kristo’s blog

I couldn’t not comment on this nytimes article...

Anne Roark’s column today struck a 4th House Libran nerve...and a real memory connected to my aching funnybone...

so this is my carefully thought through (persnickety Virgoan), but incompletely edited (Mars in Sagittarius, doncha know) thoroughly Libran comment...along with the article itself, of course...

kristo

spectacular art work on sale in walgreens!!!

forget MoMA, ignore Sonnabend, and screw Sotheby's. If you wanna see or buy great art... just walk into walgreens.... hell, there’s even a special on....

okay...so maybe you’d have to come to Chicago to see this particular work...which just may be a once in a lifetime - one of a kind masterpiece...

and just in case you think I'm joking... just look at the art historical inspiration for this spectacular curatorial gem...

wait!!! 

there’s more!

I’m also reminded me of the tomb of St. Josaphat beneath the altar of St Basil (in San Peter’s at the Vatican)...but I couldn’t find an image of him anywhere on the internet...

if any of you guys out there know of a link to him in his tomb...or actually have an image to share...I’d love to link to it here....

thanks...

kristo

hey...look what’s on sale...!

a learning curve isn’t something easily bent...

This excellent nytimes article by Doctor Richard Friedman certainly speaks to the issue of difficulties associated with the practical / experiential education required for expertise (and with it...confidence).

Like any good / excellent teacher...he questions his own methods in terms of contributing to the problem...and continues to care about the reality of the situation and improving the outcome for his students and their patients.

I can offer a clinical observation of my own...which is that unfortunately, we learn the best and the most from our clinical mistakes.

It is not our successes that help us to grow in expertise as clinicians...in fact, they can often contribute to the blindness of ego.

But our clinical failures...and especially our (inevitable in training) brain-farts, general clinical naivete and ignorance...and the subsequent problematic (for our patients) results...are what make us grow...and benefit all subsequent patients.

There was a baseball player who spoke of the definition of game experience / seasoning expressing essentially the same idea...saying (in effect) that experience is what you wish had never happened...

Sad...I suppose....

Unfair for patients...possibly....

But a learning curve isn’t something easily bent to fit our convenience....

kristo    

a little St. Patty silliness from the website attic...and...a teacher’s tale...

attending a jesuit prep school in nyc meant having a holiday on march 17th every year....

but not my freshman year.... all of us in 1G fucked up miserably on our first huge latin midterm...and zane rodriguez, our exasperated latin teacher forced us to come to school on st. patty’s day for a make-up exam.

for some reason or other, not only was I determined to ace this make-up...but I actually did. and was the only guy (man oh man...gender segregation in high school is just not cool...) to do so...prompting praise from mr. r, and some degree of scorn from my cohort....

the point though, is that forever after (from high school, through undergraduate and med school) I looked for ways of studying class material so that I could learn and memorize it as well as I was able to for that first forced make-up...and almost always (i.e. nearly without exception) failed to do so....

yeah, there were a few successes here and there...but most material seemed to resist any and all of my efforts to gain some sort of mastery of / over it....

but it turns out that mastery of book material (which is essentially called theory) is a pretty relative sort of thing...and that just passing exams is pretty much of a dead end in itself.... something I think of as jumping through hoops.... and it’s really up to the teacher to make an exam some sort of relevant learning experience...and not just a delusional theoretic exercise...

of course I say delusional because for a medical student to imagine being able to actually help anyone based on theory alone seems to be a pretty common misconception...one that we’re all pretty much disabused of on the very first day of our internship.

(and just for the record...I eventually learned all of theory necessary to practice medicine, and jumped through every hoop known to man...or at least all medical students and board certified specialsts...)

anyway...as a teacher, I really bust my ass trying to make up relevant exams and lectures for my chinese medicine students.... but just as often feel that I’ve somehow come up short....

but book learning is really only half of the story...especially in medicine.... clinical experience is the other half...and teaching that is a completely different animal.... one that I’ve had plenty of experience with as well...from both sides of the fence...

in point of fact...experiential knowledge is called empiric. and an empiricist is one who knows things pretty much only by way of experience. and such a person, who is heavy on experience and light on theory is also known by a very quaint but useful term...

a quack....

of course that begs the question...what do you call his counterpart...i.e. the guy heavy on book learning and theory....

