hot NY diva action
Sunday, December 5th, 2010
impromptu Hourglass SoloLab moment at filmmaker @SandiDubowski’s (Trembling Before G-d) Hannukah Bordello downtown heather gold, elyse singer, yolanda shoshana, christen clifford
Archive for the “life” Category
Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe, Niagara, machines
Thursday, December 2nd, 2010
Marilyn in my hometown, Bernard of Hollywood at the Warhol Museum
Pittsburgh, PA
But they treat her like a machine.
A money machine.”
-Marilyn Monroe “I make work this way
because I want to be a machine.”
-Andy Warhol I grew up in Niagara Falls where Marilyn filmed one of her first, if not her first leading role. Niagara powered machines.
Cyanamid. The GM plant.
The water was full of dioxin.
Love Canal was next door. Machines were jobs for most. Money.
It’s where people went. It was blue collar like Pittsburgh was.
Who could a slight, aspirational, fey boy be here? He could be the camera. Many at the #BeingHuman conference at Bard I spoke at a month ago were aghast and serious when someone shared this quote of Andy’s. How horrific to want to be the machine. To turn others into one. Marilyn did it and struggles to find self. Andy seemed to pine to lose his. It doesn’t seem horrific to me at all.
It makes sense in his life. In him.
He aimed to have no emotional at all. “Film is the best medium because it has two-dimensional images. Two dimensional emotion.” – Andy Warhol How else to be him, be noticed, be with everyone. Avoid the pain that must have been too enormous to feel.
That’s my guess. How else for her to be seen, desired? Never alone. Each was not alone if they could help it. I wrote my first school report on Marilyn in grade 5. I held the book with these photos, some naked, on my lap. People came by. How else to be noticed? Be with everyone?
Mondrian moment
Thursday, December 2nd, 2010
Cathedral of Learning
University of Pittsburgh
An unexpectedly perfect day and a poem: Long before physics knew it
Friday, November 26th, 2010
Sometimes the exact perfect flow of events happens when life grabs you by the throat.
-photo Piedmont Park, Atlanta
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-photo Piedmont Park, Atlanta
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Long before physics knew it
You could plant
And cut years apart
Feelings laugh at space
and ending has nothing to do with Love
Love mocks it all
Happy to laugh at your misery
Your joy
It doesn’t go anywhere
It doesn’t travel
It’s already soaked everything through
National Gallery has a show of gay and lesbian portraiture and art
Saturday, November 13th, 2010
Walt Whitman, 1891
The show, called Hide/Seek includes Eakins, Rauchenberg, Leibovitz, Mapplethorpe and more.
Listen to the NPR story on the first queer show at a national museum.
“Without gypsies, Jews and fags, there is no art” – Mel Brooks, To Be or Not To Be
HT: @ElyseSinger (fb)
WITH contd – Hey, social media commentators: It’s about us stupid.
Friday, November 12th, 2010Alex Madrigal, The Atlantic’s tech writer, has a really nice response to Zadie Smith’s critique of both the film Social Network and facebook itself and its meaning.
Madrigal is hitting on the main thing that most social media phobic critiques miss (eg. Jaron Lanier, Gladwell and Sherry Turkle’s upcoming book which I had the chance to respond to at a recent conference at Bard): the technology is made by us. Us people. Our relationship needs and issues exist without and with the technology.
So what is it we are going to do about it? Alex Madrigal mentions a need for a kind of “urban planning” to make facebook and social media better. This is like the idea Stowe Boyd had a while back to approach social media like architecture. Ross Douthat today commented in the New York Times on Madrigal’s Atlantic comment on Zadie Smith’s NY Review of Books piece saying he weighed in on the side of Madrigal’s call for “mastery” of social media rather than avoiding it.
And even if these publications weren’t finally online and blogging they’d still have esteemed writers writing about each other and people would talk to each other about it and hey, that sounds an awful lot like social media and the Internet, only slower.
I disagree entirely with Douthat’s framing of the question or Smith’s that our challenge is about “how to remain human in a social media world.” Our challenge is how to be connected to our humanity with or without social media.
Ross Douthat and Zadie Smith why are you so sure we have more human-ness before social media rather than after?
Dissociation is easy to come by. I did it with books for years. Does it make that act less real than when it’s done with a screen? You can do it with a drink, a thought, a snort, a fuck. You can check out and not see others or feel your own basic impulse extremely easily. Intellectuals are as good at this as anyone. Whether you got a PhD for your method of checking out or the delirium tremens our need is to fell what it is we really feel and to be able to handle those feeling, thus developing enough as people to be able to handle and see and enjoy what is in others too, including what is different.
I believe the real question we face is: how can we be ourselves and be ourselves together. How can we be WITH each other?
And I believe that social media is part of a major change in our getting closer to this. Because people who have only been able to manage analytically are getting forced to reconnect to the relational and the relational is getting translated into data where the analytical can understand it.
At night I look to the stars / Will they say kaddish for me
Wednesday, November 10th, 2010Last night I look at the stars here in Monticello Florida on my journey #<3trip. I didn’t recognize them and so I felt alone.
You are never alone – Socalled
And this dude makes music with David Krakauer whom I got to see play at Bard a couple of weeks ago with a symphony and he blew my head off. Seriously. I had to walk down from the mid-level balcony to the mezzanine to get it and stick it back on. Then I could feel the film strip between my ears, so I know what Socalled is talkin about.
I reach New Orleans tonight people. I think I’m going to visit with some clarinet music.
If you’d like to meet up reach me @heathr
80s snack
Monday, November 8th, 2010
If I was willing to be completely honest, I’d admit I wore a hairband or two back then. I would also acknowledge this was not a wise choice.
(via @ch_clifford)
WITH 1 – Video of my talk at Bard – The feminine moves to the center.
Monday, November 8th, 2010
WITH is a project I’m creating socially through public talks and conversations.
This video is from the first of these at this conference at Bard. Many thanks to the Hannah Arendt Center for having me and to Sherry Turkle and Ray Kurzweil and all the other presenters whose talks helped create part of this response.
I’m exploring my premise that social media is part of the major shift of what we’ve called the feminine back into a central place in our public culture.
Business is now having to solve the same problems as people working on social issues like racism and sexism because the central goal is to create ways and space in which we have WITH relationships. This means you don’t act AT or TO someone else but WITh them. You each see each other.
Information and data become simple and easy to access and then what becomes recognized as “scarce” and also powerful? Our time with each other.
It’s not that the relational is new. What is changing is that we are having data convey the relational to the mostly dudes who have managed most powerful public business. And that the information economy leads to this. Social media is accelerating it. What were publicly dismissed as “private” “feminine” skills and topics are now a major amount of our western culture anyway (gossip, personal lives, friendship etc)
Here’s the initial post about it.
Please comment there to leave me your thoughts, feelings and responses or send them @heathr on twitter.
To bring me to your event or organization for one of the next talks contact me.
My interview about the Rally for Sanity on TWIT’s East Meet’s West podcast
Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010I had a great time talking with Tom Merritt and Roger Chang who is one smart cookie. I’ve known Tom a little while (he was actually one of the backers of my first crowd funded talk show at SXSW 08), but this was the first time I got to meet Roger who really impressed me.
Listen or download and enjoy.
