Coulrophobia Détournement Double (with Betty Wut)

The rules by which she and I will each construct a détourned video on the same theme:

1. Video must be accompanied by any version of "Send in the Clowns," legally purchased from Google Play,  iTunes, AmazonMP3,   eMusic .
2. Can include audio from other clips (of no longer than :30) but the total work cannot exceed the run-time of the selected song.
3. Must include some portion of the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2nK_qmvJ7A, but each clip can be no more than :30 in run-time before transitioning to another.
4. Can include video from other clips found only on YouTube, but each can be no more than :30 before transitioning to another.
5. Finished work must be uploaded for public view on YouTube with their standard license selected and a purchase link back to the song included.

If anyone else is reading and wants to participate, please do! I would love to see what you come up with and post links to your work on YouTube.

The House of Usher

The ego is an exitless, windowless room in which I can move about freely, to a point. I have built it brick by brick through a million interactions over time. Each brick is a response: to my environment, to my fears, to threats, to education, to discourse, to beauty and ugliness, to prop up my own failings.

It's a room of my own construction, built not just to contain my self but to keep everything else out. No stormy weather, but also no light is admitted, no fresh air. I've been in the room so long that I no longer notice that it's there and I no longer remember what is outside... or what's within, for that matter. I just assume it is and always has been.

This understanding of the ego as a room is what allows me to analyze my self. It's apart from me, contains me, but also limits and constricts me. It is the I that thinks about me.

It is only when I move closely to the walls, and discover their limits, that I begin to see fissures. There are cracks that I suddenly find my self digging into with bare hands. There are loose bricks that, with a gentle push, fall away from the wall, letting in beams of light that expose other loose bricks and fractures.

Once I've started the process of demolition, it's easy to second-guess my self. Destroying my protective space admits risk. Is the risk worth it? Will the whole thing fall on my head and destroy me with it?

But, the more light I admit and can see the contents of the room, I see that the ego is not a room that contains me. It is me. The room itself is empty. If I am the room, then I am destroyed when it is destroyed, and doesn't that frighten me?

Only if I believe the room is all there is of me. What if I'm not just the room, but the house the room is in? And the neighborhood the house is in. The city that the neighborhood is in. The state that the city is in. The nation that the state is in. The continent that the nation is in. The planet that the continent is in... If I am everything, then I am no one thing.

The ego is a House of Usher that, with some work, crumbles under its own weight.  With its destruction, the illusions of my self as both contents and container are shattered.

The thing that I have learned to call me is but a tiny light particle in a vast, fiery sun that, once contained by the ego I built, has come to believe that it is something else.

I am the room. I am the cracks. I'm the darkness of the room and the light entering through the cracks. The foundation of the house. The smoke of its chimney. The air into which the smoke rises.

If I can just eliminate me, I could be so much more.

Tony

Sunday, December 3, 1995 1:36 a.m.

I drink at Jeff's last night after band practice for Aster. We've all had a few and A_____ says she's taking Tony home, asks me to ride with them. I accept, because I'm a bit bored and there is always the prospect that A_____ has weed. She does. The three of us enjoy a joint, each other's company, and the chilly night drive to Tony's place.  She parks and they get out for a lengthy goodbye kiss in his driveway.  Spotlighted by the car's headlights, I can see steam curling up from their nostrils, which causes me to look away. When they break apart, I get out of the car to wish Tony goodnight and move to the front seat for the ride back to my place. I start to hug him and say goodbye, but only get a couple of words out before Tony's mouth is on mine in a full-on kiss that lasts a couple of minutes. A_____ is already back in the car and, although I assume the headlights are now on us and it's our warm breath dancing out of our nostrils, I am not conscious of any of this. There is only my friend, Tony.

It's bold and unexpected, but this isn't a kiss of seduction or even curiosity. It's not a kiss that's intended to lead anywhere else. It isn't a delirious, drug-induced, out-of-your-mind kiss. Though it isn't close-mouthed, there are no exploring tongues or inadvertent clanking of teeth. It's not particularly wet or aggressive. There are no passionate grunts and it is not accompanied by roaming hands. It's something spontaneous and beautiful and reflective of his unique, loving nature. It's not something friends, even close ones, do; however, now I am not so sure that I understand why friends don't. It's an act of happiness and presence without self-consciousness.

