From: Freya (email suppressed)
Date: Mon Sep 22 2008 - 04:37:56 PDT
Hiya Fred,
I'm sorry if you found my reply to you to be "obnoxious", as you suggest it wasn't meant in that spirit, it just came out that way perhaps.
Also apologies for the delay in my reply. I wasn't rudely ignoring you but I too am very busy and don't get much time to post here these days as I'm dealing with other stuff.
> an ignorant
> statement, which she had. Furthermore, you don't
> exactly do your
> admiration of Gandhi's great statement any credit by
> bragging about your
> "bigger dick" in another post the same day. I
> realize you were replying
> with humor to someone obnoxious, but the only way to deal
> with a troll
Well, I don't think of sexual harrasment as neccesarily being the trivial issue that you do Fred. When it is accompanied by someone trawling the internet and trying to pull up every personal detail about you and mailing them back to you, it starts to cross the line into very creepy and a little frightening. Lastly jumping on the bandwagon of someone elses smear campaign, makes it very clear that this person is a very nasty individual who takes pleasure from the suffering of others. I think that to dismiss these things as being the actions of a troll is somewhat disingenuous at best and is trivialising of some serious issues.
As for "bigger dicks" it would appear that you have either missed the point completely or are once again being disingenuous. Perhaps a bit of both.
> is to ignore him, as you should have learned by now:
> "Please do not feed
> the trolls." Anyway, I have limited time, and wading
What I'm perhaps starting to learn is that maybe it is best to keep the "trolls" well fed. A friend of mine has had a good and fairly succesful time doing this and I've been much impressed. Compared to my own silly "lets talk" attitude or ignoring the problem she has had fantastic results in fact. I've learned a lot of things over the last couple of years through genuine experience rather than listening to poular memes.
> Finally, it seems to me that anything argued logically, and
> written in
> standard English, is what cari means by
> "academic." This strikes me as
> not only wrongheaded, but actually dangerous. It lets you
> run away from
> the meaning of what you say, as she has tried to do. I
"It" being the dialect of English that Cari writes in you mean as opposed to the "standard English" that you use in Chicago? Ironically it's not clear what you mean by "It" here, so I have to assume that you refer to Cari English, as opposed to other possible interpretations such as "French is a dangerous language" for example.;)
Perhaps it is to try and stop people putting their own meanings on what she says. Such a denial of semiotics seems like a far better strategy than that taken by the Materialist school here in the cinema of exclusion. It's all very well making abstract films etc but at the end of the day the artist who makes those films is still very much figurative so you can dump alll your twisted distortions directly on the artist herself rather than her artwork. It's rather like putting your head in the sand really as I've found out to my own cost.
From that point of view a more abstracted means of communication seems somewhat sensible in fact and rather than being dangerous provides for a certain amount of safety in dangerous times. Perhaps it is better to abstract yourself and participate more fully in the dialogue around signs and meaning in your work, rather than the other way around.
OTOH perhaps she just likes poetry. ;)
> prefer to
> identify myself, and I do mean this as a
> "political" statement, as a
> member of the "reality-based community." For
> further explanation, see
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community
A very intresting quote there from a Bush aide about manipulating reality and what people observe and the U.S. empire.
It should be noted that even the world of academia which might make claims to being reality based, is caught up in its own memes that can be observed to be little more than nonsense.
I will definitely check out your Bela Tarr article when I get a moment so thanks for that link. I think it's a shame you don't want to participate in things on Frameworks anymore but given the way you feel about it I can see that perhaps you are right.
love
Freya
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For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.