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Unrehearsed Beauty (1998)
Families Are Formed Through Copulation (2007)
Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed (2010)
Polyamorous Love Song (2014)
Rich and Poor (2016)
Authenticity Is A Feeling (2018)
Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim (2024)
The World Ends in Our Desires (2027)
Desire Without Expectation (2030)
(Man makes plans, God laughs.)
[Also, I'm gradually realizing that the current still-in-progress trilogy - Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, The World Ends in Our Desires, Desire Without Expectation - is all loosely based around questions concerning the desire for utopia.]
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October 29, 2020
October 24, 2020
Michael Eddy Quote
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One could argue, like Maus above, that the antidote to irony is actually authenticity. If the self-reflexivity I called for above meant authentic presence, maybe we could indeed eliminate the risk of artificiality in the vague appropriation? In a performance of Jacob Wren’s recent book Authenticity Is A Feeling, which recounts the history of PME-ART, the performance group he has headed for twenty years, Wren explained that his ultimate goal and what keeps him going is work that strips away the baroque theatricality of most performance art (like scripts, affectations, etc.). It may be odd to finish this essay on an example that seems to eschew the scaled plating of appropriation for some type of biographical vulnerability. But while I found Wren’s performance affecting, I also could not help finding it affected. “In a way this echoed something that had followed us since the beginning of the show: when you are being yourself, when you are trying to bring more of this reality into the performance situation, so many people think that because it is still theatre, taking place onstage everything you’re saying must not be true. Or at least they come expecting fiction, and when it’s so unclear how the things you’re saying match or don’t match this expectation, they can easily become suspicious.” In my suspicions of Wren’s call to “being yourself in a performance situation,” I display the ironic symptoms of so many people. But a few pages later, I get a sense of why I enjoy this suspicion, these symptoms: “I am rewriting history from the perspective of now, because non-fiction is always also a kind of fiction.” Authenticity always also has a kernel of irony, not least when representation is involved. If we hope to find a more productive and just form of appropriation based on authenticity and sincerity, I have a hunch that scenes of self abuse would be necessary to make us feel possessed of our identities; or that dedication to a principle of opacity would firewall errant interpretation; or that it may not be appropriation after all.
- Michael Eddy, Vague Appropriation
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One could argue, like Maus above, that the antidote to irony is actually authenticity. If the self-reflexivity I called for above meant authentic presence, maybe we could indeed eliminate the risk of artificiality in the vague appropriation? In a performance of Jacob Wren’s recent book Authenticity Is A Feeling, which recounts the history of PME-ART, the performance group he has headed for twenty years, Wren explained that his ultimate goal and what keeps him going is work that strips away the baroque theatricality of most performance art (like scripts, affectations, etc.). It may be odd to finish this essay on an example that seems to eschew the scaled plating of appropriation for some type of biographical vulnerability. But while I found Wren’s performance affecting, I also could not help finding it affected. “In a way this echoed something that had followed us since the beginning of the show: when you are being yourself, when you are trying to bring more of this reality into the performance situation, so many people think that because it is still theatre, taking place onstage everything you’re saying must not be true. Or at least they come expecting fiction, and when it’s so unclear how the things you’re saying match or don’t match this expectation, they can easily become suspicious.” In my suspicions of Wren’s call to “being yourself in a performance situation,” I display the ironic symptoms of so many people. But a few pages later, I get a sense of why I enjoy this suspicion, these symptoms: “I am rewriting history from the perspective of now, because non-fiction is always also a kind of fiction.” Authenticity always also has a kernel of irony, not least when representation is involved. If we hope to find a more productive and just form of appropriation based on authenticity and sincerity, I have a hunch that scenes of self abuse would be necessary to make us feel possessed of our identities; or that dedication to a principle of opacity would firewall errant interpretation; or that it may not be appropriation after all.
- Michael Eddy, Vague Appropriation
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October 20, 2020
Karen Tei Yamashita Quote
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By now we understood the joke about the Red Block on Kearny and swimming around in radical alphabet soup – KDP, IWK, WMS, KSW, IHTA, CPA, CCA, EBS. On the face of it, we were all radical activist revolutionaries, and we were all united to defeat a capitalist-imperialist system of greed. We threw ourselves into the concerted work of myriad social and political projects, and we worked our butts off. Our commitment and our passion were irreproachable. We were in these years full-time revolutionaries, and we only thought about the revolution we were building, the fierce resistance to a system that served the few and propertied and wealthy, a social system that had failed our immigrant parents and grandparents, had denied their human rights because of their class and color. We learned to educate ourselves in a literature and culture of resistance, and finding ourselves gathered together at the very center of our Asian communities, we also began to educate ourselves in the practice of that resistance. And that practice gave us experience and power. We were young and powerful, and we were the future.
Well, that was the face of it, because over time, despite our agreed ideals, we came to hate each other. For some strange reason, once we entered one of those four inviting radical doors of the I-Hotel and gave our lives to any one of the projects within, our lives were transformed. Our transformation from individuals into collectives was precisely the thing that gave us power, but power has many sides to it, especially the power of a group. Feeling power, wielding power, demonstrating power. A group could act as a single fist or as an open handshake. Well, handshakes were not the tenor of our times. Perhaps it could be said that four mighty fists emerged from four doors to confront a common enemy, to fight in concert the foes of the I-Hotel, but we admit that very often the left fists did not follow the right fists, the punches did not follow the hooks and jabs; we could not agree on our tactics and strategies, and outside the safety of our doors, we avoided or passed each other in hostility, rushing off to our separate tactics and strategies.
