“John Jasperse and Nicholas Leichter View Artifice Through... - Village Voice” plus 3 more |
- John Jasperse and Nicholas Leichter View Artifice Through... - Village Voice
- FIFA World Cup 2010: Do or Die (in the hands of Free Press) for England! - Bleacherreport.com
- Dutch courage - Boston Phoenix
- Chris Christie: *Shredding* The Script - RedState
| John Jasperse and Nicholas Leichter View Artifice Through... - Village Voice Posted: 22 Jun 2010 04:24 PM PDT Theater has always trafficked in illusion. The flesh-and-blood performers may be within touching distance, but reality has been leeched out of them. They are—and are not—"themselves." Those aren't shots of real bourbon the actor is knocking back. Fictions, as in life and politics, masquerade as truth. DetailsJohn Jasperse Company
Joyce Theater June 16 through 19 Nicholas Leichter Dance In Truth, Revised Histories, Wishful Thinking, and Flat-Out Lies, John Jasperse and his four terrific performers offer a witty and provocative web of dancing, acts, and images that test in bewitchingly eccentric ways our ability to distinguish between truth and lies and between real acts and simulated ones. The choreographer as trickster. The first half of the work is dark, full of fog and shadows, although the magical lighting by Jasperse and Joe Levasseur makes the black sequined shifts worn by Erin Cornell and Eleanor Hullihan glitter almost alarmingly (costumes by Jasperse and Deanna Berg MacLean). To one side is a little "room," whose single rear wall and floor are wallpapered with a rose pattern. The same print is used on the bikinis that the women strip down to, so they can behave as if they're on a beach (we can't hear their muted chatter, but their buttocks quiver minutely to convey its rhythm. What's wrong with this picture?). In one of Jasperse's cameo appearances, he attempts a single pirouette, each time over-explaining the reason he falls off-balance, even talking over the recorded voice of his patient teacher (Janet Panetta). Finally, he sort of masters this example of artifice and—unwilling to accept the fact that he's a terrible turner—immediately decides he's ready to attempt a double. Who's he kidding? His magician act is equally lame, allowing us to grasp the desired illusion, even though we see where the balls appear from. (A genuine surprise comes later, when Neal Beasley ends a dance section by spitting out a ball we'd never have guessed he's secreting.) The piece layers the many variations of its theme. While Jasperse is pulling balls out of pockets, Hullihan and Kayvon Pourazar are immersed in a tango, to James Lo's intriguing score (part recorded, part live, although we see no musicians at present). The tango's elegant simulation of foreplay contrasts to what Pourazar then does with Cornell—a messier, more fumbly affair. The dancing throughout the piece is rich and juicy—its big, sweeping, slippery movements and canted spins sometimes veering almost out of control. But the performers' apparent dizziness or laziness is as simulated as the invisible cigarettes they puff (just once) and the invisible drinks they not very convincingly sip. Jasperse even makes you wonder if the shifting flashes of unison dancing are carefully planned or accidental. Inevitably, the piece skewers the fabricated sexy manners that are a crucial ingredient in show dancing. Tall, languorous Cornell and the shorter, spicier Hullihan—strutting in heels— are adept at conveying the style without overplaying it—as are Beasley with his whiplash body and Pourazar in his own softer way. "I want you to want me," their prowling and hot stares proclaim. But, of course, they don't. Not really. One of the highlights of Truth is a mysterious sequence in which the two women, standing in place, execute in exacting synchrony a sequence of smooth balances on one leg or the other. All the time, Beasley and Pourazar, dressed from head to toe in black, with only part of their faces visible, crawl around and between them. They're like the stagehands in Kabuki theater; we're meant to pretend we don't see them, even though we do. The men keep close, their moves echoing or accommodating to the shapes the women are creating, but no touching is involved. The effect is strangely erotic. The post-intermission part of the piece is its "white act": floor, back wall, costumes—all white. Now the four string players of the International Contemporary Ensemble are seated onstage (they're wearing white clothes too). The centerpiece of this act is a fight between Cornell and Jasperse, which takes place on the floor, as if they've already knocked each other down. As in a slow-motion action sequence in a film, their every punch, jab, twist, push, and press happens smoothly and without apparent weight, although their silent howls and gritted teeth bespeak their rage and the illusory pain they're inflicting and enduring. The climax to this highly artificed bout is a single real slap. The visible and the invisible are queried in this half of Truthtoo. After the fight, dancers and musicians solemnly place large doilies over their heads for a while, like children who think that you can't see them if they can't see you. The dancing that runs through both parts of this wonderful piece poses its own questions about reality and illusion. These performers are like us and not like us, like their own everyday selves and not. They're also beautiful in the way their ease lies to us about the sweat and muscle work that attend it and the hours of rehearsal that brought it to life. Five Filters featured article: Headshot - Propaganda, State Religion and the Attack On the Gaza Peace Flotilla. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| FIFA World Cup 2010: Do or Die (in the hands of Free Press) for England! - Bleacherreport.com Posted: 22 Jun 2010 05:14 PM PDT Big day ahead! If you read the English press, you might be forced to believe that the England national team is in a massive crisis. There's been too much written and said about England's performance in the last . . er . . 2 matches. This is not being looked at as two bad matches. But if the world cup itself lasts for 7 matches for the finalist, playing badly in 2 matches is quite a proportion. Anyways, in summary, England has played poorly, probably very poorly, in this world cup so far and they need to win the next one to stay in the world cup. What's more disgusting than England's football is the English journalism. I must say that the behaviour of the English press is sickening. They seem so excited with England's failure than they might feel with England's success. At the end of the Algeria match, some of the press people might have pumped their fist saying 'yesss'. See, as I said, it's clear that England played poorly. And it is fine if the English press criticise England's performance. It's gone beyond that. There's so much fiction and fantasy about what could have caused this instead of proper constructive criticism and proper theories of what could work going forward. England had a fantastic qualifying campaign. I knew that Capello would make a difference to England but I was still surprised at how England breezed through the qualifiers. They even had a sweet revenge with a 5-1 win over Croatia. It was not without a reason that England had very favourable odds to be world champions, before the tournament began. Capello sacked Terry as captain and that was welcomed by the press (it was more like engineered by the press). When Capello announced his squad, it was welcomed by the press. So, up until the start of the tournament, it was all fine. In the eyes of the fourth estate, Capello was the kind of disciplinarian, tactical master that this England team needed. As soon as England drew two matches, all hell has broken loose. Unfortunately, there was a dire need to find some scapegoat – Capello, Rooney, Lampard, Heskey, Green – as you see, the press wanted a scapegoat in flesh. The pool of players from which the squad was picked, was poor. That wasn't a good scapegoat. There are hardly any good, skillful ball players in England. The football training structure or the playing style in England does not reward that kind of play, hence you don't get those kind of players. That wasn't a scapegoat. The FIFA world player of the year is being awarded since 1991. There is not even ONE player from England that has become a world player of the year. Premier league is the richest in the world but England could not produce one world player of the year in two decades? In the last 30 years only once an English player has won the European player of the year (Ballon 'd Or). Shouldn't this be the talking point? This is all very fundamental. This is not something Fabio Capello can change overnight. It is the FA that needs to act and not Fabio Capello. But still, the papers are all about Capello, Heskey, Green, Terry, Lampard, Gerrard etc.
Just when the press has created a national uproar over England's performance, FA organised a press conference to calm the nerves. You had every goddamn press reporter over there just waiting to insult whoever is gonna be behind the mike. So gets behind the mike? Super captain Stevie Me? Nah, he is not the one for close range, he is more like a 40-yard man, isn't he? Who else then, the most expensive England manager Fabio Capello? Nope. It is the ousted captain John Terry who walks in and dares to speak. I was mightily impressed with John Terry's interview. He was clear, he was honest and he was confident. It was FA's idea to get John Terry speak. There was an FA representative sitting right next to him all along. The key message from Terry's interview was that (i) they are all together and fully behind the manager (ii) the team recognizes that the performance so far has been poor (iii) they are focussing completely on the Slovenia match and (iv) they are 100% confident of progressing to the next round. Instead, what the press including BBC picked up from the interview was totally different. That's sad. In most cases, he was responding to questions. He was asked about Joe Cole, so he responded and I think his response was spot on. Yes, Joe Cole and Rooney are more skillful so they can unlock defences. And yes, if he has a problem he will speak to the manager. I thought Terry's interview was very positive. The whole battery of journalists were expecting something very spicy. So it didn't matter what message Terry was trying to convey. They just twisted the whole interview to the stories that they wanted to write and debate. The column by Phil McNulty, Chief Sports Editor of BBC, was really disgraceful. Having listened to the whole 15-min interview, I was astonished at the way McNulty described the whole interview and had woven a pre-meditated story. It's very sad especially because it's the BBC and not The Sun or The Daily Mail. Finally, the journalists succeeded in making a traitor out of Terry who's trying to arrange a coup while all he was trying to do was to exude confidence and provide assurance. The next day, there was another press conference. Still no signs of Captain Stevie Me. It had to be another Chelsea player to come on. Vice captain Frank Lampard came on to reiterate that there are no problems in the English camp. Lampard's interview was also brilliant. I like the way he supported Terry's message. He almost said 'are you all idiots, don't you understand what he was trying to say'.
