The Performance Artist and the Archives

February 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment

During the fall of 2009, I took a course at the Graduate Center with Prof. Jean Graham-Jones, “Contemporary Latin American Theatre and Performance.” Going in, I had assumed that much of the archival material we would be referencing would be from the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (HIDVL), a collaboration between New York University Libraries and NYU’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. This digital venue brings together videos of performance throughout the Americas that would otherwise be “inaccessible to scholars.”

While it’s true that this is a respected and reliable one-stop reference place to find (and preserve) such materials, given the contemporary focus of the class, YouTube offered hours of browsing enjoyment. The two resources serve very difficult functions—and have very different levels of functionality. (Especially since the Hemispheric Insititute’s archive is frequently restricted to performances that they themselves have had filmed at their own events.)

I don’t know if it counts as procrastination or further research, but I whittled away many evenings that semester watching clips of the dynamic performers we had been studying.

First, here’s a link to a performance by Mexican cabaret performer, Astrid Hadad, from the HIDVL. Her performance, ‘Amores Pelos,’ was filmed in Monterrey, Mexico, in July 2001, as part of the Second Annual Hemispheric Institute Seminar. It’s a long clip, but worth the time to see the costumes changes involved in the “wearable art” of her hair. The site provides a bit of context for those first meeting this artist’s work: “Hadad blends popular songs and ranchero, son and bolero music and political satire with highly theatrical precision to create a genre of music she calls ‘Heavy Nopal’.”

And then, below, is another unique Hadad performance, this time from YouTube (and featuring some well-placed self-flagellation). It brings us into the actual performance space, and is part of a larger documentary about Hadad.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OutdQW_jz0g[/youtube]

Filed Under: Art, Fun, Internet, Media, Music, Politics, Resources Tagged With: , ,

On Academic Language

November 20, 2009 By 1 Comment

We often rag on our students for their poor writing abilities, but here’s a tool from the Writing Program of the University of Chicago that pokes fun at the (sometimes) incomprehensible and bloated writing of academics:

Make Your Own Academic Sentence

After playing around a bit, I came up with “The (re)formation of post-capitalist hegemony asks to be read as the systemization of the nation-state.” Excellent! I can’t wait to put that into my dissertation!

You can spend some good time procrastinating on your actual writing by making sentences containing random phrases like “history as such” and “poetics.” The site also has some excellent writing sources for students and academics alike, such as The Sentence of the Week, where a published sentence is thoroughly critiqued for its positives and negatives, giving us a great sense of what makes a well-written sentence. There’s also this guide to college writing that I’ll surely point out to my students.

But, if procrastinating with random word generators is more your thing, you can always play with the classic Wu-Tang Clan name generator.

Yours,

Tha Eurythmic King of Nowhere

Filed Under: Fun, Language, Resources

Then You Can Study It

October 6, 2009 By Leave a Comment

A few months ago my mother and my aunt embarked on a bit of a nostalgic exercise to see if they could remember (in proper sequence) the storefronts that populated Brighton Beach Avenue when they were growing up. The endeavor proved tougher than they first thought, but the idea itself has led them down some fun memory lanes.

While trying to dig up some examples for a CPE workshop the other afternoon, one article in Popular Science grabbed my attention: a group of computer scientists built an algorithm that matches hundreds of thousands of photos on Flickr using common elements, like a high-tech jigsaw puzzle. Coupled with software that speeds through 3-D reconstruction, they could then create digital models of three cities in three dimensions.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7NT3BrrsaQ[/youtube]

(In the category of “exceptionally cool,” those diamond shapes along the bottom represent the tourists who are taking the photos.) It’s probably pretty clear the potential this kind of project represents for a wide variety of academic disciplines. As one of the scientists explained, “”If you have a digital representation of something, then you can study it.” (And here I’m reminded of Tom’s earlier post about digital museum tours. Same idea, different scale.) The project also turns camera-happy tourists into quasi-professional archivists, with formerly private shots contributing to a very collective and participatory project.

