utopian times.

via my friend pasha, thank god the war is over! not to mention DeBeers giving free prosthetics to victims of "diamond conflicts" violence, which actually had me fooled.

neat avatar stuff

virtual transgender suit: http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2008/08/marc-owens-who-designed-the.php

girlfriend experience (the prostitutes who get paid the most pretend to be your gf--affective labor, simulation/illusion: http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2007/01/martin-butler-p.php

avatar machine: http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2007/06/the-virtual-com.php

butler on obama.

look, no promises, but this was good enough to make me peek my head out of blogretirement. those of you who care have probably already seen it, but it was nice to get the feeling that i'm not the only one who can't look at a political rally (even a relatively awesome, pro-obama one) without flashing back to Triumph of the Will. si se puede, for sure, but also: eeep.

okay!

about that ERS show: it was good! being a huge faulkner fan (especially those compsons), i was maybe more engaged than some. it was long. but unlike the kerouac show, i didn't mind. and like the kerouac show, there was some lovely dancing. susie sokol always (okay, both times) reads like a tiny, bony, bill irwin; a clown in the best sense of the word. she wuz great.

periodic absence.

that's just how this blog rolls. didn't mean to cry "auslander!" and then leave you hanging. more soon--i'm off to see elevator repair service tonight. will report!

ten free shows! um, philip auslander!

joe's pub is having an anniversary party: ten free shows. register here by october 5 for the goodies.

[i have been thinking a lot about the auslander thing. apart from a single flurry of emails, most of which were little more than advertisements for aggrieved correctness on the parts of academics, i haven't heard anything about it in weeks. i guess we'll see what happens when the TDR issue comes out. if you haven't heard, try here (a draft of schechner's remarks on the controversy) and here (chronicle of higher ed site may require login).]

superstruct!

i'm on the advisory board of jane mcgonigal's new game, superstruct. check out this preview article from discover magazine. and then come play.

brava.

please read jill dolan's assessment of this particular elephant in the room:

>>I continue to believe that university theatre programs should push at the envelope of cultural expectations about the arts. If we defy conventional beauty and body image standards; if we routinely commit to color-blind or cross-race cast our productions; if we teach students to critique representations of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, and other identity markers in our own and mainstream productions, along with their aesthetic and ideological values; and if we teach students to reach outside conventional theatre to form their own companies and to create their own plays and performances, then we’ve truly added something to the national dialogue not just about the arts, but about citizenship and democracy. Supporting the status quo is untenable.<<

if i aspire to nothing else, it's making a little bit of difference for a small number of students in exactly this way.

the performance series to which no one is invited.

i love that he sends a postcard every month telling the mayor not to come.

it's a big box, inside which a performance occurs, outside of which nothing is known of the performance. it's not really the performance that gets me, but the advertising--the posters this guy prints up and distributes telling people not to show up:

>>Every month he finds a performer and spends about $500 of his own money on the theater rental and for posters and advertising disinviting everyone (the project is recalibrating his relationship with his own money). Artists are loving the privacy and formality of STRIKETHROUGH—the chance to create, rehearse, and produce without the restraint of an audience.

"I really, really needed this," said Marya Sea Kaminski, an actor who was transitioning from performing in a group to producing a one-woman show when she wrote June's STRIKETHROUGH. "I totally rehearsed. I made costumes and a soundtrack. Confronting the fact that it was just for me and just for a theater space actually challenged me not to half-ass it.<<

i actualy performed in this space a few times (the theatre, not the box). it's a nice spot for something like this: in a bar, sort of plush-velvet old school but the opposite of self-important. i'd wander by with a beer in my hand. you bet i would.

mccain/palin: leaving room for the holy ghost.

political snark aside, i was interested in the times' take on ticket intimacy. apparently chaste hugs are the new handshake when it comes to "mixed-sex major-party presidential ticket[s]." the article leads off with a handy guide to discerning your candidate's number two from his wife when there are two women on stage:

"For now, the rule is simple: Hug your running mate, kiss your wife."

thank god someone clued me in.

authentic cultural journey: $1850

confirming your own privilege? priceless.

this (log-in required) new york times story begins by reminding all of us that in this era of globalization, "an authentic experience" can be hard to find. never fret, however. a direct path to authenticity--do not pass Go, do not collect $200--is available to those who pony up close to two grand for an “Andean Special Interest” trip from Peru Cultural Journeys, which may include "interaction within a traditional community and participation in its workday. Themes include traditional medicine (bone setting, midwifery); textiles (weaving); archaeoastronomy; music and dance." i don't mean to discount the revenue this probably brings to folks who are making good use of it, but: ew.

propaganda!

hmmm. maoart.

vacation's over!

but not so the olympics. we're particularly enjoying heather havrilesky's take on honky space alien bob costas's recent diatribe. Usain Bolt's supposed lack of class resonates with the alleged Obama arrogance--and the athelete's first name sounds eerily like Hussien. someone, alert the media douchebags! will 2008 go down in history as the year everyone dressed their racism up in euphemisms and assumed no one would notice?

