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| Richard Duffee |
In the first of two provocative area presentations this week in response
to Valentine’s Day, Hello, I Love You,
Won’t You Tell Me Your Name? will plumb the Crusades, church/state
relations, Islamic poetry, women's rights and other topics when Richard Duffee
shares his research and conclusions at Curly’s tomorrow night at 7:30 regarding the
origins of the wildly impossible conception of romantic love, incorporated as
part of modern industrial life.
A PoemAlley fixture,
egalitarian analyst of social power and author (The Slow News of Need, available from the “Collections and Anthologies” section below), Richard elaborates: “The shocking thing about Western love poetry is that the
tradition does not assume one needs to know anything about the recipient of
one's affections in order for one's claims to love to be credible. It's
difficult to realize how weird this is because it's a feature of the cultural
landscape that's been around for 900 years.” 
Because
the output of Medieval troubadours and trobairitz (female troubadours)
reflected their own romantic conceptions, as opposed to actual people, this
helped set the stage, along with numerous intertwined social influences, for
the senhalic, or fill-in-the-blank, adaptability of, well, affected affections as purveyed by today’s
“sentiment-industrial complex” of greeting cards, candy, door-stopper-grade bridal magazines and wedding planning consultancies.
As
for Tinsletown’s generous contributions, Spike Jonze’s Her (Warner Bros./Annapurna Pictures, 2013) makes a strikingly insightful
break from this cheapening fixation in its portrayal of an emotionally hollowed-out divorcee’s romance
with a self-learning computer program, set against a day-after-tomorrow Los Angeles which is, appropriately, Hallmark Card-cozy, while stringent in its devotion to socially-received (as opposed to individual) relational
expectations:
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| Ingrid Burrington |
Also surveying the urban crossroads of
devotion and the digital, New York artist Ingrid Burrington’s pre-Valentine’s
Day talk Connection Over Missed
Connections at Franklin Street Works will scrutinize romantic longing across
various cities as mapped out through a leading Franklin Street Works online classifieds hub. “Analysis of Craigslist
Missed Connections postings and communities,” notes Ingrid of her show Taxonomy of
Missed Connections, “offers
a glimpse into the loneliness and sexual tension that serve as the linchpin of
any thriving metropolitan environment.”
Part of FSW’s Neuromast:
Certain Uncertainty and Contemporary Art exhibition,
Taxonomy of Missed Connections is also a component of Ingrid’s Center for Missed Connections project
and its mission to encourage a collective embrace of loneliness, both poetic
and banal, within public spaces.
Find out more
about Ingrid at her website, lifewinning.com. A free exhibition, Neuromast is curated by Taliesen
Gilkes-Bower and FSW Creative Director Terri C Smith and will be on view
through March 9.
When:
Thursday, February 13, 2014
6:30-8:00 PM
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| Joaquin Phoenix in "Her" |
Where:
Franklin Street Works
41 Franklin Street
Stamford, CT 06901
(Light snacks
and a signature holiday drink to be served)
Phone/e-mail:
203-595-5211
203-595-5211
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