i dream

...of mobility facilitated by the latest in style. Or should I say the most retro of styles?
First a passionate love for:
(think minus dorky drink-holder, and additions of spokey-dokes and handlebar streamers)



and now, due to the richness of its blood, a new love:

Try crossing fingers and toes.
And chanting "I DO believe in fairies"...

All together now!

language makes the heart grow fonder

It seems unlikely that anyone has failed to notice that my posts seem to have been coming in spurts, usually related to visual imagery - video clips, to be precise.

And that's probably appropriate, because it seems like my head has been working in video clips - shakin' the blues, zipping, and longings for the new and the old / vintage.

I could choose at this point to wax lyrical about longings for the pre-linguistic (particularly appropriate since discourse analysis as methodology is the current bane of my research existence), or the relative appropriateness of visual representations of emotional / affective response. But perhaps this sums it up best:

publishment

So I didn't want to talk about it till i had a hard copy in my hot little hands, but it is in fact true... Traffic contains an article in it from yours truly. Truly, truly. It's scrumptious.

At the risk of making this blog be more about my favourite visual stimuli, and less about my random musings...

This is love to me:



its how i love, and how i want to be loved.
Double or nothing.

life has been a little monochrome lately

So recently, my secret sin has been black and white movies.
The classics, of course.
And I keep falling in love again and again.

Ah, the bliss of the sheer talentless beauty of Eva Gardner as the statue of Venus come to life.
The toe-tapping intensity of Eleanor Powell in one of those blistering routines she makes look so effortless.
The starry-eyed crooning of yet another square-jawed singer.
The dreamy intensity of Ms Frances Gumm's baby-faced earlier efforts.

You see what I mean?





Musicals as utopic, Mr Richard Dyer? Yes, please.

keep it Rosemary

oh yes





*giggle*

Now go do what the nice lady says!

CRUSH!

got two of 'em
two kinds of ladies.

one on-going:


and one retrospective:



see the similarities!?
i do.
*sigh*

drag it up, drag me down...

Upcoming in Traffic: 'The Past Rewritten - A Future Imagined'



Drag King - Camp Acts, Queer Bodies, Desiring Audiences


The motivations for, and intentions of, the performances of any given Drag King are various as Drag Kings themselves. The boundaries tested by the Drag King are reached through his performances, with the participation or refusals of his audience - as an embodied queering of play across gender. The Camp and Drag traditions from which his performances draw facilitate this, and draw out erotics - an essential performance of the Drag King - articulated through varied methods of access to the incoherently gendered or re-gendered body. Working through the piece as a desiring audience, these acts are examined and explored in the light of this desire.

The Contact of Roller Derby: Hospitality, community and conflict

Regularly referred to as the fastest growing sport in the world, Roller Derby brings together conjunctions of contact and conflict, and the contact of hospitality and community that global movement brings. This presentation takes my own embedded and physical experience of Victorian (Australian) Roller Derby in the Victorian Roller Derby League (VRDL), and examines it in this light.

Roller Derby’s most recent incarnation has subcultural leanings towards and roots in rockabilly, punk and skate culture. Its main support base draws from these groups – be they skaters, referees, trainers or audiences and advocates. It takes a D.I.Y. aesthetic from the community that is the only force to keep it in motion – from the use of open access online resources between leagues; the adaptation of the traditional banked track to the flat track (which has more appeal to the under-resourced); the acknowledged variances of rules across leagues and place.

Starting at the ‘mythology’ surrounding its revivification, through its portrayal in the documentary Hell on Wheels (2007) and then to encounter with one of the rollergirls from the original Austin, Texas league, Roller Derby is examined for the ways in which the tensions between contact and conflict have shaped the formation of its community.

The conjunctions of contact, conflict and community and hospitality in Roller Derby come together best perhaps in established expectations of care and welcome for any rollergirl in a ‘strange’ city with an established league - from a bed for a night, to friends and derby ‘wives’ for a lifetime, or trainers and rivals. The women who play roller derby know bodily how contact and conflict sit in tension – better to ‘block’ a Derby friend than an enemy.

trite

be still my beating heart

oh the depths to which we sink
for trite
crap.