Blind Pony Books

ALL SORTS OF REMEDIES TALK

2009-12-06T19:30:00.000-08:00

a candid conversation about the twin stars of art & death.

wine will be sold; you may bring your whiskey.

herbert pfostl | all sorts of remedies
november 21, 2009 - january 8, 2010

Observatory | 543 Union Street | Brooklyn
thurs/fri 3-6pm | sat/sun 12-6pm
observatoryroom.org

ALL SORTS OF REMEDIES

2009-11-04T10:23:00.001-08:00

at Observatory

543 Union Street- at Nevins
Brooklyn, New York 11215

Hours:
Thur & Fri 3-6pm
Sat & Sun 12-6pm

Opening: Saturday, November 21st at 7:00pm

Exhibition: November 21, 2009 - January 8, 2010

Further events coinciding with:
ALL SORTS OF REMEDIES:

ART AS MAGIC & THE COLD HARD FACTS OF LIFE

DECEMBER 18 - 7:30

as well as:

Palinurian splinters

2009-10-17T10:38:00.000-07:00

There are also solitary bees, and it is not claimed that they are biologically inferior.

When we see someone living alone, like a beech-tree in a clearing, with no other signs of life around him yet proclaiming his freedom, displaying his possessions and maintaining his devotion to his friends, we can be sure that such a person is an ogre and that human bone-meal lies buried under his roots.

Why do ants alone have parasites whose intoxicating moistures they drink and for whom they will sacrifice even their young? Because as they are the most highly socialized of insects, so their lives are the most intolerable.

Streets of Paris, pray for me; beaches in the sun, pray for me; ghosts of the lemurs, intercede for me; plane-tree and laurel-rose, shade me; summer rain on quays of Toulon, wash me away.

For a dark play-girl in the night-club I have pined away, for a dead school boy, for a bright angel-vixen I have wept in vain, If this thoughtless woman were to die there would be nothing to live for, if this faithless girl forgot me there would be no one for whom to write. These two unseen and otherwise occupied figures compose the fragile arch of my being and constitute a Tribunal which they have long ceased to attend.

A child, left to play alone, says of quite an easy thing, 'Now I am going to to do something very difficult'. Soon, out of vanity, fear and emptiness, he builds up a world of custom, convention and myth in which everything must be just so; certain doors are one-way streets, certain trees sacred, certain paths taboo. Then along comes a grown-up or a more robust child; they kick over the imaginary wall, climb the forbidden tree, regard the difficult as easy and the private world is destroyed. The instinct to create myth, to colonize reality with the emotions, remains. The myths become tyrannies until they are swept away, when we invent new tyrannies to hide our suddenly perceived nakedness. Like caddis-worms or like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.

We pay for vice by the knowledge that we are wicked: we pay for pleasure when we find out, too late, that we are disappearing.

- The Unquiet Grave
A Word Cycle by Palinurus (Cyril Connolly)

remedies

2009-09-09T18:36:00.000-07:00

The wonderful, of which the miraculous is a subcategory,
was never boring.

- Jacobus de Voraigne

2009-09-07T10:43:00.000-07:00

"We ARE A part which has to imitate the whole."

- Simone Weil/Brancusi

to be absolved...

2009-08-22T17:13:00.000-07:00

Throughout the first centuries of our era, the Gnostics disputed with the Christians. They were annihilated, but we can imagine their possible victory. Had Alexandria triumphed and not Rome, the extravagant and muddled stories that I have summarized here would be coherent, majestic, and perfectly ordinary. Pronouncements such as Novalis' "Life is a sickness of the spirit", or the despairing one of Rimbaud, "True life is absent; we are not in the world", would know the conditional assent of the pious laboratories. In any case, what better gift can we hope for, than to be insignificant? What greater glory for a God, than to be absolved of the world?

Borges - Other inquisitions

pieces

2009-08-14T09:11:00.001-07:00

There is no paradise on earth, but there are pieces of it.
What there is on earth is a broken paradise.

