Marcie Bianco

The Affect Theory Reader

brittany — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Edited by Melissa Gregg, Gregory J. Seigworth

As the first definitive collection of essays on affect studies, The Affect Theory Reader demonstrates how the affective turn in academia has been, and continues to be felt, throughout a variety of disciplines. Studies on affect produce qualified and valuable effects in the realms of aesthetics, ethics, and politics—to name just a few. Affect, in other words, is all pervasive, and the efforts of editors Gregg and Seigworth focalize on this estimation, while at the same, as evident in the gamut of essays, they emphasize that affect is readable in specific bodies and spaces.

What is “affect”? The editors offer a working (and, unfortunately, longwinded) definition on the first page of their introduction: “Affect, at its most anthropomorphic, is the name we give to those forces—visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion—that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension, that can likewise suspend us…across a barely registering accretion of force-relations, or that can even leave us overwhelmed by the world’s apparent intractability.” One, arguably feminist, value of affect in academic studies is that it has allowed the body (human or otherwise) to function as an epistemological site of knowledge and inquiry. The body, sloughed off and pushed aside by decades of poststructuralist and deconstructivist studies, has new value as both producer and product of affect. The essays by Elspeth Probyn (“Writing Shame”), Lauren Berlant (“Cruel Optimism”), Patricia T. Clough (“The Affective Turn...”), and Megan Watkins (“Desiring Recognition, Accumulating Affect”), all, in subtle or explicit ways, pronounce the underlying feminist register of studies on affect.

The collection of essays, while thematically varied, almost upon a spectrum of the materiality of affect (from the emotion of “happiness” to the commodity-fetish of affect in consumer culture), all philosophically and methodologically derive from a handful of prominent theorists and critics: Spinoza, Bergson, Freud, Deleuze and Guattari, (Raymond) Williams, and Lawrence Grossberg, who is figured as the inspiration behind the editors’ decision to create this volume and who is interviewed in the piece that bookends the volume. Grossberg, they claim, is “the principal figure in cultural studies to have recognized ‘passion, emotion, and affect as the new frontier for politics,’” and the interview offers a genealogy of Grossberg’s own affective turn.

In addition to the aforementioned essays, especially Berlant’s, whose “Cruel Optimism” made me squee—internally—at my own naïve “cruel optimism” about my sexual attachments (“‘Cruel optimism’ names a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic”); Sara Ahmed’s “Happy Objects” is a standout piece that opens the volume. In this essay, Ahmed studies how happiness “functions as a promise that directs us towards certain objects and how, in turn, there are bodies—such as feminist kill-joys, unhappy queers, and melancholic migrants—who thwart collective societal happiness by refusing to reproduce happiness-norms. Ahmed shows us how happiness is indeed socially produced but at the same time idiosyncratic; happiness is subjectively experienced and qualified individually, by each body. The result, as she notes in her analysis of the “unhappy queer,” is that “[a]lthough we can live without the promise of happiness, and can do so ‘happily,’ we live with the consequences of being a cause of unhappiness for others.”

C’est la vie.

Written by: Marcie Bianco, February 16th 2011

The Extra Man

admin — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Directed by Shari Springer Berman, Robert Pulcini

Magnolia Pictures

Based on the Jonathan Ames novel of the same title, The Extra Man is a film about, among other things, the amusing network of personal eccentricities that are produced when people engage with each other in society. The society in this film centers around a small cohort of men who live in the same apartment building: Henry Harrison, a self-proclaimed, unapologetic gentleman of yesteryear, who lives off escorting older New York City high society ladies; Louis Ives, a seemingly downtrodden young “gentleman” with a penchant for sexual deviancy (paying sex workers for spankings, cross-dressing) who rents a room from Mr. Henry Harrison and comes to admire the older man greatly; and Gershon, a falsetto-voiced man who dreams of singing melodies in a cave with his dream woman, but compensates for this dream by reading the dictionary, riding his bicycle, and masturbating ceaselessly.

The narrative follows Paul as he arrives into New York City after abruptly leaving his lecture position at an exclusive Princeton prep school (he was caught trying on a female teacher’s bra). Paul takes residence in the city with Mr. Harrison, played brilliantly by Kevin Kline, whose deft ability to perform deadpan comedy sparkles in this film. Positioned as a seemingly unwilling mentor to Paul, played by a mellow, soft-spoken Paul Dano, Mr. Henry Harrison teaches the young man how to become a gentleman—how to scam one’s ways into the opera; how to pee in the middle of the street via strategic hand maneuvers under one’s raincoat; and how, in particular, to regard women as objectified mediums to provide a gentleman’s grandiose, and somewhat garish, lifestyle.

Throughout the film, Paul seems unsatisfied with his life; he longs to be a writer instead of a lowly salesman, he longs to win the heart of his coworker Mary (Katie Holmes), and he longs to “find himself,” as do so many people who boldly move to a big city in an attempt for self-discovery. But Paul, no matter how often he partakes in his sexual fantasies, remains a depressed creature—his apparent happiness emerges only in those moments of interaction with the quirky Mr. Harrison. The denouement of the film occurs when Mr. Harrison discovers Paul cross-dressed as a woman, and so the two have a twenty-four-hour period of separation, in which the kid bemoans his woe-is-me, depressed existence. Of course, the two reunite after realizing that both enjoy each other’s company.

Kline, Dano, and John C. Reilly as Gershon, all perform wonderfully and make their characters memorable via how adeptly each embodies their respective role. The blending of genres, from British-inspired satire to melancholic realism renders the film baffling—as in, I kept looking at my watch, wondering when the film would come to a conclusion. To be honest, though, I don’t believe this reaction to be a fault of the film, but rather the film’s achievement. My guttural response was an effect of the layer of sadness that permeated the film. In other words, if you empathize with those nineteenth century decadents who ruminated on their melancholia for hours in their dimly-lit gray rooms, then, you’ll greatly enjoy this film. If you feel a Nietzschean aversion to this sort, like I do, then you’ll walk away from the cinema in full appreciation of what the film accomplishes, but feeling “mehhh...”

Written by: Marcie Bianco, July 10th 2010

Fish Out of Water

admin — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 00:01:00 +0000

Directed by Ky Dickens

First Run Features

In Fish Out of Water, Ky Dickens recalls her effort to reconcile her devout, Christian faith with her homosexuality. She claims she feels like a “fish out of water,” because, after coming out during her senior year of college at Vanderbilt, she was ostracized from her academic community, but, at the same time, didn’t quit feel an affinity to the gay community at large. To remedy this intense feeling of conflict within her self, Dickens set out to study the Christian scriptures, mostly by traveling the country to consult leaders of the Christian faith. What she discovered during her journey was that many people lean blindly on the Bible—believing, for instance, that the Bible ordains that homosexuality is a sin, but, for the most part, these same people have very little idea about what actually is written in the Bible.

Therefore, Dickens’s objective in the documentary is to examine, through a series of interviews with key Christian leaders, the seven verses (of over 6,000 total) that are cited as the key verses used to buttress Christians’ condemnation of homosexuality and, specifically, same-sex marriage. Especially revelatory are the four verses analyzed from the Old Testament (the final three are from the New Testament scriptures written by Paul in Romans, 1 Timothy, and 1 Corinthians). In the creation story that begins Genesis, biblical scholars discuss how God created Eve as the “fit helper”—ezer kenegdo, a “corresponding helper”—for “Adam” (meaning human of no gender). Eve was not created as his servant or slave, but as a life companion, in which Adam can find strength to live life to the fullest. Not only does this explication turn misogynist interpretations of the Bible their heads, but it also works to clarify that the primary function of this creative coupling was to not “be fruitful and multiply,” but to live harmoniously. Eve was not meant to be the vessel for man’s reproduction, neither does this injunction to “be fruitful and multiply” connote that sexual relations, of whichever sort, that do not seek to reproduce are “unnatural.”

Another fascinating discussion focuses on the Sodom and Gomorrah story, which is cited by the ignorant masses as proof that homosexuality is “unnatural” and that “sodomites” will be subject to the wrath of God. The moral underlying the tale is not about the unnaturalness of homosexuality, but the consequences of failing to provide hospitality to strangers. Lot offers two strangers shelter for the night, to the dismay of the local villagers, who turn violent from what appears to be sheer boredom. They want to “know” (ie, rape) the two strangers, who turn out to be angels—and these angels unleash their fury upon the villagers, while allowing Lot and his family (his wife, who turns to salt, and his two daughters) to flee the village before it is destroyed. The two daughters, eager to create their own tribe, decide to get their father drunk and then rape him in order to procreate to begin their own tribe. Via analysis of this story, it becomes apparent how irrelevant and ineffective this verse is in a bigot’s arsenal against homosexuality—because it has nothing to do with same-sex relationships or marriage.

Overall, Dickens offers us a more satisfying take on the conflict between the Christian faith and homosexuality than other pieces, especially the tepid For The Bible Tells Me So, which had little substance in relation to is political bite. The focus on exegesis rather than politics renders the documentary a much stronger weapon against blind faith and bigotry. Fish Out of Water is a heartfelt but serious film for those who, like Dickens, long to ease the conflict between their religion and their sexuality. As well, it could prove a quite powerful tool if utilized in pedagogical settings, to dispel misconceptions of scripture in society.

Written by: Marcie Bianco, June 25th 2010

Le Tigre: On Tour

admin — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 19:00:00 +0000

Directed by Kerthy Fix

“What’s the status of Le Tigre?” an eager—albeit slightly angst-ridden—fan asks Kathleen Hanna during the Q&A session after the screening of Le Tigre: On Tour. I, too, had been wondering the same question—because this band, who has proven so formative to women young and old everywhere, seems to exist only in our collective lesbo-feminist consciousness at the moment. For myself, in particular, I was introduced to Le Tigre’s music a year before they performed their final show in NYC, on 18 September 2005, so I never had the opportunity to witness their awesomeness in concert. Their existence to me, in other words, was always to me like a memory, an extant pastness that is real but not actual in that particular moment. I think their existence, for me, is kind of like how people understand Jesus or Santa Claus: he’s touched their hearts, and therefore he’s real… at least they think he’s real, but they’ve never actually seen him.

