Originally screened as part of the NT Live broadcast, this short film gives an insight into Sam Mendes's 2014 production of King Lear with Simon Russell Beale in the title role.It is definitely plausible that Lear was suffering from a neurological disorder, especially at such an advanced age, Lewy Body Dementia or otherwise. But I posit that it is his irascible, conceited personality that fuels the tragedy of the play. His daughters know this all too well, and while the two eldest play the pandering game with him, Cordelia refuses to. Goneril and Regan stand to benefit in a major way, while their youngest sister doesn't look for reward and is thus free to be genuine and truthful. If I as a clinical psychologist may hazard a diagnosis on Lear, then, it is that of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Cordelia's refusal to pander to him is an infuriating, shameful blow to his ego. This narcissistic rage, as we clinicians call it, is the beginning of the end. So while nothing will come of nothing means, at first, no reward for Cordelia's impetulance, later on in the play nothing takes on a more tragic, literal yet existential meaning: loss of worldly possessions and kingly trappings, loss of Lear's most loyal and loving daughter.
Monday, September 29, 2014
Lear and the Tragedy of Narcissistic Rage
Friday, September 19, 2014
Voice-Text Work on `Much Ado About Nothing
Pause awhile,
And let my counsel sway you in this case.
Your daughter here the princes left for dead.
Let her awhile be secretly kept in
And publish it that she is dead indeed.
Maintain a mourning ostentation,
And on your family’s old monument
Hang mournful epitaphs and do all rites
That appertain unto a burial.
Marry, this, well carried, shall on her behalf
Change slander to remorse. That is some good:
No, though he thought his accusation true.
Let this be so, and doubt not but success
Will fashion the event in better shape
Than I can lay it down in likelihood.
But if all aim but this be leveled false,
The supposition of the lady’s death
Will quench the wonder of her infamy.
And if it sort not well, you may conceal her,
As best befits her wounded reputation,
In some reclusive and religious life,
Out of all eyes, tongues, minds, and injuries.
Actor Chris Saul has a wonderful, fitting voice for Shakespeare. He sounds to be a neophyte to Shakespeare, but he has potential to be a truly fine actor in his plays. Iambic pentameter is the hallmark meter for Shakespeare, but as voice coach Jeannette Nelson suggests, the Bard was so masterful with his poetry-cum-drama that trochees (along with spondees and pyrrhics) play along with the iambs. The varying accents within a pentameter line make for such rich poetry, and bring the drama along as the plot intends.
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Voice-Text Work on Hamlet
To be, or not to be? That is the question—From Act III, scene i of `Hamlet.
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing, end them? To die, to sleep—
No more—and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to—’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished! To die, to sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th' oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?
To my ears and in my mind, the sibilant sounds in this deeply philosophical passage are less about intellect and structure and more about the continuity or the flow, if you will, of Hamlet's grief and agony. It's the other sounds that are about intellect and structure, such as b in "To be, or not to be?" and l in "slings" and r in "arms." That said, son of renown actor Ben Kingsley, Ferdinand has difficulty reciting this passage quietly, even after Jeannette Nelson instructed him twice to do so. For him to truly understand this passage, he does have to work almost a whispered voicing of it.
Monday, September 15, 2014
Voice-Text Work on Ophelia
Oh, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!—From Act III, scene i of `Hamlet.
The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword,
Th' expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
Th' observed of all observers, quite, quite down!
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That sucked the honey of his music vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh;
That unmatched form and feature of blown youth
Blasted with ecstasy. Oh, woe is me,
T' have seen what I have seen, see what I see!
I love this kind of work, and I buy into the notion that vowels carry the emotion, while the consonants anchor the intellect, in the English language. Ophelia is all about emotion, isn't she, as counterpoint to the brooding, philosophical Hamlet. Actress Ellie Turner must be grateful to have a voice coach like Jeannette Nelson working with her, and she was getting there nicely with her monologue of this well-known passage by Ophelia.
Friday, September 5, 2014
Art has Value
As Dr. Ron Art took sufficient shape for me to launch it via a Facebook page three years ago, I wanted to share my Art Manifesto. This manifesto isn't just a set of beliefs about art, but also a proposal about the very nature of art. Physicists work at discovering the immutable laws of the universe, and in a similar way I work at crystallizing some fundamental truths about art. More broadly, art is an integral component of The Tripartite Model, along with science and religion.
My Art Manifesto
- Art is cross-art by nature
- Art is always autobiographical
- Art is sensuous
- Art is synesthetic
- Art is never completely original
- Art has value
My Art Manifesto is the undercurrent for these projects. This is the last of six articles, where I introduce this manifesto.
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| (image credit) |
When I lived in Dubai, a Filipino friend invited me to his first solo exhibition. His paintings were astounding, both in breadth (they were huge) and in theme (they were profound). His creative talent wasn't narrowed to painting, but extended to photography, sculpting and performance. At this exhibition, for instance, we all wondered where the hell he was. Two hours into it, and he still hadn't shown up. Then he arrived, wearing exactly what he wore in a sizable self portrait, including clown makeup, and pulling the same red wagon depicted in that photograph. He was like the Pied Piper, as he snaked through the crowd, picking up odd things on the floor, and us opening up, making way for him, and regathering behind him to follow along. It was a tour de force show.
I was equally astonished, however, at how much he low-balled the pricing of his pieces. It was par for the course for a lot of Filipinos in Dubai, that they hardly saw their true worth and hardly demanded it. They smiled at whatever pittance they received, because after all they were the happiest people in the world. But being dead bottom on the salary scale in an Arabian Business survey was emblematic, I thought, of how people and companies took advantage of their low salary expectations and how Filipinos themselves reinforced it with their acceptance and passivity.
On the face of it, my artist friend was the same. So a few days later, I got together with him, and asked him point black: If someone were to offer him 10 - 20 times more than the pricing he had set for any of his pieces, would he accept it? I was glad to hear his response: yes. I wanted to advocate for him and to serve as his talent agent, and his response suggested that we had something to work with. Had he said no, instead, there would have been little reason for us to go forward.
Art as the royal road to wealth
Consider the following documentary on very expensive paintings:
If this documentary doesn't take your breath away, then you may have little or no breath to begin with. Certainly each artist may dream of a multimillion dollar windfall for his or her art. For the vast lot of us, however, eking a living out of what we love most is a daily struggle or an impractical option altogether.
But how to determine art value?
A few years ago I spoke to a German friend, who at the time was pursuing her PhD in marketing and focusing on pricing as a specialty. I asked her how the value of art was determined. We chatted a bit, but mostly she just sent me a wealth of articles on the subject. Evidently art pricing wasn't something she had looked into, as she really wasn't able to advise me.
I gathered the following were pricing determinants:
- Talent and renown of the artist
- Promotion, sales and marketing efforts
- Historical, social and political context
- Art market trends for particular genres
- Whim, ego and wealth of the art aficionado-collector
Dr. Ron Art in perspective
It took a few years to clarify the concept, create the platform, and launch it in earnest. So when I spoke to the foregoing friends, this wide-ranging endeavor was still in its infancy. I wanted to create art and engage others, but I also wanted to promote, negotiate and sell it. (a) I've been posting stuff in methodic fashion, across Google+, Twitter and Facebook, and (b) writing articles like mad across several Blogger, Tumblr and Pinterest profiles. (c) Plus I am working on specific projects, at various stages of progress:
- Poetry in Multimedia. Searching for a multimedia publisher for `The Song Poems
- Shakespeare Talks! Staging `A Midsummer Night's Dream in the community
- Dramatis Personae. Writing my play `The Room, as advocacy against housemaid abuse
- Art Intersections. Planning my photography project `Real Beauty
- T'ai Chi Empower. Teaching students and coaching leaders on T'ai Chi
Art is simply not something to dish out for nothing.
Wednesday, September 3, 2014
Art is Never Completely Original
As Dr. Ron Art took sufficient shape for me to launch it via a Facebook page three years ago, I wanted to share my Art Manifesto. This manifesto isn't just a set of beliefs about art, but also a proposal about the very nature of art. Physicists work at discovering the immutable laws of the universe, and in a similar way I work at crystallizing some fundamental truths about art. More broadly, art is an integral component of The Tripartite Model, along with science and religion.
My Art Manifesto
- Art is cross-art by nature
- Art is always autobiographical
- Art is sensuous
- Art is synesthetic
- Art is never completely original
- Art has value
My Art Manifesto is the undercurrent for these projects. This is the fifth of six articles, where I introduce this manifesto.
The four points I've written about so far in my Art Manifesto - (a) art is cross-art by nature, (b) art is always autobiographical, (c) art is sensuous, and (d) art is synesthetic - came to me five years ago, but this fifth is a recent inclusion. I crystallize it here.
We are all inviolably connected to each other, and we belong on long, billowing ribbons of life, since the beginning of life itself. So while we may pull things together in a novel fashion, while we may take a radical leap of creativity, and while our work may strike others as duly original, the fact is we are never fully alone or isolated from others in the world. Our art may be original to some extent, but never completely so.
Literature
Consider the famous reflection by the English poet and cleric John Donne (Meditation XVII):
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.American novelist Ernest Hemingway drew from Donne for the title From Whom the Bells Tolls. William Shakespeare, Donne's contemporary in the late-16th, early-17th centuries, drew quite a bit from his predecessors, and they from their predecessors, too, for instance, for `Romeo and Juliet:
- The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke, and Palace of Pleasure by William Painter were primary sources.
- In turn, for his narrative poem, Brooke may have translated the Italian novella Giuletta e Romeo by Matteo Bandello.
- There are characters named Reomeo Titensus and Juliet Bibleotet in the works by Pierre Boaistuau, who translated some of Bandello's novellas into French, such as Histoire troisieme de deux Amants, don't l'un mourut de venin, l'autre de tristesse (The third story of two lovers, one of whom died of poison, the other of sadness, rf. A Noise Within).
- One Bandello story was La sfortunata morte di dui infelicissimi amante che l'uno di veleno e l'atro di dolore morirono (The unfortunate death of two most wretched lovers, one of whom died of poison, the other, of grief, rf. A Noise Within).
Film
`Stoker is very stylish 2013 film by South Korean director Park Chan-wook, and in its simplest, most obvious theme it is about the coming of age of a young lady. But it's more complex than that, and quite a lot move and shift in the interiors of this family. The acting - led by Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode, and Nicole Kidman - is simply superb.
For the purpose of this article, I want to highlight American film talent Wentworth Miller, the screenwriter for `Stoker. The name didn't ring a bell to me. But because I love film, and I am obsessively curious about the background and crew, I Googled him. I found out that he played the younger Coleman Silk in another beautiful, very curious 2003 film The Human Stain, also starring Kidman and Anthony Hopkins.
[Miller] used the pseudonym Ted Foulke for submitting his work, later explaining "I just wanted the scripts to sink or swim on their own." Miller's script was voted to the 2010 "Black List" of the 10 best unproduced screenplays then making the rounds in Hollywood. Miller described it as a "horror film, a family drama and a psychological thriller". Although influenced by Bram Stoker's Dracula, Miller clarified that Stoker was "not about vampires. It was never meant to be about vampires but it is a horror story. A stoker is one who stokes, which also ties in nicely with the narrative." Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt also influenced the film. Miller said: "The jumping-off point is actually Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. So, that's where we begin, and then we take it in a very, very different direction."Reference: Stoker.
I have been enthralled with `Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) for a long time. I watched that Hitchcock film (1943), and it too was superb. I'm sure the inspiration for Miller is a bit more intricate than we can know, but an evocative name like "Stoker" and a conniving character like Uncle Charlie are the threads that stitch Miller to his creative predecessors.
Poetry
The influences to my poetry are many, but Shakespeare, and poets WH Auden and John Ashbery are prominent. For example, my latest poem - Swan Song of Ophelia - is about one of the most tender yet enigmatic women in Shakespeare. Auden wrote a breathtaking commentary on The Tempest, titled `The Sea and the Mirror, which in turn inspired me to write a long poem about a patient I worked with, who committed suicide. Ashbery, along with surrealist painter Salvador Dali and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, were instrumental to the poetry I wrote in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
But let's take one from my collection The Song Poems. The idea is simple: I take any music video I like from YouTube, then I let it take me wherever it wishes to take me. These poems are an account of these journeys.
The influences to my poetry are many, but Shakespeare, and poets WH Auden and John Ashbery are prominent. For example, my latest poem - Swan Song of Ophelia - is about one of the most tender yet enigmatic women in Shakespeare. Auden wrote a breathtaking commentary on The Tempest, titled `The Sea and the Mirror, which in turn inspired me to write a long poem about a patient I worked with, who committed suicide. Ashbery, along with surrealist painter Salvador Dali and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, were instrumental to the poetry I wrote in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
But let's take one from my collection The Song Poems. The idea is simple: I take any music video I like from YouTube, then I let it take me wherever it wishes to take me. These poems are an account of these journeys.
The following are the specific music videos that inspired me to write this song poem:
Nowadays social media, technology devices, and digital content all extend and tighten the ties that connect us to one another. What I've captured here is just a small sampling of my argument that art is never completely original. To come back to Donne, none of us is an island onto himself or herself. There is no person born and raised in complete isolation, and biologically we are forever bound to our parents.
Art simply gives us the means, the knowledge, and the opportunity to do what creative thing we wish to do with whatever and whoever came before us.
Monday, September 1, 2014
Art is Synesthetic
Preface
My Art Manifesto
- Art is cross-art by nature
- Art is always autobiographical
- Art is sensuous
- Art is synesthetic
- Art is never completely original
- Art has value
My Art Manifesto is the undercurrent for these projects. This is the fourth of six articles, where I introduce this manifesto.
I have this pet idea that (a) we work at art is sensuous, that is, heightening our five senses for any stimuli around us. Then (b) we cross the usual pairing of sense and stimulus, and now it's art is synesthetic. Synesthesia is a neurological condition, where sense-stimulus pairings are scrambled, for example, hearing colors or seeing music.
Some synesthetes often report that they were unaware their experiences were unusual until they realized other people did not have them, while others report feeling as if they had been keeping a secret their entire lives. The automatic and ineffable nature of a synesthetic experience means that the pairing may not seem out of the ordinary. This involuntary and consistent nature helps define synesthesia as a real experience. Most synesthetes report that their experiences are pleasant or neutral, although, in rare cases, synesthetes report that their experiences can lead to a degree of sensory overload.Reference: Synesthesia.
Though often stereotyped in the popular media as a medical condition or neurological aberration, many synesthetes themselves do not perceive their synesthetic experiences as a handicap. To the contrary, some report it as a gift—an additional "hidden" sense—something they would not want to miss. Most synesthetes become aware of their distinctive mode of perception in their childhood. Some have learned how to apply their ability in daily life and work. Synesthetes have used their abilities in memorization of names and telephone numbers, mental arithmetic, and more complex creative activities like producing visual art, music, and theater.
That's stupid. Numbers don't have colors, they have personalities!Of course, synesthesia isn't the purview of art alone. I love what Alex relates at the end: Fellow synesthetes have very different orientations to numbers, so their gatherings have the makings of a friendly fight.
I don't view synesthesia as a medical problem, though it can be, if a person is disturbed by it and it affects his or her day-to-day functioning. By and large, though, synesthetes who may or may not be artists clearly find it pleasant and normal. I imagine that in general established artists or would-be artists have a greater degree of synesthesia than non-artists.
Imagine the creative possibilities
Five years ago I was at Happy Hour with a couple of friends in Dubai, and I must've mentioned synesthesia. They didn't know what it was, so I explained it and mentioned it as a hallmark of art. I met them in an acting class, so like me they were artistic sorts and they were duly intrigued by its being an art manifesto.
I promised to write a poem about it:
They say, true synesthesia is involuntary –
Like
twitch of muscle fibers, firing of nerve cells,
Molecular
activity of momentary
But
frequent ringing of cross-stimulating bells.
But
I do not conceive this as neurologists
For
science claims too much of human mantelpiece,
Or
relegate to armchairs of psychologists
(Though
I am one) this cross-emotional release.
So,
dear, who truly owns this synesthesic power?
The artist! Let’s begin with sight. For eyes have might
To
hear the music in Picasso, feel the hour
Shorten
upon the skin from images at night.
Consider
hearing. Enter Mozart opera –
“The
Magic Flute” singspiel that is a
rousing texture
On
fingertips, a harlequin to camera
Of
colors from dramatic notes-and-words admixture.
Now,
smell. The fragrant hyacinths across the
field
May
give rise to a spread of roasted lamb, merlot
And
crème brûlée – for flavor is as
much the yield
Of fragrance as of succulence,
tied with a bow.
Taste, then. Cold water on the palate in the heat
Of equatorial summers is to
bathe in springs
Collecting from the
mountaintops, down to their feet,
Where rushing, falling is what
water also sings.
Last but not least, is
touch. For lovers, all the world
Is synesthesia. Were they simply left alone
To stroke each other’s face,
we’d see the cherubs twirl,
Hear oud play, breathe perfume,
lap Häagen-Dazs’s cone.
So, there, the sensual artist
is the king and queen,
Whose living fully rules each momentary scene.Synesthesia © Ron Villejo
So how about synesthesia in short film, music video, and training and education?
I love the bits about listening to fruits and vegetables, meat and eggs, then himself. Toasting, cooking and eating books. Herds of cats coming out of the speakers.
The lyrics and singing are terrible, but the visuals and music are catchy. The Hindu holiday of Holi - the festival of colors - is a nice touch.
I like the notion of metaphor as seeing the similar in dissimilar things. But imagine the work of researchers in synesthesia, applied as training and education for all art students. There is evidence that our brain is very plastic, that is, pliable and changeable. So we could adopt neurological applications for children, teenagers and adults, and thereby build up their artistry, creativity and innovation, and reshape their (our) brain for a meaningful good.
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