The Gentrification of Brooklyn: The Pink Elephant Speaks

On Thursday, February 4th, the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) in Fort Greene, Brooklyn opened their newest exhibit titled "The Gentrification of Brooklyn: The Pink Elephant Speaks" to a mass of attendees. Complete with digital turntablism and free food (which I overheard was donated from local eateries and restaurants) and wine, the opening event was so crowded that it was almost difficult to see all of the 20 works of art inhabiting the walls, floor, and video screens in the museum's gallery space. I was there supporting my friend Josh Bricker, whose installation piece at the MoCADA titled "The Order of Things" can be viewed by either visiting the gallery itself (open Wed thru Sun 11 - 6) or by visiting the sculpture section of his portfolio on his website.

I mention this exhibit not just to plug my friend's piece, but also as a nod to my "Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the Media" course. (I know, it's pretty much the only course I've blogged about thus far. Trust me, posts having to do with "Sexual Personae" and "Art After Deleuze" are forthcoming.) There seemed to be a mix of anger, confusion, and critique present among the attendees and the works of art in the gallery as to what the gentrification of Brooklyn means in relation to class, to loss of a unique identity, and to the social structure of the inhabitants of the area that is in the process of gentrification. I highly recommend visiting the exhibit for yourself to witness pieces from artists from the five boroughs of New York City of diverse ethnic backgrounds (none of the artists currently reside in Brooklyn, however) whose pieces cover topics including relocation, homogenization, redefinition of the word "community," and what it means to be a neighbor.

For more on the exhibit see an article from The Daily Serving and a video from NY1 in which you can see Josh's piece with the artist himself standing by, and my bewildered-looking roommate (hilarious).

Punxsutawney Phil is on Facebook

First of all: who else, when thinking of the lovely American tradition of Groundhog Day, has a certain Sonny and Cher song immediately pop in their head? All you Bill Murray fans out there better say, "I do! I do!" or I'll make you watch Broken Flowers over and over again until you can't move due to your smothered state of depression. A good Murray film from the 80s or 90s is capable of being remembered for it's iconic moments and infinite string of quotable lines, and today just makes me wish I had Groundhog Day on DVD. But, alas, I will have to resort to looking up key scenes on YouTube. Le sigh...



Anyway, the real reason for this post is to briefly comment on the fact that even HOLIDAYS have begun to appropriate social networking for their own purposes (via the Christian Science Monitor). And whatever a groundhog needs a Facebook page for is totally beyond me, save maybe to alert people that February 2nd is on the horizon and then on February 2nd using the page to announce whether Punxsutawney Phil has seen his shadow. But that's it. Every other day of the year, this page has no purpose. Although, Phil does have 7,572 fans, more than most Fan pages for famous humans tend to acquire. Oh, and Phil is also mobile-savvy: today, he sent out his prognostication via text message.

I don't know how many more fans he will make after this year, seeing as the "over-sized rodent" saw his fat little shadow, forecasting another 6 weeks of winter. Double le sigh...

Congrats to Kathryn Bigelow!

From The Guardian:

in a low-key ceremony in Los Angeles, Kathryn Bigelow became the first-ever female winner of the Directors' Guild of America (DGA) award for best direction in a feature film.

This is an important moment: in the DGA's 62-year-existence no female director has ever won this award. Congratulations to Bigelow aside, this win now points her firmly in the direction of an Academy award: almost every DGA win in this category results in the same achievement at the Oscars.

This could mean, since the Oscars usually follow suit with the results of the DGA awards, that Kathryn Bigelow might be the first female director to win an Academy Award for best picture in the 82 year history of the Oscars. I have no delusions here, and realize that Avatar could easily win best picture based on Guild voting from the past. Although, since I've only seen the first tense twenty minutes of Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, I cannot accurately assess whether I believe this film is more worthy of the award than Avatar. If the award was for technological innovation and spectacular achievement, I doubt the award for best picture could go anywhere else but to Cameron's film. But, this does not mean that the Academy will select the same film/director combo for the Best Picture/Best Director awards, as evidenced numerous times over the history of the ceremony.

Aside from the fact that it would be wonderful to see Bigelow accept this award, I really don't want to hear Cameron's Navi version of "I'm the king of the world!" Actually, as opposed to being in the native language of the people of pandora, his acceptance speech would probably start with something along the lines of "I've obtained the unobtainium!" Gag.

Another interesting dynamic at play here is that Bigelow is Cameron's ex-wife, making this also the first time that a husband/wife pair, albeit a former husband/wife pair, were nominated in the same category and up for the same award. The DGA Awards, in my opinion, is far more valid and reputable ceremony than the Oscars, but is not nearly as publicized or brandished as the Oscars. I just really want to see a woman win, but last year was the year for the underdog. I have my doubts as to whether the little guy (or, in this case, little lady) could possibly trump the big shot.

