Et alia

Day. Thirtyish, butchish, weirder about some things than others. Always learning.

[richardburbagehateblog]

Ayy I think I've got the start of an idea for this play

[ragsy]

Contemporary art haters will be like "i don't get it" and then not read the title or artist statement or the medium or the year or

[ragsy]

How to "get it":

Ask yourself, how does this piece make you feel? (No wrong answers)

Look for an artist statement nearby. What does it say about the artist and their relationship to their work? What does the artist say that they are trying to convey with their art? What contextual clues can you pick up from what they say about their background, or what they omit?

Look at the title of the piece. What is the artist saying about their work by naming it that, either explicitly or implicitly?

Look at the medium. Is there anything about the piece that stands out to you, knowing what it's made of?

Look at the year it was made. What cultural events might have been happening around this time? Was this piece part of a particular art movement? What was the purpose of that art movement, and what was it trying to say?

Accept that sometimes, you still might not get it. This is perfectly okay.

[thedreadvampy]

the British national character (such as it is) involves recreational complaining but Not Making A Fuss because the British national culture is built around a feudalist belief (literal or semi-literal) in the Divine Right Of Kings and in a structure of power where a benevolent ruler makes decisions for his benighted people

this produces the idea that decisions will be made among the ruling class with little or no reference to the general public. you can respond to that with fatalism, apathy, resentment or bootlicking but on a basic level we don't expect to be able to change it unless we're already in the ruling class. all decisions are as inevitable as the rain. possibly more inevitable cause at least the sky won't set mounted police and/or cavalry on you if you complain too loudly at it.

this is what you get when a country hasn't managed a successful populist revolution in a millennium (it doesn't count as a successful revolution until the actual balance of power has moved out of the hands of the families that were given it in the 11th century). sitting in circles agreeing that Better Things Aren't Possible.

[thedreadvampy]

to be clear hopelessness in this context isn't 'Everything Is Doomed Forever' it's more like

hm ok so if I may get wanky for a moment. Leibnizian optimism is the 17th century school of thought that this must be the best of all possible worlds because God is both good and omnipotent and therefore wouldn't make a world that was less than optimal. So this must be the best things can get, because it's designed to be optimal, and any suffering is an unavoidable part of the design.

The British political ideology isn't exactly that but it stems from the same place. there's a very rigidly entrenched and not very changeable hierarchy in place and it rules from a place of benevolent patriarchy.

This is how feudalism works: God chooses the king, the king chooses the lords, the lords manage the people, who cannot manage themselves. At each stage, the higher must make decisions for the good of the lower, which might seem unpleasant or uncomfortable but which are, ultimately, necessary.

This is an inborn hierarchy, which means that if you're not born and trained to rule, you can't expect to understand the subtle balance. So you have to accept that the unpleasantness is necessary, and that if you acted to stop it, you'd break the whole optimal system and everything would get worse. It's fine to acknowledge it as bad, you can kvetch about it, but to change it would be an existential threat. Change must be done super super carefully and by the established hierarchies of power, or you'll break the whole country.

over time this has moved to include parliament as well as aristocracy (although lest we forget, we still have a monarchy and hereditary peers) but the fundamental principle is still that we're sheep milling around in need of a Good Shepherd (no, not that one. although also sometimes that one, this is legally a Christian country). a bad shepherd is better than no shepherd. a bad king is better than no king.

and, unlike Leibnizian Optimism, it does have the escape valve that, if things do get unutterably fucked you can agree that there was a Bad King but if we replace him with a Good King then it'll be ok.

This is, obviously, bullshit. But it's very pervasive especially in a system which a) has a continuity of aristocracy for almost 1000 years, b) has maintained one of the biggest world powers under that aristocracy, and c) educates its children in an again, continuous two-tier school system where the children of the rich are groomed to continue into power.

and imo as the empire has collapsed and exposed the fundamental precarity of the British economic position, people have locked in more rather than less. if everything's already feeling very unstable the last thing you want to do is test the theory that trying to fix something won't break everything.

like I've read a bunch of prerevolutionary French and Russian literature is some of what makes me think this is the problem. we just haven't really got past the 19th century in terms of popular political philosophy.