great red spot eats baby!

aaaaa!

photoshop disasters.

i like this blog. partially because of the good-humored snark (probably actually funny or interesting only to those who are serious photoshop geeks or have a serious fascination with counterfeiting) and partially because of its low-key attitude about fakery. this blog gets it right: we want you to photoshop well, not so much because photoshop is cheating and we still hunger for the original article (so make your intervention as invisible as possible on moral grounds); rather, because a certain aesthetic has developed around pshop, and when its disrespected too flagrantly, the work gets laughable. maybe it's an obvious point, but i like what's going on here in terms of a relaxation of anxiety in favor of more craftsman-like criteria. it's not that it's fake that makes it wrong and bad, it's that the fakery is poorly done. that's probably true in most cases where construction is unavoidably at the fore, but i hope this sort of attitude is getting both more common and more explicit.

cheerleaders with nunchakus, since i am too timid to talk about rape.

sometimes, when i'm looking for performancey stuff that might belong on the blog, i start somewhere sort of central, like at salon or the new york times, and go from there. on this particular day, everything i came across was so complex and multi-determined that i couldn't come up with anything responsible to say about it, so i'm going to give you this instead. it's not the most interesting thing i read this morning, but it's handle-able. (and if you have something good to say about the jezebel/lizz winstead/amusing rape stories thing, maybe you could help me out.)

anyway: Peking Opera cheerleaders.

sisters of perpetual indulgence

are in LA on saturday, doing a benefit for Highways. the postcard describes their "Free My Ass!" as "an iconoclastic expose' in drag of the ways in which we are no longer free, in which freer than we know, and in which we invent 'freedom' as a construct." ah, sisters. you had me at ass. $20; $15 for students and seniors.

more from the nytimes on what we don't know.

also, some interesting commentary brewing in the comments section of Miguel Helft's Bits, if that kind of stuff doesn't make you barf.

>>My point is that there are no guarantees that anyones [sic] comments or blogs are actually genuine. Take everything with a very small grain of salt. Enough finger pointing about how Obama’s supporters are so nasty, Clinton’s supporters are so racist, and Republicans are dispicable. You don’t know who is actually saying these things and if they actually mean them or if maybe they’re just trying to spark some anger inside you mischivieously [sic].<< (poster "AHS," july 30)

i believe scarlett johansson is real.

in discussing a [book about a] famous case of forgery involving paintings by Vermeer, one of the new york times blogs today sidles up to a discussion of simulacra, commodification, and performance in terms of identity and reputation. the blogger is hardly first on the scene, here, but it was sort of nice to read without excessive jargon that we never know exactly what kind of clothes the emperor is wearing, and that an absolute picture of the duds' "true" nature may be the least interesting thing about them.

and, we're back.

wow. didn't mean to leave a post about bikes and hymens up there in the on-deck circle for my entire vacation.

summer comes, meaning less school and more pondering. if you have performance- or tech-oriented books to recommend, now is the time to say so in the comments. that means you, the-five-of-you-who-read-this!

back to dailyish posting, assuming performance continues to be, y'know, "important."

“The man is the biggest of all the donkeys.”

via the new york times: hymen restoration surgery. the story at least attempts to explore the complexity of the reasoning behind the decision to roll one's odometer "back to 'zero,'" but this reader couldn't help shuddering at the idea of going through that kind of pain, again, on purpose, on a wedding night. my own virginity was lost as i fell off a bike at age thirteen, and holy shit. it's my privilege that allows me to say this, but: never again.

good lord, that hurt.

let me just answer you by saying: no.

is racism over? this has been coming up in student conversations for some of my colleagues, and frankly, it's jaw-dropping. i talked with an acquaintance at length about her anyone-but-obama stance regarding the upcoming election--she was a clinton supporter, but was willing to defect to the GOP rather than vote for obama--and was greatly dismayed. the talking point seems to be that no one makes blanket judgments based on any longer race, or will cop to an absolute racial hatred, and what remains (assuming these more overt hatreds have been quelled, which seems unlikely) is something other than racism.

the pundits linked above say "it's race, not racism," something like "racially influenced judgment" rather than racism itself, and "it's the unfamiliarity" (a lack of experiential knowledge as opposed to a hatred). i feel like i'm explicating the obvious a little, but isn't saying you're afraid a black presidential candidate will "bring in farrakhan" (what does that mean, anyway? a cabinet position? a telephone call? a golf lunch? "bring him in" to do what?) because you've been persuaded by a media frenzy that he associates with crazy-go-nuts race radicals . . . isn't that a little . . . racist? if we call it "racially influenced judgement," has the nature of the behaviour really changed?

if someone has to be a card-carrying white supremacist to qualify as racist, then i guess a bunch of us are relieved to know we're in the clear. i've been pointing to project implicit as evidence of the deeply entrenched racism even the very nicest of us have going on, but it doesn't seem to make much difference to those i encounter who insist that since they abjure the klan, racism has been vanquished. insert laughable mission accomplished banner here.

