The other week when I taught at the art school on the one famous ethnography of cruising in public park restrooms, after doing Socratic method and unearthing a number of problem areas with the scholarship, I checked in with students to see how many had gone through the scholar's excerpted notes and tried to figure out what the people he observed were doing in any given moment and whether he had theorized the culture accurately from his observations.
The answer?
No-one had tried visualizing.
So, I asked for volunteers, cleared out a space in the center of the room, set up chairs to represent the restroom stalls and urinals, and then read a photostat copy of the guy's ethnographic fieldnotes from an inset in the book as students moved around accordingly.
At each step, we tried to interpret the people's behavior in terms of the guy's overarching theory (negotiation for oral sex, active strategies for fellators to go up to men standing at urinals, etc.).
Believe it or not, I think the students got a ton out of it!
And, the guy's overarching theory held and was very illuminating, at least to interpret the one situation we staged.
Saturday, February 28, 2015
Friday, February 27, 2015
Superbowl halftime show: Count me as disappointed.
So I was disappointed with the Superbowl halftime show:
1) Staging was lifeless and way too static, esp. compared to Katy Perry's stadium concert that I saw this summer (notes of which I still have and I need to write up at some point).
2) The beachball thing looked cheap, like something a high school glee club would do if they had to scale up to "Triumph of the Will" proportions.
3) No-one can ever compete with Madonna's halftime show for energy and pure fun, even if you factor out the striking subversiveness...
I like this YouTube comment on the performance from 8 mos. ago btw -
I heard some of the dancers are local union workers. My best guess is the guy in white during vogue
- and also this one from "grandmasterkrush", who subscribes to lots of current YouTube hiphop channels:
maaan at first I was like madonna for halftime? ain't she like sixty by now? meh well aight. and then this kicks in and leave me in awe. total pwnage. this was the best halftime show ever bar none. she bossed it out.
. . .
1) Staging was lifeless and way too static, esp. compared to Katy Perry's stadium concert that I saw this summer (notes of which I still have and I need to write up at some point).
2) The beachball thing looked cheap, like something a high school glee club would do if they had to scale up to "Triumph of the Will" proportions.
3) No-one can ever compete with Madonna's halftime show for energy and pure fun, even if you factor out the striking subversiveness...
I like this YouTube comment on the performance from 8 mos. ago btw -
I heard some of the dancers are local union workers. My best guess is the guy in white during vogue
- and also this one from "grandmasterkrush", who subscribes to lots of current YouTube hiphop channels:
maaan at first I was like madonna for halftime? ain't she like sixty by now? meh well aight. and then this kicks in and leave me in awe. total pwnage. this was the best halftime show ever bar none. she bossed it out.
. . .
Thursday, February 26, 2015
2 (older) (black) women at a bar liked Katy Perry.
The day before the Super Bowl, I was out hitting up some bars in a (black) neighborhood southwest of me.
At the 4th and last, it was slow, and of the people there, like 4 were staffers and 1 was a regular.
Of them, the (late 30s) (black) (female) manager was a seat down from me doing inventory on her laptop, and the (older) (black) (female) bartender was doing re-stocks at the bar, hoping for a crowd that night, though assuming that people were holding off going out since they'd be going out the next night for the Super Bowl.
Somehow - perhaps from them asking me if I was going to be watching the Super Bowl? - me and them got to talking about Katy Perry, and straight away when I mentioned her name to them, both of them were like, "I love her."
The bartender said she just liked her and thought she was pretty, and the manager said she liked the message of her songs, and had her teenager download "Roar" for her after she heard it.
Interestingly, she didn't know of the existence of the song "Firework", and so before I left, I gave her a dollar and told her to go give herself a treat on me and have her teenager download it for her from iTunes.
She also said she just somehow knew that Katy Perry was going to open the halftime show with "Roar" - which turned out to be true! -and I said that I knew that she'd close with "Firework", which also turned out to be true, though that's a pretty obvious choice since it goes well with fireworks and a big close.
