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Taxi Driver

On every street there’s a nobody who dreams of being somebody. He’s lonely, forgotten man, desperate to prove

that

he’s

alive.

Dans chaque rue il y a un inconnu qui reve d’etre quelqu’un. C’est un home seule, oublie, qui cherche, desesperement a prouver

qu’il

existe.

“Geshem” (Rain) by Meir Banai was written after Travis'(Robert de Niro) famouse phrase : “Thank God for the rain which has helped wash away the garbage and trash off the sidewalks”.

#Taxi Driver #homage #Rain #Geshem #Meir banai #גשם

The garden gate is opened as easily as a turned page questioned by a regular devotion and once inside, our gazes have no need to fix on objects that already exist completely in memory. I am familiar with the customs and the souls and that dialectic of allusions which any gathering of humans weaves. I need not speak nor claim false privileges; those who surround me here know me well, know well my afflictions and my weakness. That is to attain the highest thing, what will perhaps be given us by heaven: not veneration or victories, but simply to be accepted as part of an undeniable Reality, like stones and trees.

poem : Simplicity, by Jorge Luis Borges

from Fervor de Buenos Aires, translated by Stephen Kessler

photographs : Syncopath, La Fontaine Baron Horta, Brussels 2013

To grasp the full significance of life is the actor's duty, to interpret it is his problem, and to express it his dedication.

quote : Marlon Brando still & moving image : Pacino and De Niro meeting face to face in "Heat", 1995.

Every Body Sees

The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what no body yet has thought about that which everybody sees.

text : Arthur Schopenhauer images : artist Doris Salcedo, istanbul Biennial, 2003.

reSpect

The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.

text: George Bernard Shaw (from article: Man and Superman 1903) images: Sachiko Abe "Cut Paper" performance

Ecce Homo

No one can play a game alone. One cannot be human by oneself. There is no selfhood where there is no community. We do not relate to others as the persons we are; we are who we are in relating to others. Simultaneously the others with whom we are in relation are themselves in relation. We cannot relate to anyone who is not also relating to us. Our social existence has, therefore, an inescapably fluid character... this ceaseless change does not mean discontinuity; rather change is itself the very basis of our continuity as persons.

text : James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games.

photography : Evelyn Bencicova, Ecce Homo, 2014.

The evening had no destiny at all. Since it was clear, i went out to take a walk and to recollect after dinner. I did not want to determine a route for my stroll ; i tried to attain maximum latitude of probabilities in order not to fatigue my expectation with the necessary foresight of any one of them. I managed, to the imperfect degree of possibility, to do what is called walking at random. I accepted, with no other conscious prejudice than that of avoiding the wider avenues or streets, the most obscure invitations of chance.

text : Jorge Luis Borges, from "A new refutation of Time".

image : from Kontakthof piece by Pina Bausch

video : Syncopath

eChoes ...

And we, inhabitants of the great coral Cosmos, believe the atom (which we still cannot see) to be full matter, whereas, it too, like everything else, is but an embroidery of voids in the Void, and we give the name of being, dense and even eternal, to that dance of inconsistencies, that infinite extension that is identified with absolute Nothingness and that spins from its own non-being the illusion of everything.

text : Umberto Eco, The island of The Day before, Paradoxical Exercises Regarding the Thinking of Stones.

photography : Stephanie Jung

Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand. But we must built as if the sand were stone.

The Brittleness of our Concrete Reality/quote-collage

adage : Jorge Luis Borges still & moving image : Syncopath, Construction Sight, 2011.

The painter does not paint on a virgin canvas. The writer does not write on a blank page. But, the page or the canvas are already covered over with pre-existing, pre-established cliches. (habits of sight & habits of thought). The cliches must be scraped away to find a singular vital space of possibility. For cliche is precisely what prevents the genesis of an image. (just as opinion & convention prevent the genesis of thought). The painter does not need to cover a blank canvas, but on the contrary, to empty the canvas of all these 'givens' that are present in it .. (these cliches and ready made perceptions, actual or virtual), for one can really think only where what is to be thought is not already given.

text : Gille Deleuze ; Francis Bacon the Logic of Sensation. still&moving image : Syncopath , in homage to Magritte's long-lasting provocative pipe. * Yantra (Skt. support, instrument) is a mystic diagram, a model and a mediator for visualizing different aspects and powers of the divine. Sometimes also called "Visual Mantras".

Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people’s convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. Culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines.  We have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. But we are led by the least among us – the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons. Our world is in danger by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness. If the words ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ don’t include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn’t worth the hemp it was written on. Culture and ideology are not your friends. They are not your friends. This is a hard thing to come to terms with, because a certain kind of alienation lies at the end of this thought process. Culture is a closed system of thinking and values, of the sort I am denouncing; and the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency, is your culture. And I realise with ... joy, that here I skirt the bounds of political correctness, because everyone is running around saying, you know, “Recapture your roots, get in touch with your Swedishness, your Irishness, your whateverishness”… and that’s all very fine, but I think it’s your humanness that may have eluded you in all this ethnocentric graspingness .... !