[romanceyourdemons]

i’m not going to call myself “the friend who’s too woke” or hedge around my opinion because this is my deeply considered belief: horror literature is the theater of disgust, and the disgust that drives the vast, vast majority of classic horror media from the 1890s-1940s—dracula, jekyll and hyde, king kong, nosferatu, the mummy, universal frankenstein, the wolf man, cthulhu, and more—is the exact disgust that drove the worldwide tide of violence in the 1930s and 40s, a tide that has never fully receded, and you have NO business adapting a piece of classic horror media if you aren’t willing to put in the work to identify what is portrayed as disgusting in that property and enter into some form of dialogue with it. if you don’t want your movie to be “about” race or class or gender or sexuality or ability, you’re free to choose a source material that isn’t already about that, but unluckily for you giant hypersexual apes do not exist in a vacuum

[richardburbagehateblog]

Might fuck around and get into Duchamp idk

[anonymusbosch]

the post going around about how you can't automate various fabric processing/sewing tasks is largely not correct and i think suffers substantially from treating technology as separate from economy/policy/research funding/capital. & have a half-thought-out response but wanted to plant a small flag first. you can cut fabric to a pattern in a variety of more or less automated ways. & furthermore the extent to which automation is or is not happening is partially to do with legitimate difficulty of robotic manipulation of flexible materials & textiles AND partially to do with the cost of automation vs cost of sweatshop labor. i think it rly devalues the role of globalization of the supply chain & exploitation of labor in the global south to just hand-wave textile & clothing automation as impossible when it is not so

[tpwrtrmnky]

Guy who has a non-research degree in a field that never studies human subjects: Here are my opinions on what needs to be done for me to respect this field I've decided to become a denier of.

[Extreme breach of scientific ethics]

[Violent abuse of power]

[Method that actually doesn't obtain any information]

[Controlled double-blind studies of phenomena where that is literally impossible]

[Seeking empirical proof that a word has the meaning that it's defined as]

[Study that would have a dropoff rate of 100%]

Additionally, how do we know that [best currently available theory] is true, and not [dominant theory from 100 years ago that repeatedly failed in the face of evidence]? I have found some minor methodological flaws in [studies that were not designed to prove the best available theory, but rather examine edge cases within that theory], so we should really consider [nonsense with no evidence backing it whatsoever].

[geopsych]

5th of July 2020, morning scenes

[richardburbagehateblog]

Just had top surgery and if anyone reading this is considering it in the future, my absolute number one tip is to do some yoga, climbing, anything that builds core strength and capacity to consciously move using different isolated muscle groups.

I've had a much easier time of recovery so far than some other people I know/have supported for this reason. I'm much more mobile; I can get to the ground and back up, or up from lying flat, without using my arms; I can interact with objects/ furniture/whatever more easily cause I can be precise about which parts of my body I'm using.

Makes a huge difference to the felt sense of overwhelm/ vulnerability/ helplessness as well as meaning I'm able to do more stuff for myself more easily and less likely to strain my incisions while doing it.

[mybeingthere]

Aerial photography by Georg Gerster (1928 - 2019)

He was born in Winterthur, Switzerland, on April 30th, 1928 and studied classical languages at his local grammar school, before reading German and English at Zurich University, where he also received his doctorate. From 1950 to 1956 he was science editor of the Zurich Weltwoche. Since 1956 he has been a freelance journalist specializing in science reporting and aerial photography. He has undertaken extensive visits to every part of the world, including Antarctica.

By pursuing this line of reasoning, Georg Gerster has turned aerial photography into something more probing, something that, with luck, may prove a contemplative, philosophical instrument encouraging greater reflection.

Georg Gerster remembers:

„I stopped over in Columbus, Ohio, on my way to Hawaii. The purpose of the stop-over was to photograph the Great Serpent Mound, a precolumbian earth effigy. The January day in Columbus proved to be one of the coldest in memory, at least in my memory, some 30 centigrades below. The airplane had to be warmed up in the hangar. When it had become operational we took off, but the pilot couldn’t find the snake, monumental as it is, wiggling half a kilometer in an Ohioan valley. I despaired, this was my only chance, and I didn’t intend to blow it. I pleaded with the pilot to set down the airplane in a field close enough to a farmstead in order to enquire about the snake. This was of course quite illegal, but the pilot obliged me and landed on a field. I disembarked into Ohio’s severe winter in light city clothing fit for Hawaii.

As it turned out, the farmstead was much farther than I had figured. I stumbled across an expanse of icy, snow-covered stubble in low shows - arriving at the farmhouse half frozen. I knocked and the farmer’s wife opened the door. With numb lips I just managed to say – hello, I am looking for the Great Serpent. She stared at me – and I could see in her eyes that she was convinced she was in an encounter of the Third kind. A Martian stood before her, an extraterrestrial had arrived, ET had made it to Ohio.When she had overcome her shock and realized that I was from her planet she treated me well with a bowl of hot soup and the required information.“

Aerial photography worldwide | Georg Gerster

[ymutate]

Zulu Imbenge baskets are woven entirely of recycled telephone wire in the heart of KwaZulu-Natal, a province of South Africa. In the 1990s, Zulu women began repurposing discarded telephone wires, weaving them into intricate patterns to create colorful and durable baskets while preserving traditional weaving techniques.