"Your breath tastes like smoke," he laughs as he pulls away and walks to the porch.

"You kiss pretty good. For a drummer," is my retort.

Musical Détournement II

I've belabored over my second Musical Détournement for sleepless night after sleepless night and I am still only halfway through a 5 minute 45 second song. This one is a video rumination on phallic fears, both rational and irrational.

I'm a man obsessed and the slow progress is driving me mad.

Squirrels

Wednesday, September 27, 1995 3:53 p.m.

Every day since moving here, I have spent part of the day on our deck, staring out into the now yellowed and browned wilderness that is our backyard. I idly smoke (Chesterfield, filter-less) as the squirrels submit to their compulsion to harvest walnuts. Why are they cursed with such diligence, with the need to gnaw at and remove the green nut encasements from the branches of these trees? As autumn dies into winter, the nuts will all fall to the ground anyway, where the squirrels could make quick work of gathering them.  Instead, the rodent workaholics run the vast network of branches and labor to prematurely pluck the nuts, chew open the green outer shells, and store away the meats found within.

Maybe they know that winter sometimes comes too soon and, if they were to wait, snow might enshroud their fallen foods, leaving them to starve. Or, maybe they are already beginning to feel the siren-like pull of hibernation, tugging at their instincts, their collective unconscious, and know that they must get the work done before they can sleep. Whatever the case, it makes me restless to know that the world is hard at work while I lie in wait for the walnuts to ripen and fall in their own time.

Do squirrels even hibernate? Greedy bastards.

Public Privates

Stirred up by the lint I received in the mail today

Sunday, October 15, 1995 11:53 p.m.

Life at the Saloondromat

I am working in a laundromat. A laundromat that is also a bar. That is also a concert venue. I clean blankets of lint out of industrial size dryers. I make change. I sweep up dunes of powdered laundry detergent from the floors. I watch a lot of television. Write.

Sudsy Malone's is where my rock and roll lifestyle (as Fei calls it, tongue-in-cheek) has led me. A couple of nights a week, I sit at the back door and baby-sit the washing machines while mostly obnoxious bands scream on stage up front. Occasionally, I pour a few drinks. Occasionally, I check ID's and stamp hands. Occasionally, maybe I do live the rock and roll lifestyle.

Like maybe tonight. Hope Nicholls, formerly from Fetchin' Bones, and now frontlining SugarSmack, gave me a Twizzler, accompanied by a charming, gap-toothed smile. The red licorice twist was, in fact, the best tip I had received all night.

I have to be back here at 7 a.m. so I can't stay for her show. Is that rude? To accept candy from a stranger and then slide out the back door while they're doing soundcheck? What exactly does rock and roll lifestyle etiquette dictate on such an occasion? Am I really expected to stay? I mean, it's not like I did a line of her coke or anything.

I'm a late adopter in this case, but...

I used Instragram for the first time today for the Public Privates project. It is the second in a series of photographs showing the progress of cleaning my bedroom, my own private space.

1977 Filter.

Bionic Guānyīn - Musical Détournement I

Please watch my musical video rumination on the construction of gender in media and technology.

The Soup

My friends are funny. 1:23.

Social Media and Participatory Culture online class for Summer 2013

Here's the initial description for a new course I am developing and have the green light to offer through distance-learning this summer:

For the month of June 2012, Facebook had one trillion page views with 870 million unique visitors, or nearly 47% of all Web users. It is clear that social media is not just a fad that indulges our narcissistic and voyeuristic pleasures, but a powerful communication tool. This course explores the reach and potential of various social media channels from multiple perspectives. We will look at the conventional use of social media in marketing, but also as forms of individual expression and social group communication. We will also examine the place of social media in a larger participatory culture of reality TV and user-generated content.

And, in true social-media-crowd-sourcing fashion, I'd like anyone and everyone's input. Let me know your ideas, resources, projects...

Freddy's show

Please see my roommate's show at NKU's galleries. Not just because we worked really hard on these cards, but because Freddy paints real good.

