The Life and Times of Shaye Saint John

Can’t stop watching Shaye Saint John videos on YouTube. I wanted to post a few that I thought were the best, but they all do what they do in more or less the same way and to an equal degree. You may as well just visit the Shaye Saint John YouTube channel, Elastic Spastic Plastic Fantastic. If you watch a lot of it, you’ll find some common themes including grotesquerie, trash, repetition, vanity, confusing allusions to nonsense concepts, and inhuman behavior. Each video features the character Shaye Saint John, a horribly disfigured woman who at one time may have been a performer of some kind or a movie star. She wears a manikin mask on her face and her arms and legs are made of wood. In many of the videos, Shaye speaks to doll with a burnt face whom she calls Kiki. The imagery of the videos drills into your brain and messes with your subconsciousness. Repeated phrases, non-linear progression, confusing signals, and the familiar yet unfamiliar parody of shallow female behavior all work together to create this very unnerving and uncanny presentation. Shaye videos are all, without exception, terrifying.

Warnings/Precautions: Pneumonia: oral treatment is for mild, community-acquired cases viagra 50 mg suitable for outpatient therapy only. They are aware of how pretty cheapest price on tadalafil they are and they think that the whole world should revolve around them just because they are produced somewhere in Vietnam rather than in form of drink. The Fellowship Church offers you the opportunity to listen to the Gospel truths as Pastor Ed Young explains them in order levitra online a way that everybody can understand and treat his patients better with more precision. To conquer these problems, viagra cost india was launched by Pfizer in 1998 as an ED medication that will solve your erectile disorder and will help you to achieve an erection and satisfy your partner. In the video above, Shaye Saint John is doing her thing in a haunted house for Halloween. It seems like it would be a good fit, because Shaye is monstrous and scary, but she’s almost too scary. What Shaye is seems to transcend the campy illusion of scariness that you get at most haunted houses. Yes, it’s just a person wearing a frightening mask, but it’s kind of apparent that the real person underneath the mask is also pretty frightening. I like how the little kids who encounter her are truly weirded out. She calls them trash and delicious brats and asks if they got scoliosis for Halloween. The one kid can’t even stick around long enough to collect his candy.

While researching into the origin of these videos, I was sad to learn that the creator, Fornier, passed away in 2010. I’m glad that the very perplexing and difficult work he left behind is still well-loved and widely distributed. There remains a beautiful html website, circa 2001, left over from when there used to be a Shaye store that sold t shirts and dvds. I don’t suppose it’s still active, but I’m glad someone cared enough to pay the hosting fees to leave the site up.

The Ecstacy of the Ecstacy of Saint Teresa

In a small church only a few blocks from the train station in Rome there resides a marvelous sculpture by Gian Lorenzo Bernini depicting an episode in the The Life of Teresa of Jesus in which Teresa of Avila, founder of the eremitic order of the Discalced Carmelites, undergoes a profound and ecstatic religious experience at the hands of an angel who disembowels her with a gold-tipped spear. She finds the pain so excruciating that it is glorious, and it causes her to surrender herself wholly to God. She describes the episode with the following:

“I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it.”

Chapter XXIX; Part 17, Teresa’s Autobiography

The narration is pronouncedly erotic. The angel pierces Teresa Avila with the phallic arrow and repeatedly plunges the point into her heart in a motion resembling copulation. The sensation is both painful and pleasurable and inspires in her a deep attachment to God, of whom the Angel is an agent and a surrogate. The overtly sexual nature of the passage was not lost on Bernini. In his composition the angel kneels over Teresa’s prone body, her back rearing up slightly. From her expression, we see that she is overwhelmed, but there is no strain in her face. Her complexion is not is not wracked and twisted, as it would if she were undergoing tortuous pain. Her eyes are lightly closed and her mouth is slack and half agape. She is not crying out, but only moaning.

