crooked road

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[saratoga springs: dec 2010]

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there is this brilliant neuroscientist named V. S. Ramachandran, who wrote a book called Phantoms in the Brain. He was very interested in people with phantom-limb pain, and he had one patient who had lost his hand from the wrist down, but the guy’s sensation was not only that the hand was still there, but that it was in a painful fist that kept clenching. Ramachandran built a box, with a mirror and two holes in one side. When the guy put his arms in, he saw the one hand reflected. When he opened the hand, he saw it open and it was like the missing hand was unclenching. It fixed his phantom-limb sensation. That’s what I think images do; that’s what the arts do. In the course of human life we have a million phantom-limb pains—losing a parent when you’re little, being in a war, even something as dumb as having a mean teacher—and seeing it somehow reflected, whether it’s in our own work or listening to a song, is a way to deal with it.

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blind boys of alabama : people get ready

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[martha’s vineyard: oct 2010]

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The Mighty Explorers : (You Froze the) O-Rings of My Heart

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“Ingmar Bergman went so far as to say, ‘Andrei Tarkovsky for me is the greatest [director], the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.’ And Akira Kurosawa acknowledged his influence too, adding, ‘Every cut from his films is a marvelous image in itself.’ Tarkovsky’s seven feature films often grapple with metaphysical and spiritual themes, using long takes, slow pacing and metaphorical imagery.”
View select Tarkovsky films online here.

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[arlington, ma: june 2010]

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[walden pond: april 2010]

“This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.”   -Henry David Thoreau

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Elvis Costello : Beautiful

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There is much humour in Ozu’s films, but they are most profoundly marked by an atmosphere of bitter-sweet melancholy … life, inevitably, is full of loss and disappointments, but there is beauty even in sadness. Japanese have an aesthetic expression for this: mono no aware, the tears we shed over the transience of things. It is hard to translate precisely into English, and is frequently cited as a kind of definition of Japanese culture, but it is something all of us can feel.