Bedtime Story Conservatory 54 20/05/2020
Helloo everybody,
I am currently in the process of archiving all of these emails and readings on my website, which can be found at this link if you are interested-
https://www.samuelthompsonplant.com/bedtime-story-conservatory
Having gone through all of my emails I have also realised a grave grave grave and fatal error on my part, I have repeated a number, meaning that this is not edition 53, but 54! Also meaning that making a big deal of the projects 50th anniversary the other day was not based in time, but hey, it was based in mind, that's what counts.
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One thing, I don't know how you feel about TED talks, I have heard that they are loved and hated, but I would like to point you towards this one by Jon Ronson, author of The Men Who Stare at Goats 2004, which I watched the other day. It says some interesting stuff about our virtual selves, which is maybe quite relevamt today, and I think it leads nicely into the reading today-
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Today's reading is the beginning of Visible Man, or the Culture of Film 1924 by Béla Balázs, a Hungarian film critic, 'aesthetician', writer and poet. It's cited as a groundbreaking writing on film aesthetics, and I think it has some valuable and powerful resonances with this time, in which our bodies and, as he puts it, 'souls' are morphed into tiny heads on sticks amongst others in a virtual room.
"In 1919, Béla Balázs escaped to Vienna from Budapest when the six-month old Hungarian Soviet Republic was crushed by Romanian and Czechoslovakian forces supported by the United States, France and England. Born Herbert Bauer in 1884 to Jewish parents who identified with German culture, Balázs was a leader of the Hungarian arts renaissance, producing plays, poems, stories, essays and reviews."- here
Here is a link to the reading-
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ujiZx1kWgzQzSc2zZIXtKAvHs7tlwtRD
And a link to all previous readings-
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1t4v042zpGgwI7KN6_ST_tAthqm63J22V
Warm wishes, and with lots of love,
Sam
The Passion of Joan of Arc 1928.
(from this article about Balázs and the film, I haven't seen it but I thought this was a beautiful image)