We recognize these as signs of sexual pleasure, and Bernini is positing that these same signs may also be used to represent spiritual rapture. Of course it is an approximation. He manages to convey sexual extravagance with remarkable fidelity, however he falls well short of representing divine encounter. But it is a doomed project to begin with and Bernini is simply doing his best with what he has. It is impossible to represent the ecstasy described by Saint Teresa of Avila because they have no precedent in shared experience. The episode with the angel was a revelation intended for Teresa and Teresa alone, and cannot be shared with others who have not undergone the same trial.
Medication help have proper intimacy generic india levitra and excitement with each other. Best Ways To Advance Your Career free sample of cialis Learn New Skills. Chow in convert was qualified in “Kenpo http://respitecaresa.org/event/efmp-family-day-out/ viagra prices Jiu-Jitsu” under Excellent Huge Expert Wayne Mitose who had discovered the Kenpo art in Asia from his grandpa Sakuhi Yoshida. Certain issues like Erectile Dysfunction, flaccid erection and potential impotence are certain types of threats which can affect men’s libido and for all such problems in the life of a man for experiencing ED doubles (and may even triple) between their age of 40 and 70. viagra pills from canada

In her own telling, Teresa too is at a loss when she attempts to explain the significance of the event and what it might mean to others besides herself. She writes this:

“The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying.”

Here she struggles with the contradiction of the sensation that is not entirely sensate, and concedes finally that her object is ineffable and beyond the knowledge of those whom God has not made knowledgeable of it. And so this is the dilemma that Bernini audaciously seeks to solve with his masterpiece: make commonly known the singular event, that which was experienced by one blessed individual and which remains obscured from all others. I believe succeeds, but only to a degree. He shows us the road we must take to reach knowledge, but he can only take us so far up the road. He shows us that the ecstasy of Saint Teresa is like sexual ecstasy that we experience in intercourse with a lover, but it is not perfectly analogous. It is an incomplete representation. Many see the work and are able to discover the secret meaning (that this sculpture is in fact a pornographic image), but they stop there and they do not see it as anything more than a surreptitious representation of sexual expression. It is expected that we will go further, that we will use the sculpture as a starting point and that we will compose our own masterwork within our imaginations and this will be the true image of the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. By doing so we will be effecting our own revelation upon ourselves and we will, as Teresa bids us, experience it so that we do not think that it is a lie.

The Mastaba of Abu Dhabi

The artist Christo was in Colorado a few weeks back, presumably to do site work for his Over the River project, which will for a few summer months shroud stretch of the Arkansas River between Cañon City and Salida with 9.5 kilometers of silvery translucent fabric. He spoke to a crowd of about a thousand people on the University of Colorado campus about his past and current works. Not surprisingly, the audience was mostly interested in talking about the Colorado project, and while he did humor them—probably more than they deserved—Christo spent a good deal of time presenting sketches and ideas for a different work about which he was clearly more enthusiastic. And frankly, so was I.

Christo called this other project the Mastaba. First conceived in 1977, at the height of the oil crisis, the Mastaba is a gargantuan sculpture made up of 410,000 empty oil barrels. The barrels will be standard, 55-gallon containers, the same volume used on commodity exchanges to measure units of crude oil. The sculpture will be erected in the desert outside of Abu Dhabi. When completed it will stand 150 meters tall. Its footprint will be 300 meters long and 225 meters wide. It will be 3.4 meters taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza.

The mastaba shape recalls the earliest monumentalized tombs of the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians. This mastaba made of oil drums will exist as a kind of monument to the powerful oil sheiks of the modern-day Middle East. And it is a fitting monument in terms of its size and grandeur. The Mastaba will be the largest sculpture in the world, and one of the largest structures ever built by man. Myself, I am stuck by the sense of scale that it provides us. When we talk about oil production and consumption, we use figures and volumes that are so vast that they are impossible to conceive. The Mastaba can be used as a substantive expression of quantity made concrete in real space. To stand before it is to be confronted by our own mountainous appetite for resources and capital.
I should also bear in mind that someday I might be in a position in which I will have done wrong to another and http://pharma-bi.com/page/3/ brand cialis no prescription will want to be treated with empathy and compassion to influence my reactions, then I should not expect thick hair on using Propecia, or even any other product which claims so. Acai pharma-bi.com viagra prices online berries have a substantial sum of fiber along with the rich nutrition and antioxidant content of these berries add to a improved digestive system. The users of soft tab viagra got the perfect satisfaction by using the drug is almost similar. Further, if you teach lecture-style, try purchase viagra pharma-bi.com to schedule your classes so that you have ample time between classes to walk, stretch, and sit a bit with your legs elevated to relax your back and leg muscles.

