Sep. 18th, 2010

tartysuz: (Salt)
As you may have noticed, my interest in Lady Gaga went from about 2 to 10 this past week. It's all because of the meat dress. It cemented my suspicion that Gaga is more rewarding when consumed (ha ha) as a performance artist rather than as a pop star, which is merely just a subset of her larger performance project (see footnote, below).

It also occurred to me that I'd been thinking about food and performance subconsciously because of the preview notices I'd received about Visualeyez, the annual performance art festival (now in its 15th year) that takes place this weekend. The theme this year: food!

During the opening night gala on Thursday, several performances were in progress, and of course, they were participatory, so here I am, technically taking part in a performance:


Photo 1: Adina Bier and me, snapped by Cindy Baker.

How about them <s>apples</s> bananas )
tartysuz: (Dream bigger darling)
Or, that's what Philip Pullman would like to see.

I completely agree with him that the use of solely the present tense in longer work limits temporal textures, making for tedious reads. But he goes on to a larger issue:

It's an abdication of narrative responsibility, in my view. The storyteller, in film or novel, should take charge of the story and not feel shifty about it. Put the camera in the place from which it can see the action most clearly. Make a decision about where that place is. Put it on something steady to stop that incessant jiggling about. Say what happened, and let the reader know when it happened and what caused it and what the consequences were, and tell me where the characters were and who else was present – and while you're at it, I'd like to know what they looked like and whether it was raining.

But taking charge of the story is the one thing that some sensitive and artistic storytellers don't want to do. They've come to feel a timorous uncertainty about the right-on-ness of something so politically dodgy as telling a story in the first place. Who are we to say this happened and then that happened? Maybe it didn't, perhaps we're wrong, there are other points of view, truth is always provisional, knowledge is always partial, the narrator is always unreliable, and so on.

"If I just relate now what's happening now," the writer seems to say, "I can't be held to account for it. It's the way things are. I'm just standing close to the action as it happens. I'm not editing or anything. It's really real."

Source: The Guardian.


This is actually why I like to think that Inception had a definite end: otherwise, it's narrative wankery. While an indeterminate end might seem clever, it actually takes away from the fact that narrative arcs were successfully completed in the movie -- no small feat in the world of Hollywood movies.

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