Amrita Sher-Gil was an amazing Indian artist, who died prematurely at age 28, yet leaving a prolific legacy of creativity and beauty.
Amrita’s style was very influenced by Western schools of painting, Post-Impressionism mainly, but the richness in coloring seems to evoke the East for some critics, so her work is a very unique blend and a huge influence for Indian artists after her.
I personally like this painting very much, as I find it very warm in spite of dealing with an otherwise “gloomy and cold” subject of a cemetery, well it is a “merry cemetery” after all! The variety in reds, browns, and greens as well as her strong brushwork observed here was also part of her signature style, this cemetery remains solemn while it evokes the fact that death is only another part of the life of a vibrant village around it 🙂 . At least to me!
Oh my God, why did I even think this was a good idea?
Don’t get me wrong, there’s hardly an artist whose life is so full of particularities to talk about, it’s just, oh man, Satie is in a different sphere and I’m just afraid my article won’t make him justice. But hey, “fortune favors the bold” so I’ll give it a try.
What I was looking for and what I found
If you’ve been reading my Music Crisis section you know it’s really about solving a very personal problem: music fatigue. When I find something I love, something that will make my brain produce happy chemicals, I’ll listen to it obsessively until I kinda “waste it”. In reality, it never does waste since it’s always going to be a source of good memories, and revisiting it will be rewarding, just not that often.
So this puts me again in the tiring and often inconvenient task of having to find something new. See, now that I decided to talk about Satie I’ll dare to say the following: some especially unhappy people will likely develop obsessive tendencies toward topics that trigger valuable moments of happiness. Satie was a rather unhappy genius, who treasured food and drink like few other things; he would spend all his money inviting his friends to dinner, as that procured him some happy moments among the very unhappy years of his life. Me, I listen to music, I discover music and find things that touch deep regions of my mind and soul: some of these regions store pain, others store violence, hope, beauty, and some host rather unknown things that I’d like to explore even if I can’t put my finger on them.
Oftentimes, I don’t know what I was looking for until I find it, hence in a more general sense, I’m looking to feel something as I find life very boring typically. When I found Satie, I realized what I was looking for was rest, putting my mind at rest and allowing myself to feel complex things but in a simpler manner. I know, LOL.
Satie’s music does that, and of course, I’m listening to it as I write this (I always listen to the music I’m writing about, it’s yet another way to experience it). Satie is a pioneer of minimalism, this makes his compositions magical and relatively easy to listen to; he seriously intended to innovate and step away from the Romanticism of the 19th century, and create a sort of poetry with this piano, along with other interesting concepts like “Furniture Music” which we would know today as “ambient” music.
Through the minimalist eyes and hands of Erik Satie, I also come to be acquainted with some of the most marvelous music I’ve ever listened to (besides Satie’s own):
Ludovico Einaudi
Phillip Glass
Yann Tiersen
are just a few names that come to mind, albeit unforgettable names I treasure in the wing of my heart that stores beauty.
Satie cultivated a very particular look, which was part of his signature as an artist.
Watch this if possible
“Satiesfictions: Promenades with Erik Satie” (directed by Anne-Kathrin Peitz, fl. 2011-2014 and Youlian Tabakov, 1975-; produced by Paul Smaczny)
This short video I posted is a trailer to the “Satiesfictions: Promenades with Erik Satie” documentary.
Now there’s a lot on Satie, being an eccentric and talented character with much influence in music history, I’ve already targeted a couple books where much of his personal journals and comments from contemporaries are captured. But this documentary, besides tackling the daunting task of informing us about the man’s life and personality, does it in a manner that is aesthetically pleasing and very much dignifying of the person he was, which is going further than the artistic aspect most would focus on.
Now I didn’t use the word “daunting” lightly here, Erik Satie was a rather mysterious man, not easy to understand. You can feel it in his music, you can really feel it; this was a man who dealt with much distress as it came to his own existence and purpose, a man who reached out for a reality deeper and brighter than the one the society of his time presented to him. In doing so, he managed to reach us generations later, while like many unique geniuses, most people of his time failed to see the treasure before their very eyes. Or maybe they where just a painful ingredient to completing the full picture of a man who, by knowing himself deeply isolated and misunderstood, decided to build a monument to his own genius through his work, even if only he would see it and understand it for what it was.
