hal tweets ·11:28 AM
Ghostbuster zines from the Canzine Hollywood Piracy Zine Challenge are now online! http://t.co/RoAMEQTU
2009,
13:59 GMT
Hal’s Excellent Alberta Adventure
Posted by: Hal
Hey everyone, next week I’m heading to Alberta for hijinks in Calgary, Banff and Edmonton. If you’re in the area, I hope you can come by, take in some peep and say hi. And of course check out all the great authors who are coming from around the country and the world to read at Wordfest!
Here are the details of all the events:
Hal at Wordfest —
Calgary: Word of Mouth event. This is a spoken word type event. I’m a bit of an odd man out here, but it’ll fun anyway and we’ll make it work somehow! Plus the other performers are really interesting. Thursday October 15. 9:30pm-11pm. Vertigo Theatre Centre Studio. With Elizabeth Bachinsky, Kris Demeanor, Billeh Nickerson, Alexis O’Hara, Roland Pemberton and me.
Calgary: For a Nickel I Will. 12–1pm, October 14. Downtown Calgary mystery location. What will you tell me for a nickel? I’ll be in an as yet undisclosed downtown Calgary location collecting and displaying secrets from passerbys. I’ll be posting them to my twitter and blog account, as well as to the Wordfest site, and displaying them on a big screen as people wander by. Prizes and other enticements. Not sure when they are going to release the location. Check the wordfest site day of!
Banff: Dine and Spill. 12:15–1:15. Lunch at the Banff Center with me! At the Banff Centre Vistas Dining Room. Basically you eat and, one-by-one, tell me your secrets. The secrets will be displayed on a big screen in random order. I will discuss your secrets, my own secrets, and the general need of humanity to share share share and overshare.
Banff: From Pop to Peep. October 18. 5–6pm. Banff Centre, Rice Studio JPL Building. This is a presentation by me on the rise of peep culture. It’s basically as many ideas about what Peep is and how it works and where it came from as I can pack in. Plus questions.
Hal in Edmonton (note this isn’t part of Wordfest, which is a Calgary/Banff thing…)
At the University of Alberta, Monday, October 19, 7:30pm,
Humanities Centre Lecture Hall 3
With panelists: Kevin Haggerty, Cecily Devereux, and Liz Czach
This is a free event. I’ll be presenting my ideas about peep culture, and afterwards the panelists, all professors at the U of A, will respond with lively conversation and their own insights/ideas. And best of all, it’s free!
2009,
12:07 GMT
New Peep Vlog: Hal Sings a Song
Posted by: Hal
A week or so ago I sent out a tweet saying that I had written my first new song in 4 years. Director Sally got excited, and immediately sent me an email: she wanted me to record the song on webcam and post it as a vlog, under the watchful eye of her own much larger camera, of course. She sensed, since the song is called “I’ll Call You When I Get There”, that there was an underlying personal theme, and that this would be a way to get at some of the personal stuff I don’t share all that readily.
Anyway, even though I don’t sing publically – though I used to way back in my college days – and generally consider my song-writing a private hobby, I decided to go with it. In the spirit of peep, everything private is public! The song itself was inspired by some of the comments W. was making while I was away. It’s not about W and me. It’s about a couple, a man and a woman, and the way the woman feels with the man being away all the time. That’s all I’m going to say. Let me know what you think.
2009,
16:36 GMT
Google Latitude Experiment
Posted by: Hal
So as of today, I am providing my approximate location to anyone who cares to know it. I am doing this by using a google service called Latitude. To see my location, go to the main page of peep and look at the map.
I’m curious about this, I don’t know how people will use it. Will anyone drop in on me randomly in the course of my wonderings? I have a lot of travel coming up in the next two months so it might be fun for people to see where I am at any given moment.
Anyway, if you see I’m near you and have the urge, definitely come on by!
And if you’re staying at home watching me going about my business, let me know, because that’s interesting too.
I first learned about this service when me and the doc crew were out in San Francisco at Google headquarters. I’ve been eager to try it ever since, but had to hold off as we were working on other aspects of Peep. So now’s my chance!
2009,
15:46 GMT
Hal Plays Monopoly with Real Money Tonight
Posted by: Hal
Hey I’m playing Monopoly with real money tonight at the Toronto Stock Exchange from 1 to 3 am. It’s part of Nuit Blanche, Toronto’s all night art festival. It’s a performance piece orchestrated by the very cool Windsor based artist Iain Baxter&. Here’s an article on him and the evening that ran in the Toronto Star.
Here’s the complete info:
TMX Broadcast Centre Gallery The Exchange Tower 130 King Street West (Viewing area outside venue) – from 7pm to sunrise.
Monopoly with Real Money, 2009
IAIN BAXTER& - Windsor, Canada
Performance Art, Multimedia Installation
Money becomes a conceptual and tactile medium as Toronto celebrities play the iconic real estate board game throughout the night at the TSX. This timely restaging of the artist’s 1973 event draws an eerie connection between the 1970s era-defining recession and today’s market meltdown. Monopoly, patented during the Great Depression, gains new relevance with every boom-and-bust cycle. Does it provide an escape from the grim reality of stock-market crashes and factory layoffs, or offer a training ground for the next generation of would-be entrepreneurs? See how unlikely combinations of artists, musicians, journalists, authors, media personalities, and (yes!) financiers and developers vie for prize properties in an uncertain investment climate—all played in cold, hard cash.
2009,
23:45 GMT
One Big Post About Reality TV BootCamp
Posted by: Hal
Okay so I’ve had a few days since I’ve been back to wrap my mind around the whole reality tv boot-camp thing. I’m going to write about my feelings regarding the camp and what I saw and did there. But first, to give you a sense of the vibe, here are three videos I shot on my cell phone capturing three of the different workshops that were put on during the course of the weekend.
