FB Post 7/20

This feels very chaotic and has a Noah vibe to it.

The painting is Materia by Umberto Boccioni:
This painting is the most ambitious project Umberto Boccioni ever accomplished. Like a watershed, it divides his early Futurist paintings from his later, fully developed Futurist work. Boccioni was particularly sensitive to the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and this title recalls that of Bergson’s fundamental 1896 text, Matière et mémoire.
The subject is a full length portrait of the artist’s mother (”mater”). She is seated in a room at her home in Via Adige 23, Milan, with a window behind her overlooking the Piazza Trento below. The artist has merged the frontal view of his mother with his own visual impressions of the outdoors reflected from the window panes, when he replaced her in the seat before him. The images of the horse and the man, representing incidents taking place in the piazza below the house, are different in their forms from the rest of the painting. The inspiration for the man was Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No.2 (1912; Philadelphia Museum of Art). In place of the intersecting architectonic planes characteristic of Cubism, transparent planes with radiating and arching lines imply movement. This look forward to the language Boccioni was to use for his studies of rapid movement in the second half of 1913, such as Dynamism of a Cyclist. (via this page)

As a side note, Duchamp is one of my favorites, particularly Etant donnes, which is just begging to be recreated as an installation/immersive/piece of virtual art.

Wanted to point out that this painting isn’t really cropped.

Also love the quote. Too many people fuck up/make mistakes and burn bridges, and just try to mend them so they can get back to their comfy life they’re used to. That’s not always how it works- sometimes burning bridges stay burnt. There’s no fixing charred wood.
Move forward with your life and make a new path, new bridges. Accept that you fucked up and live with it. Life isn’t a nice fluffy pillow that you can always go to sleep on every night; sometimes it’s a pile of shit and you have to deal with the smell.

Too many metaphors. Moving on.

Yeah, but burned bridges come back to haunt you. I’ve lived long enough to know that people I crossed 15 years ago might have cost me something in the present. It’s not always about wanting to go back to comfy and cozy, it’s about not being an asshole because the world is a small, small place (especially if you work in entertainment/theatre). Make a choice not to go back to comfy and cozy, you can do that without destroying relationships.

I normally hear “don’t burn bridges” in the context of networking. There’s an assumption that the bridge connects you to a helpful person or group. But what happens when a person/group is poisonous? When the connection between you is one-sided? When the bridge allows danger to cross a protective gulf and hurt you?

Burning bridges can be a valuable method of empowerment. In fact, from a purely subjective viewpoint, the fire has helped me more often than not.

I don’t mean I have people out to get revenge on me. I mean I have people who won’t work with me, or who will work with others instead of me, or something similar. For example I just burned a bridge this past spring. One could argue that the company lied to me about giving me a crew to work with, never gave me a contract, and then provided outrageous working conditions so I had every right to do it – but the fact is that they are known quantities in Minneapolis and I am not, having only been here 2 years. Sure, it felt good. It won’t feel good later when I don’t get a job because that director talked about how I caused problems for her. It would have been smarter of me to finish the job and then make the choice to never work for them again.

This past week in Los Angeles someone could have arguably burned a bridge with me, but after the number of times I’ve fucked up in my life and been given a second or third chance I can’t not give someone else that same thing. So if he wants it and his ego lets him take it it’s his.

My own sister burned the bridge of our relationship last summer, cut my husband and I out of her life and her kids’ lives. And when he was in a coma and nearly dead over Thanksgiving weekend she regretted that.

Life’s too short for that shit you guys. There are other ways to empower yourself.

Burning bridges and moving forward sounds nice but, like all things in life, it isn’t as black and white as this quote makes it out to be. There are some times burning bridges can rid oneself of toxic influences and be a positive influence. Other times we burn bridges that could have been a positive influence but we noticed something about the bridge that warned us away from it.

I am looking now at the context of the quote. Fridtjof was an “explorer” – aha, I think he literally burned bridges to prevent his team from going back during explorations. So the bridge might not represent a connection between people, but a connection between the future and past? Now, I am a geneticist, so this is outside my field! But interesting.

Yes, cheers for optimistic progress! I’m now going to spend the next half hour reading about Nansen’s Arctic expeditions. It’s fun! Bridges everywhere, too, though they’re mainly ice bridges haha.

And if by burning bridges we are also burning evidences, traces, anything that can also lead to us? No track to be follow if we burned the way, right?