After yesterdays loaded post, it’s time for a slice of plain art … I first discovered Arvo Pärt’s My Heart’s in the Highlands, which was composed for the 50th birthday of the countertenor David James, through Paolo Sorrentino’s fabulous film La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty), 2013. La Grande Bellezza is a pure sensual overload of…
Category: film
Job without God
To all my nature loving friends, if you can manage to tear yourself free from the wilderness for just a short while, here is a film to watch; the Russian movie Leviathan is a beautiful story about the strength of nature and the weakness of man. It’s a story about Job without God, about the…
La grande bellezza
Yesterday my study of beauty led me to the movies, to see Paolo Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty) (2013), a film which has been described as Sorrentino’s modern take on the themes of Fellini’s La dolce vita. La grande bellezza is a film about Jep Gambardella, a journalist (and a stalled author) who…
a stranger kind of beauty
The Dead The dead are always looking down on us, they say, while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich, they are looking down through the glass bottom boats of heaven as they row themselves slowly through eternity. They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth, and when…
Love, no matter what!
Parenting is no sport for perfectionists I’m writing a piece on art and motherhood. It will not be an exclusively positive portrait. Being a mother for 23 years have displayed a multifaceted picture, I’m trying to capture some of this complexity in my text. Today my research led me to two fantastic findings, to Andrew Solomon…
… forgetfulness
The Dad Poet has a great post on poetry and philosophy, using a beautiful poem by Billy Collins as a springboard, or maybe rather as a centerpiece, for the discussion. Following some links on The Dad Poets’ page, I ended up with some great animations made to Collins’ poems. Here is Forgetfulness Forgetfulness – Billy…
Becoming intimate with fear
—Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry. (Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten.) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value * Maggie Nelson: I’ve often written about things that terrify me—likely out of compulsion more than hope for comfort, or catharsis; as Peter Handke says near the end of his horrified memoir of his mother’s suicide, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams,…
On being disappointed
– how come something like this could happen … ? I had so much been looking forward to reading this book, expecting it to be a feast – at the level of my best reading experiences. But there just wasn’t any sparkle between us, I felt as if I was trying to light wet wood,…
The Floating House
– rediscovering blueness; in all its strange and wonderful variations. Paulette Phillips, The Floating House, 2002. Video still from the 16mm film. . Paulette Phillips made a beautiful video of a house adrift on the Atlantic Ocean, a house which slowly gets pulled under by the force of the sea. The film has a very interesting…
Christmas in February
A dear friend, whom I sometimes suspects knows me better than I know myself, came to visit me the other night. She brought me a delayed christmas gift, containing this: India Song – a 1975 French film directed by Marguerite Duras. It has been some years now since I last visited the world of Marguerite Duras. I…
sub rosa 