Recently I asked on Twitter (with a typo, yay) if anyone knew any west coast-centric latinx authors of sci-fi or fantasy books I should check out.

This is maybe a dumb ask but I’d like to read some fantasy or sci-do by latinx folks from the west coast/with west coast perspective. Any y’all know some?

— B. Zedan (@BZedan) May 7, 2018

I’ve been holding off buying books and too stressed/busy to read lately but those are excuses and I miss reading and need to be reading contemporary stuff. I wanted some ebooks I can read on the trip to our new home in a new state.

There’s more and more easily findable out there by latinx authors with latinx characters.  This awesome list from Andrea Corbin has a whole mess of ’em. This is great! But it’s also completely east coast authors. I’m mad amped on books like the Brooklyn Brujas series and Shadowshaper, but the samples I read didn’t grab me as hard as when I read a little of Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (and not only because: vampires). She was born in Baja California and currently lives in Vancouver, Canada but is Mexican and writes about Mexico. It may not the West Coast, USA, but it’s a hell of a lot closer to me than Brooklyn.

As I explained to a white person who questioned how I said “latinx” after asking me how I pronounced latinx, there’s a big ol’ cultural and language gap between the coasts. First, folks and their families tend to be from totally different countries, and second, they’ve grown up in and reflect on totally different cultures. I mean, there is a lot of space between Brooklyn and Portland, let alone a Cuban family in New York and folks who came up to California through Mexico.

I’m not like, expecting to find something that perfectly resonates with my experience—I may be getting greedy for something more familiar, finally seeing more latinx faces in my media—but I know I’m never going to see something exactly like what I know as a non-binary mixed Salvadoran raised by a white mom in the rural PNW. I’m no white man who expects to see themself reflected in all mirrors. But I know folks who aren’t on or about the east coast also write books! And yay the Twitter hive mind did send some my way so here’s the list of what I’ve been recommended so far, of west coast latinx authors.

• Jaime Hernandez of Love and Rockets, etc. Absolutely something I should be reading anyway.
• Aaron Duran with La Brujeria and The Forgotten Tyrs, comics and middle-reader books, respectively.
• Ernest Hogan, with High Aztech and several more sci fi books, here he is on Amazon
• Latino/a Rising, an anthology with a bunch of folks from different places so I’m guessing some gotta be west coast-adjacent.
• Slivia Moreno-Garcia, who writes fantasy, vampires and magic,even if she feels she doesn’t qualify because to me she does, so there.

And you know what, fuck it:

• B. Zedan, The Audacity Gambit. Because I’m a latinx author, dammit. And that informs what I do.

THIS IS SO FEW, PLEASE TELL ME MORE. Specifically, I want things like sci fi and fantasy. Please give me genre. Romance novels, second world fantasy, uneasy ghosts in the corner of your eye, hard sci-fi, speculative fiction, high fantasy with high elf drama, post apocalyptic, whatever.

Shouldn’t have to note, but: please also do not give me white folks who write about not white folks unless it’s a real banger and they don’t seem like dicks.

Mirrored from B.Zedan.

Oh god, I failed this last last two month’s focus.  I did not make an animatic.  Oh, but that’s because I used the paintings I did to make this.

And I spent a bunch of time making this

And writing like 7,000 words of the sequel to The Audacity Gambit.

And researching how exactly San’s cape in Princess Mononoke works. Talking to Chase about his show, which is now next spring (a good thing!). Being excited with my favourite people about their new house and looking at fridges with them. Watching ALL the Adventure Time and drawing this.

I don’t know if the focus months are necessary any more. The reasons why I needed an outside force to make me stop feeling like I was neglecting things, or leaving things unfinished have eased up. The stress of the commute I used to have is in the past, my brain is sort of coming together, I dunno. but I want to make stuff unbound.

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.

For some gift holiday last year, Chase got me an airbrush.  It’s not just any airbrush, it’s an airbrush gun and air compressor specifically made for nail art and miniature work. It came with little stencils and fake nails, because some wonderful lady in southern middle America had made an investment and then decided against it.

