Yule Heibel's Post Studio © 2003-2014

Bad art

“It’s pretty easy to recognize bad old art,” I thought to myself as I passed two auction house windows full of the stuff: weird and watered down versions of styles that were strong and well-handled by masters of their day, done nearly to death by second- if not third- or fourth-rate epigones.

I’ll confess that it’s harder for me to be as sure with contemporary art. First, there was the whole “art [painting] is dead” issue, which led to a distrust of objects. We looked to process (but not gesture, because that would tie the process to the body, to physicality, which was disdained); we admired minimalism and the touch-free (no human touch) trace or record; we mocked notions of originality or heroism (“the avant-garde”); we fitted ourselves out in seriality and reproduceability, neither of which needed anything messy (whether paint, emotion, body-ness, or Big Ideas). In fact, we were so sure about the confident march toward abstraction and disembodiment that we derided any sort of representational mark-making as evidence of neo-fascism and an extreme willingness to collaborate with capitalism at its worst.

Off the top of my head, I wonder if design benefitted from capital-A art’s abandonment of things – so much of the most interesting work is happening in design (whether Steve Jobs or Steve McQueen, Zaha Hadid or Freeman Thomas).

Painting came back, sometimes grotesquely. For every Kiefer, there were at least two Immendorffs. Yes, there’s a lot of crap design out there, too, but design in fields other than “fine art” seems a lot more interesting than the fine arts themselves. I’m not encouraged by “exhibition[s] of artists employing formal and political concerns to develop new languages in colour theory.” Artists employing formal and political concerns to develop new languages in color theory? It sounds like the Russian Revolution all over again – except I missed the memo calling the current crap we’re in a revolution. I thought it was just crap?

Anyway… I could tell you why some of the “art” in the photos that follow is stupendously awful because I’ve got the analytical tools and the historical hindsight that let me be sure. But I’m far less certain when looking art contemporary art, particularly if, lacking body, it has clothed itself in bad ideas.

Ok, here’s the gallery of horrors:

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Ballet Victoria’s “Beauty and the Beast”

Ballet Victoria, led by artistic director and choreographer Paul Destrooper, is currently dancing a wonderful version of the classic fairytale Beauty and the Beast at Victoria’s Royal Theatre. Even though I’m more familiar with the Alan Menken-Howard Ashman Disney version (watched many times while the kids were growing up), the original – here adapted for ballet – is brilliantly satisfying.

If you’re in Victoria BC, consider supporting your local arts by attending a performance either tomorrow or Thursday evening at 7:30pm. After seeing it tonight, I was impressed by several aspects of the production. First, I’m continually amazed by how much our arts organizations create with so little. Multi-media, if it’s deployed, might consist of a sheet artfully draped – so artfully that you’re convinced you just saw a 3-D transformation (more on that in a sec). Whether it’s theater, dance, or music, you won’t find any company or troupe or ensemble or orchestra drawing on huge budgets to produce their performances, nor are there armies of dancers, performers, or musicians overwhelming audiences through sheer quantity. No, it all gets done through quality – and the quality is really very very good.

Ballet Victoria‘s Beauty and the Beast fits right into that category of excellent quality produced as if by magic on relatively tiny budgets. Of course it’s not magic at all – it’s discipline, training, excellent choreography, fantastic dancing (and acting), delightful costumes, artful sets and lighting, and resourceful, imaginative staging: hard work that comes together to look like magic so that audiences come away absolutely delighted.

Take that sheet, for example: in a dance, it’s difficult to manage the Beast’s transformation into the Prince – it’s easy to tell about it (tell the story), Disney can show it (make the movie), but how do you present it on stage with dancers? This is where, quite unexpectedly, the sheet comes in: in an earlier sequence, prior to the penultimate scene with the dying Beast (who is about to be transformed into the Prince), Belle had fallen into a slumber in which she had a surrealist reverie that anticipated the Beast’s true nature as a Prince. The audience has therefore already glimpsed the transformed Beast.

Then, as Belle’s reverie ends, the Prince exits through a curtained passageway while the Beast enters it in the same instant: they pass, brushing against one another, exactly in the middle of the passageway, completing the transformation of “imagined” Prince back into “real” Beast. As the Prince exits stage left, he’s behind a transparent scrim that looks like a mirror before which the Beast stands, watching his better self depart.

