Adventures of Mr. Chris

While I was adventuring in the midwest, I did manage to squeeze a bit of operatic culture into my trip. Well, I’m not sure if a night at the movies really counts as “operatic culture,” but really, who’s counting? For those of you who haven’t already seen the new Les Misérables movie, don’t worry, I’m not going to be giving and spoilers. If you’re not familiar at all with the original Victor Hugo novel, you can learn more here.

Now I’m not a theatre geek like my friends were in high school, and I’ve never been much of a fan of opera, but I do love the French Revolution and partisan politics, so surely that must count for something. But in all honesty, it was a fairly well done production of the original story. The major highlights for me were more to do with the production and direction, and less to do with the stars themselves, who were fine but left much to be desired for a true opera fan–which luckily didn’t phase me much–with the exception of the innkeeper and his wife . Read More

So while enjoying my holiday respite in Cleveland I spent a fair bit of time watching other people’s TV watching habits. During one of those days, my Cleveland suburban friends’ son was watching cartoons, and by chance an episode of the Nickelodeon show Yo Gabba Gabba was playing. By some act of cosmic Doctor Who intervention, given how many possible episodes or segments of episodes that could have aired, the clip that happened to be playing was when one of the female characters named Toodee (who coincidentally is a blue cat-dragon–how awesome is that?!) gets sick and a doctor comes to visit. And like all good kids shows, this inevitable leads to a song and dance routine featuring a special visit by Anthony Bourdain as “Doctor Tony.”  Read More

Meet my new country, the Borderlands of Catastrophism! No seriously, it is my new country, thanks to a fascinating online game called NationStates by Max Barry. In short, the game is an adaptation of his novel called Jennifer Government. Here’s how the general storyline goes:

“The world is run by American corporations; there are no taxes; employees take the last names of the companies they work for; the Police and the NRA are publicly-traded security firms; the government can only investigate crimes it can bill for.

Hack Nike is a Merchandising Officer who discovers an all-new way to sell sneakers. Buy Mitsui is a stockbroker with a death-wish. Billy NRA is finding out that life in a private army isn’t all snappy uniforms and code names. And Jennifer Government, a legendary agent with a barcode tattoo, is a consumer watchdog with a gun.” Read More

In May of this year artist Gabo Guzzo had an installation and series of talks at Banner Repeater in London. The event, called The Geologic Turn, focused on the topic of the Anthropocene. Among other notable people there was Jan Zalaseiwicz, a UK geologist who has been writing about the Anthropocene, and made the following comments:

What we probably need are low carbon pleasures to keep us going in life and art can fulfill at least part of that because you don’t need to jet across the world to gain satisfaction in life, as well as having the basic essentials. I think that is probably not realized enough, that we can be happy sitting in our back garden with poetry or art or whatever rather than transplanting yourself for a month on the other side of the world.

It’s a case not of reducing our expectations but of modifying them so that we can simply use fewer resources. We can’t go back to the Holocene, it’s too late, it’s gone but we can slow down the rate of progress of the Anthropocene through the kinds of things you have suggested. Read More

In this week we turn to the relationship between perception and attention, thinking through some of the ideas of Roland Bartes in Camera Obscura and Cameron Tonkinwise and Karen Pinkus’ Want Not: A Dialogue on Sustainability with Images. Both sets of texts ask us to think about images and their power to influence us or cause some form of affective response. For Barthes, it is about adventure, for Tonkinwise and Pinkus, it is about thinking through how we think–and visualize–sustainability. Read More

Who could ask for a more enticing hook for sci-fi fans than a question like “What forces shape you?” That’s right, Star Wars Identities is coming to town, well, at least a few Canadian ones, and hopes to shed some (psychosocial?) light on that question…

The exhibit attempts to look at questions of modern identity formation through the lens of the much-beloved movie series Star Wars. The event, a combination of pop psychology and science, will be hosted first by the Montreal Science Centre, followed by the Telus World of Science in Edmonton. Unfortunately it appears that the show will not make it to the US, which is a shame, as I would really like to see what this is all about, but can’t really make time to go to Montreal or Edmonton just to see this exhibit. The whole exhibit is shaped around the central question “What forces shape you?” There is even a Rorschach-style video montage that has been produced as promo for the exhibit (see below). Read More

In The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir writes:

“If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through “the eternal feminine,” and if nevertheless we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question: what is a woman?”

What is a Woman? According to Google...

As seen above, these are just a few examples from the top search hits under Google Images for “woman.” What do you notice in relation to de Beauvoir’s piece? What tropes of the woman are reproduced here. Or, we might ask, how is woman visualized, and what does she signify within the visual space of the image? Read More

Some materials to think through in relation to questions of Nazi and Fascist aesthetics, and the influences of German art and politics between WWI and WWII. Reflections on Nazi film propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, Susan Sontag’s critique of her in Fascinating Fascism (1975) and Boris Groys reflections in The Hero Body: Adolf Hitler’s Art Theory on the body in relation to politics, domination, control and visuality. Does BDSM carry a latent fascist sexuality? All this and more!

“What is interesting about art under National Socialism are those features which make it a special variant of totalitarian art. The official art of countries like the Soviet Union and China aims to expound and reinforce a utopian morality. Fascist art displays a utopian aesthetics—that of physical perfection. Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.” – Susan Sontag, Fascinating Fascism Read More