I haven’t been very good with this gift, I use it sometimes, and got most of the awkwards out, but I don’t use it nearly enough—nor have I practised basic technique enough with it.  So this month I’m doing the exercises over at How to Airbrush and getting this tool to where most tools and skills I have are at: skilled-workable. Which just means that I can use it to do what I want, without thinking about it, but not feeling like I’m perfect at it.

Not that I can’t bully it into doing what I want as it is right now.  At the start of the month I went up to Seattle and had a semi-planned (as in, I brought all the things and we picked through what things we’d use) photoshoot with the amazing and wonderful Libby Bulloff.  I pushed my airbrush to the limit of the total area it can cover, which was good to learn—because now I need one that is made to cover large areas of skin, since I love the images Libby got.

(airbrushed through lace and tipped nails with white)

(acrylic housepaint up to wrists, airbrushed gradients from there)

Alas, not all life is glorious photoshoots with wonderful people, so when I got home, I started doing the airbrush lessons. The first was lines and dots. I’m at a disadvantage, because my kit is for miniature work and I’m still pushing it to work bigger.  But that’s why we do learning things.

Aaaaand gradients.  I can do gradients pretty well on dimensional stuff, but not on flat stuff. I think a big problem here is scale. I need to figure out the ideal scale for this particular airbrush.

Beyond doing these lessons I don’t have any particular goals set, but I love using this thing, so who knows what will come of it?

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.

Folks, you’re gong to need to indulge me. Having finished the edits of The Audacity Gambit, I need to decompress and talk some process.

At the start of this year, when I started this focus thing, my focus was writing—specifically, getting some significant headway into a book. The longest finished piece I think I’ve ever written was a little over 4,000 words long and itself a product of that focus month. One of the standard definitions of a novel is 40,000 words—ten times that.

But I had an idea that I wanted to mangle out that long. Your regular idea, born of several obsessions and personal themes. It wasn’t like I hadn’t written things of total length. There was that weekly webcomic I had for what? Two and a half years? I could finish a story (let’s ignore Anise and Slow Build here), I wasn’t going to let word count stop me.

A dear friend of mine had recently finished her first book and another has been serialising theirs for a while, so there was encouragement that it could be done. I could so do this, however daunting. In the three-ish years since I finished that comic, my outlining process had changed significantly. Back then it was constantly evolving outlines, sub-outlines, plotted timelines and so forth, each more detailed down to the script. For this story I made the loosest outline possible. I barely knew how it’d end (and don’t worry, spoiler-fearers, what you see below is an old version, not the outline I ended up using for the end).

But I got a big chunk of it written in January, enough to put in the can and start updating once my lovely first reader had edited it. And once I had a title.

It was the title that really pushed back the first update. I hate naming things, because there is a stupid amount of weight involved in a name. Since I was focusing on tropes, I rabbit-holed TVTropes, looking for some one thing to click in my head. I couldn’t tell you how exactly I decided on “The Audacity Gambit”, but I do know that I love the idea of audaciousness. There’s a sense of foolhardiness to it when applied to bravery.

So, it was named and began updating and I started again that weird cycle I’d set aside years before—of building up and depleting an update queue, then building it back up—a flurry of behind the scenes attempts to not fail an invisible audience who in theory expected a regular schedule. I serialised it as I wrote because I’ve learned over the years that promising the internet regular updates is enough to shame me into keeping up a working pace. It also meant I’d get intermittent feedback from folks who have opinions I value. It’s encouraging for me to have that while I’m writing.

I wanted to finish the damn thing by the end of the year. And I handwrote the last line in early December (the majority of the first draft has been written by hand since the summer). Not too long later I typed up the last chapter and passed it on to my first reader. It’s all queued up and will run until March 11, 2012. Less than a year of weekly updates, but not a bad little run.

I look forward to not thinking about Audacity Gambit for a couple of months. Then I can read the thing from start to finish and run another series of edits. I don’t know what all I’m doing with it once it’s all done, but something written and edited in pieces like this needs another inspection as a whole.

