On being : single, double, triple and trouble

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bLOGOS/HA HA loves the wisdom of the The Goons.

A favourite insight, often recalled, is their description of Caesar as projection-space with troubled interior :

Greenslade: Caesar, Caesar.
Caesar: Oh, it's Stomachus Grossus!
Greenslade: Caesar, there is an angry rabble outside, we have their leader captive.
Caesar: Is he bound?
Greenslade: Of his health I know not, sir.
Caesar: Bring him hither, sir...
Bloodnok: Ohh! Take your hands off me! You want to catch something? Ahh! So you're Julius Caesar, ehh?
Moriaritus: Caesar is all things to all men.
Bloodnok: Oh, it must be hell in there!

from "The Histories of Pliny the Elder"
by Spike Milligan and Larry Stephens
sourced from here

The transformation was complete,
the others had taken over :
we the self possessed

bLOGOLINKS

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From the Rare Books Collection of the Library of Congress,
via the International Children's Digital Library
www.childrenslibrary.org

Gobolinks or Shadow Pictures
For Young and Old
Ruth McEnery Stuart ~ Albert Bigelow Paine
1896

That's the cover above, and the back cover is two down.

The image below, The Butterfly Man, is one of 73 pages of similar mirror beings. These can be quickly scanned over and then viewed individually : click here then click on READ THIS BOOK

THE BUTTERFLY MAN.

A very gay fellow was he -
As gay as a mortal could be.
And he fluttered about
Till at last he turned out
A Butterfly man, as you see.

Neologist challenges Murdoch : Monetise me!

Mr Murdoch sounded somewhat disenchanted with his investment, telling analysts in February that generating returns from assets such as MySpace remained a challenge.

"I think we have to find new ways to monetise our huge audiences," he said as he reported a "slight downturn" in MySpace's second-quarter revenue.

( full article here )

( It's happening again : here )

A Tibetan Blogger, Always Under Close Watch, Struggles for Visibility

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( click here for woeser's blog )

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By Andrew Jacobs
The Saturday Profile:
NEW YORK TIMES

A graceful, soft-spoken woman whose disquieting tales are often punctuated by nervous laughter, Ms. Woeser has become an accidental hero to a generation of disenfranchised young Tibetans. Like many of her peers, she was schooled in Mandarin, part of a policy of assimilation that left her unable to write Tibetan, and she grew up embracing the official version of history — that the Communist Party brought freedom and prosperity to a backward land.

Her pedigree is all the more notable because her father, the son of a Han father and a Tibetan mother, was a deputy general in the Chinese Army who oversaw Lhasa.

It was only at 24, after seven years studying Chinese poetry and literature, that she reconnected with her Tibetan DNA. During a visit to Lhasa, an aunt dragged her to the Jokhang Monastery, one of Tibetan Buddhism’s holiest sites, and she found herself overwhelmed by the emotional intensity of the faithful. “I was crying so loudly a monk told my aunt, ‘Look at that pathetic Chinese girl, she can’t control herself.’

“It was that moment I realized I had come home,” she said.

( Read full article here )

A Saturday evening blog post

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This is by Jack Welch, October 28 1950.

John Brack retrospective at Ian Potter Centre: National Gallery of Victoria

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JOHN BRACK : a retrospective of the art of John Brack opens today at the Ian Potter Centre of the National Gallery of Victoria.

bLOGOS/HA HA is a great admirer of John Brack and his art.

What is chance? By chance, John Brack's 1971 exhibition of his paintings of nudes and Persian carpets (plus the portrait Barry Humphries in the Character of Mrs Everidge) at Joseph Brown's tiny gallery at the top of Collins Street was the first commercial exhibition your correspondent ever attended. One afternoon some fellow architecture students announced they were off to see Freda's father's exhibition. Did I want to come along? I didn't know Freda's dad was an artist. I didn't know Freda's surname. That's her below, with the flowers : The Girls at School, John Brack, 1959.

To my ready mind the exhibition was magic and my experience of it a palpable hit exacerbated by a vertigo from the floating carpets, the absence of shadows and the playfully uncertain multiple vanishing points of the floorboards, this plus the intoxicating perfume of fresh oil paint and varnish that permeated the confined space. Brack instantly became my model and standard.

The photo below shows artist Lisa Roberts, one of Brack's models for this series, looking at her depiction in The Pink Carpet, 1971. At her website, she recalls that experience in some detail. ( click here )

Gabriella Coslovitch has written several JOHN BRACK preview articles for The Age in recent days. ( here and here ) These also give a portrait of the admirable Helen Brack, John's wife, the artist Helen Maudsley.

bLOGOS/HA HA is always intrigued to note the publicity and photography associated with NGV exhibitions. Most recently noted was this one. Get the picture? Pictures R US

Yesterday, again in The Age, this.

bLOGOS/HA HA has written before about the adventures of the subversive/superversive Golden Guillotine group. Are they also behind these chameleon scenarios of the NGV?