neoliberalism in rolling stone.

insight into "market stalinism" and an incipient police state (via jason grote, whose 1001 i will be seeing tomorrow night):

>>American commentators like CNN's Jack Cafferty dismiss the Chinese as "the same bunch of goons and thugs they've been for the last 50 years." But nobody told the people of Shenzhen, who are busily putting on a 24-hour-a-day show called "America" — a pirated version of the original, only with flashier design, higher profits and less complaining.<<

this is scary stuff, but there's a sort of cold-war era feeling about the construction of china as the new bogeyman that's a little weird-tasting. i don't heart the panopticon anymore than anyone else does, but:

>>Remember how we've always been told that free markets and free people go hand in hand? That was a lie. It turns out that the most efficient delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style police state, fortressed with American "homeland security" technologies, pumped up with "war on terror" rhetoric.<<

hmm.

i haven't seen

the sex and the city movie, but i did read anthony lane's paternalistic and off-putting review in the new yorker, accompanied with the above drawing of the witches from macbeth, i mean crazy murderous dolls, i mean difficultly gendered asylum inmates on a daytrip to saks.



i didn't like the series for a long time, mostly because i felt alienated by all the conspicuous consumption and because of a nebulous beef about it not being quite feminist enough. after i moved to and away from new york, though, i started watching it on re-runs, i think because some of the new york stuff made sense after living there (although i was still torqued by watching these women navigate it with the lubrication that wealth provides without ever acknowledging their privilege) and because, faults aside, watching a television show that really was about four adult, more or less single women--admittedly all white, straight, beautiful and moneyed--who ate pizza and had sex and made mistakes was so unusual. there's a lot not to like about the series and it doesn't take much snooping, but i'll admit that the simple fact of the protagonists was enough for SATC to win DVR space.

professor dolan? are you taking requests? we'd love to hear what you think.

jane mcgonigal online, in new york.

video of mcgonigal's talk at the "Stories From The Near-Future" conference thrown by the new yorker, and dates for her upcoming big game stuff, including the june 7 stop in central park.

i know i already alerted about the gaming in new york, but i just wish so much i could be there. if you're at all tempted, please go. for the sake of the weary angeleno whose quarter isn't quite over yet.

learning to be real.

this appears to be making the PS rounds: training for those who aspire to reality television stardom.

>>Every week thousands of people audition for Reality TV shows, the competition is fierce and the odds of making it past the first round of submissions are very slim. BUT if you are lucky enough to be noticed and fortunate enough to be called in, will you be able handle the pressure of this once in a lifetime opportunity?<<

i was just reading something recently about how conception of celebrity in the united states has historically been hard to reconcile with itself. there's a performative aspect to celebrity, of course, and a strong myth of open access--the actress discovered at the drug store soda fountain, etc. but when that sort of stuff happens, this writer was pointing out, often the myth overlies a strong sense that those who become famous do so because of a certain birthright, an inherent quality. makes the proposition of reality television--of manipulated actuality as spectacle, of "undeserved" fame or folks being famous-for-being-famous--seem sticky in a new way. or at least it did for me.

there's gold in that there fry-pappy.

in the year after my parents were married, folks siphoned gas from cars parked on the street. today, it's Mel-Fry. and maybe also gas, who knows.

>>Outside Seattle, cooking oil rustling has become such a problem that the owners of the Olympia Pizza and Pasta Restaurant in Arlington, Wash., are considering using a surveillance camera to keep watch on its 50-gallon grease barrel. Nick Damianidis, an owner, said the barrel had been hit seven or eight times since last summer by siphoners who strike in the night.

“Fryer grease has become gold,” Mr. Damianidis said. “And just over a year ago, I had to pay someone to take it away.”<<

discipline and preference.

soon available to some TiVo users: let the chicago tribune's critic pick your television.

>>The recommendation service will be available only to the roughly 100,000 TiVo subscribers in the region surrounding Chicago. But Thomas S. Rogers, chief executive of TiVo, said in an interview that TiVo was in talks about similar partnerships with other print media outlets. The service, if extended to other markets, could create new relevance for local television critics, whose numbers have shrunk in recent years as papers cut expenses.

“It creates a connection between reading the recommendations and actually having them on your TV set at your convenience,” he said.<<

remediation.

from mike sacks, photos of tv.

grad students arrested for al-qaeda download.

from Dr. Alf Gunvald Nilsen, University of Nottingham:

>>Their alleged “crime” was that the graduate student had downloaded an Al-Qaeda training manual from a US government website for research purposes, as he’s writing his MA dissertation on Islamic extremism and international terrorist networks. He had then sent this to his friend in the Department of Engineering for printing. The printed material had been spotted by other staff and reported to the University authorities who passed on the information to the police. The two were then arrested by armed police on May 14 and held for six days without charge, before being released without charge on May 20. During the six days they were imprisoned, the men had their homes raided and their families harassed by the police.