Top class response from Super Frankie Lampard. He's telling the journos to 'GROW UP!' I might have said this a million times and I would keep saying this – this English press is sickening. It's all turning out to be absolutely baseless stories, fantasies, fictions, information from 'close sources', information from 'insiders' etc. There are hardly any quality articles or debates. There is a mad rush to print scoop that sells. These journalists have no moral ground to talk lowly of England's performance. I'm sure articles would be ready for an England elimination. It is at least to silence these idiots, I want England to win on Wednesday and progress further. England for the win. Whether England wins or not, I'll be pleased if the unwanted focus moves away from the players and coach while the real issues are addressed. I'm very clear in my mind that the England players and the coach are not the real issues. The real issues are far more fundamental and deep rooted. It may not be very sensational as John Terry sleeping with his colleague's ex-wife, but it might add some value in improving the condition of the game in England. England for a 3-0 win. Five Filters featured article: Headshot - Propaganda, State Religion and the Attack On the Gaza Peace Flotilla. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Dutch courage - Boston Phoenix Posted: 22 Jun 2010 03:48 PM PDT
When you've already written a novel like Cloud Atlas, which travels from 1850 to the apocalyptic future and back again, writing a historical novel might be redundant. Moreover, with his motif of reprising characters and events from book to book, David Mitchell has been spinning his own history of the world — one that's based only tangentially on everyone else's.
Not many of those connections to previous work occur in his new novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Or at least, few that I could find. Here's one: the name Kobayashi appears in both Mitchell's first book, Ghostwritten, as the alias used by a terrorist, and in this one, as the name of a Japanese translator. Not much there to pin a PhD thesis on.
Neither does this new effort bear a strong stylistic or formal resemblance to his others. It strays little from the confines of the historical-fiction genre. But beneath those conventions, Mitchell's past themes persist. In particular, his insight into how certain fictions are necessary to make experience coherent and bearable — artifices like language, science, religion, and history itself. To paraphrase one of the book's characters: it's stories that make life tolerable. The human mind is "a loom that weaves disparate threads of belief, memory, and narrative into an entity whose common name is Self, and which sometimes calls itself Perception." Illusory or not, the historical setting of Jacob de Zoet is Dejima, a Dutch East Indies outpost in isolationist Japan at the turn of the 19th century. The young clerk of the title has just arrived, hoping to make his fortune so he can return to the Netherlands wealthy enough to marry his fiancée. Instead, he finds himself on the threshold of a tantalizing new world. Dejima is more an abstraction than an island, a manmade outcropping in Nagasaki Harbor constructed by the Japanese, who fear the influence of European culture but covet its riches. A single gated bridge connects the island to the mainland, and only a chosen few, from either side, are permitted to cross. One of those is the Japanese midwife Orito, a beautiful woman whose medical skills have won her the right to study Dutch medicine under Dejima's cranky Dr. Marinus. One look at Orito and De Zoet is in love, his planned life back home forgotten. However, politics and tradition separate them, and things don't get any easier when outside forces from Napoleonic Europe and shogunate Japan reduce both to desperate straits. Orito's situation is particularly dire: she is incarcerated in a convent with practices creepily similar to those found in one of the more dystopic chapters of Cloud Atlas. Mitchell relates this somewhat bodice-ripping plot in a style that ranges from purple to profound. He doesn't shy from breathless, italicized, single-sentence paragraphs to reveal a character's innermost thoughts, or portentous appearances of cats, moths, and cockroaches, or the crude realism of a belch, fart, or blob of phlegm. On the other hand, he has scenes like the one in which a Japanese doctor describes how he and his colleagues compared a dissected cadaver with a Dutch anatomy text and, recognizing the book's accuracy, vowed to translate it into Japanese. The flesh, in short, is made word, and then reworded into another language. Five Filters featured article: Headshot - Propaganda, State Religion and the Attack On the Gaza Peace Flotilla. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Chris Christie: *Shredding* The Script - RedState Posted: 22 Jun 2010 10:04 AM PDT I give you (once again) The Honorable Governor Christopher James Christie of New Jersey. One of the more pernicious developments of the past two decades has been the widespread acceptance of the Beltway proposition that there was something fundamentally wrong with disagreement in politics. That a failure to achieve a consensus or "Bipartisanship" on any given issue is a sign of a failure by the parties involved to put "country above party." The American people want "moderation", "centrism" and "compromise" - the Beltway punditocracy solemnly intoned. The American people are "sick of the partisanship", they want "pragmatism", they want "Bipartisanship". The American people are crying out, desperate for "moderate" "centrist" politicians