Category Archives: Analysis

Rational Soul Music

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spockguitar

Reposting a momentous meme. This one spoke to me conceptually and immediately conjured questions. Could a Vulcan express himself musically? Music is math but it’s also emotion. Maybe Spock’s “music” is more a mode of expressing encoded meaning. Like morse code with notes for reasonable context. Either way the inherently contrary image sparked my synapses, remixing my nostalgia for 70s music icons with a cold rational sense of extra terrastrial mystery. No matter what Nimoy actually played off set while still dressed as Spock, I’d like to hear it.

Judging from the aesthetic of the photo it may have been Serge Gainsbourg tunes.

An Honest Interpretation

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During a late night scour of YouTube for rare reggae recordings, this ukulele adaptation of the Wailers’ “It Hurts to Be Alone” by an unknown, vaguely European fellow presented itself. Regarding the Wailers a bit seriously and tending to disapprove most attempts to repackage or update the music, I was utterly ready to discount what I had not yet seen. This honest little video won me over. I watched it 3 times before deciding it was good and a few more before actually really loving the interpretation. It’s a reinvention that is beautiful, humble and respectful.

The Most Astounding Fact

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“I’m a sucker for this type of thing.” I hear myself think it as I watch another beautiful video from some of the folks that produce the Sagan Series.

A whole lotta time elapsed, matter and energy shifted to form the physical history that unfolds itself to constitute my casual sense of humor about the essence of existence. I’m fascinated by our attempt to understand it through both the notions of spirit and science. The more you consider it from either side, science and spirituality are separated by an imaginary membrane: our capacity for understanding either.

Pitch Black Comedy

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Stand Up from Joseph Pierce on Vimeo.

Not much to add about this other than… the illustrative expression is guttural and the artist’s choice to animate the tension between another artist, a brutal comic, and his unforgiving audience is a brilliant construct once removed. Are we the viewers disgusted with the character or his creator? It probably depends on the levels we appreciate.

Right of Way

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Cars R Coffins

I’m a motorist. I’m cyclist. I’m a recreational bicyclist. I’m also a pedestrian. I have 4 points of view here as it relates to road safety, courtesy and general cooperation. The one that wants to speak up is the one on a bike. If you are a motorist moving down the road in a 6ooo lb chunk of rubber and metal you may not fully appreciate what a more vulnerable and self propelled traveler experiences.

My point here is that cyclists take their life in their hands every time they get onto a public street. While cyclists and motorists may not see eye to eye a bicycle is a vehicle and entitled to both be on the road and be safe doing so. Most cyclists are also motorists. Most motorists are not cyclists.

Biking is about freedom, fitness, sustainability, self reliance. Given the way the world works today you have to have a car and a license to maximize your opportunities but some of us opt to ride a bike when it is suitable to do so and we’d all be a lot better off if more people did so more often and if our cities and towns were better set up to accommodate this option.

In sum. You can’t realistically suck on a Biggie Coke while texting at 30 mph on a bike. If you are doing so don’t you do dare honk at me in traffic.

Tony Orrico’s Black & White Symmetry

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tonyorrico1

The reduction of line and form all the way to black on white. Literal direct concrete symmetry. Looking upon this the right and left eyes see almost identical images which is unusual in our stereoscopic and assymetrical lives. Image creation at it’s most psychologically and perceptively primal must be black and white symmetry. It is uncommon in nature but utterly natural in the mind.

As I interpret his work, Tony Orrico records movement to create image. He is not reproducing an image from his imagination but rather creating an image as by-product of an art meditation, a process of mind and body but not thought or idea.

On a physiological level, his process involves the balance of right and left arms moving together in mirrored motion. This engages his right and left brain at the same time on a motor level beyond simple reason and imagination.

Any art involves right and left brain activity but as the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and vice versa, I imagine that his ambidextrous technique engages his brain even more fully and it’s no accident of nature that some of his images conjure a likeness to the nerves of a human brain as the mind creates the body, the body does not create the mind.

I got clued to this on Swiss Miss