Which is why this documentary is so utterly amazing: the film, comprised of compiled concert and backstage footage from their final tour for the album This Island in 2004, and including more recent interviews with the trio—Johanna Fateman and JD Samson, in addition to Kathleen Hanna—is essential to the band’s continued existence in our collective lesbo-feminist consciousness. Seeing footage of live performances made me dance in my seat, and it brought tears to my eyes, particularly during the scene in which Hanna turns to Samson and gives her an acknowledging look—the “this is it” moment—of it being the last performance (“Deceptacon”) of their final show.

Director Kerthy Fix did a brilliant job creating this documentary in a way that proves attractive to all audiences: her attention to the trio of characters, and their feminist, queer ethics that embody the desire that each person be her “own lost hero,” as Hanna professes, speaks to everyone who wants to cultivate themselves as strong, powerful, and unique individuals. The documentary-as-archive is so crucial not only to preserving the band’s music, but also Le Tigre as a seminal part of the riot grrl movement, which has been built by the enterprising musical endeavors of the band collectively and separately, as each has her own individual pursuits.

Here we can think, of course, of Kathleen Hanna’s previous band, Bikini Kill, as the foundational component of this movement. And, as we Bikini Kill fans know so well, there is a scarcity of Bikini Kill footage out there—they existed before the explosion of the Interwebs, of the social media sites and blogs—so having this documentary is a welcomed addition to the steadily growing archive of the feminist and riot grrl movements.

Kudos to Fix for providing feminists young and old with this filmic insight into the iconic band—from Hanna’s deadpan explication of dressing room snack items (i.e., a bowl of fruit fit for the pope) to Fateman’s detailed vitamin regimen and Samson’s coming to terms with her Casanova status—and their raw lyrics and hot dance moves (“West Side Story meets Jazzercise,” to be precise).

Le Tigre: On Tour does not yet have a distributor; indeed, it’s still in the processing stages, pre-color correx and sound fix. Hopefully, by the end of the year, this film will be picked up and shown in theatres across the world for all the Le Tigre fans who, like me, long to connect with the band that filled their hearts and heads with sweetness and light.

Written by: Marcie Bianco, June 17th 2010

Between the Sheets: Nine 20th Century Women Writers and Their Famous Literary Partnerships

admin — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 17:02:00 +0000

By Lesley McDowell

Overlook Press

The adage, “Behind every great man is a great woman,” is a backhanded compliment to women, and one that implicitly avers a submissive feminism of codependency. At first glance, it is easy to misjudge Lesley McDowell’s Between the Sheets as a kind of backward-feminist interpretation of women writers’ literary careers, such that the success of these writers was primarily a product of the men who mentored them and who essentially produced their success.

Feminist scholars of the last three decades, of course, have written texts contesting and criticizing relations between prominent male and female literary figures. McDowell’s objective, however, is to prove that these female luminaries should not be cast as victims in these relations: “The aim of this book is...to demonstrate that none of the women artists mentioned here were victims at all, but that they chose their own fates knowingly and without the taint of victimization; that they chose such relationships in order to benefit their art and poetic consciousness.” This objective is what makes McDowell’s text praiseworthy in the larger scope of feminism: her book is an effort to move away from the culture of victimhood that plagues feminism today. In order to avoid trite notions of female victimization at the hands of men, McDowell attempts, as she explains, “to situate these liaisons at the center of these women’s emotional and literary lives, not to detract from their achievements, but to emphasize them, to show how important these relationships were to them, and why.”

The structure of Between the Sheets splits nine case studies, or literary relationships, into three sections, delimited by historical chronology as well as the geographic locale in which these relationships primarily took place. Part One, set in the 1910s and1920s, explores the relationships of Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murray, H.D. and Ezra Pound, and Rebecca West and H.G. Wells. Part Two, the “Paris Set” of the 1920s and 1930s, considers the relationships of Jean Rhys and Ford Maddox Ford, Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, and Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Satre—the last relationship of which, for me as a former student of philosophy, made me giddy with tales of Beauvoir and Satre pimping out their students to each other (oh, how fantastically perverse!). The third and final section is devoted to transatlantic relationships from the 1930s-1950s: Martha Gelhorn and Ernest Hemingway, Elizabeth Smart and George Barker, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

McDowell culls her information from diaries, letters, and journals, which, in all, makes for a thorough but accessible reading. The information being imparted is not revelatory, but the subtle, argumentative slant of the text is laudable for its elevation of women commonly stereotyped as victims who lived passive lives in relation to the men they loved. Anyone interested in some crisp, literary gossip should take a look at this book.

Written by: Marcie Bianco, February 7th 2010

The Heretics

admin — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:08:00 +0000

Directed by Joan Braderman

Crescent Diamond

The Heretics: Stories from a Feminist Collective premiered at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) during the first two weeks of October, 2009. Written and directed by Hampshire college professor, Joan Braderman, the documentary chronicles the creation and life of the feminist art collective, the Heresies, and their homegrown publication, HERESIES: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, which was in print from 1977-1992.

