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August 7th, 2011
 | 11:38 pm - Signal Boost: Return of the DDoS
Originally posted by ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=91.7) deathpixie at Signal Boost: Return of the DDoSFor those wanting to know more about the recent DDoS attacks, yes, it looks like it was the Russian government trying to shut down the dissidents again.As I said last time, while it's frustrating not to have access, LJ is a lot more than a social network platform. From the article: "LiveJournal isn’t just a social network. It’s also a platform for organizing civic action. Dozens of network projects and groups mobilize people to solve specific problems — from defending the rights of political prisoners to saving endangered historic architecture in Moscow."So while I know many are considering the move over to Dreamwidth and other such sites, supporting LJ is a way we can help support those who use it for more than a writing/roleplaying/social venue. Also, as a FYI, LJ is giving paid users effected by the outage two weeks of paid time as compensation.
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April 5th, 2011
 | 10:59 am - read, read - v, pp
Fabulous. Jana Perkovic, "an honest recounting of what moving to Australia felt like."
The Sad Truth About Time Travel
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March 30th, 2011
| 12:07 pm - The Democratic Set
“What do you do with difference, in regard to equality? Ignore it, mark it, suppress it, smooth over it?”
Bruce Gladwin, Artistic Director, Back to Back Theatre from an informal talk at Arnolfini, September 2010.
This is a dark space, an auditorium, or rather it can be made dark. The floor, the walls, the curtains, all black. Cables cross the floor, and a camera track; the floor is alive with technology.
A camera on a pyramid of scaffolding is set on the track. It is focussed on the inside of a big, square, plywood crate, mellow with light. Inside the crate, a woman with a plastic bag over her head is vacuuming. She wears the classical costume of Performance Art. We sit on temporary seating behind the camera and watch, waiting our turn in the dark. The camera glides across the floor in ten-second passes from right to left, capturing the microcosm in the crate to a monitor at the side of the room, which reveals without distraction the lighted box: the woodgrain-patterned plywood, glowing, organic, a fine frame; the person, also glowing. Just a person. Just ten seconds of person.
It’s time for the next performer. He had intended to cry, having brought in an onion specially, but doubts whether the image he had in mind can be achieved in the standard ten-second tracking Long Shot. The ingenious guys in the dark – I should call them anti-gremlins, since they make fiddly tech stuff go delightfully right – get busy with the problem while the performer does increasingly brutal things to himself with the onion to get tears to roll down his face. This tender, wistful, melancholic image is projected in huge Close-Up to the back of the box while the face’s owner follows the pass of the camera across it to create his own Live ten seconds.
I’m up next. I take direction like a good’un, I hope, and try to be myself/a performer/not too silly/silly enough/innocent/knowing/vital/ordinary etc. As one does. The image that truly strikes me, reviewing the footage as Rhian rough-edits on his laptop on the fly, is of me waiting in the dark by the side of the crate, catching an edge of light from the side-door into it; breathing, quiet, getting ready to step into the Live space. Into the ten seconds of glowing mellow well-framed precise exposing un-foolable light in the dark.
When all the different sequences are edited together it looks as if the camera is tracking past an infinite series of boxes placed side-by-side, each one inhabited by its animating performer, its genie. Paradoxically, the body functions as soul here, if that’s not too fanciful. There is a lot of play with entrances and exits, the action in one ten-second slot sometimes feeding into the next, sometimes not. There are group actions, solo actions, sequences that continue across many boxes, and, very moving, people simply standing in the box looking out. And people standing in the dark outside the box with their backs to the camera, looking in. Some performances are carefully choreographed, some not: some people have put a lot of planning into their slot, some have turned up and asked: What shall I do now, then? Or, We’ve got an umbrella, can we do something with that?
It is quite difficult without having experienced it, to get a feel for how long ten seconds is – i.e. short. The crew are ingenious, sensitive to the ideas that are brought to them and to the sensibility of those who bring them. Aside from the participatory aspect, there is a further element of play in the editing and sequencing of the episodes, which are stuffed with reminders of the magical beginnings of cinema and its antecedent optical toys like the Zoetrope and Thaumatrope and even....of past ideologies and technologies of seeing and conceiving and controlling, the Camera Obscura, the Panopticon. Apologies again if that’s a bit fanciful but I think practitioners who play in the space between representation, persistence of vision, plain sight and politics cannot help but be fed by such references.
The Democratic Set puts in place an integrating process, it really does produce a democracy of Performance, it creates a frame within which to perceive the equal value of Presence of all bodies as they generate their different styles and motives and intentions and intensities. Watching previous sessions on video helps an observer or potential participant to get this, and is a good way to approach taking part: and participation is the most vital and least technical element of the project. We make it mean something. And it means: Here I am. Here am I. We accumulate, all the I’s accumulate, and become legion and various, and connected – part of a collective.