Hello frens, I miss you, I’m taking a short break from my writing / content-creating activities, but wanted to take a few minutes to write a message for those of you who read me, for which I’m grateful.
So, I’ve struggled for many years (almost my whole life) with clinical depression; I’m not looking for sympathy, long gone are those days, I don’t need it.
But this blog is about me and my mind, and while there’s a lot in my mind that’s valuable and worth sharing, there’s also darkness, and I can’t always translate that into art or creative projects/impulses, unfortunately (if you read my poems, you’ll notice sometimes I get to turn these feelings into something beautiful).
So this is one of those cases in which I know I’m down, it’s going to take some time to get back on my feet, I’m not sure how long, and I just need to find shelter and let the storm pass. I’m finding much comfort in prayer, books, work, enjoying art, movies, and video games, as well as working out; trying to transform this into some “me time” or “maintenance time” for my busy mind. Doing the best I can with what I have, but I’m not in great shape to write deeper stuff that’s more demanding, than this small night journal. And I haven’t even been writing in the journal until today.
This will probably happen from time to time, but please know that this is just beginning and there will be jjosuminded for years to come! I’ll be back with more once I’m fully myself again.
Also, the ads you will see on this site currently aren’t mine 😦
WordPress.com is putting them cause I paid for the basic plan, so they’re the ones making money out of my blog; I get that’s the deal and I can’t pay for an upgrade right now, but I will ;). Bear with me in the meantime.
I’m still going to start the Cultural Deviants Coffee Club stream on Twitch and YouTube this week, so I’m saving my energy for that; check the details out here, hope to see you there, we’re gonna have fun I promise I’ll make it nice! 😀
I’m thrilled to present to you “The Cultural Deviants Coffee Club”.
I’m a person of the Arts and Humanities, and I happen to believe there are many breadcrumbs to a deeper understanding of the world, which have been left by some of the greatest minds in diverse disciplines like film, and literature, arts, and music.
It’s a delight for me to analyze and interpret the beautiful legacy of great artists, I also happen to believe that if you’re a non-conformist, a person who’s thinking outside of propaganda and cultural mainstream, you’re probably interested in finding like-minded individuals.
My aim is to achieve both things and share them with you, and through this start building a community, an actual “Club” where creativity, connections, projects, and great ideas can spawn in freedom, detached from bullshit impositions around us.
So I say: Let’s do this!
TCDCC will start streaming next week and it will also be recorded and uploaded to my YouTube channel. So here’s the gist:
Live Streaming on Twitch Thursdays at 9 pm CT here
Live Streaming on YouTube Saturdays at 9 pm CT here
Subscribe to my Twitch and YouTube channels and enable notifications so you don’t miss it!
“Four Seasons in One Head” by Giuseppe Arcimboldo. (c. 1590)
Psychologist: “No, the still-life-portrait doesn’t exist, it can’t harm you”
The still-life-portrait.
Folks this is the first time I come across Giuseppe Arcimboldo, and I couldn’t let the opportunity pass; this still-life portrait is something like I’ve never seen before, and the date (1590) makes this even more interesting to me. Arcimboldo was a mannerist, and like many other talented painters of his time, his clientele was in the courts, he was the court painter for three Holy Roman Emperors and like others in his time also painted many religious pieces.
But his eccentricity is more appreciated in the compositions he made with fruits, animals, and other landscapes and natural elements in human shapes, they had a grotesque intention even when his technique is rather polished and sophisticated, with mannerist style.
This one, in particular, seems to be a metaphor for a person aging and hence, having evidence of being through all seasons of life. Or maybe it’s just a mockery since it seems the courts found these to be rather amusing curiosities.
“It’s better to burn out than to fade away” – Neil Young
This is personal
This is a post about me, this is a public declaration of a decision that will change my life forever, I know it because I’ve taken a similar one in the past, and it did.