Here’s where The Audacity gambit was written:

• On the MAX light rail, when I commuted from the suburbs into the city for work.
• During the second half of C.O.P.S. classes, since I didn’t always want to attend a critique class.
• In two coffee shops, Tiny’s SE and Press Club. I finished the thing at Press Club (and drafted this post there, even).
• During my smoke breaks at work.
• At the laundromat (which is where I am typing up this post). I actually don’t know what I’ll do while I wait for my laundry now.

This is probably boring, as most introspective looks at process are, but I’m still coming down. I wrote a book guys! At 38,000+ words it isn’t technically a novel, but who cares. I am warning you, expect a nerdy, meandering look at themes and junk that I had to look up in the future.

Anyway, why don’t you (if you haven’t yet) try reading The Audacity Gambit? It updates Sundays at 9pm and all the entries are linked to here.

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.

All the lovelies that I mail things to, I am sad to say, are not getting crafty presents this year.  It turns out that when you don’t spend 4 hours commuting via public transit, you kind of end up with less dedicated crafting time. I am super sad about this, by the way.

I ended up only crafting a couple of things, which (as I said at the beginning) I expected to give out less this year.  Mostly because the bulk of my present crafting time was taken up by something I’ll show you after the holiday and this beauty:

Gorgeous, right? As is Ru. (And, as always, images link to Flickr, so click through for more views)

This was for my lovely friend Laurel, who has watched RuPaul’s Drag Race with me for years now.

I took a Barbie Fashionistas doll, removed the hair, re-rooted some strawberry blonde to mimic Ru’s most common colour, removed the face decals and repainted it, then added hella false lashes.

There’s a dress too, but I couldn’t find good shoes, so Ru is currently barefoot. This will be remedied soon.

Gelsey’s present was a little thing that you put notebooks in, so you always have something sturdy to write against.  It has horses because she likes horses.

Rachel and Cam got patchwork animals, which probably most people will end up with over the next year, because these were hella fun to make.

Whatever the hell Chase got me is wrapped amazingly. We don’t get fancy things much, so holidays and special occasions are when we do that. And it’s nice to get people things. I am excited for what I got him, but now I am kind of super curious about what he got me.

He probably, as someone said at work “understands that [I] want to be a Bruce Willis princess.”

After I’ve mailed out our hella boss holiday CD I’ll share the cover and playlist. It’s pretty great, guys.

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.

I percentage of how I use the internet is based in finding that something is missing and adding it to the cloud, or whatever that’s being called now.  Things like the paper making photo set and the mini comic stand template were perfect for Flickr because they were information-based and easy to notate and download.

I’ve been using Tumblr a lot lately, and you know what it’s good for? Screencaps.

Recently I just gave up and capped the scenes RE: Sally Bowles’ nails that for some stupid reason still aren’t easy to find (if in existence) online, even though they’re two key lines.

And yesterday, looking for good side-by-sides of the signage in They Live, I found an equal amount of nothing. How? There are people more obsessive than me and I feel they’re slacking on the job.  So I made some.  But, because I really feel the need to make sure that other people can find these (the Cabaret ‘caps I know are niche) I am posting them here too.  So get ready for a handful of comparison screencaps from the first They Live sunglasses scene of signage, signs, billboards (keywords) and then, for fun, a still from the last scene showing a framed print (FYI: and also boobs) that Chase and I kind of want to get.  All images can be clicked on for bigger.

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.

I’m taking classes at the Conceptual Oregon Performance School this summer and I’m a huge nerd, so I’m taking notes.  TBA has been happening and things, so these are late.  This was the last proper class, the following week was a group critique.

Class notes: (Note—as points of Debord’s work was shown as slides, the salient points are included here as space allows, with a link back to the entire piece online. There were also a lot of in-class discussion quotes worth adding here, sadly I didn’t note who said what.)

