Tuesday, May 18, 2010

space, place and moby

i wanted to talk about what i learnt today but instead made an exciting discovery when i chose moby as my background music for the afternoon.
i bought the cassette a while ago from an op shop but only played suzie quattro and the violent femmes when i got home and moby was to wait for a later date. so this afternoon i listened to the majority of it happily until i sat on the heater vent and took out the sleeve which to my delight contained an essay by moby!! reading it i discovered this is a thing he does for his records, but with me not being a regular mody-cd-buyer i was not aware. he talked about how he put the record together and that he had to choose 18 out of 150 songs, also mentioning that he has written about 3,000 unreleased songs which i find astonishing, possibly because i've never been able to write poetry and i'm not really musically gifted (performance-wise let alone composition). he also talked about his beliefs and how they've changed and why; the reasons that caused him to rethink the way he views life and what is important to him and how others beliefs affect him. it was such an interesting and honest insight and seemed so human even on paper. i felt he was genuinely sharing what he has come to realise with me because he actually wants me to know. as i finished reading, the tape stopped and i felt better for it all.
what i learnt today was that the spacial turn is about space and place as being socially constructed, where it is no longer seen as an inert container in which action takes place. this was in relation to the queering of public space which i am finding very interesting although at some points i still get confused. it's difficult to give new meanings to words you are so comfortable using in the way you originally learnt to use them. discussing which spaces are policed made me so aware of how heteronormative educational institutions (especially primary and secondary) and families are. one person in tute mentioned that a woman had told her children that homosexuals existed, just that they weren't some of them. both this and silencing and ignoring non-heterosexual possibilities is just as bad as condemning their existence.

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