Now, fast-forward to the dying Beast scene: The Beast lies on the floor, dead. Belle discovers him and collapses by his side. The Rose Fairy and her attendants enter and surround the pair. As they dance toward the front of the stage, they pick up the front edge of a large sheet (not visible till now). As they lift up this expanse of cloth, they effectively hide the dancers (including Belle and the Beast). Colorful pastel light projected on to the cloth creates the illusion that it’s some kind of massive fog – or fairy dust! – behind which a magical transformation is occurring. The dancers deftly work the cloth: they are underneath it, and shimmy it over their bodies and heads. As it’s lifted out of the way, it reveals Belle and the Prince, exactly as he appeared in Belle’s earlier surrealistic reverie: this time, the transformation is “real.” They wake up, and …well, all’s well that ends well, right?

That’s just one example of creative staging. Ballet Victoria has worked this kind of magic throughout all of Beauty and the Beast. Oh, and did I mention that the dancing is terrific?

Choreography: Paul Destrooper

Belle: Andrea Bayne

Beast: Geoff Malcolm

Prince: Robb Beresford

Father: David Beales

Additional cast: Tao Kerr (Rose Fairy); Vimala Jeffrey-Howe & Christie Wood/ Amanda Radetzky & Brichelle Brucker (the Two Sisters – alternating cast: they also dance the part of Roses); Risa Kobayashi, Natsuki Murase (Roses); Ellen McDonald and Rieko Yamagata (Gargoyles Moyne & Zulme).

Lighting Design: Adam Wilkinson; Costume Design: Jane Wood; Set Design: Geoff Malcolm; Beast Make-up Design: Helen Kennedy Buchholz; Accessory Design: Christie Wood; Stage Manager: Jason King.

Music: recorded (Delibes, Dvorak, Gounod, Tchaikovsky)

The Monday (!) Diigo Links Post (weekly)

Oops, forgot to post this yesterday!

• Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic | The Economist

  Yes, university departments cranking out PhDs can be a racket.
  QUOTE
  Many of those who embark on a PhD are the smartest in their class and will have been the best at everything they have done. They will have amassed awards and prizes. As this year’s new crop of graduate students bounce into their research, few will be willing to accept that the system they are entering could be designed for the benefit of others, that even hard work and brilliance may well not be enough to succeed, and that they would be better off doing something else. They might use their research skills to look harder at the lot of the disposable academic. Someone should write a thesis about that.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: academia

• A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation – NYTimes.com

  Great article by Jonah Lehrer about Geoffrey West and urban metabolism(s).
  QUOTE
  It’s when West switches the conversation from infrastructure to people that he brings up the work of Jane Jacobs, the urban activist and author of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” Jacobs was a fierce advocate for the preservation of small-scale neighborhoods, like Greenwich Village and the North End in Boston. The value of such urban areas, she said, is that they facilitate the free flow of information between city dwellers. To illustrate her point, Jacobs described her local stretch of Hudson Street in the Village. She compared the crowded sidewalk to a spontaneous “ballet,” filled with people from different walks of life. School kids on the stoops, gossiping homemakers, “business lunchers” on their way back to the office. While urban planners had long derided such neighborhoods for their inefficiencies — that’s why Robert Moses, the “master builder” of New York, wanted to build an eight-lane elevated highway through SoHo and the Village — Jacobs insisted that these casual exchanges were essential. She saw the city not as a mass of buildings but rather as a vessel of empty spaces, in which people interacted with other people. The city wasn’t a skyline — it was a dance.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: socialtheory jonah_lehrer geoffrey_west santa_fe_institute urban_energy urbanization nyt

• Hide&Seek: the company that wants you to play more | Stage | The Guardian

  Great question, interesting speculative answer:
  QUOTE
  Fleetwood believes that embracing play could have an enormous impact on our everyday, as well as cultural, lives. “We’ve spent huge sums of money on arts buildings over the last 15 years or so. What if we had put that money into creating games instead? So, rather than spending £60m on building a theatre, what if we had injected the same amount of money over 20 years into the town and its people, to enable them to become more playful and creative? I think it would have a huge impact on civic and social life. It could be transforming – a town in which playing is a way of life.”
  UNQUOTE

  tags: hide_and_seek game_design gamers socialtheory

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Writing and crafting and entrepreneurship, oh my!