Braderman circles the globe in search of her former colleagues—painters, writers, filmmakers, among other artists—in an effort to document the history of the Heresies Collective and their publication within the larger context of the feminist movement of the 1970s. Braderman is successful in capturing the spirit of the heretics through her many interviews. HERESIES was a seminal publication in and for the feminist movement, and, throughout the course of the film, each interviewer details the love and dedication poured into the publication, from all night meetings to open sessions for readers to critique the most recent issue.

As a contributor to this publication, which advocates the same spirit of global feminism of its precursor, I felt a kinship with the feminism embodied by the interviewees. Each interviewee emphasized the collective’s success in promoting feminism and feminist dialogue through the conduit of their journal. “Success” is a fraught word for feminists, who have worked for large-scale change, but for whom change has yet to come on an equivalent scale. Indeed, it was heartbreaking to hear various members of the collective lament the current state of feminism, particularly in the United States. They spoke of the fact that very few people are feminists, or even desire to appropriate the identity of feminist. These women, commonly known as the second wave feminists, along with women around the world, have dedicated their lives to achieving political and social equality for women—and yet, women today spit on both the appellation of “feminist” and the philosophy of feminism. The film therefore not only documents the past, but issues a challenge to the future: do you—you feminists, you women—dare to be heretical?

Written by: Marcie Bianco, November 15th 2009

You’ve Changed: Sex Reassignment and Personal Identity

admin — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:26:00 +0000

Edited by Laurie J. Shrage

Oxford University Press

Each essay in Laurie J. Shrage’s collection, You've Changed, takes on the challenge of analyzing the philosophical, cultural, and psychological dimensions of the—for lack of a better or more acute concept—umbrella category of “trans” identity. This same challenge, which underlines the collection’s creation, is the same challenge that often times handicaps its clarity and ultimate success. The breadth of scope of the volume on “trans” identities is awe-inspiring, but simultaneously hinders the conceptual clarity of many of the concepts discussed within the essays: “trans,” used primarily as an identity prefix, is applied indiscriminately, and, frequently inconsistently, to gender, sex, and sexuality throughout the essays. The difficulty, from the reader’s perspective, is the inability to grasp exactly, with precision, what—philosophical, phenomenological, or physical—concept the author is referring to in their his/her essay. Each author attempts to map out the concepts that they he/she engages with in their his/her essay, but the lack of conceptual consistency and coherence within each essay, and among the essays collectively, creates readerly confusion (for even the most adept of gender studies scholars!).

Take, for instance, the first essay of the volume, Christine Overall’s “Sex/Gender Transitions and Life-Changing Aspirations.” Overall logically begins the essay by laying out the terms of her discussion of transitioning. She writes, “I use the general term ‘trans’ to refer to individuals who go through changes from man to woman or woman to man, deliberately glossing over the differences among transgendered and transsexual individuals.” She then goes on to explain, that “gender is the presentation or identification (or both) of self as being a woman or a man or some permutation thereof. By ‘sex’, [she] mean[s] (human) female and male, as well as (human) femaleness and (human) maleness,” and delimits “femaleness” and “maleness” by “the presence of the genitalia standardly associated with each.” The first “gloss” is logically productive in that it allows Overall to employ “trans” to refer to any form of “transitioning” that an individual may experience in her life. However, the following clause, which seems an attempt at specification, only problematizes the concepts of gender and sex, which clouds the productive function of the “trans” prefix, and which is apparent by the author’s continual untangling of “gender” and “sex” throughout the essay.

Overall’s essay, like all essays in the volume, is praiseworthy for its sophisticated and serious effort. Gayle Salamon’s essay, “The Sexual Schema: Transposition and Transgender in Phenomenology of Perception,” is particularly brilliant for its appraisal of Merleau-Ponty’s text and how it manages to illustrate how Merleau-Ponty’s work in general—once shunned for being too “airy-fairy,” poetical, or qualitative—proves quite useful to discussions of trans identities.

Written by: Marcie Bianco, October 2nd 2009

The Naughty Kitchen With Chef Blythe Beck

admin — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:53:00 +0000

By Chef Blythe Beck

Oxygen

Oxygen devised a new show from a most novel idea: produce a “food show” as a documentary, or in their terms, as a “docu-series.” The show, The Naughty Kitchen, has the drama of the popular Top Chef without the competition. Instead, it delves into the mania and frenzy of the restaurant business from Chef Blythe Beck’s perspective. Chef Beck was recently named executive chef of the highly regarded Dallas restaurant, Central 214. The docu-series, therefore, documents Chef Beck’s ascension to the role of executive chef, as well as the trials and tribulations that await her in her quest to achieve, in her words, “total world culinary domination.” In a nutshell, think female chef bildungsroman—or, in this case, bildungsTV.

