M!

Mark Ismay

The perfect photograph

Sitting in the park today watching the unlikely union of suits and vagabonds build rapport surrounding an oversized chess board, it struck me what lies behind the perfect photograph.

Two SLR-clad women stopped by to take a visual record of the game. The first of the two walked by, giggling to a friend and snapped a shot. The second, by contrast, sat and watched two games in their entirety before removing her lens cap. She discovered the personalities of the players and even shook their hands.

Ed Wood

Edward Davis Wood, Jr. is an unconventional role model of mine. Celebrated as the worst film director of all time, Ed Wood would write, direct and star in his own films, demonstrating a tenacity to succeed that is unrivalled.

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Rob May, founder and CEO of Backupify distilled this kind of entrepreneurial passion well: "Your idea sucks, but you should start anyways. You aren't making progress because you aren't learning. A bias for action will fix that."

A bias for action is what Wood possessed. He knew what it meant to fight to survive at all odds, a single-mindedness depicted well in the Tim Burton film 'Ed Wood' which I last saw during a Tim Burton exhibition at the ACMI in Melbourne.

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It is interesting, although not entirely surprising, that Béla Lugosi and Wood become friends (or that Lugosi was exploited by Wood in his declining years, depending on your perspective). Having defined the role of Dracula on the stage, Lugosi set his mind to acquiring the companion film role - much to the chagrin of Universal Pictures - campaigning through so many handwritten letters that he was unable to move his wrist.

It is also interesting that they both seem flawed in the same way: Lugosi not mastering English over his native Hungarian, and Wood never transcending his technical errors and overuse of stock footage. They failed to learn. I was recently asked why I love silent film, and this is why: for all their technical errors, they were pushing boundaries and learning.


I recently saw Jeffrey Hatcher's black comedic play 'Murderers' at the Ensemble theatre, and this bias for action was demonstrated by two of the main characters through their monologues: Lucy Stickler (expertly brought to life by Nancye Hayes) and Minka Lupino.

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There's an interesting article in the New York Times about Greg O’Connell, a real estate developer who gradually bought up the main street of a downtrodden rural area and preceded to renovate each, reinvigorating the town and handsomely profiting from the project.

There's a benefit to taking action.

Tuna Casserole

By Marty Smith from The Free Agent, March 1987 (a Portland, Oregon alternative newspaper).

October 10

I find myself trying ever more radical interpretations of traditional dishes, in an effort to somehow express the void I feel so acutely. Today I tried this recipe:

Tuna Casserole
Ingredients: 1 large casserole dish 

Place the casserole dish in a cold oven. Place a chair facing the oven and sit in it forever. Think about how hungry you are. When night falls, do not turn on the light. 

While a void is expressed in this recipe, I am struck by its inapplicability to the bourgeois lifestyle. How can the eater recognize that the food denied him is a tuna casserole and not some other dish? I am becoming more and more frustated.

This imagined humorous piece, should Jean-Paul Sartre have written a cookbook, has value in its own right in distilling the white noise of daily life. How are we to discover what we want from life when omnipresent spuriocracy[1] fill our senses and mind? I am reminded of a piece I recently read in the Los Angeles Times on the fallacy that a brain at rest is an idle brain. The idea is that our modern lifestyle retards the essential cognitive functions that unify disperate regions of the brain when at rest that might be the origin of the elusive sense of "self" psychologically and psychiatric conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, depression and schizophrenia clinically. This gives whole new credence to the idea of "losing oneself" in their work.

Food for thought, or for daydreaming.

[1] Spuriocracy: coined from the composition of spurious and mediocracy.

Politics and war

John Adams, the second President of the United States in a letter to his wife Abigail Adams on 12 May 1780 said...
 
I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

Seneca the Younger professed liberalia studia as the elevator of a noble from the mechanical and technical skills of a slave. Moral Epistles 88 states...

You have been wishing to know my views with regard to liberal studies. My answer is this: I respect no study, and deem no study good, which results in money-making.  Such studies are profit-bringing occupations, useful only in so far as they give the mind a preparation and do not engage it permanently.  One should linger upon them only so long as the mind can occupy itself with nothing greater; they are our apprenticeship, not our real work.  Hence you see why "liberal studies" are so called; it is because they are studies worthy of a free-born gentleman. But there is only one really liberal study, — that which gives a man his liberty.  It is the study of wisdom, and that is lofty, brave, and great-souled. All other studies are puny and puerile.  You surely do not believe that there is good in any of the subjects whose teachers are, as you see, men of the most ignoble and base stamp?  We ought not to be learning such things; we should have done with learning them.

And yet, for my inherited privilege I have always found manual labour cathartic. Working with ones hands sates the soul like no other activity. Vale.

Having a Coke with You

by Frank O'Hara.

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne   
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona   
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary   
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still   
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it   
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth   
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint   
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
                                                                                       I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world   
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time   
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism   
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or   
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me   
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them   
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank   
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully   
as the horse
                   it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it

Or, read by the author...

I cannot convey how much I adore this poem. The puerility of the form both belies and exalts the message.

Clasp

Fumbling inside an art deco cabinet for an attractive shiraz to warm an otherwise unassuming evening, my hands caressed the clasp holding the opposing door in place. I was fascinated by this mechanism as a child, an equally unassuming aspect of an heirloom from my great grandmother. The brass clasp would break the symmetry of the piece by appearing on only the left door if it was not for its position inside the cabinet: to be felt but unseen unless sought.

Perishability does not cause childhood fascinations to fade but rather broadens curiosity's crosshairs along with an opening world. Corkscrew in hand, Chopin's Op. 28 prelude: No. 7 in A Major seemed to synchronise perfectly with my dance opening the wine bottle. Coincidence is to seduction as screw tops are to veniality; cork taint be damned.

Driving with discourse

All clambered into a car on the way to the snowfields, a tangential discussion about the nature of God and whatnot (you know, the trivial questions of life) reminded me of the song In The Aeroplane Over The Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel.

The song concludes with the lyrics "can't believe / how strange it is to be anything at all" that I've found to be a starkly frank statement of the singular abstruse absurdity that I find completely unfathomable irrespective of the effort I invest in the problem.

I fail to understand how some gloss over this truth so lightly.

Now, how I remember you
How I would push my fingers through your mouth
To make those muscles move
That made your voice so smooth and sweet
And now we keep where we don't know
All secrets sleep in winter clothes
With one you loved so long ago
Now he don't even know his name

The image of Anne Frank's Father Otto Frank placing his fingers into his daughter's mouth on publishing her famed diary account of her experience hiding from a Nazi occupied Netherlands is a stirring one. Equally well, one can imagine the reader bringing Anne's voice to life as they flip through the pages of her diary. The symbol of Anne stands for many: including my Grandmother fleeing Latvia, her home, from the Soviet 'sphere of influence' to the relative refuge yet lifelong displacement of the immigration camps.

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What a curious life
We have found here tonight
There is music that sounds from the street
There are lights in the clouds
Anna's ghost all around
Hear her voice as it's rolling and ringing through me
Soft and sweet
How the notes all bend and reach above the trees

From my favourite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind.

When I looked outside right into the depth of nature and God, then I was happy, really happy.

As the Anne Frank tree ails with disease, The Anne Frank Center's plan to distribute saplings across the United States seems only fitting as it mirrors how my Grandmother's family was cast across the globe like thistledown in the wind.