We could blame this all on Lenin and Mao, the two leaders whose theory and practice had led to real revolutions, to the overturning of old social structures, and we were avid readers and interpreters of their theories and practices. They were our heroes. We thought they had realized our dreams. Thus we may have followed their principles of democratic-centralism, meaning in theory that we should all participate in our arguments but finally follow in the fierce unity of our majority decision. And we also believed that our arguments were necessary to our collective struggle, that each group was pursuing a line of thinking that would eventually be proven or disproven in practice, that at the end of our struggle, we would finally unite in common unity. Our struggles would make us stronger, more powerful. But we were young and inexperienced, and our fighting was very real, our ideas held just under the tender surface of our new skin and flared in our nostrils. We wanted to be right. We wanted to win.
After we had worked together for our beliefs in twenty-four-hour days without rest, bonded ourselves to each other through the inner struggles of self-criticism within our groups, confessed our social sins to our brother- and sisterhoods, and lost our individual selves to our collective purpose, we finally could only be with each other. And we found ourselves fighting about if we should collude with the so-called system and its elected liberal officials, if our struggle should be defined as working with the working class or our oppressed Asian communities, if this or that hotel tenant was an advanced worker, if our loyalties were with the PRC or the USSR, if any of us were reformists, revisionists, or sellouts, if our art and writing must always have political purpose, and we were very sure that depending on our correct analysis of these definitions, we could then make decisions to act that would be ultimately unbeatable. But however we may have accounted for our thinking and our actions in these years, this was how we found and spent our youth.
– Karen Tei Yamashita, I Hotel
.
By now we understood the joke about the Red Block on Kearny and swimming around in radical alphabet soup – KDP, IWK, WMS, KSW, IHTA, CPA, CCA, EBS. On the face of it, we were all radical activist revolutionaries, and we were all united to defeat a capitalist-imperialist system of greed. We threw ourselves into the concerted work of myriad social and political projects, and we worked our butts off. Our commitment and our passion were irreproachable. We were in these years full-time revolutionaries, and we only thought about the revolution we were building, the fierce resistance to a system that served the few and propertied and wealthy, a social system that had failed our immigrant parents and grandparents, had denied their human rights because of their class and color. We learned to educate ourselves in a literature and culture of resistance, and finding ourselves gathered together at the very center of our Asian communities, we also began to educate ourselves in the practice of that resistance. And that practice gave us experience and power. We were young and powerful, and we were the future.
Well, that was the face of it, because over time, despite our agreed ideals, we came to hate each other. For some strange reason, once we entered one of those four inviting radical doors of the I-Hotel and gave our lives to any one of the projects within, our lives were transformed. Our transformation from individuals into collectives was precisely the thing that gave us power, but power has many sides to it, especially the power of a group. Feeling power, wielding power, demonstrating power. A group could act as a single fist or as an open handshake. Well, handshakes were not the tenor of our times. Perhaps it could be said that four mighty fists emerged from four doors to confront a common enemy, to fight in concert the foes of the I-Hotel, but we admit that very often the left fists did not follow the right fists, the punches did not follow the hooks and jabs; we could not agree on our tactics and strategies, and outside the safety of our doors, we avoided or passed each other in hostility, rushing off to our separate tactics and strategies.
We could blame this all on Lenin and Mao, the two leaders whose theory and practice had led to real revolutions, to the overturning of old social structures, and we were avid readers and interpreters of their theories and practices. They were our heroes. We thought they had realized our dreams. Thus we may have followed their principles of democratic-centralism, meaning in theory that we should all participate in our arguments but finally follow in the fierce unity of our majority decision. And we also believed that our arguments were necessary to our collective struggle, that each group was pursuing a line of thinking that would eventually be proven or disproven in practice, that at the end of our struggle, we would finally unite in common unity. Our struggles would make us stronger, more powerful. But we were young and inexperienced, and our fighting was very real, our ideas held just under the tender surface of our new skin and flared in our nostrils. We wanted to be right. We wanted to win.
After we had worked together for our beliefs in twenty-four-hour days without rest, bonded ourselves to each other through the inner struggles of self-criticism within our groups, confessed our social sins to our brother- and sisterhoods, and lost our individual selves to our collective purpose, we finally could only be with each other. And we found ourselves fighting about if we should collude with the so-called system and its elected liberal officials, if our struggle should be defined as working with the working class or our oppressed Asian communities, if this or that hotel tenant was an advanced worker, if our loyalties were with the PRC or the USSR, if any of us were reformists, revisionists, or sellouts, if our art and writing must always have political purpose, and we were very sure that depending on our correct analysis of these definitions, we could then make decisions to act that would be ultimately unbeatable. But however we may have accounted for our thinking and our actions in these years, this was how we found and spent our youth.
– Karen Tei Yamashita, I Hotel
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October 14, 2020
Six Paul Valéry Quotes
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The path that leads from a confused idea to a clear idea is not made of ideas.
God made everything out of nothing, but the nothing shows through.
The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs that properly concern them.
Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
At times I think, and at times I am.
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The path that leads from a confused idea to a clear idea is not made of ideas.
God made everything out of nothing, but the nothing shows through.
The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs that properly concern them.
Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
At times I think, and at times I am.
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