an accounting: 4 questions and 21 audiences @ the new year

First thing first: did you know I am pretty sporty?

I mean, nothing like my Grandma Janet, who was actually a tennis pro (and my mother and I think younger than I am now in the photo I found of her in Suzanne’s apartment). But then again, I did row crew in college.

I only took this photo because my gay male acolytes told me that it might help my numbers (and up my visibility). And honestly, I don’t care about that. I haven’t cared (with Sarah Banet-Weiser) about self-branding or about virality (given its virility) over the many decades I’ve been writing about and on the internet. Or more precisely, I care not to.

What I do care about is how to live during this interval between election and inauguration. Writing on this blog has been a self-care practice—with an audience, and a politics. A self-imposed practice: online but following another set of protocols. Its rigidity gives me structure; its purpose gives me fortitude. The online audience: a (sick, dark, misguided, complicated) residual of this para-professional activity.

Secondly. Is a tennis class an audience? I say, no. I’ve spent about five weeks asking this question of the 21 groups that I’ve joined in search of sustenance since November 20. Once I deem a group blog-worthy, this is the follow up: what are this unique audience’s affordances?

The tennis class I took today stayed too personal, and almost entirely apolitical (I did wear my Brooklyn College hat and VOCAL NY shirt as bat signals), to be the kind of audience that I seek in this confusing interval between election and inauguration. I’m not saying that I shouldn’t do this delightful act of self-care, nor that self-care won’t be critical for us all after the inauguration. But I am trying to learn more about how to gear up with others. How to use our bodies, the digital, our words, actions, and connections to care, resist, and get by, communally. I have learned a lot during this personal practice, and I have learned it by blogging about it on this nearly moribund platform where my audience stays small, I work hard, and I stay present, focused, and respectful to a variety of groups and gatherings.

For the final eighteen days before the inauguration, I don’t really want to keep asking these questions and doing this practice. It’s exhausting and I’ve done a lot and learned a lot.

So third, an accounting: Where did I go? What did I do? What have I learned by joining diverse groups of people and writing with attention and close consideration?

