BERNEVAL

Produced by artistic (collective?) zzthex … this is a visual and aural treat. Imagine all the care and time in assembling, selecting, and stringing together. One minute and fifty-five seconds.

good morning
good evening
i’d like to welcome all of you here today

allright, so the beginning of all this was 1997
the early universe was almost all hydrogen and helium
in this roaring extend feathered wing to feathered wing
the universe is beginning to clump up and build galaxies from scratch
like an ocean of solutions, you dive in there, and these solutions come
this was the period in which you assembled the mass into galaxies
streets, subways, window ledges
in fact the stars only account for 1/2 a percent

gods and stars and stars or totems are not game animals
incidentally i’ve kind of switched on you

we don’t know when it hits us, but we become seekers, we start asking questions, we start getting curious
what next, you know
you can choose where to work, you can choose to buy television sets, you can choose to travel

this all turns out to be wrong
it’s very very unusual to want it if you don’t like it

so you see the galaxy in the center there, that doesn’t look like a spiral or an elliptical, it’s kind of chaotic
what you’re seeing is two phases of forms of social integration
finally you see constitutional law evolving in response to political, social, and constitutional pressure
the same people who had been unproductive you know, for 100 years plus, suddenly became very productive and very dynamic
ahh, the people, the people, merely they are flesh of my flesh

but I think it’s a question with more than one context

what would you do if all the lovers of your years passed by at midnight, dressed in the flesh that they wore when you last loved them
you’d be able to see the charactaristic size of these waves in an otherwise chaotic ocean
that’s, that’s actually kind of profound

A mash up of lectures given at UC Berkeley. Music is Grace by Bobby McFerrin and Yo-Yo Ma.

Lectures:
* Advancing Integrative Psychological Research on Adaptive and Healthy Aging – Session 3: Decision Making in Aging – May 21, 2009
* David Lynch: Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain – November 6, 2005
* Memristor and Memristive Systems Symposium – November 21, 2008
* 2009 Frickey Symposium – Plenaary Session 1 – April 24, 2009
* The Dawn of Creation: The First Two Billion Years – Steven Beckwith – April 23, 2008
* Lunch Poems – Robin Blaser
* Conversations with History – The rise of Asia and the Decline of the West – Kishore Mahbubani

And so for day 2740
14.06.2014

Nella’s puzzle. I offered to post the prototype by snail mail. She challenged me to send the thing by the Internet. I thought it would require some fancy coding to create a stack of flash cards that could be shuffled for surrealist word games or made to touch edge-to-edge in the manner of a jigsaw puzzle.

It dawned upon me that the tools are on the receiver’s machine.

Deriving inspiration (and cut up from a takeaway) from Grayson James “After Alexandria”
https://berneval.hcommons-staging.org/?s=after+alexandria

And hoping that we all live in universe where derivative works are covered by an implicit share alike Creative Commons license …

File under: dopplegamer

And so for day 2739
13.06.2014

This is not a review of the biography of Leonard Cohen by Ira B. Nadel Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen

It’s a little plucking from “Flowers Talk in Languages of All Races”

From Jackson Daily News 1930

reproduced in Eudora Welty Early Escapades

The expression of flowers is varied by changing their positions. “Place a marigold on the head,” says the etiquette book, “and it signifies ‘mental anguish;’ on the bosom, ‘indifference.'”

[…]

The flower custom in the nineteenth century stared out to be a contest. Now it remains only a commercialized custom — beautiful none the less, of course, but the really coy feature of it, the repartee between the sexes, has been thrown over to other pursuits like the straw vote polling on prohibition.

An old article breatheing new meaning to the phrase “say it with flowers” and invites one to invest some time to pour over some old sources:

Floriography – the language of flowers – had gained popularity during the Victorian era to the extent that it had become a complex means of coded communications. Using particular blooms or even just their scents, Victorians were able to convey emotions that the strictures of the time made impossible to speak about openly. Thus, if a man sent the target of his affections a red chrysanthemum (meaning ‘I love you’) he would be hoping to receive in return perhaps a Jerusalem Oak (‘Your love is reciprocated’) and not a striped carnation (a symbol of refusal). It all got so complicated that floriography dictionaries were published allowing flustered romantics to check the meaning of the latest delivery – is that a chickweed (‘I cling to thee’) or a burdock (‘Touch me not’)?

https://www.creativereview.co.uk/say-it-with-flowers/

I do like that term: floriography.

And so for day 2736
10.06.2014

A passage from the program notes for the world premiere of Frame by Frame based on the life and work of Norman McLaren

I went to London and went to the ballet; I’d never seen ballet before and was utterly fascinated, because I saw several types of ballet. But I was more interested in the nondramatic ballet, the ballet of movement and the creation of the choreography and the changing forms and patterns on the stage. If I’d been born in London and could have gone to the ballet from the age of 8 or 10, I might have wanted to be a ballet dancer and eventually a choreographer.

In a sense he played with forms and patterns in his animated films. The attention to repetition and form is even evident even in the prose about dance.

And so for day 2732
06.06.2014