“A mondegreen is the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase, typically a standardized phrase such as a line in a poem or a lyric in a song .” I just was reading about this one: In Britney Spear’s song “If U Seek Amy,” the lyric All of the boys and all of the ...
Two Ideas
Race and Beauty in Gay Culture “I remembered what you had said to me on that wonderful evening when we first dined together, about the search for beauty being the real secret to life.” If beauty were the secret to life, how would you search for it? Would you wake up every morning,...
The Myth of the Stage and its Audience
Stage: n \?st?j\ Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French estage abode, story of a building, state, from Vulgar Latin *staticum, from Latin stare to stand … 2 a (1) : a raised platform (2) : the part of a theater on which the acting takes place and which often includes the wings (3)...
The Myth of Maps
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the...
Our own mythologies
We move to New York to “make it.” But what does this mean? What is it about New York that inspires people to believe this is the place where they can realize their ambitions? How do these ambitions, modeled into stories and mythologies, relate to the way we actually live right now? How are...
Silence
A critique we received from the Finnish students who came to visit was that our recent mythology pieces were too text driven—that we relied on text too heavily. Perhaps it was because our inspiration was Barthes’ text, but what would it be like to explore silence? What can we say without...
DocuGame
A clique of game designers has proposed the idea that the 21st century will be the “Ludic century.” This theory advances the idea that, much like the 20th century was dominated by the medium of film, the 21st century will see a shift to games as a means to learn, socialize,...
Exercises in Nonfiction
The following are two amusing activities for the UnionDocs Collaborative to consider. 1. THE TRUTH We’ve been so eager in locating and analyzing myths in our culture that we’ve lost all touch with reality. A point had been raised by one viewer during our MOMA Q&A: our collaborative...
Learning to Talk Female: a project proposal
A few months ago, I interviewed a woman who was newly a woman. Physically a man her whole life, she had just come through several years of transition to become the woman she’d always felt herself to be. She’d also been a poet her whole life, and, upon assuming her new female identity, she was...
Love At First Sight: a project proposal
We all can imagine it: that immediate tug at one’s insides, that look which registers beyond any look, the sky-opening-hallelujah of a meeting: falling in love, at first sight. And even if we haven’t really ever felt it ourselves, the idea has assumed a cultural omnipresence. This is the...