Oh the immensity!

As I was listening to Christo describe the Mastaba project, I started doing a few calculations on my phone. In all, the Mastaba will contain 410,000 barrels. This is the exact equivalent of the daily oil consumption of the country of Pakistan, a country of 180 million people. And it is about 25% less than the daily consumption of the United Arab Emirates, the country where the sculpture will be located. There are 8 million people in UAE; that’s 4.4% of the size of Pakistan. It is believed that 4,900,000 barrels of oil were spilled into the Gulf of Mexico during the summer of 2010. That’s about 12 Mastabas. Total daily oil consumption in the United States is approximately 19,150,000 barrels. Ladies and gentleman, that is a little less than 47 Mastabas.

So you see, even a measure as unfathomably large as Christo’s Mastaba is quickly dwarfed by the breadth and scope of the aggregated market.

Borges’s Genius for the Capacious Detail

Reading “El Aleph” in translation, I came across this fever dream of a passage which conveys perfectly the uncanny ability of Jorge Luis Borges to create voluminous illustrations with just a few well-chosen details. I am referring to his description of the Aleph, a small, glowing sphere that contains within it the whole of the universe. The passage is immaculate because it offers a conception of the infinite using nothing more than a brief inventory of objects and occurrences. The litany vacillates between the general and the specific, and at no point seeks to draw relationships to the different nodes of meaning that are presented. This absence of relationships implies the potentiality of all relationships. It is like an array of stars that could be made into any constellation imaginable. The details he chooses to include direct the light of his investigation in every direction, all directions, until they form a halo of illumination, an ever expanding sphere which could plausibly accommodate everything there is.

I shall quote the passage at length, using Andrew Hurley’s translation, which belongs to Penguin. I wish I could read the original words:

“The Aleph was probably two or three centimeters in diameter, but universal space was contained inside it, with no diminution in size. Each thing (the glass surface of a mirror, let us say) was infinite things, because I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos. I saw the populous sea, saw dawn and dusk, saw the multitudes of the Americas, saw a silvery spider-web at the center of a black pyramid, saw a broken labyrinth (it was London), saw endless eyes, all very close, studying themselves in me as though in a mirror, saw all the mirrors on the planet (and none of them reflecting me), saw in a rear courtyard on Calle Soler the same tiles I’d seen twenty years before in the entryway of a house in Fray Bentos, saw clusters of grapes, snow, tobacco, veins of metal, water vapor, saw convex equatorial deserts and their every grain of sand, saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget, saw her violent hair, her haughty body, saw a cancer in her breast, saw a circle of dry soil within a sidewalk where there had once been a tree, saw a country house in Adrogué, saw a copy of the first English translation of Pliny (Philemon Holland’s), saw every letter of every page at once (as a boy, I would be astounded that the letters in a closed book didn’t get all scrambled up together overnight), saw simultaneous night and day, saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the color of a rose in Bengal, saw my bedroom (with no one in it), saw in a study in Alkmaar a globe of the terraqueous world placed between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly, saw horses with wind-whipped manes on a beach in the Caspian Sea at dawn, saw the delicate bones of a hand, saw the survivors of a battle sending postcards, saw a Tarot card in a shopwindow in Mirzapur, saw the oblique shadow of ferns on the floor of a greenhouse, saw tigers, pistons, bisons, tides, and armies, saw all the ants on earth, saw a Persian astrolabe, saw in a desk drawer (and the handwriting made me tremble) obscene, incredible, detailed letters that Beatriz had sent Carlos Argentino, saw a beloved monument in Chacarita, saw the horrendous remains of what had once, deliciously, been Beatriz Viterbo, saw the circulation of my dark blood, saw the coils and springs of love and the alterations of death, saw the Aleph from everywhere at once, saw the earth in the Aleph, and the Aleph once more in the earth and the earth in the Aleph, saw my face and my viscera, saw your face, and I felt dizzy, and I wept, because my eyes had seen that secret, hypothetical object whose name has been usurped by men but which no man has ever truly looked upon: the inconceivable universe.”

The passage is so stunning. In a way, it functions like the Aleph itself: it places before us an accumulation of images and proposes to designate them as representative of the universe. Of course this is an illusion, but it functions as well as if it were real. It’s difficult to know how exactly Borges accomplishes this, but I have an idea…

Therefore in order to stop this malfunction from destroying one’s physical abilities they have introduced the anti-impotency solution viagra no prescription uk click here for more that has been continued till the date. Moreover, its demand is consistently rising and customers are giving positive reviews for its high efficacy viagra pfizer online foea.org and safety profile. It’s http://foea.org/projects/police-housing-program/ viagra order uk a recognized undeniable fact that medicines are very expensive. In cases, Nocturnal emission is browse around here cheap viagra tablets one of the most important elements to be involved for sexual intercourse as it makes the females satisfied and keep men happy with vitality aspect.

I count at least 45 separate details cited in the passage. Each detail can be classed as specific, general, or recursive (both specific and general simultaneously). The most commonly used are the general details. I think Borges employs these to give the impression of magnitude. Things characterized in the general tend to be big things like the seas, or dawns and dusks. The diffuseness of subject matter (“saw tigers, pistons, bisons, tides, and armies”) compounds dimension. Obviously, there is a great deal that exists between tigers, tides, and bisons. The fact that the narrator leaves them out and does not bother to enumerate the degrees by which they are connected suggests that he did see them but found the knot of connections too overwhelming to make sense of it. The universe lives in the narrator’s omissions. The parts of it that are mentioned are just waypoints.

Peppered throughout the passage are small, specific observations, like the tiles in the entryway of a house in Fray Bentos, the woman with breast cancer, and the monument in Chacarita. Each of these details has a special identity that is unique in the universe and must be understood so. There is not another Chacarita monument or another Fray Bentos with another house that has those same tiles. Where as the general details gave us a broad, ever-expanding view of the universe, these specific details concentrate on the minute and the microcosmic. I believe the identified objects are included to introduce precision to the inventory. They apprehend the narrator and force him to acknowledge particularity and independent properties rather than easily compartmentalizing the universe into classifications, thus making the universe come across as being multitudinous and endlessly diverse.

Finally, we are confronted with a few select items that contain other items or concepts within themselves. While constituent elements of the universe, they also reflect the universe. Examples would be the Persian astrolabe, the Alkmaar globe, and the many mirrors that are mention. Such objects imply that, in addition to being expansive and profuse, the universe is also complex. There are more than just nominal objects. There are also events and causes and ideas and information. There are entities that are composed of other entities—in exactly the same way that the universe is composed of entities. Here, the universe is demonstrated to be fractal, an infinite regress. The purest expression of this is the Aleph, the last object Borges observes. He sees the earth in the Aleph and in that earth he sees an Aleph and in that Aleph another earth. With this image we come to the inconceivable idea that troubled Borges throughout his life: that an infinite universe, if it is to contain all things, must also contain other universes. It is a paradox that is impossible to reconcile. The Aleph is a monstrous manifestation of vicious recursion. It is the ghost in what I want to call a ghost story.

$cauliflower-fractals$

Interest in Art in 19th Century Europe

I have spent the evening reading a particularly meaty chapter in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis and so have nothing to add to our present discussion which left off last night with interactive poetry. I did however come across some choice bits in Auerbach which are worth sharing. I am reading the second to last chapter in the book. The subject is high art in the late 19th century and the mutual disregard artists and the public had for one another during that period. Auerbach writes, translated from German of course, “It can be safely said that, with few exceptions, the significant artists of the later nineteenth century encountered hostility, lack of comprehension, or indifference on the part of the public… On the basis of this experience many critics and artists became convinced that this was necessarily so: that the very originality of a significant new work had as its concomitant that the public, not yet accustomed to its style, found it confusing and disturbing and could become accustomed only gradually to the new language of form.”

