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Dis-Assembly Lines: gestures, situations, and surveillances | Alex Pittman
Gestures, situations, gags
Here is a familiar scene: it is the fall of 1952 and Lucy Ricardo and her neighbor Ethel Mertz are at work on the assembly line of a chocolate factory.1 Having proved incompetent to other tasks in the factory's production cycle, the women now occupy one of its final positions, where a humorless forewoman has assigned them to wrap each chocolate that comes down the assembly line, or be fired. This is not exactly an ordinary situation for the pair, who generally carry out the plots of the domestic situation comedy, I Love Lucy, inside the Ricardos' apartment, not in the matching uniforms of workers. Nonetheless, the two appear to have landed in a task with which they can also fall into sync. With fluid motions, Lucy and Ethel scoop up with one hand and exchange to the other the chocolates, twist the wrapping paper around them once, and place them back on the conveyor belt. So easy do they find their new task that Ethel even adds a small, self-satisfied flourish to her movement as she puts down her second or third wrapped chocolate. As the pace of the assembly line picks up, however, things – namely, their gestures – fall apart. Where the initial scoop and terminal placement of the chocolates once traveled along their bodies in an unbroken motion, their movements now begin to fracture as they attempt to hoard the candies or to mash them in wrapping paper before they disappear through the opposite wall. When the assembly line halts to announce the approach of the forewoman, their movements become even more discomposed: they sling the chocolates through the collars of their uniforms; they spit them into their hats; finally, they stuff the rest in their mouths.
And here is another scene, perhaps less familiar: it is any hour between 11 April 1980 and 11 April 1981, and the artist Tehching Hsieh punches a time clock that he has mounted on one wall of his New York City studio. Upon completing the punch, he turns to face a 16 mm camera mounted against the opposite wall, steps to the side of the clock, and documents his attendance with one film still, which captures in a single frame both the hour on the clock and his uniformed body. Known as “Time Clock Piece,” but formally titled One Year Performance 1980-1981, this is a performance of intense temporal and spatial constraint, one shorn almost entirely of a status and scale that one could call an event. Rather, among the many legal and formal documents that Hsieh accumulated as the traces and products of his durational performance, each punch registers as only a slight perturbation or tremor. This perhaps explains why, of the 14 days throughout the year that he opened his studio to the public to view his work, hardly anyone attended.2 In what is the performance's most accessible single document, a six-minute time-lapse film that is as breathless as it is convulsive, these tremors register bodily. Hsieh, despite his performance of attendant stillness and despite the forfeiture of his gestures to the camera's shutter, appears on screen as a twitching surface of compressed time: or, as the spectacle of a body that exhibits what, after Giorgio Agamben, we might describe as “an amazing proliferation of tics, spasmodic jerks, and mannerisms – a proliferation that cannot be defined any way other than as a generalized catastrophe of the sphere of gestures.”3
While Lucille Ball's and Tehching Hsieh's gestural acts hold obvious differences in their historical situation and in the forms of their production, distribution, and consumption, each is a peculiar kind of assembly-line performance that enmeshes the spaces of artistic production, labor activity, and home life. The bodily discompositions and gestural dis-assemblies that both works stage within this enmeshment present several challenges to how we understand the labor process as a site of subjectification. That these performances took place in what Marxist cultural criticism describes as distinct phases of capitalism, one known as Fordism and the other post-Fordism, each of which implies different relations of work to life, offers an opportunity to consider these phases as a movement across bodies, rather than as a map of subject positions as economically determined quantities. Both performances stage the collapse of the spheres of work and home through artistic production, as well as the discomposition of the types of subjects that are supposed to secure the distinction between these spheres. This is not to say that these performances work in identical ways. How they diverge, though, might come into a different focus if we first consider the ways these performances converge, less through representational similarity than through their shared disorganization of bodies and spheres through gestural and rhythmic performances of timing. Although it would be a mistake to take either performance as a realist document of the assembly line, both provide, through the impropriety of their gestural performances, alternative inhabitations of work as a disciplinary scene of inclusion in twentieth-century U.S. culture. These performances and visual media not only expose but improperly inhabit the apparatuses of surveillance that are supposed to manage their labor. Much of the work of this article lies, then, in the effort to articulate what else happens within these performances of gestural discomposition, especially given that each produces less an evasion of the space of disciplinary surveillance than proliferations of time that are only partially absorbed by the imperative to production.
Throughout, several tropes organize my analysis of the convergence of these labored gestural performances, even when these tropes are the implicit rather than the explicit idiom of the sections that follow. Two of them, the situation and the gag, I have embedded within my descriptions of Lucille Ball's and Tehching Hsieh's performances, but I want to briefly outline how these terms inform my movement between these sites. Critical to my approach is Lauren Berlant's recent work on the attachments that bind subjects to objects and scenes that at some point promised but have since come to block the conditions that might allow them to flourish. Such attachments, she argues, demand other forms of attendance to the present's slow grind under late capitalism than those provided by theories of the event.4 To describe endurance in the attenuated scenes of late-capitalist ordinary life, she describes the emergence of the genre of the situation, a genre organized in part through a sense of continuity that is also marked by perturbations and tremors that might (or might not) turn into events of lasting interest. The domestic situation comedy, in these terms, is a genre that makes the possibility of an event an open question, which is to say, a source of both anxiety (since an event is what threatens to rupture the forms of life that the sitcom characters live as repetition) and hilarity (since an event with a reorganizational force, impact, and scale is what never quite arrives in the sitcom, which tends to feature the smaller dramas of character adjustment).5
As a genre, the domestic sitcom is peculiarly suited to the aesthetics of precarious situations precisely because it repeatedly invites and withholds an event that might collapse the relational forms it sustains from week to week and season to season. The second trope, the gag, is an operation that blocks speech, whether in the form of chocolates stuffed into a mouth or a breathless and silent film reel. But the gag is also a performance of something that cannot find articulation in language. In comedy the sight gag is the emergence of what has been evaded or withheld in speech so that a situation might continue, even though, like the gag that Lucy and Ethel perform to hide the unwrapped candies, this evasion usually fails or produces effects that rebound on its producers. What is also notable about the gag is its status as a quietly insistent performance within the structure of an enduring situation. In his essay on gesture, Giorgio Agamben calls the gag a speech defect in philosophical thought: or, a dumbstruck silence in the face of what does not yet have the status of an event.6 What the gagged performance gestures toward in its non-idiomatic, as well as imposed and imposing, disturbance of situations, is one subject of this essay.
The gag therefore functions as a highly ambivalent trope, since it can as quietly affirm as it can comically perturb the scenes where it emerges. As such it helps conceptualize how Ball's and Hsieh's falls into silence perform something critical at the same time that they leave something else unsaid. Similarly, while the situation, as a genre and a temporal bracket, focuses attention on the ways tremors, perturbations, and disturbances matter, it is also a form contoured by the endurance and the repetition of norms. As well as marking points of conceptual and performed overlap between Ball and Hsieh, these tropes help describe the continuities, repetitions, serializations, and silences that are internal to each. However, what is also common to these performances is the spectacle of gestural discomposition. What are these gestures that Ball and Hsieh perform from their situations, from within their situated-ness, along materially and historically distinct assembly lines? What, in turn, do they dis-assemble as they fracture, shudder, discompose, disjoint, and contract?
Excursus: out-of-joint gestures
Near the end of his incomplete essay, “Americanism and Fordism,” Antonio Gramsci writes that, although industrialists might wish otherwise, the mechanization of the assembly-line worker's gestures provides not subordination but rather the conditions for “complete freedom” within an increasingly accelerated workplace.7 Gramsci then traces what he elsewhere calls a “new type of man demanded by [Fordist] rationalization” in the genealogy of workers tasked with the reproduction of texts (297). What links the scribe, the stenographer, the typist, and the compositor is an ability to isolate words and phrases into non-signifying textual blocks. In other words, these workers arrest and discompose flows of linguistic meaning into units they can release and recompose into new signifying forms. For Gramsci, the measure of this worker's skill is his capacity to embody abstraction at a nervous, muscular, and gestural level. He claims: “The only thing that is completely mechanicised [sic] is the physical gesture; the memory of the trade, reduced to simple gestures repeated at an intense rhythm, ‘nestles’ in the muscular and nervous centers and leaves the brain free and unencumbered for other occupations” (309). Because the Taylorist acceleration of this process requires a memory lapse (specifically, of the ability and desire to read) in order for the machine and the labor it paces to “nestle” comfortably into its corporeal home, Gramsci believes the successful mechanization of gesture leaves an empty mental space for a radical self- and class-consciousness to fill.
Let us note some salient points of Gramsci's theory of mechanized gestures. First, any gesture that testifies to a form of memory outside of labor is irrelevant to Gramsci. Indeed, on one level his theory disturbs humanist Marxism's claim that the most exploitative effect of the assembly line is its estrangement of a “human content” that precedes labor (308). Rather, gesture's mechanization produces a new type of body, one immanent to the labor process's organizations of pacing and timing, with capacities that Fordism can only attempt to manage and direct. That Gramsci does not gesture in kind to critical forms of life outside of labor is problematic, for he appears to delight in the possibility that Fordism will dismantle and reassemble all gestural differences in the same way. Further, his argument naturalizes one capacity as a specifically gendered difference: that is, a capacity for embodied abstraction only recognizable in the work of this “new man” that is also his potential revolutionary subject. Nonetheless, it is worth considering his suggestion that gesture might not communicate anything at all but that it might instead performatively and internally divide the time of the labor process so as to hide the worker in the plain sight of management. Such a theory of gesture should be of interest to performance scholars: a theory of performative division as opposed to expression, it presents gesture as a technique that does something quite different than transmit embodied forms of knowledge; and yet, given the specificity of both the event and the subject of gesture, Gramsci's theory is not entirely legible as an early deconstructive approach.8 When considered through Ball's and Hsieh's performances, however, a different set of questions emerges. Namely, if the machine fails to “nestle” or domesticate itself inside its new home in the laboring body's rhythms, do gesture's performative divisions of space and time similarly fail? Or, could the laboring body's dis-alignment with and by the temporal imperatives of the assembly line indicate, instead, a gestural performance that travels through without becoming a property of a virtuosic subject like the “new type of man” where Gramsci invests his hopes? I will attend to these questions through what I will call the performance of out-of-joint gestures.
Out-of-joint gestures mark a curiously manic and erratic, as opposed to smooth and well-executed, quality of performance relative to the temporal and disciplinary demands of the assembly line. These gestures, in short, fall out of sync and, in so doing, often take the form of a gag: as something, that is, that blocks speech, but also as a performance of something just on the edge of articulation. They are tactical performances that carve out fleeting temporalities of waste, ones opposed to an accelerated present organized toward production and surplus extraction. While I draw on Gramsci's analysis, I do not go nearly as far as him to claim that these gestures inaugurate a revolutionary consciousness. Especially in the case of I Love Lucy, out-of-joint gestures emerge in a situation where subjects scramble back toward domestic and gender normativity through that form of memory lapse that is one of the show's refrains: “We'd like to forget the whole thing.” Nonetheless, what interests me about such gestures are the ways they function (or, more accurately, malfunction) to buy time, to make time, and to waste time inside of situations where there never seems to be enough time.
I also call these gestures “out-of-joint” to focus on their iterability, or their performative repetition across works situated in slightly different historical moments and in relation to slightly different antagonisms. In other words, out-of-joint gestures are performances of bad timing, not only as they “disjoint” the subjects that perform them, but as they “disjoint” the unity of historical time, as well. In this sense I take the way these gestures break up and redistribute the flow of their own present as the justification for a historical and analytical twitch of my own, one that aligns a performance broadcast over a single night in 1952 with another that lasted from 1980–1. What I hope to achieve by tracking the repetition of this out-of-joint gesture through my own twitch is a different way to consider the differences between Fordism to post-Fordism. Rather than seek out how the conditions that enmesh work and life augur a seemingly endless number of vanguard subjects, I consider this transition as it rattles across the gestural capacities of bodies without, in the process, fixing an ideal subject. If, on the one hand, the performance of out-of-joint gestures divides the present time of its emergence, then, on the other, it brings its historically distinct iterations into proximity. In this sense, this chapter builds a kind critical habitus through these gestural performances, one that attunes analysis to migrations across generic and historical forms (such as domestic situation comedies and durational performances) and the ways they frame and enclose political antagonisms. Because out-of-joint gestures describe two temporal movements – shudder and repetition, division and continuity – my analyses attempt to integrate what the scenes of their performance disclose and what their jarring stillnesses occlude.
Within and without the home
Because Gramsci pins his hopes on the capacities of a “new type of man” while remaining ambivalent about the desires of women to Fordist regulations of appetite, I wonder what he would have thought of “Job Switching,” an episode of the television show I Love Lucy that premiered on 15 September 1952, and inaugurated the sitcom's four-season long position as the most watched show on network television. Weekly from 1951–7, I Love Lucy showcased the comically frustrated persistence of Lucy Ricardo, the homemaker who wants to break into the world of “showbiz” occupied by her husband, Ricky Ricardo, and formerly occupied by their landlords, Ethel and Fred Mertz. The outline Jess Oppenheimer, the sitcom's head writer and producer, registered with the Screen Actor's Guild places the show's conflicts within competing visions for the good life: Lucy's desire for the glamor of nightlife performance regularly runs counter to Ricky's desire to be an “ordinary citizen, keeping regular hours, and living a normal life.”9 However, the show's domestic situation was reproduced weekly not only by Lucy's frustrated efforts to perform outside of the home, but by her expertly performed incompetence at occupational tasks located within it, as well. As Lori Landay notes, this narrative incompetence of Lucy, the character, to find herself at home in the social spheres of either artistic production or domestic reproduction effectively secured the star image of Lucille Ball, the virtuoso of physical comedy.10 Such a comic contradiction, however, has not provided much clarity for the program's feminist analysts, since this tension between character and actor tends to divide scholars over the possibility of recuperating either for a politicized approach to mass culture.11
In other words, what divides feminist analysts is how to measure the effectivity of the circuit, which travels from the possibility and performance of subverted conventions to their eventual affirmation within narrative, which the show establishes as its genre. But because the show makes subversion itself a genre convention, one subject to repetition and serialization, debates over its possible or impossible feminist recuperation perhaps miss how it stages gender as a field of political antagonism. For this reason, I sidestep the question of recuperation to track an iterable performance that shudders its way through one of I Love Lucy's (if not television's) most iconic gags: the one in which, while at work on an accelerating assembly line, Lucy's and Ethel's well-ordered gestures come apart in the effort to keep these “men's” jobs in which they are apparently so precarious. And indeed, this scene isa gag, one that stops up speech as much as it performs something that cannot quite find articulation within language. As a performance of bad timing, its comic value derives from several competing temporalities, most notably that friction between the women's capacity to work and the speed of that capacity's extraction, but with the result of neither production nor accumulation but a disjointed gestural performance. Their bad timing at work – or, their bad inhabitation of the workplace's temporality – also derives comic value as it slides below the surveillance of the forewoman, that figure whose own improper inhabitation of gender threatens to put Lucy and Ethel back in theirs. While the scene on the assembly line is the most clear index and performance of these temporalities, the episode as a whole begins to appear as an immense accumulation of badly timed activities.
An attunement to such temporalities helps re-pose the central antagonism of “Job Switching,” which, as Fred Mertz puts it, is one between “two kinds of people: earners and spenders; or, as they are more popularly known, husbands and wives.” However, what Fred names as a gendered antagonism manifests, at the levels of both performance and plot, as a temporal difference between production (posited as value creation through the production of consumer commodities) and consumption (posited as the domestic management of these commodities through reproductive work). At an immediate level, Fred's use of gender to interpret differences between production and reproduction appears to participate in this period's ideological retrenchment of divisions of labor. Elaine Tyler May has called this period the “homeward bound” years, in which the domestic became a privileged site for the reconfiguration of home-spaces and work-spaces through inter-articulations of race and gender: that is, in the material and geographical redistributions of an expanding postwar middle class to racially segregated suburbs, and in the ideological demand that the middle-class woman serve as manager of the hearth.12 However, as Landay notes, in 1952, the year “Job Switching” aired, more women constituted the workforce than at the height of the war. She writes: “One of the ironies of the postwar era is that the ideology of separate spheres and polarized gender roles was strongest at a time of increasing permeability of the boundaries of those spheres and roles” (35). But the show plays these retrenchments for laughs: the humor of this “battle of the sexes” plot – which appears at least as serious as it is anachronistic – resides in how the show makes gender malfunction in its capacity to manage this temporal difference in postwar U.S. culture. What “Job Switching” adds to May's and Landay's accounts of postwar spatial divisions is the way gender is marshaled to secure the difference between these spheres as a difference of timing.
Across these divisions of postwar domestic space, the episode sends up its gendered operations through the oscillation of characters and objects between what it posits as a temporal difference between production and consumption. This dynamic bears itself out in at least three comedies of bad timing other than the scene along the assembly line. It is, after all, the return of Lucy's bounced check to the home that begins the episode's conflict. Likewise, domestic goods become increasingly zany in the situations of the men, who are expelled from the home by the unmanageable, queer vitality of the commodities.13 Finally, in the gag that closes the show, the women, nauseous from their over-consumption of chocolates, collapse after they each receive a five-pound box of them from their apologetic husbands. It is through the manic oscillation of bodies and objects between different spheres and moments of the economy, to the point that these spheres and moments begin to lose their distinction, that “Job Switching” stages its discomposition of gender as a reliable manager of their separation. In Sianne Ngai's terms, these dynamics mark the episode's aesthetic of zaniness, or its physicalized anxiety that gender regimes prove unable to secure a distinction between work (as production) and life (as reproduction).14
What is also notable about I Love Lucy is that, as one of the most technologically advanced sitcoms of its day, the show's producers had an unprecedented opportunity to construct its conflicts visually and spatially as well as narratively.15 One of the best examples of the non-idiomatic techniques the producers use to code the episode's antagonisms can be seen at the episode's start. When Ricky and Lucy's argument takes on a gendered character at the entrance of Fred and Ethel, the narrative division of spheres registers as a visible division of framed space. The show uses a range of framing and visual techniques to produce tensions within, not only between, divisions of labor. Notable within these divisions is the irony that the “men's work” Lucy and Ethel eventually find is occupied by women whose performances and spatial occupations already tilt toward a bit of gender trouble. The show constructs this both visually and rhythmically through a formal repetition of the shot composition of Lucy and Ricky's breakfast conversation, where Lucy “feminizes” Ricky through an aseptic emotional performance of “masculine” unavailability before she leaves for the employment office (Figure 1.1). In the chocolate factory, however, Lucy ends up in the structural position of Ricky in relation to what is now her female colleague's queering non-reciprocity (Figure 1.2). I call the emotional impassivity of Lucy's colleague “queering” here because, if the show tethers types of emotional performance to the gendered division of social spheres, as it does at the breakfast table, then the clarity of these spheres and roles blur in momentary but quite powerful ways through this peripheral, silently imposing character.16
Fig 1. Emotional impassivity at home and at work. Stills captured by the author from I Love Lucy – The Complete Second Season (1951). DVD. Episode directed by William Asher, 1952. Los Angeles, CA: Paramount, 2004.
When considered within the coordinates of what Eva Illouz calls emotional capitalism, the episode's cross-gender performances of emotional impassivity within divisions of labor take on a peculiar significance. Emotional capitalism, or the twentieth-century enmeshment of economic rationality and emotional coordination, she argues, was rendered explicit within a series of studies conducted by the psychologist Elton Mayo at the height of Fordist rationalization in the 1920s. These studies, known as the Hawthorne experiments, were designed to measure and refine labor productivity through the emotional and relational dimensions of work. What Illouz notes, however, is that the methods deployed by his team point to a moment in which emotional correspondence and intimacy figured centrally within the management of waged work. These methods and their results did not lack gendered implications either: with data drawn exclusively from women who were encouraged by the researchers to establish continuities between their experience in the workplace with that in the home, these results not only blurred the gendered divisions of productive and reproductive labor but were also applied as a general measure for labor productivity in the early twentieth century.17 Such a study, she argues, requires a revision of the history affective labor is marshaled to tell, which tends to proceed from the exclusion, until sometime in the late twentieth century, of affective from productive labor and from a clean division between gendered experiences of capitalist rationality.18 Rather, the modulation of productivity through the measurement of emotion augurs not only an entangled history of affective and waged labor, but “homo sentimentalis,” an affective-economic figure whose emotional styles of communication and intimacy, forged from the techniques of Fordist rationalization, serves as the relay between home and work. To return, then, to the rhythm of impassive, non-communicative emotional performance, both within and without the home, this might be why these performances appear through and as a kind of drag – that is, a cross-gender performance that also does not feel particularly good. Such figurations of drag as both emotional and sartorial style suggest the presence of ambivalent kernels embedded and performed within the episode's negotiated attachments to the normativities of work and gender.19
Negotiated attachments, indeed. As tempting as it is to suggest that these ambivalent kernels are the very stuff of I Love Lucy's subversions, it strikes me that it is through them that the episode recomposes normativity, as well. Consider the forewoman, that figure who, in the episode's distorted emotional economies and gendered divisions of work, also inhabits gender improperly, but only insofar as she embodies the mobile surveillance apparatus that threatens to return Lucy and Ethel to their homes. The assemblage of performed dynamics, visual techniques, emotional blockages, and ambivalently gendered figures ultimately raises the question, what is it that is “switched” over the duration of this episode? While “Job Switching” accumulates scenes of badly timed activity in general, the scene on the assembly line showcases its most frantic effort to make more time out of a situation in which there is so little. This is where out-of-joint gestures emerge to carve out of the assembly line's relentless forward motion a brief space and time of abeyance. What is funny here is not only the clash of corporeal and mechanical speeds, but that these gestures of consumption and non-productive hoarding slip below the forewoman's surveillance, and that they do so only to rebound when subterfuge produces more demand. Unlike Gramsci's “new type of man,” however, Lucy and Ethel perform compensatory moves along the assembly line in what the show regularly suggests are the only ones they know: that is, how to consume. In this respect, although the out-of-joint gesture divides the labor process from within, making a little extra time for its workers below the managerial gaze, it strikes me as a mistake to suppose a radical consciousness attends it. Rather, these gestures that re-place Lucy and Ethel in roles defined principally by their management of commodity consumption also presage their move back into the domestic sphere, a sphere that at the episode's end becomes further reified as a site of feminine reproduction when all the characters reach consensus on their gendered family roles. The memory lapse that Gramsci hopes might make way for the worker to realize a new consciousness surfaces here as a form of forgetfulness that is quite pernicious in its yield to the ideological and the generic status quo. As Ricky says when the nauseated Lucy and Ethel return: “We'd like to forget the whole thing. Let's go back to the way things were: we'll make the money and you'll spend it.” This amnesiac resolution of “the way things were” deploys convention as a sort of refrain in order to secure within genre the political antagonisms it everywhere evidences and that threaten to rupture its form. “Job Switching,” in this respect, switches little, but projects a kind of screen-memory, however fragile, of recomposed subjects and spheres.
Though comical, this closure of the generic circuit can be seen more broadly as a negotiated attachment, rather than a cheerful capitulation, to the normative demands of citizenship. I will return to how this quietly determines I Love Lucy's situation shortly, but it can be tested through Tehching Hsieh's durational work, “Time Clock Piece.” The second of a series of one (and in another case, 13) year performances, “Time Clock Piece” followed closely on his first performance of spatial and temporal constraint in the United States. This prior performance, known as “Cage Piece,” kept Hsieh confined in a cell inside his downtown New York City studio, with the additional gag-rule that he could not speak, write, read, or otherwise interact with the outside world. Where “Cage Piece” restricted his spatial environment, “Time Clock Piece” regulated his measurement and documentation of temporal experience, especially as such experience appears inevitably, if irregularly in the period of late capitalism, managed through the wage. The documentary demands of “Time Clock Piece” did create intensive spatial constraints, however, since his hourly punch of the clock required proximity to his studio, which became a work, home, and art space for the entire year. In general, these and Hsieh's other performances stand as experiments in the collapse of life and art, but experiments organized less in terms of a horizon of unalienated life than in the cultivation of alternative inhabitations of formalism's restrictions.
Given their taxations (such as sleep deprivation, bodily confinement, and unsheltered life, to name a few), it is unsurprising that vulnerability has emerged as one conceptual framework for these commitments to restriction.20 Not only a conceptual frame, however, vulnerability functions politically for his commentators as a liberal recognition of Hsieh's precariousness during the years of the One Year Performances, when he lived as an undocumented (art) worker in the U.S. While I do not wholly contest this recognition of vulnerability in both his art and his situation, it does carry a potentially insidious effect, as well as one that says little about how his work troubles vulnerability as a framework. As Angela Mitropoulos argues, vulnerability, as an attribution of political indecision to the migrant, implicitly subjectivizes the non-migrant within the structure of the sovereign decision – that is, as the one proper to the state, the one with the power to decide – and this despite the sense that these distributions of political sovereignty are what migrations, such as Hsieh's, throw into disarray.21 Put another way, Hsieh's intensive self-documentation within the situation of his undocumented status perturbs the law's apparatuses of recognition and capture, especially as these performances transact with (rather than represent) his formal citizenship status.22 Similarly, the delimitation of properly political spheres and subjects blocks any theorization of the enmeshment of artistic production, labor activity, and home life within onesphere. Such an enmeshment, to the degree that, in “Time Clock Piece,” no practical distinction between economic, aesthetic, or biological (re)production can be drawn anywhere, renders it, according to a certain literature, an exemplary post-Fordist performance.23 If, however, the performance's primary document, the time-lapse film that renders Hsieh's convulsive attendance to the clock and the camera, repeats Lucy and Ethel's gestural collapses within these same spheres, but in Fordism, then what might be gained by a consideration of a serialized, assembly-line performance like Hsieh's as a sort of domestic situation comedy? Those who have seen the severely minimalist film that documents “Time Clock Piece” will likely find this question perverse. As my experience during lectures, classes, and presentations attests, however, this piece does tend to elicit nervous laughter from its viewers. To switch its genre, then, might provide both a way to account for some aspect of this strange effect and a way to shift the expectations seemingly demanded by the performance's genre and by the performer's “status” within the state.
One way to consider the enmeshment of economic, artistic, and domestic spaces in “Time Clock Piece,” despite the lack of explicit visual cues within its documentation, is through David Harvey's claim that the body increasingly becomes a central mechanism, measure, and mode of accumulation in the situation of late capitalism.24 To elaborate this point, Harvey traces the circulation of variable capital, or the wage as the lever of the sale and purchase of labor power qua capacity. Harvey's interest here is on how to conceptualize the circuit of variable capital as it connects, at a structural level, forms of corporeal flourishing with debilitation in globalized divisions of labor. But the body as an accumulation strategy, when thought as a figuration of capacity in late capitalism, also conceptually bridges strands of Marxist cultural theory often set in opposition. For variable capital, which concerns the measure of labor power's potential or capacity, takes on a resonance with virtuosity, Paolo Virno's concept that refers not to good, impressive, or even pleasurable performance, but to the capacity to perform as such.25 “Time Clock Piece,” when figured between these authors, formalizes the accumulation strategies that reshape and erode the body under late capitalism, but it does so as a conversion of variable capital's circuit into the spectacle of out-of-joint gestures. This circuit's most direct reference is in his use of the time clock, the wage's measure, but in such a way that splits this device from its disciplinary function. What plays across the scene is instead the virtuosic performance of Hsieh's attendant body, a body that produces nothing but its capacity to attend, measured not by the accumulation of variable capital but by the accumulation of hair (Figure 2).
Fig 2. Still captured by the author from Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance: Art Documents, 1978–1999. DVD-ROM. 2000.
Unlike I Love Lucy's scene, another aspect of Hsieh's situation is in the camera's function as an apparatus of surveillance and capture. His alignment of a photographic, a cinematic, and a surveillance gaze has several notable differences from the kind of mobile, embodied surveillance of the forewoman that Lucy and Ethel slip below, but several important resonances as well. Most notably, the collapse of a mobile surveillance apparatus into a mounted photographic/filmic gaze of the 16mm camera makes impossible a performance of bad timing like Lucy and Ethel's: the Taylorist division, fragmentation, and measurement of time, which is the very material stuff of “Time Clock Piece,” requires of Hsieh a performance of perfect timing, as the documents his work leaves behind also function to record his mistakes.26 But as persistently as the performance measures time, it is equally a performance that wastes time: or, a gag that slips just under the inscriptive regulations he otherwise exposes.27 While his tactics of evasion differ, Hsieh's wastage of time within the spectacle of out-of-joint gestures should be seen in a sort of rhythmic continuity with Lucy and Ethel's evasions. Both are aesthetic projects that expose, in part, the surveillance apparatuses that would manage them, but in their improper temporal inhabitations of these apparatuses, each also suggests some politics of means – which is to say, of gestures – in opposition to ends-based politics.28 Especially in the case of the film that recomposes the measurements of “Time Clock Piece,” Hsieh's inhabitation of the surveillance gaze, rather than simply an exposure of it as harm, strikes me as a quite distinctive distribution of the sensible. For the film's imposing silence, which I take as one source of the nervous laughter it can elicit, functions as a gag of a rather radical sort: one that is not simply a representation of speechlessness but a refusal and an impasse of speech; a rejection of the incitement to speak in a form of recognition, agency, and subjectivity conferred by the state; as well as the affirmation of a self-documentation that slips below the proper scene of U.S. citizenship.
On immanent critique
Consider, then, what does not make it to the screen in “Job Switching,” for both the conflict of the episode and its dynamic discompositions and recompositions of its social spheres are unimaginable in the terms laid out in the sitcom's original proposal, which featured Lucille Ball not as an incompetent homemaker but as the movie-star wife of a Cuban bandleader. Despite the fact that this would have more closely aligned Lucy's and Ricky's characters with the off-screen life of the Ball–Arnaz marriage (which was the explicit inspiration and frequent source material for the show), both CBS executives and potential sponsors claimed such a show would stretch the boundaries of “reality” too far for television.29 While it is impossible to say how the show's internal conflicts would look if this original proposal had made it to the air, it does strike me as reasonable to speculate that the specificity of this episode's gendered conflict depends on the management of inter-racial and inter-ethnic intimacy off of it as well. Ball's and Arnaz's circumnavigations of intimacy begin to look like negotiations with the normative demands of citizenship – of what, that is, surfaces as a form of border and body patrol at the edges of national belonging – in such a way that is inadequately explained as either resignation to or willful subversion of such demands.30 Such an expansion requires a much longer study, but it points for now toward one way in which, despite certain differences, Hsieh's and Ball's rhythmic performances are enmeshed within a similarly negotiated inhabitation of citizenship.
Ball's and Hsieh's out-of-joint gestural performances demand an attention directed not toward the detection of some subject beyond or outside of capitalism, and which critique might function to protect or recuperate, but through the discompositions and recompositions of the laboring subject as a critical form. That is, rather than reduce these performances to the indwelling relations of power that mark their historical moments, I have tried to think in terms of the agitative movements that variously de- and re-form gender, genre, and citizenship from within. This has required that I not only take on ambivalence as a topic – for ambivalence certainly contours each of these performances – but that I take up ambivalence as a practice of attendance. Ambivalence can be seen, then, as the non-dramatic structure of the gendered, economic, and emotional situation that these works simultaneously expose and inhabit. Neither an event of radical rupture nor one of tragic resignation, ambivalence provides the situational circuit of the dis- and re-composition of spheres. A difficult thought, then, but perhaps a necessary one, for it strikes me as equally mistaken to over-emphasize the exposure of ambivalence as the signal and affect of radical incompletion as it is to under-state the pleasures that attend its inhabitation. I would like to close, then, by commenting briefly on why I have chosen this approach and why it might be of some political interest. In her article, “Life Within and Against Work: Affective Labor, Feminist Critique, and Post-Fordist Politics,” Kathi Weeks argues that both immaterial and affective-labor theorists tend to be hampered by the model of estranged labor, which, in its maintenance of some subject outside of capitalism, reproduces a normative separation of social spheres that splits gender into a binary model. Rather, Weeks notes that the challenge is to develop an immanent critique focused “on work as a means of subjectification without the conceptual apparatus of alienation and the distinction between existence and essence on which it depends.”31 Gesture, I would like to suggest, provides one level of rhythmic attention to support the analysis Weeks recommends, but I would go further, as well, to argue that gesture might help us think of a movement politics that traces its way through virtuosic subjects but does not therefore become their property. Rather, gestures become the sites of improper, unanticipated belongings whose shapes, rhythms, and genres must be traced instead of supposed.
1. I would like to thank Tavia Nyong'o, the two anonymous peer reviewers, and the editorial collective of Women & Performance (especially Kara Jesella and Aliza Shvarts) for their intellectual support, editorial assistance, and stylistic advice throughout the period that I worked on this article. I would also like to thank Jeanne Vaccaro and John Andrews for offering me the invaluable resources of stretched-out conversation and expertly timed silence, especially when they offered these resources in situations where I did not realize they were necessary.
2. The script reads: “I, Sam Hsieh, plan to do a one year performance piece. I shall punch a Time Clock in my studio every hour on the hour for one year. I shall immediately leave my Time Clock room, each time after I punch the Time Clock. The performance shall begin on April 11, 1980 at 7 p.m. and continue until April 11, 1981 at 6 p.m.” It was reproduced in Heathfield and Hsieh (2009). See also Heathfield's essay from the same book, “Undoing Time.”
3. Agamben (2000, 51).
4. See in particular Berlant (2010: 229–45, 2011).
5. Berlant (2011, 5–6, 176–8).
6. Agamben (2000, 60).
7. Gramsci (1971, 309).
8. For more on gesture, see Noland and Ness (2008).
9. See Oppenheimer and Oppenheimer (1996). A reproduction of the copyright is in the frontspiece of the book.
10. See Landay (1999, 25–47). For an extensive analysis of the anxieties of gender that attend the collapse of play and work, see Ngai (2012).
11. For opposed positions on this question of recuperation, see Mellencamp (1986, 80–95); and Doty (1990, 3-22). Mellencamp argues that Lucille Ball's virtuosic slapstick routines cannot be reduced to the enunciations of “Lucy,” the character, and, as such, suggest a subversive potential under the show's televisual surface. Doty argues that, nonetheless, these routines always functioned narratively to recapture the character within the domestic sphere and to secure not only her “place” but her infantilization there. For more on the relationship between critique and mass culture in postwar television comedy, see Hamamoto (1989).
12. May (1988).
13. When I say that these commodities have a “queer vitality” I am riffing on Karl Marx's claim in “The Commodity Fetish” that the commodity is “a very queer thing.” The vital and zany commodities in this episode are the chickens that explode from a pressure cooker and the rice that erupts from a pot.
14. See note 9.
15. See Jess and Gregg Oppenheimer's Laughs, Luck … And Lucy (1999) for an account of the early budgetary and production decisions (and occasional crises) that gave the show its look and feel.
16. In the terms I used to describe “the gag,” this scene also functions as a silent and silenced performance of something just on the edge of articulation. While I have not been able to confirm this fact, it is reasonable to speculate that, given the set design ofI Love Lucy, these scenes that collapse kinds of emotional performance at home and at work were also produced in the exact same stage/set space. Given its formal composition, they were almost certainly filmed through the same cameras.
17. Illouz (2007, 10–16).
18. Weeks (2007) makes a similar point.
19. Although not the subject of this essay, the bad drag performances of the men in this episode, particularly Fred, can be read through this claim.
20. Langenbach (2007); and Heathfield and Hsieh (2009). To be clear, both Heathfield and Langenbach do not reduce his performances to the framework of vulnerability, but they do not trouble it much either. In the monograph that Heathfield and Hsieh collaboratively released, they reproduce a photocopy of the “wanted” noticed that the U.S. Immigration Service released for Hsieh in 1978 (2009, 325). Hsieh gained U.S. citizenship during his final 13-year performance, at the same time that he disappeared entirely from the art world.
21. See Mitropoulos (2007, 127–36).
22. This provides one way to consider his arrest for weapons possession during his next performance, “Outdoor Piece.” His arrest and (near) trial not only snapped the formal rules that he had set for himself – in which, for one year, he would not enter any architectural structure – but it also brought him into direct confrontation with the law at a time when U.S. immigration services were apparently looking for him (see note 18). However, his extensive documentation of his practice apparently satisfied the judge that he was a “serious” artist whose work should be allowed to continue. He was not required to come indoors for his hearing and the charges were eventually dropped.
23. Theorists of immaterial labor draw attention to the enmeshment of these spheres in post-Fordism. See in particular Virno (2004). See also the essays collected in Virno and Hardt (2006). Heathfield takes their enmeshment as the reason to refer to Hsieh's lifework rather than artwork.
24. See Harvey (2000, 97–116).
25. Virno (2004, 54–5).
26. Jess Oppenheimer notes that the performance of “bad” timing that Lucy and Ethel perform is, in fact, a performance of perfect timing relative to the audience, whose laughter measured the duration of any particular gag. See Oppenheimer and Oppenheimer (1999, 10), specifically the chapter “Perfect Timing.”
27. Hsieh responded to a student's incredulous question of how he filled his time during the performances with the answer, “I just wasted time,” during a presentation for undergraduates at NYU in the Fall of 2009.
28. See Agamben (2000).
29. Oppenheimer and Doty note this; Agamben (2000).
30. So much more could be said about this point, especially when one considers that “Job Switching” opens the season that introduces “Little Ricky,” Ball's and Arnaz's biological son, whose broadcast was timed to coincide with his actual birth. Similarly, the crisis of citizenship that affected Lucille Ball, when she was brought before the House of Unamerican Activities a year later for purported Communist Party affiliations, and Arnaz's defenses of her, might be thought more through these clashes of rhythms.
31. Weeks (2007, 247).
Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. Notes on Gesture. In Means Without End: Notes on Politics, translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casaraino, 49–62. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Berlant, Lauren. 2010. Thinking About Feeling Historical. In Political Emotions, edited by Janet Staiger, Ann Cvetkovich, and Anne Reynolds, 229–245. London: Routledge, 2010.
Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Doty, Alexander. 1990. The Cabinet of Lucy Ricardo: Lucille Ball's Star Image. Cinema Journal 29 (4): 3–22.
Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Americanism and Fordism. In Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited by Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, 277–318. New York: International Publishers.
Hamamoto, Darrell.Nervous Laughter: Television Situation Comedy and Liberal-Democratic Ideology. New York: Praeger,1989.
Harvey, David. 2000. The Body as an Accumulation Strategy. In Spaces of Hope, 97–116. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Heathfield, Adrian, and Tehching, Hsieh. 2009. Out Of Now: The Lifeworks of Teching Hsieh. London: Live Art Development Agency.
Illouz, Eva. 2007. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Landay, Lori. 1999. Millions “Love Lucy”: Commodification and The Lucy Phenomenon. NWSA Journal 11 (2): 25–47.
Langenbach, Ray. 2007. Moving Pictures: The Persistence of Locomotion. Performance Research 12 (2): 114–124.
May, Elaine Tyler. 1988. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War. Garden City: Doubleday.
Mellencamp, Patricia. 1986. Situation Comedy, Feminism, and Freud: Discourses of Gracie and Lucy. In Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, edited by Tania Modleski, 80–95. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Mitropoulos, Angela. 2007. Autonomy, Recognition, Movement. In Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorizations, edited by Stevphen Shukaitis and David Graeber, 127–136. Oakland: AK Press.
Ness, Sally Ann, and Carrie, Noland eds. 2008. Migrations of Gesture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ngai, Sianne. 2012. The Zany Science. In Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, 174–232. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Oppenheimer, Jess, and Gregg, Oppenheimer. 1999. Laughs, Luck … and Lucy: How I Came To Create the Most Popular Sitcom of All Time. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
Virno, Paolo. 2004. A Grammar of the Multitude: For An Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, translated by Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson. New York: Semiotext(e).
Virno, Paolo, and Michael, Hardt, eds. 2006. Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Weeks, Kathi. 2007. Life Within and Against Work: Affective Labor, Feminist Critique, and Post-Fordist Politics. ephemera 7 (1), 233–249.
The Precarious Situations issue can be found here.


text:
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Jeffrey Friedman, DO practices as an Internist in Clementon, NJ.Jeffrey Friedman, DO graduated from Des Moines Univ, Coll Osteo Med & Surg, Des Moines Ia 50312.

domain: medical


text:
buy the ebook
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I do my best to keep up-to-date on my international publishers, but please search Lauren Layne on your local Amazon, iBooks, etc to see what's available in your country!
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Sorry! This book is published by an e-book only imprint of Random House, and is not available in paperback.
Jordan Carpenter thinks she’s finally found the perfect candidate for Jilted, a new dating show about runaway grooms: firefighter Luke Elliott, a known player who’s left not one but three brides at the altar. The only problem? Luke refuses to answer Jordan’s emails or return her calls. Which is how she ends up on a flight to Montana to recruit him in person. It’s not Manhattan, but at least the locals in Lucky Hollow seem friendly . . . except for Luke, who’s more intense—and way hotter—than the slick womanizer Jordan expected.
Eager to put the past behind him, Luke has zero intention of following this gorgeous, fast-talking city girl back to New York. But before he can send her packing, Jordan’s everywhere: at his favorite bar, the county fair, even his exes’ book club. Annoyingly, everyone in Lucky Hollow seems to like her—and deep down, she’s starting to grow on him too. But the more he fights her constant pestering, the more Luke finds himself wishing that Jordan would kick off her high heels and make herself comfortable in his arms.
“Quintessential Lauren Layne goodness—a sassy, feel-good and entertaining love story infused with laughter, sizzling chemistry and heartfelt romance.”—USA Today
“A luscious LL read wrapped in small-town charm—I can’t wait for the rest of the I Do, I Don’t series!”—Jessica Lemmon, author of the Real Love (Candy) series
“Ready to Run is as sweet, sassy, and adorable as every Lauren Layne romance, and I’m head over heels!”—Sarah Robinson, bestselling author of the Kavanagh Legends series
“Ready to Run is trademark Lauren Layne: a smart heroine, a swoon-worthy hero, and more flirty, sexy banter than you can shake a cowboy boot at. Loved it!”—Kate Meader, USA Today bestselling author of the Hot in Chicago series
“Layne gives a nod to Runaway Bride and The Bachelor with this clever romance set in Lucky Hollow, Montana. . . . Luke’s secrets create just enough suspense, the revelations are smooth, and the characters and setting are delightful.”—Publishers Weekly
“Ready to Run is the literary equivalent of the perfect after-work cocktail: [it’s] comforting, a little surprising, and injects the night with joy. I loved it, y’all.”—All About Romance
“Lauren Layne’s new series is everything I could want in a contemporary romance.”—Heroes and Heartbreakers
“A new series from Lauren Layne all about a reality dating show with runaway grooms at the center? Count me in.”—Hypable
“Cute, funny, sweet and sexy, and low on angst, Ready to Run totally hits the mark.”—Girl Plus Books
“You can always count on Lauren Layne to deliver a well-written and heartfelt romance between two very different people. . . . It’s lighthearted and fun but with enough emotional heft to make it thoroughly satisfying.”—Dirty Girl Romance
“Ready to Run was absolutely adorable and so much fun!”—Star-Crossed Book Blog
“Ready to Run was once again LL at her finest. She keeps publishing these romances that keep topping the last on my favorite reads lists!”—Obsessive Book Nerd
“I enjoyed the premise of Ready to Run and the surprisingly nuanced and complex story behind the story. Ms. Layne has a definite knack for creating complicated and endearing characters who are flawed yet ever-so enticing, and I just adored Luke. I also appreciated the storyline being well balanced between the heart squeezes and humor.”—Books and Bindings
“Ready to Run is a cute, spunky, and fun small-town romantic comedy that will make you grin and laugh at the witty and effortless banter, swoon at the sexual tension, and maybe even tear up at certain events in the story. It had a wonderful pace and a slow burn I enjoyed immensely.”—Of Pens and Pages
“Obviously, I had a fantastic time reading Ready to Run. It was exactly what I love in a contemporary romance, and it started out the I Do, I Don’t series in the best way possible. Bravo, Lauren Layne! I can’t wait to read the next book!”—A Novel Glimpse
“Two minutes, City Girl.”
She followed him, wanting to retort that she hadn’t always been a city girl, but the way her stiletto sank into the damp grass weakened the sentiment. So Jordan said nothing, carefully tiptoeing her way across the lawn to where he stood leaning against the pole of the swing set.
He took another swig of the beer before lowering his arm to his side, letting the bottle dangle loosely between long, strong fingers.
For a moment, Jordan felt blindsided by a pang of homesickness—a longing for a normal life where the men sipped beer from bottles, and women didn’t count carbs, and where comfortable cowboy boots were perfectly acceptable footwear for all occasions.
“Okay, here’s the thing,” Jordan said, taking a deep breath. “You don’t like me. You don’t like the idea of this show. I get that. But tawdry as the whole thing sounds from your perspective, you have my word that the women will be handpicked to be potentially compatible with you.”
“Handpicked,” he said sarcastically, taking another drink of beer. “You don’t say. Handpicked by whom, you?”
The precise grammar caught her off guard, and she realized this was no country hick to be steamrolled with sweet talk. She quickly shifted her stance to her ace in the hole. Her boss had insisted it be a last resort only, a last-ditch effort to get their guy, but Jordan read people for a living, and her read on this guy told her there wasn’t a romantic bone in his body.
So she took the other tack.
“We’ll double the original offer.”
He didn’t even blink.
“Twice as much,” she said.
“Yes, I’m aware what double means.”
“It’s a lot of money,” she said. “And like I said earlier, if money’s not important to you, just think what it could do for the town should you want to donate it.”
Luke took a sip of beer and said nothing.
Her eyes narrowed. “Do you even remember what the first offer was?”
“Didn’t forget, I just . . . never read it in the first place.”
She scowled. “I spent a lot of time on those emails.”
“Well, you wasted your time. I never made it past the second sentence.”
Luke moved so quickly she gasped when he stepped toward her, crowding her space. Her surprise had her rocking backward, the spikes of her heels sinking all the way into the grass and throwing her off-balance.
He reached out quickly, a palm against her back. His touch steadied her stumble even as it sent her heart racing.
“I’m only going to say this once more, City, so listen up,” Luke said in a low growl, his breath warm on her face. “I don’t care how much money’s on the table. I don’t care if your ‘handpicked’ women are all Victoria’s Secret models with degrees in neuroscience who run charities in their spare time. I’m not, nor will I ever be, interested in being a part of your show. So you can prance your high heels and your tight ass right back to New York City and leave me and my town in peace.”
He released her so quickly she nearly stumbled again, although she was pretty sure her unsteadiness had more to do with the thrum of her awareness of being so close to Luke than it did the stilettos.
This book was published by an e-book only imprint of Random House, and is not available in paperback. I've asked/begged, and they've said no. Sorry!

domain: literature


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Sunday, January 24, 2010
some more life drawings...
Today at life drawing the model was really putting forth some great poses for the group-I had drawn a 'burlesque-ish' type model the day before and it was so evident in her lack of intensity and imagination in her poses that she was not experienced. She boasted that it was her first time at the end of the session- but she was a very sweet girl indeed. She nearly picked my drawing in a contest for a bottle of Stolichnaya, but after having to put to friend to bed that same night because of a vodka incident- I'm glad I lost. I'm glad I did not win that drawing contest. But I'm going to win at one, one day........and we will do vodka shots to celebrate.

domain: artistic


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The other day I stumbled upon this new meme. It is hosted by Lia @LostInAStory. The aim is to declutter your Goodreads TBR shelf. You sort them from first added to last added and go through it in parts. Read the synopsis and decide whether or not you want to keep them. I’m also sharing in which folder the books I’m keeping will be placed. ‘To be read’ are books I own already, ‘Wishlist’ are books I want to buy so I can read them soon, and ‘After’ are books I want to read that I’m less eager to get to. My Goodreads TBR shelf currently, has a total of 350 books. This is a lot, especially when you consider I only made my Goodreads account a year ago (in January of 2016).
“Most of you probably know this feeling, your Goodreads TBR pile keeps growing and growing and it seems like there is no light at the end of the tunnel. You keep adding, but you add more than you actually read. And then when you’re scrolling through your list, you realize that you have no idea what half the books are about and why you added them. Well that’s going to change!”
For me, the aim of this meme is to reduce my current TBR down to the books I actually think I will get to soon. Most books I am removing from my TBR are books I still want to get to someday, just not in the near future. For instance, I am removing a lot of classics because I feel like I am not YET in a place where I can enjoy reading them.
“Mikael Blomkvist, a once-respected financial journalist, watches his professional life rapidly crumble around him. Prospects appear bleak until an unexpected (and unsettling) offer to resurrect his name is extended by an old-school titan of Swedish industry. The catch—and there’s always a catch—is that Blomkvist must first spend a year researching a mysterious disappearance that has remained unsolved for nearly four decades. With few other options, he accepts and enlists the help of investigator Lisbeth Salander, a misunderstood genius with a cache of authority issues. Little is as it seems in Larsson’s novel, but there is at least one constant: you really don’t want to mess with the girl with the dragon tattoo.”
#1 – Added January 24, 2016
I haven’t watched the movie but was intrigued by how mysterious the synopsis sounded. And I still am!
Verdict: KEEP (Wishlist folder)
“Libby Day was seven when her mother and two sisters were murdered in “The Satan Sacrifice” of Kinnakee, Kansas. She survived—and famously testified that her fifteen-year-old brother, Ben, was the killer. Twenty-five years later, the Kill Club—a secret society obsessed with notorious crimes—locates Libby and pumps her for details. They hope to discover proof that may free Ben. Libby hopes to turn a profit off her tragic history: She’ll reconnect with the players from that night and report her findings to the club—for a fee. As Libby’s search takes her from shabby Missouri strip clubs to abandoned Oklahoma tourist towns, the unimaginable truth emerges, and Libby finds herself right back where she started—on the run from a killer.”
#2 – Added January 24, 2016
I have watched the movie for this one, which makes me less interested to read it. After having read Gone Girl, I want to pick up other books by Gillian Flynn. But it it’s not going to be this one.
“Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, reporter Camille Preaker faces a troubling assignment: she must return to her tiny hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls. For years, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows, a beautiful thirteen-year-old with an eerie grip on the town. Now, installed in her old bedroom in her family’s Victorian mansion, Camille finds herself identifying with the young victims—a bit too strongly. Dogged by her own demons, she must unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past if she wants to get the story—and survive this homecoming.”
#3 – Added January 24, 2016
As explained above; I want to read more books by Gillian Flynn. I think this will be a better fit because I don’t know anything about this story yet.
Verdict: KEEP (Wishlist folder)
“10:00 a.m. The principal of Opportunity High School finishes her speech, welcoming the entire student body to a new semester and encouraging them to excel and achieve.
10:02 a.m. The students get up to leave the auditorium for their next class.
10:03 a.m. The auditorium doors won’t open.
10:05 a.m. Someone starts shooting.
Told from four different perspectives over the span of fifty-four harrowing minutes, terror reigns as one student’s calculated revenge turns into the ultimate game of survival.”
#4 – Added January 24, 2016
This book caught my attention because 1. It’s a book by a Dutch author that got translated into English and 2. It’s about a school shooting. I think this topic is very important in today’s society. BUT, I’ve read a lot of reviews saying the shooter didn’t get a voice at all and there wasn’t really a reason as to why te shooting happened. I lost interest in it because of this.
“Meet Dexter Morgan, a polite wolf in sheep’s clothing. He’s handsome and charming, but something in his past has made him abide by a different set of rules. He’s a serial killer whose one golden rule makes him immensely likeable: he only kills bad people. And his job as a blood splatter expert for the Miami police department puts him in the perfect position to identify his victims. But when a series of brutal murders bearing a striking similarity to his own style start turning up, Dexter is caught between being flattered and being frightened — of himself or some other fiend.”
#5 – Added January 24, 2016
I’ve watched the Dexter Tv show and enjoyed it (except for the very last episode… it was terrible). While watching I kept thinking “this would be a great book”. Only to find out later that those books actually existed. I’ve also heard that the books have a totally different storyline. So still excited for it!


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I’m new to the communities both Mac and Sketchup. Right now I’m using my 4-year-old PC with i5 and nVidia Geforce GPU. I was quite happy with my PC doing my personal work on sketchup, mostly on sketching only, until I learned to render using Vray. Almost every time I rendered the model in a higher resolution than 800x600 it just crashed. I currently fixing my problem with turning on a fan blowing directly to my laptop and it actually helps. I think it might be because of my GPU performance being too old or obsolete to handle the sketchup rendering. SO I’m thinking to buy one of the MAC product lines.
I've been looking at MAC Book 12 with retina display which I personally like b'cuz of its thin design and light weight but worry about its performance.
So can anyone suggest me which Mac I should get according to your personal experience?
Most of my works are Home design. Any opinions are welcome and Thank you.
Just a quick note, and hopefully others will chime in. A PC with an i5 processor will likely outperform the Macbook Retina. I am a Mac user, have been for 20 years, but I don’t want you to buy it to improve performance because it may not.
That being said, there are often driver and malware problems that are just more common on PCs, and you may want to look there for a quick fix. However, you would be right in assuming that in general, the Mac is going to have better a better user experience due to the integration and less issues with drivers.
So, my recommendation for a new Macbook Retina is…wait as long as you can. The Macbook Retina is a first generation product, that they will almost undoubtedly improve drastically in the next release cycle. There are complaints about the keyboard, and having used it a bit, I can understand that. The biggest complaint is with the performance though, and if you want to render, I don’t think it’s going to impress you.
If you must buy now, you might want to look at the 13" Macbook Pro with some upgrades to the processor and memory, especially if you have some interest in small and lightweight. The only reason I hesitate to recommend the 13" Macbook Air is because the retina display is really worth it if you spend a lot of time in front of your computer. And I must say, I don’t think you can go wrong if you don’t mind carrying around the 15" Retina Macbook Pro, I love mine.
I hope that helps, if you have any more questions, ask away.
I would like to know if anyone recommends setting up renders on one machine and passing them to another for the actual rendering? It could change my answer about the 12" retina Macbook.
The most important aspect of your decision is the hardware under the hood, not the label on the lid.
Compile a list of the hardware/software requirements of all the applications you’ll run on the new system.
Use that as your guide to make an informed decision.
SketchUp Hardware and Software Requirements
V-Ray 2.0 for SketchUp System Requirements
I have a MacBook Pro Retina 13 inch, which I like for its mix of performance and size. One thing to think about is that you can drive multiple monitors from Mac notebooks, and so I have matching setups at home and work. In both places I have wireless keyboard and trackpad, and 27 inch monitor. The monitors are not Retina, and that doesn’t ever bother me, which means that arguably the internal screen need not be Retina either. When I’m on the road or doing presentations I’m just using the internal display, but I suspect if it was not Retina that would be fine.
There are so many gesture things that you can do with a trackpad in Mac OS, I wish SketchUp could make use of some of them!
Thanks guys, all comments are useful to me. I’m in a hurry to get a MAC now. I might wait a little longer while my pc is still doing a fine job. Anyway, i lean towards MBP, gonna do some more reseach.
Saran, Did you end up buying a Macbook? If you did what did you buy cos at the moment I am also thinking of purchasing one.
What would be the best Macbook to buy at the moment to do Sketchup Vray in your experience?


2PM’s Taecyeon, Preparing for Their Comeback?
By Staff Writer | October 13, 2012 11:34 AM EDT
Taecyeon wrote on his twitter, "They say it won't work because the song title is too long... "You Know What Time It Is" is definitely a lot to pronounce and too long, right? T.T Hmm... So what should I name it? lol"
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This hinted at the fact that Taecyeon was composing a song for 2PM's comeback set for the end of this year.
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Former Nine Muses member Ryu Sera has released her first official music video since her departure from the idol girl group in June.
OP-ED 12.18.14 | 09:35AM EST
'Dirty Vibe' Music Video Appearance Is Strategic Move For 2NE1's CL Prior To Her U.S. Debut [Opinion]
Skrillex's new music video featuring CL may be a way for the 2NE1 rapper to bridge the cultural and musical divide prior to her U.S. debut.
Editorial 12.18.14 | 09:13AM EST
The highly competitive nature of the K-pop industry unfortunately means that some groups don't make it. In 2014, there were four groups we said goodbye to.
Hot Issue 12.17.14 | 07:16PM EST
K-Pop Crossover: Stephen Colbert Slips In Hallyu Reference During Seth Rogen Interview On 'Colbert Report' [VIDEO]
Stephen Colbert's eight-year tenure playing a conservative blowhard on "The Colbert Report" might be coming to an end on Friday, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have time for one last shout-out to the South Korean music scene.


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The author describes the metatheoretical concepts of teonomic pedagogy (based of the law of God) and teonomic didactics of literature. The concepts are homogeneous, since we can talk about the correspondence of general objectives of education as well as the objectives of literary education. In the context of theological divagations and Christian visions of humanity and the world, the author ponders the thesis that literary education should of be service to God and in God.

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We’re proud to announce the premiere of a new track from “The Dawn Sang Along”. Go to the KCRW blog to take a listen to “Forro”.
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Watch WWE Mae Young Classic
- 2 Seasons
The Mae Young Classic is a multi-night special event and tournament promoted by the American professional wrestling promotion, WWE. The tournament comprises various matches, that result from scripted storylines and have predetermined results. It is constituted by a 32 competitor tournament exclusively for women from both NXT and the independent circuit.


It’s not easy to keep track with music news especially when you make yourself a busy bunny, so we check it all out regularly and make a selective list of the new stuff that you could most likely be into. That’s the great stuff you missed!
1. Autumn Ruin stream debut EP ‘We Make Our Own Damn Luck’
British alternative pop rockers Autumn Ruin have recently released a new record called ‘We Make Our Own Damn Luck’. This is a very enjoyable effort that will accompany you through your daily activities and make it all more bearable.
Autumn Ruin – ‘We Make Our Own Damn Luck’, available now via Square State Records.
Full stream HERE.
2. Taking Back Sunday – Death Wolf
As far as Taking Back Sunday are concerned, life is still running its course, as they are getting ready to release their seventh studio album ‘Tidal Waves’ . Here’s the latest track they’ve released, ahead of the record. “This album is truly an expression of what Taking Back Sunday is during this snapshot in time as opposed to what we think people expect from our band.”, frontman Adam Lazzara explains.
Taking Back Sunday – ‘Tidal Waves’, out September 16, via Hopeless Records.
3. Dead! – Something More Original
Here’s a new Dead! track. Turn the volume up and enjoy!
4. Stick To Your Guns – No Tolerance
Shortly after announcing the release of a new EP on new label Pure Noise Records, Stick To Your Guns are revealing yet another track off the new record. “[No Tolerance] is about our intolerance for intolerance. There is no tolerance for racists, sexists, homophobes or fascists in our scene.”
Stick To Your Guns will soon be presenting these new tracks to the European crowds, as parts of Architects’ All Our Gods Have Abandoned Us headline tour next fall.
Stick To Your Guns – ‘Better Ash Than Dust’, out September 23rd through Pure Noise Records
5. TesseracT – Hexes (music video)
Hexes is taken from TesseracT‘s upcoming album ‘Polaris / Errai’. This is a beautiful video for a massive song.
TesseracT – ‘Polaris / Errai’ out September 16.
6. Knocked Loose – Full album stream
Kentucky hardcore band Knocked Loose have debuted a stream of their new album “Laugh Tracks”, on Pure Noise Records‘ Soundcloud page.
If you like what you hear, you can still preorder the album HERE and go check out Knocked Loose on tour at the end of this year, with Counterparts, Expire and Landscapes.
7. Boston Manor – Lead Feet
Not long until ‘Be Nothing’! Here’s a new single called Lead Feet, that the band has premiered on Alternative Press recently. “Lead Feet is about how two people’s lives can begin so similarly but the choices they make can take them in totally opposite directions.” You can read more about the story behind this song right HERE.
Pre-order ‘Be Nothing’ HERE.
8. Green Day – Revolution Radio
Now that Green Day are officially back, with a new album around the corner and a tour early next year, why won’t you just keep calm and listen to a new song? Here’s Revolution Radio.
9. Frank Iero and The Patience – I’m A Mess
Frank Iero and The Patience present I’m A Mess, from the upcoming, awaited album ‘Parachutes’, available on October 28th.
10. WSTR release new song / announce debut album
British pop punks WSTR have announced the released of their debut album ‘Red, Green or Inbetween’, out on January 20th, 2017 through No Sleep Records.
Check out this new song Lonely Smiles.
11. Microwave – Vomit
This video is worth watching. Vomit is taken from Microwave‘s upcoming album ‘Much Love’, set to be released on September 30 (SideOneDummy Records). Enjoy!
12. While She Sleeps launch Pledge campaign for DIY, upcoming album release
While She Sleeps have decided to go independent. Watch the story and read the statement below:
“After 10 years of dealing with the ups and downs of the music industry we have decided to continue our journey independently and self release our third full length album, available now for pre-order on PledgeMusic.
All money raised goes directly towards funding the new album, artwork, music videos, touring and everything that keeps our band alive.”
There are really cool recently released records that are worth listening :
- Chris Farren – Can’t Die (SideOneDummy Records)|| Watch : Say You Want Me music video || Check out : European tour dates with Brian Fallon
- Twin Atlantic – GLA (Red Bull Records) || Listen : The Chaser || Watch : The Making Of ‘GLA’ || Check out : European tour dates
- Norma Jean – Polar Similar (Solid State Records) || Listen : Everyone Talking Over Everyone Else
- Kamikaze Girls – Sad (EP – Bearded Punk Records) || Watch : Stitches music video
- This Wild Life – Low Tides (Epitaph Records) || Watch : Hit The Reset music video || Check out : European tour dates
- Moose Blood – Stay Beautiful (EP) || Listen : Stay Beautiful || Check out : European headline tour


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Vedauwoo is an area of rocky granite outcrops located in south-eastern Wyoming, and is the state’s best rock climbing area. The area is within the Medicine Bow – Routt National Park and is located near the towns of Laramie and Cheyenne.
Vedauwoo is a popular place for mountain bikers, hikers, and anglers, as well as rock climbers. The granite outcrops provide some of the best wide crack and offwidth routes in America, plus some excellent bouldering.
All of these rock climbing guidebooks for Wyoming are in stock (unless otherwise stated) and are dispatched within 2 working days (usually 24 hours) from the UK.
This is a comprehensive guidebook to the rock climbing found in Vedauwoo in south eastern Wyoming near the towns of Laramie and Cheyenne. As the name suggests the guidebook details are many classic wide crack and offwidth routes – the style of climbing that Vedauwoo is famous for The majority of the routes covered in the guidebook are single pitch traditional routes complete with lower off chains. There are some 2-pitch routes and a small number of sport routes as well. Published in 2003, all the routes are shown on photo topos. More Information
This is a comprehensive guidebook detailing the all the bouldering to be found at Vedauwoo in south eastern Wyoming near the towns of Laramie and Cheyenne. Vedauwoo is the perfect destination for boulderers of any level. This is due to the excellent granite rock, along with the large number of problems across a wide range of grades and near perfect landings. Over 560 problems are detailed, which are shown on a combination of boulder photos, boulder topographical maps, and individual descriptions. More Information

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Katy Perry has found a home on the Billboards Hot 100′s List, making her the first artist in over 10 years to remain on the 100 charts for a consecutive year. Her smash hit “E.T” (feat. Kanye West) has made a remarkable jump from the lucky 13 to the No.1 spot in the past week.
Perry has hits on the 100′s list dating back to May 2010. Without question, she manages to pick just the right tracks to please her fans and gain their support. Songs like “California Gurls,” “Teenage Dream,” Girls,” “Firework” and now “E.T.,” keep this star out shining her competition.
Her album, Teenage Dream, debuted August 2010 and sold more than 190,000 copies in the first week of its release. “E.T.,” celebrates the unique and extraordinary lover. The song embraces the originality and blaring love for such a foreign individual. Perry has reached relationship bliss, and nothing on this earth could possibly compete. Not even Adele.
Who will be victorious? This battle is definitely one for the books.
Check out Perry’s “E.T.” video below:
Tags: Adele, Billboard Hot 100, California Gurls, E.T., Firework, girls, Kanye West, Katy Perry, Teenage Dream

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UNARCO Material Handling, Inc. was the first manufacturer of pallet rack in the United States. Product line offerings include both structural and roll-formed Pallet Rack, Carton Flow, Pallet Flow, Push-Back Rack, Cantilever, Drive-in/Drive-thru and highly engineered Pick Modules. UNARCO also manufactures RhinoTrac heavy-duty carton flow for a complete system solution.


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How far you can get with the Bee past obstacles?Best controls, awesome music and your cute Bee :)Bzzzzzzzzzz!What's new in this version:Bug fixes, compatibility for older devices Post your scores! The dragons have taken over the castles and they are trying to protect their kingdoms and the knights are attacking.
- CAN YOU PARK A TRACTOR? WHY NOT TRY AND SEE.
Asphalt Riders GT Racing 2014 is the game of the year, where you can get behind the wheel of the fastest supercars in the world and become a professional racing driver!Reach extreme speeds thanks to the maximum power of your turbo V8 engine using tuning nitrous oxide!Feel the real adrenaline of the professional races with this fun free car 3D game in HD, it will make you feel like you're in the most exclusive tracks in the world. Try flying him through the city, but don't expect to see him at work anytime soon. Forget the classic car washing games, go karts games or those about cars, motorcycles and trucks parking and feel like a real pilot with the heat of a real apache racer.
Toast=====Taping a toast scores 1 point. Rocket Toast==========Tap a Rocket Toast - it scores 5 points, increases your Jelly Power and releases a Power Star. Be the most furious from your friends and show them who is the best at dodging obstacles and shooting guns and missiles while jumping from the edge of spectacular air ramps.
+++++ Enjoy the game where the tide has been turned around in favour of the dragons.
Discover a new perspective in slot games as you play with this amazing game.
and Tweet about it with hashtag #flipabirdWhat's new in this version:Bug fixes dear kids, like it Come play with.most importantly beat you friends high score. com for questions or concernsFollow us on facebook and twitter! This game is an absolute blast! Features: - Collect fruit and watch out for flying barriers! - Unlock awesome levels- Never ending gameplay and never ending fun! Download it right now!
What's the mayor up to this time?The city needs him, but he's busy practising his Jamaican accent at 3 in the morning.


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Fall pillows that create a cozy and comfortable atmosphere in your home
How to choose the right fall pillows to create a truly cozy and comfortable atmosphere in your home? Throw pillows are one of the quickest decorating techniques for any room in the house – living room, bedroom, family room, etc.
Big and small, round, square, oval, bright or in muted colors – decorative pillows are so different and so irreplaceable in creating comfort and accents in the interior. Almost no modern room is complete without this element. We all know that no matter how beautiful and stylish the furniture may be, it is small details that add character and individuality to the appearance of any room – photographs of loved ones, a favorite cup on the bedside table or pictures on the wall. But nothing can compare the attractive look and the appeal of decorative pillows. They are a symbol of comfort – soft, pleasant to the touch, they not only decorate a sofa or an armchair, but also provide more comfortable seating. How pillows can change the space and become a calendar in the interior? What are the rules for combining colors and patterns? We shall answer your questions and show you fantastic interiors decorated with fall pillows.
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How to decorate your home with fall pillows?
Decorative pillows have long taken their place in interior design and decoration. They could be found in oriental interiors and in baroque palaces. Throw pillows are not just another way to create comfort, but also a charming decor element. They can emphasize the chosen style of a bedroom, living room or even a kitchen, or they can become a bright and unusual accent. In the living room, decorative pillows have a place on the sofa, armchairs and chairs, and now it is difficult to imagine a comfortable sofa without several pillows of different sizes and colors. In the bedroom, they decorate the bed. Usually they are placed on top of the bedspread and make the bed look much neater and tidier. Even the kitchen has room for throw pillows. If you spend a lot of time there, you should take care of your comfort and put soft decorative pillows on the chairs or bench in the breakfast nook. How to choose your fall pillows? What is important to know? Can you combine colors, patterns, textures? How to do combine them harmoniously? Here are some basic rules that you can use as guidelines:
Choose your color palette
Warm, slightly muted colors, shades of red, orange, terracotta will warm you on cold autumn evenings. It is with soft warm shades that you can prepare your home and yourself for the most romantic and sentimental time of the year. These colors will create an autumn interior and bring tranquility and comfort to your home. However, you should not limit yourself to only on orange and yellow colors. Light pastel shades and even dark browns are appropriate and they pair beautifully with greens. Gold and copper are also beautiful colors for fall decorations. You do not need to saturate the room with many shades. It is enough to choose one main color, and accent it with two additional colors. It is the accents that will complement the interior, make it softer and a little lighter. So, choose one color palette and keep to it or check the color wheel for complimentary shades.
Choose a theme or a fall symbol
The market offers fall pillows with almost any pattern and symbols of the season. The pumpkin is one of the most popular ones as it reminds of harvest and Halloween. Among other things, the sunny ripe pumpkin is a wonderful decorative accent. If you are skilled at sewing, knitting, patchwork or any other textile-related craft, you can make your own fall throw pillows. A piece of orange felt would be perfect for a DIY project, right? Remember that pillows with drawings, symbol or particular pattern are best complemented by solid color cushions which make them stand out.
Another popular theme for decorative pillows is fall leaves. Pillows with multi-colored yellow, burgundy, orange leaves (bouquets or wreathes of leaves) will be a great warm color accent in your interior.
Autumn is not only a harvest season, but also a hunting time. If you like hunting, but there are no pheasants in your area, why not have one on a pillow?
Plaid and kilim style pillows are another option. You can select the color shades that complement your existing interior.
Combine patterns and prints
The market offers a huge variety of fall throw pillows. There are patterns and prints of all kinds and they are all beautiful. It is understandable that many people are tempted to buy emotionally everything that catches the eye. However, emotional purchases are not necessarily the best choice. Balance is the most important criteria. How to balance different patterns and prints? For example, if you selected one main color and want to group fall pillows, it is best if you choose three different fabrics that work together. If you like prints, then you must remember the rule – One simple (small) print, one busy (big) print, and one solid. The large print should be on the biggest pillow or on the one placed at the center of the sofa.
How to arrange the pillows?
A symmetrical arrangement is always a good decision. It creates a feeling of order and allows you not to overdo the decor by layering too many different fabrics, textures or prints. For a balanced look, make sure that the largest pillows are in the far corners of the sofa. Experts recommend to arrange small pillows in the center of the sofa. You can experiment with asymmetrical arrangement depending on the style of the room and the visual effect that you want to achieve.
How many pillows do you need in a room?
Decorative pillows are primarily meant to give you comfort. Yes, they add to the visual appeal of the room, but you need to be careful with the number of cushions you throw on the sofa. You may want to display all these amazingly beautiful fall pillows that you have but… there might not be enough place left for you to actually sit down. Yes, the size of the sofa matters greatly, but no matter if you have a huge sectional couch or a small one, if you feel like you piled too many decorative pillows, then you are probably right!
In conclusion, we have to say, that you don’t have to make drastic changes to your interior design to bring a seasonal feel to your home. It is enough to change a few decor items, replace textile, add some unique decorative elements and arrange them around the house, and voila – your home is filled with fascinating fall colors!