Quotes

Mar 24 2014
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PERFORMANCE, quotes

A critic’s code of practice

Just to remind us all that this is not exactly unexamined territory:

“Theatre is among the most interactive of the performing arts. As privileged spectators, theatre critics share with audiences and performers the same time and space, the same individual and collective stimuli, the same immediate and long-term experiences. As working theatre commentators, we seek in our individual ways to articulate these interactions as a frame for discussion and as a meaningful part of the interpretation and significance of theatrical performance. The International Association of Theatre Critics therefore urges its members worldwide to accept as an agreed starting point the core professional guidelines articulated in this document.

1. As writers and thinkers in the media and/or as scholars connected to various branches of academic discourse, theatre critics should always remain aware of normative professional practices, respect artistic and intellectual freedom, and should write in what they believe to be the best interests of the ideals of the art of theatre.
2. Theatre critics should recognize that their own imaginative experience and knowledge is often limited and should be open to new ideas, forms, styles and practice.
3. Theatre critics should speak truthfully and appropriately while respecting the personal dignity of the artists to whom they are responding.
4. Theatre critics should be open-minded and reveal (as appropriate) prejudices – both artistic and personal – as part of their work.
5. Theatre critics should have as one of their goals a desire to motivate discussion of the work.
6. Theatre critics should strive to come to the theatrical performance in their best physical and mental condition, and should remain alert throughout the performance.
7. Theatre critics should try to describe, analyze, and evaluate the work as precisely and specifically as possible, supporting their remarks with concrete examples.
8. Theatre critics should make every possible effort to avoid external pressures and controls, including personal favours and financial enticements.
9. Theatre critics should make every possible effort to avoid situations which are or which can be perceived to be conflicts of interest by declining to review any production with which they are personally connected or by serving on juries with which they are personally connected.
10. Theatre critics should not do anything that would bring into disrepute their profession or practice, their own integrity or that of the art of the theatre.”

IATC.org

A critic’s code of practice

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Mar 26 2013
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LITERATURE, quotes

A Letter to a Young Poet

And for heaven’s sake, publish nothing before you are thirty.

— “A Letter to a Young Poet,” The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, Virginia Woolf

A Letter to a Young Poet

Feb 02 2012
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brief notes, CITIES, quotes

Groups can be creative too.

Basically, what I learned from Japan is that creativity isn’t solely the domain of individual artists or inventors. Groups can be creative too. It took me a while to realise this, but when I did it made me happy, because it resolved an apparent conflict between two of the things I hold most dear: collectivism and creativity. I think you can say that Japan is capable of producing both the cliches of the manga industry and the originality of someone like Yuichi Yokoyama, whose quirky abstract mangas depend for their impact on twisting the conventions of mainstream manga. It’s not like Yokoyama defies manga, or appears courtesy of divine lightning.

– Momus, The Rumpus Interview

This feeds into a number of conversations I’ve been having recently, through which I have unearthed the roots of my own understanding of a meaningful life in the diet of socialist-approved children’s books my generation grew up on in Croatia; books in which gangs of smart children come together and make awesome things come through, generally accompanied by either a complete disinterest, or active sabotage, of adults (Vlak u snijegu, Družba Pere Kvržice, Junaci Pavlove ulice, Emil i detektivi, Blizanke, Koko i…). This, to me, ties directly to the fact that the most interesting initiatives in art, politics and design in Central Europe (not merely post-socialist, but all of Central Europe) are collective pursuits (art, design and curatorial collectives, magazines, festivals, movements, protests), as well as to the fact that contemporary young Australia is woeful in all of these categories. Coming together to work on a bold, brave project is shrouded in a kind of sublime poetry over there. Here, people shudder and say I hate group work, and ‘arts management’ is understood as the art of midwifery for many individual little geniuses.

Groups can be creative too.

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Jan 24 2012
LITERATURE, quotes

Foreign Objects

Foreign Objects
Bruce Covey

Hemlock is high in soluble fiber.
A self-directed bullet contains no fatty acids.
Asphyxiation eliminates 2nd-hand smoke.
Carbon Monoxide is nitrate-free.

Sleeping pills reduce the body’s need for sugar.
A blow from a sword is high in iron.
Hanging flushes the body of its toxins.
Cyanide cleanses potentially harmful resins.

Bleach cuts cholesterol levels.
Jumping simulates weightlessness.
Drowning ensures hydration.
Smoking improves eyesight.

An oncoming train is filled
With many fruits and vegetables.
Running a car into a tree reduces
The need for red meat consumption.

Foreign Objects

Dec 17 2011
LITERATURE, quotes

Holy men of our time

Bismarck’s epigram about diplomacy and sausage applies also to the way we Americans seem to feel about professional athletes. We revere athletic excellence, competitive success. And it’s more than attention we pay; we vote with our wallets. We’ll spend large sums to watch a truly great athlete; we’ll reward him with celebrity and adulation and will even go so far as to buy products and services he endorses.

But we prefer not to countenance the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so good at one particular thing. Oh, we’ll pay lip service to these sacrifices – we’ll invoke luck clichés about the lonely heroism of Olympic athletes, the pain and analgesia of football, the early rising and hours of practice and restricted diets, the privations, the prefight celibacy, etc. But the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up bovine hormones until they collapse and explode. We prefer not to consider the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews, or to imagine what impoverishments in one’s mental life would allow people actually to think in the simplistic way great athletes seem to think. Note the way “up-close and personal profiles” of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life – outside interests and activities, charities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what’s obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It’s farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one pursuit. An almost ascetic focus. 42 A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to their one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child’s world, is very serious and very small.