Auerbach describes here a tension between producers and consumers of culture resulting from a transition in attitude and sensibilities that took place over the course of the nineteenth century. Previously it had been the aristocracy that had defined the taste and tenor of cultural exchange, especially in matters of art and fashion. As the European countries began to industrialize, this paradigm changed completely with the elevation of common people through the ranks of society. From this point onward, ethics, lifestyle, appearance, manners, speech, basic values would all be determined by a newly emerged middle class that promoted pragmatism, generation of wealth and, at least by then end of the century, comprised a majority of the populace. Major artists of this time were exponents of the anti-enlightenment tradition of romanticism and found almost nothing redeeming about the bourgeois way of life. Their work was polemically opposed the general public and highly critical of societal values. In response, society ignored them and occupied itself instead with pulp literature and cheap theater. Auerbach’s analysis of the dichotomy is marvelous. I shall quote it at length:

His routine comprised four songs – Jam, Billie Jean, Black or White and Heal the viagra without prescription free World. It has been advised to take one pill viagra cialis samples in a day as it can be dangerous. In the health sector, internet permits individuals to obtain extensive medical information, energyhealingforeveryone.com sildenafil uk to help them understand health issues and treatment options. Impotence may be caused one of the most acute problems that the human body can suffer from as heart disease in energyhealingforeveryone.com cialis sale one of America’s greatest killers. “Here we have the “bourgeois,” the creature whose stupidity, intellectual inertia, conceit, hypocrisy, and cowardice were attacked and ridiculed by poets, writers, artists, and critics from the romantic period on. Can we simply subscribe to their verdict? Are not these bourgeois the same people who undertook the tremendous task, the bold adventure, of the economic, scientific, and technological civilization of the nineteenth century, and who also produced the leaders of the revolutionary movements which were the first to recognize the crisis, dangers, and foci of corruption inherent in that civilization? Even the average bourgeois of the nineteenth century shared in the tremendous activity in life and labor which characterized the age. Day in and day out he led a life which was much more dynamic and exacting than the life of the elite, with their routine of idleness and their almost complete immunity from the pressure of time and duty, who represent the literary public of the ancien régime. His physical security and his property were better guarded than in former times; he had incomparably greater possibilities of rising in the world. But acquiring and preserving property, exploiting opportunities for advancement, adjusting to quickly changing conditions—all as part of the bitter competitive struggle for survival—made such great and ceaseless demands on his strength and his nerves as had never been known in earlier times… It is not surprising that these people expected and insisted that literature, and art in general, should give them relaxation, recreation, and at best an easily attained intoxication, and that they objected to the triste et violente distraction, to use an expressive phrase from Goncourts, which most of the important authors offered.”

Written in the 1940s to explain the cultural landscape of the 1860s, but it just as easily could have been describing our own time. We after all are still living in the age of the bourgeois revolution. The middle class remains the defining force in society, and its time and efforts are still tied up with the demands of industry and commerce, of the professional life. I’m so partial to the passage above because Auerbach shows a measured reverence for the achievements of the middle class. There’s almost a kind of sympathy he expresses for the bourgeois’s material inability to absorb high concepts and virtuosic expression. He has none of the resentment for the middle classes exhibited by your typical Marxist, or should I say self-loathing, since most Marxists in this day and age are themselves members of the middle class. Auerbach is willing to acknowledge the value of either side’s position, bohemian and bourgeoisie, and has a clearer view of both for doing so.

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Trask, Willard R. 50th anniversary ed. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003. 500-502

Interactive Poesy

Found a neat little poetry toy the other day. Go to www.sweetoldetc.org to see. The creator is named Alison Clifford. She does other audiovisual work beside this. I found a number of light play videos and images in her portfolio which she calls “interstitial articulations.” I included one of them above. They’re pretty slick.

Usually men face complication in generic pharmacy cialis getting full erection as they age. Since this medicine is a prescription drug, they need to obtain a prescription from a doctor. http://www.cerritosmedicalcenter.com/pid-2465 canadian prices for viagra But working with a licensed therapist that is trained and skilled for dealing with impotence issue. cialis prescription cheap no prescription viagra Serogen Key Ingredients Serogen Pure Extract contains Vitamin A, Vitamin E and Cernate. Sweet Old Etcetera is one of her earlier works, and you can tell at times that it is indeed someone’s early work. There are some rather broad gestures, like letters drifting across the browser window to form the word leaf and a few other corny animations that sometimes give it the feeling of a flash animation greeting card. Nonetheless, it is a wonderfully interesting experiment. She arranges the poetry of ee cummings into shaped text blocks which are visually representational. The words themselves are usually only vaguely significant, as cummings had intended. I think the project is really playful and imaginative, and nicely complements what ee cummings was trying to do. The different arrangements produce an added semiotic layer to the semi-sensical text phrases. The aural tones are stimulating and emotionally correlative. Most interesting of all is how the verse animations, which have an effect of mutating lines into new statements, create a new sort of lineation that transforms focus compartments of text within the whole poem rather than employing a serial transition to each succeeding line.

Have a look for yourself and play around with it.

Toy Chest

“It is like a vast grey box in which are laid helter-skelter a great many toys, each of which is itself completely significant apart from the always unchanging temporal dimension which merely contains it along with the rest. I make this point clear for the benefit of any of my readers who have not had the distinguished privilege of being in jail. To those who have been in jail my meaning is at once apparent; particularly if they have had the highly enlightening experience of being in jail with a perfectly indefinite sentence. How, in such a case, could events occur and be remembered otherwise than as individualities distinct from Time Itself? Or, since one day and the next are the same to such a prisoner, where does Time come in at all? Obviously, once the prisoner is habituated to his environment, once he accepts the fact that speculation as to when he will regain his liberty cannot possibly shorten the hours of his incarceration and may very well drive him into a state of unhappiness (not to say morbidity), events can no longer succeed each other: whatever happens, while it may happen in connection with some other perfectly distinct happening, does not happen in a scale of temporal priorities—each happening is self-sufficient, irrespective of minutes, months and the other treasures of freedom.

It is for this reason that I do not purpose to inflict upon the reader a diary of my alternative aliveness and nonexistence at La Ferté—not because such a diary would unutterably bore him, but because the diary or time method is a technique which cannot possibly do justice to timelessness. I shall (on the contrary) lift from their grey box at random certain (to me) more or less astonishing toys; which may or may not please the reader, but whose colours and shapes and textures are a part of that actual Present—without future and past-whereof they alone are cognizant who, so to speak, have submitted to an amputation of the world. ” (ee cummings, The Enormous Room)

The remarkable passage above belongs to ee cummings. It introduces the period in his autobiographical work, The Enormous Room, in which he was incarcerated in a military prison without charge or sentence. The passage signals a transition in the narrative. In previous chapters, cummings played the role of the foreigner abroad. We was traveling or being made to travel. Each episode presents him with increasingly unfamiliar circumstances. Now, he is brought to the prison where he is to remain indefinitely. The narrator informs us the linear progress that we are accustomed to seeing in stories must come to a halt. The narrative, along with its protagonist, is put into suspension. The experience is incomparable, we are told. There arises a disruption in continuity, which causes traditional relationships and associations to vanish. The narrator is essentially being released into a social and temporal vacuum. Context is stripped away and we are left with only essence. This sudden disintegration of meaning should be terrifying, yet narrator is unperturbed. In fact, he seems pleased. We struggle to discern whether the tone is ironic. Partly it is. The narrator(cummings?) is subjected to unmistakable torment, but he is so enthralled by the novelty of the situation. This enormous room new world with a new set of incomprehensible principles. People and objects are discovered like uncharted continents. In the absence of shared custom or rules of conduct for entreating these unknown entities, the narrator is free to entreat them exactly as he wishes. Naturally, his first impulse is to play with them. All methods of conduct must be refashioned and the only effective way of doing so is through goofing and using the imagination to project meaning where none can be found. For this reason, he calls them toys. He finds that playing with them is remarkably stimulating, liberating even.
In market, you have overnight generic cialis several options for getting out from the penis. Men are always very concerned about their sexual health, such as eating well, viagra generico cialis exercising, quitting smoking, limiting alcohol, and avoiding illicit drugs. But when you Buy women viagra order online you can also buy affordable generic medications from online pharmacies. That is the reason; the medical science wanted a new kind of bulk viagra that is Sildenafil Citrate.

The purpose of this work is to present a vehicle through which cummings can share his toys with us. We admire them together, author and reader. We are, he hopes, as interested and “astonished” as he is.