Yesterday Oxygen premiered the first episode of the series for bloggers in New York City. The first episode is driven by the plot line of Chef Beck’s, and Central 214’s, first major culinary review in the Dallas Morning News. Being the first episode, of course, the episode spends the necessary time introducing the show’s cast of characters: here, in addition to Chef Beck, kudos goes to the so-called “Door Whores” Emily and (new hire) Curtis, who pass their time out in front of the restaurant by entertaining themselves in the most hilarious of ways. In the first episode, Tweedle-E and Tweedle-C venture a spelling bee challenge. Emily stymies Curtis with the term “horrogenous,” which, in her estimation, is a word (a noun, it seems) that refers to plants, like horticulture, except it’s not. Needless to say, all the fun doesn’t just take place in the kitchen on this show.

At the premiere I had a chance to talk with Chef Beck, who is just as warm and lovely as she appears on television (and, to note, just as pink as well!). She spoke to me about the challenges facing women in the culinary world—the name calling, the exclusion, and the pervasive sexual harassment—and her dream of “total world culinary domination.” To achieve this goal, she says, she needs to know the “dirty food secrets” of everyone around the world. Knowing these secrets—her dirty secret is mall pizza, by the way—will enable her to create the most naughty, most delicious, of dishes to over indulge the palate.

“Naughty” foods, clearly, are foods made of creams, butter, and bacon that are not touted as “healthy.” Decadent foods are naughty; fatty foods are naughty; sugary foods are, alas, naughty. This we all know, but Chef Beck implores us to indulge, just a little, and it is this encouragement to indulge through the creation of some sinful dishes (see her fried chicken dishes, particularly) that makes Chef Beck just as naughty as her food.

In the first episode, we hear the Dallas Morning News patronize Chef Beck’s naughtiness as “schtick,” but in their critique, they fail to understand Chef Beck’s culinary creations in their totality. In other words, they look solely at the end product—the plate of fried chicken—and say, “How naughty?” What they overlook is what we, the viewers, are able to see played out on the show: naughty is a lifestyle. It’s a continuous process that encompasses every step in the act of creation of food and of life. It’s not just the end product.

Chef Beck was gracious to partake in a quick game of word association. I asked her to shout out the first word that came to her mind. Here is the game, as it played out:

Me: Tuesday

Chef Beck: Hangover

Me: Pink

Chef Beck: Me

Me: Naughty

Chef Beck: Kitchen

Me: Fried

Chef Beck: Avocado

Me: Women

Chef Beck: Powerful

The Naughty Kitchen airs Tuesday nights at 10pm EST on Oxygen starting tonight!

Written by: Marcie Bianco, September 22nd 2009

The Good Fairies of New York

admin — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 09:29:00 +0000

By Martin Millar

Soft Skull Press

Having recently moved to New York City, one of my first excursions was to the Strand Bookstore. Late one evening in May, I walked into the shop and, feeling slightly overwhelmed but giddy with excitement, I ventured into the maze of tables and shelves surfeit with books.

Within ten minutes, I happened upon a book entitled The Good Fairies of New York. The title caught my attention: fairies? New York? The titular connotations suggested that the book would be a type of urban fantasy. Seeing that Neil Gaiman, a master of sci-fi and fantasy literature, wrote the introduction (an obvious sign of endorsement: “I owned it for more than five years before reading it, then lent my copy to someone I thought should read it, and never got it back. Do not make either of my mistakes.”), I immediately decided to purchase the book and began to read it as soon as I hopped onto the train.

The book’s opening scene encapsulates the fittingness of the generic prescription of the book as “urban fantasy”: two drunken fairies stumble into a fourth floor window and vomit all over the apartment floor of its owner, Dinnie, who is described as “an overweight enemy of humanity.”

The narrative of The Good Fairies consists of a handful of interwoven plots, such that the events of one plot have an effect, direct or less than direct, on another. There are two prominent storylines among the abundance. The first is that of the two Scottish fairies, Morag and Heather, and their quest to find a way home to Scotland, after mistakenly arriving in Manhattan and, as time passes, becoming engrossed in the various lives and events that occur throughout the city—from fairy wars in Central Park and Harlem to helping the ghost of The New York Dolls’ Johnny Thunder recover his lost guitar.

The second pertains to one of Heather and Morag’s adventures in New York and with New Yorkers, in which they determine to assist Dinnie in becoming a respectable violinist, and, more important, a respectable human capable of winning the heart of the book’s female (human) protagonist, Kerry. Kerry suffers from Crohn’s Disease and spends her time trekking through the city in her quest to unearth rare flowers for her flower alphabet project. Dinnie’s aforementioned distaste of humanity and his corresponding misanthropy sit in contradistinction to Kerry’s love of humanity and her abundant exuberance for life—a positive effect of her disease. Clearly, it is not quite love at first sight for the two, but the fairies vow to make the match.

Millar is wonderfully successful in capturing the mad buzz, the electric energy, the vibrancy and vitalistic life of New York City. Like many fantasy novels, the eccentric characters make the novel memorable. But, unlike a majority of texts in this genre, this particular one refuses to follow any particular, trite, story-arc oft associated with the fantasy (as a type of romance) genre. Instead, what The Good Fairies follows is the pulse of New York City and the beatings of the characters’ hearts, filled with punk rock beats and melodies.