- Pierro della Francesca / Jules Renard

difficult and invisible

2009-06-20T12:08:00.000-07:00

Today it is difficult to asses the enormous extent of Nietzsche's solitude at the time. Having become a shadow for most of his old friends, a difficult and invisible man, by now accustomed to publishing his books at his own expense, accustomed too to counting his loyal readers on his fingers and having to reduce their numbers as each new book comes out, Nietzsche seems to have circled as far from the world as possible, to a point of insurmountable alienation, which his old friend Erwin Rhode had felt at their last meeting, in the spring of 1886: "as though he came from a region inhabited by no one else."

Calasso - Fatal Monologue

2009-06-10T21:39:00.000-07:00

...that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been,
is half owning to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life,
and rest in unvisited tombs.

- George Eliot

two and a half

2009-06-10T21:26:00.000-07:00

Man has here two and a half minutes -- one to smile, one to sigh,
and a half for love: for in the midst of this minute he dies.

- Jean Paul

accomplished gestures

2009-06-08T15:20:00.000-07:00

Crown prince Rudolf and Marie Vetsera

In Vienna the world was often coming to an end;
usually to winegarden songs.

He must be saved by some midnight beyond reason:
the logic of daytime was sinking so fast.

How beautiful the leaves aged on ten thousand twigs!
No politics could produce such glory in a forest.
Only so natural and simple a thing as death.

Rudolf had conjured the glistening anticipation of greatness, only to dissolve into black bafflement.

By then the word Mayerling had already begun to phosphoresce throughout the world.
Abroad it tingled and thrilled. In Vienna it was like some hidden hell machine of which nothing was known except that it was made of gold.

- Frederic Morton, A Nervous Splendor. Vienna 1888/1889

brief epics

2009-05-07T23:15:00.000-07:00

Death makes no sense
except to people who have passionately loved life.

- Cioran

Tesla

2009-04-29T18:56:00.000-07:00

died penniless, alone with his pigeons.

Blind Pony at Observatory

2009-04-04T09:19:00.000-07:00

PERFVGIVM is low-fi ventriloquism - of the old American man-with-guitar tradition - infused with curtains of wayward noise. The performance at Observatory will be an experiment in re-creating the shapes of sound and physical space manifested in the recordings "Perfugium" and "The Gown".

heartsnatcher

2009-01-14T20:58:00.000-08:00

Of a distant person one can think, and of a person who is near
one can catch hold - all else goes beyond human strength.

Kafka - letter to Milena
Image: Hans Christian Andersen

Quasi una fantasia

2008-12-25T10:56:00.000-08:00

There is music from the nineteenth century, which is so unbearably solemn that it can only be used to introduce waltzes. If it were left as it is, people listening to it would fall into a despair beside which every other musical emotion would pale. All the feeling of great tragedy would surely overwhelm them and they would have to veil their heads with gestures that have fallen out of use since time immemorial. This music no longer possesses a form with plangent tunes, and each stands on its own so that the listener is exposed to them in their naked immediacy. Only the excess of pain helps which springs from the certainty that things cannot go on like this. The double attack of F in the violins, the dominant of B-flat minor - a pathetic remnant of sadness together with a tiny E grace note, which a moment later will drive on the waltz melody in sharp, jolly spasms, always staccato and always in the train of the E.
Nowadays such music thrives for the most part only in the bad music played in zoos or in the small orchestras in provincial spas.
Children are its greatest fans.

- Adorno/Zola

2008-12-18T21:11:00.000-08:00

Who has turned us round like that, that we,
do as we may, are in the attitude
of going away?

- rilke

2008-12-02T21:08:00.000-08:00

There are two truths which men will not generally believe: one is not knowing anything, the other is not being anything. Add a third, that grows largely from the second: of having nothing to hope for after death.

Giacomo Leopardi, from his journals

(Thanks to James Walsh for finding it.)

2008-10-26T22:05:00.000-07:00

The only cure for madness
is the innocence of facts.

- Jacques Riviere in a letter to Antonin Artaud

2008-10-17T13:53:00.000-07:00

Fate had elected him for a special deed.
But he then made sure that later times lost all memory of him.

- Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March

2008-08-06T15:00:00.000-07:00

and they held out as long as they could.

irretrievable & irrepeatable

2008-08-04T12:44:00.000-07:00

What conclusion can we draw?
To invite the gods ruins our relationship with them
but sets history in motion.
A life in which the gods are not invited isn't worth living.
It will be quieter, but there won't be any stories.
And you could suppose that these dangerous invitations
were in fact contrived by the gods themselves,
because the gods get bored with men who have no stories.

- Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Thank you Tonya van Gieson

When I die, the world is in my room.

2008-07-19T20:17:00.001-07:00

In November 1966, a day before his 72. birthday, composer, translator and wanderer Juergen von der Wense died in Goettingen, Germany, in an attic filled with 10.000 pages of writings on science, poetry, philosophy and music.
Few splinters from it ever reached the public.
He lived for his work, always alone, with no academic or artistic consolations, in poverty supported by a few friends and admirers.
Nature, art and religion to him was one – and ALL important.
Despite loss and solitude, his life was a marvelous experiment, guided by its own inner light, overflowing and outreaching (in 6000 letters to friends) – and blessed by the absence of (and concerns for) career, family and endorsements.
A solitary genius like Mahler or Nietzsche and odd like Bruckner, he was a universe to himself. Marvelous and homeless like the storm.

---------------------- Splinters from EPIDOT:

Movements are not created, they only find each other. That something happens is only ... luck, an act of genius. God himself is permanently surprised. True art.

Biographies must become prophetic. Every life is a divination. Genius is a sacrifice, from which God foretells himself. The life of a genius is fragment, secret knowledge.

Flaws must enter the composition like poisons in medicine.

To be free means to be free from opinions. To be sociable with the stars above. To be rich from spending one's life. To embrace it with one's knowledge, to know it with one's heart.

Wisdom is a crisis.

Sudden happiness is a great loss, so we become sick, because it breaks our habits, unsettles our vanities, when we realize, how long we had been content with the platitudes of feeling.
This joy whisks me from my destiny.

Everything we experience is an answer.

What is noble about the sun is not her warmth but her distance.

We embrace the ocean when we drown.

Consolation: nature has no opinion of me.

People without love have no destiny, they only improvise. With the speed of a falling weight my destiny increases because of love.

The meaning and goad of navigation is the secret, to sail after the sun and to go down with her. The meaning of travel is religion. Wanderlust is our nobility: a marvelous striving without destination. Seafarers were the first aristocrats.
With Columbus begins the downfall. His high caravels, filled with mutineers and robbers: the image of rabble. He thought he found paradise, but every paradise was discovered by the devil.

The rainbow is the banner after the battle between the sky and earth.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My translation.
Hoping against hope that someone will pick it up from here to bring Juergen von der Wense or Hans Henny Jahnn or Jean Paul Richter a better appreciation and impetus for us to keep going.
hp

nothing in return

2008-07-06T13:24:00.000-07:00

The fulcrum of America is the Plains, half sea half land, a high sun as metal and obdurate as the iron horizon, and a man's job to square the circle.

Some men ride on such space, others have to fasten themselves like a tent stake to survive.
As I see it Poe dug in and Melville mounted. They are the alternatives.

In Moby-Dick, when Ishmael has said all he can say about Ahab, he admits that the larger, darker, deeper part of man is obscure. He suggests the same holds true for any man and insists it is necessary to go down to a place far beneath a man's upper earth in order to uncover the unknown part.
There, he says, a man will find that his root of grandeur, his whole awful essence sits in bearded state

an antique buried beneath antiquities and throned
on torsos.

Melville became Christ's victim, and it was death, and lack of love, that let him be it.

Death bothered him. That bare-headed life under the grass, his own, worried him, in Dickinson's words, like a wasp. He looked for solace to the Resurrection. He got nothing in return. For the loss of mortality he got nothing in return.

trostlos

2008-06-30T21:49:00.000-07:00

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

- Kafka, notebooks