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phuongthanhle · 9 months ago

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WEEK 4: Reality TV

1. WHAT IS REALITY TV?

Reality television is a television programming genre that purportedly presents unscripted and often dramatic or humorous situations, documenting real events and featuring non-professional actors (obo, n.d.). It can be characterized as a form of artificial or "heightened" documentary. Reality TV is a commercially driven genre that is defined less by strict aesthetic rules or certainties and more by the amalgamation of popular entertainment with a self-conscious claim to representing reality. This fusion has positioned reality TV as a significant platform for various institutional and cultural developments, including the integration of marketing and "real-life" entertainment, the convergence of new technologies in program production and promotion, and a recognition of the manufactured artifice that coexists with truth claims (Murray and Ouellette, 2004, p. Introduction 3).

The distinctive feature of reality TV lies in its manner of filming. Whether the show unfolds in an actual setting with real people, resembling a documentary, takes place in front of a live studio audience that actively participates in the program, or utilizes hidden surveillance, reality TV relies on the camera capturing events as they unfold (Winifred Fordham Metz, 2007).

2. WHY REALITY TV Í SO APPEALING TO WATCH?

First and foremost, television (TV) serves as a form of leisure and relaxation for many individuals. A German study delved into the reasons behind varying levels of TV consumption among different age groups. Through the use of questionnaires, the study unveiled that individuals with a lower inclination for cognitive engagement tended to spend more time watching TV. The research posited that individuals with a diminished need for cognition experience a sense of unease when confronted with idle time that necessitates introspection. Consequently, they resort to TV viewing as a means of escaping this negative emotional state.

Another study examined the motivations of students in relation to their consumption of reality TV. Despite the perceived stigma associated with reality TV viewing, the study revealed that students persist in engaging with this genre. This can be attributed to the fact that reality TV serves as a mechanism for escapism from the pressures and demands of everyday life, while also providing a sense of social connection and belonging (psychologyfactsweb, 2016). Moreover, it allows viewers to vicariously experience alternative lifestyles through the lives of reality stars.

3. IS REALITY TV REAL OR SCRIPT?

Reality television is a genre of programming characterized by unscripted content that showcases real events or situations, featuring non-professional actors. These shows often incorporate a host or narrator to guide the audience through the unfolding narrative. Unlike scripted programs, such as sitcoms, dramas, and newscasts, reality TV does not rely on the involvement of professional writers and actors. Instead, the production of reality shows is primarily managed by producers and editors. This aspect contributes to the cost-effectiveness of reality TV, prompting networks to embrace such content, particularly during periods like the Writers Guild of America strike. The hallmark of reality TV lies in its distinct filming style. Whether the show takes place in authentic settings with real individuals, resembling a documentary approach, or is filmed in front of a live studio audience actively engaged in the program, or even employs covert surveillance techniques, reality TV hinges on capturing unfiltered and spontaneous moments through the lens of the camera (Winifred Fordham Metz , 2007).

It is important to recognize, however, that reality shows are only "real" in the sense that they are constructed from unscripted footage. The term "unscripted" should not be misconstrued as lacking in a written framework. The source material of reality TV is inherently genuine, but it is the responsibility of editors and unscripted television writers to shape and mold this raw footage into coherent episodes. This process involves crafting sympathetic characters, developing compelling storylines, and establishing narrative arcs that encompass a beginning, middle, and end. Unscripted storytelling often entails a deliberate backward approach, where the desired ending serves as a foundation, enabling the creation of an emotionally resonant, humorous, or thought-provoking journey for viewers (J. Ryan Stradal , 2015). Reference:

J. Ryan Stradal (2015). Unscripted does not mean Unwritten. [online] web.archive.org. Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20150321123053/https://www.wga.org/organizesub.aspx?id=1096 [Accessed 1 Feb. 2024].

Murray, S. and Ouellette, L. (2004). Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture. [online] Google Books, NYU Press, p.Introduction 3. Available at: https://books.google.com.vn/books?hl=vi&lr=&id=4_W19oHGzZQC&oi=fnd&pg=PR5&dq=what+is+reality+TV&ots=3mIPm8D3yG&sig=JJSj_WQr0FOUIhymoV7mpc-Eg_E&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=what%20is%20reality%20TV&f=false [Accessed 1 Feb. 2024].

obo. (n.d.). Reality Television. [online] Available at: https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199756841/obo-9780199756841-0057.xml.

psychologyfactsweb. (2016). Why is Reality TV so Popular? [online] Available at: https://psychologyfactsweb.wordpress.com/2016/06/26/why-is-reality-tv-so-popular/ [Accessed 1 Feb. 2024].

Winifred Fordham Metz (2007). How Reality TV Works. [online] HowStuffWorks. Available at: https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/reality-tv.htm#:~:text=By%20definition%2C%20reality%20TV%20is%20essentially%20unscripted%20programming.

#mda20009 #week 4

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erius-vidi · 1 year ago

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Hallmark Queen Lacey Chabert to Host Network's 1st Unscripted Show

Hallmark Queen Lacey Chabert to Host Network’s 1st Unscripted Show Read Full Text

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#Politics #UK #US #World

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pujajhap · 1 year ago

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Kareena Kapoor Khan Koffee With Karan

Television has always been a source of entertainment for people across the globe. From sitcoms to reality shows, there's a wide array of content to choose from. However, some shows manage to stand out and become iconic in their own right. One such show that has carved a special place in the hearts of viewers is "Koffee with Karan." In this beginner's guide, we'll delve into what makes "Koffee with Karan" so special, exploring its unique features and the reasons behind its immense popularity.

READ MORE :-Kareena Kapoor Khan Koffee With Karan | करीना कपूर खान के ‘कॉफी विथ करण’ इंटरव्यू का खास अंदाज़ | करीना कपूर खान लेटेस्ट न्यूज़

The Charismatic Host: Karan Johar

At the heart of every great talk show is a charismatic host, and "Koffee with Karan" is no exception. Karan Johar, a renowned filmmaker, and Bollywood personality, takes on the role of the affable host. His wit, charm, and ability to connect with both guests and the audience play a pivotal role in making the show special.

Karan's knack for asking probing yet respectful questions is one of the show's hallmarks. He has a unique way of getting celebrities to open up about their personal lives and share anecdotes that fans wouldn't hear elsewhere. It's this quality that makes each episode of "Koffee with Karan" a must-watch.

Star-Studded Guest List

A key reason behind the show's popularity is its star-studded guest list. "Koffee with Karan" invites some of the biggest names in the Indian film industry, from actors and directors to musicians and producers. This star power not only attracts viewers but also creates intriguing dynamics between guests.

Each episode features a celebrity duo, often co-stars or close friends, which adds an element of camaraderie and chemistry. Viewers get a chance to see their favorite stars in a candid, unscripted setting, which is a rare treat in the world of Bollywood.

The Infamous 'Koffee Rapid Fire' Round

One of the most eagerly awaited segments of the show is the 'Koffee Rapid Fire' round. In this lightning-fast Q&A session, Karan fires off a series of rapid-fire questions, and guests must respond with the first thing that comes to their minds. This segment is a true test of wit, humor, and spontaneity.

The 'Koffee Rapid Fire' round has become legendary for its candid and often controversial responses. It's a delightful mix of fun, drama, and unexpected revelations, making it a standout feature of the show that keeps viewers coming back for more.

Unfiltered Conversations

"Koffee with Karan" is known for its unfiltered and uncensored conversations. Unlike traditional interviews, where celebrities often maintain a carefully crafted image, this show encourages guests to drop their guards and speak their minds.

This authenticity is what sets "Koffee with Karan" apart. Viewers get a glimpse of the real personalities behind the public personas, making them feel closer to their favorite stars. It's a refreshing departure from the polished and rehearsed interactions that are common in the world of showbiz.

Controversy and Entertainment

Controversy and entertainment go hand in hand, and "Koffee with Karan" doesn't shy away from either. The show has been at the center of several controversies over the years, thanks to the candid nature of its conversations and the willingness of guests to speak their minds.

While controversies may stir up debates and discussions, they also add to the show's intrigue and keep viewers hooked. Whether it's a slip of the tongue, a shocking revelation, or a playful argument between guests, these moments become water-cooler talk for days after each episode airs.

Behind-the-Scenes Insights

In addition to the on-screen drama, "Koffee with Karan" offers viewers a peek behind the scenes of the glamorous world of Bollywood. Karan often shares anecdotes and stories about the film industry, giving viewers a better understanding of the complexities and challenges faced by celebrities.

This behind-the-scenes insight adds depth to the show, making it not just about entertainment but also about education. It's a unique blend of gossip and enlightenment that appeals to a wide range of viewers.

In conclusion, "Koffee with Karan" is more than just a talk show; it's a cultural phenomenon. With its charismatic host, star-studded guest list, rapid-fire rounds, unfiltered conversations, controversies, and behind-the-scenes insights, it offers a comprehensive package of entertainment and enlightenment.

So, what makes "Koffee with Karan" so special? It's the perfect concoction of glamour, wit, and authenticity that keeps viewers coming back for more. If you haven't watched it yet, now is the perfect time to dive into this captivating world of Bollywood and see for yourself why this show is such a sensation.

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positivexcellence · 2 years ago

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Mark Pedowitz Saved The CW. As He Exits the Network, Greg Berlanti and Jared Padalecki Reflect on the Exec’s Legacy

When Mark Pedowitz first joined The CW as head of the network in 2011, he told “Supernatural” star Jared Padalecki that he was a fan of the series (which was then in its sixth season) and had seen every episode. At first, Padalecki assumed that Pedowitz’s comments were the kind of niceties that an incoming network president is supposed to say to their series stars.

