Given the above here a piece of science we now firmly believe in:
“The distances between stars are huge. The distance from the Sun to Proxima Centauri is 4.22 light years which is equal to forty trillion kilometres. To walk this distance would take you about one billion years. Even our fastest space probes would take sixty thousand years to travel this distance.”
Is it a folly to think this pawn is trying to escape the game by kiting through the frame?
To me, the pawn made the kite and has now found a way to fly it into the power zone so it can pull it into the air right through the restrictions of the fields on the board. I have much sympathy for the pawn. I made the pawn. From clay. I also made the kite and the thread. I glued the thread to the board so it looks like it’s attached to the kite. Also, the kite is painted on an old chessboard. But I painted a cloudy sky behind the kite. And a window.
I read somewhere there once was a military man who studied physics. Having found atoms exist mainly out of empty space. He looked at the wall and figured the wall therefor also exist out of empty space and very little wall. He thought it must be possible to go through the wall using the emptiness. He ran as fast he could and hit the wall at maximum speed.
The freedom of kites seems like the freedom of mind. I can think myself being the kite and fly with joy into the wind and into the power zone. I can pull the pawn up into the air. Right through the constrictions of the game. I can be the pawn. Or the thread. Or the board or the window. I also like to be cloud. White and soft and floating. And then I can have planes fly trough me or rain drop from me.
What better folly then a composition of things in a drawer.
The things in the drawer were loosely gathered to demonstrate unconscious assembly as a pattern. No thing was more important nor more powerful then any other thing. No thing was hustling another thing over a position of relative importance. There was no center of things, rather they were somewhat dispersed. No thing that tied them together but the walls and the bottom of the drawer. Much like everything else.
Manitas de Plata was illiterate, but he played like the best of writers, like the best of painters - brutally direct with no mercy for himself. Just concentrated. Pointed and hard like a rock and soft like moss on it. Almost seemingly clumsy without a plan, following the heart of traditional patterns in flamenco. Stumbling in and picking up speed all by itself. Notes playing Manitas. Also he was the reason i wanted to learn to play the guitar. When I heard him play on my parents record player — i think i was 7, i told them i wanted to learn to play the guitar. And so it went.
I just found the tune and there is a good movie and good sound!
It’s not that Manitas has this great flawless technique, actually, on the contrary. There are may other flamenco players that have much better techniques. Paco de Lucia, Tomatito, Ricardo Nunez, all are stunning technical players. Manitas often starts off playing like a smuggler. He is messy. But as you listen in, it will take you because he lets it take it. No wonder Pablo Picasso supposedly said (I disagree) he was a lesser painter then this guitarist a musician. But it’s understandable because music is performed in a forceful stream of consciousness, especially with an audience, where painting happens in a series of movements, often without audiences. The force of a stream of consciousness shared with audiences demands a very deliberate and focussed attitude tied in with a total acceptance of presence.
Anyway — here is my “Manitas” — an ode to the artist that hooked me up — and thanks for the inspiration.
Produced by Lutein van Kranen & Mark Fonds at www.sunderling.com Peter Arends (accordeon) - Mike Kamp (bass) - Dave van Beek (percussion) - Mark Fonds (guitar)
Fixing debts these days seems to be turning into a game of sudden death. How big can a folly grow in the presence of experts and specialists before everybody can clearly see and experience it’s stinking fumes? The pseudo science behind modern finance, that has grown it’s own meme in borrowing for investment returns and insuring against losses on unpredictability, is a staggering example of how all explanations point back at greed and fear or both. Man is the ultimate, selfish animal. Europe is at the brink of collapsing under it’s own ambition of being a unity of people because it’s leaders and bankers are prone to think of themselves first when arranging for their plan-B. Because they exemplify the norm, everybody is in for the ride. Of course it is a self defeating strategy. The beast is trying to die itself out of death. We are now just watching who is killing who, one by one, in order to jump the ship first. Ow, wait… but what if there is no water in the sea?
Do you feel like watching a reality show that is going to hurt you really hard in your own reality, lets say, the rest of your life? Start digging in. It’s always on, and happening now. Two amusing channels are Yves Smith’s Naked capitalism and Satyajit Das Blog. And this is what i ran into today – I can’t help to, sort of sheepishly, laugh at the next quote from Edward Hugh at Roubini, because it’s probably right on:
So rather than being over, what the debt crisis now may be entering is a new stage, where one sovereign bond after another is being chisled out and sent off to join their Greek counterpart in the isolation ward. Actually, in this sense the present European Sovereign Debt situation does rather resemble the plot of the well known Agatha Christie detective novel “And Then There Were None“. As told by M. Christie a group of ten people, all of whom have in one way or another been previously complicit in an earlier death, are somehow tricked into travelling together for what was intended to be a short stay on a secluded island. Once there, and even though the guests are apparently the only people on the island, they are - somehow, and one after another - systematically murdered. So, in a way which may eventually come to foreshadow scenes from the forthcoming meetings of the European Financial Stability Facility management board, each morning one guest less shows up for breakfast. One by one, and little by little, each participant becomes mysteriously overcome by a seemingly inexplicable bout of some fatal variant of what could be termed “systemic instability syndrome”.
Interestingly there are a whole bunch of bloggers and opinion makers getting their keyboards dirty on commenting Paglia’s rant on Gagaism in defense of the latter. It just feels like what is missed is the part where Paglia has her way with the same thing Gaga has her way with — a dance around the tree of calling who is who in authenticity land. It occurs to me that we assume there are somehow unwritten rules as to that what we say we are and what we say we think and what we are and think — are somehow related. Obviously that is not a necessity. In pop culture one can say anything for the saying of it. Sing anything for the singing and mean nothing. Anyway, this is what they did to the fleshdress after the MTV awards…
A new theme arises: domestication. Strolling through the Amsterdam zoo Artis, we stumbled upon the Domesticated Ass.
From the wikipedia: Domestication (from Latindomesticus) or taming is the process whereby a population of animals or plants, through a process of selection, becomes accustomed to human provision and control. A defining characteristic of domestication is artificial selection by humans.
So how about humans domesticating other humans? How do we artificially select each other?
By humans nature, it seems, words are the tools of creation on top of all chthonic history. Nothing is easy to me about words and meaning. Seriously challenged.
Jinglebell is an initiative by Mark Alexander Fonds. Enjoy.