who are not "controversial" or "confrontational" - who "reach across the aisle" to find the "middle ground" and build "consensus" to "get things done." As a sidenote; it is not entirely a coincidence that the heavily liberal Beltway circuit really began to push this new conventional wisdom somewhere around late 1994 and early 1995 - right after the Gingrich led GOP made history by winning both Houses for the first time in 40 years. Unfortunately, (or inevitably) as most Beltway conventional wisdom usually does, it found a receptive audience with the GOP's so-called "moderates", and some of them even got themselves organized post-cocktail into a group dedicated to "bipartisan legislative results" that was never considered necessary when the Democrats were in the majority. Ultimately, this new conventional wisdom of the typical American voter crying himself to sleep at night because Republicans and Democrats are not whispering sweet nothings into each others' ears on Capitol Hill and in the various state capitals successfully established a new "civility" in politics that has made it a faux pas to address issues directly lest it offends some interest group, or effectively criticize the opposition. Turning things on their heads, somehow the punditocracy has managed to convince itself and far too many Republicans all over the country that politics is supposed to be free of strong disagreement. This perverse new "civility" came with its set of rules, conventions, dos and don'ts, vocabulary, not to mention third rails and sacred cows. Certain subjects were off limits for discussion. Certain policies and programs were beyond debate. Bringing these issues up was "partisan", "divisive", "confrontational", "insensitive", "wedge-issue politics", "extreme", etc. The enforcers of this new civility are the self-appointed elite, the LA-DC-NYC cocktail set - the people the New York Times' David Brooks reverently refers to as the "educated class." Which is why reading Tom Moran's write-up post the smack down that made both he and Christie (the man he called Governor "Wrecking Ball" - get it?) famous, it is not hard to believe that Moran's confusion at Christie's continued "confrontational tone" is not just typical opportunistic partisan hackery but actual genuine confusion. What Christie is doing and the way he is doing it, is simply not done. As he put it;
In other words, there's a script - and its one that doubly applies to Republicans in Blue states like New Jersey. It says; Don't make waves. Don't rock the boat. All those promises you made during the campaign? Put them aside for your re-election campaign and just go with the flow. Lower taxes? Small government? School choice? Those are "divisive" and "confrontational", "extremist". Worse, they're so unsophisticated. They certainly won't make you popular with the "people that matter", you won't get invited to the fashionable soirees to sip wine with the elite, and, worse they'll threaten your re-election prospects. Instead say things like "Bipartisanship", "both sides" and "get things done". Be anodyne, nebulous and non-specific. Play it safe, keep an eye on the polls and take care not to annoy any interest groups (especially liberal interest groups) that can throw significant amounts of cash into an opponent's campaign warchest. It's therefore easy to see why Tom Moran, who as the editor of the state's largest newspaper, is a charter member of the NJ political establishment, is so flummoxed - Chris Christie not only is not following the script so helpfully written for him by the infamously corrupt, intellectually incestuous and comfortably liberal NJ establishment, one that has been followed so assiduously by his predecessors in both parties, he seems to have torn it up to tiny pieces and scattered those tiny pieces to the four winds. There are certain things you're not supposed to say, most especially when they're true (e.g. public sector unions are wholly destructive parasites killing their states), but Christie is saying them. There are certain things you're not supposed to do (e.g. slap down asinine partisan hacks masquerading as impartial reporters) but Christie is doing them. Certain people, organizations, policies are supposed to be sacrosanct and beyond question or challenge, but Christie is slapping them around as if the "rules" did not exist. Worse, instead of sitting back and allowing himself and his policies and decisions to be attacked without hitting back - as Republicans are expected to do (see "New Tone" and Bush, George W. - who thought this would make him a "statesman") because that's what the punditocracy assures us the electorate wants, he's gone all out to defend himself and take the battle to the establishment. Instead of ducking fights, he joyfully unsheathes his sword and jumps into the fray. The word "controversial" does not frighten him. Poll numbers faze him not at all. And it's driving the establishment crazy. Christie's refusal to play ball and call things as they aren't is wreaking havoc across New Jersey political world and threatens to bleed out to other states and infect others. And people like Tom Moran, including many registered Republicans, long used to and dependent a political culture based on polite fictions, obfuscation, noble lies and self-interested deal making are not liking the new environment they're finding themselves being forced to inhabit. … All hail Governor Christie. Five Filters featured article: Headshot - Propaganda, State Religion and the Attack On the Gaza Peace Flotilla. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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