proposal notes

Proposal points


- the liminal
- the institutions
- the racial
- the gender
- performance identity
o surivival or passing
o priviledge and play
o occupying social spheres
o confounding authenticity,,./;l
{“}\
o \

- the anthropology of self
- the white woman, the black man, and drag
- femininity / masculinity / inbetweening
- Chicago as liminal space (between east and west canons)
- vcs as liminal (what is critical about the visual : ambiconti)
- tricksterisms.
- Subliminal political
- The force of innocence (lacking ulterior motives)
- Documentating the process (de-secreting)
- Researching themes that arise.
- Process as force of form – project as investigative reaching, rather than aiming towards a goal.
- Allowing for openness. Encouraging it.
- As process is a living/dyimg/rebirthing thing – seeing and taking and moving with this as a series of steps toward else. In one sense – video
o ‘remaking’ paris is burning. Camera turned on the filmer too. All involved
o reality tv? Myspace?
o Hip hop – etc – cultural interstices

- research topics (legitimizing) (and articulating the trope of academic legitimacy)
o the fascination.
o The other
o Etc (al the above)

- border states. Just a little bit of the personal (contextualize it)
- why I am a part of each institution and yet apart from each.
- Ulterior motives / stated motivations
o To draw attention to the segregated racial state of this specific space (these) – Chicago spaces.
o Under that – a diversion into histories
o This is (primarily) racial. (next – personally) about performing others and others for personal gain (individuation? Socialization). Then – gender crossing.
• obviously – backing the performative, the fashion. Style, adornment, costume and consumption.

- and then – the process of organization. Collaboration. The learning process. The reason for grad school. Resources, networks, and how performance plays into the process of organizing performance.
-

back to life, back to reality.

the 2008 list.

(not in chronological order or order of importance but first thought and then some. subject to undocumented expansion)

-write thesis proposal. write it well. write it soon. it's overdue. afterall.

-email patrick (beforehand aforementioned) to let him know the proposal is admittedly late but on its way.

-ummmm third reader. joseph? yes please

-email n.s. like now. but not now, tomorrow.

-upload video.

-(pay bills)
-(make money)

-ballin.

-keep in touch

-read and write and read and write and read and write.

-(do laundry) (clean room) (clean studio)

-(paint)

-all that other stuff.

-new york flights planning soon (birthday)

-nashville, she said?

-meetings and recordings.

-networkin and connectivity activities

-push push push it on and up and

-buckle down

-(swim) (stretch) (move)

Evolutions

Postponed my flight to NY til tomorrow. Meeting with FLR on Sunday so there was really no need for me to be there tonight. Projects before parties. Much to do.

Thinking during last night's somewhat productive insomnia about how to answer the 'How is this a VCS project' $5000 question. Sure - first the usual justifications appeared (investigating and investing in the processes and production of visual culture / semiotics of performance and play / etc....) but then it seemed suddenly and quite simply obvious:

VCS is itself a battle of disciplines, a performance of paradox embodied, a masquerade of projects and shifting alliances. VCS has no fixed identity. It is what it is all the time. It's liminal, impossible, and exciting - it challenges assumptions and resists categorization. VCS is itself an occupant and antagonizer of the borderline. Its 'residents' fight binary'd paradigms because their activated space is that of being between / both / neither either/ or. Why...?

... Is it all in the name?
Visual Critical Studies?

I'm reading The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, and one of its fundamental assertions is that - to paraphrase - the visual is not a critical faculty. Judgemental - yes indeed. But critical?

... I need to think more to articulate this better.

status message

zephyr is flying to new york tomorrow
zephyr is awake late every night, nearly
zephyr is chemically enhanced
zephyr is learning the hustle and likes it
zephyr is busy busing and bustling
zephyr is annoyed that her stolen wifi is so slow
zephyr is hiding from toothy beasts
zephyr is a toothy beast herself sometimes
zephyr is sleepless in chicago
zephyr is hungry and full
zephyr needs a week's worth of massage
zephyr is taking a break... soon enough
zephyr is blustering about the USA
zephyr isn't sure what she's started but it's gonna be ...
zephyr is no tightrope walker.
zephyr needs to take a chill pill and call her in the morning
zephyr wants to breathe sea
zephyr is up for it, what the hell
zephyr is pocketing cash
zephyr serves you heavy metal mac n cheese
zephyr is good like that
zephyr needs to quit smoking. oh god yeah.
zephyr is all for the smoking ban
zephyr's hair smells like a bar
zephyr is tired but.
zephyr hates to have to walk through the long cold flat to the bathroom when she's already in bed
zephyr considers having a chamber pot but modern times say no.
zephyr is doing it for now and later
zephyr by the seat of her pants.
zephyr : like the red queen running the treadmill
zephyr is rather overwhelmed but whatever.
zephyr is awful at pool, snowboarding, and iceskating
zephyr must remember how to breathe.
zephyr wishes her computer didn't look so... electronic
zephyr is rather wired.
zephyr knows nostalgia
zephyr really needs to pee now.
zephyr : goodnight moon, goodnight room
zephyr hush

putting the BALL back in BALLA

So my thesis has shifted from the morte to the balla ...

I've teamed up with Mother Solomon Infiniti to throw a House Ball in the SAIC Ballroom.