Written by: Marcie Bianco, July 30th 2009

A Night of Shorts (06/05/2009)

admin — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 08:55:00 +0000

The WorkShop Theatre

New York, New York

The Wellesley Project’s inaugural show, A Night of Shorts, brought six single-scene dramatic performances and two choreographed pieces to the WorkShop Theatre for a short-run at the beginning of June. While home for the Project is New York City, its namesake—Wellesley College—figures as the catalyzing spirit behind the Project’s conception. Its founders, Caitlin Graham and Janice Yang, envisioned the Project as an artistic medium for women to pursue opportunities in both theater and production. In addition to a handful of other women writers, the two composed two individual pieces for the show. While topically disparate in scope, the show consisted of a medley of performances that all focused thematically on the issue of relationships, which explored both the sexual and the platonic.

Both in spirit and in conceptualization, A Night of Shorts is bold and eclectic. The second performance, “The Tracks are Electrified,” by Jane Miller, is undeniably the most captivating short of shorts. In this piece, Miller contemplates how the concepts of trust and love function in a relationship. A young couple—Rosy (Allison Whittinghill) and Max (Rocio Mendez)—find themselves debating the relationality of the two concepts: are trust and love mutually exclusive, or inextricably connected? Can you claim to love someone fully, entirely, while simultaneously maintaining that you can never trust that person entirely? This is Max’s position, whereas Rosy advocates that one cannot exist without the other. And, can a relationship survive between two people who abide such contrasting ethics? The two actors create a superb dynamic of play and intellectual tension that renders every moment of dialogue overfull of emotional intensity.

The other standout performances included the two choreographed numbers, both of which were directed by Erin Porvaznika, who also directed “The Tracks.” Set to Nina Simone’s “I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl” and Frank Sinatra’s “How About You?,” respectively, both pieces evoked the utopian feel of the mid-twentieth century. The routines were lighthearted and fun, and, frankly, sexy—that is, if one finds a handful of women dancing together sexy.

Beyond these three performances, however, the show exhibited moments of unevenness and inconsistency, particularly in execution. Some technical devices, such as having a character share a dialogue with another character seated in the audience, seem devoid of formal or thematic significance to the development of the plot. Other pieces at times tended towards a type of gratuitousness that came across as sophomoric; for instance, the protagonist of “Wine Diatribe” takes off her clothes while flirting with someone—perhaps the audience? or, an imaginary character in the audience?—offstage. She seems to get herself off more than anything else (particularly when she crudely wonders if all lesbians imagine licking their mothers’ pussies). The performance is poorly acted and executed, and, as a result, it just does not come together cogently in the end.

That being said, A Night of Shorts was, in short, quite entertaining and quite a laudable feat for an inaugural show. Perhaps it was just feeling the magical potential of being in a theatre, perhaps it was the feeling of anticipation that precipitates the unknowability of the series of performances that awaits the audience, but there was some thing, some quality, that was simply wonderful to witness unfold as the audience member is beckoned into an idyllic Wellesleyian world.

Written by: Marcie Bianco, June 27th 2009

The Non-Believer’s Bible

admin — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:15:00 +0000

By Franklin St. John

Inkwater Press

The Non-Believers Bible was passed along to me for review by a colleague who found the writing style to be painful, thereby foreclosing the possibility of her writing a deliberate review. Rather than headache-inducing, I found the text to be perplexing. Both while in the midst of reading it and after finishing it, one question continuously echoed in my mind: How to read this text? The question posed is both one of style and of method, since the method makes or is materialized in the style just as the style manifests in the method.

Perhaps, then, it is more appropriate to say that a growing sense of perplexing grew within my mind as a result of the motley combination of methods (which varied according to the “facts, research, history and common-sense view” culled by St. John) and styles at work in the text. The primary method and style is critique. The five purposes outlined in the preface articulate the overarching aim of the text: a critique of prominent world religions, a critique of the effects of religious beliefs, and a concluding section that describes the ethics of a non-believer.

It is the mode of critique—both as style and as method—that proves indigestible, as if the text were so chewy that it renders it impossible to swallow with understanding. Critique is art—to be able to write a critique, then, is an acquired artistic skill. It seems that St. John recognizes the mode of critique as the art form par excellence of writing. The text’s generic blending is reciprocated by the stylistic blending—the effects, however, for this reader, are confusing. The text, in its blatant, rhetorical, mockery of religion, sometimes reads as thoughtful provocation, while at other times reads as solipsistic and uncritical.

Particularly problematic is the author’s egregious oversight in claiming “facticity” for his project while simultaneously criticizing various world religions for asserting the same claim. “The book is factual, non-fiction, and absolutely true.” On the other hand, religious texts “are not based on fact, only hearsay,” he emphasizes, “I cannot stress enough the concept that religions are based totally on hearsay, no facts, nothing measurable.” Herein lies the problem: What is fact? St. John reiterates that his book is factual, but the assertion that his text is completely factual is predicated upon the melding of these following “facts”: as he says, “concepts [that] come from my own head. I have about twenty years of formal education, public school, college, and postgraduate work in Biology and Education. I am over sixty years old. I am a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a cousin. I read a lot and I think a lot.”

What is “fact,” St. John? Not only is the author hypocritical, more important, he fails to distinguish how his facts are different—or, more “true”—than religion’s facts. The concept of “the fact” is a nebulous one; for those of us with “formal education,” and, in particular, training in philosophy and critical thinking, we know that the concept of the fact is predicated upon the institution in power that determines what is fact; we know that quantitative systems of measurement are arbitrary and artificial, such that measured facts exist within determinate, closed, systems; and we know that all thought and language inherently emerges from perspective, from individual or collective perspective(s), such that any claim of objectivity is fundamentally rendered moot.

St. John’s text is inspiring for its discussion of how one can make meaning of life outside of religion, but, otherwise, the text is undermined by its own logic and therefore lacks the necessary rigor and critical acumen to present an effective critique of religion in general.

Written by: Marcie Bianco, June 24th 2009

Examined Life

admin — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 16:51:00 +0000

Directed by Astra Taylor

Zeitgiest Films

Astra Taylor’s documentary, Examined Life, is fantastically untimely in both its form and content. Formally, the documentary is structured as a series of eight, roughly ten-minute segments in which nine of today’s leading critical thinkers ruminate upon a social and ethical issue. Each thinker (seven have their own segment while Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor share a segment on a discussion gender and disability) is filmed while in movement: Peter Singer, for example, discusses consumer ethics while walking along Fifth Avenue in New York City; Slavoj Žižek rummages though heaps of trash at a landfill while wildly gesticulating about his philosophy of a new ecology for the twenty-first century.

The carefully regimented segments divided by topic and thinker (Avital Ronell bitterly jokes that she should have more face time than the others) are made cohesive by the theme of movement (of going for a walk or even rowing a boat in the middle of Central Park). Taylor’s utilization of the canonic concept of the peripatetic philosopher is a wonderfully clever nod to the origins of philosophy, and it also bespeaks how philosophy is at work in today’s world. Indeed, one of Taylor’s objectives for the documentary as a homage to philosophy is to literally show how philosophy is always relevant to “today”; how it is always a worthy endeavor because what philosophy allows for is the creative (mental and physical) space to think the new—to think about how to approach deleterious social and ethical problems in new ways in order to create new, more productive, methods for tackling those problems. The content of these segments—the philosophical fragments created in the spur of the moment (the most productive way for thinking creatively, as Nietzsche says in Ecce Homo: “give no credence to any thought that was not born outdoors while one move[s] about freely”)—is thus untimely, because the topics of these segments, which broadly address how life acquires meaning and how, correlatively, we can engage with the world as socially responsible creatures, are insoluble but nevertheless issues that need to be thought about in continuously new ways for us to progress beyond our current personal and social limitations.

Cornell West, who both opens and closes the film, offers the most poignant (and, at times, the most hilarious, especially when he greets an adoring fan at an intersection moments after jumping out of the car) thoughts on how to think about the meaning of life: he rightly asserts that to romanticize life is to render it a form of nihilism. In other words, to desire the whole or to believe in the possibility of the whole (of complete happiness, for instance) is a grand delusion that is inevitably detrimental to living life fully. We should not predicate the value of life on the ideal of wholeness, but instead should create an ethics of the self that understands “time as a giver,” such that one is no longer concerned with the inevitable failure of never being able to attain the whole (of something) but can appreciate what she attains outside of this fabricated notion of the whole.

Examined Life is smart and spectacular. The literal movement mirrored in the thematic movement from thinker to thinker has a similar affect on the audience: I left the theatre walking expeditiously, the thoughts provoked by the documentary swirling just as rapidly. I felt the kind of giddy excitement that one feels that they are thinking, truly thinking deeply about life, which may seem a vague description but is actually the most fitting way to articulate how this documentary touched the spirit of my existence.

Written by: Marcie Bianco, April 16th 2009

Sophie’s World: A Novel about the History of Philosophy

admin — Mon, 07 May 2007 11:40:00 +0000

By Jostein Gaarder, Paulette Moller

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

An international bestseller when it was first published over a decade ago, Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World has recently been re-released with a new appendix consisting of a short set of thematic and plot-related questions. Gaarder’s novel, brilliant in its philosophical scope and concision, narrates the intellectual maturation of its protagonist, Sophie Amundsen, a fourteen-year-old girl living in Norway. The novel is comprised of brief synopses of major philosophical theories and figures, from classical myth to twentieth century existentialism, from Socrates to Beauvoir. The synopses are interspersed between narrative segments that follow Sophie’s quest to discover the mysterious identities of Hilde Møller Knag, Hilde’s father Albert Knag, and their connection to her philosophy teacher Alberto Knox. In a quite frightening narrative twist constructed as a type of surreal mise en abyme, which culminates in the delightful philosophical garden party, Sophie and Alberto discover that they are fictional characters in Albert Knag’s novel (coincidentally entitled Sophie’s World) that he has written to Hilde for her fifteenth birthday.

