nicholasbentz

[nicholasbentz]

'Weep You No more Sad Fountains” by John Dowland

some angsty Renaissance lute tunes for you all (and a healthy dose of some of the best sequences I’ve ever heard in music)

[nicholasbentz]

Finsta Retrospective Update #12

(5/25/18)

I often wonder what the overriding issue is that has spawned so much divisiveness among us. There are a wealth of answers by scores of people much more qualified to approach such a complicated and ultimately unsolvable question, but I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t try to come to my own conclusions on it. All things considered, I think a lot of it boils down to this: people are far more concerned as to what they are rather than who they are. It’s attractive to want to place yourself in a neat box along an easily digestible continuum, but humans don’t work this way. We are infinitely complex creatures surmounting an evolutionary ladder that shoots backwards into the unfathomable depths of time. To think that any of us on this journey is simply labeled and pigeonholed is ludicrous, and while I sometimes (though not often) envy the confidence of those so sure of their own place, I am eternally glad to not be ignorant of my own ignorance. I am overjoyed to know that I don’t know, to recognize my and everyone else’ infinite spread of gifts and talents, to realize that I will never stop learning. You are not your labels. Those were made by people and institutions that couldn’t care less for you, so why give them the opportunity to steer your ever-precious existence? Know yourself on your own terms, see yourself from your own eyes first in order to begin to understand how others perceive the world.

[nicholasbentz]

Finsta Retrospective Update #11

(5/23/18)

“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will life you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.”

-Terence McKenna

[nicholasbentz]

Finsta Retrospective Update #10

(5/20/18)

I’ve heard of the theory that all human agency is geared toward the want to remain immortal, and while it makes sense, it’s by no means right in all circumstances (enter my sexuality, stage left). We worry so much about being remembered and leaving out mark in out own time that death becomes a worrisome if not horrifying thing - an obligatory end that all things must face, forcing out life’s byproducts to operate in our infinite absence. Wherever we go (which is somewhere else, I’m certain), our immortality here and now is guaranteed by virtue of our own existence. Every person creates an indelible mark on the evergrowing continuum of the human experience; whether large or small, that unique wrinkle will always exist after its inception, rippling out in a unique set of grooves whose crests and troughs will reach people millions if not billions of degrees of separation away. Your effect on those distant experiences, no matter how minuscule, is still your immortality at play. Like lasers through an infinite hall of mirrors, we begin to exist as the effects of our selves once we truly lack our Self, abandoning this fallible vessel for an ineffable beyond. 

[nicholasbentz]

Finsta Retrospective Update #9

(5/18/18)

It’s wild how the shrinking finiteness of your experiences somewhere brings forth streams of memories from the most mundane of objects. The glow of my apartment in the morning, sane as it will always be, takes me through countless instances of joy and sadness, ecstasy and despair, flooding by only to be remembered as copies of copies, ever fading into a phantasmatic gray. The casual and unmoving intersection of metal and brick in the cafeteria ushers forth a wave of anecdotes that I struggle to place on the ineffable axis of time. The smell of the dorms reminds me of my past passions, my loves that I never pursued, the feelings that I orphaned only because I didn’t know what to do with them.

[nicholasbentz]

Finsta Retrospective Update #8

(4/19/18)

My thoughts on the Pulitzer finely condensed into two undeniable points:

1. Kendrick shouldn’t have won for DAMN. He should’ve won for ‘To Pimp a Butterfly.’

2. Biggie should’ve won in 1994-5 for ‘Ready to Die.’

It’s hilarious to see the classical world finally confront its inherent biases in the wake of this wonderful news. Music is music, sound is sound. And while there is a hierarchy of art, it is not dictated by genre but personal skill and artistry, which Kendrick practically oozes with. The future of classical music is not in the conservation of tradition, but in the abolition of genre and the crossmutation of style.

[nicholasbentz]

Finsta Retrospective Update #7

(2/16/18)

I’ve stopped telling myself that I can do things later. That sentence is forbidden for me now. The now is all we ever experience, so to put things off is to just burden your later self with a menial task whose mundane nature coupled with the powerful inertia of procrastination makes mountains of mere molehills. It stops here and now. I’m granting my current self the ability to accomplish so that my later self has the ability to revel in that wonderful solace of completion for but a short while.

[nicholasbentz]

Finsta Retrospective Update #6

(2/2/18)

“The problem is to make space speak, to feed and furnish it; like mines laid in a wall of rock which all of a sudden turns into geysers and bouquets of stone”

-Antonin Artaud

[nicholasbentz]

Finsta Retrospective Update #5

(1/12/18)

Getting the occasional slap in the face is just as important as a hundred pats on the back. Complacency is one of the greatest nemeses of an artist, and while success is not something to gawk at, I find myself more rewarded by the times when I’ve failed, when my best was not enough, when a door you’ve walked through lead to a stark brick wall. It forces me to examine the minutiae of what I do, to launch my perspective from subjectivity into a more objective horizon in the search of a more perfect art. Failure is the greatest of teachers in that it is the harshest. It burns and it hurts. But it is from once-ravaged soils that newer and stronger plants may grow. 

[nicholasbentz]

Finsta Retrospective Update #4

(12/14/17)

Very few things are truly as simple as they first seem. Details, and more importantly, structure favor a longer, more patient glance, and will only give you their secrets in due time. Always be observant of the world in all of its inspired magnificence, and remember that the ground on which you walk has supported so many others, while the sky has carried their gazes.

[nicholasbentz]

Finsta Retrospective Update #3

(12/12/17)

I always love recording. It lends an additional level of immortality to music that’s always attractive. Technically every sound ever created is eternal in its displacement of material throughout the universe. Sounds from thousands, even millions of years ago are emanating out into infinity, however faint their ripples have become. When people mention the fleeting nature of music, I always remember this fact that speaks to the inherent eternity of music. Once it has happened, it’s launched into the heavens to reverberate ad infinitum, sent to mingle among stardust and planets for the rest of existence.

[nicholasbentz]

Finsta Retrospective Update #2

(12/10/17)

Just lying here waiting for the semester to end. there’s something really spellbinding about the way light and snow interact - the way that light seems to come out of the snow in the darkest of nights. It’s as if the packed snow creates its own luminescence in exchange for its substance as it slowly melts into oblivion. I realize that it doesn’t truly work that way, but I like to imagine that it does.

[nicholasbentz]

Finsta Retrospective Update #1

Just for clarification - I’ll be dual posting my finsta here as well. In order to start, I’m backlogging my favorite previous posts:

(12/4/17)

I feel like when I write I come very close to love. Loving what, I don’t, nor do I want to know. But I feel something indescribable when I compose. I once talked with Cody, and he remarked about how from certain angles we’ve had pretty (if not extremely) rocky childhoods yet we’ve come out of it writing the more aesthetically beautiful music of our colleagues. I’m certain that I hear (and try to write down) beautiful music because I want to escape from the prison that life is and has been. I want to escape to the degree that I can keep escaping again and again, like a teenager from their bedroom at night. I want the thrill of moving away from the grey and almost meaningless existence I feel, traveling into a sphere of my own control and my own design. A place where I can determine my own path, as trivial a path as that may be.

[nicholasbentz]

The Flowers of St. Francis / Francesco, giullare di Dio  (Roberto Rossellini, 1950)

Today - 4 October - is the Feast of St Francis of Assisi

[nicholasbentz]

Shishido Jo

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Youth of the Beast | Seijun Suzuki | 1963

[nicholasbentz]

Youth of the Beast Dir. Seijun Suzuki | DP: Kazue Nagatsuka | 1963