There are about twenty tabs open in my browser right now, and I’m getting a bit anxious to close some of them. Only a couple are destined for bookmarking on Diigo, while the rest belong to those devilish categories of inspirational+ reference, which means study this+dig deeper later [when you have time <sic>].

So I figured it would be best to round them up in a special links post.

The first one is somewhat beyond my comfort zone in terms of social media-and-marketing focus, but there are nuggets I’m sure I’ll want to lay my hands on later: How to Develop a Social Media Content Strategy. Includes references and links to various tools.

Next, Steve Garfield: Get Seen – Web Video, a 40-plus minute video tutorial on making videos. Haven’t had a chance to watch more than the first 15 minutes, but it looks like a great resource and I definitely want to be able to reference Garfield’s post if or when I ever decide to put myself online in video.

I’m a writer, right? Even if at present I’m suffering a kind of content lacuna, unable or unwilling to commit to a theme, a topic, a goal. (I’d like to change that in the coming year, incidentally – this might explain my rooting around in the online equivalent of the self-help section…) With writing in mind, I scoped out a couple of great posts by writers helping writers.

Justine Musk – aka Tribal Writer – has some terrific posts. First one I came across was this: the secret ingredient to a strong author platform. This all gets back to branding (self-branding) and therefore marketing again, but if you take a look at the disruptions in the publishing industry, it makes sense that writers figure out how to do this stuff. Her posts are full of additional links to other great stuff – you can lose yourself in them. For example, here’s another one: the online art of developing your author brand molecule global microbrand thing. (From there I came across Gaping Void‘s the global microbrand rant, another interesting read – ok, it’s from 2005, therefore not exactly new to the world, but to me it was. Incidentally, this one made me feel a bit better about living so far off-center, although it can’t be said that Victoria is cheap, cheapness being the case Hugh Macleod makes for living away from the Big City…)

Justine Musk references creative entrepreneurship, which is something I’m determined to stake my claim in (see pave your way to creative domination: the writer as creative entrepreneur) – my first task is (RE!)-figuring out my goal(s). I used to be really clear on those, but lost the thread some years ago. It’s definitely time for me to get that mojo back.

Incidentally, I came across Musk’s posts via Jane Friedman’s There Are No Rules – another “lose yourself in the links all day” site. I’ve never written to an agent, but maybe one day I’ll find this helpful: How to Ensure 75% of Agents Will Request Your Material. Nor do I wish to write a memoir, but I might reference this: Your Self-Help Book Should Not Be a Thinly Disguised Memoir. Again, these posts are themselves full of additional links, so be prepared for a long reading…

More marketing/ blogging/ writing nuggets from Tara Gentile: How to Sell With a Story. Not sure how/ if I’ll use this, but simply in terms of how Gentile describes her own transition makes me want to keep this in the reference file. That she writes about building an empire (see big thinking) just adds icing to the cake!

Gentile was someone I found via some research about Etsy. I did that research because of something I learned from my son, whose university friend’s father has a thriving Etsy shop. I wanted to tell two of my friends about what Etsy might be able to do for them, so I found some links for them. (Now of course I’m the one who’s interested – although my sculpting days are quite a few years behind me…)

Here are some good ones I found: Megan Auman’s Crafting an MBA is full of brilliant stuff. Start with how to use Etsy as a launch pad – Auman, like Gentile, is thinking “empire,” and she means business. Then check out her recommended reading list and get ready to burn the itty-bitty book light…

Another post of hers that I love is skill, price, and Etsy as business incubator, in which Auman references the theory that you need 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery (popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Outliers), and then refers to a couple of other posts, which let her conclude that on Etsy, people are putting in their 10,000 hours in public. Fascinating idea. From here, she goes on to discuss pricing, and ends with making the case that Etsy can be a business incubator.

Be sure to check this article out, too: why your craft business gets stuck. This one has some great observations about what makes women-led businesses work …or not work so well.