The Cinematic and Televisual Vampire as the Imaginary Racial and Sexual "Other"

The title of this blog post is a topic I am brainstorming on as a potential avenue of exploration for the final paper in my Race, Ethnicity, and Class in the Media course that I am taking this semester with Racquel Gates. This concept is inspired by some of my burgeoning and preliminary thoughts on the blurry and fluctuating metaphor of the vampire as the racially- or sexually-marginalized "Other" on the HBO Original Series True Blood.

My hope is to investigate the use of the vampire as a representative figure for at once gay communities and minority populations both, utilizing discursive analysis of phrases employed on this program such as "coming out of the coffin" - which is easily identified as a signifier for queer culture and the process of "coming out of the closet" - or the term "Vampire Rights Movement," a battle for equality and rights being waged by the vampires of True Blood that was fought by African Americans in this country in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Movement, a struggle for equal representation and opportunities that still continues within the LGBTQ community to this day. In most cases, the vampire takes the place of the discriminated or marginalized Other, especially in the small fictional town of Bon Temps, Louisiana featured in True Blood; while we are not sure that there was extreme racism against the racial Other - and in Bon Temps, LA, this racial Other is by all accounts a member of the black community - before the vampires came out of the coffin a few years prior to the time period of the first season of the series (roughly present day), it can be certain that all hatred, stereotyping, fear and bigotry that was focused on and around the racial Other in Bon Temps is now directed at the vampires as the new Other. The vampire seems to be a convenient stand-in for a minority, since vampires are purely mythical beings, able to become a location for metaphor, for symbolism, for contextualized signification.

There is a fascinating character on True Blood on whom I would like to focus seeing as he shares almost the same role of the Other as the vampires but without the same of stigmatization: Lafayette Reynolds, a homosexual black short-order cook, public works employee, prostitute and drug dealer. Wearing multiple hats with his myriad professions he is one of the keenest and most strong-willed characters on the show, having connections with the mainstream public in his restaurant job, with the hidden sexual life of some of the high-ranking men in his town through his prostitution and webcam service on his website, as well as with the vampire community as a dealer of "V," or vampire blood, a substance that seems to have similar attributes to ecstasy - or, as an active party or rave subculture would refer to it, "E." He is also the physical personification of what the vampires signify as the Other as a black man and a homosexual man, for at times the vampire can represent both the racial and the sexual Other, never quite committing to one or the other.

So far, I believe I will most likely be referencing the writing of bell hooks, Homi K. Bhabha, and Stuart Hall. As I delve deeper into the semester, I am sure I will find more and more that I can work into this paper. Any suggestions? Please leave them in the comments!

I am also interested in investigating the rumblings I've heard surrounding queer identifications with and sociological analyses of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) and other more classic representations of vampires in the cinema and on television. I am not yet sure where the Twilight franchise will fit in to all of this, and I feel I would be remiss in skipping over this phenomenon entirely, but I really, really don't want to read those books.

Gilles Deleuze

So for this lovely, sunny Winter Break that I've been spending in Southern California, I've been spending a good deal of it reading. Granted, I've also been watching a hell of a lot of television on DVD, namely the first season of House and the first season of True Blood. There's been some "Jersey Shore" sprinkled in there (don't judge, you know you watch it, too) and a few films, both in the theaters (Fantastic Mr. Fox and Avatar) and on DVD (Angels with Dirty Faces, Finding Woodstock, Triplets of Belleville, probably a few more that I'm forgetting), but the time not spent watching has been spent reading. I'm still working on Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, and two days ago I finished Wesley the Owl by Stacey O'Brien, a sort of Marley and Me-esque memoir but with a Caltech biologist who lives with and raises a rescued barn owl.

But the main goal of this break was to get started on some texts by Gilles Deleuze, especially since I'm enrolled in a class in the Spring called "Art After Deleuze," and I figured I should probably begin to understand some of his concepts and his style before I try to understand that which came and was created after him.

Thanks to a generous gift card to Amazon from my very literary aunt, I have purchased three texts by Deleuze: What is Philosophy?, which is co-authored by Guattari; Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, a text which I've been reading in front of a computer in order to search for all of the paintings to which Deleuze is referring; and Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, quite possibly the most dense text of the three. I'm only through the various introductions and the first 5 pages, but I've already found a passage that grabbed me, which I would like to share here:

...what was cinema's position at the outset? On the one hand, the view point [prise de vue] was fixed, the shot was therefore spatial and strictly immobile; on the other hand, the apparatus for shooting [appareil de prise de vue] was combined with the apparatus for projection, endowed with a uniform abstract time. The evolution of the cinema, the conquest of its own essence or novelty, was to take place through montage, the mobile camera and the emancipation of the view point, which became seperate from projection.

I know some of you might be thinking that this is quite an obvious statement of the moment(s) when cinema began to evolve, and the means through which it did, and therefore must be wondering why I like this quote so much. It's quite simple, really: I'm a sucker for concise definitions.

Hopefully this text gets a bit easier as it goes on, because right now I'm struggling a little. This could be because I'm trying to read the introductory concepts at 7 in the morning, which is what I'm hoping the case may be. I should probably continue reading when I've had a bit more caffeine...

