0.6 days to Confirmation Day
18 days to Red Beret Day
27 days to Marie's Baptism Day (with the name Dominique)
I. Signs and Coincidences
When Marie mused upon which name to choose as her baptismal name, she went to the Patron Saints Index and searched under just about anything that caught her attention under the topics section, like problematic children, choirs, Bohemia etc. The name Domini(c/que) appeared enough times to arouse some suspicion. It might be just that Domini(c/que) is a very common name in saints, but we picked Dominique for baptism anyway; it suits the name Marie as well.
II. Personal rituals
1 Passing SOC (overcoming a mental obstacle)
2 35k (in this context, interpreted as a pilgrimage of toil before the ceremony)
3 Confession
4 Get a pair of black pants
III. An Observation on Instrumental Music
One major difference between listening to songs that are sung and listening to songs that are just played, is that while the voice of the singer fills the mind, the sound of instrumental music makes space.
Really! While listening to Natalie MacMaster's fiddle today on the road my mind was racing to the beat, thinking about quite many other things. It's something I haven't been able to do under the influence of Tri Yann, even if they sing in French.
I've just watched Xiangjun's application video to ADM. It's cool to hear her voice again after such a long while, even if it's a recording. She used fiddle music by Christian Lemaître for the start, which fit the monologue like a glove, but towards the end of the video she used An Cailin Gaelach by Altan, in which the lyrics had a brief clash with the narration, but it's still okay. [Oi Xiang, you still here?]
IV. A New take on Aesthetics
Q: So what makes something or someone beautiful?
A: Their integrity.
I would venture so far as to explain thisaways:
1 First you have an entity, a person or an object
2 An entity exist by themselves, but they also have a overarching context (e.g. London is in England) and subordinate attributes (e.g. London has x boroughs and a population of y) that define them.
3 The integrity of an entity is the totality of the entity itself, its context and its attributes alike.
4 This integrity is important in many aesthetic experiences--
(e.g. which one gets when touching down to Heathrow for the first time. The aesthetic experience comes in the form that this moment holds a lot of meaning and implications by virtue of the aforesaid three components.
ENTITY: London Heathrow, its infrastructure, the bustling city of London itself, or if you land at night, the light pollution
CONTEXT: You're coming to fabled England / You're going to a prestigious university you've been fighting for in a long while
ATTRIBUTES: London has a neat nightlife, virtuoso graffiti artists, Westminster Abbey, access to places like Cardiff or Stonehenge, and et cetera)
5 Stripped of any component, the object loses integrity and its beauty becomes banal
(e.g. suppose you take a whole album of photographs of London and you show them to your friend, who hasn't gotten anywhere near London but studies in Providence instead, she will see and feel the city's beauty in itself (ENTITY) but will not experience it (CONTEXT and some of the ATTRIBUTES))
6 When the integral beauty of a large entity is rendered irrelevant, the focus is narrowed (if you are focusing on the beauty of the London Eye instead of London, you will tend not to mind too much the context and attributes of London itself)
Implications.
a. Abstraction should be used with caution in Art and Design. While abstraction does provide for a sense of cleanliness and creates visual treats often, it is essentially whittlng at the integrity of an object.
If you want to abstract a tree, you could take a real tree, take away the landscape, take away the unique form of its leaves, smooth out every kink in its trunk and branches, or what does you to make something which is the archetypal tree, is no tree at all and yet stands for all trees, or the truth underlying all trees etc.
It has a virtue of impact and universality, but it has lost the virtue of integrity. The tree you have made isn't interesting, hasn't got a history, hasn't got a life even.
bi. Integrity is even more important when applied to people, because a person's integrity (in this aesthetic sense) is his/her dignity.
bii. A person cannot afford to (and has the rights not to) be disassembled into entity, context and attributes, because each of these is inalienable to humanness.
biii. Any attempt to disassemble anyone into entity, context and attributes is an act of objectification.
biv. objectification = injustice committed
This happens a lot of times in our daily lives, consciously or not.
Example I: Pornography. You didn't really care who the girl is, where she was born, who her dad was, what books she likes to read in her spare time and all those things that defines her being-- You just did aherherherrrmmherm
Example II: Portraiture. You're doing the portrait of some noble with a flattened nose. You're afraid of offending the fellow so you straighten it up for him in paint. Yes, it may look better, but it's not the portrait of the fella anymore, and you had better be sacked for your troubles.
Example III: You're a tourist in Singapore and you are invited to come to all these spiffy places -- but it turns out that the city planners had it for you tourists and predominantly for you tourists. Something is amiss! Is Singapore a city of Singaporeans, or is it a city of tourists? If it is the former, then is it not better for our Integrity to let them visit where the Singapore atmosphere is at its thickest, in the heartlands and suburbs and countryside, instead of where all the other tourists are? Same goes for many other cities as well.
Example IV: A French song. You enjoyed listening to this song sung in French, though you do not know the language. You like it for the instrumental accompaniment, the way the words sounded, the mood that the singers conveyed, but you are ignorant as to what it meant, its context and its devices.
So when you obtain a translation, be in for a shock and you may never see the song the same way again; it becomes way more interesting, it makes an impact by telling a story, and the language, context and mood start fitting together coherently like jigsaw pieces. The beauty of this song becomes so much more complete!
So,
Q: What is the most important thing you should look out for when doing Art?
A: Integrity.
Q: Which means?
A: The totality of the subject.
Q: Which means in turn?
A: Everything-- aargh, this is going nowhere
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