It's gonna be wild.
Shade will be thrown. But I'm no Jennie Livingstone... right? We'll see...
Mark your calendars: May 4th.

epoetica

epoetica: an electronic literature symposium organized by davin heckman

my participation was grounded in the exploration of mallarmé's 'pour un tombeau d'Anatole'.

chris died before i could close out my comments.

googlegoth

the death of a scene

how to be goth

fire up a gothic match





Though you probably can't stand goth music, you tolerate going to clubs because of the occasional Ministry and Misfits that they play and the hot people in vinyl and chains. Not that you'd ever have the social skills to date one of them, but eh, *something's* gotta fuel those masturbation fantasies, right?

What kind of goth are you?

gothic fakes

Gothic is about the denial of depth and the insistence on the surface - on the mask rather than the face, the veil rather than what lies beneath, the disguise rather than what is disguised." (from Sedgwick)

"Gothic... possesses no original." Spooner, 32

The very notion of 'mock gothic' is... an oxymoron, because one cannot mock what is always already mocking itself. (35) (camp, and the misfits.)

(unchained melody: 9:23am)

"the legacies of the past and its burdens on the present

the radically provisional or divided nature of the self

the construction of peoples or individuals as monstrous or 'other'

the preoccupation with bodies that are modified, grotesque or diseased...

Gothic has become so pervasive precisely because it is so apposite to the representation of contemporary concerns...

we should perhaps be careful of assuming that the Gothic simply reflects social anxieties in a straightforward manner - as a genre deliberately intended to provoke horror and unease, it plays to audience expectations and therefor is rather too self-conscious to illuminate our most secret fears..."

"There is no 'original' Gothic; it is always already a revival of something else."

Catherine Spooner

- Gothic as 'the passionate overthrow of reason' coming from 5th century Goths' overthrow of Rome

- Gothic as a retrospective architectural term for medieval structures embellished with pointed arches, grotesque angles, gargoyles, stiff elongated figures and elaborate detail... ignoring the clean lines and proportional curves of Classical styles.

"[A Gothic text should comprise] a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration..."

Chris Baldick

(etymological/historical tensions between definitions: gothic as transcendent spiritualism or corporeal horror?)

:Gothic text: past as a site of terror, injustice that must be resolved, evil that must exorcised. 'the past chokes the present, prevents progress...'

:Gothic (Revival) architecture: the past is imbued and invested with nostalgia and idealism.

Perhaps it is only secure cultures that produce Gothic texts...

it is only a society that has stopped believing in ghosts that is able to turn them into the stuff of entertainment.

liminal inks

Written on the Body - ed. Jane Caplan

I've been getting all these new tattoos lately, and wanting more and more.

("is it the pain or the art?" dad asks.
"bit of both." and then the whole healing process - the crustacean ink, the itch.)

the tattoo is "an indelible insertion that is both visible and out of reach... an exchange between interiority and exeriority, 'a paradoxical double skin...'" (xiii)

infidel(ities):

You shall not gash yourselves in mourning for the dead: you shall not tattoo yourselves." (Leviticus)

much in the first few chapters about the etymology of the tattoo - the (disputed?) relation between 'stigmata' and what we think: ink.

stigma.

brian summed up (a part of it) well : tattoos are so temporary. disregard all the warning speak of permanence. these drawings die with me (except for: see Roald Dahl: Skin). unlike the paintings (crap paintings) that go nowhere except for into corners, the boxes of photos, of letters and books and books and books of drawings. art on the body to do nothing with but burn when body burns.

on the Obscene

Main Entry:
ob·scene
Pronunciation:
\äb-ˈsēn, əb-\
Function:
adjective
Etymology:
Middle French, from Latin obscenus, obscaenus
Date:
1593

1: disgusting to the senses : repulsive
2 a: abhorrent to morality or virtue; specifically : designed to incite to lust or depravity
b: containing or being language regarded as taboo in polite usage
c: repulsive by reason of crass disregard of moral or ethical principles
d: so excessive as to be offensive (obscene wealth) (obscene waste)

1593, "offensive to the senses, or to taste and refinement," from M.Fr. obscène, from L. obscenus "offensive," especially to modesty, originally "boding ill, inauspicious," perhaps from ob "onto" + cænum "filth." Meaning "offensive to modesty or decency" is attested from 1598. Legally, in U.S., it hinged on "whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to a prurient interest." [Justice William Brennan, "Roth v. United States," June 24, 1957]; refined in 1973 by "Miller v. California":

and from Corpses, Skulls and Skeletons by Bernhard Fibicher, in SFU (p.57):

The representation of the dead body in art can only be obscene in terms of the etymological meaning of the word as being 'away from the scene' and therefor 'not visible.' Making visible something that is supposed to remain hidden creates a feeling of unease..."

(the obscenity of diaries)

To what Degree can the Horror of Death be rendered Invisible by vesting It with Maximum Visibility?

drawn to the gothic and the grotesque, the liminal and contradictory, the uncanny and the unbecoming.

by the way: it's Halloween.

responding to the community (in part)

Reading Six Feet Under (Kunstmuseum Bern), this from Thomas Macho's The Return of the Dead after the Modern Age:

"Death does not occur in time but in space... Spatial arrangements reflect the event that is death, an event that negates all social order and therefor the spaces within which the members of a society usually operate... complex rituals and ceremonies, measures designed to defend and protect, are enacted to counter such a risk. All death rituals are first and foremost an attempt to realign the injured social space..."

I like the idea of thinking of loss as spatial rather than temporal, and it seems to speak to Matthew's idea of death as social rupture.

As an utter and total narcissist myself it takes some stretching to get past the (very American indeed) feeling (exactly) that that absence is mine...