“I didn’t think he was lying,” Padalecki said. “But I thought he was at least being kind. Maybe he hadn’t caught up yet or had seen two episodes. He was certainly supportive and friendly. But I came to find out, as the months and years progressed, that he actually was a big fan of Supernatural and had seen every single episode… When we talked this weekend, he said that he has seen every single episode of every show that he was president of, and will continue to watch every episode of every show. And I believe him. He hasn’t lied to me ever.”

As Pedowitz prepares to depart The CW after more than a decade at the helm (and following Nexstar’s acquisition of the network from longtime joint partners CBS and Warner Bros.), producers, stars and execs are all repeating the same four words: “End of an era.”

“He is a fan of great television and stories,” said megaproducer Greg Berlanti, whose tremendous CW output has included “The Flash,” “All-American” and “Riverdale.” “He’ll watch every episode, he’ll give you know every kind of note, and he wants to argue and debate things. He represents to me that legacy of network heads that love TV. He was always having to do more with less and navigate two different boards. And he still figured out a way to connect with the audience. A whole generation have now grown up watching all of these CW shows.”

Pedowitz wasn’t there at the birth of the CW, but he kept the network alive and thriving over the past 11 years thanks to the kind of crafty dealmaking that has been a hallmark of his career — including during his lengthy tenure at Disney/ABC.

At ABC, he was created business templates that helped evolve the way deals were made between networks and studios. He did the same at the CW, starting with the network’s landmark digital streaming deal in 2011 — in which the network, in concert with parents CBS and Warner Bros., struck a pact with Netflix for post-season access to The CW shows. That helped give The CW a new lease on life, by making it even more worthwhile for CBS’ and Warner Bros.’ studios to produce series for the network.

But it was also a tremendous factor in the growth and success of Netflix. When that deal came up for renewal in 2016, Netflix was willing to pay even more to maintain domestic SVOD rights to the CW’s output, which at that time had become even more successful under Pedowitz, growing to include a lineup of DC Comics-branded superhero shows, notably “The Flash” and “Arrow,” and buzzy critical darlings “Jane the Virgin” and “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.”

The deal was ultimately valued at more than $1 billion, and that digital strategy helped turn series like “All American” and “Riverdale” into hits, thanks to their exposure on Netflix. The CW’s then-parents ended the deal in 2019 as they launched their own streaming services.

With the end of the Netflix arrangement (and a previous pact with Hulu), Pedowitz also eventually secured full in-season digital rights to all new CW scripted series for its The CW app and CWTV.com website.

In growing the CW, Pedowitz increased the network’s programming output, including more original scripted series, international acquisitions and unscripted series and specials. That led to finally programming a full seven nights a week, restoring Sunday in 2018 and adding Saturday for the first time in 2021. And although Pedowitz remained frustrated at the Television Academy’s lack of Emmy attention for the CW, the network was honored elsewhere, including an AFI Award, Peabody and Golden Globe (via star Gina Rodriguez) for “Jane the Virgin,” and Golden Globe and Critics Choice wins for “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” star Rachel Bloom.

The CW under Pedowitz also earned high marks for its embrace of inclusive fare that represented people of color, the LGBTQ community and more. According to the network, last season around two-thirds of showrunners, writers and directors on The CW’s original scripted series were women and/or people of color, while nearly 50% of the series regulars were women and 57% were people of color. And according to GLAAD, The CW held the highest percentage of LGBTQ series regular characters among broadcasters for the fifth year in a row.

“If it was about a storyline or person’s life experience, or someone’s point of view, [Pedowitz] would say, ‘this is all I can bring to the table, please bring what you bring to the table,’” Berlanti said. “And he was encouraging that people be themselves, as long as they were hardworking and passionate. That was his goal to tell different kinds of stories. It was a great part of this character and a great part of the success.”

Pedowitz elicits fierce loyalty from his producers and stars, most of whom have a story similar to Padalecki’s of being wowed by how well exec kept close tabs of their shows and their lives. That’s a task for his underlings, they’d think — but Pedowitz not only watched every episode of every series on his network, but he’d spend several weeks every year visiting the shows’ sets (mostly in Vancouver).

“It goes a long way,” Berlanti said. “I can’t make a lot of sports analogies, because I don’t know a lot about sports. But I think of ‘Moneyball,’ and doing more with less, and figuring out ways to be just as successful with less. Great stories first, believing in younger showrunners or less experienced showrunners, diverse voices. He did that and built a real library of hits.”

Berlanti credited Pedowitz with saving “Supergirl,” which had originally premiered on CBS but couldn’t find an audience there, as well as “Black Lightning,” which had first been developed at Fox. And Berlanti said it was Pedowitz who inspired the creation of “DC’s Legends of Tomorrow” by pointing out how that some of the other DC series’ ancillary characters deserved more time in the spotlight.

“The whole DC world that we had to build, really took a lot of trust and faith,” Berlanti said. “In a landscape where it was pretty much all about movies. I think the audience really could tell they treated them with the kind of support and sensibility of as important as any feature film stories are getting told in the same kind of universe.”

Padalecki said he knows, without a doubt, that “Supernatural” wouldn’t have lasted as long as it did — 15 seasons and 327 episodes — if it wasn’t for Pedowitz. “If we didn’t know that we had Mark, driving the winds that blew the sails on our little boat called ‘Supernatural,’ we would have been canceled [long before then],” he said. “But we knew that [Pedowitz] really believed in us and because he believed in us, it was the rocket fuel to whatever spark we had.

“We knew that one way or the other, he cared about us as human beings,” he added. “That was even more important. I’ve been public about my relationship with depression and anxiety. And whenever I talked to Mark, he was always more concerned about that than he was about the show. He was always more eager to hear if I was willing to talk about, was I ok?”

Ironically, The CW’s success in building hits that succeeded in streaming helped lay the foundation for CBS and Warner Bros. to fully embrace their own full-fledged streaming services — which, in turn, eventually led to their decision to pull their majority stakes in the network and sell it to Nexstar (which owns most of The CW’s key affiliates, including WPIX New York and KTLA Los Angeles). Nexstar, which has a very different business model than CBS and Warner Bros., seeks to evolve the CW to make it a better fit for its station group, which will make it a different kind of network than it was under Pedowitz.

Padalecki now stars in and executive produces “Walker” (now entering its third season on the CW) and is also an EP on the new prequel series “Walker: Independence.” Despite the ownership change and Pedowitz’s departure, he remains optimistic: “I am aware that the only constant in this life is change,” he said. “My only job is to do the best damn job I can do. And so let the chips fall where they may. If I do the best work I can do, and it doesn’t work out, then I can sleep soundly at night going, ‘well, I gave it my all.’”

Berlanti said he believed The CW remains “oceanfront property” because of the unique status of being a broadcast network. “It takes people longer times to find shows now, no matter where you are. It’s a valuable place to be one of those pit stops along the way,” he said.

Meanwhile, as Pedowitz dusts off his Pine Street Entertainment production shingle, Berlanti said that it was “my sincere hope is that I can keep working with him, wherever he goes and whatever he does next. Because he’s such an important part of my life. He’s been such a mentor to me.”

Variety

#Jared Padalecki #Mark Pedowitz #greg berlanti

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sleepykittypaws · 4 years ago

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J.J. Jamieson Interview

A writer, producer and former network executive, J.J. Jamieson, has produced movies for Hallmark Channel, including all three Graceland movies (Christmas at Graceland, Wedding at Graceland and Christmas at Graceland: Home for the Holidays), and is now working with Bounce TV, writing both their 2019 original, Greyson Family Christmas, and this year’s Marry Me This Christmas, starring Brandon Jay McLaren and Gabrielle Graham.

Ahead of Marry Me This Christmas’ December 6th debut on Bounce (also available On Demand in Canada on December 8th), Jamieson was kind enough to take the time to talk from his Santa Monica home about what makes Christmas moviemaking special, and how Bounce’s latest holiday entry came together despite a global pandemic.

Q: How did you get involved in moviemaking?

A: I’m originally from Princeton, N.J. and way back in the late 1800s (laughs), I joined NBC as a page and eventually became an assistant in the movies and miniseries department, as that just happened to be where there was an opening, and then stayed there for the better part of a decade, eventually becoming a creative executive.

When I left NBC, I moved out here [to California], because show business is what I felt like I should be doing, and this is where show business is. I became a producer and worked for a variety of different companies, and sometimes for myself, and because movies and miniseries were what I knew, I occasionally worked on TV movies including—much to the horror of my children—one called Spring Break Shark Attack (laughs). You gotta pay the bills, right?

But, whatever you’re doing, my goal as a producer is to always to do the best with what you’re handed. Sometimes that turns out better than others, but the work is always the work, and you have to find that something that makes every project special.

A: How do you go from producing Spring Break Shark Attack to Hallmark movies?

Q: A friend of mine, Michael Larkin, a very accomplished creative producer, was working with Hallmark and said they needed a producer, someone to be the network’s eyes and ears on the ground, for a movie (Wedding of Dreams), and he couldn’t do it, so he said if they were really desperate, they could hire me (laughs).

Hallmark makes so many movies a year, their executives can’t be on set for the, usually, six weeks it takes to make them—three to prep, three to film—and then the edit, so they need someone on set to make sure everything is in alignment with the aesthetics of Hallmark.

…So, I did one movie with them, and then three more movies after that.

Q: What’s different about working on a Hallmark movie?

A: I’ve worked on a lot of different types of TV shows and movies, and have never been involved in anything else where there’s this fantastic love of the genre. People just love these movies.

I was shooting something in Tennessee, and struck up a conversation with this cop who was just sitting in his car, blocking the street while we were shooting outside, and he asked what we were filming, and when I said it was a Hallmark movie, his response was, ‘Oh, I love Hallmark movies,’ and I was thinking, ‘Really? You do?’

But he was serious. He was a fan. I think there are just a wide variety of people that these movies appeal to. Much broader than most imagine.

I think there’s comfort in the fact that when you sit down to watch, you know what you’re going to get. You’re going to get a happy ending, you know it’s all going to work out, and ‘What’s wrong with that?,’ as my niece, who is also a fan, said to me once.

When I think about why Hallmark movies are so popular, I think of a conversation I had once with a friend of my wife’s, an MBA, a very accomplished woman, and she watches these movies. When I asked her, ‘What is it about Hallmark movies that you find so enrapturing, when there’s usually so little conflict?’ She said to me: I don’t need conflict. I’ve got enough stress with the kids, stress with my ex-husband, stress at the office…I don’t need more stress. I want to sit down and watch something devoid of stress that feels good for the soul.

I think that’s the key, and I think it’s what Hallmark has tapped into, and the competition to emulate that is just fanatical, particularly with the Christmas movies.

Q: What do you think of the explosion of Christmas movies across the dial?

A: People want to be in this game. When every other cable channel’s ratings were falling, Hallmark was the only one going up. They were doing something right. They had tapped into something. Which I think is why Lifetime wants to do the same thing. I don’t think they have quite captured it, yet, but there’s also Netflix, doing it in a little bit of a different way. And then all these other channels, too, what, a dozen now? More? Producing their own [holiday] movies.

I’m shocked there’s not a saturation in the market, actually, because they keep on trying to spin that same wheel, but the appetite is obviously there, and I think there’s room, especially when you’re trying to do something a little bit different.

Q: How did you go from producing, to writing and producing, or in the case of Marry Me This Christmas, just writing? Are you a producer who writes, or a writer who also happens to produce?

A: It’s really a very different skill set, writers tend to be more introverted, more comfortable in front of a computer screen, because that’s mostly what writing is, just you in front of your computer, creating a world. Producing is more a job of management, making sure everyone shares the same vision of what the network wants.

To be a producer, is to be a generalist, and I guess I’m a generalist. I’m not a musician, but I can have a conversation with a composer and know enough to talk about what elements of a score I think a scene needs. I’m not a director, but know enough to see a scene and say, ‘Let’s try one that’s less big,’ or whatever. I’m not a cinematographer, but I can see where we might want to try a few more lights, so we don’t lose the actor in a scene.

Being a producer is an incredibly humbling job. One of my favorite parts of being on set is the first day. It always reminds me why I came out to Hollywood to do this. You’re surrounded by a team of experts, all of whom are brilliant at their specific job—the hair stylists, the makeup artists, lighting, sound…Every single one of them knows more about their jobs than I ever will, and you feel humbled by that. It makes one appreciative of the collaborative aspect of this art form. It’s nobody’s movie. It’s not the writers, or the producer’s, or the executives’, or even the director’s or actors’—every movie is a product of everyone who worked on it, and it’s all our movie.

I had a good friend who went from being a creative producer to being a line producer (NOTE: a line producer’s role is usually to manage the budget and act as an on-set human resources department; someone who puts out the inevitable fires that come up during filming), and I asked him, ‘But don’t you miss the creative side?’ And he said to me, ‘It’s all filmmaking. We’re all filmmakers and it’s all essential.’ I thought that was a lovely sentiment, and a testament to the overall teamwork nature of filmmaking. The people signing the checks in accounting are just as important as anyone else, because you can’t make the movie without them.

So, to finally answer your question, I think I’m more of a producer that also writes. A producer who spent enough time working with writers to get story ideas made, so that the idea of writing things myself began to feel realistic. And, so far, my record of giving my ideas to other writers, versus just me writing my ideas myself, has a pretty good percentage of getting things into production. The way I look at it, at least this way I have no one to blame but myself if something doesn’t work.

Q: How did you get involved with Bounce TV? And, for those like me who didn’t know Bounce even existed until last year, can you share a little about the network?

A: Sure, and you’re definitely not alone. Bounce is a sizeable basic cable and broadcast network, based in Atlanta. They’re in 94 million homes. They’re not in all markets yet, but that’s part of their mission, to increase their penetration and increase awareness.

I got involved because a good friend of mine that’s a talented producer and former Turner executive, David Hudson, moved from Santa Monica to Atlanta to oversee original programming for Bounce. His background is more in unscripted programming, so when Bounce decided they wanted more TV movies, he reached out to me and the first thing he said was that he needed a holiday picture for that same year.

Greyson Family Christmas was originally Greyson Family Thanksgiving. He gave me the premise—a family lives next door to each other, one more conservative, one more liberal, and the daughter brings home her white boyfriend for the holidays—and he needed a script. Given that it was so specific, I thought it would be easier if I just wrote it, which I did, and then worked as a producer on set during the shoot in Baton Rouge.

Q: Greyson Family Christmas ended up being one of my personal favorite movies of last season, and one thing I liked is that it was a little bit different. It wasn’t just a broad comedy or a straightforward holiday rom-com with little conflict.

A: Thank you, and we did try to make it about more than silliness. We wanted it to be light and fun, but also to say a little something about some of the very real things we wanted to address about race and family.

And we got so incredibly lucky with our cast, who were just amazing. Part of the trick of making a movie that has a lower budget, is doing what you can afford to do, and doing it well. Not stretching beyond what that budget allows. And we were very aware of that during production. With that incredibly short schedule—we shot Greyson in 12 days—and tight budget, you have to be.

Look, I know you can’t please everyone with these movies. I mean, some people hate Dickens and Hemingway—and I’m not saying Greyson is that, but I was really pleased with how the movie turned out, and think we had a great group working on it to make that happen.

We didn’t have a ton of money for publicity beyond the promos that aired on Bounce—no billboards, or things like that—but the cast was great at promoting Greyson on social media, and even with the tight timeline and everything else, it ended up being the highest-rated original movie in the history of the network.

Whenever you make a movie, you try to make it the best you can, and how it performs is really out of your hands in a lot of ways, but it sure is nice when you haven’t let down your network, and it was doubly important for me, given my friendship and fondness for David Hudson, who my kids all call Uncle David.

Greyson Family Christmas will be re-airing this December, so I really hope even more people get a chance to discover it, because it really was a labor of love for me, and the network and, really, everyone involved.

[NOTE: Bounce currently has encore airings of Greyson Family Christmas scheduled for December 6th, 11th, 18th and 24th.]

A: The latest Bounce original holiday movie, Marry Me This Christmas, debuts on December 6th, which you also wrote. Tell us a little about the movie, and the process of filming it during a global pandemic.

Q: I didn’t produce this one, mostly due to COVID, [which is also why] it was shot in Canada.

Tonally we were trying to go for something more like a dramedy—some comedy, but some real bit of business going on in the story.

I actually wrote this one a couple of years ago, not as a Christmas movie originally, and the whole idea is born out of the one joke at the end at the end of the first act, where she comes in to the pastor and says, ‘I know we haven’t known each other long, but you’ve become really important to me, and this may sound crazy, but I really want you to marry me,’ and this guy who has had a huge crush on her is all excited and says ‘Yes, yes,’ and her response is, ‘Great, my fiancé will be thrilled.’

That’s the joke, and it’s silly. It’s a dad joke, really, but the whole movie was built out from there, and as silly as that idea is, we wanted to explore what would really happen if this young pastor fell in love with someone engaged to someone else. To try to make believable, and be about something.

Q: Was that inherent element of faith something that came from you, or a direction from the network?

A: This was all my own. I was raised Catholic, and grew up going to church every Sunday. My sons then went to Catholic School, so religion has kind of hung over my life like the cloud of dirt over Pigpen. (laughs) I mean, if I wasn’t going to hell before, I probably am for that line, right? (laughs, again)

Anyway, I really was interested in this notion of trying to be a good person playing against the other qualities of our human nature. Sometimes our hearts are drawn to do certain things—not bad or evil, just being human beings, not little boxes of saintliness. To me, the essence of the story was putting that around this character whose actual job it was to be a good guy, but on the other hand he’s also a man, wrestling with the nature of love, and finally coming around to a greater sense of understanding than he had at the beginning.

We are all supposed to act with a sense of service and self-sacrifice, but on the other hand, we’re not utterly devoid of self. To be a human, even a human in service of God or goodness, doesn’t mean you’re also not supposed to fall in love with that same, almost religious, fervor, which is what I hope he realizes at the end. And it’s all a lot more ambitious than that ‘ha, ha’ dad joke of the premise.

I hope this movie is for everyone, not just people of faith. That’s why I put in there that the best friend is an atheist. That a pastor and someone who doesn’t believe can still be friends. That [the non-believer] is still this supportive friend, and a good guy.

I was also very deliberate in that I didn’t want our pastor to pray for God’s help and receive it in a [direct] way. There’s a scene in the chapel with the Bible, and I wanted it to be very clear that you’re not going to just get the answer to your problems [divinely], you have to figure out those sorts of matters yourself.

Q: How did the pandemic effect production?

A: Well, COVID has trimmed the number of original productions at Bounce in 2020. The plan is to increase our original movie production, and that’s been at least temporarily waylaid by all the [fallout] from COVID, but we did want to have at least one new movie for the fourth quarter… and knowing how well last year’s original holiday movie did for them, there was definitely the sentiment of, ‘Let’s do another Christmas movie,’ so it was a conscious and deliberate effort to make that happen, despite the pandemic.

So, I reached out to a friend of a friend, Thomas Michael [of Fella Films], because Canada had lower COVID infections and a rich film community, and he became our partner and producer. There also [had to be] a little extra money for COVID protections, and [filming] took a few extra days just due to safety protocols for the cast and crew. Plus, our cast is entirely Canadian, due to restrictions.

David Hudson and I, working as a consultant for the network, were looking for holiday movies, or rom-coms we could spin into a holiday movie. We were even looking at stories to develop into full scripts, and we just weren’t finding what we’re looking for, so I said, ‘Look, this has been sitting on my shelf, it’s available, and I’m a cheap date.’ (laughs)

Q: Hallmark, in particular, has said casting Black actors in Canada is difficult, was that an issue you experienced?

A: I will say it was a question raised, because that’s not our usual production [location]. And working with Thomas Michael, we moved towards Ontario, because they do have a larger pool of Black Canadian actors, just because they have a larger Black population overall.

After some [research], we all felt very comfortable with the talent pool, and I think we once again got really lucky with our cast. These guys were just all really great. We did a read through, and I was just choked up by how good they all were.

They might not have the same name recognition of some of the actors in Greyson, like Stan Shaw or Robinne Lee, but they’re all working actors. Brandon Jay McLaren, our pastor, is working on the new Turner and Hooch series, and I worked with him on a TV pilot 10 years ago. Gabrielle Graham, our female lead, has been a regular on two Amazon Prime series, [The Expanse and 21 Thunder].

I really hope people will respond to them, because I think they did a great job with the characters.

Q: How did Marry Me This Christmas end up with Megan Follows, best known as Anne of Green Gables, directing?

A: Once we had the determination to do it in Canada, we began looking for a Canadian director, on a pretty tight timeline. Our producer had a [working] relationship with Megan, and she has been directing more and more. We reached out to her and she responded well to the material, and I think got what we wanted to do with it.

She and the cast were terrific. And I think we just got lucky it turned out as well it did, given all the circumstances.

Q: There was talk there might be a Greyson Family Christmas sequel, was that idea a casualty of COVID?

A: Unfortunately, yes. We had a story worked out for a wedding, but with COVID and the difficulty in production, the soonest we’d have been able to get it on the air was spring or summer 2021, and that’s a long time to wait for a sequel. But I like to think of Maya and Trent, and the rest of the Greyson family, living on happily, safely and healthily, nevertheless.

Q: Bounce is a network geared towards an African-American audience, does the fact you’re not Black come up when writing these stories?

A: Definitely. Especially in the first movie, Greyson, which really digs into more sensitive and deeper matters of race, having this white guy from New Jersey writing the movie was a little unusual, as I’ll be the first to admit.

I mean, when you’re telling a story, you are always putting yourself into characters unlike yourself—teenage kids, the 75-year-old grandmother—and trying to do it in a way that resonates and feels authentic. But, yes, I got help from people of color. Particularly for Greyson, where I was on set, the cast was extraordinarily helpful, making changes and making sure the voice was right.

I will say that where the characters in Greyson succeed, in respect to race, I give all the credit to the actors, who inhabited those characters and made them their own, and if anything feels a little off to an audience, I take the blame for those shortcomings.

In that movie, where I was a producer, and in my Hallmark movies too, I made an extra effort to hire and fill out our teams looking beyond the first resumes we received, because if Bounce can’t be supportive of the black filmmaking community, who can? We really did try to hire a crew that was reflective of America’s demographics.

For too long, in this industry primarily driven by white men who have the tendency to hire other white men, that wasn’t the case, so you have to be open to the person who has 7 credits but might not have had the same opportunities, versus someone who has 35 credits, and not just pick the default. To undo that unconscious bias. I’m sure I’ve been guilty of favoring people with longer resumes, instead of saying we need those diverse voices that are more reflective of society at large. It’s something I hope to keep working on, because I think it makes the final product better as a result.

Q: What do you hope viewers take away from Marry Me This Christmas?

A: As a filmmaker there’s always something fun anytime you have an idea in your head and it ends up on screen for other people to see, so I’m just excited for it to air and hope people like it.

Bounce wants to be in that arena, making holiday feel-good movies, but maybe doing something a little bit more. Yes, it’s a rom-com at Christmas, but I think it’s a little bit of an alternative to all those other kinds of movies, and you might get something you don’t expect. A little present under the tree you didn’t realize was there. I hope it brings just a little extra joy for the holiday.

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queerhannibal · 5 years ago

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1) I read your minivan au fic and I LOVED IT!!! I just went back and reread parts of it at work bc it makes me so happy. 2) I saw in your tags on the post w Hannibal getting in everybody’s way at the lab that you were using it as another tick in your “autistic Hannibal” column, bc you read it as a genuine clumsiness on his part since he didn’t have a social script to follow. I was wondering if you would talk more abt this bc I kind of love it!

1) thank you so much!!! I’m so so glad you enjoyed it, it made me so happy to write and hearing that people feel compelled to reread it is one of the most delightful comments one can receive!! (I would link the fic but then this post wouldn’t show up in the tag; it’s “this might turn and wind up just the way we’d dreamed”)

2) I feel like there are so many ticks in my autistic Hannibal column that it’s difficult to organize them cohesively but I will do my best

A lot of his emotional processing difficulties seem to align with the ways autistic people tend to experience feelings—a lot of the time we have trouble identifying feelings and have to step back and actively analyze ourselves to have any clue what’s going on, and a lot of the time we have No Idea how strongly something is going to affect us until it happens, and a lot of the time when we get very overwhelmed we lash out in ways that ultimately hurt ourselves.

The disconnect from traditional morality is also something that’s not uncommon with autistic people: not being a totally amoral degenerate, but having a totally different standard of morality, which is exactly what he has. He’s capable of thinking other people are shitty based on their actions, it’s just a different set of actions that he thinks are shitty than what is traditionally dictated by society

He also always dresses the same!!! He owns multiple near identical suits (like he has two suits that are exactly the same pattern except one has blue lining and one has brown). This is very autistic of him.

But honestly the biggest thing that makes me think autism specifically is how fidgety he is!! His hands are almost never still! He’s always fiddling with things, or actively doing something with his hands to disguise the fact that he can’t hold them still

And then we have the clumsiness-when-in-unfamiliar-social-situation with which I got your attention: he does very very well socially, but he mostly avoids being in unfamiliar (and unscripted) social situations. He does well as long as he’s in charge, and most of his life is arranged so that he can always be In Charge, but the minute he’s in someone else’s space and working in a team? He’s a mess.

Also the way he is about Will feels very Autistic, especially since Will is also autistic. Especially their season one interactions with that element of “!!!!!! I can just be myself with him!!!!” is an autism mood

He’s also just yk got that classic low empathy (with occasional hyperempathy) that’s an autism hallmark

Mostly though it’s just I’m autistic and I like him

#hannibal #hannibal lecter #autistic hannibal lecter #asks #mine #headcanons #my writing #minivan au #osirisjones #fhdjdjshsjs im so used to anon asks i just automatically tagged it that way sorry

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steelcityreviews · 2 years ago

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FRINGE 2022 Preview Series - Ends with a Kiss

Steel City Girl thanks creator and producer Craig Logue for his insights and experience bringing this production to the Hamilton Fringe 2022!

1. Quickly! 5 words to describe your show!

Improvised tribute to Hallmark movies

2. What inspired your company to produce this show? What inspires you generally when creating shows?

Red Brick Theatre is a brand-new theatre company in Hamilton dedicated to producing scripted and unscripted comedy shows. “End With a Kiss” will launch our company. I was inspired to create the show because Hallmark movies are so ridiculous that they are ripe for satire, and what better way to pay tribute to them than by taking random suggestions and turning them into a Hallmark movie-inspired show.

When creating shows, I’m looking for something unique and original, but, most importantly, will be funny to someone other than myself. “End With a Kiss” should have broad appeal because it’s an all-ages show, done in the style of Hallmark movies, which means wholesome, earnest and ridiculous.

3. Is this your first time producing a show at the Hamilton Fringe Festival? If so, what influenced your decision to bring your show to the city? If not, what helped you decide to return to the festival this year?

This is my second time producing a show at the Hamilton Fringe. The first show was also an improv show featuring opera singers called “Whose Opera Is It Anyway?” I didn’t create that show, but I was the producer. It was a lot of fun, and I hope to resurrect it someday. Producing that show actually inspired me to move back to Hamilton permanently after living in Toronto for two years.

4. What have been some challenges in bringing your show to life and how have you overcome them?

Well, there was this two-year-long pandemic that threw a wrench into the works. This show was originally supposed to appear in the 2020 Hamilton Fringe Festival, and then in 2021, so it’s been a three-year slog of mostly waiting to finally make it happen. Patience was definitely a key there. Launching a new theatre company right after two years of lockdowns is definitely not without risk, but determination and a supportive partner are helpful, and I have both.

The other challenge has been building infrastructure to have a comedy-based theatre company, including a lack of venues in Hamilton, mining talent, and developing an audience that will come out after the Fringe is done. The Staircase reopening is a big part of getting things going. The rest is still a work in progress, but I’m very happy with the cast we’ve assembled. Hopefully the audience will come.

5. How will this show speak to audiences?

Everyone knows Hallmark movies, either by watching them religiously or in passing, so it will be fun to watch our cast pay tribute to them, but with an improv spin on it. The ridiculousness will definitely be heightened. Also, we’re keeping it clean – at least, I hope we do. It is improv, after all, so you really never know what will happen, but we’re aiming to mimic the earnest wholesomeness of Hallmark movies, which should make it funny but not offensive.

6. Why is Fringe important to you? How do festivals like Fringe help you as an artist?

Fringe is a great way to workshop new ideas in a lower-risk setting than if you were to produce the show yourself. You get to benefit from the group marketing of shows, and the environment that encourages people to try something new. I was determined to launch this company during Fringe for those reasons. After that, I want to keep them coming back through the year.

For more information, including show dates, times and ticket information, please visit: Hamilton Fringe 2022 - Ends with a Kiss

#HamOnt FringeFestival theatre #improv hallmarkmovies liveperformances

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nightynineshop · 4 years ago

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I Have Two Needles You Have Two Eyes Do Not Mess With A Knitter Chicken T-Shirt

Glad you have cosmetics not but your colors are too light please include darker colors of blush many ladies asian and latina etc have darker colors especially my friends from sri lanka cape verde and the I Have Two Needles You Have Two Eyes Do Not Mess With A Knitter Chicken T-Shirt pacific islands etc thanks. A top turkish official says the only logical conclusion is that jamal khashoggi’s body was dissolved in acid after being cut up. Victoria shink of yorkville il is the last unicorn screening tour’s october prizewinner selected at random from the 10 000 people who signed up as tour members at screenings she attended the 9 29 2014 show at the marcus orland park cinema as her prize victoria selected the deluxe 17 character last unicorn 35mm frame set she also sent the attached pictures and this story of her screening experience when I found out the last unicorn was going on tour I could hardly contain myself my first thought was I m so wearing my unicorn ears to this I immediately purchased two tickets just in case I found someone who wanted to tag along if I didn’t find someone I was going regardless of course this was a done deal the red bull himself couldn t stop me from attending shortly after scoring my golden tickets my husband found out that I had made plans to take myself on this last unicorn date I think it was because the unicorn ears came out and because I was just a little excited and endlessly raving about it he has seen this movie more times than he d like to admit because I watch it when I m sick when I m happy when I m sad when I m cleaning as background noise or when I just want to sit and watch one of my favorite movies I have been watching it like this since before I can consciously remember watching it at all needless to say he s too familiar with my last unicorn obsession supporting everything I m passionate about he proudly escorted me to one of the coolest experiences ever even though I never asked this of him he drove me in the rain bought me popcorn and candy slept through the movie in his typical last unicorn watching fashion carried all of my books I brought and bought held my purse while I waited in line for peter to sign my many requests and then continued to wait for me because I just didn t want to stop talking to peter s beagle who told me that he has a daughter named victoria bonus cool I have a true gentleman of a husband who put himself aside so his unicorn crazed wife could have a great night and that I did listening to peter speak was such a gift seeing the last unicorn on the big screen for the first time in my life displaced me and launched me back to my childhood I swear my jaw was on the floor and my eyes were lit up like christmas morning through the whole showing all of this over a movie I ve seen at least a million times I even won a rebekah naomi cox art print the harpy in the raffle and I believe a lucky lady got proposed to at this showing it was definitely a hallmark night for me and something I will never forget in his own way I think my husband actually enjoyed our unique date he did get to watch a 36 year old woman geek out over a cartoon while prancing around in unicorn ears thank you stephen shink for loving me the way you do congratulations victoria and stephen is a very lucky guy which he obviously knows

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In honor of my final week as a I Have Two Needles You Have Two Eyes Do Not Mess With A Knitter Chicken T-Shirt laker I ll be sharing a few favorite moments over the past 20 years you can see my top moment from each season at herovillain kb20 first up december 14 2014 dedication sees a dream come true. Just received this in the mail my order did take an extra 2 weeks to get to me just assumed it was from the boxing day sale rush your customer service is amazing and your follow up was so unexpected in a great way i’ll definitely keep ordering from you. The world s only 5 million audition is back do you have the x factor the x factor is expanding its audition process to reach more singers than any talent show ever before in its search to find the best new solo artists and vocal groups in america in addition and new for season two artists with pre existing management contracts can now audition subject to limited restrictions america s best undiscovered talent can audition for the x factor season two as follows open calls in kansas city austin san francisco greensboro and an additional city to be announced online auditions open march 1 mystudio hd recording studios across america open march 1 the x factor reopens its invitation to all of america ages 12 and over with no upper age limit to audition for season two subject to full eligibility requirements this fall s no 1 unscripted series discovered such diverse recording artists as winner melanie amaro and finalists astro chris rene josh krajcik marcus canty and rachel crow who have all signed major deals with sony music See Other related products: Fall For Jesus He Never Leaves Pumpkin Leaf Sunflower

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bringinbackpod · 4 years ago

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Interview with Noah Guthrie

We had the pleasure of interviewing Noah Guthrie over Zoom video!

Please share while we are #togetherathome 🏠

Music has been at the forefront of emerging singer-songwriter Noah Guthrie’s life for as long as he can remember. With his family’s musical roots running deep, Guthrie’s dream was always to be an artist and musician, but he didn’t realize he could make it a reality until 11th grade when he started posting unique cover videos on YouTube. At that point, he knew he had the opportunity to turn his dream into a career. Although his musical journey as an artist has been exciting and fulfilling thus far, he still faces difficulties - including trying to distance himself from past endeavors and find his own identity. While he’s received national attention for his creative YouTube covers, including posting a blues-filled version of LMFAO’s “Sexy and I Know It,” which has received more than 26 million views, and his pivotal role as Roderick Meeks on FOX’s hit TV show, “Glee,” it’s clear to see that Noah’s real talent shines through putting pen to paper and crafting original music. While he was able to showcase his unscripted musical talents with his semi-finals run on season 13 of NBC’s “America’s Got Talent,” he is still working hard to get people to see the original singer-songwriter Noah Guthrie that he’s always wanted to be.

Though he’s pursuing a career as an artist, it’s never been about becoming a famous celebrity for Noah. In fact, the down-to-earth rising star still lives in his hometown of Greer, SC. A safe, comfortable place to come home to when he gets off the road, the small town has positively influenced his creative process. Not only has it allowed him to relax and explore different musical ideas when writing, but even better, he has unlimited access to the studio his brother works at right down the road.

While Noah started learning to play bass as a teenager, he fell in love with the acoustic guitar after receiving an abandoned instrument from his dad’s office. From then on, the acoustic guitar has been instrumental in his songwriting process; Noah starts with a feeling and a guitar, and the lyrics follow. For him, songwriting has always been a form of direct expression, something Noah learned when he wrote his first song about missing his grandad after he passed away. Through a few chords, he was able to get his feelings out into a song, and his bedroom recording sessions didn’t stop there. While Noah has been successful in writing on his own, he also appreciates the special collaborative effort of co-writing and tries to learn from new songwriters each time he visits Nashville.

Noah describes his sound as an alt-country/Americana blend that is similar to Chris Stapleton’s country/rock tracks. Yet, the unique soulfulness in his richly textured voice and the unmistakable Southern influence in his music makes him capable of conveying emotion only a handful of artists can in today’s musical landscape. From his older sweet tune “Til It Thunders,” one of Noah’s favorite songs about coping with a long-distance relationship, to his newest single, “Hell or High Water,” a gritty track about navigating life, Noah’s versatility and distinct voice is evident. However, Noah isn’t trying to box himself into any specific genre; for him, it’s just about making good, honest music – music that just sounds like him. Differing from his previous polished, pop-sounding songs, the now more experienced singer-songwriter is focused on personally connecting with others through impactful storytelling and showing the real “Noah Guthrie” in his new music.

Noah has performed across the U.S., built a strong following through social media and TV, and released two critically-acclaimed albums. He has also performed on NBC’s Today Show and Tonight Show, Hallmark Channel’s Home & Family, and ABC’s Dancing with the Stars. Noah has opened for a wide variety of artists, including Ed Sheeran, Neon Trees, Ben Rector, Corey Smith, Sister Hazel, Matisyahu, Matt Nathanson, and Selena Gomez. Noah and his band, Good Trouble, were recently featured performers on Rock Boat XVIII with Sister Hazel, Barenaked Ladies, needtobreathe, Drew Holcomb and others. With career highlights like opening up for Willie Nelson and touring Europe five times, it’s just a matter of time before the world sees what Noah will accomplish next. With new music on the horizon, an energetic band by his side, a loyal fanbase behind him, and another international tour in his future, the sky's the limit for Noah Guthrie.

Check him out at his website and on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

We want to hear from you! Please email [email protected]

www.BringinitBackwards.com

#podcast #interview #bringinbackpod #foryou #foryoupage #stayhome #togetherathome #zoom #aspn #americansongwriter #americansongwriterpodcastnetwork

source https://bringin-it-backwards.simplecast.com/episodes/interview-with-noah-guthrie-g0Gjr0Mi

#podcast #interview #bringinbackpod #music #aspn #americansongwriter #americansongwriterpodcastnetwor

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ourmrsreynolds · 5 years ago

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stuff i read November 2019

Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance (2014) (Stormlight Archive #2) “I don’t want my life to change because I’ve become a lighteyes … I want the lives of people like me—like I am now—to change.” Kaladin Stormblessed, ACTUAL LOVE OF MY LIFE. Contrast: Dalinar whose “well you just have to be twice as good by distinguishing yourself in the position I gave you, that’s how you change the world” rhetoric makes my skin crawl. Nah it ain’t fam. Dalinar may be be a good person who has never personally mistreated a darkeyes, but that’s beside the point. He still benefits from a highly unequal, unjust arrangement that places him at the tippy top of the social, economic & political pyramid. And the parshmen at the bottom. If the next book isn’t 100% about Parshmen Rights I'm outta here. this book—well there were moments i was on my feet cheering, like that four-on-one-duel where Kaladin is the only one with the cojones to jump into the ring, and Adolin’s “bridgeboy” goes from a term of disparagement to a term of endearment. When we found out the Shardbearer whom Kaladin killed in Amaram’s service was Shallan’s brother that was WELL-PLAYED SIR that punch really landed. Renarin turning out to be a Radiant is a pretty harsh indictment of the overvaluation of martial prowess, and I liked that too, but on the whole I didn’t like this book as much as Book 1 because I wanted MOAR KALADIN.

Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire (2019) “Nothing empire touches remains itself.” They say that science fiction is psychology and fantasy is sociology. If that’s true (and I don’t remember where I heard it) this book bucks that trend because it’s all in for both sci-fi (it’s a space opera!) and sociology. It’s been getting a lot of well-deserved buzz and I really enjoyed it. I do think it’s fair to point out it’s a story centered on whip-smart highly-educated bureaucrats and the imperial court they orbit; that the perspective of “ordinary” people is missing, and you feel the lack because in the course of the book there’s a revolution/coup?? But I mean, if you think about the Roman Empire (the author is a Byzantine scholar) the kinds of “barbarians” it attracted were always from the better-off stratum of “barbarian” society. I guess the chimney sweeps wouldn’t have been reading Catullus. Nothing empire touches remains itself.

Robert Galbraith, Lethal White (2018) (Cormoran Strike Mysteries #4) The unresolved tension between the leads is A+ 10/10 but I feel like the actual mystery plot is not resolved as elegantly as I expected from JK Rowling? She’s like, the queen of tight plotting and I didn’t think she’d just round up 7 suspects only to let 6 of them off the hook with an apologetic shrug of “whoops that was a red herring.” There’s a metric shitton of gratuitous bashing of socialists & other lefties, which didn’t even faze me. What bothered me was the novel’s unevenness. The portion of it that was dedicated to character work was phenomenal. Rowling’s always had a gift for invoking petty and/or aggrieved secondary characters and she absolutely nailed it here, plus the main characters experience extraordinary personal growth while still bearing the scars of their traumas. Yet tbh Chamber of Secrets is a better mystery novel and I say this as someone who ranks Chamber of Secrets dead last on my personal “HP books, ranked” listicle.

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the body, and primitive accumulation (2004) Pluses of academic writing: you get to raid the ENDNOTES and BIBLIOGRAPHY for more texts devoted to your topic of interest. Minuses of academic writing: dense as hell, puts you to sleep. Praise be to Silvia Federici whose arguments are uncommonly lucid and contain almost no bloat, though the sections covering the New World are definitely weaker than the European sections, which is where Federici’s speciality lies. She argues that the witch hunts of the late Middle Ages were a political project, a campaign of terror designed to decimate the power of peasant women, sever them from their communities, and subjugate their reproductive capacities to doing USEFUL stuff like accumulating surplus for capitalists. The parallel between the enclosure of public commons and the enclosure of women’s bodies & labor power—all done with an eye towards private profit—is one that will haunt me for the rest of my life. What an absolutely staggering work of scholarship. So glad I sprung for the physical copy so I could annotate copiously.

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1848) It’s been 20 years and I’m still salty about Jo/Laurie. This is the first time I’ve actually reread it cover-to-cover instead of just reimbibing the shippiest bits and I gotta say, props to Louisa May Alcott who is a much better writer than I recalled. Her treatment of the process and the craft of writing is also right on; the 1994 movie by contrast just has Jo climb up into the garret and don her writing hat and hey presto, a manuscript. What I’d forgotten was Alcott’s mastery of tone to skewer a character—I don’t wanna say she rivals Jane Austen in this department but she comes close. I had also forgotten how much of Part I in particular is just Jo repressing her desire to marry Beth and cart her off to a lesbian utopia bursting with grand pianos. My girl is dead set against any of her sisters marrying, insists she’ll man up herself in order to keep the family intact, and if you only read Part I you may well conclude she’s not wrong. Part II is painful because it’s where Alcott sinks my ship. Hate to say I can see why she does it?? It’s because Amy and Laurie have the most to learn from each other, and Alcott is all about GROWING and LEARNING as a person. You know what, the text doesn’t belong to Alcott. The text belongs to all of us, and I will proclaim Death of the Author from the rooftops. Jo and Laurie love each other without labels, they’re not “romantic” or “platonic,” they set no limits on that love.

Cat Sebastian, The Lawrence Browne Affair (2017) (Turner Series #2) You know why this mlm Regency was absolutely DELIGHTFUL? Because it’s literally kidfic. They bond over the kid, that’s the story. It’s not the whole story, I just mean the arrival of the kid kicks the plot into high gear, even if there isn’t undue focus on the kid as a character in his own right. God this book is so relatable: They both have the worst case of imposter syndrome. “Neither of us is normal but have we ever thought to question whether fitting in is good, or normality is desirable?” It’s that trope where “I’ve insinuated myself into your life under false pretenses and now I’ve gone and fallen in love with you, how do I make a clean breast of it,” meanwhile your romantic interest knows FULL WELL you’re a con artist and it doesn’t lessen their attachment in the slightest. Also relatable: Lawrence likes being alone, clings to routine because unscripted social interactions give him anxiety.

Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom (2004) (Saxon Stories #1) I marathoned all three seasons of the BBC/Netflix adaptation earlier this year and I gotta say, lead actor Alexander Dreymon and his combination of martial arts background and tenderness 100% makes the character. Whoever does the score for the show also knocked it out of the park. In comparison, the book falls flat. Uhtred comes off as merely bratty rather than deeply conflicted in his loyalties, which could be a function of his extreme youth—he’s 18 I think at the end of this installment. The Danish vs Saxon identity contest is less prominent here; he pretty much accepts he’s a Saxon. @Bernard Cornwell your English ass is showing. There isn’t a real tight three-act structure, the plot just sort of meanders along from one battle to another (which is a hallmark of Cornwell’s writing, and never bothered me in his Grail Quest trilogy which are some of my favorite books of all time, so idk why it seems like weak sauce here) . One thing that remains constant is that Uhtred becomes irrational when threatened with the loss of things or people he considers MINE. Uhtred: sees a random dog paddling along in the middle of a storm. Uhtred: IS THAT RAGNAR’S DOG. Lmao.

Brandon Sanderson Oathbringer (2017) (Stormlight Archive #3) I opened this book with some trepidation because it is Dalinar’s book, the way Book 1 was Kaladin’s book and Book 2 was Shallan’s. I mean, all the flashbacks belong to Dalinar. You can tell Brandon Sanderson built this world around Dalinar, that Dalinar is more foundational to this ‘verse than any other character. And I gotta hand it to him, when I put the book down there were actual tears in my eyes: “The ancient code of the Knights Radiant says ‘journey before destination.’ But if we stop, if we accept the person we are when we fall, he journey ends. That failure becomes our destination. To love to journey is to accept no such end. I have found, through painful experience, that the most important step a person can take is always the next one.” I think about when Kaladin took the first oath way back in Book 1, when we first heard “journey before destination,” and I say BRAVO SIR BRAVO. I think about how Gavilar’s assassination is this primordial scene we keep circling back to; with each new book we return to the scene of the crime with a different POV and we keep peeling back the layers and upending everything we thought we knew. Other things I am here for: Shallan referring to Kaladin internally as Brightlord Brooding Eyes (I’m still recovering from how Sanderson sank my Kaladin/Shallan ship). Kaladin running into his archnemesis & ex-bully and all he can think is “Adolin would never be caught dead in a coat three seasons out of date” lmao Kaladin x Adolin brOTP of the century. Ok but remember how I said while I was reading Book 2 “I hope Book 3 is 100% Rights for Parshmen”??? Well I called it didn’t I. Turns out humankind are the invaders—they literally rolled up from another planet which they had accidentally destroyed, they came as refugees and they proceeded to…enslave the indigenous parshmen. What. The fuck. Brandon Sanderson was born and raised in the USA, where the ideology of settler colonialism is fucking hegemonic. We are REALLY GOOD at conflating preemptive warfare with self-defense, dispossession with property rights enforcement. We tend to think of democratic self-rule as coextensive with coercive rule over alien subjects. Sanderson’s choice to dismiss out of hand the “would you give the land back to the parshmen” argument is troubling because it absolutely bolsters the settler colonial narrative that indigenous elimination is a necessary condition of settlers’ “freedom”. I realize that the parshmen are currently being led by Hitler but that’s a choice on Sanderson’s part. Giving us 95% human POVs is a choice. This is the story of humans reckoning with their blood-soaked history, not the story of parshmen throwing off their chains.

#stuff i read

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lyuboviab4stb0 · 5 years ago

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Katie Cazorla husband Photo Info and their life details Reality Star

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American unscripted tv character who is best known for her work on the TV Guide Network’s Nail Files. She is likewise perceived for having showed up on the Hallmark Channel arrangement Home and Family.

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andrewromanoyahoo · 8 years ago

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Donald Trump doesn’t talk like other presidents. He’d be a better president if he did.

President Donald Trump speaks at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. on April 7, 2017, after the U.S. fired a barrage of cruise missiles into Syria in retaliation for the week’s gruesome chemical weapons attack against civilians. (Photo: Alex Brandon/AP)

When Donald Trump speaks, he sounds — unabashedly, unmistakably — like Donald Trump. But does he sound like a president?

And does sounding like a president even matter anymore?

Now that Trump’s 100th day in the White House is upon us, it’s worth pausing to consider the concept of a “presidential voice” — mainly because, as with so many of the traditions and trappings that have come to define the highest office in the land over the last 228 years, Trump seems to have dispensed with it entirely.

Some presidents strive for loftiness. (Think John F. Kennedy). Others speak more colloquially. (Harry Truman comes to mind.) But prior to Trump, you could pretty much put all of them on the same spectrum. They all tried, in their own way, to sound like presidents.

“There’s a transition that happens when someone is elected president,” says Jeff Shesol, a former speechwriter in the Clinton White House who founded West Wing Writers in 2001. “Usually it starts to happen right away, on election night.

Partly it’s how we hear them: There’s a gravity to their words that wasn’t there 24 hours earlier. But it’s also that they hear themselves differently. They pivot out of campaign mode into a new role.”