In his review in the New York Times of the novel upon its first publication in English in 1994, John Vernon aptly refers to the Sophie’s World as a kind of modernized “old-fashioned conduct book of the sort written by a father for his daughter’s education.” While this description bespeaks the novel’s unfortunate bland style—which Vernon calls as “plain as a box,” with “tissue thin” characters—it also is indicative of the novel’s practical value as an elementary guide to the history of philosophy; if a reader, for example, wanted a brief summary of Sartre’s version of existentialism, she can easily flip to the novel’s index for quick reference. It is a wonderful resource for a basic introduction to philosophy, especially for younger generations of readers who have already devoured J.K. Rowling’s and Philip Pullman’s books and who are looking for something else to satiate their desire for intellectual intrigue, mystery and adventure.

Written by: Marcie Bianco, May 7th 2007

Judith Butler: Philosophical Encounters of the Third Kind

admin — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 20:45:00 +0000

By Paule Zajdermann

First Run/Icarus Films

The title of the new documentary on feminist theorist Judith Butler plays upon Dr. J. Allen Hynek’s hypothesis that there are three possible kinds of encounters with aliens: the first kind is defined as “sighting,” the second as “evidence” and the third as “contact.” The title not only suggests that the intention of the documentary is to make “contact” with “Judith Butler,” but that, more to the point, something has prohibited this contact. The objective of the documentary, therefore, is “to popularize [Butler’s] insightful analysis of sexual identity and gender roles” so that contact can be made between “us” and “her,” the imaginary, inaccessible Other. Consequently, the result is that the past twenty years of Butler’s work is reduced into digestible phrases: “people are anxious about gender,” “gender is always about ambivalence” and “gender is always a failure.”

For those of “us” who engage with Butler’s work on a scholarly level, this documentary will be unsatisfactory; there is no critical discussion of Butler’s most contested ideas about gender, performativity, how she negotiates various (and seemingly disparate) theories into her own critical methodology or the problematic significance of Hegelian recognition in her theories on identity and ethics. Instead of establishing contact on a philosophical level, the desire is to make contact with Butler on a personal level. Thus the film opens with Butler describing herself as a “problem child,” who skipped classes and did “terrible things,” and ends with the camera lingering slowly over a photo of her with her partner and son.

The currency of academia in America seems to be in its value as entertainment - in scholars as celebrities, when morsels about their private lives can be included in the pages of People Magazine. It is no wonder then that we are told at length about Butler’s family owning movie theatres in Cleveland, or that her mother is like Joan Crawford. In one particularly intriguing, albeit uncomfortable, scene, Butler discusses her celebrity status, the invasion of her privacy by the press and that some criticism she receives is both personal and painful. Her frustration with the expectation that she must embody her own theory functions as ironic commentary on the documentary itself. It also raises the question about what compelled Butler to do the documentary—what kind of contact, and at what price?

Written by: Marcie Bianco, April 20th 2007

Sticky Fingers: Queers Running the Stage Art Gamut (2/17/2007)

admin — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 01:27:00 +0000

Galapagos Art Space

Brooklyn, New York

Sticky Fingers featured a medley of performances ranging from spoken word poetry to electro-rock by queer artists from across the eastern seaboard. Held at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn, NY, the show was stimulating in its polymorphous perversity, the performances audacious in their satirical elements and guttural verve. Manhattan-based artist Chavisa Woods opened the night with her spoken word piece “No One is Ever Going to Touch You Like This.” Woods’ piece was a powerful inquiry the reality of passion and fantasy. The force of her language was materially rendered onto her body as a space of confrontation and mutilation: the inquisitive nature of her question “Do you lack passion?” asked while being whipped became an imperative to the audience to rethink their emotions.

Woods’ piece was just one of the many highlights of the show. Philly-based, electro-rock, multimedia performance artist LotSix, also the show’s producer, electrified the audience with her danceable beats, incisive lyrics, and poignant visuals. Her performance was refreshing in its approach to salient political and cultural issues. What distinguishes LotSix from other queer artists is her ability to refrain from the pervasive dogmatism that has dominated the queer performance scene. This is what makes a LotSix performance unique: her music is not comprised of trite didactic commentary but satirical ruminations on life. Songs like “You Are” mock the necessity to “out” and place labels on people—here, the “you are” is a mocking interpellation of Sarah Gilbert as she was outed by Curve Magazine (then Deneuve Magazine) in the early 90s—while songs such as “Contextuality” play upon the seriousness of relationship issues through a retelling of a personal experience.

Katz, the solo member of the Athens Boys Choir, blends spoken word poetry with hip-hop beats to create dynamic music that, like LotSix’s music, is wonderfully creative and avoids the bland aftertaste of the standard politically-driven queer performance. His songs “WaHo”—a dedication to his love of Waffle House—and “Tranny Got Pack”—a parody of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back”—were priceless in their hilarity. “Sticky Fingers” also featured short films by Phoebe Morris and Jen Heck, the latter whose film “Airplanes” was recently awarded first-runner up of the 2007 PlanetOut Short Movie Award. Closing the show was Brooklyn-based, post-riot grrl band Marla Hooch, who rocked the space with their hard-hitting, but less gritty and angry than their riot grrl predecessors, music.

Written by: Marcie Bianco, March 28th 2007