Wednesday, March 11, 2009

It's supposed to be spring!!

Bad day at work. I'm in this weird stage where I feel like I'm losing interest in what I was initially very intrigued by and I'm struggling against it. Perhaps it was the grayness of today that made me feel so down. Or perhaps I am just being hard on myself but it really matters to me that people don't consider me lazy or ambivalent. I feel like I'm the wicked, duller stepsister.

Time at home makes me very excited. I'm happy with the few hours I get to spend in the privacy of my room making something or reading...it's what got me through this long, awful winter.

Other things that are currently making me feel happy:



Creepy narrative photos involving dolls.
More at http://turquoisechildren.online.fr




Cameo Necklaces with Couples in them.
I know, I know. Fuck you. But how can I resist the cheesy loveliness of this necklace??!! I almost bought one like this with a hand painted portrait of Joel and Clementine.




Obnoxious Ribbon
Yes!


I just learned about this band within the past month. I like the original version of this song but this video has somehow become a subject of intrigue for me. I can't seem to tell if the lead singer is super cute or creepy.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Caged Performance....I have lots of work to do.

I should actually be working on other things but I feel compelled to post, thanks to my lovely art history class.



Today we watched The Couple in the Cage, a video documentation of a collaborative performance involving Guillermo Gomez- Pena and Coco Fusco. It was an obvious satire in which Guillermo and Coco traveled around the globe, decked out in faux Amerindian costumes and posed as "savages" locked up in a cage.The cage was set up in the main lobby of various art and natural history museums, allowing the visitors to interact with the performers. If you payed fifty cents, Guillermo and Coco performed faux tribal traditions. Coco would do a "warrior dance" to a hip hop song while Guillermo told a story about his homeland in a made up tongue while holding a rubber snake. If you went up to their cage and enunciated the word, "P-H-O-T-O", they would even pose so you could take a picture with them.


The performance was very effective in that it had a very sophisticated way of being satirical and that was primarily due to the passive attitudes of the performers...which I totally commended because if someone tried to feed me a banana through a cage, I'd probably spit on them.


The video documentation was interspersed with images of native people being shipped off to Europe and America to be showcased in the circus like freaks. At first, I was irritated with the very didactic comparison but there was a moment when I kind of lost it and got a little emotional. What REALLY effected me was that there were still some people who didn't seem to understand that it was a social commentary. I distinctly remember a sailor from Chicago asking, "Who shaved her legs for her?".

ttp://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$misc?clips/COUPLEINTH.mov
(A small excerpt from the video)