(no subject)
“I quote others only the better to express myself.” -Michel de Montaigne
The ancient peoples of Papua New Guinea, who live in the inaccessible highlands of an island six times the size of Britain, were only discovered in the 1930s. They have traveled from the Stone Age to the Space Age in less than 70 years.
Henry Ford: “History is bunk!”
British Patent No. 14, 204 (1884): A formula for making gold from wheat. Cut straw into fine square nips, put them in cold water, keep at a steady 59 degrees F. for ten hours, strain the liquid into a china dish, leave it to stand 24 hours at a temp of 60 degrees F. The surface skim is pure gold.
“I’m interested in the moment when two objects collide and generate a third. The third object is where the interesting work is.” -Bruce Mau, Designer
Helen Keller, blind and deaf from infancy, dreamt of a pearl. This she described as “a smooth exquisitely moulded crystal” with the “velvety green of moss, the soft whiteness of lilies”. She could never have seen or remembered a pearl, a lily, or moss. She was not unique. There are many instances of people dreaming things they have never seen, or of participating in events centuries past or future happenings.
Giraffes only sleep five minutes every 24 hours.
Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep?
Charlie Chaplin, who composed his film music while asleep, had a recording device so he could wake up, hum a few bars, and go back to sleep.
Revelations which arrived in dreams include: Rene Descartes (philosopher): the principles of analytical geometry, Albert Einstein, the connection of time with space, Robert Louis Stevenson, the plot of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Elias Howe, the first sewing machine.
Brian Eno: “Dreamed I was a song. Disappointing to wake and find myself a man in a hole.”
Identical discoveries and inventions made independently but concurrently include: the evolutionary theory of the species, calculus, the telephone, the telescope, photography, the planet Neptune and the Rubik Cube.
In Wales, the traditional metal bar cattle grid has confined sheep for centuries. Apparently flocks near the small town of Blaenau Ffestiniog have recently learned to cross cattle grids by tucking up their little legs and rolling over the bars. In sheep terms this represents a giant leap in reasoning power. -The Sunday Times, April 1985
By the way, the British Standards Institute issued a specification some years ago which required all cattle grids to have a narrow ramp for hedgehogs- so they don’t fall between the bars attempting to cross from one side to the other.
Wild monkeys on an isolated island off Japan were introduced to the sweet potato. Unfamiliar with this new food they were unable to cope, getting them covered with sand and dirt. Luckily there was a monkey genius in the community who washed the potatoes in a pool, and then ate them, a ritual which was gradually adopted by the others. At a certain point something quite extraordinary happened. The habit suddenly and spontaneously occurred, without any rational explanation, in several other isolated and unconnected monkey colonies.
Edward James: “Salvador Dali’s inventions are curious things, like, for instance, the Pleuvial Taxi. They came out of real occurrences. Dali and I were waiting one day for a taxi after lunch in Verona. It was pouring, pouring rain and there weren’t any empty taxis. Dali got more and more nervous. Finally it stopped raining, and up came an empty taxi, and Dali said, “It’s almost sure to be raining inside the taxi now that it’s stopped outside.” From that he elaborated the idea of the Pleuvial Taxi. He said, “They’ll be very elegant. It will cost more money to be in a raining taxi. Everybody will come to lunch a bit wet, wearing a mackintosh, even on sunny days, because they’ll have been in one of my Pleuvial Taxis.” He created a Pleuvial Taxi for the first Surrealist show in Paris, with a wax model in it, with snails crawling up her arms. That was the origin of that!”
“An artist who is self-taught is taught by a very ignorant person indeed.” -John Constable
The bark is the song of the dog.
A visual shout vigorously communicates a Soviet message in this poster designed in the 1920s by Alexander Rodchenko. The photograph is of poet Mayakovsky’s girlfriend and was taken by Rodchenko. The poster is frequently reproduced, (for example, on the cover of Franz Ferdinand’s latest album) however, this is the first time, unless you are conversant with Russian, that you will understand what it says: “BOOKS” (she shouts) - “IN ALL BRANCHES OF KNOWLEDGE”.
23.2.1974-- A man in a new overcoat and an astrakhan hat, the weekend shopping in his arms, walking along the pavement barking loudly like a dog. -Ian Breakwell’s Diary, 1964-1985
In 1996 Gary Kasparov- arguably the greatest chess player ever- was beaten by a machine whose capacity for calculation leaves the human brain standing. Whereas Kasparov can evaluate three moves a second, IBM’s Deep Blue can evaluate millions. Nevertheless such is the complexity of chess, this still only provides for five moves ahead. The advantage is reversed when it comes to improvisation, and Kasparov won the second game by this strategy. I think he lost the rest of the matches and apparently at the end of the session, accused the machine of cheating- maybe it has already acquired human characteristics.
"Has anybody publicly said how nice it is to write on rubber with a ballpoint pen? The slow, fat, ink-rich line, rolled over a surface at once dense and yielding, makes for a multidimensional experience no single sheet of paper can offer." -Extract. Nicholson Baker. The Mezzanine.
