Re-reading our history through posts, I was embarrassed over how savagely I attempted to will something into being through nothing more than sentence after pretentious sentence. I can now admit to myself and to others: not the way to go. I honked a few rhetorical horns no better than the most untalented trained seal, thinking to build through impressive stunts. So, chagrined and wanting to make an end, here’s my last version of what I think lacunagroup could be. It doesn’t involve building or actually undertaking anything. Allow me to devote a few more pretentious sentences to this task; then that voice is done. Imagine: out in the middle of nowhere (let’s face it–we are) is this thread of thought that at times seems to give shape to notions of theatre and performance, art and engagement, creativity and ambivalence. (Why theatre? We start from our immersion in the history we have in common. I know I can’t drop an obsession overnight.) This thread unspools anonymously, perhaps, and reaches out to notions and places one is hard pressed to imagine being reached, especially in the middle of nowhere (let’s face it–we are). The thread might go from the discursive to the playful and on toward the outrageous, returning at times to the ruminative, here local, there global, staging a few abrasive associations, and never forgetting to engineer the occasional irony or equivocation. The thread is a kind of work, or (better) a working-through, spinning out as artful performance. My hope is that the actual thread will make its start by reacting against this post…
25 thoughts on “what why where when”
Comments are closed.
I’m not sure I understand. However, I do want to give a heads-up. In Rome I headed up a RoundTable for the Joseph Campbell Foundation for several years. I’ve been thinking about doing the same thing here. But I also had this wild idea of proposing a merger. A Lacuna Mythological RoundTable, if you will. Let me know if you’re interested. I have some ideas.
Oh wait! I was supposed to rail against Marc’s post. Um, wait … um … performance. Per Form. Form. Formulate. Form is function. Is it? Thread. Web. Spin. Spin the tale. Spin. Sufi-like, whirling dervishes. Natalie Merchant. Christmas. Economics. Spinning, spinning. Vomit.
Oh, come on. I can’t be the only one in a playful mood.
You may be. Part of the reason why lacunagroup’s utopian collaborative dynamic (see, just lost three readers with the last three words)never achieved centrifugal force. (and in re-reading your second comment I note the centrifugal spinning already at play–see, collaboration is always surprising
I’m not being scornful of folks. It’s hard to take the time for a collaborative intensity to develop with the demands of the day-to-day always at the door. Go with what’s proven to work.
As to understanding marc’s post. Let the written blog thread become the initial creative investment. For instance, you can talk about trying to set up some Campbell roundtable thing on this blog, or you can just begin doing something on the blog, not waiting for real-life face-to-face-ness, that tries to start fulfilling your aspirations and invite others to play along. You don’t even have to put an explanatory frame around it.
As to a “lacuna mythological round table” taking place, if you bid a luminary,I feel like I have to also bid a luminary to stay in the game. I’d probably try to bring my pet interest in Lacan to the table or Lacan, a hyphen, and the neurotic Viennese doctor who got the twentieth century going (for better or worse). Which might be a nice balance since Campbell conjures up the psychotic Swiss doctor who had problems with the neurotic Viennese doctor. Lacan would also allow me to think of Levi-Strauss and structural anthropology, a useful compliment to Campbell as well. If lacunagroup then wants to turn the whole thing into show-biz, so be it.
Let me exploit this comment to mention the things I was going to write in a new post. The writer’s strike in Hollywood and the book Proust was a neuroscientist(both mentioned on NPR this morning) got me to thinking, again, about creativity and utopia. What if the strike can be interpreted as meaning “orthodoxy is on hold” and, therefore, everything else is possible, including artists renewing an interest in actually investigating reality as opposed to pandering to sensationalist appetites in “the industry?” What if the strike truly creates a vacuum that creative folk outside the system begin filling in new and interesting ways, and doing it through new methods of labor and materials organization? For instance, a film made cheaply on digital by a collaborative in which the traditional production jobs were scrambled and blended? Or a theatre piece created to reflect some other form of thought, like the speculative essay? Or a blog that becomes as suspenseful or addictive as some new tv series? Or as searching as speculations in theoretical physics might be when confronted with experimentation?
I have not smoked enough clove cigarettes in my life to claim even faux hipster street cred, so your offhand linkage of Ms. Merchant with the Sufis is news to me. Why is your interpretation of “reacting against” more like free-association? Or were you just trying to find a way to vomit, which is truly a reaction of a kind?
So what is it you guys want, louder or softer?
re: the writers’ strike
Or what if, bereft of narrative, the industry shuts down until its storytellers return? Occam’s Razor, muchachos
Egad, I was still trying to make some sense of Marc’s first post and now you guys throw all this out there. So do you want to do something, talk about doing something, or talk about talking about doing something?
I think Terry gets it.
Let’s kill someone. As art.
Let’s begin with Shakespeare. We can move down from there.
Are we only allowed to kill dead people?
Shakespeare is already dead?
I cut myself on Occam’s Razor once. A simple thing, really. A most simple thing.
Heeey. Let’s use Occam’s Razor to kill people.
By the way, I must know. Is “Elbowdeath” marc’s twin? Are there really TWO Lacan devotees on this board? Who’s working the Improbability Drive on this ship?
I wish to go back for a moment and sit with “Are we only allowed to kill dead people?” An ingenious sentence.
Re:re:the writer’s strike. I don’t want to slice anything no matter how thinly it could be accomplished. I want the whole industry to become superfluous. I want tables full of young smart asses fresh from New Haven to realize nobody out there is interested in their arch, condescending and too clever vanity. Then “the storytellers” would emerge, and from elsewhere, and do something else. Not a focus group in sight.
Re: Shakespeare. The only true father is a dead father.
Re: louder or softer? Definitely louder.
Re: talking about talk. I strongly believe in doing something rather than doing nothing, and talking about talk is a perfectly fine thing to do while waiting for the muse to finish menstruating.
Who knows? It may turn into storytelling.
Speaking of storytelling and the industry and my ambivalent status as a consumer of entertainment. And of focus groups.
I wish to understand more about why I respond more intensely to certain stories and less to others. I can imagine a series of thumbnail tales presented to me in some numbered order. The tales would be complete, all containing final resolutions. No cliff-hanger endings to unfairly captivate the reader. After reading each tale I would scale my response to it in some way. What could I learn about myself by doing this?
I am thinking about this because I see myself as someone with “refined” taste in narratives. If I am seeking pleasure through a narrative rather than through more formal values in some bit of expression, I exercise a certain fussiness, often a reluctance to even undertake the tale. Could I evaluate that peculiar fussy response? Could I find out in rating these little thumbnail tales how my own narrative “stakes” are constituted? Am I a snob or old or perverse or anhedonic or what? Would my discoveries re-enforce anything JC (Joseph Campbell) has observed about the structure of tales and our response to them?
The many masks of marc? I have to go to a reception but I will return later tonight and respond to some of this.
I’m not sure my taste is so “refined.” [Lately I’ve been watching a lot of Battlestar Galactica (the new one)]. But I do know that I’m more reluctant to invest time in movies than I used to be. Why? Because so much of it is formula. I know the conventions. I know Syd Field. It annoys me when, for instance, a character asks a question, there’s a CUT, and then the next shot answers the question. Or when a character says, “Absolutely not! Now way am I ever gonna do that! NO! NO! NO!” And, naturally, the next scene shows the character doing just that. I could go on, but why bother? Even this rant is cliche.
Did anyone here see 21 Grams? I didn’t much care for the movie, but I did like the idea of cutting up the screenplay, throwing all the pieces up in the air, then pasting them back together in a kind of random order. I read books backwards. I’m non-linear. I could go for more of that.
