ISSUE 9 | OCT 2011

RECONSTRUCTION

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Etha Williams

Setting Words to Music: Rameau’s Nephew and the Way the Enlightenment Listened

« dancing about architecture » - « ask ten people the meaning of a Haydn symphony » - « melody is merely a succession of sounds. No doubt. » - melismata - harmony, at the time a hermeneutically empty vessel - Querelle des Bouffons - the final phenomenon imitated is silence itself - the manic appeal of the performance

Philip Engel

The Makings of a Mathematical Abstraction

accusatory, questioning, rhetorical, and exasperated! - the most certain kind of proof - more and more properties - the coincidences and the certainties - live in a delineated space - enough words to talk about Z

David Richter

Notes on the Period Film

« you could not have new objects! » - the aftermath of a war - candy-colored and gynocentric melodrama - testimony of unreliable witnesses - purging past sins and corruptions - a relation, however dialectical, to the « real world. » - rhythm, after all, is a synchronic phenomenon - a kind of innate and habitual conservatism

Emily Balsamo

(Pere)(pere)(pere)stroika, or a Divorce Between the Signifier and the Signified

you’re not supposed to be there - « we didn't put them there, why should we take them down? » - the final phase of Soviet propaganda - two confident-looking farmers with impeccable posture painted in bold colors - we have been trained - a 200-ton statue of Karl Marx - proletarian revolution is the signified - history existed - overstimulation of political symbolism

Christine Heller

The Graduate

faith that the world is round - waft the stink of History - rhythmic breathing - saturation in a single given world - the full weight of gravity - one can choose to dwell

Cat Pierro

In the Event of the Unexpected Onset of Retrograde Amnesia

a sense of my values - ever more secrets in all the wrong places - help getting home/warm/fed - don’t blame it on your amnesia - just with his emphases - his interest in this project of telling you things - soak each other up - a skeletal narrative of your past