Wu Tsang, in this month’s Interview Magazine
Paris is Burning, Is Paris Burning?, Paris has Burned
I. Paris is Burning (1990)
Watch it on Netflix, please. If you need my log-in, e-mail me. ENJOY!
Also on Vimeo with Japanese subtitles.
II. Is Paris Burning?
Responses to and controversy around the film:
a. An essay by bell hooks (“Is Paris Burning?” from “Black Looks,” 1992)
b. An interview with the director (from Bomb Magazine, 1991)
III. Paris has Burned
After the “fall:”
a. An article from the NY Times (“Paris has Burned,” 1993)
b. Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990, let’s just read the Wikipedia)
c. YouTube: Vogue: Dips & Drops (Part Two, 2010)
d. YouTube: VOGUE NIGHTS CATFIGHT LEYOMI VS KATRINA
VS FEMININE DESTRUCTION!!! (2011)
e. YouTube: How to Do the Dip in Vogue Dramatics (2011)
f. YouTube: Madonna - Vogue - MTV Awards (1990)
Extra credit: there’s a video in the basement of the museum here now called “For how we perceived a life (Take 3)” by an artist named Wu Tsang. He’s a transman, and the video uses a technique he developed called “Full Body Quotation” wherein actors are fed lines through an earpiece that they then speak and “perform.” The video, like 8 mins on a loop, feeds lines from Paris is Burning, lines from interviews with the director and subjects afterwards, maybe even part of the bell hooks essay. The diction is so on point, especially for the woman who does Crystal LaBeija.
Things to think about maybe:
1. Drag and class/gender/AIDS/feminism/male gaze/fashion
2. The rights/possibilities of representation/voyeurism/ethnography
3. Terms like “reading,” “realness,” “shade,” “banjy,” “house of,” “children,” “gagging,” “legendary,” “10s,” and “fall”
Pg. 24 of David Markson’s copy of James Joyce: His Way Of Interpreting The Modern World by William York Tindall:
On which Markson underlined the words:
“Nothing is accidental or insignificant in Ulysses.”—
Nothing is accidental or insignificant in Ulysses.
Which reminds me of a quote from the book:
“A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”Nothing accidental.
Nothing insignificant.
David Markson thought highly of Ulysses, and like Tindall, found nothing accidental or insignificant in Joyce’s masterpiece.
He makes this known in many places, but perhaps none more clear than in The Last Novel on pg. 168 in his critique of Dale Peck (who he’s critiquing for critiquing Ulysses):
“Anyone who would employ the word diarrheic to describe a book as exactingly crafted in every line as Ulysses has either never read eleven consecutive words or possesses the literary perception of a rutabaga.
Ulysses. Diarrheic, unquote. Dale Peck.”As he grew older and stopped reading fiction, Ulysses was the one book he kept returning to:
“I can always reread Ulysses. In fact I went through it twice, consecutively, just a few years ago. But hell, that’s not like reading a novel, it’s more like reading the King James Bible. Or Shakespeare. You’re at it for the language.”
(From his Bookslut interview.)Nothing is accidental or insignificant in Ulysses.
Volitional.
Exactingly crafted.
You’re at it for the language.
GHOSTS
some questions to consider:
—what function does the supernatural serve in literature and history? contemporary life?
—can atheists account for the supernatural? can science?
—how much is this a discussion about religion?
—who loves philip pullman?
—who loves philip pullman?
Hans Halvorson, Quantum Mechanics and the Soul
Ghost Writers and Their Spooky Literature
Charles Choi, Do Computers Dream of Electric People?
xx: In an secular view of the world, how can we explain the supernatural?
some basic theories about ghosts:
Scientific skepticism
See also: ParanormalThe physician John Ferriar wrote An essay towards a theory of apparitions in 1813 in which he argued that sightings of ghosts were the result of optical illusions. Later the French physician Alexandre…
Is Techno Viking the idealized Artaudian man?
He’s kind of cruel. What’s in that holster? He’s definitely in touch with his mythical, tribal, inner spiritual self. He’s in peak physical shape. He protects women, and even shuns capitalism. (Look how he rips up that flyer.)
How did we end up here?
(Source: youtube.com)
A Homeboy , A Hippie & A Funki Dredd - Total Confusion (1990) (by Swirls888)
Early hip house with proto-jungle/rave/breakbeat signifiers… great jacking!
D-Mob “We call it acieed” (by zynsk)
England co-opts the radical subjectivity of queer Chicago house and turns it into a kind of parody… classic combo of an English production duo and a African-American rapper, which would go on to dominate “Hip House” throughout the early 90s. What would Artaud say?
Jack ‘N’ Chill - The Jack That House Built (by schlagertyp)
1987 UK House crossover, one of the first to be wildly popular with mass audiences instead of specialized queer Chicago DJs and club kids… British production duo with a “blackwashed” visual aesthetic, incorporating some of the cheesier traits of earlier Eurobeat dance music with the 909 drums, samples, and piano of Chicago house. Also a great example of the visual aesthetic so common with late 80s “House”, in all its iterations.