I did a bit of googling, and found another interesting example of this kind of work, “Rome Reborn.” (I’m clearly behind, since there’s also an App.) A bunch of Engineering and Technology centers collaborated on a project that would create a 3-D rendering of ancient Rome’s development, beginning at A.D. 320. This digital modeling relies on collective efforts too, but here it’s a wide variety of research and data. The results, Rome 2.0, are a far cry from the grainy visuals of the ancient city reproduced in textbooks all over.

acqueduct

These efforts to reconstruct cities—past or present—appeal on two distinct levels. Our desire to preserve the very intimate relationships we have to these places is certainly one (see Luke’s post from a while back, when he explored his old neighborhood with Google Earth). But these projects also satisfy our desire to communicate subjects like architecture and history in more dynamic ways, while incorporating changes over time.

These kinds of tools have been on my mind lately. This past weekend I presented a paper at a conference on development in Brooklyn, and a lot of presentations sought to record—and define– neighborhood change in particular ways. Over lunch, when I told a historical preservationist about my mother’s quest and frustration with the limitations of city records, she told me about a tax survey that had been done in the 1930s, which now provides us with a house-by-house visual record of the period. There seems little doubt that our ability to combine existing visual archives with mapping technologies will mean that it won’t be too long before my mom can reconstruct and represent her old stomping grounds.

Although who knows? I admit to wondering if maybe certain things are best left to memory.

Filed Under: Art, Conferences, Fun, Internet, New York, Technology

The Importance of Being Earnestly Edited

August 4, 2009 By Leave a Comment

palin-edits

If your students have any doubts about the importance of good copy editing, perhaps you could use this for “show and tell”.

Filed Under: Fun, Grading, Language, Pedagogy

Zine Fest…’09?

June 23, 2009 By 9 Comments

zinefest1There’s a Zine Fest at the Brooklyn Lyceum this weekend. When I told my former zine co-creater about it, her response was, “Who knew people still made zines?!” I had the same thought. Turns out, they still do.

Hearing about this upcoming event presented a nice occasion to revisit my zine-making past. The information for the Fest seems to refer to real zines, the cut-and-paste kind, not some sort of newfangled virtual version. Do zine-creators distinguish between the two these days? Are you kind of lame if you make an online zine (but not a blog?), or are you pathetically retro if you bother with the paper kind? Some brief research suggests that they’re existing cozily side-by-side— online resources are archiving the material stuff in searchable ways, interested readers are finding them more easily and a community is sustained and expanded. (Back in 1994, I usually found zines to order through the self-styled ads in the back of other zines, a process both haphazard and mysterious.)

My furious bout of zine Googling also led me to the Barnard Zine Library. Barnard College is the first academic library to circulate zines, and their collection numbers in the thousands, focusing primarily on Riot Grrrl and Third Wave Feminist Zines. (And, if you’re feeling confused right now, their website has a concise FAQ to get you up-to-speed on zines.) Thanks to this Zine Library, you can even search for zines in CLIO– Columbia Library’s Online Catalog– which is where I was surprised to find one of my old zines, Electric Mayhem, listed. That’s either entirely embarrassing or extremely cool.

Turning to legitimately talented zine writers, I’m thrilled that one of my favorite zine grrrls continues to make distinctive creations as a graphic designer, and shares them on her blog, Miss Sequential. I was somehow relieved to discover that the same elements that made me wait by the mail slot for each new issue of /nothing/ and Red-Hooded Sweatshirt were still there for me in her current work.

painting by Marissa Falco

painting by Marissa Falco

And, giving a little shout-out to the readers and writers whose zines are languishing in childhood bedroom closets around the globe, she occasionally posts her cartoons from the good old days, when we were all into “intense autobiographical chronicles.”

originally printed in RHS #4

252975933_65e47330bf_o

originally printed in RHS #4

Filed Under: Art, Asides, Fun, Media

“The Loathly Lady,” or what do women want most?