I love that both Auman and Gentile provide a real soup-to-nuts service with their sites: sign up for newsletters, join the online book club, do some online workshops, and so on. I’m seriously in awe of both of them. I could spend hours following more and more links on Auman’s site (for example, using etsy’s circles and activity feeds to research your ideal customer), so I better stop now – otherwise my plan to close tabs will fail. 😉

Climb that mountain …even if it's in another country

“Moscow Stations” at Victoria’s Theatre Inconnu

Right now, Victorians have a rare chance to see the Canadian premiere of Moscow Stations, Stephen Mulrine’s adaptation and translation of Venedikt Yerofeev’s novel Moscow to Petushki. A one-man play starring Theatre Inconnu‘s Clayton Jevne, the piece takes you through the stations of the drunkard’s cross as he tries to reach salvation in the perpetually elusive Petushki.

You may never want to booze it up again after seeing Jevne’s brilliant performance. But don’t think that this play is impossibly heavy: quite the opposite, it’s incredibly funny (albeit relentlessly profound). Who knew, for example, that you could build an existentialist theory by monitoring the frequency of hiccups, irrespective of whether those hiccups were produced by an atheist or by a knowing believer? What matters is how you name your poison…

^ Graham McDonald (director) and Clayton Jevne (actor)

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Those who want to do some pre-theater homework can watch a 5-series documentary (in 10 minute increments), Moscow-Petushki, on Youtube (the link goes to the first installment). It’s not necessary to see the documentary in advance (I didn’t), although it helps to know just how rich Yerofeev’s work and his interpretation of late-sixties Soviet Russia is. That alcohol plays such a huge role isn’t exactly a surprise. What is surprising is the quality of the light that Yerofeev’s shines on the problem: it’s the light a lover would shine, someone who truly loves drinking …and drinking …and drinking, even as he shows without remorse just how debilitating and utterly destructive it is.

It’s a remarkable play, directed by Graham McDonald – and Clayton Jevne absolutely nails the performance. His interpretation has the intellectual heft the script requires, while bringing all the physical details to bear with great power: he switches from persona to persona without missing a beat, he embodies the demons that punish him, the angels that succor him.

^ Poster for Theatre Inconnu’s production by Robert Randall, who also blogs, here.

Moscow Stations plays again tomorrow night (12/26) at 8pm, and continues on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday this month. In January, the show resumes from 1/2/11 through 1/8/11. There are also two Sunday matinees – tomorrow (12/26) and 1/2/11 at 2pm. On Tuesday 12/28/10, it’s “pay what you can,” otherwise it’s $14 regular or $10 for students/ seniors/ unwaged. Theatre Inconnu is located in Little Fernwood Hall at 1923 Fernwood, in the heart of Fernwood and Gladstone (what we called “Happy High,” next to Victoria High School), in extreme proximity to the Fernwood Inn and Stage Wine Bar, and other venues of comestible and cultural interest.

Despoliation of the environment, high finance, mountain top removal

Two articles that need your attention: one, in the Wall Street Journal, Trader Holds $3 Billion of Copper in London, which describes how some trader is sitting on 80-90% of circa 50% of the world’s exchange-registered copper stockpile, squirreled away in a London warehouse. We don’t think a lot about where those metals come from.

Which brings me to the second article, in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung: Obama-Effekt erreicht Bergbau und Banken. The article looks at the involvement of Swiss banks in financing companies like Massey Energy – companies engaged in environmental despoliation of a scale that’s hard to imagine. It’s called “mountain top removal”…

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Watch iLoveMountains‘ video, above. Check out their website.

This is where (and how) we get our resources.

There’s got to be a better way.

Below, image of a landscape wrecked by copper mining, via Wall Street Journal article:

Invisible light

Feeling discombobulated as usual around this time of year – hence the dearth of posts lately – I found myself poking around this afternoon for inspiration at Russell Books, Canada’s largest used-and-new bookstore.

Careening toward the self-help section, suddenly I saw it:

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Yule – A Celebration of Light & Warmth…

As if.

I am anything but light and warmth these days. I am invisible.

…Or at least marked down, to half price.