It would seem this institution's representative viewer either assumes or, more sinister, has imposed upon them some approximation to the appearance of each object of their gaze.

In yesterday's three-frames setting below (photo: Rebecca Hallas) the viewer is garbed in the palette of Portrait of Hal Hattam.

I come
I behold
I become

(repeat:)

Before this, at the icon to the right, the guise was classic b&w. Cool, sharp, corporate. Now, as she approaches the Act Three (of Past/Present/Future) projection-space, Portrait of Fred Williams, and enters into that, her appearance will change again. Tweed, I'm guessing.

It is not evident whether or not this morphing also involves changes of mind.

P.S. The next morning, Anzac Day. Unusually, awoke just before dawn. Thoughts of those attending Dawn Service; thoughts of the infinitude of empty emptinesses (after Leonard Cohen's "There is a crack in everything/ That's how the light gets in" and Zeno's paradox). Later, ABC Classic FM plays Arvo Pärt's dolorous Spiegel im Spiegel. It seems appropriate.

I've just looked at the Wiki reference to this work ( here ) and it underlines that feeling and the dawn thoughts:

"Spiegel im Spiegel" in German literally can mean both "mirror in the mirror" as well as "mirrors in the mirror", referring to the infinity of images produced by parallel plane mirrors: the tonic triads are endlessly repeated with small variations as if reflected back and forth.

Am writing this as a post script rather than a new post because it seems to continue yesterday's observations about chameleon and mirror happenings. Here's a drawing done yesterday.

P.P.S. That Leonard Cohen quote above comes from a very suitable Anzac Day song. ( Lyrics from here )

Anthem

The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.


Ah the wars they will
be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again
the dove is never free.


Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.


We asked for signs
the signs were sent:
the birth betrayed
the marriage spent
Yeah the widowhood
of every government --
signs for all to see.


I can't run no more
with that lawless crowd
while the killers in high places
say their prayers out loud.
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
a thundercloud
and they're going to hear from me.


Ring the bells that still can ring ...


You can add up the parts
but you won't have the sum
You can strike up the march,
there is no drum
Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.


Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.


Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in

LOOK AT THIS

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As I look at this
from here
A rhyme from childhood
doth appear

[......]

and dithappear!

HA HA

Made you look
you dirty chook
hanging on

a butcher's hook

M spelled backwards is ............................ M Aaaargh! [Death to all Mirrors!]

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M (for Fritz Lang)

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Today's image (conceived at St Peter's, Rome, in 1988; screen- printed at Berlin in 1992; and over-painted with a red M at Hepburn Springs in 1995) is dated -1995- and inscribed for Fritz Lang, after his 1931 film M.

M for Me, My, Mind, Mirror, Mired, Marked, Murder, Madness, Monolog (and more...)

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Yesterday's image came from an autographed audio LP cover.
Today's is from a film, Fritz Lang's M (1931).

In the previous image the woman before the mirror asks herself:
"What would people say if I let them see the real me?"

In M, the chalk-marked murderer at the end of a pleading monolog reverses this question and addresses it to all who would judge him:
"Who knows what it's like to be me?

An obvious third to recall here is Rene Magritte's widely known Not to be Reproduced (La reproduction interdite), 1937.

Unlike the first two, no formal question accompanies it other than Magritte's clever title and our interrogative self-talk in response.

. . . .

What is chance? By chance, last night I started on the latest Mandala magazine.

In it's opening article, Appearance and Illusion, the late Lama Yeshe (above) suggests another mirror practice :

... If you have realized the reality of non-self-existence, if somebody praises you, prostrates to you and anoints you with perfume while another criticizes you, complains about you or even beats you, you have the space of mind to maintain balance. Why is there space? Have you no mind? Are you out of your mind? Have you lost all feeling? Are you no longer human? Western intellectuals might question me like this. No – you have universal consciousness. What you have lost is the attitude of fanatical, extreme, dualistic grasping. That mind has disappeared.

We lamas have a technique for practicing this kind of detachment. You look at your reflection in a mirror and imagine two people, one hurling insults at the you in the mirror, the other praising and trying to please your reflection as much as possible. As you might expect, the you in the mirror pays attention to neither of them. Now, you’re going to argue that of course the reflection doesn’t respond; it has no mind. There’s no reason for it to be happy or unhappy. But this is not an exercise in logic; this is the lamas’ scientific technique for training our minds to overcome the eight worldly dharmas. Try it out for yourself; you’ll see that it works.

Lama Thubten Yeshe
Extract from Appearance and Illusion, a teaching given at Manjushri Institute, England, August 1977. Published in Mandala : April/June 2009)