This week-end (Saturday 2019-08-31 and Sunday 2019-09-01; 12-5pm) is the last opportunity to attend the Person/ne exhibition at Griffin Art Projects in North Vancouver, where Lam Wong is currently artist in residence. I found this exhibition of multiple artists works to be very thought-provoking.
Continue reading Person/ne Exhibition at Griffin Art Projects: Lam Wong Artist in Residence
Our friends, Huguette Lacourse and Michèle Desponts, blessed us at home on Saturday with their wonderful performance of wonderful (mostly French) music.
Here Huguette sings Edith Piaf’s, “La vie en rose”, accompanied by Michèle:
Continue reading A Musical Celebration of Spring and Love Chez Nous
Samedi le 18 mai, nous célébrerons le printemps (cette verdeur qui nous entoure!) et l’art, dans toutes ses formes. Le jour, nous serons imprésario (ou au moins hôtes) d’un événement musical français. Le soir, on ira à un spectacle musical du Vancouver Symphony Orchestra: Mozart, Morlock et autres.
Entre temps, CogSci Apps et CogZest s’apprêtent à lancer de nouveaux produits.
I tweeted the poem below today, minus “‘s”. I’d draw a cartoon to go with this, one to do with a teapot. However, although I quite enjoyed Crystal Pite’s recent Revisor, I don’t want to risk needing to issue a retraction, as even professional cartoonists have had to on this subject. So, I will leave it up to your imagination. As for the poem, there are a couple of clues in the tags.
“Betroffenheit” is a German emotion word. Max Wyman compared it to being gobsmacked. I might add nonplussed. But English and French words only capture part of the meaning of betroffenheit. Crystal Pite, a brilliant Canadian choreographer (Kidd Pivot productions), created an entire dance show that translates betroffenheit in several of the brain’s (verbal and non-verbal) languages.[1] Since seeing this very powerful show a couple of weeks ago, it has frequently come to my mind (a light perturbance); and I’ve discussed it with many people. I had been resisting the urge to blog about it, for lack of time. But reading Brett Terpstra’s blog post, “How’s it going?”, about the grief he is experiencing from losing his dog, Emma[2], led me to reply to his post with the following.
Continue reading Betroffenheit: The Show and the Emotions
There must be a thesis on this somewhere: How did Simon & Garfunkle’s soundtrack to The Graduate come to be what it became? I don’t mean the administrative part. I mean: what was the specific assignment S&G received? What were the constraints? And more interestingly, how did S&G translate this assignment into the masterpiece they created? Continue reading What Inspired Mrs. Robinson and Other Songs in The Graduate?
This year, I have not been blogging as much as I had expected to. Here’s the background.
At the Vancouver Arts Club on Friday, I attended the emotion-inducing play, Angels in America Part 1: Millennium Approaches. (Its wikipedia page. One of the characters, Louis Ironson, is a Jewish homosexual consumed by anxiety and guilt. Today, I used this character to reflect upon imperfection, the emotions of guilt, and self-directed learning. I wondered in particular how one can use feelings of guilt and fiction/non-fiction to become more effective. This blog post touches briefly on this problem. Continue reading On Using Fiction and Non-Fiction When Feeling Guilty
Tonight, I will moderate a humanist meeting on “Self-directed Learning with Fiction”. Here’s the blurb:
Continue reading Humanist Meeting On Self-directed Learning with Fiction
Who would argue with this: “Learning is good in itself. The quality of performance —in work and personal endeavours — depends largely on prior learning”? Hence we should learn deliberately, and optimally. Now, if we are to devise better ways of learning, would it not help to have some explicit understanding of the different ways in which we can learn, or develop? I think so.
Continue reading What Can You Learn from the Knowledge of Others?