I suppose nerd would qualify... 

and now just recently I came across a most excellent word that fully explains the concept of properly integrating theory and praxis / experience...

it’s called expertise....

and there are no saints among that crowd.... but no sinners, either...

just real people...

oh, just a little eye candy...

what’s the use of art...

or anything, for that matter?

Well...I think it really means making a tool out of the object in question.

And somehow this strikes my fully-libran / semi-buddhist sensibilities as both nasty and hilarious.

That said...I've now got this very useful (or is that use~less...) little web tool called (temporarily, at least) kristo’s blog...and I'm really juiced about writing more often, and in smaller snippets than I've been able to do on the website.

So...an article in the Guardian concerning an important minimalist installation in Paris called Voids (a Retrospective) illustrates the Horn Gate vs. Ivory Gate of dreams dilemma rather nicely.

Of course the dilemma of Horn (symbolizing Truth...for lack of a better, concrete word) vs. Ivory (symbolizing pure opaque, bullshit...which is pretty damned concrete...although perhaps not so accurate...since horse dung is awfully use~ful in the context of a vegetable garden) is easily applied to dreams...but much more accurately applied to art.

The way I see it...dreams always illustrate Truth...so there’s no question of any Ivory Gate in that regard.

Instead, it’s the interpretation of any particular dream or dream fragment / image that must necessarily pass through either one of those gates.

And in the case of art...whenever we choose to view it in a museum or gallery...we give ourselves the opportunity to explore a work all the way back to it’s Gate of Origin...whichever one that might be.

And despite what any curator, journalist or critic (professional or otherwise) might tell us, we’re still free to decide for ourselves whether that origin is the Gate of Horn / Truth, or that Ivory / Crass sorta business.

The problem is that too few of us actually have the chops, the time, and the patience it takes to find out for sure if a purported work of art really comes from that Horn(ed / y) Gate of Truth or not.

And not knowing is no excuse for calling something trash...any more than relying on (the delightful, intelligent, and entertaining) Sister Wendy is an excuse for calling something great.

Because the visual arts are my passion and obsession I made it my business to know how to “judge” art works...which in effect...just means I care enough to trace them back to their Gate of Origin whenever I can.

And I'll let you in on my criteria...which is drop dead simple...but can be excruciatingly inconvenient and time consuming.

Crucial to my criteria of Truth, Art, Beauty, or whatever you wanna call it...is visiting and examining work in person.

 My unofficial motto then is “If you ain’t seen it...it ain’t art.”

And if that sounds harsh or ignorant...it’s simply consistent with the notion that if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it...it didn’t really make a sound.

Jung argues that it is the act of witnessing that is necessary for creation...i.e. without the eye (or ear) of the beholder...there is no true creation.

And recordings, photographs, or reproductions of any sort don’t count!

They are not the work.

(and with my apologies to Walter Benjamin)...One (or more) step(s) removed, reproductions simply serve as a reference / link to the real work, which must often be experienced in its own, unique context.

A baroque concept, for sure...but one that simply works for me.

Anyway...that’s the inconvenient part.

The sometimes excruciating and time consuming part is to find a consistent, thorough metaphor in the piece (or pieces) you’ve chosen to visit.

You can try this all in one go...like a tourist...or you can do the sane thing and pick your spots...visiting specific or random pieces (sometimes repeatedly) over the course of time.

This involves spending significant time with a single work...and paying rather close attention to it.

(Ha!

An art tourist I am not...and so I always attract a veritable parade of museum guards...essentially relieving them of their boredom.

And I usually leave a large number of people in my wake inspecting whatever work I was viewing...all of them presumably looking to find out what the hell was so damn interesting / impressive to that weird guy / me.)

The object then is to look closely and carefully through the lens of whatever work you’re examining to see if that Gate of Origin ever comes into view.

Learning to look for and recognize the metaphor is crucial...and is anything but an intellectual exercise.

It is, in fact, the finding of pure alchemical gold...or what I may just end up calling the Gesamtkunstwurst.

A complete emotional, intellectual, physical, and intuitive experience that once found, is something that cannot be transferred from one person to the next.

It’s also a helluva lotta work.

Work that you either love or hate.

And this is much more akin to meditation than concentration or entertainment (i.e. watching tv...or a movie)

And that’s why art can be such a frustrating experience for everyone.

