flying monk links

Flying monk of Copertino

Eilmer of Marmesbury

Ingenuity, Eilmer and more

Eilmer again from the BBC

photo of a flying monk

Padre Pio who stopped bombing during WWII

and there's a children's book

someone who was enlightened by a vision of a flying monk

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

by William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning [1962]

Musee des Beaux Arts, W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. [1938]

Ovid on Icarus

These, as the angler at the silent brook,
Or mountain-shepherd leaning on his crook,
Or gaping plowman, from the vale descries,
They stare, and view 'em with religious eyes,
And strait conclude 'em Gods; since none, but they,
Thro' their own azure skies cou'd find a way.
[Ovid, Metamorphosis, VIII:183-235, Sir Samuel Garth, John Dryden, et al trans.]

Bruegel's Icarus

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c. 1558
by Pieter Bruegel

hi-res image
it's like Where's Icarus?

Review of Jeff's work

STAGES OF TRANSCENDENCE -
Sculptor Jeff Becker's twin exhibits beautifully blend a stage designer's sense of drama with a post-K sense of dread
Friday, December 21, 2007
By Doug MacCash, Art critic
The students at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts may be just high-school age. But a list of their visual arts teachers reads like a university faculty. Keith Perelli, Erzy Schwartz, Mary Jane Parker, Courtney Egan: The roll call of instructors is a list of some of the most accomplished artists in the Crescent City.
NOCCA sculpture teacher Jeff Becker is best known for his ambitious, inventive stage designs that date back to the 1990s. Times-Picayune theater critic David Cuthbert described Becker's set for ArtSpot's 2004 production of "Maid of Orleans" as a "brilliant piece of stagecraft," including a "whirling circular platform . . . ingeniously refashioned into a gyroscope."
Becker, 44, sees the ingenious, toy-like sculpture he's produced over the past two years as models for possible future stage designs. Clusters of miniature bombs hang beneath a tiny couch, bed and easy chair. The small-scale furniture hangs like surrealistic porch swings beneath the wings of abstract stealth bombers. Marionettes, holding bells in their tiny hands, balance precariously atop tall metal towers that sway back and forth on rounded bottoms. Other marionettes are carried toward the heavens by old-fashioned hot air balloons.
Becker envisions real live actors someday seated on life-sized versions of his dangling furniture, rocking atop his towers and swaying beneath his balloons. He probably has the skills to pull it off.
From welded iron, to cast paper pulp, to poured bronze, to embossed metal repousse, Becker has mastered myriad sculptural techniques. But he tells his students that technique shouldn't be their first concern.
"Don't worry about the how," he tells them, "worry about the what."
The what, in Becker's recent works, is flight.
"I'm intrigued by how our desire to fly has created innovations and consequences that are ongoing and unpredictable," he said.
But he's not just interested in flight as it pertains to aircraft; he's interested in flight in the sense of fleeing danger. Becker and his family fled Hurricane Katrina to Charleston, S.C., where they spent three months on what he sarcastically calls a "hurrication."
He said he didn't exactly set out to create metaphors for New Orleans' jarring experience when he returned to art making. But like so many artists, the trauma seeped into his work anyway.
As Becker pointed out, a pair of feet being carried aloft by wings brings to mind the helicopter rescue of so many stranded citizens. A cow borne by a hot air balloon implies a search for "greener pastures." The suitcases and figurines that dangle from balloons at the Contemporary Arts Center symbolize "people and possessions that are caught in some state of limbo awaiting eventual transcendence."
For Becker, transcendence has come sooner. The beautifully made, whimsical objects in his pair of exhibits deftly describe the longing for deliverance so many of us in post-Katrina New Orleans still have somewhere deep in our hearts.
Though Becker has shown his sculpture regularly in local group shows, the current twin shows represent a solo breakout for the high-flying artist, who says he will translate some of the designs into stage sets for an Artspot production titled "Flight" at the CAC in June.

vocalizing in the dark 12-10 session

this links to an 8mb, 10 minute file of the 12-10 vocal experiment

flying lessons tumble

flying lessons

pilot&co-pilot straight

gravity experiment

Flying Dude, Jean Albert

Cocteau's Blood of a Poet

I'd like us to watch Blood of a Poet (45 min., I could do excerpts if necessary). There are some nice ways of disorienting space that if so inspired we can draw on. Also, Cocteau was interested in mixing drawing and the 3-d human form on film - some things I'd like to try with mixing the body with projection. The image of the man falling into the pool of water began with him looking into a mirror that exactly fit the size of the pool - with the cut, it appeared he was passing into the mirror with a splash.