[Video: “Translating Architecture into Instruments,” TED video by “contemporary sound, performance and installation artist” Allard Van Hoorn. Van Hoorn’s Urban Songlines project of a few years ago experimented with ways to generate sound — “songlines” of a sort — from various architectural elements. Although I can’t embed the video here, I was especially taken with his “Lusophonic Storyboard,” which you can read about (and whose video can watch/listen to) here. As for songlines in general — the Australian Aboriginal variety — you can read more below.]
From whiskey river:
Phantom Blues
I have the phantom blues.
I’m too tired to be blue.
This is what phantoms do.
They only almost have the blues.Maybe I’ll get some rest
so I can get depressed.
Yes, that’s it. I need to
feel better to feel worse.Maybe I am a phantom.
I hadn’t thought of that.
Just an old weary ghost
with an invisible hat.
(Hans Ostrom [source])
…and:
Antilamentation
(excerpt)You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don’t bother remembering
any of it. Let’s stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.
(Dorianne Laux [source])
…and:
Sometimes I muse about how wonderful it would be if I could string all my dreams together into one continuous life, a life consisting of entire days full of imaginary companions and created people, a false life which I could live and suffer and enjoy. Misfortune would sometimes strike me there, and there I would also experience great joys. And nothing about me would be real. But everything would have a sublime logic; it would all pulse to a rhythm of sensual falseness, taking place in a city built out of my soul and extending all the way to the platform next to an idle train, far away in the distance within me… And it would all be vivid and inevitable, as in the outer life, but with an aesthetics of the Dying Sun.
(Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet [source])
