Blogging playwrights pile on
Posted by: Glover |Brouhaha of the week: Blogging playwrights pile on
Oh, how sharper than a serpent's tooth is a playwright incensed over varying gradations of privilege! Some seriously tart exchanges on ye olde Internet this week were touched off by this, Mat Smart's HowlRound post, in which the playwright brought the tough love to his fellow emerging playwrights. Smart challenged what he sees as the defeatism of emerging playwrights, asserting that: "In the end, our approach to our own work is the only thing we can control—and I believe that you have to love the doing. You also have to love the chase, love the absence of any resemblance of fairness, justice, or due course. And as long as it doesn’t make you too desperate or crazy—there is a nobility in this endurance, in this brand of foolishness. There must be a sense that 'I am going down with the ship.' And frankly, it is a commitment that I don’t see many emerging playwrights make."
This comes in the middle of a long essay on playwright laziness, which, despite its inflammatory wording, is written from the perspective of someone who wants to hammer home the importance of a work ethic. It should be a familiar refrain—we've heard it from every other writer who has ever told us ass-in-chair time is the secret to success.
Kill your facebook account
Posted by: Glover |Facebook is pretty inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. It has wormed it's little coding into our collective unconsciousness and made us feel that we are doing something proactive to be less lonely, miserable, depressed and isolated than we really are. Facebook is a digital simulation; mimesis of the Hyper-Real, faux communication which passes as "friendship," there is no "real" reason to maintain any presence on Facebook or any other digital social network. So I suppose I can't really give you any reason not to delete your account. It has certainly crossed my mind on a regular basis over the last few years. On the other hand you could jump in the car and come over to NYC where we could hang out and have a few "real" experiences which we can then promote on Facebook. Proving to others that we have "real" friends in the "real world."
The man who isn’t there By Mike Krumboltz
Posted by: Glover |You might say that Liu Bolin likes to blend in.
But the Chinese artist does more than just wear camouflage pants and stand next to a bush. With the help of some assistants, Bolin paints himself, head to toe and unassumingly just stands there--in grocery stores, next to piles of coal, on staircases, you name it. And, unless you look really closely, you'll miss him entirely--which is pretty much the point.
Postmodern Mondrian
Posted by: Glover |"Composition with Javascript is an interactive work made using HTML, CSS, Javascript and jQuery, based on Piet Mondrian's “Composition with Yellow, Red, Black, Blue and Grey” (1920). It allows everybody [to] deconstruct the original painting and form it again in whatever [way] he or she wants. Lines are shiftable (just drag it with your mouse) and colours changeable (click on it). Texture of the painting was preserved for authentic look. One can play with composition, forms and colours, alter the harmony of the piece or even destroy it and compose something pictorial (see examples).
[The artists] used similarity among Mondrian grid structures and tabular web interface to make this project which aims to represent the relationship between modernity and postmodernity (or rather the way in which we as people living in postmodern epoch treat the art of modernism) and main cultural shifts concerned: from distance between artist and public to participation, from finished work to ongoing process, from purpose to play, from creation, totalization to deconstruction, from metaphysicsto irony and so on.