• “Well, with the day I’ve been having it will be interesting. About performance and audience, and civics, and spectacle, and media, and me being awkward.”
  -Opening slide in class, from C.O.P.S. professor Micheal Reinsch’s Facebook.
• Wafaa Bilal
  • Domestic Tension, Day 1 [YouTube link]
  • Paintball gun controlled via online viewers
• Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
  • “The spectacle originates in the loss of the unity of the world, and the gigantic expansion of the modern spectacle expresses the totality of this loss: the abstraction of all specific labor and the general abstraction of the entirety of production are perfectly rendered in the spectacle, whose mode of being concrete is precisely abstraction. In the spectacle, one part of the world represents itself to the world and is superior to it. The spectacle is nothing more than the common language of this separation. What binds the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at the very center which maintains their isolation. The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.”
• Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent
  • “QUESTION: When we talk about manufacturing of consent, whose consent is being manufactured?
    CHOMSKY: To start with, there are two different groups, we can get into more detail, but at the first level of approximation, there’s two targets for propaganda. One is what’s sometimes called the political class. There’s maybe twenty percent of the population which is relatively educated, more or less articulate, plays some kind of role in decision-making. They’re supposed to sort of participate in social life — either as managers, or cultural managers like teachers and writers and so on. They’re supposed to vote, they’re supposed to play some role in the way economic and political and cultural life goes on. Now their consent is crucial. So that’s one group that has to be deeply indoctrinated. Then there’s maybe eighty percent of the population whose main function is to follow orders and not think, and not to pay attention to anything — and they’re the ones who usually pay the costs.”
  • “A ruling or elite class dominates at the level of ideas, thus undermining any consciousness of change.”
    “The video shows Chomsky’s guiding belief to be that a decent society should maximize human need for creative work — not treat people as cogs in a machine so that the power elite can maintain control, continue private ownership of public resources and increase profits — all the while managing media content (while preserving the myth of a free press).”
    “17) Chomsky argues that people need to work to develop independent minds — maybe in part by forming COMMUNITY action groups with others with parallel interests and values, not in isolation, which is where the present system tends to keep people.”
    Key Points in “Manufacturing Consent”
• Flash Mob robs 7-11
• What is a flash mob?
  • Improv Everywhere
    • Sprint Commercial*
    • Marxian Concept of Capital Accumulation
• BART Jams Cell Phone Service to Shut Down Protests
• “The spectacle is the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue. . . If the social needs of the epoch in which such techniques are developed can only be satisfied through their mediation, if the administration of this society and all contact among men can no longer take place except through the intermediary of this power of instantaneous communication, it is because this “communication” is essentially unilateral. The concentration of “communication” is thus an accumulation, in the hands of the existing system’s administration, of the means which allow it to carry on this particular administration. . .” Debord, Society of the Spectacle(point 24)
  • Leprechaun in Mobile, Alabama
  • UFO Sightings increase 67% in 3 years
• “Exchange value could arise only as an agent of use value, but its victory by means of its own weapons created the conditions for its autonomous domination. Mobilizing all human use and establishing a monopoly over its satisfaction, exchange value has ended up by directing use. The process of exchange became identified with all possible use and reduced use to the mercy of exchange. Exchange value is the condottiere of use value who ends up waging the war for himself.” Debord, Society of the Spectacle (point 46)
