Art Forms

[Above, the trailer for the short film Lost and Found, an adaptation of the children's book of the same name by Oliver Jeffers. For stills from the movie, visit the Cartoon Brew link above, and STUDIO aka.]

From whiskey river:

Recipe for an Ocean in the Absence of the Sea

You have the ingredients on hand,
Get to the edge of something,
yourself best of all, and take
yourself in hand. Take, I mean, your hand,
trace out the blue menaces
released and lapsing there,
watch closely around the wrist: they will
remind you what you must do,
They are what you must do. Be
them, until there is nothing but them,
then you are ready. Now take
time, all there is in the house –
it does not have to be yours. Take time
and never for a moment
losing track of what changes
back into yourself, bitter enough
so that you will need almost
no salt, mix well and then leap
over the edge. Wait there. When you can
wait no longer, it is done.
Serve at once. It does not keep.

(Richard Howard [source])

…and:

The world of the arts is by no means always comfortable, but neither is it likely ever to be boring. It is full of surprises, humor, traps for the unwary, and challenges to smugness. It is a world of moods as well as of revelation, of beliefs and fears, of unpleasant truth as well as of delicious fantasy. Perhaps it is arrogant to say that anyone who does not venture into this world is only half-interested in life. I say it, nonetheless.

(Russell Lynes, The Fine Edge of Awareness)

Not from whiskey river:

He radiated, from afar, the hard blue glow of high purpose. I remember listening over the radio to the All-Star Game of 1946, in which Williams hit two singles and two home runs, the second one off a Rip Sewell “blooper” pitch; it was like hitting a balloon out of the park. I remember watching one of his home runs from the bleachers of Shibe Park; it went over the first baseman’s head and rose meticulously along a straight line and was still rising when it cleared the fence. The trajectory seemed qualitatively different from anything anyone else might hit. For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill.

(John Updike, on Ted Williams, in Baseball Almanac: “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu“)

…and:

Dancers don’t use anything other than who they are in the sense that we are not machines where the volume can be turned up or amplified. We have to do it all visually and energetically. I say to the dancers, “Ladies and gentlemen, please turn up the volume in your movement; you have to turn up the volume, the technicolor in your eyes.” We are our own technology, our own instruments. There is no cinematographer, no editor, no sound track to enhance. You will have days when you don’t balance as long, or you don’t turn as many times or you can’t jump as high. That’s where your response to music and space comes into play. I want to teach my dancers to have a facility to use another vocabulary, just like a writer searches for a better word. We should have that kind of thesaurus in our technique, the ability to delve deeper into our dance voice. It’s much more visceral, much more vulnerable. And that makes many people uncomfortable.

(Dancer — and now dance teacher — Suzanne Farrell, in a 2003 interview in BOMB Magazine)

Finally, Michelangelo’s first draft disappoints its most important critic: