among friends

Come Saturday, there are going to be seventy or so pleasantly surprised, or completely confused Haverford students.    The one thing that they will have in common:  All will be recipients of an ornate, loving, anonymous Valentine’s Day Card.    Will you get the golden ticket?  To be continued…

As you may not know, E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial is going to be a big part of Pope.L’s upcoming performance. In preparation for the big day, I’ve been doing some research on Steven Spielberg, watching some of his movies and generally getting familiar with the material. Not being very familiar with his work, I was a little surprised at some of what I found. Read the rest of this entry »

We chatted with Nao again this week. We didn’t get to pretend we were in Paris, because iChat (and thus its special effects) weren’t working. But we had a very productive talk on Skype, and now we’d like to fill you in.

We couldn't play with the special effects, but Nao played with her funky hat.

Plans for the comfort station are coming along. Nao found warming heart gel packs for soothing purposes (click Read More to see). For the station itself, we want a cabana lean-to; the icon could be a red cross tilted to an X. Before Nao gets here, we’ll put together a questionnaire asking Haverfordians what their worries are. We’ll have a big sewing party to make fanny packs; Nao had the idea to make origami flowers from dollar bills and cover them with Velcro dots.

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Here’s an excerpt from a New York Times article about a local institution, Kim’s (a video rental store), closing down and its unique collection being moved to Italy. An ENTIRE TOWN is going through an among-friends-on-Steroids event:

“According to the report, an ancient town in western Sicily called Salemi had initiated an unusual renewal project. Founded around the fourth century B.C., the town achieved brief renown as the site where Giuseppe Garibaldi first planted the country’s tricolored flag in 1860 during his quest for a unified Italy.

But Salemi’s moment of glory lasted only a day before the place slipped into oblivion. A devastating earthquake in 1968 proved the final blow, and for decades, the historic center sat abandoned, the town largely forgotten.

Now, an ambitious effort was under way to reverse the damage.

The town had invited prominent artists and intellectuals to assume control of the government. An art critic and onetime anarchist named Vittorio Sgarbi was elected mayor. A prince was put in charge of town planning, and a performance artist was officially declared alderman to nothing. The provocative Italian photographer Oliviero Toscani, whose ad campaigns for Benetton included a series on AIDS patients and inmates on death row, was named alderman of creativity.

Ms. Pauli had worked with Mr. Toscani years earlier. Now, as president of a small arts foundation called Clio, an organization devoted, as she put it, to promoting “culture as an everyday thing, something you consume every day,” she was fascinated by this effort to give artists political power.”

Here’s the link to the full article: www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/nyregion/thecity/08kims.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

These are all people you may know, students you’ve seen walking around campus, eating in the Dining Center, studying in Lunt Café. So what, you ask, are they doing in these masks, popping out of a wooden board in Ryan Student Center that looks like a Whac-a-Mole game at your local carnival? Read the rest of this entry »

Today I took a trip to the nice bathroom by the periodicals room in Magill, and I found this weird flier. The question on this sheet of paper reads: “If you were to make a peanut butter sandwich, what else would you put on it? Be bold.” The responses (honey, AIDS, your mom’s chest hair among them) interest me less than the question. Who’s asking? Are we asked to write about a sandwich we would really eat? Or is the question just a clever vandalism opportunity that allows us to scrawl “semen” on a wall? And will we receive sandwiches for our participation?

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I went to see the Gilbert & George exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art over winter break. Let me tell you, their art is crazy. These two London artists address war, sex, politics, religion, and bodily functions. Their earlier work includes mostly black and white sketches, but they are better known for their shocking large-scale pieces: digital collages of photographs, graphics, and color.

I didn’t understand a lot of their work, but I did enjoy it. There was everything from feces to naked bodies to psychedelic crowds of people to screaming, angry faces. Sometimes Gilbert & George have a specific political message, but sometimes it seems like they are just trying to send a message, any at all.

Gilbert & George paste real personals into their piece, alongside crude graffiti, eerie eye-shots, and photographs of themselves. There’s Gilbert pictured in front of the personals. Three giant panels took up an entire wall of the museum.

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Jane and I met Nao on Friday, through the wonders of video chat. She was wearing a gray sweater, a red and white scarf, and a black hat with a rose pinned on. And she’s nice, guys. She’s nice!

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In June 2005, while in Vietnam, Harrell Fletcher visited the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. The experience so affected him that he returned several times, eventually photographing every image and caption in the museum. These photographs became “The American War,” Fletcher’s ad-hoc re-presentation of the museum material he had encountered in Vietnam.

As a reproduction of another exhibition, “The American War” raises issues of originality, of context, and of cultural exchange. In a conversation with artist Michael Rakowitz, Fletcher described the work as an example of the “bootlegging” he encountered in Vietnam:

Outside of the War Remnants Museum … people [were] lined up selling stacks of bootlegged books on the Vietnam War. … The books [were] about the Vietnam War, but they were written by Western writers and were originally distributed in Western countries. … The other thing that I found really fascinating was that many of the images in the museum itself were copied from American magazines and newspapers. They just took publications like Life and the Chicago Sun-Times, re-photographed the images in them, enlarged and framed them, and then hung them along with original images taken by Vietnamese war photographers.

Thus, in the spirit of “The American War,” although admittedly without the political weight, I re-present three images from Peter Tonningsen‘s “Flotsam and Jetsam,” which I encountered in the Oakland airport yesterday (only three images are on display in the airport; these, along with seventeen others, are available on his website): Read the rest of this entry »

WORK WITH POPE.L!

Calling all adventurous, dynamic, risk-taking performers for some groundbreaking creative collaboration! Pope.L needs a cast of 18 performers and a film/lighting crew for his residency’s culminating performance shoot (filmed performance) at Haverford College on Wednesday, March 26.

Pairing the experiences and identities of civil rights martyr Emmett_Till and Spielberg’s  E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial, Pope.L’s innovative performance piece is a murky exploration of curiosity, misunderstanding, alienation and fear.

Beginning Tuesday, January 20, Eli and I will be tabling with audition/event details and sign ups in the DC during meals. Auditions will be held the evenings of January 25, 26, & 27 in 10 minute slots. Pope.L is looking for a random, yet enthusiastic and dedicated assortment of performing talent. Beatboxer? Flautist? Clown? Soprano? Mime? Improvisor? Magician? Drummer? Hummer? Ballerina? We want you in addition to ever-valuable technically talented camerapeople and lighting gurus!

As part of the event you’d need to commit to rehearsals the few days before the performance (more details to come), but that’s it! FAST & FURIOUS. Plus, you’ll be privy to the chic among friends happenings throughout the artists’ residencies.

This is quite a unique opportunity for performers at Haverford; think it over and sign up! Tell your limelight-loving friends!

Feel free to contact Ali – aking@haverford.edu or Eli – nbloodpa@haverford.edu for more information!