Let me tell you a story.
I got married young, very young. I didn’t know what the fuck to do with adult life suddenly falling upon me like a fucking iron dome, no way out. It wasn’t marriage that was the issue, as a matter of fact, this was no issue at all, my life was already a lot better than it was years before. The issue was, that I had to become a full adult as an “emergency procedure”, there was a sequence of decisions that were all about breaking free and having a very slight chance to actually build a life of my own, and the promise of these decisions came with a high cost.
It was tough. I was broken, really broken not like nowadays that everyone with a hint of anxiety says “we’re all broken” to get sympathy, fuck it. Seriously.
Do you know what it is to be tied to a hospital bed and left screaming until you simply can’t fight anymore?
Do you know what it is to see everything you prepared and worked for years be destroyed in a matter of days?
Have you had an experience where something out of your control rips your life apart and effectively takes away every dream and hope you had sinking you into chaos?
Have you felt a hospital is more of a home to you than your actual home?
Have you been institutionally abused, harmed, tied to a bed, or threatened with getting electroshocks to your brain?
Have you watched every person you know move on with their life and plans, while your youth is draining like the blood of a dying man in an alley, with no hope to be helped, no one who can stop the hemorrhage?
Have you ever felt death was a gentler fate than dealing with who you are or have become?
If you have, because I’m sure I’m not alone in tragedy, then I send you a sincere hug and I tell you: this will pass, but you need to hold on to hope, focus on that and find a way out, things will get in place eventually.
If you haven’t, then I hope you never have to walk those paths, I don’t envy or resent people who’ve had a better or easier life, I believe this world needs all the happiness it can get, and I sincerely hope you’re making the best out of it.
I lost the five most important years of my young adult life, my college years, not in college as I have prepared for, getting the best grades, getting admitted to the college, and the program I dreamt of and planning everything carefully. I spent those years in between hospitals, doctors, depression and despair. It didn’t come to me because of a bad decision, it simply happened and it couldn’t be helped.
Back to where I began: adult life. At 23 I was just recovering from the darkest period of my life when I decided to make it on my own and marry. Not only was I broken mentally, emotionally, physically, and with no structure whatsoever in life but also, I was financially broke and absolutely ignorant of how things work. So I came out of a personal tragedy five years long, to an absolutely brutal struggle with my own decision of becoming independent and the poverty that came with it; when I say poverty I mean it.
Then, a life-changing decision
While I took a crappy call center job, I came across network technologies; I heard it from lots of people this was a hot trend to get into and people were being paid lots of money. I needed no more explanation.
You see, I was a failed law student because of tragedy, but that was in the past now. At this point, I was able to have a job (that was a huge achievement believe it or not given my circumstances at the time), I was just married to the best girl I’ve ever met and we were both enduring great pain. It didn’t matter that “it wasn’t my passion”, it didn’t matter that “I felt life was unfair to me”, nothing of that mattered. What mattered was that there was a very slight chance of turning the tide for us, and I took it.
There was only one shot at turning the tide, and I took it
It wasn’t easy, I was never a systems person, I have always been a culture and humanities person. But I’m thankful to God I had the opportunity, and the vision to believe I could thrive in this; I couldn’t afford lessons so I had to learn this by myself.
I had no computer, I stayed late at my job to use their computer and then took the bus home; my health was still in terrible shape, and doing my job plus studying was simply taking me to the limit. When I finally was able to buy a cheap Toshiba Satellite laptop, I was living in a tiny, cheap apartment full of noise and shady people, one of whom actually came to threaten me with a gun if I kept asking them to lower the music a notch. These are the conditions in which I completed my first I.T certification, after paying it with a credit card because it was impossible for me to afford the exam, and then failing my first attempt.
It didn’t matter, now I was in a different community, a different market with unbelievable opportunities and I laid my life on the line to be part of it. Many more years of study, a lot of tough on-the-job learning, and countless hours of side freelance gigs to increase my learning and development, finally took me to a proven position of seniority and the ability to pretty much choose my jobs, after a decade.