[cryptic-curation]

This sick bleach shirt I made. Something to showcase my undying love for prehistoric cave art.

Some of the bleach burned thru the shirt bc this was my first time bleaching anything ever, but it kinda adds to it.

[kafk-a]

Om Ezitouna

[unsubconscious]

Claire Laude, When Water Comes Together With Other Water, La racine brulée, 2015  

[nevver]

It might be time, James Kerwin

[takataapui]

'the dignity of lycanthropy based risk' is a lyric game about being a werewolf on medication, wanting to reduce that medication due to the side effects, and battling a hostile medical system in order to 'get permission' to do so.

explore a world where lycanthropy is a metaphor for mental illness/disability, and where the answer to medical mistreatment could maybe be just going feral.

Purchase this game here:

the dignity of lycanthropy based risk by takataapui

a lyric game about werewolfism, healthcare, and ableism

[playwrongs]

It's interesting that the governing ethos of theatre architecture and design this century is flexibility, basically extending the logic of the black box to larger and larger spaces with fancier and fancier means of changing the space. In the second half of the twentieth century, there were a lot of different ambitions around how to construct a theatre and shape its stage,* but none of them were "flexibility". Indeed, a lot of what got built locked certain things in.

From what I can glean, there were a few ideas dominating theatre design in the middle of the twentieth century. One was "intimacy," increasing the sense of connection between audience and performer. Another was "authenticity", which meant trying to reconstruct the playing conditions and performance styles of earlier eras, most particularly the Elizabethan. These ideas also collided with each other in various ways. For instance, "authenticity" and "intimacy" dovetailed because the Elizabethan stage was what we now call a three-quarter thrust stage, and so a lot of thrust stages got built, with the dual aim of creating Elizabethan-ish performance conditions and making the audience physically closer to the actors. This also factored into the design of the Olivier Theatre in London, which was modeled after the ancient Greek theatre at Epidaurus (authenticity) but the seats furthest from the stage are no more than 65 feet away (intimacy).

Now, this is not to say that flexibility wasn't a concern at this point, just that it wasn't the main concern. But for reasons I can only speculate on, the ideal twenty-first century theatre is essentially a giant room where everything is infinitely movable. I guess it's partly because technology has developed enough that this is now possible. I think, too, that theatre as a discipline wants that flexibility badly. A lot of the mid-century spaces were modified after the fact to accommodate more varied designs and layouts. On the other hand, a lot of these theatres were developed on the basis of ideas about the relationship between theatre and history, theatre and civics, theatre as something important. And the dominance of the ultra-flexible space has concurred with an abandonment of any belief that theatre pertains to anything besides entertainment. Correlation does not imply causation, of course, and really I can't say anything about it that has more substance than a hunch. I'm just sort of going "makes you think," because it makes me think!

*For a rough cross-section of these, there's a very interesting book called The Ideal Theater: Eight Concepts, which you can check out from the Internet Archive here. The book documents an assignment and exhibition funded by the Ford Foundation in the early 1960s—the project paired eight stage designers with eight architects to imagine the interiors and exteriors of what they would consider an ideal theatre, and of course they're all radically different.

[savouryduck]

the project paired eight stage designers with eight architects to imagine the interiors and exteriors of what they would consider an ideal theatre, and of course they're all radically different.

do you think maybe the prioritizing of flexibility might have been influenced by the fact that different 20th century stage designers/architects had mutually incompatible ideas about what the ideal theater should be? after all, if you were to build any one of the theaters in this project, you would make one designer very happy and the other seven frustrated and annoyed that they can't do things the way they want to. after a few rounds of that kind of thing, I would start prioritizing stage designs that can be shifted around to suit different creatives' visions.

[playwrongs]

I mean, I think the book is kind of a bad piece of evidence for the claim, but I nevertheless think the claim is correct. The book shows the most extreme and extravagant conceptual versions of what the architects and designers imagined; none of it was ever built. But it's true that the designers of mid-century stages made choices that ended up feeling constricting and were rolled back. For instance, here's the stage of the Delacorte Theater in Central Park as originally built, to a design by a guy named Eldon Elder:

The steps and the elevated trapezoidal platform were meant to be permanent features of the venue. Here's what the stage looks like now, without a set:

You see also that they've removed those walls that screened the wings. I have no doubt that their thinking was, "god, it's annoying to have to design for that fucking platform. What if we just got rid of it and made the stage a big semicircle instead? That'd be easier, right?"

So the flexibility is, in large part, a practical decision. But I do think there's a little something else to it.