When I left, the one (very old) (male) regular was outside, doing something with a shovel since he also seemed to work for the bar.
"You have a good night!", he was like, "And be careful, there's a lot of assholes in this neighborhood."
At the 4th and last, it was slow, and of the people there, like 4 were staffers and 1 was a regular.
Of them, the (late 30s) (black) (female) manager was a seat down from me doing inventory on her laptop, and the (older) (black) (female) bartender was doing re-stocks at the bar, hoping for a crowd that night, though assuming that people were holding off going out since they'd be going out the next night for the Super Bowl.
Somehow - perhaps from them asking me if I was going to be watching the Super Bowl? - me and them got to talking about Katy Perry, and straight away when I mentioned her name to them, both of them were like, "I love her."
The bartender said she just liked her and thought she was pretty, and the manager said she liked the message of her songs, and had her teenager download "Roar" for her after she heard it.
Interestingly, she didn't know of the existence of the song "Firework", and so before I left, I gave her a dollar and told her to go give herself a treat on me and have her teenager download it for her from iTunes.
She also said she just somehow knew that Katy Perry was going to open the halftime show with "Roar" - which turned out to be true! -and I said that I knew that she'd close with "Firework", which also turned out to be true, though that's a pretty obvious choice since it goes well with fireworks and a big close.
When I left, the one (very old) (male) regular was outside, doing something with a shovel since he also seemed to work for the bar.
"You have a good night!", he was like, "And be careful, there's a lot of assholes in this neighborhood."
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Great graffiti.
If I have to take public transportation to the art school, my morning commute has 3 quick legs:
1) Bike ride or a bus to the subway station.
2) Head up one stop on a fast train.
3) Hop out on the platform, wait for a different train, and take that one stop north.
A lot of times, I just zone out and people watch on the platforms or look out at the city when I'm on the bus or train, since the commute legs are so short that it doesn't pay to pull out a book or something.
I noticed the other morning that on 2 buildings on the north side of the train on commute leg #2, someone had spraypainted -
KEEP ON HAVIN A NICE DAY!!!
- though the first time with only one exclamation mark.
I love it. It's usually like 8am and sunny on a winter's morning when I've been seeing that, and it just makes my day.
I especially love how it assumes you're already having a great day, though for me at least it puts me in a good mood and inaugurates my good day.
Tuesday, February 24, 2015
Why I got a smartphone:
1) My cheap-ass phone company phased out the network supporting my $35/mo. unlimited talk-and-text, and I could get a free new phone and either a $25/mo. unlimited talk-and-text or a $35/mo. smartphone plan with 1GB of data.
2) I'm so scattered this semester, I've wanted a phone to check weather and movie listings and whatnot, since I don't have net at home.
3) I want to wean myself from texting, and I find the typing interface of the phone really annoying, so maybe that will help me cut down.
4) If I don't like it, I can cancel at any time and then I just have to spend $50 on a new phone and downgrade to the $25/mo. plan, and in 5 months I'll have recouped the costs.
2) I'm so scattered this semester, I've wanted a phone to check weather and movie listings and whatnot, since I don't have net at home.
3) I want to wean myself from texting, and I find the typing interface of the phone really annoying, so maybe that will help me cut down.
4) If I don't like it, I can cancel at any time and then I just have to spend $50 on a new phone and downgrade to the $25/mo. plan, and in 5 months I'll have recouped the costs.
Monday, February 23, 2015
Sunday, February 22, 2015
Art school weirdness: Ethics of sex.
When I teach my sex class, I discuss the ethics of introducing sexual content into the classroom, to get students thinking before explaining the guidelines that I have chosen as instructor (e.g. no discussion of personal sex lives b/c that can be nonconsensual verbal exhibitionism).
I mentioned this to a colleague in the office, and she said that things could be a little looser at the art school, and that a colleague of hers in Performance had a class devoted to collapsing class and performance.
"One day she ended up naked in front of the students," she was like. "But no-one left the room."
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