gnossienne – n. a moment of awareness that someone you’ve known for years still has a private and mysterious inner life, and somewhere in the hallways of their personality is a door locked from the inside, a stairway leading to a wing of the house that you’ve never fully explored—an unfinished attic that will remain maddeningly unknowable to you, because ultimately neither of you has a map, or a master key, or any way of knowing exactly where you stand.
–The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
I don’t have much to say this morning. I just wanted to share a little music from the French composer Erik Satie, someone whose work has always spoken to me in its elegant spareness. It was a great influence on some of my earliest works. In fact, I even titled an early piece or two after the composer but I can’t locate the images at this point.
I thought I’d share his Gnossienne no. 1 as played in this fine video from the contemporary Italian pianist/composer Alessio Nanni. The word gnossienne was created by Satie. He sometimes created new terms or appropriated terms from other fields to describe his compositions. Gnossienne is generally thought to simply denote a new form although I like the definition at the top from the website The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. It seems to fit the composition very well.
Anyway, give a listen to Satie’s beautiful sounds and have a great Sunday.
I started off this morning at a very different place than where I finished when I began looking for this Sunday morning’s musical selection. I started watching videos from Long John Baldry which somehow led to Neko Case which even more oddly led me to Oscar Peterson and Count Basie.
I hear all the time that this election is about bringing change to our country. While that sounds pretty good for some folks, especially those who feel like they’ve somehow ended up with the short end of the stick, I want to speak a word of caution:
First, let me extend thanks to everyone who came out to the show at the Kada Gallery on Saturday night. It was great seeing some old friends and meeting some new ones. And thanks to Kathy and Joe at the Kada for their longtime friendship and encouragement–you provided me with a wonderful night. If you didn’t make it out there, you can still see the show as it hangs until December 3.
But there are the Cramps.
There are two ways of looking at my paintings for me. During the process, I view it as an assemblage of parts, a series of decisions to be made and obstacles to overcome. It feels very much like it is part of me at that point, like I hold all the cards and determine where it will go and what it will inevitably be. I feel a bit like a mechanic or a surgeon in that time.
In these current strange days, I am not quite sure how I feel about Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. I think I’m okay with it. After all, I’ve always though of him as much a writer/poet as a musician. His lyrics have been winding around the world for fifty some years and it’s hard to find any musician just about anywhere who hasn’t been influenced by his words, his music and his social consciousness.
Wow.
One of the results of doing this blog for so long– over eight years now– is that when real life takes precedence and there’s not enough time or energy to write anything, I feel a real sense of guilt. This has become an entrenched part of my day and to be too busy or distracted with something else leaves me with a bit of an empty feeling, like I’m shirking my duty, even if it is only to myself.
The last couple of weeks have been pretty hectic as you might guess from the lack of posts here. There was the Gallery Talk last weekend at the Principle Gallery down in Virginia then a few days spent setting up and leading the painting workshop at Sunny Point on Keuka Lake with a bunch of personal things jammed in between. I was plain pooped out yesterday and just couldn’t get myself to write anything for the blog.
But the workshop at Sunny Point this week went really well and was, I think, fun for the folks there. Me, too.
Redtree Times 