Quotes

Armour is more than just fighting equipment, it's turning the wearer into this extraordinary work of visual art and it's broadcasting all kinds of complex messages about the person inside: their loyalties, their beliefs, everything about them is being constantly broadcast by their equipment.

This quote made me think of how I view clothes. It's not very remarkable to say that the clothes we wear outwardly express something about us, but I think the way it's phrased here is especially eloquent.

Somebody I like very much indeed is Frank Auerbach. I think there are some mornings that if we hit each other a certain way—myself and a portrait by Auerbach—the work can magnify the kind of depression I’m going through. It will give spiritual weight to my angst. Some mornings I’ll look at it and go, ‘Oh, God, yeah! I know!’ But that same painting, on a different day, can produce in me an incredible feeling of the triumph of trying to express myself as an artist. I can look at it and say, ‘My God, yeah! I want to sound like that looks.’”

I feel a similar connection with some great pieces of art; I'd love to find one for my apartment that affects me as deeply so I can emotionally and artistically wrestle with it each morning, like Bowie does here with Auerbach.

[...] and all audible musical sound is given us for the sake of harmony, and which, anyone who makes intelligent use of the arts knows, is not to be used, as is commonly thought, to give irrational pleasure, but as a heaven-sent ally in reducing to order and harmony any disharmony in the revolutions within us.

Plato does well to describe the symbiotic relationship between the soul and music. I think, however, he makes a mistake categorizing non-critical listening as 'irrational pleasure'; to clear one's mind and absorb pleasurable sounds is as important to remedying the disharmony within us as any other form of listening.

Nevertheless, the heritage of existentialism remains a living part of the modern dramatist's almost obsessive concern with ambiguities and perplexities of cosmic dimension.

The theatre of the absurd demonstrates the confrontation of the absurdity of life as prescribed by existentialist philosopher Albert Camus. The aim of the absurdist playwright is to explore the "quest for spiritual meaning in an incoherent and irrational universe" (Block). This 'concern with ambiguities and perplexities of the cosmic dimension' taken to its farthest extreme results in some of my personal favourite theatrical works Happy Days by Samuel Beckett and Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco.

It's all in there, the beauty, the terror and the love, the sheer humanity of life in this incredible electric world which is so full of distortion that it can be beautiful and frightening in the same instant.

Gleason beautifully and concisely articulates what I love so much about avant-garde jazz and free improvisation.