25.3.1975 London: Farringdon Road, EC1-- A man with one leg considerably shorter than the other, lurching along whistling “I Could Have Danced All Night”. -Ian Breakwell’s Diary. 1964-1985
Liszt, Wagner, Scriabin (‘D Major was yellow’) and Goethe all saw musical notes in colors. For Anthony Burgess an oboe was ‘silver-green lemon juice’ and a flute ‘light brown and cold veal gravy’. Wassily Kandinsky heard sunsets and saw music. ‘Absolute green’, he was sure, is the same as ‘the placid middle notes of a violin’. As a writer Rimbaud had typographic leanings and felt that the letter A was a ‘black hairy corset of loud flies’.
Alexander Theroux listed things that he felt ‘seemed yellow’: ‘maiden aunts, gumdrops, diffidence, the letter H, all women’s poems (except Emily Dickenson’s, which of course, are red) lewd suggestions, debt, the seventies, sadness, the Yale English department faculty, the name as well as the country Brazil, August, the House of Congress, the word ‘hills’, lampshades, physicians, insurance agents, the thin, squealing noises of children in playgrounds, political compromise, the state of Nebraska, illness in general, old wagon wheels, whispering, and the vapid name Catherine.”
“The man who can’t visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.” -Andre Breton
A…is like two friends who embrace and shake hands. I is the war-machine that throws projectiles…P is the porter carrying a burden, R signifies rest, the porter leaning on his stick. U is the urn, V is the vase (that is why U and V are often confused). X signifies crossed swords, combat- who will be the victor? Nobody knows- that is why philosophers used X to signify fate, and the mathematicians took it for the unknown. Z is the lightning- is God…” -Victor Hugo
28.6.1985 London: St John Street, EC1-- ‘A man is staring at a puddle. He inspects it from three different positions. Then he walks away, sighs, shrugs his shoulders and says: “With puddles like that there’s no hope for us.” -Ian Breakwell’s Diary
Charles Baudelaire described walking down city streets in the 1850s as an adventure, more dramatic than any play, richer in ideas than any book. One should become, he suggested, a flaneur (a stroller or saunterer). Flaneures don’t have any practical goals in mind, aren’t walking to get something, or to go somewhere. What flaneurs are doing is looking. Opening their eyes and ears to the scene around them, wondering about the lives of those they pass, constructing narratives about the houses, eavesdropping on conversations, studying how people dress and street life in general. Flaneures relish what they discern and discover.
Alfred Stieglitz: “Photography is a fad well nigh on its last legs, thanks largely to the bicycle craze.”
“On his way home from China, Marco Polo saw a rhinoceros in Java. He assumed it was a unicorn although he recorded his surprise at its appearance which was less elegant than he thought and its disposition less gentle.” -E.H. Gombrich Art and Illusion.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, expert of deduction, believed in fairies.
Evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould wrote a ten page essay on whether zebras are white animals with black stripes or black animals with white stripes. He concluded the latter.
Photographer Martin Parr restricted himself to only take photographs on grey days when it was raining or bad weather.
“Imagine a piano having seventy-five different sounds. This is the situation of painters.” -Salvador Dali
“The fewer limitations the artist imposes on his work, the less chance he has for artistic success.” -Alexander Solzhenitsyn
“Give me a laundry list and I will set it to music.” -Gioachino Rossini
“How can you govern a country which has 264 different kinds of cheese?” -General de Gaulle
Note to self- look into What A Life! (1911)
“Sculpture is the stuff you bump into when you step backwards to admire a painting.” -Baudelaire
“Ugliness is superior to beauty; it lasts longer.” -Serge Gainsbourg
“I’m not against beauty, it just sounds boring to me.” -Tibor Kalman
“The most constructive word I can think of for Cornish catering is…Yeeeuuuurrrrchhh. And any restaurant that wants to quote me on the menu can. Almost without exception, it’s vile.” -Food Critic A.A. Gill
In 1840 Edgar Allan Poe wrote The Philosophy of Furniture, an essay on good taste. His preference was for the English style of the period: “a glory of wallpaper, figured rugs, marble-top tables, tall narrow windows with dark red curtains, sofas, antimacassars, vases, unfading wax flowers under bell jars, a rosewood piano, and a cozy fireplace.”
Kumquats are tiny Chinese oranges. They are delicious, succulent, a touch bitter. You like them or you don’t. Deeply nailed into the you of YOU is the like/don’t like feeling. It is not rational or even shared. People like/don’t like the colour puce, bugs, the sound of wind in the willows. If someone doesn’t like spinach you will never ever persuade them that they do. As Clarence Darrow expostulated: “I don’t like spinach, and I’m glad I don’t, because if I liked it- I’d eat it, and I just hate it.” Just like Darrow I used to hate spinach- but now I sort of like it. Maybe it’s because I’m not who I was.
“2 and 2 equals 22, not 4.” -Man Ray
In 1953 Julius and Ethel Rosenburg were executed in America as Russian spies. To keep their contacts clandestine they used a cardboard Jell-O box torn in two halves. Both pieces were given to two individuals so they could identify each other when they met. If the halves matched all was well. It was the unpredictable results and the degree of informational complexity of tearing which made it foolproof.