mirror methods

Posted on March 20, 2013

still from The Mirror (1975) dir. Andrey Tarkovsky Excerpt from a letter, from a daughter who had just recently seen the film, to her mother: ‘ . . . How many words does a person know?’ she asks her mother. ‘How many does he use in his everyday vocabulary? One hundred, two, three? We wrap our feelings up in words, try to express in words sorrow and joy and any sort of emotion, the very things that can’t in fact be expressed. Romeo uttered beautiful words to Juliet, vivid, expressive words, but they surely didn’t say even half of what made his heart feel as if it was ready to jump out of his chest, and stopped him breathing, and made Juliet forget everything…

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Tagged: 1970s, affect, Andrey Tarkovsky, Art, film, film-going, method, mirrors, Soviet, time

re-inscribing the city

Posted on April 2, 2011

Hey New York, I’m participating in this panel discussion next weekend, which promises to be interesting. Come out and participate, if you’re in town! Re-Inscribing the City: Unitary Urbanism and it’s Legacy Panel Discussion April 9th , 4:15-5:45pm WHERE: Judson Memorial Church (balcony) 55 Washington Square South, NYC A panel for the 5th Annual Anarchist Book Fair. From the late 1950s until about the early 1970s, a group of poets, artists, architects, students and troublemakers known as the Lettrrist/Situationist International (LI/SI) made a desperate attempt to re-inscribe the European city so that its inhabitants could break free from the bleak urban routine of work and consumption. Today some artists are still attempting to break from urban alienation, while operating on the periphery of the establishment,…

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Tagged: 1960s, 1970s, method, New York, paris, situationists, walking

liz in iran, liz in israel

Posted on March 23, 2011

In 1975, my friend’s mother, Avril, was working at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, when who walked in, but Ms. Elizabeth Taylor, and Richard Burton. Avril was transfigured by their presence. A real star.

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Tagged: 1970s, Elizabeth Taylor, Jerusalem, RIP, Tehran

meeting place

Posted on January 13, 2011

We begin inside a small Baptist church at dusk, on the outskirts of a Lagos neighborhood in the mid 1980’s. We are here for a rare event, the screening of a film depicting the second coming of Christ. This Baptist church is not my church. In my house, going to church is a special event—the whole family piling into the station wagon wearing special shoes and hats, sitting still for what seem like hours—reserved for a few Sundays a year. We are not Baptist, and there are certainly never any films shown at our church. We come to this new lively church on a regular weeknight at the invitation of my friend, a neighbor. I am allowed to go because it is just a…

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Tagged: 1970s, 1980s, catastrophe, church, film, film-going, Lagos, memory, rapture

writing life & death

Posted on December 11, 2010

That was another lifetime. On Sherbourne Road in Detroit, Michigan. We were living there in the aftermath of the so-called Detroit riot of July, 1967–gunshots and looting only two blocks away, on Livernois Avenue, a nightmare cacophony of fire engines, police sirens, random shouts and cries, National Guardsmen with rifles, the acrid smell of smoke, smoldering fires that lingered for days–this “racial tinderbox” of an American city, which was also our home. … Memory pools accumulate beneath chairs in the waiting areas adjacent to Telemetry. It may be that actual tears have stained the tile or soaked into the carpets of such places. Everywhere, the odor of melancholy that is the very center of memory. Nowhere in a hospital can you walk without wandering…

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Tagged: 1960s, 1970s, death, Detroit, good writing, home, hospitals, Joyce Carol Oates, memory

i feel love

Posted on October 8, 2010

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Tagged: 1970s, Donna Summer, love, music

the DJ still runs this house

Posted on June 24, 2010

For a long time the word “house” referred not to a particular style of music so much as to an attitude. If a song was “house” it was music from a cool club, it was underground, it was something you’d never hear on the radio. In Chicago the right club would be “house,” and if you went there, you’d be house and so would your friends. Walking down Michigan Avenue, you would be able to tell who was house and who wasn’t by what they were wearing. If their tape player was rocking The Gap Band, they were definitely not house, but if it was playing Loleatta Holloway or (surprisingly enough) the Eurythmics, they were and you would probably go over and talk to…

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Tagged: 1970s, 1980s, black America, Chicago, Dennis Ferrer, DJ, house music, Miami, music, New York, rhythm control

Adrian Piper’s funk lessons

Posted on June 11, 2010

Consider the history and style of funk dancing, as a form of expression in urban black America, and then as a popular American dance form. Consider how this form has disappeared, in a sense, from our everyday physical vernacular. How are popular dances, ways of moving and self expression, archival practices? Notes on Funk I (excerpt) by Adrian Piper 1985 From 1982 to 1984, I staged collaborative performances with large or small groups of people, entitled Funk Lessons. The first word in the title refers to a certain branch of black popular music and dance known as “funk” (in contrast, for example, to “punk,” “rap,” or “rock”). Its recent ancestor is called “rhythm and blues” or “soul,” and it has been developing as a…

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Tagged: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Adrian Piper, black America, dance, funk, music