Wallace Shawn podcast - Trump is the Boot Man

Summary notes after listening to Wallace Shawn in conversation with Adam Shatz (London Review of Books)

Trump is the Boot Man

https://www.lrb.co.uk/2017/08/17/lrb-podcast/trump-is-the-boot-man

- entertainment and violence/sadism/cruelty/darkness
- privilege
- war
unconscious and writing
- when one's writing is smarter than its author
- between dream and waking states
- political awakenings and crises
- activism, observation, participation
- rationalisations to justify ways of life and privilege
- Trump
- the human species as climactic (the best) or the worst

The Pineal Eye

“The pineal eye, detaching itself from the horizontal system of normal ocular vision, appears in a kind of nimbus of tears, like the eye of a tree or, perhaps, like a human tree. At the same time this ocular tree is only a giant (ignoble) pink penis, drunk with the sun and suggesting or soliciting a nauseous malaise, the sickening despair of vertigo. In this transfiguration of nature, during which vision itself, attracted by nausea, is torn out and torn apart by the sunbursts into which it stares, the erection ceases to be a painful upheaval on the surface of the earth, and in a vomiting of flavorless blood, it transforms itself into a vertiginous fall in celestial space, accompanied by a horrible cry”.


Georges Bataille, “The Pineal Eye”, 84.

Night Flight by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"And now, like a watchman in the depths of night, he discovered that night reveals the nature of man: those cries for attention, those lights, that anxiety. That simple star there in the darkness indicates how isolated that house is. And in another it goes out: it is a house concealing the love within it".

"At the hotel he had unpacked his case and revealed those small objects with which inspectors try to show that they can relate to the common man: a few tasteless shirts, a toiletries kit and a photograph of a skinny woman, which the inspector pinned to the wall. In this way he made a humble confession to Pellerin of his needs, his affections and his regrets. By laying out his treasures in this pathetic way he was displaying his misery to the pilot. It was a moral eczema. He was showing him his prison".

[Italics by me.]... a moral eczema...

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Night Flight (1931)

University of Rochester

Good news! I have been awarded the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) scholarship to study for 6 weeks at the University of Rochester, NY, under the supervision of Rachel Haidu. Of course, I am thrilled.

Baudrillard on atmosphere

This quote reminds me of Bill Brown's 'Thing Theory', a paper which I have come to love since my undergraduate studies.

“Objects are more and more highly differentiated – our gestures less and less so. To put it another way: objects are no longer surrounded by the theatre of gesture in which they used to be simply the various roles; instead, their emphatic goal-directedness has very nearly turned them into the actors in a global process in which man is merely the role, or the spectator”.

Jean Baudrillard, “Structures of Atmosphere”, 59.

Taiwan Season: Ever Never

Today, at the Edinburgh Fringe, I went to see the play 'Ever Never', which I thought was a fantastically creative performance not only in terms of acting, but also in its direction and choreography. Each scene flowed into the next with the utmost subtlety. The characters changed roles constantly, reflecting most strikingly family relationships and eliciting those moments where stories and/or memories are created in an effort to imagine the lives, actions, and thoughts of others.



The description of the play is as follows:

"Deeply affected by her father’s death, on her travels she found the aircraft cabin a mysterious space where the past could be intercepted and where fragments of forgotten memories were rekindled and brought to life. Following Co-coism’s guiding principle of cooperatively-devised theatre, Ever Never draws on the experiences of playwright Feng Chi-Chun and the rest of the creative team. An airport and airplane become vehicles where past and present collide; places of real and remembered, love and regrets, happiness and sadness, and loved ones and themselves."

Clip: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVwb_a5V3wE&feature=youtu.be

Framing Space through Architecture and Film

CALL FOR PAPERS - AAH ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2018

5–7 APRIL 2018
Courtauld Institute of Art 

King’s College London

Framing Space through Architecture and Film

Jessica Schouela, University of York, js1878@york.ac.uk
Hannah Paveck, King’s College London, hannah.paveck@kcl.ac.uk


We experience architecture and film as media of duration that unfold in time. The encounter of an embodied spectator or inhabitant with a film or a dwelling is informed principally by motion and the succession of one frame or screen (architectonic and cinematic) to the next. These two modes of construction investigate into the three dimensional occupancy and representation of space as it relates to both bodies and objects, framed within curated and mediated spaces. Instantiating an experience of space that is far more than visual, architecture and film activate both sound and touch, the latter being a mutual and relational ‘commitment’ of the body and the world (Jennifer Barker).

Adolf Loos famously writes: “it is my greatest pride that the interiors I have created are completely lacking in effect when photographed”. Does film function differently? How have architecture and film represented each other and in which ways do they, either similarly or distinctly, frame or design space? What happens to architecture when it is filmed and how might a building be described in terms of its cinematic qualities (Beatriz Colomina)?

Moreover, how can film and architecture challenge our perceptual habits? Can film convey atmosphere of space and the built environment (Gernot Böhme)? How might the representation of urban versus domestic narratives (i.e. exterior and interior space) through film result in distinct viewing experiences?

This panel explores the mutually informing link between architecture and film in an effort to not only open up the limits of these methods of representation but also to look beyond what typically gets included within the history of art. Proposals may address the relationship between architecture and film through ontological comparisons, the framing and representation of space, and/or the phenomenological experience of mediated spaces.