It is worth noticing that in talking to one of my colleagues, a police officer remarked that the incident would never have occurred if the persons involved had been “blonde, Swedish PhD students” (the two men were of British-Pakistani and Algerian backgrounds respectively).<<

Dr. Nilsen's whole letter here, and a times higher education supplement story here.

pervasive gaming, nyc

i wish i were around for this:

>>

In 2006 the Come Out & Play Festival turned New York City into a playground for a weekend, then did the same for the city of Amsterdam in 2007. Hundreds of players gathered to play dozens different games across each city. Players raced through the night in a city-wide game of zombie tag. Friends faced off in life-sized Pong using only their ears to "hear" the ball. Payphones produced points and Tompkins Square Park became a putt-putt course. 200 people performed stunts to display on the Reuters screen in Times Square. It has been darn good and fascinating fun.

Well, the festival is back. In June 2008, the New York will have the chance to come out and play again across the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Right now we're accepting applications for games in Come Out & Play 2008 in New York. Drawing international media attention, designers from around the world and hundreds of players, Come Out & Play features innovative work in the emerging world of street games, big games and pervasive games.<<

CFP: mapping queer scholarship/activism/performance

NACCS Joto Caucus &
Center for the Study of Genders and Sexualities, CSULA

present the

2nd NACCS Joto Caucus Conference

“Sacred Space Making: Mapping Queer Scholarship, Activism, and Performance”

October 10-12, 2008
California State University, Los Angeles

Submissions due August 1, 2008.
Email submissions to: naccs-joto@naccs.org

more here.

is this a thing?

puppy parties? did we know about this?

NYT theatre round-up

davids yazbek and henry hwang bring a new musical about bruce lee, harvard's ART gets a new artistic director, what it's like to close opening night, drama desk awards are out, and kelli o'hara is apparently responsible for single-handedly rescuing the ingenue from extinction. um, thanks?

SITI woolf in nyc

the SITI company is giving a reading of Virginia Woolf's Freshwater:



>>Virginia Woolf wrote Freshwater on a lark for her friends and family to put on during idle hours. She wrote the play both as relief from her own tough labor during the writing of her masterpiece Mrs. Dalloway and as an unmitigated entertainment to share with those closest to her. The play is eccentric and delightful, full of literary references juxtaposed with almost surrealistic situations. She created a deliberately witty and wacky universe and she cast her family and friends as the characters in the play.

Our production is an embodiment of Woolf’s adventurous spirit – a theatrical escapade that taps into our shared social human impulse to entertain one another. The actors and audience are transported together into a Victorian garden on a summer evening. Freshwater is an amusement, a variety show of sorts, acted out by an exotic yet familiar tribe in a playful mood. SITI will premiere this work, directed by Anne Bogart and featuring 6 SITI Company actors and the SITI design team, at The Women's Project in January 2009. SITI will present a free reading of the play on Thursday May 22 at 7pm at The Women's Project. Seating is limited; to make reservations email your name, number in your party, and phone number to reservations@siti.org by 2pm Wednesday May 21.<<

better than a goddess.

oscar pistorius, who was born without fibulas and runs on carbon fiber appendages, has won his appeal to compete in the beijing olympics.

>>[A] scientific investigation carried out by the Institute of Biomechanics at Cologne University last November found that the blades gave him a clear competitive edge over such athletes. . . . [The Court of Arbitration for Sport]'s three-man panel decided that the IAAF, which claimed that Pistorius benefited from a 'technical device', did not prove that claim to a sufficient extent.

The CAS statement added: "On the basis of the evidence brought by the experts called by both parties, the Panel was not persuaded that there was sufficient evidence of any metabolic advantage in favour of a double amputee using the Cheetah Flex-Foot.<<

new paradigm: the megan meier suicide.

via wired:

>>A nationwide community backlash ensued, after a news story published last year revealed [accused Lori] Drew's role in the cyberbullying, and pressure was placed on Missouri authorities to charge Drew with a crime. But after investigating the incident, local prosecutors concluded last December that they could find no law under which to charge Drew.

That's when federal prosecutors began working to build a case -- a difficult task, given that there is no federal law against cyberbullying. On Thursday, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles unveiled its solution by charging Drew with "unauthorized access" to MySpace's computers, for allegedly violating the site's terms of service.

MySpace's user agreement requires registrants, among other things, to provide factual information about themselves and to refrain from soliciting personal information from minors or using information obtained from MySpace services to harass or harm other people. By allegedly violating that click-to-agree contract, Drew committed the same crime as any hacker.

That sets a potentially troubling precedent, given that terms-of-service agreements sometimes contain onerous provisions, and are rarely read by users.<<

background on the story here.

toy theatre!

great small works' toy theatre festival is coming to DUMBO.

more on how theater failed america.

from mike daisey (i would give an eyebrow to see any of these panels, and not just the one with my secret boyfriend scott shepherd):

>>As part of the reopening of HOW THEATER FAILED AMERICA at the Barrow Street Theatre we're hosting a series of roundtable discussions after select performances on the state of theater in America. These feature luminaries like Robert Brustein, Rocco Landesman, Gregory Mosher, Oskar Eustis, James Bundy and more in direct conversation with working actors, do-it-yourself producers, arts funders, theatrical bloggers, and you...the schedule is below, and I hope you'll come and be part of the conversation.