I let myself go and also my previous aspirations in order to be able to attain opportunities for me and my family. It’s taken me a lot of time to understand that there are years of my life I simply lost and they’re not coming back, nor the experiences I was eager to live during those years. But I got something different and amazing, certainly far better than what my original career was going to give me as far as life quality and opportunity.
I was blessed, and I consider myself blessed. The decision to jump into the void finally proved to be the right one.
But…
But this is not what I want in life, it’s certainly a beautiful stop on my path to it, but it’s not it.
I told you before, I’m a man of culture and humanities, not a man of technology. I’m a thinker and a writer, and it’s amazing that I got to build a strong career as an engineer given the fact that I’ve never had fulfillment doing this.
Man, you build a life for more than one decade of continuous, hardcore sacrifice, sleepless nights, all sorts of jobs, you earn certifications, study the coolest and craziest cutting-edge stuff, build a business and succeed, then fail, rise again, build connections, travel the world with your shiny career… all of this after being poor and having nothing at all! And then come to realize this will always get you a good income, but will never fulfill you, will never replace what you know you want, what you know you are. It’s hard to know what to do.
I’ll tell you what I did: I wrote.
I wrote, all my fears, pains, dreams, hopes, feelings, light, and darkness. I wrote it all, and I keep writing…
A New Beginning
This takes me to 07-01-2022 at 1:52 AM, the time of writing this post.
When I was a child, I used to create monsters, stories, and worlds of my own; my first short stories, I wrote just because I felt like at 6 or 7 years old. My first poems at around 9 years old, and as a teenager, I always carried a notebook for thoughts, songs, and poems, and I ended up destroying it always because I felt it wasn’t enough and because the contents hurt me more than they would help me.
It’s been extremely hard to find myself, but this is me, a writer.
I believe even if tragedy hadn’t struck me and I had carried on with my plans, sooner or later I would have realized law was not going to fulfill me the way writing and creating does.
This is me, I’m an artist.
It’s hard to find it out at 35, but it would be a lot harder to never find out and live with a deep pain I can’t understand.
My English sucks, I really need to work on it, I’m totally rusted, I have never studied creative writing seriously and I know no one else close to me who is a writer, who could give me a hint.
But I found out I have a slight chance to be fulfilled at what I do, even more, to leave a mark on other people. And I will take it.
I will keep working in technology because my career is a miracle and a blessing and because I have to fund my dreams and provide a platform for my family. But once again, I will study at night, and spend late nights writing, reading, and editing, not because I need the money like the first time, but because I need to be me.
The first serious poem I wrote as an adult, “Binary“, is my story and my promise to that broken teenager who died in darkness, that he will live again and become what he should have been, and do what he’s meant to do.
“Huyendo de la crítica (Escaping Criticism)” by Pere Borrell del Caso. 1874.
Hello, I hope you’re having a great Thursday so far!
Today’s art piece is quite out of the ordinary, I feel. Most scenes portrayed in paintings I post are as observed by an omnipresent narrator, the artist, who’s opening a window to another reality, scene, event, emotion, or concept they wanted to share with us.
But in this case, the art has come to life and it’s approaching us directly! I loved this piece because of its creativity and also the human aspect it shows. I don’t know if the person here (seems like a boy to me), represents Pere himself or not; but he surely represents a very understandable fear an artist should overcome which is obtaining bad criticism of his work. I wouldn’t find any other reason why this character would have that look on his face and it’s attempting to flee its frame than fearing bad criticism unless we’re talking about someone who’s very shy and would also be upset by a good critique 🙂 . It’s entirely possible.
In either case, I love the sincerity in this painting and the “out-of-the-box” thinking of the artist, or should I say “out-of-the-frame”?
Why the fuck is it that people think it’s cool to assemble classical playlists and associate them with ordinary activities?
Beethoven For Studying
Working Day with Vivaldi
Mozart for BBQ (What the ACTUAL FUCK?)
Dude, these people were locked down in their studies for weeks to present a complete set of works just to be enjoyed, to actually get the fuck out of ordinary life concerns and enter the realm of the sublime, what’s the difference between Mozart for Babies and for BBQs? xD
Alright, that’s it, I needed to say it.
