There's more in 8 street minutes than 80 movies

[imomus]

1. Andy Warhol's biggest unfulfilled ambition was to have a TV show called "Nothing Special". It would just be a camera pointing at a street corner or something, he said. Nothing is so special!

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2. There's a theatre company in Germany called Rimini Protokoll who think actors are boring. Instead, they build spectacles around what they call "experts in everyday life": ordinary working people. They don't like to call them amateurs, they're just professional in something other than acting. So far they've built productions around a failed German mayor, a Calcutta call centre worker, a Bulgarian lorry driver. "By allowing everyone to stand on stage as themselves and contribute something of substance as an expert, the Rimini Project takes on the character of a social experiment, a social utopia, a theatre in which every individual is interesting and valuable in their own way," said Theater Heute magazine.

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3. Recursive circle alert: if ordinary is the new special, then special is the new ordinary, which is therefore the new special, so we're back where we started, and special is the new special.

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4. "There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man's life than in all the philosophies." The Revolution of Everyday Life, Raoul Vaneigem. "From now on the analysts are in the streets."

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5. "Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others". Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life.

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6. These two pieces of French theory have been plundered by the art world recently. They may well have been behind "Lovely Greetings", Erik van Lieshout's installation in the 2006 Berlin Biennial, a shipping container parked on Auguststrasse showing a video in which Lieshout gets to know Germany by bicycle. "He criticises a man on the street who appears to be out of work and yet owns an iPod; he gets beaten up; he worries about his pee being yellow."

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7. Gorgeous Indian Girls: Nameless Beauty is a rather wonderful "nothing special" sort of blog about Indian women glimpsed on the street and in public transport. "Gorgeous Indian girls and ladies pictures which are not aware about the camera and really have an Indian look." The understated, normal and badly-photographed women are somehow more exciting to look at than carefully-made-up, fully frontal Bollywood celebrities.

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8. My favourite YouTube channel is Hitodori: People in the Town. "Here is collection of videos taken from cities around the world. I record video on the street to see the people of the town," says its Japanese creator, who has assembled 366 fixed-camera "visual field recordings" of people passing on the street. Each recording lasts about eight minutes. I find them completely absorbing. Some are shot in my favourite people-watching spots, like this one at the entrance to Daikanyama Station:

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"Atmosphere of towns are affected by people," the filmmaker explains. "To record the atmsphere, I focus on people, not building and landscape. By these videos you can try... marketing reserch... to feel traveling a lot of cities... human watch to kill time... to recover your lonelyness heart... to get used to rush hour." I'd add: to play guessing games with your partner, to study the relative smileyness, fatness or wealth of people in various countries, to check pretty girls, to admire traditional costumes and condemn baseball caps and boring black jackets.

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Although this man has been all over the world with his camera (the tapes show Bahrain, Canada, China, Hong Kong, Italy, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, UK and US), he doesn't think they're anything special: "Attention: These are boring... just videotaped on the street and upload them... no editing and no story... they are different from TV program and movie that have a lot of interesting scene and exciting scene. Please understand they are just record, not entertainment."

Comments

[alicetiara.livejournal.com]

It just smacks of street harassment to me. I do understand that people obviously find aesthetic enjoyment in other people- girlwatching, boywatching, peoplewatching, whatever. But sometimes, as a woman, it's hard to accept that men's enjoyment in watching attractive women is harmless, because women have to deal with the implications of this all the time (being yelled at, catcalled, followed down the street, photographed against their will, etc.). The voyeuristic aspect of this to me feeds the discourse that women are objects for men to find pleasure in; which then prioritizes the men's pleasure over the woman's comfort. And of course part of this discourse is that if a woman objects to this she is humorless, or uptight.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think the fellow's main crime isn't his interest in, ahem, melons and purses and so on (if this interest flags, the species dies) so much as the way he plays to the gallery. He talks about the girls he photographs (and if photographing in itself is intrusive, we have to say the Hitodori guy is problematical too, and anyone who takes photos on a street, including surveillance cameras) in the way certain men talk to certain other men about certain women. But then again, wouldn't it be worse if he used this tone to the women themselves?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Which reminds me of Germaine Greer's line: "Women spend the first half of their lives wondering why men are looking at them, and the second half wondering why they aren't."

[milgram.livejournal.com]

Wasn't Greer's point that it's depressing that we have gotten to this state where mature women consider this kind of harassment “normal”?
Guys like this instil that horrible feeling by judging you daily on the street. It's objectifying in the same way as immediate street harassment, which is not the same as the “voyeurism” of an indiscriminatory street shot or surveillance camera.

Re: "wouldn't it be worse if he used this tone to the women themselves?" why do you believe that he doesn't? anyway, would it be that different? here he's speaking to a wider audience of women and men and still encouraging this "women are objects for men to find pleasure in" idea.

horrible feeling

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

The text is similar to a 15 year old discussing his hot friend and the male species projects this throughout his lifetime.
No need to worry old girl!

interest flags

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

Aren't there any woman voyeurs represented here? I do not like the sexist note here and feel it pollutes this entire blog.