Film storytelling is certainly a set of formulas, and we are so hard-wired by them due to constant exposure from an early age, you can almost say it’s become how we think. It’s pot-boiler logic writ large, and much of it is still due to Hitchcock. Who’s mastery we must revere, no doubt, but it very much is about setting up a game for the audience. Playing with time and multiple tracks of reality and variable tracks of reality are still extensions of the core idea of constructing a clever, suspenseful, baffling game for the viewer based on what is revealed and concealed, the directions and mis-directions, and an ultimate identification with a protagonist. Ultimately, it’s all good rationalist fun, a hunt for the Easter Egg of Truth.
I’ve often thought it would be interesting if the material for a narrative film was not initially organized in the traditional script format (this is not original, probably; Godard, no doubt, has already been there). The materials would be collected in some compendium form that pleases the author. It could be a series of stories. It could be a collage of verbal and visual gestures. A catalog of bits of evidence. A cycle of poems. A series of contemplative essays. What have you. This collection of materials could then be taken up by any number of filmmakers who could create numerous films utilizing the material in their own unique style and through their own distinctive production processes. In other words, the screenwriter prepares the material in a way which allows for multiple interpretations and multiple films. Related in spirit to what goes on in Von Trier’s 5 Obstructions, but also different in that the various versions would be created by various artists. Think about the new kind of enjoyment an audience will experience, and the new discussions to be had, as it views the various interpretations throughout a year. This kind of thing already happens in a very stupid and cynical kind of way when competing films get made exploiting similar stories and styles (the Prestige, the Illusionist, etc–or the various Valmonts who hit the screen a few years back–two examples) or when a production company makes a sequel.
I like this idea because it would allow me to experiment with a collaborationist, collectivist production mode in approaching such material. Would the good ole verities of storytelling get obscured or lost without an airtight script providing architecture? Maybe not. Maybe what’s actually valuable and immutable would distill. The rest is show biz and can be retired if one so chooses.
Another way to address the question of scripts and formulas is to look at the work of true cinematic masters who let the nature of their medium guide them to new and distinctive choices, ultimately dispensing with pat formulas altogether.
I think Coppola didn’t really bother with a script for most of Apocalypse Now. He was just winging it. If you get a chance, watch Hearts of Darkness when it comes out on DVD later this month. Should have been included with the earlier “Complete Dossier” DVD, but whatever. I’ll shell out the extra dough.
OK, I’m with this whole idea. But instead of a cycle of poems or essays, can we use Grantham’s collection of Creek myths? Or this:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/se/mtsi/index.htm#section_000
Do we all have access to MiniDV cams? I can loan you mine. Two-minute films. Live action, animation, music video WHATEVER. We make digital files and post them either to YOUTUBE or whatever.
Give ourselves a one-week deadline? What say you?
This can be for its own sake, an exercise, a love offering, whatever. But there are many other possibilities here. If we can do this right. If we can make something of quality.
The guantlet has been thrown.
And yes, I overused the word “whatever,” but WHATEVER.
I like the idea. I have access to a cam but I need to find a new battery for it. And I’ve never looked into what editing possibilities this Dell comes with (I promise I’d be Mac if I could; don’t be hatin’).
Be warned, however. I will continue to talk about process and possibilities on the post. I don’t insist on a closed set now that I’m going to actually try something, and I want to give myself permission to articulate some notions about film and the like. Part of my process. And part of that “lacunagroup” collaborative invitation in which all is transparent and all intermingles.
Try what? I have no idea. Once I assemble my tools (I must respect my little obsessive rituals…) I’ll see what might be of interest. Something about the agony of things no longer there, probably. And I’ve always wanted to experiment with an associative form of editing. I’m probably as much interested in the phrase “myths and tales of the southeastern indians” as I am in the actual stories.
I’m going to pen another post in which I encourage folks to read these exchanges of comments but also outline another “lacunagroup” notion I had planned to mention this morning before I read your idea.
OK, it’s on. I’ll have my two minutes ready for posting by next Friday. Let’s see where this goes.
We have a mac laptop that is free to use for anyone who needs to edit. We also have two miniDV cams and batteries. Just ask, you will receive. Peace.
I ordered a battery yesterday. I feel giddy.
Barb’s in. She says we should hook up the projector and have a little film festival next Saturday. Roll out the red carpet.