Now that I think of it, Wednesday was not so bad. I had a bad hangover from the night before when I had met my friend Manfred. We had been in a Pizzeria, later in a bar in his hotel, and then I had the idea to go to my apartment, just “for a couple of songs”.
We haven’t done that in years and he predicted that we would play music till 3am. Impossible, as I would have to work and he was on his way to Innsbruck. No problem, I said. Just half an hour, three songs each. He conceded under that condition, and off we went to my place.
You know, it was just about time. When there are two people who love music and love to play music to each other, and when they have not done that in years, it’s inevitable.
He used his iPod, I played from my CD collection, one song an answer to the other, time and wine went by, and we merrily played the last song at about … 3am 🙂
"Urban Dreams", my SoFoBoMo project this year, it feels really good. It’s what I did all those years, actually it’s what I did all my life.
I have no idea if I can convince anybody that there is a system or a method in this haphazard heap of images, but in a way they are a part of me, of the way that I see, of the way that I look.
You can’t see without looking, you know? I think for all kinds of visual art you need a certain openness, a certain way of looking at things, a way of looking without prejudice, a way of looking without immediately attaching agreed upon meaning. You have to look at the things, not at the symbols they have become in our mind.
This is not meant deprecatingly, there is nothing wrong with automatically attaching meaning, with categorizing, with sorting things onto our shelves before we even fully realize them, to the contrary. This is just what intelligence means, to be able to sort things out. This is the way we communicate. We do it by exchanging symbols. It’s the nature of language, the basis of knowledge.
It is only not a good way to be creative in an artistic sense. In order to do that, I have to step back, to strip the things of their normally pre-attached meanings, to not see them as the symbols they have become. I have to look at the raw materials. I have to put my hands in, I have to feel them running through my fingers, and only then can I put things together in a new way.
Readers of Mark “The Landscapist” Hobson’s blog may recognize the sentiment: it’s what Mark calls “plain seeing”. It shows in different ways, as “dense photography” in Mark’s work, a concept that I like to dabble in at times, and more often in my own work it’s about selection. Which ever way it turns up, it’s always about a very central question, namely what do we deem worthy of our attention?
Maybe this explains a little about today’s collection of images, if not you can always blame them to the influence of alcohol and wild music 🙂
Apropos music, when I looked up the word “busk”, I got “to make street music”, and that immediately triggered the association with Fanfare Cioc?rlia, a brass band from north-east Romania. I had the pleasure to see them last year, and after the official concert they simply concluded in the foyer, with all people dancing around them. It was magic, irresistible.
The Song of the Day is “Manea Cu Voca” from their 2000 album “Baro Biao: World Wide Wedding”. See a video on YouTube.
I have no idea what the lyrics mean, Romina over at “skinny dippin’ photography [a dream catcher society]” will certainly know. She’s from Bucharest, has a very nice photoblog, makes awesome photos, and I wish she would post much more often.