June 2, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Wendy Steiner, Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, created a comic opera called The Loathly Lady in an effort to “[step] out of the university into the worlds of politics and the arts.” The plot is based on Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” with bits of allusions to Jane Austen, Sigmund Freud, and Virginia Woolf just to name a few. A 7-minute pilot animation is available to watch on her homepage, and the detailed production notes can be found in her article published in Profession (2008). The animation in itself could be a nice introduction to Chaucer’s work for students in class. (It takes a while, about 5 minutes, to download the animation, but it is worth waiting.)

Filed Under: Art, Fun, Gender

Hijab Punk

May 14, 2009 By 8 Comments

princesshijab

Hijab: (Arabic) Veil.

A philosophy that has originated in urban centers.  A transnational movement of modesty and subversiveness.  A response to misconceptions that Muslim women, and especially Muslim women who veil (or who hijab), are submissive, passive, victimized and the worth of two bearded goats (on a good day).  A response to Oprah pulling the burqa off of a brown woman on stage at Madison Square Garden circa 2002.

Burqa: (Pashto) A full-body veil that covers the face.  Seen in Queens during celebrations at Flushing Meadow Park.  Seen lifted up during the post-Taliban years in Afghanistan.  Seen torn off by American women (and in one comic book, by Wonder Woman as well).

cihanclassvisit2Hijab Punk styles… too numerous to count. But some examples are: Hijab combined with green nails, pink sneakers and an affinity with Rainbow Brite; Goth hijab girls who thrive on their mother’s kajal collection; Hijab with safety pins and Sid Vicious references on their t-shirt… the list goes on.

Ultimate Hijab Punk story to read: “Misli Midhib, Punk Rock Hijabi” by Cihan Kaan about a girl named Misli who is dropped down to the earth via a meteor and who covers her cosmic skin with a full hijab and performs Sufi whirls to disrupt the narratives of Muslim women.  One of the stories in the forthcoming short story collection titled: Halal Pork. Here is an excerpt from the story:

A nameless lightning bolt hit a magical Afghan carpet from a distant star,  carrying on it a wandering babushka caught in a world between the skies.  Drifting space rocks, a homeland memory that dropped her through our atmosphere onto the Central Asian steppe of Coney Island, New York. She walked the rustic shores, lived in broken amusement parks and worked silently inside sideshows.

Ultimate Hijab Punk artist to follow: Princess Hijab, a young woman based on the streets of Paris, who interweaves the philosophy of Adbusters and the Hijab.  (See photo above from Princess Hijab website). She describes herself as:

This is the story of a young woman fighting every day for a noble cause: she wants to “hijabize” advertising. Princess Hijab knows that L’Oréal and Dark&Lovely have been killing her little by little… When she was a teen, she heard about movements such as Adbuster; but since 9/11, things have changed… Princess Hijab will go on, veiled and alone, forever asserting her physical and mental integrity. By day, she wears a white veil, symbol of purity. By night, her black veil is the expression of her vengeful fight for a cause (custom ad). With her spray paint and black marker pen, she is out to hijabize advertising. Even Kate Moss is targeted

Cihan Kaan author of Halal Pork, forthcoming 2009, Up-Set Press Inc

Cihan Kaan author of Halal Pork (forthcoming, Up-Set Press)

Incorporating this concept of Hijab Punk, or the more popular (and more macho) Muslim Punk (which draws origins from punk garage bands and from the writer Hanif Kureish, the Pakistani/British novelist) into a standard Muslim Diaspora course at a college was the best thing I ever did as an academic. Not only was it “snooze proof” because Punk aesthetics is always so confrontational, brutally honest, and anti-establishment (which is what makes the term Muslim Punk so controversial), but it introduced a discussion of fashion, music, and film in the construction of one’s hybrid and sometimes transnational identity.  Its the fluidity of Hijab Punk or Muslim Punk that appealed to my students and myself.

cihanclassvisit6

Students listening to Kaan read.