• “The tendency of use value to fall, this constant of capitalist economy, develops a new form of privation within increased survival: the new privation is not far removed from the old penury since it requires most men to participate as wage workers in the endless pursuit of its attainment, and since everyone knows he must submit or die. The reality of this blackmail accounts for the general acceptance of the illusion at the heart of the consumption of modern commodities: use in its most impoverished form (food and lodging) today exists only to the extent that it is imprisoned in the illusory wealth of increased survival. The real consumer becomes a consumer of illusions. The commodity is this factually real illusion, and the spectacle is its general manifestation.” Debord, Society of the Spectacle (point 47)
• “In the inverted reality of the spectacle, use value (which was implicitly contained in exchange value) must now be explicitly proclaimed precisely because its factual reality is eroded by the overdeveloped commodity economy and because counterfeit life requires a pseudo-justification.” Debord, Society of the Spectacle (point 48)
• Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled 1992 (Free)
  • The idea of power, art having power, an access to power?
• Is there something intrinsic in the making of art that is accessible?
• The inherent hostility of performance.
  • Look at me/experience me [The Who: Listening to You]
  • Internet disperses power?
    • How then can artists redefine power/control?
  • Commodity is people’s information, not created by powers necessarily in control (emperor’s new clothes).
  • Zine culture as an earlier version of this information/creation dispersal
  • “Given optimism, you can create something viral.”
  • Powers in control allowing appearance of freedom?*
  • Is it now easier to get and harder to hold attention?
• Do the 80% feel like they don’t have access?
  • Do they care?
• “At the end of the day, no piece of art has changed my mind about anything . . . philanthropy changes people’s lives.”
• “[Art is] important, but doesn’t do anything.”
• “[Art] is the safest place to be a dissenter.”
• “People really selectively give a fuck.”
• “There has to be an accumulative effect.”
• Late capitalism
  • “What we must now ask ourselves is whether it is not precisely this semi-autonomy of the cultural sphere which has been destroyed by the logic of late capitalism. Yet to argue that culture is today no longer endowed with the relative autonomy it once enjoyed as one level among others in earlier moments of capitalism (let alone in pre-capitalist societies) is not necessarily to imply its disappearance or extinction. Quite the contrary; we must go on to affirm that the dissolution of an autonomous sphere of culture is rather to be imagined in terms of an explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life – from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself – can be said to have become “cultural” in some original and yet untheorised sense. This proposition is, however, substantively quite consistent with the previous diagnosis of a society of the image or the simulacrum and a transformation of the “real” into so many pseudo-events.” Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
• Anonymous
  • Necessary anomalies [similar points noted previously here with a *]
    • You need an “other”
• Does audience give and define power/agency? (Power/agency being value assigned)
  • Power is etymologically rooted in potential.
• Every other career is rooted in the development of capital.
  • Other people don’t worry about it,
    • Artists worry about it.
• Any time you create something with no capital value, is it a perversion of the system?
• Does jealousy relate to legitimacy?
  • Does someone investing in your work equal legitimacy? How?
  • Not to judge for or against once money is involved.
    • Money-based capital is a measurable value.
• Homo Aestheticus
  • The ability to label art because of leisure.
  • An increase in artistic careers in post-industrial society.
• “As someone who makes art, you have to acknowledge your own hypocrisy.”
• Use the modes of production to critique the modes of production.
• “Fucker money”
  • To take money from fuckers, yet not yourself become a fucker.

