Toward a theory of art:
music
Recital
From deep inside soft warmth,
shy glance outward and daring intimate pressure on the instrument that opens her to memory. It serves her as a speculum.
George Eastman, whose Eastman Kodak atelier fashioned the speculum for the hands of mezzo-soprano Ina Bourskaya, was born in 1854. Sigmund Freud was born in 1856. Because portraiture is an art of revealing the body, a new way of portraying will equip the eye with new, bodily ways of experiencing. Wielded a century ago under Eastman’s influence, this cable release was a newly seductive unbuttoner.
Eastman’s original advertising slogan was this. Consider it sung by Don Giovanni.
They that carried us away captive required of us a song
In the midst of all this life, what won’t die is the music
November 28, 2020: songs for the Decameron
In Honolulu’s Koko Head District Park, among silent cattle egrets, the members of a barbershop quartet rehearse under social-distancing conditions. Notice the yellow barrier tape around the playground equipment, but notice also the gregarious word “Barbershop” on the orange shirt. The mountain isn’t Koko Head but the nearby Koko Crater.
Elegy: the deeply right adjective
O gerne im Grünen
He understood the connection between how you dress and how you move
And now he’s dead of coronavirus.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/world/africa/aurlus-mabele-dead-coronavirus.html
Band
metal brought among men:
passage of mortal breath shaped by ideal curves into a form with an ending:
pulse for the destined dead:
…
Restored detail of “‘Elmira Cornet Band,’ Thirty-third Regiment, of the New York State Volunteers, July 1861.” Civil War Negatives and Related Prints Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2013648631/