Cultural Synergy: February 2016

Sunday 28 February 2016

Film quotes #6: A River Runs Through It

But when I am alone in the half-light of the canyon, all existence seems to fade to a being with my soul and memories, and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River, and a four-count rhythm, and the hope that a fish will rise.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.

The river was cut by the world's great flood, and runs over rocks from the basement of time. And some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

Wednesday 24 February 2016

A light shines in the darkness: Piotr Grudziński

[Riverside | Facebook]

Riverside's statement | Mariusz Duda's post

This post is dedicated to the loving memory of an exceptional musician; Piotr Grudziński is not with us any more, but he will never be forgotten.

Saturday 20 February 2016

A day in the life: Paul Klee

Eros, 1923 [PaintingDb]

Paul Klee

Affected Place, 1922 [PaintingDb]

Thursday 18 February 2016

Courage and dignity against the barbed wire

[World Press Photo]

Warren Richardson took this photograph at the border from Serbia to Hungary on 28 August 2015; today it was awarded the World Press Photo of the Year 2015 prize. It may be read as a symbol of hope against the policies of Fortress Europe that have caused so many deaths of migrants and refugees. As Warren Richardson states on the World Press Photo webpage, the picture was taken "around three o’clock in the morning and you can’t use a flash while the police are trying to find these people, because I would just give them away. So I had to use the moonlight alone." In this sense, the picture embodies and underlines the actual political harshness that migrants and refugees are faced with, rather than turn them into a spectacle; and as such, it may also be read as a reflection on the politics of photography.

Wednesday 17 February 2016

Michel Foucault on polemics

[Paul Michel Foucault]

Politics, polemics and problematizations | Foucault, Info

I like discussions, and when I am asked questions, I try to answer them. It's true that I don't like to get involved in polemics. If I open a book and see that the author is accusing an adversary of "infantile leftism" I shut it again right away. That's not my way of doing things; I don't belong to the world of people who do things that way. I insist on this difference as something essential: a whole morality is at stake, the one that concerns the search for truth and the relation to the other.

In the serious play of questions and answers, in the work of reciprocal elucidation, the rights of each person are in some sense immanent in the discussion. They depend only on the dialogue situation. The person asking the questions is merely exercising the right that has been given him: to remain unconvinced, to perceive a contradiction, to require more information, to emphasize different postulates, to point out faulty reasoning, and so on. As for the person answering the questions, he too exercises a right that does not go beyond the discussion itself; by the logic of his own discourse, he is tied to what he has said earlier, and by the acceptance of dialogue he is tied to the questioning of other. Questions and answers depend on a game — a game that is at once pleasant and difficult — in which each of the two partners takes pains to use only the rights given him by the other and by the accepted form of dialogue.

The polemicist, on the other hand, proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in search for the truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is armful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then the game consists not of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak but of abolishing him as interlocutor, from any possible dialogue; and his final objective will be not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has been manifestly upholding from the beginning. The polemicist relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied.

Sunday 14 February 2016

The Lovers, by Lauren Fleishman

[Ignant]

Lauren Fleishman | The Lovers

Tuesday 9 February 2016

Living in a panel: Dave McKean

[Intramuros]

Dave McKean | Cages

I had started making notes for a collection of short stories, but they all seemed to exist in the same place, and many of the characters seemed to relate to each other. Also, at the time, there was an interesting air of independence among the illustrators and writers who started work in the 80’s. The distribution system was quite good, so there was no NEED for a Marvel or DC. Why are we giving away the rights, control and most of the income from our creations? Plus, I knew I wanted to do something that was more experimental than anything DC were interested in, and I wanted to expand into a few hundred pages, not just 64 or 96, in order to pay close attention to how my characters talked and moved and thought.