Since there’s no such thing as lukewarm art.

It either lights you up or leaves you cold.

Everything left in-between is half-assed.

A knock off...or a wanna-be.

Or maybe something even more like bullshit than we’d care to realize.

But I can tell you this...

it’s ALWAYS up to the viewer to decide for him or herself...

and if he or she is left cold...(or out in the lukewarm...)

it’s not likely to be (entirely) the fault of the artist (if at all)...

but of the culture that insists on some / any use for art....

Something use-ful (is NOT Art.)

A sausage, maybe.

kristo

the meaning of dreams...

Lately I find that I really enjoy fossicking through the nytimes...and came across an interesting article on dreams.

Of course, most articles and writings about dreams interest me on one level or another...but this particular piece by John Tierney appealed to me because it served as a reminder of the basic paradox inherent in many dreams, most intuitive work...and many, many fairy tales.

He reminds us of the difficulty involved in deciding whether or not to take our dreams (or any one particular dream) seriously.

A peculiar difficulty often encountered by the casual observer of dreams who wakes up one morning to find himself confronted with the unsettling memory of one helluva seriously disturbing dream.

 

Tierney cites Penelope's perfectly imperfect answer to this from the Odyssey...

which is to say...some dreams count and others don't.

The ones that do come through some mythological Gate made of Horn...(meaning that these are transparent)....

while the one's that don't come through an opposite Gate made of Ivory...(meaning clouded and obtuse...i.e opaque ).

Of course in my mind...all dreams come through that damned Ivory Gate...and then tease the hell out of us if we decide to pay any attention at all to them.

And we either persevere until they actually led us right up to and through that elusive Gate of Horn...or we forget them.

But of course...the nytimes is concerned with those among us who have no time or inclination to spend with dreams...but who simply can't escape the occasional distress of a sometimes thorny / sometimes horny bit of dream ivory that refuses to fade away quietly.

   

Long story short...he announces newer scientific research which aims to help make that distinction for us...which is therefore logic / thought and sensation (as in the use of the thinking function and the sensate function) aiming to bypass the feeling and / intuition / intuitive functions.

In Myers-Briggs typology-speak this is ESTj science trying to capture, measure, dissect, categorize, classify, and otherwise pin down INFp woowoo. Which is pretty much just butterfly collecting...but in some silly (and nasty) way is nearly the equivalent of trying to clone a dead human being.

It will probably be done, eventually...but it's not gonna be precisely what science is (apparently) looking for.

In case you’re interested in the comments I couldn’t help making...

both of which include some nifty dream interpretations...

you can see them here and here....

kristo

  

more on the use of astrology...

So it’s the uniqueness of a birthchart that gives it mystery and complexity.

And it’s the intuition, attitude, and style of the astrologer that resonates with the reader / listener.

But when it comes down to the practical reality of use-ful-ness...here’s the deal....

An astrologic reading of any kind is just like a massage.

And (unless you’ve never had one...) I'm sure you know just what a massage can do for you.

(and ...uh...just in case you've uh...never indulged...well...it can feel f*****g awesome)

A good astrologic reading is something that should make you feel just as great (if not better).

And is something you can go back to over and over again...and each repetition (as you discover new and deeper insights for yourself) becomes like another comforting and exhilarating massage.

As for “bad” readings...well... you can’t always know that's gonna be the case unless you at least sample the work.

And then, well...just like a bad massage...nobody needs them.

And I could get into it...but let’s leave the concept of ego stroking for some other time.

So...maybe, “what's the use of a massage?” is an interesting philosophical / existential question...but no matter what the answer, I can easily bet that you, me, and everyone else sure could...use one.

kristo

what’s the use of astrology?

Well...that’s pretty much up to whoever’s asking the question...and in what context.

But let me throw this out there for starters...which is that I see astrology as a very particular kind of simple, mechanical tool.

One that acts like training wheels for the Intuition.

And in that sense, it’s no different from Tarot, the I Ching, Runes, Numerology, Palmistry, Scrying, Tea leaves, or Haruspicy for that matter.

So for me it’s not the astrology that counts...but Intuition itself.

And my intuition (which really isn’t “mine” at all...but more like a simple, individual expression of “Neptune”, perhaps in the context of my unique birthchart) tells me that it’s time to start writing about this stuff.

kristo