“Readings”:

• Watch Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.

Well, July’s focus wasn’t entirely a failure. I mean, it mostly was because here I am at the end of August, having just finished the basic goal (to tidy my craft area upstairs so I can actually use it). But I still finished it!

I made slow progress in the earlier part of the month

But hoorah, now it is done.

I need to vacuum, and there are areas that need to be further broken down and tidied, but the primary issue—having no floor space and just junk everywhere, is done.

And it’s not as though I haven’t been doing other things these past two months. I’ve been going to class at C.O.P.S. and writing ridiculous hyperlinked notes, regularly updating Audacity Gambit and generally enjoying the most pleasant summer in my memory.

I know what next month’s focus will be too. One of the points of this exercise was to hold off working in certain themes until the itch to do so was so strong I’d really be able to focus—instead of flitting around dis or half-interestedly. So I know what I’ll be doing by the end of the year and I know what I’m doing for September. It should be fun.

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.

Class notes: [M. Reinsch reads aloud, alternating from both a copy/paste poetic manifesto and various readings, notes are comparatively brief and disjointed for this section.]

• blank.org
• Catch and release attention
• The Gutenberg Galaxy: a mosaic by Marshall McLuhan, 1962.
  • Tech infects mind and how mind processes
  • A universal understanding/entity . . . a peace? [see reading: Arendt 1]
• Literary criticism as mystical and divine.
  • Does not work with the changes of the Post-Industrial era.
  • New Criticism is reactive, brings in contemporaries rather than mooning on predecessors. [compare with changes in author mentioned in Death of the Author, from class 07/09]
• Every medium forces transformation on the mind
• Machine as Narcissus [Narcissus to a Man: Lifelogging, Technology and the Normativity of Truth, Kieron O'Hara, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McLuhan]
• Non-linear, “head trip”, immersive, self-reflective
• “Passive aggressive revolution”
• “During the period of modernity, the “body of work” replaced the soul as the potentially immortal part of the Self. Foucault famously called such modern sites in which time was accumulated rather than simply being lost, heterotopias.” [see reading, Groys 1]
• “Art is the person who loves you but only when they’re drunk.”
• Copy/paste revelation, “nascent plagiarism”
• Sherrie Levine, Marx. Artistic appropriation v. appropriation of labour.
• “The future is yours for the taking and you’re still here making stuff.”
• Art and space [Notes Toward a Confidential Art, Robert Irwin]
  • Site-dominant (murals, etc): Artist
  • Site-adjusted (space taken into account): Artist
  • Site-specific: (conceived with site in mind): Artist
  • Site conditioned/determined (reason for being is site): Artist is not the point, the place is.
• object:non-object::seeing:not-seeing
• Mind’s kitchen drawer of information . . .
• “Clammy palms pressed together in hollow prayer.”

[reading ends]

• Using the internet as a crutch, going for something different this time.
• How present are you in the internet?
  • Wikipedia and the Death of the Expert
  • Augmented Mobs: Riots and Cleanup On and Offline
  • GameSave
  • Geeks Without Bounds
• Documentation of performance
  • Should it be documented?
  • Shares the information, image and myth (if you get good documentation)
  • A still can encapsulate better than video (which just documents)
    • Find the correct mix of media to best portray work.
    • Don’t just have a friend do it.
    • No documentation helps create pure myth.
• Chase reads his review of a Twitter update by Gwenneth Paltrow
• I read my review of a Tumblr post
• What is appropriation
  • Paying reference
  • Knowing nod
  • Can be positive or negative
• Science has periodic table of elements
  • Art appropriation can add to a table of elements, flesh out a lexicon
• Appropriation versus plagiarism
  • Appropriation is/should be self-aware
• The process of documenting
  • Keeping up with media/the new thing (avoid nostalgia)
  • Have to make conscious choice for or against control of documentation
    • Let the audience do it and pull from the cloud?
    • Control your myth?
  • Whether or not to use markers (visual, audio, clothing, etc.) that mark time and era?
• Digital does not equal archival.
• Accessory is the new logo
  • Statement pieces
    “Though 2011 will see us move still further from the economic woes of recent history, don’t expect a massive change in the tangent of fashion: the major excesses of the last decade are gone, and 2011 will see us, rightfully, continue on with a drive of subtle consumption mixed with obvious quality. 2011 fashion trends will accomodate the fact that we’ll be buying less but spending more. That means less bland, and more quality. Fewer indulgences, but better statement pieces.”
    Fashionising.com
• Aloduous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

Readings and sundry notes:

Arendt, Hannah. The Public Realm: The Common

1. This enlarge­ment of the private, the enchantment, as it were, of a whole people, does not make it public, does not constitute a public realm, but, on the contrary, means only that the public realm has almost com­pletely receded, so that greatness has given way to charm every­where; for while the public realm may be great, it cannot be charming precisely because it is unable to harbor the irrelevant.

Groys, Boris. Comrades of Time.

1. Hesitation with regard to the modern projects mainly has to do with a growing disbelief in their promises. Classical modernity believed in the ability of the future to realize the promises of past and present—even after the death of God, even after the loss of faith in the immortality of the soul. The notion of a permanent art collection says it all: archive, library, and museum promised secular permanency, a material infinitude that substituted the religious promise of resurrection and eternal life. During the period of modernity, the “body of work” replaced the soul as the potentially immortal part of the Self. Foucault famously called such modern sites in which time was accumulated rather than simply being lost, heterotopias. Politically, we can speak about modern utopias as post-historical spaces of accumulated time, in which the finiteness of the present was seen as being potentially compensated for by the infinite time of the realized project: that of an artwork, or a political utopia. Of course, this realization obliterates time invested in this realization, in the production of a certain product—when the final product is realized, the time that was used for its production disappears. However, the time lost in realizing the product was compensated for in modernity by a historical narrative that somehow restored it—being a narrative that glorified the lives of the artists, scientists, or revolutionaries that worked for the future.

