimate metaphysical and metaphysics, the latter is the nonrealistically-realistic one. The distinction between ontology and ontology (e.g., the distinction between ontological or metaphysical metaphysics of the individual and of the universe) is critical both historically and historically for understanding the development of philosophical and theological ideas about the fundamental nature of hell and on the ontological role that it plays in our personal experience. It is a striking departure from what, to me, is generally considered canonical in contemporary metaphysical theories of Hell, namely (to my mind) that ontology is about the metaphysical aspect of the Godlessness that (in reality) does not matter as much as a transcendent being could, because such a Godless world involves a vast number of human primate and nonhuman (human primate primate) primate primate primate primate/nationally-permanently-deadly 'infinite torment' of infinite duration. I contend that such a paradoxical concept must, indeed, exist. It is an idea that has been central to philosophical and political philosophy of all kinds in the last 20 years, and I believe such a theory to have been developed in the spirit of Hell because it has been able to offer both a metaphysics-centric worldview which can explain the non-realistic view of God, which is fundamentally a metaphysical account of Godlessness, and a phenomenological account of Godlessness.The present work aims to explain the ontological framework

#gpt-2 #ran out of output space #Anonymous

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Two Cy Twombly Exhibitions Marry Myth and Sensual Abstraction

Cy Twombly “School of Athens” (1961) Oil, oil-based house paint, colored pencil and lead pencil on canvas, 190.3 x 200.5 cm (© Robert Bayer, Bildpunkt AG, Munchenstein)

PARIS — With a sloppy style of vacuous vicissitudes Cy Twombly reversed what the avant-gardes of the prewar era held as a given: the view of history as a burden. There is a marvelous sprightly loose, intuitive feel about Twombly’s operatic paintings that manages to merge mythic, classical intellectualism with a Dionysian sensual immoderation that verges on shit. By this playful amalgam of semiotics with scatology, Twombly redevises history painting into palimpsest poop.

High-brow works such as “Nine Discourses on Commodus” (1963), “Fifty Days at Iliam” (1978) and “Coronation of Sesostris” (2000) organize the relaxed Pompidou retrospective containing some 200 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs, mercifully hung in chronological order. It is cogently enthralling and spaciously mounted by Pompidou curator Jonas Storsve and Nicola del Roscio of the Cy Twombly Foundation. Sad to say, the show will not be travelling from Paris.

Cy Twombly “Untitled (Grottaferrata) III” (1957) Wax crayon and lead pencil on squared paper, 1 of 7 drawings: 21.6 x 29.9 cm (each) (© Galerie Karsten Greve, St. Moritz, Paris, Köln)

Born in Virginia in 1928, Edwin Parker Twombly, Jr. inherited the name Cy from his father — who pitched baseball for the Chicago White Sox and got his nickname after the legendary Cy Young. Following a trip to Paris and Morocco with Robert Rauschenberg, whom he met as a student and accompanied to Black Mountain College for the summer of 1951, Twombly expatriated to Rome in 1957, where he pressed further into his emulsified and rickety style. An uninhibited use of sallow colors is already evident in “Untitled (New York)” (1954) (that opens the show) and “Volubilis” (1953). “Volubilis” is named after the partly excavated Berber and Roman city in Morocco situated near the city of Meknes and commonly considered the capital of the ancient kingdom of Mauretania. The scratchy, scribbled dribbles that “Volubilis” employs owe a lot to a less solemn, that is, transgressive, approach to Abstract Expressionism. Indeed, Twombly’s work’s quintessence is Epicurean and festive in nature — and he never much conformed to AE’s angst ridden expressionism. Yet I felt something like twinges of existential doubt or futility while appreciating the spikey fertility of “Volubilis,” something Twombly most likely absorbed from his early passion for the transubstantiating drawings of Alberto Giacometti.

Cy Twombly “Veil of Orpheus” (1968) House paint, crayon,and graphite pencil on primed canvas 228.6 x 487.7 cm (© Cy Twombly Foundation)

From the same year, there is also a suite of seven child-like, wax crayon drawings that Twombly gave to his friend Betty Stokes, who was married to Venetian aristocrat Alvise Di Robilant and had just given birth to their first child in Grottaferrata (from where the drawings take their name). To make them, Twombly took liberties with the liberty that André Masson’s experiments with automatic drawing yielded in the 1920s. There is also a never-before-seen sweet suite of drawings he made in bed, in the dark at Grottaferrata, that feature repeated, spewing hump-forms suggestive of volcanic eruptions, like the one that buried Pompeii in ash.

The most accomplished post-AE paintings (resembling a bit, Arshile Gorky’s) are those that also engage with a haunting look of improvisational planned chance where chance operations are deliberately introduced into the creative process, such as the tantalizingly smudged “School of Athens” (1961), loopy and sensual “Dutch Interior” (1962) and the tasteful yet flamboyant “Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus” (1962). “School of Athens” and “Dutch Interior” are great examples of his almost convulsive, balm-encrusted paintings made between 1960 and 1962. This is when he created some of his hottest, most voluptuous paintings, in which churning male and female sexual body parts flutter and float through splatters and splurges that play off the thick, eggshell-whitish ground suggestive of foamy sea scum. Inspired in part by the midsummer Italian holiday of Ferragosto (rooted in an ancient Roman fertility festival) the sloppy, raunchy imagery in “School of Athens” is excessively goofy — congregating delicately scratched or scribbled shit messes against each other. Baboons might just as well have produced it.

Cy Twombly “Pan” (1975) Oil pastel and collage on paper, 148 x 100 cm, Cy Twombly Foundation (© Cy Twombly Foundation Archives, courtesy Nicola Del Roscio, photo by © Mimmo Capone)

Twombly does elegiac restraint very well too. This is abundantly apparent in the viscous paintings “Orpheus” (1979) and “Veil of Orpheus” (1968) at the Gagosian exhibition, a calm, whitish show of six large drawings and five paintings that riff on the archaic tale of Orpheus. The large painting “Orpheus” contains urgently curtailed marks that hint at the word Orpheus while refusing to move completely beyond gesture into actual readability. The same level of abstraction as applied to Greek myth is found in French composer Pierre Henry’s great musique concrète composition “The Veil of Orpheus” from 1953. With the audacious “Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus” at the Pompidou, we have before us a large, luxuriant canvas without the typical framed glass barrier so many other paintings here are burdened with. I guess that when these babies sell for around 70 million dollars a pop (as they do) the owners are willing to kill their surface sensuality a bit in the interests of safety. Anyway, “Achilles” conveys an immediate soft-hot, violent (or vigorous) sensual attractiveness — while also remaining curbed. The subject, a reference to Patroclus from Homer’s Iliad, is typical of Twombly’s playful interest in Mediterranean myth. His use of restrained pencil lines and two warm orgiastic marks in “Achilles,” akin to scrawled vandalism, compares favorably to Anselm Kiefer’s pious and heavy resurrections of epic battles and ancient myths that were also presented at the Pompidou not long ago, to less effect.

What distinguishes “Achilles” is its sliding signifiers — the way it correlates a gooey gestural present with an imperturbable, passive, classical past. It also has immediacy. Its seemingly unpremeditated gestures suggest the eternal presence of the now, because Twombly neither accepts the Greek classics as a perfunctory accumulation of events — succeeding one another in time — nor as a reservoir of fixed forms. Rather, especially in “The Vengeance of Achilles” (1962), he seems to have positioned self-possession on the tip of a bloody spearhead, piercing history with a slippery and alienated here-and-now present. At the same time, his slathering and slack markings, such as in “Dutch Interior,” suggest a willful regression into the infantile, so as to move the viewer closer to sensual instinctiveness. Yet the baby-playing-with-poop regression sensed in “School of Athens” is turned out as optimistic: it projects historical confidence at the same time, by piggy-backing on Raphael’s Italian Renaissance “The School of Athens” (1511) frescoes.

Cy Twombly, “Wilder Shores of Love” (1985) Oil-based house paint, oil (oil paint stick), colored pencil, lead pencil on wooden panel 140 x 120 cm (© Robert Bayer, Bildpunkt AG, Munchenstein)

Large scale synthesis of words and images and sophisticated soft lighting propel that confident feel in the fantastically installed “Fifty Days at Iliam” (1978), a ten-part painting cycle based on Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad, on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I was especially moved by the carnal, crimson canvas “The Fire that Consumes All Before It” (1978). Anticipating neo-expressionism by allowing color to become dissociated from line, Twombly’s self-imposed blundering here is far more elegant and earnest than Julian Schnabel’s bombastic combinations of scribbled words and abstract marks would ever be.

As denigrated in Donald Judd’s art criticism, I found less successful the swarming, faux urgent “Nine Discourses on Commodus” (1963) cycle with its overripe and agitated crimson swirling brushstrokes sent hovering on a rather uniform gray ground. These works, devoted to the Roman emperor Commodus, who is remembered as a bloodthirsty ruler, were inspired by John F. Kennedy’s splattered brains when he was assassinated in Dallas. Though ersatz by comparison to “Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus,” I don’t deny some collective force surviving in this series of presentations of bodily sensation in disarray, but the uniform vertical gray ground tends to kill it.

Turning his gestural AE materiality towards the Minimalism and Conceptualism that emerged around the world in the mid-1960s, Twombly created a series of taut, austere, muted paintings with energetic backgrounds of grey or black inscribed with simple geometric forms in distress or script-like loop-de-loops made with white wax crayon. These works, including the windswept “Night Watch” (1966), on loan from a private collection on the West Coast, strongly suggest Joseph Beuys’s scrawled blackboards (though they lack his social idealist (leftist) intent).

Cy Twombly “Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus” (1962) 259 x 302 cm, oil, lead pencil on canvas, collection Centre Pompidou, Paris (© Centre Pompidou / P.Migeat / Dist. RMN-GP)

White is the choice for Twombly’s sculpture assemblages that are grouped together so the Paris skyline enhances them. Even though Twombly was an early enthusiast of Kurt Schwitters’s collages, his assemblages are really not very good. Consisting of disparate found materials like wood, electrical plugs, cardboard boxes, scraps of metal and artificial flowers — and unified by a coat of white plaster — they are just too reminiscent of Picasso’s superior work in the medium. Though all his compositions straddle abstraction, Twombly is so much better, so much more richly psychic, when he stays within two-dimensional, collaged space so as to create unexpectedly affective territories where connections are made to be undone. This is evident in his rather juicy but minimalistic “Bacchanalia” (1977) cycle and particularly with the gratifying “Pan” (1975) collage. Probing the gap between sign and signified, it is a delighting feat of free association thrown up against a state of panic.

Like handwriting adorning a love letter, the title makes its way across the top half of “Wilder Shores of Love” (1985), a work alluding to the 1954 Lesley Blanch book of the same name. Thus Twombly evokes a kind of sentimental longing for other places and other times through a compost heap of past matter — now ready to sprout new forms.

Some may contest this, but for me, the Pompidou show slides unpropitiously downhill from there, as Twombly relies less and less on his emollient energetic mark making and more and more on letting gravity have its way with drooling liquid paint. This continues until finally, as with the limp loop-de-loop “Untitled (Bacchus)” (2005), the dripping drool becomes the sine qua none of old age and festive excess itself.

Well, at least it was a major whoop while it lasted.

Cy Twombly continues at the Centre Pompidou (Place Georges-Pompidou, 4th arrondissement, Paris, France) through April 24, and Cy Twombly: Orpheus continues at the Gagosian Gallery (4 Rue de Ponthieu, 8th arrondissement, Paris, France) through February 18.

The post Two Cy Twombly Exhibitions Marry Myth and Sensual Abstraction appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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[jhmetal09-blog-blog]

An orally bioavailable broad-spectrum antiviral inhibits SARS-CoV-2 and multiple endemic, epidemic and bat coronavirus

Timothy P. Sheahan, Amy C. Sims, Shuntai Zhou, Rachel L. Graham, Collin S. Hill, Sarah R. Leist, Alexandra Schäfer, Kenneth H. Dinnon III, Stephanie A. Montgomery, Maria L. Agostini, Andrea J. Pruijssers, James D. Chapell, Ariane J. Brown, Gregory R. Bluemling, Michael G. Natchus, Manohar Saindane, Alexander A. Kolykhalov, George Painter, Jennifer Harcourt, Azaibi Tamin, Natalie J. Thornburg, Ronald Swanstrom, Mark R. Denison, Ralph S. Baric

Full paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.19.997890v1.full.pdf

In the past 20 years, three novel human coronaviruses have emerged. The group 2b SARS-like CoV represent an existential and future threat to global health as evidenced by the emergence of SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV2 and zoonotic SARS-like bat CoV strains that can use human ACE2 receptors, grow well in primary human airway cells and vary by as much as 25% in key therapeutic and vaccine gene targets.

Thus, to address the current public health emergency of COVID-19 and to maximize pandemic preparedness in the future, broad-based vaccines and therapeutics, which are active against the higher risk RNA virus families prone to emergence are desperately needed.

Here, we report the broad-spectrum antiviral activity of NHC and its orally bioavailable prodrug EIDD-2801, against SARS-CoV, MERS-CoVand related bat-CoV in primary human airway epithelial cells, as well as against the current pandemic strain SARS-CoV-2.  In addition, NHC is broadly active against multiple genetically distinct viruses including coronaviruses, Venezuelan equine encephalitis (VEE), influenza A and B, Ebola, and Chikungunya viruses.

Here, we show that prophylactic and therapeutic EIDD-2801 significantly reduced lung viral loads and improved pulmonary function in mouse models of both SARS-and MERS-CoV pathogenesis.

Small molecule antivirals can exert their antiviral effect through multiple mechanisms including blocking viral entry, inhibiting a virally encodedenzyme, blocking virus particle formation, or targeting a host factor required for replication.  For VEE, EIDD-2801 exerts its antiviral activity on the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase leading to error catastrophe by inducing an error rate of replication that surpasses the error threshold allowed to sustain a virus population. This process occurs when NHC is incorporated during RNA synthesis then subsequently misread thus increasing mutation rates.  Here, we present data using Primer ID NGS, a state of the art deep sequencing-based approach, to quantitate the frequency and identity of the mutational spectra in the MERS-CoV genome in both drug treated primary human airway cells and in mice at single genome resolution.

As CoV are positive sense RNA viruses that replicate through a negative sense RNA intermediate, NHC incorporation as a “C” or a “U” can occur in both polarities of RNA. Using Primer ID NGS, we found increased nucleotide transitions(A to G, G to A, C to U, U to C) consistent with those reported after influenza and VEE infections

In primary human lung cell cultures and mice infected with MERS-CoV, the NHC mutation rates inversely correlated with a reduction in infectious virus.

Although speculative, the SARS-and MERS-CoV in-vivo data provided herein suggest that 2019-nCoV will prove highly vulnerable to NHC treatment modalities in vivo, critical experiments that must be performed as animal models become available.

[stormyrecords-blog]

new arrivals 9-29-17

stormy records

13306 michigan ave

dearborn, mi 48126 313-581-9322

so many great new releases this week!!! wow!! call or email us if there is something you would like to place on hold or do mailorder for. we use realy great mailers!! THESE ITEMS IN STOCK NOW!! "ACID NIGHTMARES"   Various Artists Double LP ($26.99)    Re-stock of this excellent brand new offering from Numero Group as part of their 'Wayfaring Strangers' ongoing series.     VERY psychedelic artwork in a gate-fold cover & includes a heavyweight comic book-style insert. 

"DARKSCORCH CANTICLES"  Various Artists Double LP ($26.99)     Back In Stock after a very long absence.   KILLER double LP (from Numero Group) of mainly undergound Heavy Rock Metal bands     from the 1970's into the 1980's.   Includes great tracks by the likes of MEDUSA, AROGANCE, STONEHENGE, HELLSTORM     and more.   Blue Foiled Gatefold Cover * 17 songs

GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR:  "LUCIFERIAN TOWERS"   LP ($23.99)     Re-stocked a few more copies of their fine new release.  Comes with a poster & a dowload redemption code.

PROTOMARTYR:   "RELATIVES IN DESCENT"     Blue Color Vinyl LP $17.99 / Cassette Tape $7.99 / CD $11.99    Free Button with purchase of either format

  REAL ESTATE:    "IN MIND"  LP ($17.99)    Released earlier in 2017 * 1st time in stock  

TIMMY'S ORGANISM:   "EATING COLORS"  LP ($18.99)    Brand New Full Length Album!  w/ Download new items for friday SEPTEMBER 29th 2017 FUNKADELIC  Maggot Brain (Clear & Blue Vinyl)  LP  $28.99 "1971's Maggot Brain is the all-out Funkadelic masterpiece. Absolutely no one working in soul and funk at the time had the scope, or vision, to pull off the kind of record that George Clinton and his collaborators have made here. Eccentric funk jams are book ended by two of the heaviest tracks ('Maggot Brain' and 'Wars of Armageddon') ever committed to tape. The title track, and album opener, is nothing short of mind-blowing, Eddie Hazel's guitar is a revolution brought on by Clinton asking him to play 'as if your mother just died.' Maggot Brain is an essential classic and the deepest album to come out of the Parliament-Funkadelic camp. Clear & blue vinyl in a deluxe classic style gatefold sleeve. Limited edition of 1,000."   

AMBARCHI, OREN  Stacte Karaoke II   12"  $21.99 What happens when Oren Ambarchi is backed up by the world's greatest monster riff legends from his beloved homeland? Find out in the second volume of this infamous series where endless riffing and ecstatic shredding is the order of the day. Bonus intro track features some band from New York. Yah Boobay! Deluxe sleeve with photography by Crys Cole and Theresia Pfaender. Design by Stephen O'Malley. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. VABollywood Bloodbath: The B-Music of the Indian Horror Film Industry   2LP on Finders Keepers  $29.99 this is one of carl's favorite records - he says it is absolutley essential 2017 repress; Double LP version. After what seems like a thousand years of blood, sweat, tears, and a lot more blood, the zombified disc-disciples at Finders Kreepers unveil one of their most exquisite, exhumed, ectoplasmic, and existentially essential collections yet. This musical mausoleum of malformed freak funk and dreadful discothèque pop has been resurrected from the maligned cinematic subculture of Bombay's bloodthirsty horror film industry and witnesses the cognoscenti of the Bollywood pop scene at their most creative, destructive, and experimentally effective. Bollywood Bloodbath features India's finest composers, such as Bappi Lahiri, R. D. Burman, Sapan Jagmohan, and Laxmikant-Pyarelal, making the kind of radical risk-rock that would, under normal circumstances, have studio security escorting these overworked maestros off-set for a well-earned break or a relaxing exorcism. You've heard Italy's most famous composers when they soundtrack unwatchable Roman slasher flicks on their own uncompromised and underpaid terms? Well that blueprint just turned blood-red with sub-shoestring, low-budget studio wizards gambling with rigor mortis rock, disjointed disco, and low-voltage electronics for seldom-screened scenes of desi Draculas, lycanthropic ladykillers, and psyched-up swamp monsters. The factual history of the untraveled Bollywood horror phenomenon is fully re-exhumed with this compendium in true Finders Keepers style. Carefully documenting the drummy theme from the first-ever 1949 Indian ghost film, this benchmark collection follows the sinister lineage as directors of bloody thrillers take chances on shuddering synopsis and haywire special effects. Leading up to the inauguration of the notorious Ramsay Bros film company (whose sibling revelry in the '70s and '80s lead to the inclusion of flight-style puke bags in participating picture houses), this compilation pulls no punches and plunges the "B" of Bombay into the heart of the B-movie, squirting a masala of bloody ketchup and red wine onto the sets of Bollywood's glorious filmic musicals. Licensed exclusively from the independent Indian film music companies (revealing incidental tracks that they didn't even know they owned), Bollywood Bloodbath is the result of avid stomach-turning research via VHS tapes, chewed-up cassettes, and LPs, 12''s, and 45s, remastered from some of the only existing master tapes; presented for both the hairy home listeners and daring DJs. Also includes tracks by Rajesh Roshan, Hemant Bhosle, Ratandeep Hemraj, Usha Kanna, Khemchand Prakash, and Nadeem & Shravan. LARAAJIAmbient 3: Day of Radiance  LP+CD  $27.99 LP version. 180-gram vinyl. Gatefold sleeve. Includes CD. 2015 remastered reissue. Includes lengthy interview with Laraaji. Laraaji's glistening 1980 debut Ambient 3: Day of Radiance has from the beginning been considered an outlier. Though widely celebrated at that the time of its original release (as the third installment in Brian Eno's emerging ambient music series), the album also brought with it an aura of mystification. Where did it fit in? An uncharted synthesis of resonating zither textures, interlocking hammered rhythms, and 3-D sound treatments (courtesy of Eno), Day of Radiance seemed to push open many doors at once, ambient music being only one of them. Though there are certainly aspects of the album that find sonic common ground with other Eno-related "ambient" projects (on the tracks "Meditation #1" and "Meditation #2" in particular), the album is not easily boxed into a singular genre. Day of Radiance also mines the ethereal spiritualism of late-'70s new age music (of which Laraaji is considered a pioneer), the harmonic and rhythmic repetitions of American minimalists Terry Riley and Steve Reich, and traditional global sounds from India and Java (particularly gamelan music). And while Laraaji never explicitly embraced the "Fourth World" theories of fellow visionary and Eno collaborator Jon Hassell, Day of Radiance echoes a kindred exploratory exoticism. In the late '70s Brian Eno had relocated to New York City from London and had begun a period of fertile intersections with musicians in his adopted home. Laraaji recounts how he and Eno first crossed paths: "I was playing [zither] in Washington Square Park and I usually play with my eyes closed because I get into meditative trance states that way, and opening my eyes and collecting my little financial reward from that evening, there was a note, on notebook paper -- it looked like it had been ripped from somebody's expensive notebook -- there was a note that says 'Dear sir, kindly excuse this impromptu piece of message, I was wondering if you would be interested in talking about participating in a recording project I am doing, signed: Brian Eno.'" The album was completed in two sessions; the first one produced the faster, pulsing "Dance" compositions (on the A-side) and the second session yielded something closer to Eno's own ambient constructs -- slow zither washes and waves with more pronounced sound enhancements (on the B-side). While the album is deceptively simple in its construction, closer listening reveals its extraordinary depth of field and its polymath influences. ELODIEVieux Silence  LP   $23.99LP version. Stephen O'Malley on Elodie, the project of Andrew Chalk and Timo van Luijk, and their album Vieux Silence: "Having been entranced by both Andrew Chalk's work with Mirror (and back to his solo works as Ferial Confine, plus multiple collaborations with David Jackman, The New Blockaders, Daisuke Suzuki, etc.), and Timo van Luijk (as Af Ursin, In Camera, La Poupée Vivante, and collaborations with Kris Vanderstraeten and others) for many years, I was naturally intrigued to hear about and hear their duo project Elodie. The project formed in 2010, and has spanned eleven beautiful albums already, to date. Vieux Silence for Ideologic Organ is their first release presented outside of their own record publishing nook, Faraway Press and La Scie Dorée. However this is not the first encounter between Ideologic Organ and Elodie, they performed at a night in London I curated in February 2012, alongside Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang. Elodie's performance was among the most delicately engaging and savant I have witnessed... so very quiet, with snow falling in London outside Cafe Oto's windows, the audience palpably entered a high intensity listening focus. The impression of this vivid memory is striking, considering how spare each of the individual elements present that night were. Vieux Silence, and Elodie in general, provoke a visual imagination in an instant, perhaps filtered through aged watercolor, tape grain, antique lenses, forgotten levels of listening, and observational patience. On this gorgeous album, Chalk and van Luijk also collaborate with piano, pedal steel, and clarinet (played by: Tom James Scott, Daniel Morris, and Jean-Noel Rebilly, respectively). Each detail carefully considered and coloring step-by-step, like an impressionist watercolor." Personnel: Tom James Scott - piano; Jean-Noël Rebilly - clarinet; Daniel Morris - guitar pedal steel. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering. 75 DOLLAR BILLWood/Metal/Plastic/Pattern/Rhythm/Rock  LP  $23.99 2017 repress. 75 Dollar Bill, a project by Che Chen and Rick Brown present Wood/Metal/Plastic/Pattern/Rhythm/Rock. "Che's interest in the Arabic modes of Mauritanian music has marked our sound quite a bit but I have brought some things, too. The plywood crate I play is a big factor, defining, by its positive qualities (a nice warm 'boom' sound) as well as by its simplicity, what we're likely to do in the percussion realm. Wood/Metal/Plastic/Pattern/Rhythm/Rock, this new record, differs quite a bit from the previous one, notably in the rhythmic 'tone.' Wooden Bag (2015) was all forward momentum, stomping and shaking, but the new record explores a long-standing interest of mine: odd and 'compound' meters. In most of my previous musical activities, I've convinced my partners to delve into this, but in 75 Dollar Bill it has just felt natural and I believe Che's modal investigations and melodic/harmonic tendencies enhance (and are enhanced by) this combination. The current record differs from the last in another big way: reinforcements! Over our few years together, Che and I have frequently had friends play with us at some of our gigs. There have been all sorts of permutations of instruments and some great friends/players who don't all appear on this record but here we are lucky to have a bunch of them: Cheryl Kingan (of The Scene Is Now) on baritone and alto saxes, Andrew Lafkas (of Todd Capp's Mystery Train) on contrabass, Karen Waltuch (of Zeke & Karen) on viola, Rolyn Hu (of True Primes) on trumpet and Carey Balch (of Knoxville's Give Thanks) on floor tom. Please enjoy Wood/Metal/Plastic/Pattern/Rhythm/Rock. 'Earth' saw is one of our earliest tunes and, I think, the first result of this 'compound meter' approach. It's a slow 9 beat phrase Che came up with for this odd groove. 'Beni Said' has no fixed rhythmic cycle but a roughly unison melodic phrase and a pulsing, loose feeling of 3s and 4s played using a box full of bottle caps. 'Cummins Falls' features Carey Balch on Diddley-beat floor tom and me reprising the maracas. 'I'm Not Trying To Wake Up' is another of our compound meter songs, this one using an 18 beat scheme." - Rick Brown TURRONERO, ELNew Hondo   CD  $17.99Pharaway Sounds present a reissue of El Turronero's New Hondo, originally released on Belter in 1980. There were two labels in Spain during the '70s which were essential to understand the birth of the rumba-flamenco-pop genre: Belter and Discophon. Thanks to the work of adventurous in-house producers and sound engineers like Josep Llobell, Joan Barcons and Lauren Postigo, funk, rock, disco and jazz arrangements were incorporated to recordings of folkloric flamenco singers and rumba bands. The result was explosive and the Spanish market was flooded with "gipsy-rock" or "rumba pop" 45s and LPs, some of them highly sought-after today by international DJs looking for exotic beats. New Hondo is an otherworldly mix of cosmic disco, funk, boogie, and traditional flamenco styles by Spanish "cantaor" El Turronero. New Hondo features the legendary Josep Llobell (Oliver's Planet, Enterprise) at the controls. Including "Las Penas" and more. Remastered sound from the master tapes; Includes insert with photos and liner notes by Txarly Brown (Achilifunk). "A flamenco singer with pedigree like El Turronero lost in Studio 54 on a hangover day" --Txarly Brown. HARRY PUSSYA Real New England Fuck Up  LP  (this item will be in NEXT week)Previously unreleased mid-'90s live recordings of Harry Pussy in peak trio formation, with extensive eye-witness liner notes by Siltbreeze label-head Tom Lax and Tom Carter of Charalambides. Edition of 500. "The 1996 Shadow Ring / Harry Pussy / Charalambides 'Rose Watson' tour. . . . There were two vans, three bands, two drivers. Tom Lax was at the helm, rationing the booze and blasting Killed By Death Volume Whatever all through the Midwest. I walked out of a gig in Ypsilanti and tripped on a large dildo. Soundmen held their ears in Cleveland. We rolled out of Rochester (after Adris and my bandmate Jason blew an entire soundcheck screaming insults at each other in Spanish) and the soundman stuck his head in the car and yelled 'don't ever come back!' Byron Coley booked a show in Amherst with an audience of zero. Harry Pussy and Shadow Ring played, we didn't, and everyone was hanging out afterwards in front of the Unitarian Church when the local bus pulled up. Its lone occupant stepped out, looked around, and asked 'Is this where the Harry Pussy show is?' The TT's show, snipped from the end of this tour, was a shambolic near disaster. The fact that a recording survives at all is a minor miracle. We arrived to witness openers the Cotton Kings fleeing the venue after eating a bunch of acid, destroying the PA monitors, and swiping Adris's cymbals, which one tripping, bathrobe-clad member slunk back to return later. . . . Mr. Lax tried to calm me down by feeding me bourbon shots. We played. The PA was shot and we couldn't hear each other. I hurled my guitar across the stage, poured my beer over my head, and threw a pair of slides into the crowd, narrowly missing Wayne Rogers. Harry Pussy took the stage and sandblasted the night into oblivion, while I hid in the van (Mac: 'What the fuck is your problem?') until I was sober enough to attempt to find the Greyhound station and catch the first bus back to Houston. Christina spotted me wandering off and forcibly dragged me back into the club." --Tom Carter VAEgypt & Lebanon: Cosmic Arab Disco & Searing Dance Floor Bangers 1974-1985 LP  $21.99Egypt & Lebanon: Cosmic Arab Disco & Searing Dance Floor Bangers 1974-1985 is a monumental introduction to some of the hippest proto-electronic music from the Middle East in the 1970s and 1980s. These are some of the prime cuts that electrified dance clubs throughout the Middle East, from Cairo to Beirut, featuring psychedelic synths and organs, break-neck percussion, and mind-bending beats. The music is a flowering of experimentation with synthesizers, complex electronic flourishes, hard-disco funk, and swirling innovative melodies based on traditional forms. This LP compilation proves some of the most forward-thinking music being made in Arab world was conjured by absorbing everything that radiated from European and American discos and then furthering the dialogue, with sublime results. Features twelve, secret weapon tracks to set ablaze any dancefloor. Features Joseph Nemnom, Iman El Bahr Darwish, Isahn Al Munzer, Mohammed Jamal, Assa'd Khoury With His Oriental Electronic Organ & Band, Ammar El Shariyi, and Farid Atrache.

[micaramel]

Artist: Stano Filko

Venue: Kunsthalle Bratislava

Exhibition Title: 2037

Date: June 22 – August 27, 2017

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Kunsthalle Bratislava

Press Release:

Professionals, colleagues, and close friends know that the date and place of the author’s birth played a significant role throughout his richly structured work. Both gradually became a conceptual as well as factual mytheme of the utopian “art-system” that Filko built and synthesized foremost in the last decades of his life. According to his birth certificate, Filko was born on June 15, 1937 in Veľká Hradná, a small village in the Trenčín District. However, the objective reality of the official record was constantly disrupted and layered by the author in the intentions of the ideal of “subjective-objective art” that originates in modern art. Influenced by conceptual art, Filko later turned to “merging art and life”. Instead of stating dates, the paintings and text arts especially from the late period feature a special triple date that says “13.14.15.JUNE”. This numerical code refers to the authenticated reality of Filko’s birth on June 13 and the official registration at the registry two days later.

Filko’s multifarious lifetime oeuvre has not yet been comprehensively processed. The exhibition catalogs as well as the published reflections of his work tend to focus on the selected themes or periods of Filko’s work. The only retrospective exhibition as of yet was presented by the State Gallery in Banská Bystrica in 2003 (Filkontemplaciakcieq, curators: A. Vrbanová, V. Beskid). Shortly after the unexpected death of the author, the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava also organized a monographic exhibition (Poetry on Space – Cosmos, curators: L. Gregorová-Stach, A. Hrabušický), but a full-fledged retrospective with a monograph is still being prepared. Despite numerous exhibitions, expert analyses and reflections, Filko’s oeuvre remains exclusive to the involved “connoisseurs”. Even the recent project of the Slovak National Gallery, compiled relatively clearly and approachably, has not helped the wider public to fully understand the author. Thus, the questions of the processing methodology, reflection, as well as the exhibition presentation of the author is becoming increasingly urgent.