Feeling a bit like A Boy Named Sue, I once again bit on the irony of being named, by my weird parents, after a pagan festival. Emigrating to Canada and using my second name (Fredericka) as a bulwark against the first-name weirdness did not help: North Americans are inordinately fond of short, preferably mono-syllabic names. Therefore, a four-syllable male-derived moniker such as mine was naturally shortened first to Freddy, …then to Fred. Not what a young girl was looking for – which explains why, by the impressionable age of 16 (and under the influence of an art teacher) I returned to my first name. …And I spend a lot of time explaining that, no, it’s not pronounced as one syllable, but two.

Sure wish I could get the hang of that warmth & light thing…

PS: Looking at the editorial description on Amazon, I read that Morrison suggests that “Many people believe that Santa’s reindeer ‘represent the stags that drew the chariot of the Norse gift-giving goddess, Freya.'” Ah yes, Freya. That’s one of my sister’s names. There are seven of us – we’ve got the Edda covered.

The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)

• Schneier on Security: Security in 2020

  Bruce Schneier continues to deliver the goods when it comes to smart analysis. His end-of-2010 predictions for 2020 are no exception. Example:

  QUOTE
  We’re not Google’s customers; we’re Google’s product that they sell to their customers. It’s a three-way relation­ship: us, the IT service provider, and the advertiser or data buyer. And as these noncustomer IT relationships proliferate, we’ll see more IT companies treating us as products. If I buy a Dell computer, then I’m obviously a Dell customer; but if I get a Dell computer for free in exchange for access to my life, it’s much less obvious whom I’m entering a business relationship with. Facebook’s continual ratcheting down of user privacy in order to satisfy its actual customers­—the advertisers—and enhance its revenue is just a hint of what’s to come.
  UNQUOTE
  and
  QUOTE
  One old trend: deperimeterization. Two current trends: consumerization and decentralization. Three future trends: deconcentration, decustomerization, and depersonization. That’s IT in 2020—­it’s not under your control, it’s doing things without your knowledge and consent, and it’s not necessarily acting in your best interests. And this is how things will be when they’re working as they’re intended to work; I haven’t even started talking about the bad guys yet.

  That’s because IT security in 2020 will be less about protecting you from traditional bad guys, and more about protecting corporate business models from you.
  UNQUOTE

  Such a brave new world…

  tags: bruce_schneier trends security 2020 customers customer_relations

• The World Is My School: Welcome to the Era of Personalized Learning | World Future Society

  One of the best, most thought-provoking articles on education I’ve read in a long time, by Maria H. Andersen. Brilliant, brilliant insights and suggestions…

  QUOTE
  Mass education is adequate, as long as students are highly motivated to learn and get ahead of their peers. In developing countries, a student who is successful in education will be able to climb the ladder of personal economic prosperity faster than those who are not successful. But in industrialized countries, where prosperity is the norm, an education does not necessarily translate into a significantly higher standard of living. In these countries, there is no longer a large economic incentive to learn, so the motivation to learn must become intrinsic. As we redesign en masse education, we must address learners’ intrinsic motivations, which means that education must circle back to being personal again.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: maria_h_andersen education trends futurismo innovation disruption socialtheory

• David Cameron: The next age of government | Video on TED.com

  Wonderfully clear, concise summation of gov2.0, by David Cameron (British PM).

  tags: david_cameron britain gov2.0 ted_conference

• Whitepapers / Connected Urban Development

  “Cisco Whitepapers” : ~16 papers on urban innovation, sustainability, mobility, transportation, work centers, urban energy, infrastructure, digital swarming, gov2.0, social networks, real estate.

  tags: reference urban_development cisco whitepapers urbanism

• Placemaking 101 « Project for Public Spaces – Placemaking for Communities

  Five excellent articles on *placemaking*.

  tags: placemaking project_for_public_spaces urbanism reference

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Gary Shteyngart’s bad fathers (on Super Sad True Love Story)

So much already is written about Gary Shteyngart’s novel Super Sad True Love Story by readers and reviewers motivated far better than I that it feels redundant to add more. Read the description and reviews on Amazon, if the novel is unfamiliar. Then, if you haven’t already, get a hold of the book and read it – it’s a damn good read.

While lots has been written, I haven’t seen much discussion of what the novel says about the nature of work or what it says about the weird economy of this dystopian future.