42 Sex- and substance-issues notwithstanding, professional athletes are in many ways our culture’s holy men: they give themselves over to a pursuit, endure great privation and pain to actualize themselves at it, and enjoy a relationship to perfection that we admire and reward (the monk’s begging bowl, the RBI-guru’s eight-figure contract) and love to watch even though we have no inclination to walk that road ourselves. In other words they do it “for” us, sacrifice themselves for our (we imagine) redemption.

David Foster Wallace, ‘Tennis player Michael Joyce’s professional artistry as a paradigm of certain stuff about choice, freedom, limitation, joy, grotesquerie, and human completeness’, in A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again, p.237

Holy men of our time

Dec 14 2011
CITIES

Douglas Rushkoff: How I Became an Enemy of the People

I had gotten mugged in front of my rental apartment—on Christmas Eve, no less—and had posted the time and location of my mugging to the Park Slope Parents list, a generally helpful, crunchy, and supportive message board for people raising kids in that section of Brooklyn and beyond. Within an hour, my email inbox was filling with messages from concerned neighbors. Scratch that: angry neighbors.

They wanted to know exactly why I had posted the exact location where the mugging had taken place. Didn’t I realize what this could do to their property values? No, these folks had no immediate plans to sell their homes—yet they were still more considered with the short-term asset value of their real estate than they were the long-term experiential value of their neighborhood!

I had already begun my latest book, an alternative history of the development of corporations, in which I hoped to warn people about the precarious position of our economy and the society we had built according to its very tilted ideas about debt. But this episode changed my focus entirely: I became less concerned with the way corporations acted on us than the way we had come to act like corporations, ourselves.

The reaction of a handful of Park Slope residents to a crime in their neighborhood had less to do with eradicating crime than the episode’s ability to detract from the district’s precious brand. My effort to analyze the impact of gentrification and displacement on the relationship between rich and poor was swiftly reframed as the racist outrage of a weak-kneed liberal. Or, as New York magazine put it in their headline, “Are the writers leaving Brooklyn?”

Of course, none of this happened because Park Slope’s residents or the many who jumped on the bandwagon of outrage were bad people. This was the height of a speculative frenzy, remember, when overleveraged homeowners were depending on ever-increasing prices to refinance mortgages that they would otherwise be unable to pay. Like corporations, they were responding not to their real needs or their neighborhood’s but their debt structures. In such a situation, it was the only way for humans to respond. But it wasn’t the most human response.

Read the whole article here.

Douglas Rushkoff: How I Became an Enemy of the People

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Dec 04 2011
brief notes, CITIES

Cruel, but kind

Cruel but kind – a precise description of one element in the pervasive ambivalence of the national character. Here also are vitality, energy, strength, and optimism in one’s own ability, yet indolence, carelessness, the ‘she’ll do, mate’ attitude to the job to be done. Here is insistence on the freedom of the individual, yet resigned acceptance of social restrictions and censorship narrower than in almost any other democratic country in the world. Here is love of justice and devotion to law and order, yet the persistent habit of crowds to stone the umpire and trip the policeman in the course of duty. Here is preoccupation with material things – note, for example, the hospitals: better for a broken leg than a mental deviation – yet impatience with polish and precision in material things. The Australian is forcefully loquacious, until the moment of expressing any emotion. He is aggressively committed to equality and equal opportunity for all men, except for Black Australians. He has high assurance in anything he does combined with a gnawing lack of confidence in anything he thinks.

Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness, first ed. 1960

Cruel, but kind

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Dec 04 2011
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brief notes, CITIES

The Australian Ugliness

The ugliness I mean is skin deep. If the visitor to Australia fails to notice it immediately, fails to respond to the surfeit of colour, the love of advertisements, the dreadful language, the ladylike euphemisms outside public lavatory doors, the technical competence by the almost uncanny misjudgement in floral arrangements, or if he thinks that things of this sort are too trivial to dwell on, then he is unlikely to enjoy modern Australia. For the things that make Australian people, society and culture in some way different from others in the modern world are only skin deep. But skin is as important as its admirers like to make it, and Australians make much of it. This is a country of many colourful, patterned, plastic veneers, of brick-veneer villas, and the White Australia Policy.

Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness, first paragraph in the book

The Australian Ugliness

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Nov 28 2011
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brief notes

Doing things the long, hard, stupid way

“Remember this,” says Chang. “Just because we’re a casual restaurant, doesn’t mean we don’t hold ourselves to fine dining standards. We try to do things the right way. That usually means doing things the long, hard, stupid way.”

Doing things the long, hard, stupid way

Aug 29 2011
brief notes

A mental, primary landscape

Everyone must have a city he can call his own, a mental, primary landscape created from the relationship between the self and the city. My city is something I have created, not something given to me by someone else. Each individual continuously acquires, selects, and assimilates territories, mental landscapes, and urban fragments made up of information, ideas, and events, and from those actions arises a new city. One can create such a place or landscape, even though it may be only a temporary habitat.

Eventually, through dialogues, people will get an opportunity to discover what parts of their separate cities they do in fact share. It is then that people will discover that possession by each individual of a city of his or her own provides a more stable foundation for the city as a community.

Fumihiko Maki, Nurturing Dreams

A mental, primary landscape

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