The New Gay Marriage Map

Post-election social cartography:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/11/updated-map-new-state-marriage-equality-america

Washington is no longer a state in which "ceci est un mariage parce que vous l'avez fait ailleurs."

Next two projects

My next two projects tread more of Gonzalez-Torres' well-worn ground.

The first one will be a series of very private communications shared very publicly through social media.

By moving our private communications messages and images, those we issue everyday and those we issue not so often, to public communications channels, I am adapting another of Gonzalez-Torres' techniques, revealing the permeability of barriers between the public and private spheres. He did so by projecting Foucault into the AIDS era.

I won't send every message through public channels, just here and there.

Will making very private communications public help me to live an authentic life?

The second is to appropriate his word-portraits and use Facebook to install them.

My Day at the Movies: The Man with the Iron Fists

8 hours, a full work day, at the cinema seeing the same mediocre film again and again. The crowd for each showing is slightly larger than the last. It's the same 1 hour 36 minute spectacle again and again, preceded by the same 20 minutes of spectacular movie marketing, again and again. And in-between an endless loop of commercials. The long-standing tradition of the no-talking announcement has become no talking/texting/chatting/social networking, and is, in fact, a commercial for a cell phone carrier that wants you to do all of those things. Just not during the film. Ostensibly. Even some of the commercials have been crowd-sourced, sweepstaked, contest-won, as if to say: "Social media isn't replacing film. YOU can be a part of the cinema experience. Or, at least the Sprite commercial before the trailers."

Thousands of cubic feet of unused heterotopic space dwarf the human occupants, who are there to be entertained out of their lives. The trailers begin, lights dimming only slightly.

Movie 43. A Haunted House. Gangster Squad. Carrie. Mama. Markie Mark. Tarantino. DiCaprio.

The similarity in duration and appearance to a workday is no coincidence. Four screenings of The Man with the Iron Fists, two coffee breaks, and an hour lunch. A waste of time? Perhaps, if we determine the value of time based on its conventional use as a measure of labor, as the dollar's alter ego. But a day, a whole workday's worth of time, thrown to the pursuit of leisure... could that really be a waste?

The better question is: "Is it really leisure to which we devote our salaried time when we immerse ourselves in the mediated experience?"

Cinematic leisure time does not come without its cost. We replace hours that could be spent "earning a living" by paying for hours of entertainment. The current value of human life in the U.S., determined by its value to labor, is, at minimum, $7.50 an hour. The human body at leisure, then, is worth negative $7.50 an hour. Rest begins with an economic deficit: were we working, we would at least break even. Then there is the monetary cost of the entertainment. First showing: $6.50. Second showing: $8.50. Third and fourth showings: $10.50. The hourly cost for eight hours of cinematic entertainment averages $4.50. The experience, then, costs us $12.00 an hour, at minimum. I manage to abstain from concessions during the films, but the bottled waters, dried apple chips, tubs of soda, Sno-caps, fried chicken strips, and popcorn raise the cost exponentially. Lunch and coffee are not provided, so those costs might also be included.

And what do I get for my $12+ an hour? An experience much like that of watching someone else play a kung-fu videogame for an hour and a half while you wait your turn. A turn that never comes. Fights that showcase unique weapons and special moves, punctuated by a series of cutscenes that barely attempt to string the fights together. Am I really at leisure, sitting and allowing the mediated experience to work on me? Were I watching this film at a drive-in, I would say that a bandit slowly siphons time from my tank while I sit, unmoving at the wheel. The mediated experience is a simulacrum, an imposter of authentic experience, a time bandit.

My roommate, Freddy, has joined me for the first showing: an unwitting co-worker in this labor. Our shared social experience consists of sitting quietly in the dark next to one another for almost two hours. An occasional chuckle can be heard by the other. We wait until the credits end and the lights come up to speak and then only to concur that it's lunchtime. At lunch, we discuss the film only cursorily (shoptalk) before moving on to friends, current events in our lives, and projects on which we are working. Lunch runs long, but I don't care about being late getting back to work, midway through the second screening. It's the one little consolation for many of us-- to steal an extra 15 minutes of leisure time from the workday.  Others of us, though, must clock in and out, time being rigidly supervised and rationed. We risk our means of making a living if we steal or misplace the time that belongs to labor. The time that labor has seized from us.