1. Nov. 20: Blogs and/as Time: On “The Clock,” Twice. MoMA.
   • This week’s viewing of The Clock was a much-needed reminder that technologies are not always cruel (or digital); that cinema is both a time storage and re-invigorating device of real help to humans.
2. Nov 21. they are lost to vision altogether: gay male films and AIDS. BAM.
   • It is neither the cinema, video, the microphone nor the blog that I champion, but rather the use of extended and connected, situated expression to fight for, stay alive in, and be present for the people who we love. … in hopes of building more enduring links that we can use in struggle
3. Nov. 23: Get thee to a …. A film lecture at Columbia about the afterlives of slavery.
   • I say get thee to an historian! not for truth but because being in their presence, as they perform their very difficult labor of transmitting untold hours of research about some far-flung residual of previous human experience into digestible depictions, is an antidote to both AI doing that badly and/or the quick turnaround of today’s chattering opining classes doing it too quickly and often for reasons that perpetuate or grow the very darkness under review.
4. Nov. 24: The audience (2): at MIX Fest 2024. Black queer and trans films.
   • One way to live in a time of transition, change, waiting, and uncertainty is to go there, be there, take it in, the interval, help make it our own, momentarily and together.
   • I am suggesting that an audience one can join by being in and of a set of human receptive devices is not the same things as the audience one has been trained to want (especially via social media). One is a lived fact; the other an organizing fiction! One is made by comrades; the other is made for capital!
5. Nov. 27: On the (virtual) audience. A Zoom Memorial.
   • Unlike the projection of an “audience” we have been programmed to seek on social media, or perhaps from an (un)responsive God, the imagined but felt crowd of a virtual memorial online co-viewing accrues strength and meaning not from number, or even concrete evidence, but from a heartfelt service to the needs of some and the memory of others.
6. Dec. 2: The audience as community: Visual AIDS. The Whitney Museum. Day With (out) Art
   • audience as community, can also occur with most any group who meets in persistent, movement-centered groups affirming the lived experience of the most affected, while learning from and connecting to history, and using the time we make together to feel, care, listen, and claim what is good, what is needed, and what we can aspire for even, or perhaps most importantly, in the most uncertain times
7. Dec. 5: Audience as community (2): World AIDS Day@Brooklyn College
   • An audience can be a community when:
     • power, knowledge, and vulnerability are distributed
     • connections and differences between individuals are acknowledged and respected
     • a named political, social, cultural, or institutional goal hails and connects
     • work is made and shown and discussed with an articulated objective
     • there are opportunities to speak and to listen
     • food or drink is enjoyed
     • there is time and opportunity to be social
     • history enters the screen
     • next steps are possible
8. Dec. 6: activist video @Media Burn Archive. On Zoom. Susan Mogul featured.
   • small enough to stay known; built through and about history but alive in this present; dependent on political or artistic commitment; dialogic; and “outside the mainstream.” Feminist praxis: not just what is made but how it is done, in own own communities, about our own experiences, using the means available, and then doing this again, but updated, when we need it.
9. Dec 8: No feral femmes for me. Nowhere. When is not going a kind of care?
   • When I missed the night of perversity in two acts, I care in other ways: through intentional and community-minded absence. This is different from but I think related to that act of faith imagining co-presence with an unseen but loving (virtual) audience.
10. Dec. 9: art & audience at the intersection: mercedes 1. BAM, interactive performance.
    • Our participation included verbs and nouns: where being an audience is so many doings, and being a person is the multitude we are.
11. Dec. 10: the positive (virtual) audience (2): What would an HIV Doula Do?. 2 meetings on Zoom.
    • The affordances of this virtual audience intermix information acquisition with human connection, emotion, and empathy activated in a digital space, and propulsive enough to inspire deep identification and more production.
    • The questions become less: online, off, or hybrid? Virtual or embodied? Lecture or support group? And more: what do we need in a discrete instance of human connection, and how can we better distinguish between and use technologies to equip and sustain us?
12. Dec. 11: meta: one feminist reading group. At a friend’s home.
    • When is the Meta©/meta not a downfall? How can we be delighted by our evil twin (within?) If I start by looking at my worst self (not the ideal communities that feed me), what do I see? how is or could be social media the audience as community for the interval?
13. Dec. 13: audience in context: praise, sorrow, hisses & shouts. Whitney Museum and City Center.
    • a work of art (by Alvin Ailey) shifts depending on where and how you engage it. The same is true for the audience.
14. Dec. 15: In attendance: audience as transpersonal. Film screenings in NY small venues.
    • Mustapha’s film focuses on circular patterns of witness and attention. Annette and Uma frame their filmmaking and screenings to include looks back at the filmmaker. I highlight the reciprocity of connection via attendance: a generative exchange; a transpersonal gift.
15. Dec. 16: spirit capture. Hybrid performance at Joe’s Pub and Zoom by Dan Fishback.
    • protocols for access, crip aesthetics, build audiences where our imperfections make us human, stagings deeply woven into the one I/we are making altogether, online and off, with our many pandemic technologies of care.
16. Dec. 17: the audience as village. Soho Rep, Tribeca. Carmelita Tropicana.
    • An audience is a community, when it is in/a village. When going and showing allows for known encounters in a charged scene of recognition, respect, and attention. This has almost nothing to do with how that happens online. Neither the internet, nor social media, can not be a village because they pretend to be universal, they are built on this and other deceptions and misrecognitions, they are porous and leaky while striving to balloon, and they are built on roads and with enclosures by and for capital.
    • Going there to be and see each other in a small audience is a goodness. It is another way of “being in the world,” an act of solidarity, care, community, and respect. Our Villages will be part of how we see and save each other. But we must dream beyond minimal transport (the delight of the night) to better see and then name the tools of our own power.
17. Dec 18: inter-generational hijack: the village (2). A walk in the Village with Theodore Kerr.
    • But friendships can also be technologies of witnessing; as is being in an audience; as is writing about being in an audience; as is reading someone’s now extensive writing (on a blog) about being in an audience.
18. Dec. 25: forgetful and respectful. Hanukkah gathering, Boulder, CO with my child and mother.
    • Groups and gatherings, their audiences and speakers, can be places of empathy and attention, across both differences and memory’s distances.
19. Dec 26: white heads, Black film. BAM. Nickel Boys.
    • More a relay than a singular event, taking up a space in the audience of anti-racist cinema, and continuing this elsewhere, can be part of a process of discovering the other.
20. Dec. 28: festival of lights: 2nd time’s a charm. Angelika Theater and a private home.
    • A party becomes an audience through a shared focus on something bigger than the individual, or even the intense connection of two, through a set of processes to guide our attention and connection. Why we so often need a piece of art or a sermon, some food or a shared problem, a person or a lecture, to make that vital shift.
      • The audience as attentive and loving and captive witness.
      • The audience, a group that helps to bear the dark.
21. Dec. 30: an audience of gay men. Julius bar, West Village, NY.
    • Audience lesson as per C. James: “Who is this for–?” “Today it is for us.”
      • Audience lesson: sometimes the apostles have good advice, heed them.
      • Audience lesson as per Lemembel: queering expectations, breaking rules of engagement, inventing new modes of discourse against the grains of propriety, deliver wonders and behaviors outside of capital, hetero-patriarchy, and neoliberalism.

Fourth: So, now what?

I’ll let you know. Or feel free to help activate the more interactive affordances of social media by dropping me a suggestion (in the comments on the blog, Facebook, Instagram, or bluesky!)