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.

There was a lot of info last class and that is at least 50% why I’m so behind on notes. 25% is that I had a hell of a time with formatting on this batch, from Open Office to WordPress. Ugh. Anyway, the class on the 30th was crit and performance, which I took notes at, but they’re not really useful beyond remembering people’s work.

I’m taking classes at the Conceptual Oregon Performance School this summer and I’m a huge nerd. Here are my notes from class, links that are related and the best parts of the readings. Some of the links lead to videos:

Class notes (some reference chunks of reading, numbered in following section):

• Preliminary definition of “not acting” and “acting” as defined by reading.
• Not-acting: no pretension, feigning or impersonation.
• Acting: to pretend, feign or impersonate—not strictly physical.
• Non-Matrixed performance: not acting, nor using symbols, yet part of visual presentation.
• Tehching Hsieh: Punching the Time Clock on the Hour (1980-1981)
• Pure action, not acting, though outfit is uniform-like and could be considered symbolised matrix or even received acting. [see reading, 1]
• Symbolised Matrix performance: performer uses symbols and references, relying on context to differentiate between this and received acting [see reading, 2].
• Received Acting: performers are not feigning or impersonating, but the symbols and references they use, in a particular context, define them as actors.
• Non-speaking extras [see: As a Background Extra in the Film's Café Scene, You Can Say Anything So Long as You Appear to Be Smiling and Talking]
• The “mirror” exercise, [see reading, 3], “Hey Ya”
• Simple Acting: enhancing performance, involving pretence
• Either physically
• Like charades [see reading, 4]
• Or emotionally
• Like public speaking [see reading, 5]
• Complex Acting: multiple simple elements, physical and emotional
• Paris Hilton walks out of GMA interview [video link, has opening commercial]
• Is she acting or is it a persona?
• From symbolised matrix to complex acting
• Similar to the facades used in social situations (meeting a partner’s parents, dealing with a superior, etc)
• Absurdity as non-matrixed performing
• “In philosophy, “The Absurd” refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent meaning in life and the human inability to find any. In this context absurd does not mean “logically impossible,” but rather “humanly impossible.”
• “The universe and the human mind do not each separately cause the Absurd, but rather, the Absurd arises by the contradictory nature of the two existing simultaneously.”
  Silentio, Johannes de. Fear and Trembling.
• Sisyphus, as related by Camus as an example of absurd, non-matrixed performing.
• If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory.”
  Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus.
• Does absurdity come out more in non-matrixed performance than in acting?
• If absurdity is self-aware, how does that affect its quality of absurdity?
• See Sontag’s Notes on Camp: “The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious. The Art Nouveau craftsman who makes a lamp with a snake coiled around it is not kidding, nor is he trying to be charming. He is saying, in all earnestness: Voilà! the Orient!”
• Representation of pointlessness, futility, leaves space for audience perception.
• Does it need audience to have value?
• Performances that exist on trust
• Chris Burden’s “You’ll Never See My Face in Kansas City”, which was an exhibit of a ski mask and description card
• No capital gain, but art capital?
• “When Faith Moves Mountains, Lima 2002” Francis Alÿs
• Closer to a happening/student volunteers extras in Alÿs’ production? The material?
• An apparent unwillingness to be open/aware of the acting
• Does the lack of physical end mask this?
• “Poor people move mountains”
• How does Santiago Sierra’s 160cm line compare in self-awareness of action?
• “The Green Line” Francis Alÿs (non-matrixed performing)
• Flâneur, Baudelaire’s “a person who walks the city in order to experience it”.
• A result of leisure, the Flâneur is a voyeuristic observer (as opposed to immersed member of the city)
• A modern version could include wandering the streets/space of the internet, like the the flâneur is a “a botanist of the pavement”, the internet wanderer would observe, study and collect the rare blooms of the web.
• Flarf
• Is the process non-matrixed performing?
• “Mm-hmm”, Gary Sullivan
• The “architecture of the internet” (like Baudelaire’s Paris) evolved/is evolving to better accommodate “strollers” trawling for the weird [see the atrocity tourism mentioned in the class notes from Hello/Goodbye 07/17]
• Dump.fm
• StumbleUpon
• Ways of approaching the internet as an observer:
• Getting high and wandering (like one does in a city or what teens do in malls).
• Finding things missing on the internet and “plugging holes” by adding information
• 4Chan as screen of civil disobedience
• Flâneur on web is like to walk NY in a blackout
• Internet riots (DoS attack)
• Conceptualism vs Flarf Poetry: “Why Conceptualism is Better Than Flarf”, Vanessa Place
• “Is Everyone an Artist”, Claire Bishop
• Content only as good as those who participate [which includes artists, but good isn't a definition, it is a value]
• Apparatus is interesting, content is banal . . . unless curated by an artist.
• Curating is a way of asserting power.
• By creating internet art is the power still in the hands of the creators of internet things?
• Is everyone an artist? Who cares? ARTISTS.
• Asking for validation “Am I pretty?/Do I look fat in this?”
• “Lay person” (as non-artist) is a “pejorative”.
• “Why does art treat people like retarded kindergarteners?”

