The next Categorically Not! is Sunday 23rd April. You may recall my post on the Categorically Not! series of events held at the Santa Monica Art Studios. They’re fantastic, and I strongly encourage you to come to them.
Here is K.C. Cole’s teaser:
Really?
Look around you. Is the scene you see “real”? Or a story made up inside your head? What about atoms? Are they real? What about love? Physics tells us that familiar space and time are illusions (while black holes and quantum weirdness are real). Artists reveal deep truths by pretending. What does it mean to say something is “real,” anyway? Physicist Steven Weinberg says it means we are granting it a measure of respect.
For this month’s Categorically Not! we are delighted to have Bay Area artist Bob Miller, whose explorations into the nature of light, seeing and believing are embodied in museum exhibits through-out the world. Bob will TALK A LITTLE about, and SHOW A LOT (capitals his) about what we’re REALLY seeing when we open our eyes. It really has a LOT to do with “The Wholeness of Seeing and Being,” he says.
From a scientific perspective, neuroscientist Richard Brown will demonstrate several engaging and powerful illusions currently being studied by scientists, present current views of why our brains evolved to produce illusions, and discuss the significance of illusions in our and understanding of “reality.” Richard studied neuroscience at Caltech and UCSF, and researched human color vision at UCSD’s Center for Brain and Cognition before moving to the Exploratorium in 1998, where he continues to develop interactive exhibits about perception, behavior and minds.
For a literary trip behind the looking glass, Pushcart prize winner Aimee Bender will lead us in a group writing exercise, as well as read and talk about her reality redefining fiction. Aimee is the author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, An Invisible Sign of My Own, and Willful Creatures, which feature a girl with a fire hand, a character obsessed with numbers, and pumpkinheads who give birth to children with the recessive gene that produces a head made of an iron. Aimee has published in Harper’s, Granta, The Paris Review and is heard on This American Life. She teaches creative writing at USC.
As usual, it is held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, come at 6:00pm for drinks, cookies and a look around the space, and there’s a 6:30 start. For more information, visit the Categorically Not! website.
Hope to see some of you there!
-cvj
April 13th, 2006 at 12:33 pm
Obviously, I had a blast at the last one, but this one I’m also really excited for. Aimee Bender is a long time friend of mine, a fantastically original writer with a deep and honest interesting in nature and looking at things in new ways. Can’t wait!
April 13th, 2006 at 12:55 pm
Yeah! Should be great…..I only just learned that Aimee Bender was actually here…. I’ve heard her so many times on This American Life! Sometimes it seems like everyone is here in LA, and often at USC….
See you there!
-cvj
April 13th, 2006 at 1:39 pm
grrrr…. it sounds so extreamly interesting but I am in ohio, and that is quite a hefty distance. well hope you guys have fun
April 14th, 2006 at 8:07 am
K. C. Cole is quoted as saying: “space and time” are simply an illusion while “quantum weirdness and blackholes are real.” I do not question the assumption that “space and time” is an illusion while quantum weirdness is reality. However, I view blackholes as a perfect hybrid between illusion and reality. Stated differently, I view blackholes as a complete intertwinement between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Perhaps it is hopeless to assume that GR and Qm can be reconciled at the Planck scale as well as at the Hubble scale. Perhaps on “the road to reality,” QM will always usurp GR?
April 18th, 2006 at 12:41 am
I wonder if it is appropriate to relate Abraham Maslow’s “peak experience” to moments of intuition?
April 18th, 2006 at 12:46 am
Oh I was wondering if the the website of these events can somehow contain some information of the talks as well. Especially if all events are not possibly described in Cosmic Variance format.
I see you are busy now, so perhaps later?
Thanks
April 22nd, 2006 at 8:20 pm
[...] Turns out that there is a society/club whose mission in life is to arrange chamber music concerts in several of these stately homes and other historic places all over Los Angeles County, and this was one of the perfomances I was attending! They are called the Da Camera society, and their website is here. We saw the Avalon String Quartet perfom pieces by Schubert, Schumann and Wolf, and it was wonderful. They arranged the Quartet in a circle (facing inwards), and we the audience surrounded the musicians, sitting very close to them, so it was especialy intimate, and also afforded an interesting hearing of the pieces, since the no-traditional positioning allowed you to separate out the parts in interesting ways. I like to do this a bit in my head when I listen anyway, and so it was nice to be helped a bit by geography. Turned out (I learned from speaking to one of the musicians afterward) that the musicians found it fun to do, since they too had not heard it in that way before. (They are performing the same programme tonight -in a traditional confirguration- in Santa Barbara, for readers up there looking for something to do. They were excellent.) The excellent pre-concert lecture was given by MaryAnn Bonino, the Founding Director of the Society, who I’d met before a lot at Categorically Not!….. I’d previously no idea that she had an office so close to me all this time. [...]
April 24th, 2006 at 1:10 pm
So how did it go, and any opinions by those who went?
April 24th, 2006 at 1:17 pm
Will do a post about it soon….. then people will hopefully come in a comment there. Although people who attended can start commenting on it here if they wish to, since I might not do the post in a speedy fashion.
-cvj
April 24th, 2006 at 1:31 pm
That’s fine. Comments preferably, when you do new post? Sort of keeps it together. Just checking, and any thoughts written to the website? I know your a busy man.
Thank you
April 24th, 2006 at 1:39 pm
Plato, people can comment whenever they want. They can do it on this post if they want to since the title is correct for the event in question. I can move things if need be. People might be excited to share their thoughts immediately and might not want to wait for me to post some pictures. They might want to do their own description of the events. My point of view is only one of many, and so can wait.
Ok? Please don’t confuse other readers and potential commenters further.
Thanks,
-cvj
April 24th, 2006 at 3:21 pm
okay:)