HOW THEATER FAILED AMERICA ROUNDTABLES

DOWNTOWN, MIDTOWN, EVERYTOWN
Sun May 18th:
Robert Brustein (founder of Yale Repertory Theatre and American Repertory Theatre)
Jonathan West (Milwaukee-based actor and blogger)
Emily Ackerman (actor and ensemble member of The Civilians)
Leonard Jacobs (national editor for Back Stage)
Sheila Callaghan (playwright, Dead City)

DO-IT-YOURSELF OR BUST
Sat May 24th:
Greg Kotis (playwright, Urinetown)
Jason Eagan (Artistic Director, Ars Nova)
Erez Ziv (Managing Director, Horse Trade Theater)
John Clancy (founder of the New York International Fringe Festival)
Scott Shepherd (The Wooster Group)
Lisa Kron (actor, solo performer and playwright, Well)

YOU ARE WHAT YOU WATCH
Sun June 1st:
Jim Nicola (Artistic Director for New York Theatre Workshop)
Mark Russell (founder of PS122 and the Under The Radar Festival)
Steve Bodow (head writer of the Daily Show and Elevator Repair Service member)
Morgan Jenness (literary agent, former literary manager of the Public Theater)
David Cote (theatre editor for Time Out New York)
Isaac Butler (Freelance director and theatre blogger)

FOR PROFIT, NON-PROFIT, NO PROFIT
Sun June 8th:
James Bundy (dean, Yale School of Drama; Artistic Director, Yale Repertory Theatre)
Dan Fields (Disney Imagineer and freelance director)
Stephanie Weisman (founder and director of The Marsh in San Francisco)
Dave Greenham (executive director, The Theatre at Monmouth)
Tommy Thompson (veteran Broadway production stage manager)
Diane Ragsdale (Mellon Foundation)

ASSEMBLING ENSEMBLES
Sun June 15th:
John Collins (Artistic Director of Elevator Repair Service, The Sound and the Fury)
Tanya Selvararnam (collaborator with Jay Scheib and The Builder's Association)
Colleen Werthmann (actor and Elevator Repair Service ensemble member)
Heidi Schreck (collaborator with 2-Headed Calf, Seattle's Printer's Devil)
Scott Walters (former Artistic Director of Illinois Shakespeare Festival and blogger)
Hal Brooks (freelance director, Thom Paine and No Child…)

THEATER IN 2033
Sun June 22nd:
Rocco Landesman (Tony-award winning producer, Angels in America, The Producers)
Gregory Mosher (Tony-award winning director, former head of Lincoln Center)
Oskar Eustis (Artistic Director of the Public Theater)
Richard Nelson (playwright, Conversations in Tusculum)
Paige Evans (director, Lincoln Center's new LCT3 program)
Garrett Eisler (Village Voice theater critic and blogger)<<

the Elvis of cultural theory.

i didn't know that's what we're calling Zizek, but i'm okay with it. you can hear him at democracy now.

>>For example, let’s take, again, Iraq. This is my supreme example. They went there to do what? (a) To defundamentalize the country, to introduce their—some kind of a secular democracy, which would then serve as a model for the others; (b) to contain Iran. Now, three, four years later, what’s the result? (a) Almost two million, all the educated, secular, middle classes, majority of them left the country. The country is more religiously fundamentalist than ever. (b) We know that among the Shia political elite, the orientation is fundamentally pro-Iranian. So isn’t this a nice paradox that the ultimate result in Iraq of the US intervention is the exact opposite? It’s really a little bit like Oedipus’s story, you know? The parents were told, your son will kill you, blah, blah. They acted to prevent it, and in this very way they realized it. So something is obviously wrong here.<<

church : state :: alcohol : light sabre

that is, should be separate from.

via boing boing.

surveilling truants.

also from the times: dallas straps GPS units to truant students.

>>Truancy experts say the results in Texas are promising.

“It’s far better than locking a kid up,” and is cheaper, said Joanna Heilbrunn, a senior researcher for the National Center for School Engagement.<<

maker faire.

i had a conversation in seminar recently about whether or not modding--or maybe a larger category, more like "repurposing"--can be considered subversive, categorically. points were made on each side, but whatever you call it, i have a huge crush on people who make things, especially when involves tinkering mischievously with someone else's product:

>>“We are grabbing technology, ripping the back off of it and reaching our hands in where we are not supposed to be,” says Shannon O’Hare, who has brought his three-story Victorian mansion on wheels, one of the most prominent examples of the anachronistic style known as steampunk, to the Faire. He is holding forth in a vintage British military uniform and pith helmet, and is gesturing with a hand that holds a sloshing tankard of ale.