"R"

Below is another poem from my Google search series. Enjoy.

R

Ragtime, Ratatat LP3 tracks
RCN, The Red Bull Stop, Road bike
Ritalin
Record player, Records for sale, Records online
Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Venturi, Ramses
Roddy Macdowell, Rick Warren
Ritalin
Roy Teeluck, Rosie the Riveter
The Rumble Strips, Rhythms of modern art, Rutgers
Ritalin

Statement of Intent for "Imagining Language" project, plus one of the poems

Through the act of articulation and writing oneself into being, all participants are engaged in a performance intended to be interpreted and convey particular impressions.

- danah boyd from “'None of This is Real': Identity and Participation in Friendster"

This project is designed to act as a comment on the performative nature of the depictions of self that we as participants in online social networks create and compose for the online audience of our peers. By summing up our identities through a series of pre-determined categories (Activities, Interests, Favorite Music/TV shows/Movies/Books, etc.) we are actively creating our virtual selves to represent who we believe ourselves to be, taking deliberate control over the domain of first impressions and identity creation. This impression of ourselves that we are meticulously authoring is the self-approved version of our identity, the one meant for performance in the public space of the online social sphere.

However, factors of our online presence that we do not consciously maintain or construct – or usually, for that matter, even remember – such as the keywords entered into search engines like Google still compose a unique online identity and cache of puzzle pieces that comprise a more complete picture of a user. This running set of inquiries – searches tracked by Google Analytics when a user is signed into their Google account and conducts a search – that was reserved for the mind and oral culture before the advent of the computerized search engine can be seen as the portion of our stream of consciousness that accounts for all those “I wonder what, or who, or where…” moments, and in some ways makes up for our stunted short term memories. These keywords should not be seen as just a point of inception of an inquiry; they in fact make up another aspect of our online identities, an aspect that we do not then share in the online sphere of the social. Because we do not actively enter keywords with the foresight of public presentation in mind, these keywords are almost more indicative of our identities than the information on our deliberately constructed online social network profiles

Primarily informed by danah boyd’s notions of the personal performances that take place on the profile spaces of social networking sites such as Friendster, this project aims to make a comment on the constructed performance of identity that is so accepted within online social networks by publicly performing portions of the artist's Google search history and thus forcing the private into the public. These search results will be compiled into lists, poems, and possibly other forms that grow organically from the source material. The artist intends to perform these pieces in public spaces, exposing normally hidden aspects of her interests in the public sphere. In order to incorporate the online social sphere as well as the traditional public sphere, the artist will also post these pieces to her social network profiles, and will showcase the pieces on her personal website.

The artist acknowledges that she has set certain parameters for this project, given the fact that the project can evolve over time as Google is the primary search engine employed by the artist in her daily online activities. The artist has made selections from her searches, choosing what to include in certain pieces and what to leave out. It is for these reasons, along with the burden of time constraints, that the artist has set certain parameters for the project, including the following::

• Some of the pieces were constructed with the intent to have a certain cognitive flow, and include only search inquiry keywords that rhyme or fit together stylistically.
• Others will simply be presented alphabetically by the first letter of the search term, for example: all search inquiries that start with the letter “R”
• The artist omitted any Google Maps search results for businesses, locations, or addresses and limited the included keywords to images, persons, and things.
• The project, due to time constraints, was limited to the sample of keywords that begin with the letters M through Z for searches conducted between September, 2008 and February, 2009. This will be expanded over the course of the next several months to include Googled keywords through September, 2009 (allowing for the sample size = 1 year) and Googled words and phrases beginning with the letters A through L.
  

The inspiration for this project came after seeing a performance of Francesco Gagliardi’s poetry that was comprised of the outcomes of Human Intelligence Tasks (or HITs) on Amazon Mechanical Turk’s crowd sourcing marketplace. His performance took place at The Internet as Playground and Factory Conference on Digital Labor hosted by Eugene Lang College at The New School in New York City. This project is also somewhat inspired by the flarf poetry movement of the late 20th and early 21st century.

The artist plans to perform pieces from this project at an open mic night that occurs every Tuesday evening in Los Angeles, California’s Echo Park neighborhood.

Below you will find an example of one of the pieces intended for performance:

I Google

I Google images of a skinny cat
I Google guides for the MLA format
I Google what it means to be a pack rat
I Google Ratatat LP3 tracks

I Google media mass deception
I Google poodle illustration
I Google media extensions and medical questions
I Google the benefits of female masturbation

I Google MIT
I Google Why We Fight
I Google Sci-fi original movies
I Google Summer’s here and the time is right

I Google Paul Newman
I Google the intricacies of pumpkin carving
I Google Joe Shuster Superman
I Google a stick figure, crying

I Google Sergei Eisenstein
I Google Sherrie Levine
I Google Skyline, Virgin airlines, and We Feel Fine

I Google post-human
I Google Please please please
I Google Pakistan
I Google Mozzarella cheese