Will this workday never end? Caffeine consumed during the two brief breaks spent at a nearby Starbucks makes me antsy to leave. I've lost all productivity. By the fourth showing, I'm checking the time every ten minutes or so, disregarding the-no-cell-phone-use announcement. This draws the attention and silent disapproval of other isolated workers in the theater as they notice the glow of time-checking. Or perhaps the disapproval is because the glow provides enough light for them to see the yellow legal pad in my lap. It's clear to them that I've been disregarding my work responsibility-- to allow myself to be absorbed into the story-- and wasting company time. I've been playing when I should have been hard at work. On my leisure time.

My Day at the Movies truly was an attempt at play, masquerading as leisure, which is nothing more than labor in camouflage. Yet, don't think me terribly enlightened or free from the effects of this repressive system. Most of the day I was worried about what I should be doing instead: grading papers, working at my "serious" academic writing, designing a logo for a conference, researching curriculum for a new program at school. In this case, spectacular time did not do its work; it did not wield enough power to distract me from my own work. To delude me into believing that I am not at work even while at leisure.

But, as Lucy Liu's Madame Blossom in the film tells her prostitutes: "The thing about power is that it belongs to no one... until it is seized... seized by sex, or violence, or gold." 

The film had plenty of all three, yet, in the face of repetition, its power was reduced further with each iteration. "No wonder the mediated experience loses the power to delude," one might argue, "when you sit through the same film four times in a row. It's boredom that brings back thoughts of work."  I would argue that playing the same game but with four different mainstream films would have the same effect. Even costumed as four different films, they would rehash the same mediocre mediated experience again and again. One need only look at the trailers for films mentioned above to see this: a parody of the Paranormal Activity films, the fourth of which is currently in theaters; a remake of the film adaptation of a Stephen King novel; Tarantino's homage to the spaghetti western, with a dash of plantation slavery, oddly reminiscent of the origin story of The Man with the Iron Fists, which, in itself, is an ode to classic kung fu films.

Why do we continue to settle for the same mediated experience? How do we escape the economy of leisure? Is time ever truly our own?

Herbert Marcuse wrote in Eros and Civilization: "Play is unproductive and useless precisely because it cancels the repressive and exploitative traits of labor and leisure; it 'just plays' with reality" (195). 

True play, disregarding time as the measure of anything, could be the antidote to labor. And to the simulacra of leisure.

A Day at the Movies

I am reminded of a day, when I was about 20 years old, that my church young adult group at that time had a Day at the Movies. We, as a group, spent the whole day at a second-run theater in Louisville, watching four different films. It was an incredible experience. I don't even remember the movies except for the last one, Madonna: Truth or Dare. Yep. A church group field trip and we're watching Madonna simulate oral sex on a bottle. No wonder my views on religion are so fucked up.

Will cinema and the whole social film-viewing experience survive the threat of interactive and social media? The advent of television took a huge bite out of the film audience. How much is left? And will we even want to see what remains? Visit your cinema before it's dead. Even the chains are not immortal:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loews_Cineplex_Entertainment

AMC buys Loews. A Chinese firm buys AMC:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/china-wanda-group-amc-theatres-renovations-367774

"More so, we are enthusiastic about combining AMC’s leadership in the U.S. with Wanda’s leadership in China, the world’s fastest-growing market."

Never mind their human and civil rights abuses. Let's eat some popcorn. While watching a film set in the world's fastest-growing market. Again and again.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/88130534@N06/8149228967/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/88130534@N06/8149234219/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/88130534@N06/8149237197/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/88130534@N06/8149240483/

The Precepts

Takes me two and a half years to commit to the third precept, and one evening to commit to the fifth.

Sexual Taxonomy

I'm so glad you asked these questions. They're not just questions about sexuality, but questions about semantics and taxonomy-- all of which are some of my favorite subjects! Let's parse them.