Present at the session I attended were: Bruce Gladwin, Artistic Director of Back to Back; ensemble member Brian Tilley; videographer, Rhian Hinkley; set wrangler Mark Cuthbertson; and executive producer Alice Nash.
And, thanks to all their efforts, I must say I left happy.
written for InBetween Time and posted to Theatre Bristol Showcase on 26.10.10
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January 19th, 2011
January 18th, 2011
| 02:25 pm - blog maintenance
Fixed the broken links for all tags. No idea why they stopped working.
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September 21st, 2010
| 10:54 pm - hmmm
Your result for The Which Star Trek Species Would You Be? Test ...
Romulan
( Read more... )
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August 10th, 2010
| 12:07 pm - Peggy Shaw
"MUST the inside story: Peggy Shaw in collaboration with Clod Ensemble"
I hadn't heard of Peggy Shaw. She was in her sixties, looking good with it. She looked forceful and forthright, short hair in a sharp cut, wearing a big, square, masculine-looking suit, dark grey. She looked comfortable in it. She had on brown and white two-tone loafers. She had on a white shirt and a scarlet tie which was mic'ed up. Now I know this forceful, forthright unfrilly look has a specific name but I always feel that reduces something - a completeness, an integrity of character - to an attribute, an optional adjective. Where I grew up there were none of those adjectives but there were plenty of forthright women - not wearing the frills there caused comment and still does. Different worlds. I stand to be educated on this world's cultural history.
She talked, she rambled, she riffed. She quoted old songs. She sang and danced. She was husky and disreputable and full of poetry. She swaggered, she swung, she drawled about brawls, she lounged on street corners (set corners) in angular light; acute blocks of shadow making noir with the planes of her face and the seams of her suit. I could smell the cigarette, acrid (no-one was smoking) I could taste the whiskey - no, bourbon - she is from America, no, New York, no, The Bronx?
The suit hung and swung about her like memories. Rough, tender, fierce and sweet, memories hung in the air off her words. Kitchen formica in afternoon sun. Faces, and bodies, and words of friends. Hospital corridors, wild scrub in the city, a steel gate, coffee. More concretely, projected as a backdrop, a slide specimen of intimate tissues, knowledge reduced to data. There was a band playing piano, cello and double bass - cool, quirky, complicated music.
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January 12th, 2010
| 01:08 am - How to be a proper Nigerian woman 28
I'm hoping to wind up here cos 28 posts is quite enough. I'm missing my family and my own bed dreadfully and I want to go home. I was going to talk about the Harmattan, and the budding fruit, and the new greenery in the middle of the dry season, the incredible bounty of the land (I uploaded pictures to illustrate), and the appalling poverty in the midst of plenty. Because I think it's something like 75% of Nigerians, according to UN figures, are officially very very poor, poor enough to go chronically hungry?
( Read more... )
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January 3rd, 2010
| 09:17 pm - How to be a proper Nigerian woman 27
January 3rd 2010
Someone handed a leaflet to J on her way to Mass. I reproduce the text below:
"How PROPHET OBADARE Rose From The Dead
Says I Saw Pastor Bimbo Odukoya In Hell
E.T.A: I should just add that the name Bimbo - Abimbola, born into honour - could scarcely be further away from the UK connotation of that word.
( Read more... )
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December 30th, 2009
| 10:45 am - How to be a proper Nigerian woman 26
December 30
Some months ago, when it looked as if Dad might recover himself quite well, we stood on the main verandah looking at the garden and he couldn’t understand why it was such a mess. I must have been away, he said. Had we had tenants in the house? I said, where do you think you’ve been? He said, well, I was posted to Owerri. And then I was in London for a time.
Both of these were before I was born, early fifties.
The garden is looking much better now, or , as people have been saying, The yard is tidy (there is still a tendency to hack everything to bits and then rake it over to bare earth.) The gardeners – I include Alabi - have taken to referring to me as ‘Mummy wa’. I will take a moment of hubris to translate this as ‘Our Lady’. All I can say is it was bloody hard won. I may take Baba Ojo up on the way he addresses me as thou: it indicates he’s not reading my age right; but then again maybe I can’t be bothered. Another small victory was Mr. John, after emptying the dustbin, swilled it out without being told. The thing about it is, I haven’t had to shout (much) and most particularly I haven’t had to treat anyone like shit. I live a strange ivory tower existence here, I hardly go out, I send people out and get them to bring me stuff. But I’m getting terribly worn out by the harshness, the need to throw my weight about. Hence I savour small rewards.
But there won’t be any more conversations over a pile of photographs, ( Read more... )
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