“We’ve been told by corporate America that we cannot fix the things we own,” says Mr. O’Hare, who goes by Major Catastrophe and works as a fabricator for the stage and businesses. “All we can do is buy their stuff and like it.” Cars have become too complex to work on under a shade tree, and people have no idea what is inside their cellphones and cameras. “All this technology, and it’s not ours. It’s somebody else’s,” Mr. O’Hare says. “ Make is about taking that back off and making it yours.”<<

ethnography for hire.

this just sounds repulsive:

>>Welcome to Ethnographic Insight, Inc., where qualitative marketing research provides your business with the ultimate vantage point—a close-up of your company's products and services through the eyes of your consumer.

Ethnographic Insight anthropologists are experts in ethnography. We have academic training, years of fieldwork experience, and are innovators in the application of anthropological models and methods to marketing research.

We provide you with a real-world understanding of consumer preferences, motivations, and needs by examining the environments consumers inhabit and the socio-cultural influences on their behaviors. Such insights translate into strategic business opportunities, including improved customer loyalty and increased competitive advantage.<<

that link goes to some sort of FAQ about the bastardization of ethnography for marketing purposes, one of which reads,

"When is ethnography appropriate?"

hmmm.


eeeew.

summer school.

quarantine, an english performance group, is accepting applications for its summer school:

>>We work with both experienced performers and people who have never performed before. Using their personal histories and experiences, we invent a theatrical form that’s tailored to each piece – from intimate encounters to epic events.

We often make theatre that blurs, exchanges or even removes the distinction between spectator and performer. Our past projects have included shared meals, family parties and a journey in the dark for one person at a time - as well as more conventional performances on stage, watched by audiences in seats.

Quarantine asks questions: about the world we live in, about who theatre is for – and who should make it. Because of its form, content and the people who engage with what we do, we see Quarantine's theatre as social action as well as artistic reflection.<<

there are currently 15 performers, ranging in age from teens to septagenarians, none of whom identify as "actors."

and if that doesn't float it for you, guillermo gomez-pena's Pocha Nostra is also taking applications for a summer workshop:

>>The prestigious Pocha worship is an amazing artistic and anthropological experiment in which artists from several countries and every imaginable artistic, ethnic and sub-cultural ackground begin to negotiate common groud. Performance ecomes the connetie tissue and lingua franca for our temporary community of rebel artists.<<

black separatist worships aliens, eats toddlers

sure, identity is discursively produced, but maybe we should have a whole other term for identity produced and assigned based on hoax email campaigns.

barf.

nothing's easier to consign to irrelevance than an angry black man.

this, via bitch, phd. the coverage of the protest is less interesting than the tenor of the comments. apparently whatever demographic can be loosely defined around commenters to NYT coverage of the Bell verdict do not particularly admire those who give enough of a shit to engage in some civil disobedience.

no love for sharpton, or for the passion with which he translates anger and grief to peaceful action.

we apologize

for the break in posting. being a one-person shop (who nevertheless enjoys the royal we), ennui occasionally ensues and there's no one else to slap up random video game trivia and calls for papers. sorry.

this never happens to mike daisey. his blog is regularly filled with random but relevant links, skillfully blurbed, and punctuated with gorgeous images. we mention this today because of his tracking of the miley cyrus issue, a pop culture moment that continues to be both intoxicatingly unimportant and yetbutalso a picture window into the crazy road kill car wreck intersection between american female adolescence and celebrity.

my god.

some of us in performance studies are accused of believing everything is performance. i stand more or less guilty as charged, which is why i am so fricking excited that there is an International Society For Performance Improvement. and that it is in los angeles.

bounty

from wired:

today in nerd history: April 29, 1964: Godzilla, Mothra Clas for First Time.

ray guns?

no, i have not played GTA4 yet.

also (because i googled "Wii Pilates" on the off-chance someone could make it happen): this was certainly inevitable.

CFP: Material Effects on Religion on Bodies

i'm a big ann pelligrini fan.



Religion Matters:
Material Effects of Religion on Bodies

Keynote Address by Professor Ann Pellegrini

The Religious Studies Roundtable at The Ohio State University is pleased to announce the first in what it hopes will become a series of Annual Graduate Student Conferences, to be held OCTOBER 4, 2008. The conference, "Religion Matters: Material Effects of Religion on Bodies," seeks to explore the effects of religion on the body, as well as collective bodies (like the nation), from a wide range of scholarly approaches.

The keynote address will be delivered by Ann Pellegrini, Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies at New York University. Professor Pellegrini's interests include religion, sex and the law; queer theory; trauma and the performance of witnessing; and religion and performance. Her books include Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (1997); Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (2003), co-authored with Janet R. Jakobsen; and Secularisms (2008), co-edited with Janet R. Jakobsen. Professor Pellegrini's talk will address "queer structures of religious feeling."


