touch
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZHsWqfKUfI[/youtube]
Total Touch (Trijntje Oosterhuis): Touch Me There
dakini
‘Do not question woman. Adore her everywhere. In her real nature she is Bhagavati! Perfection of Wisdom; and in this empirical world Bhagavati has assumed the form of woman.’ Tantric metaphysics are derived principally from thePrajnaparamita sutras, and this prajnaparamita sloka clearly states the tantric view that there is no distinction between the ultimate metaphysical nature of woman and the relative human reality. Woman is the Dakini and is to be worshipped as such. Further, the Prajnaparamita gave Tantra the concept of woman as the Perfection of Wisdom, perfect insight (shes-rab, prajna), which is defined as ‘awareness of all phenomena as Emptiness’. However, in Tantra, since ‘Emptiness is not separate from form, nor form from Emptiness’, this Awareness that is the Dakini is the nondual, gnostic awareness.of which the male principle manifest as form is an aspect. Thus the totality of reality as Awareness can be represented by the Dakini alone, or it can be indicated by the inseparable union of male and female principles. In the latter case the Dakini’s perfect insight into Emptiness is in contradistinction to skilful means (thabs, upaya), the Guru’s ever compassionate, dynamic motivation that manifests as phenomenal appearances. When the Dakini alone is all-embracing Awareness (mahajnana, ye-shes-chen-po), she is the blissful cosmic dance of illusion. The existential experience of the Dakini is one, but the multiplicity of means to attain that experience, and the different ways of conceiving the inexpressible, create a seemingly complex metaphysics.
levy-strauss
For Mark Willis: Claude Levy-Strauss, in 2004, about cultural diversity and mono-culture:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky0QTKRDDk0[/youtube]
water
The first film I ever saw was Bert Haanstra’s “Fanfare“, shown together with his oscar winning short, “Glass“. I was six, so I don’t remember much, but I do remember being seriously freaked out by “Glass”, probably because of its soundtrack. Haanstra (1915 – 1997) very much represented the “dutch documentary style”. In fact, his films helped form that style and there is a direct line from Haanstra’s “Everyman”, a semi-humorous study of Dutch cultural behavior, to Michiel van Erp’s “Pretpark Nederland” or “Hurray for Victory” (and part two). Needless to say Haanstra has been parodied too. “Fanfare” was brilliantly and ruthlessly spoofed by Arjan Ederveen and Tosca Niterink. Haanstra’s work is quintessentially Dutch, because it depicts how we wish to see ourselves as a nation. We behave in somewhat bizarre ways, but are harmless nonetheless and tolerant of differences, yet we’re the measure of all things. Let’s call it the Dutch superiority complex. Much of his work was routinely screened at Dutch embassies abroad, so much of it has probably been seen more outside the Netherlands, as propaganda. This is the case with ”De Stem Van het Water”, and it is this film, indeed, I remember best, because I had to watch it so many times. “Stem” is a documentary about the relationship of the Dutch nation with “water”, and covers dam building, barge sailing, herring fishing and swimming lessons. As always, it is a marvel of editing (”Glass” is a ten minute master class on editing), and it carries maximum emotional impact. The barge sailing sequence (part one and two) is wonderful in its intensity. But the scene most people remember, because it is so painful and touching is the “swimming lesson scene”. Yesterday I was at my son’s swimming lesson, and not much has changed.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voAcoxvM2Vo[/youtube]
palace
Today’s the day that Berlin’s “Palace of the Republic“, a GDR-era showcase of “socialist culture” has been completely demolished, finally. This is something that has been intensely debated, with a majority of Berlin inhabitants against demolition. But it was not to be: the gigantic structure, built between 1972 and 1976, to replace the Schloß on the “Marx-Engels Platz”, is gone forever. For over a decade, it sat in Berlin-Mitte, its modernist architectural style considered an eyesore and an unwelcome reminder of the recent, divided, past. Many feel that the failure to preserve this monument of socialist dictatorship is also a failure to acknowledge German reality before 1989. In 1983, Udo Lindenberg, whose song “Sonderzug Nach Pankow” (Special Train to Pankow, the residence of Erich “Honni” Honecker) was banned in the GDR, performed in the “Palast”: here’s “Girls from East Berlin”:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhssDLcFsd4[/youtube]
bye
Two years before his death, photographer Ed van der Elsken, always fearless in documenting life as he encountered it, chose to document his own encounter with death. The resulting documentary, titled “Bye” was broadcast yesterday, as “viewer’s choice”. Ed’s voice is always a feature in all his documentary work: an ironic, knowledgeable, intimate voice that takes you along on his journey of discovery. And so it is with “Bye”. I lay listening to that voice, chronicling the decline, the having to let go, a last advice to the viewer: “Be strong everybody. Take care. Show who you are.”