Filed Under: Fun, literature, Media

American Idol: Audience as Juror

April 30, 2009 By 1 Comment

I admit it – I’m a fan of American Idol. The popular talent competition is now in its 8th season on Fox, and I’ve watched almost every year (I missed 2004 when Fantasia won … perhaps not a coincidence that I started my PhD program that year). I actually don’t start watching the show until they select the Final 12 performers, because I believe that’s when it gets most interesting. Each week the contestants perform, the audience votes via phone or texting, and the person with the lowest number of votes has to leave. Although the judges critique each performance, it’s the viewing audience that holds the power to keep their favorite contestants in the running.

Whether or not you’re a fan of the show, you have to give American Idol credit for continuing to be one of the highest rated shows on television. Some people attribute this to the fact that the show is a true “family program,” and in essence people of all ages and across all demographic groups can watch it. But I believe its popularity has a lot to do with the interactivity of the show. The audience has power over the outcome – “America votes!” Whether America agrees with Simon Cowell’s sneers or Paula Abdul’s cheers is somewhat irrelevant. Sure, this year they implemented the “Judge’s save,” but ultimately it’s the audience who selects the next American Idol. Of course, not everyone who watches the show bothers to vote (I draw the line there myself). But millions of audience members do vote, and that’s pretty amazing. The audience is not merely spectators, but jurors as well.

On a somewhat related note, I often feel like an American Idol judge when I help students rehearse their class presentations. It’s our job as fellows to critique their “dress rehearsal” and provide feedback on how to improve their skills before the final presentation in class. Just like the American Idol judges, however, we don’t grade the students (i.e., vote them off) … the professor does that. So should I tell it to them straight like Simon Cowell? I know I should, but it’s important to be encouraging as well, so I also emphasize the positive things I see (a la Paula Abdul). Has anyone else had these thoughts while conducting rehearsals, or do I just watch too much TV?

Filed Under: Audience, Fun, To Ponder

Missing Connections

March 26, 2009 By 2 Comments

Continuing with my subway theme and in light of our next Symposium topic, I found myself feeling very self-conscious of my eavesdropping on a conversation on the F train last night. What never fails to grab my attention in public places is Russian speech.   So there they were – a couple, in their thirties, discussing … and this is where I get tongue-tied because I couldn’t quite get the context of their conversation. I heard, “She goes to all the popular places in Moscow. … Why they’re together is a mystery to his parents, and to hers as well!” And then, oh how I hoped the guy would repeat the subject of “was the biggest mistake of my life. It was, really was the biggest mistake.” My curiosity about what my comrades residing in the parallel universe of Russian Federation consider their biggest mistakes in life wasn’t fulfilled. But, I was reminded of a wonderful passage from Rachel Cohen’s essay “Lost Cities”:

Walking in cities is an accumulation of small fragments of loss. A woman you want to keep looking at turns a corner; two people pass and you hear only, “It cannot be because of the child”; you look through a window at a drawing that looks like a print you have seen somewhere before, and it’s obscured when someone pulls a curtain across the window; a woman turns ferociously on the man standing next to her, but by the time you reach home you can no longer remember her face. – “Lost Cities”

Craigslist, of course, has attempted to assemble those fragments of loss in its “missed connections” section. Do you ever read that stuff? Doesn’t it make for a fascinating research topic?

Filed Under: Audience, Fun, Internet, New York

Tips on How to Enjoy the Coming Depression

March 19, 2009 By 5 Comments

We’ve clearly been cursed by the Chinese, because these are extraordinarily interesting times. Financial markets are collapsing. Panic abounds. Budgets are shrinking (if not disappearing altogether). Funding is tight and getting tighter (as are our belts) and the outlook for the future is grim. Very Grim.

But let us not lose hope! We can make the best of the looming global depression with a few simple tips from Gabe Soria (a friend of mine from my Brooklyn days) and Joseph Remnant who give us a timely and remarkably hopeful comic entitled “Tips on How to Enjoy the Upcoming Depression,” which originally appeared in Arthur Magazine No. 32 (Dec 2008). Click on the image below for a larger, eminently more readable version. Click on that to zoom even further.

depressiontips32

Filed Under: Fun, Funding, Politics
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »