October 2011
65 posts
“they have something called cars here”
—my mom, hilariously explaining car service to her boyfriend in buffalo.
lazz:
“There is no more inspiring figure in Koestenbaum’s pantheon of humiliation than Wilde. In 1895, having been exposed and convicted as a homosexual, Wilde, in handcuffs and prison garb, was paraded in front of a jeering crowd at a London train station. In time he came to view the experience as ‘an inevitable part of the evolution of my life and character. In a posthumously published letter from prison, he wrote: ‘So perhaps whatever beauty of life still remains to me is contained in some moment of surrender, abasement, and humiliation.’ Wilde speaks to an old and lovely and maybe even true idea: Suffering is reversible; humiliation is redemptive. Koestenbaum puts it like this: ‘Humiliation is a kiln through which the human soul passes, and where it receives burnishing, glazing, and consolidating. Humiliation cooks the spirit to a fine finish.’”
on the subject of archives
“e-misférica invites artist/activist presentations, review essays and reviews (books, films, performance, visual arts) for its Summer 2012 issue, entitled On the Subject of Archives. More than a repository of objects or texts, the archive is also the process of selecting, ordering, and preserving the past. But in recent years, the term “archive” has become increasingly capacious, interchangeable with “save,” “contain,” “record,” “upload,” “preserve,” and “share” and with systems of organization such as a “collection,” “library,” “inventory,” and “museum.” “Archive” in the digital age seems to magically transcend the contradictions between “open” and “closed,” democratic and elitist, the curated selection process and the do-it-yourself upload. But have the logics of intelligibility shifted to bring the unspoken and the unthought into public awareness? How have the power structures behind archival practices been transformed through technological and creative innovation over the past decades? What are the continuities that persist in the present? How have the boundaries between archival subjects and archival objects been reconfigured in the process? Do “live” acts, such as performances, resist the archive? Or does the archive produce its own special kind of performances? This special issue of e-misférica explores how scholars, artists, and activists throughout the Americas are using and theorizing “archives” to rethink the politics of what is saved (remembered), and what is discarded (forgotten), and in the process redefining the representational forms through which the unthought and the unspoken are made intelligible. The deadline for review essays is November 15, 2011. To submit multimedia presentations and reviews, please contact the editors with proposals by October 15, 2011. All contributions, proposals, and consultations should be sent to the editors to hemi.ejournal@nyu.eduThis e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Contributions that do not follow the editorial guidelines of the journal will not be considered for publication. Our guidelines and style sheet can be found here. Advance queries are most welcome.”
—
“…a creative listener is not someone who simply allows me to say what I already want to say, but someone whose listening actually makes it possible for me to say what I never could have said, and thus to be a new kind of person, one I have never been before and could not have been before this directed listening.”
—james carse (via azspot)
Take on Me (A-Ha cover)
Tori Amos
Last night in Oslo, Norway, Tori Amos performed a cover of the 1985 hit “Take on Me” by A-Ha (a band from Norway). The recording is from an iPhone (thanks to @frokva on twitter), but it’s still interesting to hear. This post will be updated when a better version surfaces. [mp3]
the most perfect thing ever. i have stories about the back of the bus, but they don’t matter.
“don’t get too down with the prose and poetry…it can draw you in when you should be out and about…”
—my dad. i swear i am going out, dad!
