Here we are in a room full of strangers,
Standing in the dark where your eyes couldn’t see me...

One of the greatest vamps of the 1970s. A dim memory of skating with my elementary school class at North Vancouver's now-defunct Stardust Roller Rink, the room's disco ball spinning wild patterns on the worn wooden floor.

[Art criticism in progress, late night, rain down hard outside on the Subaru's roof. And, for the record, the sensibility that generated that last thought also generated the following paragraph:

"Disassembling structures does not necessarily mean relativizing their components. Aslizadeh is not interested 'deconstructing' narrative or point of view per se, however much her subject – the repressed inner lives of the workers and managers at a ficticious American insurance company’s head office – might cry out for such an approach. Office succeeds because Aslizadeh repeatedly shifts the ways in which her narrative is told. She thereby implies compositional parallels between her video’s formal (pictorial and durational) structure and the broken, fractured and necessarily incomplete narratives that her characters tell themselves and each other. In this respect, her shifts of compositional and stylistic tone are not arbitrary, relative, or 'postmodern,' but are deliberately tied to her characters’ psychological states. Aslizadeh’s stylistic shifts are expressive of her protagonists’ conflicted fragmented inner lives, an ostensibly stylistic avant-gardism -- what Aslizadeh calls 'a visual language that owes much to the avant-garde traditions of distancing and radical breaks' – employed in the service of greater psychological realism."

Talking cats, Frankfurt School, the Bros. Gibb, "picture space," X-Men, Clement Greenberg, paperback originals. High or low? Not a meaningful distinction any more. It's all one piece.]
- posted by cjb @ 11:23 PM