Presumably, there are characters in the novel who actually work – Joshie’s Post-Human Services must have some sort of labor at its core (intellectual, scientific, research-related), and someone must be cleaning the office lavatories – but overall, for the superior classes (the High Net Worth Individuals, or HNWIs) work seems to have become weirdly symbolic, if not a-economic. People are obsessed by their credit ratings (publicly visible on the “credit poles” that line the streets, and beamed constantly through social media enabled mobile devices called äppäräts), yet there’s nothing empowering or liberating about the work that people actually do: it doesn’t seem to help anyone get anywhere. Development – personal, intellectual – has ceased as everyone is caught in a sinister empire of signs and spectacle.

There are coveted work sectors, but the people “working” in them could just as well be spending their all their time on Facebook (or, in the novel’s terms, GlobalTeens) or flipping burgers. Same difference. No qualities.

HNWIs “work” in Media or Retail, but the more you learn about the nature of this work, the more confusing it becomes. Lenny (the main male character) spends a lot of his so-called work time simply networking – or, let’s face it: schmoozing. And when he actually hits “the office,” it’s to spar with younger, more hip (more schmoozier) co-workers who desire to supplant him.

Kindergarten, anyone?

Joshua (or Joshie), Lenny’s sugar daddy – er, I mean, big daddy boss – is quite literally a father figure whom Lenny tries to guilt into keeping him “employed.” Not exactly a mature working relationship.

Joshie, meanwhile, is himself the ultimate immaturity freak who’s trying to reverse-engineer his own personal aging process. Perhaps he thinks he can to return to being “merely an egg” (no, not really), but he’s no Valentine Smith – and this isn’t Stranger in a Strange Land. It’s more like “I know everything about you and you’re in my face and that’s ok because I’m in your face and that’s all there is to ‘know’ ’cause who needs knowledge when you’ve got information?'” Information is unattached.

When it’s all over, Joshie’s quest is more like something out of Brazil, where plastic surgery and dreams of eternal youth also go horribly wrong.

Eunice, the book’s heroine, is in her twenties and “volunteers” an hour here or there, but otherwise does not work or earn an income. Instead, she spends her father’s money.

Her dream is to work in retail, apparently a highly coveted sector that only the well-connected are able to break into – ironically (from my perspective), this made me think of Richard Florida‘s idea that service sector jobs should become high-value, just as factory jobs became high-value in the 20th century. When Joshie finagles a job for her in some oh-my-gawd-so-cool ueber-mall that comes across as Dante’s something-circle of hell, we see her (through Lenny’s spying eyes) behind a stall, hawking leather cuffs with inane political sayings stenciled on them. …Shades of Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, where Frank Frink and his friend Ed McCarthy manufacture fake American Artistic Handcrafts…

Shteyngart’s emphasis on fathers, and how they succeed or fail in inculcating their children, succeed or fail in bringing them to maturity, struck me as a recurring motif. The mothers are cast very traditionally – and in fact, this is not a woman’s novel, in the sense that it’s definitely a book where a guy seems to be working out his issues. And by “guy,” I could be talking about Shteyngart or about Lenny. Certainly Lenny: the book is all about him and how he works out his issues. I guess Shteyngart sort of universalizes this, as if we’re all Lennys who get to have the last word, while the women – Eunice, for example – disappear from view. I certainly liked Lenny, but I’m not a guy, so my sympathy for/ identification with him had its limits.

America, full of bad fathers, falls apart. America, run by bad fathers, becomes a nightmare state. Where have the legendary and infamous bad mothers gone? Perhaps in previous decades writers (male) could blame “bad mothers” for the personal failings of their (male) characters. It’s a good thing, I suppose, that Shteyngart put the focus back on fathers, even if it’s a Pyrrhic “victory” from a feminist point of view. (What I mean is: when it was “just” personal, we could blame the mothers – and, yes, that got pretty tiresome; but when it’s really Big Picture – the Rise and Fall of America – then we have to re-focus on fathers because, in the end, it’s the men who matter more. Pyrrhic.)

Still, those gripes aside: loved this novel – I was drawn in from the start, and thoroughly enjoyed the ride.