Content-wise, Filko’s work is defiant to the traditional artistic-historical rendition, not only for the absence of dating or its replacement by autobiographical data (which was mistakenly considered as antidating), but especially due to the fact that the author visually and semantically re-contextualized his older works ex-post, giving them a new reading. Each time, he integrated older and new works side by side retroactively within the framework of his current scope of knowledge. The pneumatic objects and environments from the late 1960s and early 1970s (i.e. Breathing – The Celebration of the Air, 1970), the form of which later appeared in Filko’s work in the new ideological context of the color spectrum and the chakra system (the series Balloons – 12 Color of Reality, around 2005), are the perfect examples of this approach, while the metallic objects of non-expressive colored and perforated rockets (the series Rockets 1st – 12 Chakra, around 2005) stem from Filko’s early graphic and spatial works (e.g. SPACE X. ROCKETS, 1967).

Hence, an exhibition model that would explore the development of the core subject matters within the context of the author’s autobiography could be quite innovative. The composition, sign structure, intertextuality and contextuality of Filko’s work impede its primary aesthetic reception, which the audience often finds complicated. An attempt to make his conceptually structured work more approachable through his personal (and very turbulent) story seems possible, and even relevant considering the nature of the work – the aim of which is to fuse art and life within the basic premises of conceptualism. The exhibition title 2037 refers to the futuristic-utopian accent of the author’s work after 2000, when he sought to express the universe through the color spectrum and its synthesis in the form of installations, objects, but also rather subtle concepts on paper. At the same time, the number represents the unfulfilled utopia of Filko’s own earthly life, which he not only spoke of in recent years, but also encoded it in the form of the birthday triad especially in his textual and visual works.

Modest but exclusively situated exhibition presents a selection of Filko’s works borrowed from collection of Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava and private collection, aiming to present his spatial, surface, as well as conceptual thinking about the structure of the world and being, as well as his own existence in it. Later on, he layered the gradually specified the system of the existential dimensions of human life (3.D. = Earth = red/4.D. = space = blue/5.D. = metaphysical = white) into the chakra structure through a 12-color spectrum. After returning from emigration in the USA in 1990, this universal-utopian system of expressing qualitative levels of life is present in most of his newer works and exhibition concepts. With regard to this color-semantic system, Filko focused on creating a complex environment, a total installation as an absolute world as such since approximately the mid-1990s, at first in his studio in Bratislava, later in his birthplace – the village of Veľká Hradná, where he was building a place for his art and message for many years. Through this approach Filko once again overlapped the objectivizing concept with his personal mythology, merging art and life.

The installation of 12 sheet metal rockets creates a certain peristyle. Individually, each object represents one of the chakras according to the painted color spiral; together they express the continuity and coherence of the whole. Filko’s desire was to use the symbolism of colors to capture “Everything” – from the rudimentary earthly being to transcendence, spirituality, and vacuum. The subject matter of rockets was present in his work already in the late 1960s. Originally, they expressed his fascination with the first flights into space, the discovery of new spheres of human life and the enhancement of knowledge, associating the moment of withdrawal and transfer to other higher dimensions – from physicality to spirituality. The final object is a vertically perforated, white-painted illuminated rocket (Rocket – White –Tranzsprarent – 12th Chakra). It represents an aperture beyond the discerned or conceived reality towards transparent and essential spirituality.

The concept of the author’s spatial thinking is complemented by a monochrome inflatable balloon – a ball that anticipates the metaphysical 5th dimension in the color spectrum. Its shape and meaning suggest the Earth, which “personifies” all three levels of existence at once (earthly life, sphere of space and timeless spirituality that surrounds and highlights everything). The stand-alone work, which is part of a larger installation of 12 balloons (the series Balloons – 12 Colors of Reality, around 2005), points to the structure of Filko’s oeuvre, where each part usually refers to the broader context of the whole but also to itself. In addition to planetary associations, the shape of an object can also imply more universal expressive categories such as completeness, perfection, or absoluteness. Finally, the interpretative context extends the motif of vacuum as an indeterminate void, which Filko embodied presumably most aptly in the object of a transparent balloon (Ø 4 m) made of translucent synthetic plastic.

The model of being according to the author is also visualized by a collection of prints on paper, created mostly around 2005. Back then, Filko presented his installation The Model World/Quadrophonia (together with J. Mančuška, B. Ondreička and M. Pokorný) at the Venice Biennale. He moved his studio on Snežienková Street in Bratislava to his hometown of Veľká Hradná, where he began building a large “Fyilkoráb” (Ship) as his own (unfinished) museum in the form of a total installation. At the turn of 2005 and 2006, he presented the exhibition Up 300000 km/s in the Tranzit gallery in Bratislava, which was another model of this type of environment, arranged in space according to the logic and symbolism of the color spectrum. Filko’s graphic works on paper, often handwritten and “rewritten”, can be perceived as concepts or even proposals for the spatial application of the spectrum of colors in architecture. At the same time, however, they are autonomous artworks, through which the utopian idea of spatial (and timeless) gesamtkunstwerk grows more expressively powerful.

Nina Vrbanová Curator of the exhibition

Link: Stano Filko at Kunsthalle Bratislava

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