the groundhog day project

I'm reminded of a line I said way back on Day 69 - i don't even have to floss --back in the Groundhog Day phase of this blog-- He isn't just an everyman because he represents each of us. He's an everyman because he represents all of us. But, I get ahead of myself by getting behind myself. What is absent from a great deal of Stories We Tell is Sarah Polley herself. She is present in the majority of scenes in the film (only absent from the past footage that is genuine) but here story is not a part of Diane's story. Now, Acts Two and Three of the this documentary turn this into a story that is very much about Sarah instead, about her parentage and what that means for the bigger story of Diane. It was the weekend of Sarah's 11th birthday that her mother died. Eleven years old, her mother dying from cancer--there is no way that Sarah cannot remember it. It is acknowledged within the film that Sarah did not know that her mother was dying when her older siblin...

Hedwig. From the Germanic name Hadewig, derived from the Germanic elements hadu "battle, combat" and wig "war". Also, the name of, apparently, two different saints. Plus, on a very simplistic level, there's the pun on head wig . Hedwig is a character in conflict. With Tommy Gnosis. With Yitzhak. With the Angry Inch (the band). With her angry inch. With herself. She has little emotion but anger through most of the present storyline. While Yitzhak listens to Rent and wears a Rent t-shirt and auditions for (and gets offered a part in ) a traveling production of Rent ... Yitzhak is a romantic. He wants more than cold intercourse. He wants love. Or at least some sort of acceptance. On the other hand, Hedwig is stuck. She claims she's looking for her "other half" but she's just stalking Tommy. She cannot see what she has. She is too damaged. And, like another Tommy , she is a bit deaf and blind. Speaking of Tommy (which came up last week ...

(650) I was going to make a point today about performativity and performance... but then I thought maybe I'd already made it. Some scribbled notes on my copy of Brickell's (2005) "Masculinities, Performativity, and Subversion" that I wanted to share, and a quick Google search and I found the blog entry-- Day 557 - i think i hear a footstep --in which I typed up my scribbles word-for-word... I suppose you can go read that entry (which, ostensibly, was about Singin' in the Rain , by the way) but the basic gist was that all performance is performativity. That is, everything we do, even our subversions, our revolutions, are defined and con fined by what the world tells us we can get away with. I just recently started reading José Esteban Muñoz' (1999) book, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics . The gist I'm getting so far to his idea of disidentification is effectively finding your identity in the differences, the opposite ...