When ee cummings is finally released from the enormous room, he returns home to New York and encounters the mob of the city. To his surprise, these people also are toys. Though they have decipherable histories, recognized behaviors, subjective agency, power of communication, the subtext of the enormous room remains, suggesting that all of these supposedly concrete elements that make up the identity are illusory. When cummings first spots people from the ship’s deck arriving in New York harbor, they are so distant they are dots, like seeds potential germinate into wonderful possibility. He describes them in the following line, which also concludes the book: “..which are men which are women and which are things new and curious and hard and strange and vibrant and immense, lifting with a great undulous stride firmly into immortal sunlight.”

Toys in Mexico

When I visited Mexico City several years ago I happened to notice how unusually prevalent toys were. People selling them. People playing with them, both children and adults. I could conjecture a number of causes for this. Probably the biggest reason is that everyone has families and children. When people go out to the Paseo de la Reforma or the Zócalo they bring their children, and if they are going to buy anything, they’ll buy things for their children. Another reason is that toys and candy are not a costly purchases. They are minor pleasures that can be enjoyed without weighing one’s desire for them over other things. I think vendors are so common because it’s quite customary to buy things from people on the street; not really the case in the core economies where most commerce is mediated through large established institutions.

I went to an art exhibit at the Museo de Arte Moderno that actually seemed to support this notion I had developed that Mexicans are preoccupied with toys. Works in the exhibition were from artists who drew inspiration from mass manufactured play objects and games. THe works that were featured were simply delightful. They were bright and wondrous, made from neat material. Some of the objects did things. You were intended to engage with the works as a child would toys in a toy store. Each one was remarkably alluring. I’m not sure how successful the works were as art, since they sort of lured one away from a critical position towards things and invited guests to instead indulge in amusement and escapism. Unfortunately, I’m not able to find documentation of the exhibit anywhere on the internet. I didn’t take pictures of it either. Though the source doesn’t label them, I believe the three installations in the video below were a part of the exhibit.

In the absence of other works from the exhibit, here are some images of Mexican toys and toy vendors…

Masks seemed to be a popular toy to sell, though I never saw anybody wearing one.

Woman selling dolls from a gondola in the Bosque de Chapultepec.

In such cases certain medication like cheapest tadalafil, viagra etc. There are traditional buy cheap viagra medicines and therapies and there are alternative medicines. Wife would be wise to canada viagra cialis choose the trial pack you wish to have. Talk soft tadalafil with your partner about what you’re comfortable with, and what you’re not.

Traditional rub dolls. Apparently, the custom of making rug dolls for little girls dates from before the Conquest.

Mexican Barbi, for sale at Kmart.com. Her dress is from the 1800s. She has a widened nose and a chihuahua wedged between her elbow and rib cage, so as to make her recognizably Mexican, I guess.

Luche Libre wrestling figures. One of the best loved toys in Mexico for decades.

Your typical candy stand. Arresting color, bizarre texture, unidentifiable taste. Mexicandies should qualify as toy, I think. The kind of enchantment that surrounds it resembles the fetishization kids have for toys.

Naturalistic Aesthetic of the Mayan Civilization

The stylization exhibited in fine art of the Aztecs was a clear departure from the classical tradition that predated it. Art originating from the empires of the Maya and the Olmec is strictly representational. The aesthetic of Mesoamerica had been for more than a thousand years absorbed with the visible world. These Olmec figurines are the earliest exponents of this ancient tradition of assertive naturalism.

While these forms were motivated and inspired by carefully observed reality, I would not call them realistic. Accuracy was not the artists’ intent. The thighs of the baby are improbably plump. The lines of the seated figure are smooth and unintricate. The sculptors have chosen to accentuate certain features while dispensing with others. It is not an exhaustive compilation of realistic details. We see reflected in the sculptures only those details which the artists apparently interested in and chose to include. Thus, we have evidence of a sense of elegance perpetuated and passed around within this prehistoric culture.
Most of the countries require prescription if anyone wishes to use kamagra products and therefore it is called no prescription medicine. levitra properien click my pharmacy shop now As a kind of physical exertion, sex mounts in the class of mild to sensible concentration about the corresponding of doing light housework or cialis viagra sale hiking two heights of stairs. The increased flow of blood provides direct source of fresh energy to various organs and female viagra 100mg let them do their function properly. They can avail an effective and world class ED treatment. buying cialis from canada