Trump is the exception. Unlike his predecessors, he doesn’t seem interested in developing a signature presidential register; neither Trump nor his team has tried to transpose his own personal voice into a more presidential key. For the most part, he’s still speaking like candidate Trump… who still spoke like reality TV Trump… who still spoke like developer Trump… and so on.

The examples are endless.

“I’m a person that very strongly believes in academics,” Trump told CIA employees shortly after his inauguration. “In fact, every time I say I had an uncle who was a great professor at MIT for 35 years, who did a fantastic job in so many different ways, academically — was an academic genius — and then they say, is Donald Trump an intellectual? Trust me, I’m like a smart persona.”

President Donald Trump speaks at the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Va. on January 21, 2017. (Photo: Andrew Harnik/AP)

“I can tell you, everybody in this massive … this is a massive hanger,” Trump said during his Feb. 18 rally in Melbourne, Fla. “For the big planes. And by the way, do you think that one media group back there, one network will show this crowd? Not one. Not one. They won’t show the crowd.”

“One of the best chemistries I had was with Merkel,” Trump said last week when the Associated Press asked about his contentious March 17 meeting with Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. “We had unbelievable chemistry. And people have given me credit for having great chemistry with all of the leaders.”

Last March, I taxonomized Trump’s particular patois — “Trumpese,” I called it — and argued that it was serving him well on the campaign trail. “It isn’t just consistent,” I wrote, noting Trump’s incessant use of non sequitur, repetition, reversal, slang, intensifiers, the second person and the imperative mood. “It’s perfectly calibrated — and calibrated may not be too strong a word — to serve Trump’s political needs.”

But a candidate’s needs —mobilizing his base; securing just enough votes to win the Electoral College — are not the same as a president’s needs. Trump won 46.1 percent of the vote on Nov. 8; today, his approval rating averages 42.1 percent, according to Five Thirty Eight. This is the lowest 100-day number on record, and it makes Trump the only elected president in the history of public opinion polling to finish his first 100 days with less support than he had on Election Day.

Language isn’t everything. But by ignoring one of the most time-honored tools in the presidential toolkit, Trump is almost certainly making his job harder than it has to be.

***

Two things to point out before we proceed.

First, Trump’s fans like the way he talks. For them it’s a feature, not a bug. As the Associated Press recently put it, the “rambling, aside-filled bursts of simple but definitive words, laden with self-congratulatory bravado and claims that have fact-checkers working overtime, all dispatched from mind to lips in such record time it seemingly bypasses any internal filter” — all of this only proves that Trump isn’t a typical politician, which, of course, is the last thing Trump supporters want. They would argue the era of presidents sounding presidential —focus-grouped, cautious, inauthentic — is over. And good riddance.

President Donald Trump speaks during a rally at the Kentucky Exposition Center, Monday, March 20, 2017, in Louisville, Ky. (Photo: John Minchillo/AP)

Second, saying that Trump hasn’t tried to develop a presidential voice isn’t the same thing as saying he hasn’t tried to deliver a presidential speech. His Feb. 28 address to a joint session of Congress and his remarks this week at the Holocaust Memorial Museum were both speeches that other presidents could have delivered.

The problem, though, is that they were both speeches that other presidents could have delivered. They didn’t sound anything like Trump. In fact, because Trump’s personal voice is so familiar by now — imprinted on our collective cerebrum by four decades of fame, 11 years on The Apprentice, and the first stream-of-consciousness presidential campaign in American history — and because he impulsively reverts back to it, either in the midst his prepared remarks or immediately afterwards, generic presidential rhetoric rings even more hollow coming from him than it would coming from a more generic president.

“The hallmark of a successful presidential voice is a kind of internal consistency,” says forensic linguist Allan Metcalf, the author of Presidential Voices: Speaking Styles from George Washington to George W. Bush. “The only hallmark of Trump’s presidential voice, so far, is its inconsistency.”

Trump isn’t the first president who has struggled to find his voice, and the reasons “are partly practical,” says Adam Frankel, one of three campaign speechwriters who followed Barack Obama to the West Wing in 2009.

“For one thing, the substance is different; now you’re talking about legislation,” Frankel explains. “But it’s also about setting. As a candidate, you’re basically just doing rallies. As president, you suddenly have all these different settings: a speech in the East Room, a televised address to the nation. Different settings mean different kinds of speeches — yet you still have to sound like yourself.”

Bill Clinton initially leaned a little too hard on John F. Kennedy’s elevated rhetorical style, with its clipped cadence and elegant constructions. “The voice Clinton heard in his head was JFK,” Shesol says. “He didn’t know what Bill Clinton sounded like at the presidential podium. But eventually he found a Clinton idiom that worked in the presidency — that was still himself but not quite what he had been before.”

Before the 2000 Democratic National Convention, Clinton gave his speechwriters some instructions. “Look, I don’t want to deliver a speech,” he said. “I want to talk to people.” Shesol and his colleagues immediately understood what the president meant.

“He obviously didn’t mean ‘depart with the piece of paper,’” Shesol says. “But there was an immediacy he was after — an unforced, relaxed, unscripted quality. Clinton wasn’t interested in applying layers of rhetoric between himself and his audience. He wasn’t looking to ascend to some plane that would put him above and apart from people.”

The final lines of that speech were classic Clinton.

“Fifty-four years ago this week, I was born in a summer storm to a young widow in a small southern town,” the president said. “America gave me the chance to live my dreams. I have tried to give you a better chance to live yours. Now, with hair grayer and wrinkles deeper, but with the same optimism and hope I brought to the work I love eight years ago, my heart is filled with gratitude.”

Early on, George W. Bush had a similar obsession with another president — “You know, Dick, I’m more like Ronald Reagan than my dad,” he told then-House Majority Leader Dick Armey — but he eventually settled on a snappy, plainspoken style that suited both his presidency and his personality. And even Obama, the most polished campaign orator in recent times, endured a few rhetorical growing pains after relocating to the White House. His first inaugural address, for example, is more formal than later speeches — as if his writers were trying to make him sound like a president.

President Donald Trump speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington on April 25, 2017, during the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s National Days of Remembrance ceremony. (Photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP)

The difference with Trump is that he doesn’t seem to care; he clearly thinks his own voice is good enough. After all, it won him the election. Why change now? And so he continues to call reporters out of the blue and invite them into the Oval Office without warning, confident that his riffing can reshape the narrative. He continues to deliver prepared remarks — from the “American carnage” of his near-apocalyptic Inaugural Address to the sudden sobriety of the Holocaust Museum speech — that represent the rhetorical equivalent of a multiple-personality disorder in which none of the personalities seem to belong to Donald Trump. (The fact that his staff has been consumed by ideological in-fighting doesn’t help.) And he continues to undercut any semblance of consistency by digressing, contradicting himself, and tweeting whenever the mood strikes him.

***

And yet, if Trump wants to be more effective in his next 100 days than he was in his first, he might consider adopting a presidential voice — and attempting, at least, to stick to it.

“There are reasons that presidents think about the words they’re uttering,” Frankel says. “It’s not just that people just love presidential rhetoric; it’s not just about writing a good speech for the sake of it. It’s about the effect your words can have in the real world. You tailor your speeches to achieve outcomes: to pass legislation; to make an argument to different members of Congress; to target different kinds of voters who can then pressure their members; to make a case to the country. A president’s words matter.”

Shesol, for one, thinks Trump could still find his presidential voice — “if he cared to do it.”

“There is a Trump presidential idiom to be developed,” Shesol insists. “It would have to be pretty close to the guy we know, or it wouldn’t fly at all. You’d have to take the brashness and toughness and swagger and you would have to work with them and render them assets. You can’t reinvent someone. You can’t start writing speeches for Trump that sound like they should have been written for Reagan. But you could make him a better version of himself. In theory. You’d have to find a voice that wouldn’t alienate him from his base, but at the same time wouldn’t be so needlessly alienating to rest of the country.”

That last point is key. Trump’s dilemma, ultimately, is that the campaign allowed him to keep doing what he’s been doing his entire adult life: selling himself. The presidency is different: It requires you to sell your policies. By refusing to leave the campaign behind, Trump is missing an opportunity to appeal to the rest of the country — the 73 percent of eligible American adults who didn’t vote for him — and rally at least some of those citizens around his agenda. For the last two centuries, presidents have addressed the American people — not just their “bases” — a certain way. It’s a language that everybody shares and understands.

“We lose something important when we don’t have a presidential voice,” says Metcalf. “We lose the sense that our president is speaking to us and for us — all of us.”

_____

Read more from Yahoo News’ coverage of Trump’s first 100 days:

Donald Trump’s Russian riddle

Trump’s chaotic first 100 days — as seen through his tweets

What Trump has done for, and to, the environment in his first 100 days

The Ever-Trumpers: Revisiting his backers from 2016, we find they still like him

Fact check: The White House’s claims about Trump’s first 100 days

The contrarians: They didn’t vote for Trump, but they would now

Trump foreign policy at 100 days: The downside of unpredictability

Twitter, Mar-a-Lago and Obama bashing: The 45th president’s 100 days of norm-busting

Photos: From inauguration to 100th day — President Trump’s rocky ride in pictures

Photos: From crude to creative — 100 days of Trump signs wielded by fans and foes

#_uuid:fef2f689-e24b-3111-8fce-a6d35cd4e84d #_revsp:Yahoo! News #_lmsid:a077000000CFoGyAAL #donald trump #_author:Andrew Romano #first 100 days

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micaramel · 4 years ago

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Artists: Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff

Venue: The Downer, Berlin

Date: June 18 – August 1, 2020

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of The Downer, Berlin

Press Release:

I’ve known Calla and Max for a decade now. I’ve seen the spaces that their work endeavored to create. I have happily (occasionally begrudgingly) been a part of some of their exhibitions and projects during the course of this time. I once read from receipts pictured in a series of photographs after having installed them in front of a live audience; I performed in a play they wrote and directed about an in-fighting but enterprising band of squatters who run a ramen restaurant out of an apartment they share; I helped assemble banquettes in their theater, hung and painted backdrops, operated the video camera, mopped floors, and built architectural models. I’ve sold their work to collectors and donated my own paintings to their benefit auctions. Our lives are closely connected and likely will be for their remainder. This show has nothing to do with our shared history, so I will refrain from dredging up too much more of it after this paragraph. But unlike any other thus far, this show is charged with a particular energy for me. Calla and Max had a big influence on the circumstances that brought me to Berlin, Also, it was through their initiative that the Downer began.

In my eyes, the core of Calla and Max’s work is the idea of community and shared experience. It examines the ways in which these ideas can be deployed against authority or serve to reinforce it. For as long as I’ve known them, and longer, their work has brought people together. Using friends as models, actors, performers and collaborators, they have created and fostered communities. As the complexities and personalities of those communities bristled against one another, they have likewise served as mediators, confidants and — conversely — the objects of disparagement. They have founded and operated bars, venues and theaters, with each space comprising some ratio of these component parts. Their first was a ‘bar’ in their shared studio at Cooper Union — which was more of a sculpture that encouraged people to get together and have a beer. Then followed Times Bar in Berlin, founded in collaboration with Lindsay Lawson, New Theater and TV Bar, which just reopened after a few months of Covid-19 provoked shutdown (and which you should go visit). Calla and Max’s practice is, on one hand, institutional critique and, on the other, embodiment of the institution.

The series of photos that I installed and read from in 2013 pictures artists sorting through their receipts, presumably in preparation to submit them to the tax office. The photographs don’t picture the artists themselves, just out of focus glimpses of them in front of or behind receipts piled on kitchen and cafe tables. Each piece was given the instructive title of the artist’s first name, the city (always Berlin) and a period of time (i.e Spring 2013). In a simple gesture the gut-leadening feeling of dealing with anything related to taxes is communicated. For artists and artworkers in particular, who exist in an industry where passion for art is often exploited to extract unpaid labor, the quarterly conundrum of what is and isn’t a warranted write off is evoked. Was that book for enjoyment or research? Was that dinner business or pleasure? Should I have been paid for this or was I volunteering? Where do fun and labor coincide and how can they be properly distinguished when friendships blur into professional relationships? This anxiety isn’t really related to taxes — that question is quickly answered with, “write off as much as you can get away with” — but these photos indicate a deeper existential uneasiness about the ways in which we are evaluated. Moreover, they say something about the ways in which we evaluate our own lives and work, and the relationships that often straddle the blurry boundary between them.

My definition of a scene would be: a recognizable movement in which the participants’ activities — as artists, performers, personalities, whatever, really — draw them into the same chapter of collective imagination, compounding the significance and reach of their ideas. Scenes have driven the advancement of art for a few hundred years and have been allowed to more or less write their own histories. The overlapping scenes that Calla and Max have cultivated over the past decade provided fodder for their own artistic work, as well as giving inspiration and a platform to their myriad members. Relationships extend beyond Berlin and the physical spaces they have helmed, situating Calla and Max’s work within a growing, networked alliance of artists — many of them also involved in organizing project spaces or artist run galleries.

I’ve met lots of people through Calla and Max and I imagine a lot of people reading this feel the same way. Sometimes being introduced felt uncanny, as if the scene was manifesting its connections after it had already made them algorithmically. Other times I’ve been surprised to meet someone at New Theater or TV Bar who was so unknown to me that my first conversations with them felt revelatory, despite the fact that, superficially, our lives bore so much similarity.

The way that people get to know one another and end up influencing each other is something that has been parodied in Calla and Max’s plays. Many of them open on a group that has ended up together more or less by chance. “Farming in Europe” featured a cadre of restaurant workers — a textbook example of multifaceted, diversely motivated collaboration. A gang of dejected vacationers populated “News, Crime, Sports,” a play that was set on an unmoored and un-captained cruise ship. The ragtag band of squatters who sell ramen out of their home in “Apartment” seemed to have fallen in with one another out of sheer necessity. In these arenas, characters quibble over ideological differences and willingness to contribute to a collective cause. They ridicule each other for their shortcomings, pontificate about the meaning of life and agonize over how to solve their problems. They also kind of take care of one another. Their haphazard convergence nearly always ends in haphazard goodbyes, but they usually manage to have a revelation or two along the way.

A scene, of course, is also an element of theater. The artists that have coalesced around Calla and Max’s organizing efforts feed one scene that cannibalizes itself for inspiration in others. The characters in their plays are — like all works of fiction — mash-ups of real personalities. Some ended up playing versions of themselves. Others didn’t have to look far for someone to imitate — they were probably sitting in the first three rows. Casts of mostly untrained actors, who were performing mostly for their friends, took scripts into their own hands, whether intentionally or not, returning them to the collective through misremembered lines, unscripted giggles and embellishments that kept the balance of who’s-using-who in a kind of limbo. This cultivated antiprofessionalism has become a hallmark of Calla and Max’s projects, giving them both a liveliness and an easily accessed escape hatch. If you don’t take something too seriously no great disappointment can come from it.

I would venture that we exist in a moment that is anxiously and unrecoverably disconnected from earlier utopian artistic scenes. One of the reasons is that everything is so connected already. There are increasingly fewer insights and ideas to share offline as the internet swallows and aggregates, and we increasingly substitute our collective consumption for shared experience. Does a group of people who have seen the same meme constitute a scene — not really, right? Interestingly, Calla and Max almost never use the events at their spaces as documentary subjects. Occasionally they will exhibit used, purpose-built furniture or show photos that picture dirty tabletops or half full glasses. But it’s hard to track down images of their friends socializing or even of their plays being performed. When they do ask friends and collaborators to pose, it’s almost always in a quasi-fictional role — in costume, or at least with ample stage direction. Beyond headshots, this same feeling is conveyed in their series of photographs of friends’ apartments made-up for AirBnB. These depict idealistically polished, yet inherently blemished living spaces that are uncomfortably braced for evaluation. Real spaces fictionalized for someone else to imagine themselves in. Documenting something or someone being candidly themselves is resolutely, almost inherently, barred from Calla and Max’s vocabulary. As if to acknowledge that we live in the moment of the curated feed, where everything is staged and everybody is acting as their own director, giving stage direction to the leading character of their own auto-drama.

When not focusing on fictions, their photographs often focus on the liminal — the absent or the accumulation that starts to make itself heard from the wings. The ostensible subjects of their photos are usually only tangentially related to a larger subject, like a newspaper, an empty cocktail glass or a receipt. In a large series of photographs of apartment viewings from different cities, the subjects were the desolate interior landscapes that serve as a backdrop for hopeful projection. Shot in black and white and printed in a darkroom — decidedly the opposite method of image making employed by the real estate industry — these photos occasionally feature glimpses of other visitors to the viewings. Mostly they feature the product of an emptying out, volume exchanged for capital. In a funny way, they are almost antithetical to the AirBnB stagings — one attempts to conjure domesticity with no props, and the other attempts to hide the props to allow potential guests to conjure domesticity in someone else’s home. Neither strategy is as helpful as you would hope.

A third, more recent series of photographs that also relate to living spaces pictures vignettes of the residence of the US Ambassador to Germany, which is a private home that changes occupancy with each diplomatic appointment. The photos were lit using theater lights from New Theater, giving the scenes an amber melodrama that heightens the antiquated domestic setting, questioning the relevance of the pomp of this classic American excess. At the same time, diplomacy gestures towards a version of interpersonal interaction that yields more than just a social life. Are the machinations, backstabbing, and insider trading of the artworld all that different?

Having sought places to stage performances, serve drinks or host conversations for over a decade, it’s no surprise that Calla and Max’s work also obsesses over real estate. What good is an eager audience without a space to host them? And as art and performance have increasingly dematerialized themselves to fit onto laptop and iPhone screens, Calla and Max have doubled down on their belief in physical space as paramount in provoking thought and fostering friendships. The question of art’s influence on real estate has been scrutinized by artists for 50 years or more, but this link is calcifying as art is more and more frequently deployed in an effort to gentrify. Artists face the paradoxical sociopolitical inner-turmoil of occupying both sides: they are often economically and ideologically linked to those who face displacement and, conversely, dependent on and symbolically linked to those profiting from the displacing. A big, and seemingly growing share of art collectors are making fortunes in real estate. As an artist, striving for patronage and solidarity presents contradictions without easy resolutions. In a sense, this horrible dilemma could be seen as another, deeper motivating factor in Calla and Max’s practice — to create a space that masquerades as something more functional than it actually is. A ragtag gang of artists play-acting the operations of a legitimate business. Theirs is an institution that aims to welcome as many as possible and preside over none of them. Art should aim to do the same.

Patrick Armstrong

Link: Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff at The Downer

from Contemporary Art Daily https://bit.ly/3fBOZk6

#micaramel

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brilliantobservations · 4 years ago

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You Used To Coulda But You Might Not Can | Brilliant Observations 145

Amy shares a troubling secret from the bedroom she and her husband have named... Cementy. Surprise! Melissa solves it in seconds. If only Amy will listen. Spoiler: She won't.

Fresh from that psychotherapy win, Missy turns her gaze to fixing the lifelong plight of Amy’s much-beloved kids, who find themselves enraged at her demand that they have a “good” relationship with her. Spoiler: They won’t.

All that, plus liquor-filled pinatas, some-of-the-house generators and the secret DVR filled with Hallmark Channel trash. It's almost as if our brains have been in quarantine. From good ideas.

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