Archive for July, 2009

Performance: A Critical Introduction by Marvin Carlson, 2nd ed.

<—-! No notes taken before p48: may want to re-read —->

* Elin Diamond, “Unmaking Mimesis” 1997

(first 2 major feminist performance theorists: Sue-Ellen Case & Jill Dolan)

p 54: “Now [Freud] suggested that melancholia was in fact essential to identity formation, since the ego itself seemed to be built upon a series of rejected “object-choices,” such rejection being the source of melancholia.”

Ch3: The performance of language – linguistic approaches

Semiotics was proposed as a new approach to the study of human social behavior by Saussure in early 20th century

Poststructuralist thy in large part defined itself in opposition to semiotics

p 57: “Thus a theatre which sought to reflect life and consciousness accurately should be built, as life and consciousness themselves were, not upon the “representative substitutions” of signs, but upon the “libidinal displacements” flows of psychic energy” [paraphrasing Lyotard]
In 1982 essay J. Feral distinguished b/t theatre and performance by saying     that the theatre is based on semiotics and that performance seeks to
deconstruct those semiotic codes

p 59: “Talk is not simply a set of propositions transmitted from encoder to decoder, in which context is occsionally useful as an added interpretive grid through which to pass strange utterances. Rather, peple use talk reflexively to build the very contexts in terms of which they understand what they are doing and talking about with each other.” [quoted from Dore & McDermott, 1982, footnote 8]

p 64: Emile Benveniste insisted that for an act of speech to be performative in nature, it must be “the verb in the present and in the first person” and must be uttered by “someone in authority” that authority being sufficient to cause the act uttered  to be carried out. If these 2 things are not present, then the speech act is “nothing more than words.”

p 74: “…the concept of performance seems to be serving as an impetus to dissolve traditional disciplinary and methodological boundaries in order to explore more general concerns.”

* J. Derridas “Signature, Event, Context” essay

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Wanting to draw

#1 hit on google Thinking about drawing porn. And always interested in search results. This pic was the #1 on a Google image search for “porn”. Settings were Safe Search: Moderate, File type: Any, File Size: Any.

Interestingly, there was NO nudity on the first page of hits. However, there was a picture of John Ashcroft, lots of big tits, some dolls, and a lot of what appeared to be safe stock photos. A number of screen shots.

When I re-ran the search with Safe Search: Off this was still the first hit. First visible body part: Image #4 – vagina. First visible sex act: Image #4 – girl on girl oral. First visible penis: Image #10 – implied hetero oral.

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Bob Dylan

Sitting and listening to Modern Times. It’s so nice to be working again. Beau is working on an amazing painting. Can’t wait to see it.

So what is it about his playing that makes it so magical? It’s not that complicated. It’s not that loud, or intense, or fast. It’s like earth somehow. Like a garden.

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Rainy days

45caliberACPHere we are in Chicago. It’s raining again. It has been such a wet summer.

I know, I know. Why bullets?

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