On an unrelated topic, I just killed this ugly motherfucker in DMC (Devil May Cry) video game, and it felt so good! I really needed to hurt something today, something evil (at least virtually). Extra points for being gross.
It’s been a horrible day folks, I can’t lie. Some days it’s too tough to be me and that’s it; when the highlight of your day is gutting out imaginary entities from Hell, then there’s something really fucked up with you. But it’s just a day, a week, a month… I no longer know; some days I feel all of my projects were thought and started by someone else, someone who’s bright and capable and who could actually bring these things to realization. And some days like today, I feel like I’m the empty, untalented version of that guy who’s ready to sabotage everything he’s working for, and it’s just about to crumble apart.
The thing is, I’m both.
I’m a sort of Jekyll and Hyde dual monster, who’s just not hurting anyone (hopefully) and so I get to keep existing somehow in a world completely incompatible with the creature I am.
Yeah, this is just probably me being a drama bitch tonight. Oh well…
The thing is, with all of the above, I still believe in the enormous potential that lies dormant in me, and in you who are reading this as well, no matter how dark, this too shall pass.
The first title that was given to this piece was “Love and Pain” which can clearly be related to what we see here, however, the final title is “Vampire”, giving a bit of a surprising twist, as I don’t quite see the all the supernatural elements I would expect from such a motif.
However you choose to view it, it’s a beautiful piece, she seems to be comforting him and he seems lost in her embrace; not only her arms, but her hair surrounds him, intense red hair and above them, a large shadow covering them which I believe adds a bit of the ominous vampiric element; there’s something else behind this beauty, there’s a hidden motive behind the romantic scene.
Part of why I chose to publish this one today, is because I happen to be reading Dracula by Bram Stoker currently, and just last night I was horrified by the scene where the vampire ladies start harassing Jonathan Harker.
But even if you remove the supernatural element, there are complex relationships where the attachment is a source of comfort and pain, they may not suck your blood out literally but could quite take the life out of your soul. Beware of those, my friends!
(Don’t judge me, I’m excited about gothic literature rn xD)
Good evening, I’m listening to an instrumental version of “Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor, and I’m very moved by it. Today’s been a challenging day when it comes to organizing ideas and managing emotions that are linked to voluntarily seeking opposite ideas to your own; probably I will write more about it later, but it’s a tough experiment, one thing is to listen to a diversity of people, but a completely different one is to seek the ones you know you don’t like, and listening to them with respect. I’m telling you, emotions are a bitch and they can easily betray you if you don’t find a way to intentionally exercise control over them.
The bright part, is you actually find that even in those people your subconscious labels as “enemies”, “dangerous”, or “threatening” you will often find valuable things if you’re willing and open to it. I’m undergoing these voluntary experiments because I’m very interested in developing my own thought with a lot more emphasis lately, and being narrow-minded directly opposes the idea to become a thinker. By the way I published the second part of “Thinking Things Thinkers Thing” and I believe it’s quite a heavy read and one where I put a lot of effort in being upfront and clear, but as a side effect it may be a bit shocking. But hey, comfort never took anyone to a new place.
Now I’m listening to some Phonk music; man I got addicted to it, I’ll probably have to write about it in my “Music Crisis” section since I’m listening so much of it lately. So the origins of this genre are a little diffuse and it seems it’s the blend of DJs mainly from Eastern Europe with old Memphis rap tapes; the music’s mostly dark and kinda violent, so yeah of course I’d find it appealing.
I’ve been making an effort to comment on the communities of writers I subscribed to (actually to one of them, to begin somewhere); I really want to commit to exploring and building these relationships with other authors, it’s not natural in me, so that’s also emotionally tiring.
My kid (7 y/o) was accepted in a much better school than the one he’s at, he applied for admission tests a couple weeks back to third grade and we received today the news that he’s been accepted. It’s gonna cost me a kidney and I recently lost my second job, but both my wife and I are willing to make it work, it’s a good problem to have. 🙂
jjosuminded 