“To best describe something, think of a person you love and to whom you want to tell it.”— Otto Rank on the Art of Description
Johnson O’Connor English Vocabulary Builder (1939)
Unknown to 66 Percent: Canting
adj. Affectedly pious, hypocritical, whining, addicted to the use of a singing or whining manner of insincere moral talk.
American Zen Bones: Maezumi Roshi Stories (1999)
37. Where You Get It
After Susan Suzan Cotsonas told Maezumi of a recent experience of a popular spiritual/psychological program,
his reply was: “I don’t care where you get it, as long as you get it.”
An Image that Moves Me
Artist You Should Know: Stan Douglas
Since the late 1980s, Stan Douglas has created films, photographs, and installations that reexamine particular locations or past events. His works often take their points of departure in local settings, from which broader issues can be identified. Making frequent use of new as well as outdated technologies, Douglas appropriates existing Hollywood genres (including murder mysteries and the Western) and borrows from classic literary works (notably, Samuel Beckett, Herman Melville, and Franz Kafka) to create ready-made contextual frameworks for his complex, thoroughly researched projects.
TELEVISION SPOTS (1987/88) In 1989, his first series of short works for television, the twelve Television Spots, were broadcast in Saskatoon and Ottawa amid regular programming, as if they were commercials. Unidentified, the short scenes depicting open-ended, banal activities baffled viewers.
MONODRAMAS (1991) Douglas's "Monodramas," ten 30- to 60-second videos from 1991, conceived as interventions into commercial television, interrupted the usual flow of advertising and entertainment when broadcast nightly in British Columbia for three weeks in 1992. These micronarratives mimic television's editing techniques, but as kernels of a story they refuse to cohere. They are tales of dysfunction and dislocation, misanthropy and misunderstanding. When the videos were aired unannounced during commercial breaks, viewers called the station to inquire about what was being sold, their responses evincing how the media can refocus attention from content to consumption. -- Nancy Spector