 Readings and sundry notes (emphasis in bold):
Kirby, Michael. On Acting and Not-Acting. [pdf link]

1. Let us forsake performance for a moment and consider how the “costume continuum” functions in daily life. If a man wears cowboy boots on the street, as many people do, we do not identify him as a cowboy. If he also wears a wide, tooled-leather belt and even a western hat, we do not see this as a costume, even in a northern city. It is merely a choice of clothing. As more and more items of western clothing – a bandana, chaps, spurs, and so forth – are added, however, we reach the point at which we see either a cowboy or a person dressed as (impersonating) a cowboy. The exact point on the continuum at which this specific identification occurs depends on several factors, the most important of which is place or physical context, and it undoubtedly varies from person to person.
2. In a symbolized matrix the referential elements are applied to but not acted by the performer. And just as western boots do not necessarily establish a cowboy, a limp may convey information without establishing a performer as Oedipus. When, as in Oedipus, a New Work, the character and place matrices are weak, intermittent, or nonexistent, we see a person, not an actor. As “received” references increase, however, it is difficult to say that the performer is not acting even though he or she is doing nothing that could be defined as acting. In a New York luncheonette before Christmas we might see “a man in a Santa Claus suit” drinking coffee; if exactly the same action were carried out on stage in a setting representing a rustic interior, we might see “Santa Claus drinking coffee in his home at the North Pole.” When the matrices are strong, persistent, and reinforce each other, we see an actor, no matter how ordinary the behavior. This condition, the next step closer to true acting on our continuum, we may refer to as “received acting.”
3. If the actor seems to indicate “I am this thing” rather than merely “I am doing these movements,” we accept him or her as the “thing”: the performer is acting. But we do not accept the “mirror” as acting, even though that character is a “representation” of the first person. He lacks the psychic energy that would turn the abstraction into a personification. If an attitude of “I’m imitating you” is projected, however – if purposeful distortion or “editorializing” appears rather than the neutral attitude of exact copying – the mirror becomes an actor even though the original movements were abstract.
4. If the performer does something to simulate, represent, impersonate, and so forth, he or she is acting. It does not matter what style is used or whether the action is part of a complete characterization or informational presentation. No emotion needs to be involved. The definition can depend solely on the character of what is done. (Value judgments, of course, are not involved. Acting is acting whether or not it is done “well” or accurately.) Thus a person who, as in the game of charades, pretends to put on a jacket that does not exist or feigns being ill is acting. Acting can be said to exist in the smallest and simplest action that involves pretense.
5.  Public speaking, whether it is extemporaneous or makes use of a script, may involve emotion, but it does not necessarily involve acting. Yet some speakers, while retaining their own characters and remaining sincere, seem to be acting. At what point does acting appear? At the point at which the emotions are “pushed” for the sake of the spectators. This does not mean that the speakers are false or do not believe what they are saying. It merely means that they are selecting and projecting an element of character-emotion – to the audience. In other words, it does not matter whether an emotion is created to fit an acting situation or whether it is simply amplifed.

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.