First, let me say that the "G" in my ad, describing myself as "GWM," stands for "generous" and doesn't speak to my sexuality at all. It is a natural assumption that the "G" would mean gay, for a number of reasons:

1. The ad, although posted in the Gigs category of Craigslist, is clothed in the form of a personals ad and so, based on this taxonomy, we apply a set of assumptions particular to personals ads in determining meaning.
2. The presence of the word "straight" in the headline of the ad influences how we read the rest of the ad. Would one really feel the need to use that word unless one needed to set it apart from "the other." The same might also be said for the "W."
3. The letters "GWM" appear in the same sentence as the letters "SWM," another convention of personals ads, and seem to be set in opposition to them.
4. The project draws attention to the issues surrounding same-sex marriage, which is another cue that would lead one to read "G" as gay.
5. Subsequent information might be used to assign meaning retrospectively to this statement. I recently denied that the project was about gay marriage but said that it was, instead, about opposite-sexual-orientation marriage.

We make assumptions based on categories of convenience, applying the characteristics of the category to those individuals who appear, to us, to fit the category. It's a form of shorthand for knowledge, and, while labeling is a natural inclination for humans, not always accurate or fair.

So the question about my sexual orientation still stands.  My question, in response, is: "Who gets to determine it and how?" Is the label based on what someone else says (or speculates without saying) I am?  If so, I might be gay in the sense of "homosexual" or in the sense of "weird, bad, stupid" in the eyes of those who wield the word in that way. 

If the intended sense is "homosexual," is the label based on some particular social/medical/psychological definition? Am I gay if I have sexual contact exclusively with members of the same sex? 

If not exclusively, then does the label gay still stand? Or would I then be deposited into the category, bisexual?

If the social/medical/psychological definition is the one given the most weight, would it still apply to me even though I have been celibate for almost three years? Can someone be both nonsexual and gay? If not, then is someone gay only when engaged in a sexual act, and then not gay when not having sex?

Or, is the definition based on attraction, rather than sexual activity? Then, again, the question of exclusivity comes into play. Does the attraction have to be sexual, lead to a sexual feeling? Or can the attraction just be an appreciation of beauty?

Is the label based on self-identification. If I were to exclusively have sexual contact with members of the same sex, but call myself straight, does that make me straight or is that just lying? What if it isn't so much a lie as just something I say without meaning it? What if it's just bullshit, as so much that is said turns out to be?

Could marriage be a similarly clouded concept? Clouded by some people claiming the authority to define something that is not theirs to label. Is there a legal definition of sexual orientation? Is there a legal definition of attraction? Is there a legal definition of love? 

Even so, are these definitions the same as religious definitions? And, if so, which religion's definition is the one that stands? Is it the religion of the majority? The religion of the state? Isn't it strange that America was colonized by the Puritans, a people seeking to free themselves from a religion that attempted to define the limits of marriage? Doesn't freedom of religion also include freedom from the religious definitions of others?

There is no question as to my sexual orientation because my sexual orientation is not yours to question. You do not have the authority to do so. At most, you can speculate, accuse, condemn.

Now please don't get me started on how you have quantified sexual orientation, dividing it into degrees of gayness and straightness.

This just in

Whoa, wait a minute. Who said anything about gay marriage? What I am proposing is opposite-sexual-orientation marriage.  And I propose it because it already exists and has for centuries. Either to hide their sexual orientation, to produce children, to take advantage of the socio-politico-economic advantages of marriage, or just because it was what was expected of them, gay men and women have been marrying straight people since recorded history.

Same-sex marriage does not open the door for these "abuses" of marriage. The door, if there ever was one, was wrenched off its hinges and splintered into a billion pieces by opposite-sex marriage long ago. If these are "abuses" of marriage, then they are abuses that are irrespective of the gender and sexuality of those involved.  They seem, to me, more like "reasons" and they are reasons that already exist. Security. Companionship. Working together to make the world a better place for yourself and others.

Number 2

If I was trying to take advantage of the government, I would have placed an ad asking for someone to form a corporation with me.

And only one response to the ad so far

Not unless divorce is already on the horizon, and even then I don't want to be in the middle of it. Again. My father and his family were Mormons, but they didn't practice polygamy and it isn't in my genes. Good luck to you and your family. I hope you get whatever you need to take care of them.