luke, i think you will like this one.

i haven’t read it all yet, but it looks interesting: the nature of online art

via my big backyard

What I have come to like about exciting contemporary published academics is their ability to elucidate fine upstanding paragraphs from other authors and/or each other. And with the immediacy of blogging, and a reluctance to enter into the archiving ahead of me this afternoon at work, I am going to share with you a couple of paragraph quoted by Jean Bobby Noble in Sons of the Movement: FtMs risking incoherence on a post-queer cultural landscape, women’s press, toronto, 2006.

Peggy Phelan on nostalgia, or “the wound of wishing to return”:

…even at the seemingly simple level of the linguistic sign it is impossible for writers to convey the complete context in which a[n]… act occurs. To report it back, to record and repeat it, is at once to transform it and to fuel the desire for its mimetic return … Much of the writing [about performatives] is a record of a living relation between the writer and the artists she sees. This seeing is, necessarily, a distortion, a dream, a hallucination; writing rights it back towards reason by creating enabling fictions … The effort to “cite” the performance that interests us even as it disappears is much like the effort to find the word to say what we mean. It cannot be done. (Phelan 1993a:19-22) (ie from Noble 2006:59)

And Bahktin on words:

“When one finds a word, one finds it already inhabited … there is no access to one’s own personal ultimate word … every thought, feeling, experience must be refracted through the medium of someone else’s discourse, someone else’s style, someone elses’s manner … almost no word is without its intense sideward glance at someone else’s.” (Bahktin 1981:91) (ie from Noble 2006:71)

And finally a stellar bit from Noble himself:

“…Whiteness is marked and articulated - that is, made to work by revealing itself. If you think about the verb to articulate, it means to devide into words, to pronounce or utter. But it also means to connect or mark with joints - thatis, to be connected with sections. Thus, to articulate is to express fluently and to manipulate a site where component parts join (as in a knee or hip), to bring segmented parts together to enable functionality. These kings dissemble White masculinity, break it into parts, and then reassemble those parts to make them work differently, to render them dysfunctional. If White supremacy works best when it’s hypervisible and invisible, it cannot work in quite the same way when it is denaturalised, rearticulated, and most importantly, de-cloaked.” (Noble 2006:65)

This afternoon, after a delightful morning of doing bodyweather training in public, in a shallow pool in Bondi, in a training bra and undies, around the edges of a baby and parent swim class and serious lap swimmers, while the surf boomed and crashed on the rocks on the other side of the big pool, and bits of seaweed churned around us - there were 4 of us, in various stages of v’s wardrobe, and after we’d stretched and sweated out on the balcony in front of the iceberg’s gym, with nary a concern for how silly and patently ridiculous we might look, and an awesome lunch of spiffy cupcakes and brilliant tomato pasta (key highlights- olives, anchovies, coriander pesto, feta, a little lemony-green salad on the side) in a ‘30 apartment, the stairwell of which smelled just like aunty nancy’s house -and the kitchen design was almost exactly the same - after all of this, I lay down on a lounge and listened to the 5th lecture given by Thomas King in the Massey lecture series ‘the truth about stories’, 2003. And fell asleep a little bit, and drifted in and out of the stories.

I tried to make the link to the sample appear in this post, but i can’t quite work it out. So I strongly suggest you go here, and listen to the sample - which contains material from all the lectures Mr King gave, because they are excellent things to listen to, and it is a lovely thing, to sit quietly and listen to a story.

I’m off to see tj eckleberg sing at melt in the cross tonight, and have been encouraged to exit my wardrobe looking sharp and stylish. Pointy shoes then, i take it.
I didn’t really want to delve straight into the minutae of my life - although i acknowledge that everyone loves a good story, and the more personal the better, it seems.
Suffice to say that I’m starting an MA(coursework) in the discipline of sculpture, performance and installation at the venerable COFA, so perhaps I will suddenly flood this blog with a whole lot of arty wanky stuff, as i scramble to get a handle on what all the bright young things are doing.
These sentences are quite stiff, and disjointed, but I am attempting some kind of comeback on this blog, so in the interests of content and intent, I will leave them be.
Hey, does anyone know where, in the myriad of wordpress template code, i can embed a working library thing widget or lastfm widget?

full write up on interactive architecture

oh lqtm, you’re the best!

porosity: by the throat :The term “porosity” describes the nature of the edge condition, which exists between the skin of architecture and the public space of the city.”

With this task in mind I judiciously apply a bit of eyebrow pencil to my bottom lashes, (as I’ve done for the past thirty years). I shave my moustache and pencil a new one in. I use red lip pencil blended with vaseline to show off my lips. I want this effect to be subtle, I want it to look like the most ordinary thing in the world to see a hunky guy in a skirt and lippy on the rush hour tube. This is Criss Cross. I’m a Criss Cross Dresser. I use my re-creation-al hermaphroditic body to full effect. If I turn up the volume Blue Vulva emerges, or maybe tonight I let Tess Tickle take center stage, but most often I’m just being Del. A herm who has always loved glitz, glamour, shaving foam, a sharp razor and as many tutus as I can afford.

from del lagrace volcano via the fabulous jonathan

oh wow. librarything is exciting. and look, i even found out how to access this blog again!