So here’s Paul Grassi who finished 3rd on the 5th season of the now defunct reality show The Mole. Paul is talking to us about strategy and leading us through a session about how we might come off on first impressions and how that might improve or impair our chances in a game-type tv situation. Paul’s an interesting guy who seems pretty cool. He’s shooting a documentary about what happens to people after Reality TV. I’m keen to see how it comes together. Despite his enthusiastic appearances at the boot-camp, I got the sense that the overall slant of the documentary isn’t going to be very positive.
And here’s Marcellas Reynolds, who was a contestant on Big Brother series 3 and 7. Reynolds was pretty funny, talking about how he made it on to Big Brother because they were looking for either a black guy or a gay guy to round out the cast. Since he’s gay and black, he was a shoe-in! Reynolds did a nice job of not taking himself too seriously while talking to us. He claimed, and I’m not sure how serious he was about this, that at the end of the day he might have been better off career-wise if he had never been on Big Brother, because people now see him as a Reality TV guy and that limits his options.
Finally here’s Josh Harris, the subject of the documentary We Live in Public. Harris is a crazy visionary who, among other things, wired up an apartment so that he and his girlfriend (who he now claims was a recruited performance artist, though she says they were really in love) could broadcast their ongoing lives. This was way before Jennifer Ringley and the rise of webcams. At boot-camp, Harris talked to us about his new vision of a wired world that links everyone and everything, creating constant broadcast and product placement interfaces (like, for instance, when you brush your teeth). We got into quite a heated discussion about the moral implications of turning everyone’s lives into entertainment/advertisement. It will be interesting to see if Harris ever gets his project off the ground and what happens next.
So my assessment of boot-camp. First off, I met great people. The attendees were way more interesting than I had thought they’d be. These were not stupid or boring people. Some of them are doggedly pursuing a goal that’s hardly worth the effort, but they weren’t anything like the dumb, dull and desperate I was worried they’d be. It was also an older crowd than I would have guessed. Here we have older, mostly mature people who nevertheless seem to be pursuing what many of us think of as basically a live action board-game. So what makes someone like a former police chief want to be on Survivor bad enough to have tried out 7 times and spend more than a 1000 dollars on a weekend boot-camp? According to him, it’s the challenge. Dig deeper and I think there’s a lot more going on there. In many of the people I spoke with, I sensed a yearning for some experience that could somehow make sense of life. A desire for an experience that would transcend the everyday and even provide a fleeting moment of immortality (aka celebrity).
The second thing that surprised me: I enjoyed myself. We were encouraged to ham it up and I got right into it. The role playing, the skits, the developing your personal narrative: it was like summer camp meets spiritual retreat meets this-is-your-life. It was a compelling, distracting mixture of ingredients that kept you on your toes. Everyday we got a challenge that we had to surreptitiously perform. Mine were 1) to sing a love song to one of the other participants, a challenge I accomplished by insisting I sing a love song when were divided up and told to come up with a skit to perform in front of the group and 2) to pitch my new book in front of everybody. That was easy, I did it before karaoke night, offering up a copy of the Peep book to the best singer/performer and proceeding to detail its many excellent attributes. Anyway, it was all very diverting and entertaining.
Which brings us to number 3: the whole event was very fun and interesting. Eliminate the Reality TV aspect and you’ve got a nice adults-go-back-to-summer-camp weekend going. But Reality TV was, in the end, the relentless focus. The people attending were, for the most part, very very serious about their goal: to get on a big name show like Survivor or Amazing Race or Big Brother, and win. This disturbed me for all the reasons I’m already skeptical of Reality TV and its allure. So did organizer Robert Galinsky and his team at the end of the day use Reality TV to sell a false dream of celebrity and adventure? I put that question to Galinsky when we finally got to sit down together and talk on camera. He answered honestly. He told me he didn’t really care much for Reality TV. He called it “a cancer”. But, he said, if people really want to go for it, he wants to help them. I accept Galinsky’s answer as genuine. People will try out for Reality TV and put themselves in bad situations whether or not the New York Reality School is operating. And from what I’ve seen Galinsky can prepare them, at least somewhat, for what realizing their ambitions might entail. And if, as will be the case for the bulk of us at the camp, a participant doesn’t ever make it on a show, the boot-camp is fun and a genuine opportunity to make new friends, develop new confidence and skills and look at your life from a different perspective.
At the same time, as I told Galinsky, I think there needs to be more of an open and obvious critique of Reality TV in his curriculum. I believe that too many people left that weekend retreat empowered to try out for Reality TV and pursue their goals, but not necessarily empowered to ask questions about why they want to be on Reality TV so very very badly.
In the end, we graduates were milling about, dazed and confused, organizing rides to the city or the airport. We hugged each other, promised to keep in touch, and made noises about a one-year reality tv boot-camp reunion. I’ll be there if it happens. Will any of us get on a show? The sun was setting over the desert and I, for one, was sad to leave my new pals, but happy to heading back to real life.
The Bloggist
Hey, I’m Hal Niedzviecki. I’m a writer/thinker who lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada with my wife and daughter. Up till now I’ve always considered myself a private person. But at the same time I’m fascinated by people who effortlessly open themselves up to the whole world. So I’ve… more...
Ghostbuster zines from the Canzine Hollywood Piracy Zine Challenge are now online! http://t.co/RoAMEQTU
EXPOZINE 2011, Montreal’s 10th Annual Small Press, Comic and Zine Fair—http://t.co/3ISW3Ovx http://t.co/FlLfB6hk
Tag Cloud
Archive Months
February, 2011
January, 2011
December, 2010
November, 2010
October, 2010
September, 2010