A 19-year-old boy refuses a life saving transfusion. Monks resist government attempts to put down a diseased cow. A cancer patient finds healing in alternative forms of treatment. An abortion clinic is bombed. Each of these is an example of the tangible and material effects of religion on the body in daily life. This conference seeks to explore the actual, daily, lived presence of religion in the world, both past and present. We especially welcome submissions about topics that might not, at first glance, be considered religious. Submissions are not limited to scholarly, non-fiction pieces but may include fiction, performance pieces or any other
format that address the topic. Topics may include but are not limited to:

• the consequences of belief for the body: sexual, medical, political, legal, ethical, physiological, psychological, etc.
• disciplinary techniques of the body
• the effect of cultivation, meditation and practice on the body
• religious affects and intensities
• religious trauma
• religious and bio-politics in a time of war
• bodily modifications
• the relationship between corporeality and spirituality, religion, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity

In order to keep the conference unified while allowing for the greatest range of topics, focus should be on some material effect resulting from or explained at least in part by religion. Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be sent to van-kley.2@osu.edu by JUNE 1, 2008. Submissions should be prepared for blind review. Proposals should not include any identifying
names. Contact information should only be in the body of the email and should include your name, email address, mailing address, institution and title of your paper. Please put the title of the conference 'Religion Matters' in the subject line of your emailed abstract. Any questions can be addressed to Bridget Buchholz (buchholz.21@osu.edu) or Rita Trimble (trimble.38@osu.edu).

boob raider.

clicking around from wired's "7 Reasons your Boss Should Send You To Sex Conferences" led to this blog (warning, adult content, yadda yadda), on gaming and sex. the most recent post was about a kind of yawny strip-blackjack game (with the necessary three female avatars shown in some sense of undress), but earlier came an intriguing description of an "adult" RPG, in which "Raidy, a high-spirited female sword-fighter," travels around with the usual motivations.

>>When she comes upon a town plagued by monsters who steal away the beautiful maidens and turn them into their slaves, Raidy is determined to set things right, risking life, limb, and virginity to do battle with the denizens of the tower.<<

virginity, huh? something tells me that precious-and-irreplaceable jewel doesn't last long.

>>With the "sex if you win, sex if you lose" game system, Raidy is able to turn the twisted fetishes of the boss monsters against them if she defeats them in combat, or succumb to their wiles if she loses.<<

i'm not sure what "turn the fetishes" means, but interesting that sex is both a prize and a punishment. and, obviously, i haven't played the game, but it seems likely that what shifts here isn't the sex itself, but the subject position of the hyper-sexualized female character: successful, she's a randy Raidy; in failure she's a victim of assault. does kind of a number on the madonna/whore binary . . . madonnas get martyred while the slut-bags move on to level 2.

i don't mean to focus on the sex-if-you-lose part of this; though it sounds definable as a representation of rape, as a representation it sounds more like a rape fantasy. though misgivings abound when a female character is shown as "deserving" unwanted sexual contact as a result of any action, this sort of negotiated scenario wouldn't seem harmful or out of place in a live action role play situation. and "succumb" itself is a pretty plastic word--good for describing a pleasurable, maybe play-acted vacation from agency; also good for putting a romance-novel varnish on actual assault. i guess it's the negotiation of the "negotiated scenario" that's key, and i'm thinking about how that works with gameplay.


omg! i didn't look at the gamebox:



i was picturing a sort of Xena-meets-Final-Fantasy mash up, not a lump of be-boobed anime sprites. snarf.

CAE's Kurtz exonerated.

maybe exonerated isn't the right word if charges are dismissed, but dismissed they wuz. the AP story about Critical Art Ensemble's Steven Kurtz, at University of Buffalo, made the NYU alumnae rounds yesterday:

>> A judge threw out charges Monday against a college art professor accused of
improperly obtaining biological materials for an exhibit protesting U.S.
government policy on genetically modified foods.

U.S. District Judge Richard Arcara ruled that the 2004 mail and wire fraud
indictment against Steven Kurtz, a University at Buffalo professor, was
"insufficient on its face."

Kurtz is a founding member of the Critical Art Ensemble, which has used
human DNA and other biological materials in works intended to draw attention
to political and social issues. His arrest drew protests from artists in
several countries who called the charges an intrusion on artistic freedom.<<

rest after jump.

or at least that was the plan; blogger's being recalcitrant. will fix later--google for the story in the meantime. eep.

tube meat, redux.

you know those PETA folk are soooooo fricking excited to have bacon again.

on taming.

hmm.

"fatal psychodrama"?

i'm disgusted.

also: no such thing as laundry elves.

gasp! parts of american idol are pre-recorded and martially policed!

>>“At the end of every performance you will stand on your feet.” That is one of the commandments offered by Cory Almeida, the indefatigable warm-up man who exhorts and instructs the audience for 15 minutes before each performance and during the numerous commercial breaks.

For the audience members who stand in the “mosh pit,” the area immediately in front of the stage, special instructions are required. “When you are applauding after a performance, we need your hands above your head,” Mr. Almeida said before a recent Tuesday performance. “Otherwise we can’t see that you’re clapping.” As he spoke other stage technicians offered more individualized guidance to mosh pit enthusiasts, including how to wave their arms from side to side over their heads during slow songs.<<

and attended by bused-in UCLA sorority women!

