Thursday, July 22, 2004
(2:40 PM) | Anonymous:
Liberating ourselves from the safety of regularity and the detachment of the everyday
The first time I visited Darling Hall and saw the first Tingle Showcase, I swooned with pleasure and amazement. I’d found my people at last! These people are brilliant. They’re hilarious, full of thrilling ideas, socially progressive, and unexpectedly warm and unpretentious.Now I am involved in Tingle Showcase and, by some good fortune for which I am endlessly grateful, I also live at Darling Hall.
Getting inside changes things. Last Saturday, the day of the newest Tingle Showcase (which Adam Robinson will review at The Pickle), I was shamefully blasé, tromping around in my slip and clearing my books and shoes out of the theater area.
But I got over that in a moment during the show: Tyson Reeder was onstage with Stephanie Barber and Xav Leplae doing a (untranslatable here) performance that alluded to both the inscrutable absurdity and the colorful hilarity of life, and I knew that I must constantly participate in this. This is it (but not this is all). This is really happening. I want to be with everyone here and everyone who’s not here, making lively life and joy.
Connection
Fifteen Lumpen people showed up at the Tingle Showcase from Chicago. They bartered for admittance, offering a hefty stack of the notable magazine on media, culture, and politics, lumpen, and the Street Prop edition of Select magazine, “an experimental media project highlighting interventionist art as cultural interference,” in its own words.
A lumpen fell into my lap from my hungover breakfast table the next afternoon, reinforcing the moment I’d had*:
…the cultural workers, dissidents, designers, provocateurs, musicians, artists, and activists who are navigating and exploring spaces to liberate ourselves from the safety of regularity and the detachment of the everyday… are creating worlds for us to explore. They give us hope.I believe it, even after having been run over by a ten-ton train of disillusionment and cynicism. The very circumstances that brought these sensibly buoyant words to me make me a believer.
This activity is what makes us sing. They make us live and make us love….
Some readers… may be tired of reading hard-hitting diatribes against the corporate takeover of our lives or our lamentations regarding the same old new world order that is under the Death Kingdom of Bush. Politics suck. Especially today. Especially when we need to escape their horror. But the politics and the economics of the now and future affect us and our ability to survive….
We find the efforts of those creating new spaces to share and create other worlds that are possible, a much needed antidote to the way things are. We believe the only hope for us collectively is to expand the activities of the cultural scenes and meet them head on with the boring theoretical political cultures that have run out of steam and are under reconstruction. At least here in the US. We need to connect these worlds. We need to reinvent what it means to be human….
But we know we are not alone or isolated. A series of movements are being built that are yearning for connection around the country. We see threads of a different world being woven into a direction that is taking us out of the morass of mediocrity and inaction and captivity….
The margins will determine the center. We must connect and meet each other…. We believe the germinal collective we are growing can work. Don’t you?
Meta-blogging
I believe in blogging as a means for connecting and meeting each other, and as a partial answer to the US’s sore want for public discourse. The blog is a semi-public forum, sure, but as blogger Kotsko has learned, we have a way of being found. Also, I don’t care that, when blogging, we’re communicating with each other from behind our screens. I feel a definite sense of emotional connection with bloggers and comment-posters. Furthermore, the blogging format is commendable as a way for introverts to exert their influence in a culture where extroverts dominate political and social life. At the blog, introverts may safely type away, with time to reflect and compose coherent statements, and unflustered by demands for off-the-cuff responses.
I don’t know how long the phenomenon of blogging will last, or how it may evolve, but I’m glad it’s here. I am grateful to you blog posters and commenters who deal with important, difficult, and surprising things.
I think what we are doing here is good. I may even call it “liberating.”
*Bolding by me.