Van der Elsken is also the photographer I associate most with city life, whether in Paris, Tokyo or Amsterdam.
Ed Van der Elsken’s Love on the Left Bank, originally published in 1956, is not the kind of love Gene Kelly liked to warble about. It is more love on the dole – without the dole. It is about tangential lovers – slipshod, absent-minded or just out-of-their-mind gropers: young people with neither social nor political awareness. They are neither traditional clochards, nor drop-out students, nor the traditional unemployed – just lives inexplicably stalled.
Paris had many pockets of these tribes, and they were perfect subjects for this Dutch photographer, who arrived in the city in 1950 at the age of 25. His beginnings were auspicious: his first lodgings were an upturned boat on the quays by the Htel de Ville, which he shared with two tramps. He was already predisposed to record those with “feelings of uncertainty, anger, depression, pessimism and defeatism”, rather than sanitised romance on the banks of the Seine or the peacock glories of the Folies Bergère.
Van der Elsken, whose work was later exhibited to great acclaim in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, said that he found his perfect subjects in St-Germain-des-Prés. Only it isn’t St-Germain-des-Prés. It is Odéon, a place I know well. A decade after Van der Elsken, I briefly settled in the village where he shot his photo-romance. The book shows the same wan cafes: the Monaco, the Old Navy. The unnamed cafe with its chess players could only be the morose Tournon, up by the Luxembourg gardens.
Here are the same cheap, mangy hotels, on Rue Guisarde and Rue des Canettes. Here is the Petite Source, where we both gorged on frankfurters-frites. He spares us Chez Jean, in the alley behind, where the stench of cooking was so poisonous you would only go in there drunk, and refers tactfully to “the Greek” on Rue Gregoire de Tours. It was more accurately “the Greasy Greek”.
“Bye” takes us on a journey through hospitals, the process of being demolished by cancer. Ed tells us about his castration, performed in the hope that it would stem the progress of his illness. He speaks of his love for Johnny, his nine year old son and of Anneke, his wife, and his longing for sex. Ed never was an “objective” photographer. His style was always eminently personal. Once “Bye” becomes available online, I’ll link to it. Meanwhile:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10HYv5THc3M[/youtube]
silence
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cG662-kKnnc[/youtube]
Clip from “Into Great Silence“, a film by Philip Gröning, about the monks from la Grande Chartreuse. Some words about suffering, death, the everlasting now, skillful means and blindness.
bhaguri
The “bhaguri” is “the place where the ger stands“. My bhaguri was in a beech wood near Wesepe. This is an area of rather ancient estates, each the centre of a landscape that includes farmland, pastures with cows and a woodland area for hunting. For The Netherlands this is a “remote” area, but in reality it was buzzing with activity: after I became used to the sounds around me, it was easy to figure out what was going on around me: two dairy farms on either side, the “hobby farms” up the road to Wesepe and many, many people walking their dogs in “my” woods. It’s remarkable how the focus changes when you have a stove to keep going. The day is punctuated by feeding the stove and fetching wood to feed it. Walks and trips to get supplies are determined by how much of a risk they pose to fire in the stove. There was somewhat of a blizzard on sunday, which I only noticed because T. took me to have a shower at his house, and then the next morning because I stepped out in my Blundstones, but hastily changed into my Sorel boots because of the snow. I had the leisure of not having to depend on the light for my tasks. On the other hand, it took me a long time to learn the ways of my ger and it was interesting to notice that the ger needed three days to settle down properly. As the entire structure holds itself up by opposing forces, it takes some time before it has figured out how it wants to sit. The enchantment of a ger is that it is a structure that looks solid, but is entirely dynamic, all forces opposing each other, entirely alive. Hard to describe what is so appealing about solitude. In early sutras, Shakyamuni Buddha says that the effect of solitude is that it creates a feeling of happiness instantly. I think this is very true. After the second day, when I had enough wood and water and food to last a few days, an exhilariting, feeling of solitary self-sufficiency welled up inside me. And that feeling didn’t leave me until my guests arrived yesterday night. Then the spell was broken. Good to realize that it only took us a day to construct and stock this hermitage.
prematurely
Back prematurely, thoroughly rested nonetheless. Days filled with “chopping wood, carrying water”.
dying
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=easfgIzVbEg[/youtube]
the “being with dying” program at upaya (roshi joan halifax)
