Arts
The Arts section of Orient Lodge
Will This Be The Year?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 01/02/2013 - 20:40Each new year brings renewed anticipation.
Will this be the year?
For some, the anticipation may take the form of dread
as they fear an apocalypse or some personal catastrophe.
For others,it may be the hope of transcendence and transformation.
I am seeking the later.The evening sky,
passing on the last light of day,
like a painting
from the British romantic landscape painters,
or perhaps the Hudson River School,
hung over the interstate
on my drive home.
Will this be the year?Yet day after day,
the drive regains its old familiarity
and too easily sinks into monotony or tedium.
Can I keep the image of the nineteenth century romantics in my thoughts as I worry about work, family, and finances? And how do I hold onto perseverance when the cherished event, whatever it might be, continues to be delayed?
Hope deferred makes the soul sick.
Yesterday, I watched Elizabeth Gilbert's TED Talk, "Your elusive creative genius".
She talked about just keeping at it, even when inspiration, her elusive creative genius, did not help carry the load. Yet in the daily grind, the just keeping at it, the repetition, there remains the opportunity for the transcendence, for the transformation to come. My mind wanders to the beginning of Samuel Beckett's Endgame:
Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.
Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap.
When does the pile of grains become a heap? When does one achieve the creative tipping point? When do the blog posts amount to something, some magnum opus?
So, I continue to write my blog posts, to explore ideas, to share, in hopes that the repetition will lead to the impossible heap, the transcendent transformation.
The Hynes 2012 Holiday Quotes
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 12/26/2012 - 10:47I belong to a fairly eclectic, creative, some would say eccentric family, and this is especially noticeable around the holidays. Many humorous, thought provoking or just plain weird things get said around our holiday tables, and this year, I decided to capture some of them via social media.
When I was younger, I always used to carry a notebook around with me, where I could write observations that jumped out at me for one reason or another. This year, I decided to tweet some of the more interesting lines from Christmas morning.
They ended up fitting together very nicely, so, for those who didn’t see them on Facebook or Twitter, or didn’t view them as a whole, here are the Hynes 2012 Holiday Quotes
Of bowties and burquas,
and skin of teddy bear;
it's all very meta
like playing a song
with something that used to be a song,
or the cello guys with TobleroneA slippery slope of maverick jelly beans,
touch screen gloves,
a Santa rubber duckie,
and a modern flint.
It's the holiday of candy fish.Something happens when you talk too much, dad!
And it was the very, very end of the Swedish festival.
Did you get any fish?
I guessed a giant sonic screwdriver because that makes the most sense.
So many things I'm keeping inside my head right nowIs it a Tardis pillow?
I can't believe you guessed that
And how often do you get a bobble head of someone you know?
And what do you do at falcon ridge?
Lie on a blanket.
So what's better than a blanket that's a picture of you lying on a blanket?
Very meta.Brimstone is hard to get
because we live in a blue state.
Now you need to write a song
about the fragility of the universe,
meta picture blankets,
and Doctor Who.Merry Christmas everyone!
#visionforum - Finding My Religion - Picasso's Theory of Relativity
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 12/03/2012 - 07:32Saturday evening, Kim and I went to the Connecticut Forum discussion, Vision and Brilliance which featured Neil deGrasse Tyson, Neri Oxman and Neil Gaiman. The event was sold out; packed with geeks that most likely rarely make it to the Bushnell. I must admit that the only other time I've been to the Bushnell as to see Blue Man Group a couple years ago.
Others have written about what a great event it was, so I'm going to share a few of my thoughts about specific parts of the content. In the slides before the event started, it mentioned that the hashtag for the event was #visionforum. Yet then they played the standard announcement at the beginning of the events at the Bushnell about turning off all electrical devices and not taking photos. A lot of people had their cellphones out as the event started, but the tweeting subsided pretty quickly. Unfortunately, but my phone and Kim's were low on battery power and I didn't get to tweet as much as I would have liked.
John Dankowsky started off with a standard introductory question and the panelists answered the way I had already heard them speak in YouTube videos. Then he moved on to a question about what is vision and brilliance? Where does it come from. The three panelists all seemed to agree and give the same answer in slightly different ways. Vision and brilliance comes from doing what you love. From having a job you don't want to take a vacation from. Tie to that was an important aspect of keeping at your passion, even though others might not understand what you are talking about.
This played out particularly notably between Neri Oxman and Neil Gaiman. Oxman went off on topics about 3D and 4D printing; printing cartilage, printing DNA, and time after time, Gaiman seemed to say, that gives me a great idea for another story. Picasso's theory of relativity, a house seed, and several other ideas.
