Back from the Brooklyn Film Festival 2023. World Premiere of our great friend Alex Andre’s feature film PRATFALL. Awards were announced and the film won the Spirit Award for Narrative Feature! Lovely afterparty, and less than 24 hours later, back in LA. Memorable moments in life.
The Trees by Philip Larkin
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
Saw a lovely film on the Delta 332 flight to JFK called Empire of Light.
Another world.
To be able to fly. Illusion of life.
One of the wonderful people that I met at the PRATFALL after party had just arrived back from a music event in Tbilisi, Georgia that afternoon. He was there to DJ at an event called 4GB, which I did not know. Tbilisi has always been on our radar at Balse, after reading an article by Resident Advisor a number of years ago. It is now on top of the list of events to attend. link>>>4GB official site. See you there.
“it was just very touching, to see how these group of friends turned a very very sad thing that happened there, with his accident, into something powerful and beautiful and positive. It’s really, one of a kind” - Michael Mayer, KOMPAKT
Added a study of Don McCullin, British photo journalist. Inspiring. Do check it out.
The camera was a key to open up my life. It was like opening a huge window to the world. It gave me education. It gave me travel… It gave me hope. - Don McCullin
Have been digging through the vinyl records the past two weeks. Listening. Timeless beautiful tracks. See below in the Other Studies section for some sound bits like this one.
Hammer museum’s major exhibition of their collections since 2005. Together in Time: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection is a must see. Going on till August 20, 2023.
Hauser & Wirth’s Thomas J Price exhibition is also an experience that should not be passed.
Enjoying the The Danish Japanese singer song writer Mina Okabe. Pondering over the philosophy of Deleuze.
“Deleuze’s philosophy is builds upon Spinoza’s Monism. That’s everything is connected. In fact the world is so complicated, so connected, so mysterious, there are potentially an infinite number of possibilities in the world. “
And some Alison Goldfrapp to finish.
Wishing you a good one, see you back in two weeks -Charles Balse
Words of wisdom
A hero goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and returns to the ordinary world, changed or transformed, and shares that gift with their community. Before any of this can happen, the hero must answer the call to that adventure. The hero is reluctant at first refusing the call. A mentor appears, and helps them to cross threshold leaving the ordinary world for the new one. In real life it can be hard to recognize the call for adventure, it is almost always something that you are afraid to do, but know inside that you need to do. It appears as an obstacle. To be the hero of your story, you must answer the call, and the obstacle is the way. - Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces
I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things that already have an existence - Man Ray
What I perceive are not the crude and ambiguous cues that impinge from the outside world onto my eyes and my ears and my fingers. I perceive something much richer - a picture that combines all these crude signals with the wealth of past experience ... Our perception of the world is a fantasy that coincides with reality. - Chris Frith 2007, cognitive psychologist.
In us, learning has led to the establishment of a completely new kind of evolution - cultural evolution - which has largely supplanted biological evolution as a means of transmitting knowledge and adaptations across generations. Our capacity for learning is so remarkably developed that human societies change almost exclusively by cultural evolution. In fact, there is no strong evidence of any biological change in the size or structures of the human brain since Homo Sapiens appeared in the fossil record some 50,000 years ago. All human accomplishments from antiquity to modern times, are the product of cultural evolution, and therefore MEMORY. - Reductionism in Art and Brain Sciense, ERic Kandel, page 44.
These biological findings confirm Kris and Gombrich's inference that visual perception is not a simple window on the world, but truly a creation of the brain. - Reduction in Art and Brain Science, Eric Kandel page 30
"We do not have direct access to the physical world. It may feel as if we have direct access, but this is an illusion created by our own brain." - Frith 2007, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, Eric Kandel page 23
...we do not see material objects, but rather the light reflected off them (Berkely, 1709). As a result, no two-dimensional image projected onto our retina can ever directly specify all three dimensions of an object. This fact, and the difficulty it raises for understanding our perception of any image, is referred to as the INVERSE OPTICS PROBLEM. (Purves and Lotto 2010; Kandel 2012; Albright 2013)... any three dimensional object is inherently uncertain. Gombrich fully appreciated this problem and cited Berkley's observation that "the world as we see it is a construct slowly built up by every one of us in years of experimentation." - Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, Eric Kandel, page 21
Other Studies
Gordon Parks: The Haunting & The Beautiful
Ricardo Villalobos - Time Warp 2023 - ARTE Concert
Sven Väth - Time Warp 2023 - ARTE Concert
The photography of Don McCullin
Gio Shengelia | Boiler Room x Bassiani
EMPIRE OF LIGHT | Official Trailer | Searchlight Pictures
Timeless Photography Lessons from Fred Herzog
Why the world does not exist | Markus Gabriel | TEDxMünchen
The FORBIDDEN PHOTOGRAPHY of Dorothea Lange!
4GB Festival - The Story
So You Wanna Be A Writer by Charles Bukowski
The Art of Being Alone: Lessons from Famous Philosophers
Rufus - Realize Dis [BSOULLTD002]
Una Sombra (Original Mix)
Robert S ( PT ) - Atomico ( original )
A2 - Claudio PRC & Blazej Malinowski - Riddle [Inner Tension 003]
Luca Agnelli - Voltumna
Lebanon Hanover - Gallowdance (Deflex Rave Edit)
LXST CXNTURY - DEEP FUSION
Alison Goldfrapp - In Electric Blue (Video Vignette)
Juliana Madrid - Silica (Official Video)
Introduction to Deleuze: Difference and Repetition
A. Oshana - Eccentric Electrix [YoY.02]
Sciahri - Contortion [SUBT102]
Oklou - Friendless
Patrick Mason // Estella Boersma // Cera Khin - TXL Berlin Recordings Chapter 2 - ARTE Concert
Werner Herzog: There is no harmony in the universe
King Krule - Flimsier
