preview

who knows what the album will be like, but this i like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXpXpYLoCek

Roberto Rossellini - Stromboli, terra di Dio

Clips pieced together from Stromboli, terra di Dio.

Van Gogh and Dvorak Cello Concerto in B Minor B.191

I went to the Xul Solar Museum the other day in Buenos Aires and was so happy to hear music playing while walking through the galleries.  I love listening to music while seeing art and usually bring my ipod when I go to museums.  Pairing the two automatically personalizes the experience.  Standing in front of a Rothko while listening to Wu Tang changes the way that I see Rothko and the way that I hear Wu Tang.  It's a symbiotic relationship.  

I thought it would be great to capture that transformation in a way that could be shared, so here is my rather pathetic attempt to bring the two mediums together in virtual space.  I created a video out of an mp3 file, since blogger wouldn't let me load audio files.  I tried to make a short movie using imovie pairing the image with the music, but it wouldn't work.  So here they are, separate and shittily reproduced in cyberspace.

I think it might be fun to do this with different pieces and songs.  Music Playlists paired with Exhibition Checklists, something along the lines of that...

Hiroshima, mon amour by Alain Resnais

a short clip

To supplement the earlier post:

"The Captive" by Jorge Luis Borges

This tale, of course, is true.  Frontier life has always attracted me, no doubt because some hundred years ago my grandparents lived among civilization's outposts out on the edge of the Province of Buenos Aires.  Colonel Borges, my grandfather, there held the command of the Northern and Western Frontier until he met his death in 1874.  Additionally, I have always been interested in the strangeness of memory and in the fact that the past is somehow rescued, or saved for us, by it.  De Quincey thought of the human brain as a palimpsest, wherein all our yesterdays, down to the minutest detail, survive; for their release, these yesterdays 0nly await the proper, unsuspected stimulus.  Memory, not the captive, may very well be the real subject of the story.

"El Cautivo" por Jorge Luis Borges

En castellano:

En Junín o en Tapalquén refieren la historia.  Un chico desapareció después de un malón; se dijo que lo habían robado los indios.  Sus padres lo buscaron inútilmente; al cabo de los años, un soldado que venía de tierra adentro les habló de un indio de ojos celestes que bien podia ser su hijo.  Dieron al fin con él (la crónica ha perdido las circunstancias y no quiero inventar lo que no sé) y creyeron reconocerlo.  El hombre, trabajado por el desierto y por la vida bárbara, ya no sabía oír las palabras de la lengua natal, pero se dejó conducir, indiferente y dócil, hasta la casa.  Ahí se detuvo, tal vez porque los otros se detuvieron.  Miró la puerta, como sin entenderla.  De pronto bajó la cabeza, gritó, atravesó corriendo el zaguán y los dos largos patios y se metió en la cocina.  Sin vacilar, hundió el brazo en la ennegrecida campana y sacó el cuchillito de mango de asta que había escondido ahí, caundo chico.  Los ojos le brillaron de alegría y los padres lloraron porque habían encontrado al hijo.

Acaso a este recuerdo siguieron otros, pero el indio no podia vivir entre paredes y un día fue a buscar su desierto.  Yo querría saber qué sintió en aquel instante de vertigo en que el pasado y el presente se confundieron; yo querría saber si el hijo perdido renació y murió en aquel éxtasis o si alcanzó a reconocer, siquiera como una criatura o un perro, los padres y la casa.

 

In English:

The story is told out in one of the old frontier towns – either Junin or Tapalquen.  A boy was missing after an Indian raid; it was aid that the marauders had carried him away.  The boy’s parents searched for him without any luck; years later, a soldier just back from Indian territory told them about a blue-eyed savage who may have been their son.  At long last they traced him (the circumstances of the search have not come down to us and I dare not invent what I don’t know) and they thought they recognized him.  The man, marked by the wilderness and by primitive life, no longer understood the words of the language he spoke in childhood, but he let himself be led, uncurious and willing, to his old house.  There he stopped – maybe because the others stopped.  He stared at the door as though not understanding what it was.  All of a sudden, ducking his head, he let out a cry, cut through the entranceway and the two long patios on the run, and burst into the kitchen.  Without a second’s pause, he buried his arm in the sootblackend oven chimney and drew out the small  knife with the horn handle that he had hidden as a boy.  His eyes lit up with joy and his parents wept because they had found their lost child. 

Maybe other memories followed upon this one, but the Indian could not live indoors and one day he left to go back to his open spaces.  I would like to know what he felt in that first bewildering moment in which past and present merged; I would like to know whether in that dizzying instant the lost son was born again and died, or whether he managed to recognize, as a child or a dog might, his people and his home.