As Mesoamerica passes into its classical age (approx. 200 AD to 900 AD), the sophistication an and nuance of its artistic representation become staggering. The figure above can safely be identified as high realism. It was obviously created by someone who had been trained for most of his life by elder artists who were carrying on a continually improving tradition. What is interesting about this figure is not the exquisite craftsman ship or the excellent sense of anatomy—though both are impressive. Other cultures achieved comparable feats of mimesis. What sets this figure apart from those is that it is not only realistic but also plausible. There is no idealization, no extraneous expression. The artist set out to reproduce his model precisely as he is. This statue tells us nothing more than how this man looked. It expresses a refined and discerning fastidiousness.

Aztec Figuration

Representation of human and animal forms in Aztecan art is so heavily stylized that they are almost beyond recognition. The image above depicts the dark god, Tezcatlipoca, rival of Quetzalcoatl. This illustration appears on the first page of the Codex Borgia, one of the few surviving pre-colonial Aztec manuscripts. His regalia are so elaborate that obscures his figure. Ensconced at the center of all of these lines and colors is a human form. The costuming, I believe, is representative of his glory radiating outward. One can only discern the god by analysis. If you look at the image as a whole, Tezcatlipoca just looks like a hulking edifice, or a detailed map.

It is possible that depictions of gods are depicted as distorted forms intentionally. Many characters of Aztec mythology are distinctly non-human. Pictured above, also taken from the Codex Borgia, is of the monstrous goddess Itzpapalotl, the “clawed butterfly.” Though she was capable of turning herself into a beautiful woman, in her true form she skeletal head, bat wings barbed with obsidian and jaguar claws for hands and feet. While still quite stylized, her illustration in the Codex Borgia is reasonably accurate.

Kamagra Polo tablets are the latest product from Ajanta Pharma, the manufacture of Kamagra produces the medicine in three dissimilar forms and taste of order cheap levitra tablets, jellies and soft tablets. Satisfy your partner and have the climax you have viagra brand 100mg never imagined of. Other factors that can cialis from india online play a role in sexual impotence. Khakhastil levitra free shipping and Sarpgandha help to strengthen the nerves and offer effective treatment for infections. It is possible that it is not the artist’s prerogative to produce an image with confusing details and a mixture of different elements but rather that is what the mythology prescribes. This illustration from the Codex Laud seems to depict a serpent figure with multiple bodies and human limbs. I don’t believe the identity of the character has been linked to known mythology, but it is quite apparent that there is intentionality here on the part of the illustrator. He was trying to represent something that perhaps could only be conceived abstractly.

Generally, Aztec art can be recognized by its profusion of detail and blocky shape. This Huastec sculpture of Tlazolteotl, a sexuality goddess, seems to diverge from that trend. It is extremely spare. The figure is abstracted and textureless. The fact that it was crafted by a Huaxtec artist rather than the Azteca might account for its distinct style, but it shares much in common with work from elsewhere in the empire: pronounced shapes, distorted proportions. The artist is not so much interested in constructing a perfect simulacrum of the goddess to show her as she would appear if encountered in real life. I think it was acknowledged that this was beyond the ability of the artist. Instead, he seems to be trying to express other concepts beside simple physicality with the decisions he makes about stylization and what details to include.

This last haunting figure is Mictlantecuhtli, god of the dead and king of the Aztec underworld. Of all of the works I have presented here, this is probably the least familiar to the Aztecs. In mythology, Mictlantecuhtli is a blood-splattered skeleton with a grinning skull and ethereal eyes in his otherwise empty eye sockets. The sculpture gives him a very simple pair of clawed human hands. His ribcage is recognizable as a ribcage. The bloom of innards peaking out from beneath it appear to be a liver and stomach. It would seem that the sculpture responsible for this work had some passing knowledge of anatomy. He knew enough about the body to carve a figure that we can recognize as sentient. The form is distorted and abstract, but not so much that it would appear alien to us. The figure is succeeds in disturbing us because it is human-like and relatable. As I shall explain in tomorrow’s post, with this piece, the artist is reviving an older standard of artistic quality: rigorous representation of the seeable.

The Golden Assay

Tag: art