Culture is Not yr Friend/quote-collage

text : Terence McKenna (extracted from three varied talks). images : Liu Bolin, a Chinese artist best known for his "Invisible man" photographic series. video : Terence Mckenna, 03:30min video, from the lecture "Into the Valley of Novelty". more 'Culture is not your Friend' : 10 min audio on youtube ; 1 hour audio on youtube ;

We are not born from a battle. That's a lie. and we are not born from a passive egg. That's a lie too. That's all lies ..... That's what they put in our heads at school. We are born from a great collaboration and not from a great battle. and we are not born from an inert egg but from a totally active one.

gene-alogy OF co-llaboration/quote-collage

quote : Alejandro Jodorowsky image : Andreas Gefeller photography from "The Japanese Series' 2010. video : an excerpt from the DVD of the book 'Metagenealogía', by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Marianne Costa, 2011.

In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel. If this is so, how could a mere chronicle of its forms transmit the stupor, the exaltation, the alarm, the menace and jubilance which made up the fabric of that dream that night? I shall attempt such a chronicle, however; perhaps the fact that the dream was composed of one single scene may remove or mitigate this essential difficulty. The place was the School of Philosophy and Letters; the time, towards sundown. Everything (as usually happens in dreams) was somewhat different; a slight magnification altered things. We were electing officials: I was talking with Pedro Henriquez Urena, who in the world of waking reality died many years ago. Suddenly we were stunned by the clamour of a demonstration or disturbance. Human and animal cries came from the Bajo. A voice shouted 'Here they come!' and then 'The Gods! The Gods!' Four or five individuals emerged from the mob and occupied the platform of the main lecture hall. We all applauded, tearfully; these were the Gods returning after a centuries-long exile. Made larger by the platform, their heads thrown back and their chests thrust forward, they arrogantly received our homage. One held a branch which no doubt conformed to the simple botany of dreams; another, in a broad gesture, extended his hand which was a claw; one of the faces of Janus looked with distrust at the curved beak of Thoth. Perhaps aroused by our applause, one of them - I no longer know which - erupted in a victorious clatter, unbelieveably harsh, with something of a gargle and of a whistle. From that moment, things changed. It all began with a suspicion (perhaps exaggerated) that the Gods did not know how to talk. Centuries of fell and fugitive life had atrophied the human element in them; the moon of Islam and the cross of Rome had been implacable with these outlaws. Very low foreheads, yellow teeth, stringy mulatto or Chinese moustaches and thick bestial lips showed the degeneracy of the Olympian lineage. Their clothing corresponded not to a decorous poverty but rather to the sinister luxury of the gambling houses and brothels of the Bajo. A carnation bled crimson in a lapel and the bulge of a knife was outlined beneath a close-fitting jacket. Suddenly we sensed that they were playing their last card, that they were cunning, ignorant and cruel like old beasts of prey and that, if we let ourselves be overcome by fear or piety, they would finally destroy us. We took out our heavy revolvers (all of a sudden there were revolvers in the dream) and joyfully killed the Gods.

Ragnarök -or- How wE JoyfuLLy kiLLed the Gods/quote-collage

text : Ragnarök by Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths 1962, translated by James E. Irby. image & video : Syncopath, Take Off, shot in Tempelhof Berlin 2013 * Ragnarök (wiki) = is an important event in the Norse canon. it is a series of future events, including a great battle foretold to ultimately result in the death of a number of major figures (including the gods Odin, Thor, Týr, Freyr,) and the subsequent submersion of the world in water. Afterward, the world will resurface anew and fertile. * Tempelhof airport Berlin (wiki) = Tempelhof was designated as an airport on 8 October 1923; The old terminal was originally constructed in 1927; The Nazi government began a massive reconstruction in the mid-1930s in anticipation of increasing air traffic; Tempelhof was one of Europe's three iconic pre-World War II airports; One of the airport's most distinctive features is its large, canopy-style roof, which was able to accommodate most contemporary airliners during its heyday in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, thereby protecting passengers from the elements; Tempelhof Airport's main building was once among the top 20 largest buildings on earth; Tempelhof Airport closed all operations on 30 October 2008; In August 2009, Berlin city officials announced that Tempelhof would be opened in May 2010 as a city park and will be used as a park indefinitely; On the weekend of 8/9 May 2010, the outfield was festively opened as Berlin's largest public park named "Tempelhofer Feld"; More than 200,000 Berliners visited the park to enjoy its wide open spaces for recreation ranging from biking and skating to baseball and kiting.

I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.

Hopping Over yet aNother Day/quote-collage

text : Baruch Spinoza video & image : Syncopath, Bricolage, 2013

The Highest that we can attain isnotKnowledge

My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before - a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. text : Henry David Thoreau, Walking, 1862. "Walking" began as a lecture called "The Wild," delivered by Henry at the Concord Lyceum on April 23, 1851. He gave this lecture many times, developing it into the essay finally published in the Atlantic Monthly after his death, in 1862. images : Friedensreich Hundertwasser paintings image1 - Le Grand Chemin 1955 image2 - no info

mYself

Behold ! I do not give lectures or a little charity, When I give I give myself. text : Walt Whitman (1819 -1892), Leaves of Grass, Song of Myself. image1 : Liu Bolin, Invisible Man. image2 : Syncopath, No-body's Here.

I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation. Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.

text : artist Robert Smithson (1938-1973) image & video : Syncopath, BOZAR, Bruseels, 2011. (closing day of photographer Jeff Wall solo exhibition).

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