Just in case you wondered where my Twilight allegiances lay

There are few writers that are as intellectually intimidating and yet at the same time utterly sublime as Jorge Luis Borges's. I am a fairly late comer to his works, but I am a fan. The NYTime's ran an essay over the weekend that adequately describes Borges's genius.

Time, eternity, infinity and dreams--- these are the only subjects commensurate to the passions of this quiet man who lived in Buenos Aires and in  Geneva, though mostly in the vast nutshell of his own mind.  -- NYTimes

If you're going to delve in to Borges start with his short story "The Library of Babel,"  which is in the collection of his short works entitled Ficciones. Next move to "The Garden of the Forking Path."

Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

June 28, 2010

Throne of Blood (1957)

Akira Kurosawa

"That was the last time she was allowed back at the Benningan's. From then on, she started drinking at the T.G.I. Friday's." -- Joshua Ferris, The Unnamed (2010)

Cat on a Hot Tin roof (1958)

Richard Brooks

Atonement (2007)

Joe Wright

"One of the biggest--and I would guess most common--mistakes parents make is to transfer their own childhood shit onto their kids. Whatever their joys and agonies were growing up, they assume will be exactly the same for their children, and they let it guide their parenting"

--Sarah Silverman, The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee

Kicking and Screaming (1995)

Noah Baumbach

"You were never willing to think of my habits as charming"

"I couldn't tolerate magicians who did things that someone who actually had magical powers would never do. "

--Jonathan Safran Foer, "Here We Aren't, So Quickly, " The New Yorker June 14 & 21 2010, Pg 72

Sometimes on cold, rainy days in NYC I miss being home in SC, but then the Daily Show reminds me of what I am missing.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/311737/mon-june-07-2010-john-c--reilly

Watch the first segment.

Well, that didn't go as well as I'd have liked, but I still enjoyed it. If you didn't read my previous post, I spent June 2nd writing a joke every half hour, then I would post it to twitter and facebook. I've been toying with the idea of trying stand-up. I don't want to appear like I am haphazardly delving into stand-up because those few that are really good at it spend a lot of time perfecting a set. Unfortunately there are too many people who think they can just go up to a microphone and be funny.

I've been writing 10-ish jokes a day for a good two or three weeks. Out of those jokes I have about two that I would actually perform, though last friday though I read the joke:

"How many performance artists does it take to change a light bulb?"

"I don't know I left after four hours."

I started riffing on it, and found a pretty easy vein to mine. I came up with about twenty that afternoon, and spent some time over the weekend refining them, and decided I needed something to do with them. . . hence my little experiment yesterday.

Things I've learned
1) Better to slowly release new material and test the waters first.
2) People are on FB way too much. Don't you have jobs?
3) People get upset when you interrupt Farmville updates
4) You can post what you are about to do, but people won't read it
5) You can post again what you are doing, and people still won't read it
6) You need to stop trying to explain it to everyone--people just aren't going to get it
7) Even if you test a new feature like scheduling tweets, things happen. Tweetdeck has server issues and actually had to upgrade servers yesterday--good timing on my part.
8) What is funny to you might not be funny to everyone.

Some lessons learned, and I had a really good time. I'll post all 48 jokes I wrote tomorrow (In one batch. . . I won't make a blog post every half and hour).

Both equally well known and well ignored, Maraina Abramović's performance art installation closed May 31st after three months of eye starring boredom. Abramovic sat for over 700 hours starring into the eyes of anyone willing to do the same for her exhibition entitled "The Artist is Present" at MoMA.

Say what you will about her or her art form, but there is a palpable lack of performance art in the world today. Therefore I will humbly try to fill the immediate void and try to ween us off marathon performance. I will be conducting my own version of a social-media-performance-art for a 24 hours on June 2nd. My venue will be twitter and facebook--the new piazza's of the digital world. You can follow me at @topherjaynes, but I have linked twitter and facebook so if you're friends on one you should be fine.

The bit: for 24 hours I will be be posting/tweeting every half hour one "how many performance artists does it take to change a light bulb" that I have written , starting at midnight tonight.