Oxman had talked about Cubism and the Theory of Relativity emerging at about the same time and how closely related they were in her mind. They were both about taking observations and trying to make sense of them. They both built upon the what was known at the time. It led to some interesting talks about intelligence. Intelligence, at least as it is measured by humans is about learning from others, from not having to rediscover tools or fire in each new generation. I could almost hear President Obama paraphrased into, "You didn't discover that by yourself." I could imagine some conservatives writhing at the idea about how connected and dependent we really are on one another.
After the break, there was a discussion about science and religion. It seemed to fall back on what I believe is a misguided false dichotomy between religion and science. The discussion drifted into the idea of "God of the Gaps", God, described in terms of what science can't explain. I got tired of that discussion over three decades ago in a science and religion philosophy class in college. Tyson spoke favorably about Jefferson's Bible, where Jefferson left out the miraculous and supernatural stuff.
Yet this struck me as anti-science, a sort of science of the gaps. Science is about observing, forming hypotheses and testing them. It is not about discarding observations that contradict current scientific theories. It seemed that Oxman managed to capture the spiritual aspect much more wisely, with an ability to appreciate the beauty of both arts and sciences.
Recently, there was an interview on NPR about a new book about prayer, which broke prayer down to three key forms: Help, Thanks, and Wow. I thought the author was brilliant. We all pray those three prayers in different ways, and Wow is a special place where science, arts, and religion can all meet. It also sums up, fairly nicely, the response to many great ideas that were shared at CT Forum's panel discussion Vision and Brilliance.
The tweeting continued until Sunday, with people talking about another CT Forum nerdfest; perhaps making it an annual event. I know that I have plenty more to write about the event, but I wanted to get these initial thoughts down before the new week started.
Messages from a Future Biographer
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 11/17/2012 - 09:22The other day, I was listening to Fresh Air on NPR and heard an interview with the screenwriter for the new movie about Lincoln. He talked about Daniel Day Lewis getting into character yet at the same time still texting with him. He referred to himself as Lincoln's metaphysical conundrum. Not only did texting not exist back then, neither did movies. Perhaps the best analogy for Lincoln would have been receiving messages via the telegraph from a playwright.
Yet even with that, there issues of communicating across time remain puzzling. When we write, it is people in the future, thinking of time as an ongoing sequence, that will read what we wrote, not people in the past. Texts somehow made available to an earlier time present interesting issues. Could someone from the future, somehow, share with us text that we will write in the future? Perhaps a biography or some literary criticism of something we are yet to write?
Really, this isn't that new of an idea. There have always been fortune tellers, but they are rarely thought of as bearing messages from a future biographer or a future literary critic. There is the whole realm of the unconscious. Can we learn something about, or perhaps possibly shape our future by discovering or exploring what is in our unconscious?
I wrote the other day about the unconscious that perhaps exists in our Facebook groups. Are there messages from the future somehow contained in our Facebook walls?
To bring this back down to earth, yesterday, Kim asked if I wanted to see Neil Gaiman at the CT Forum in a couple weeks; a message about the future. I went and checked out a YouTube video of Gaiman giving a commencement speech at the University of the Arts. He was speaking about the future, "Make Good Art".
Of course, the question of how we make good art remains. Where does inspiration come from? How do we better incorporate creativity into our education system or our work lives? Perhaps a future biographer or critic can give us insights.
Halley's Comet
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 10/20/2012 - 19:01It is a beautiful autumnal evening and a great night to watch for shooting stars. The annual Orionid meteor show peaks this evening. I love meteor showers and often stay up to watch them. I've thought about what to wish on a shooting star this evening, perhaps something about the election, but then, I thought back to the story of the Orionid meteor showers.
They are formed from the dust that Halley's Comet left in its wake the last time it passed by in 1986. This summer, at Falcon Ridge, I heard a great band called Gathering time. Their song, Halley's Comet, was one of my favorites.
It was 1985, when Halley's comet came in view
and if I didn't see it then, it'd be a long, long wait I knew,
I lived in a college town where street lights made stars hard to see
To see it well, I'd have to walk
Unto the school observatory
Though it was often on my mind,
I somehow never found the time
and it had all but vanished when
I knew I'd missed my chances then…
The song goes on to talk about living in Brooklyn, and missing chances to visit the World Trade Center or reconnect with a friend who died on 9/11.
It is a beautiful song about missed opportunities, and a reminder to seize the day.
Halley's comet won't be back until I am over 100, but every year, we get the opportunity to catch glimpses of its remnant streaking across the sky in the Orionid Meteor Showers.
Will I see shooting stars tonight? if so, will my wishes on shooting stars come to pass? I'll need to seize the day, and try to make my dreams come true.