>>From the placement of local sorority members along camera sight lines to the instructions to the audience members about when to stand and how to wave their hands, “American Idol” is as scripted as a “reality” show dare be. . .

"We sometimes talk about this at rush,” said Courtney Lauwereins, a member from Laguna Beach, Calif. “Join Alpha Phi, and you might get to go to ‘American Idol.’ ”The show, of course, does not just throw a bevy of sorority women in front of the cameras and allow them to cluster as they may. Stage assistants choose specific women and place them where the hand-held cameras will swoop during performances. "<<

eew.

woah.

via bitchphd, but i'm sure this is everywhere:

"Beginning next Tuesday, [Yale art major Alicia] Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself "as often as possible" while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.

The goal in creating the art exhibition, Shvarts said, was to spark conversation and debate on the relationship between art and the human body. But her project has already provoked more than just debate, inciting, for instance, outcry at a forum for fellow senior art majors held last week. And when told about Shvarts' project, students on both ends of the abortion debate have expressed shock . saying the project does everything from violate moral code to trivialize abortion."

you can read the rest of the Yale Daily News story here.

and here you can read about some of the aftermath, including Shvarts's telling Yale deans that she did not purposefully inseminate herself and induce abortions, in which the project is variously described/written off as "a hoax" or a "creative fiction."

i've only dipped a toe into the roiling fen of outrage that is this matter's public record, but it does seem interesting that so much of the attention moves along did-she-or-didn't-she, should-she-have-or-not type arguments--a sort of J.T. Leroy re-dux. as Dr. B. says, "in other words, we absolutely cannot get past our sense of ownership of women's pregnancies." i'm sure ron athey gets some of the same commentary, but maybe not half so much paternalistic moralizing.

inflatables.

so, these guys were on campus the other day. actually, inflatable suits shaped like them with what looked like adolescents or very short adults inside.

along with a lot of folks waving very small flags with pandas on them, reading:

tibet belongs to china, and so do i!

hmmm.

viral marketing, pervasive gaming, "special ops."

via urbaniak:

"'A lot of what we do to some degree, and we’re not afraid toadmit, is trial and error. When you’re an agency that’s doing
stuff that’s never been done before, who knows what’s going to happen?'
-Jason Klein, founder, Special Ops Media."


authenticity: the ultimate strategy.

please don't go, girl.

if you, like most of the people i spend my days with, were born in the mid-eighties, this may not mean as much to you, but i am oddly charmed. also discomfited that i can't remember which one i liked. i think it was the youngest one. definitely not the one my husband refers to as "joey fat one."

battle of the titans.

nicholas kristof on sexism vs. misogyny. this one's been around for a while, i guess, and off my radar. i don't know kristof well enough to arrive with an opinion of his work already in place, but i can't tell whether i'm intrigued by the question--it's one i'd never thought to ask--or irritated by it. kristof seems (or professes) to be seeking out a useful lens rather than looking to create a neat arithmetic or argue arbitrary distinctions, and i like that move (despite his apparent desire to find the "root" of women's world-wide oppression. good luck with that). still, it's hard to imagine anyone successfully isolating misogyny and sexism as separate factors, much less vaunting one over the other as a more generally applicable concept--and a chicken/egg argument about the overdetermined nature of the oppression of women is exactly the kind of thing that makes me want to reach for a pitcher of martinis.

avatar machine.

via boingboing and kind colleague will bowling. man becomes stinkoman:


from designer mark owens:

"i'm interested in the how such a device would affect your behaviour . . . the psychology of the mask dictates that you behave differently if you feel an anonymity with yourself. . . . the whole idea is if you recreate the aesthetics of these [virtual] environments [like Second Life and World of Warcraft], do you transfer that behaviour . . . does that displace into the real world?"

test tube meat.

in vitro pot roast.

eew?

yay?

performative potsherds

there's an intriguing article by jane kramer in the new yorker this week, about the work of nadia abu el-haj. not my field, but a very exciting performance studies site as concerns the construction of the identity of place. pretty important place, too:

"She received her doctorate in 1995, and turned her dissertation into a book called 'Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society' . . . . The book looked at the role of archeology in what was essentially a political project: the Biblical validation for Jewish claims to what is now Israel. Specifically, it traced the history of a persistent 'grammar of biblical recovery . . . increasingly recast within the terms of Jewish national revival and return,' and the ways in which that grammar had produced a particular 'reading' of ancient stones, potsherds, inscriptions, and even bones by the scientists who unearthed them--or as one member of the Jewish Palestinian Exploration Society put it, in the nineteen-forties, 'Pottery is not pottery, it is Eretz Yisrael.'"

full disclosure: i haven't finished reading the piece. but abu el-haj's struggle for tenure in the face of her seemingly clear scholarly achievement is its own site for a discussion of performance. the article's not online, sadly, but you can read about george clooney.