K I P W O R L D

Tickled pink: the year behind, the year ahead.

2012-01-07T12:56:00.012Z

"How breakthroughs come, and the price people pay for them".

It certainly has been a productive and eventful year for me. After more than five years of scheming, planning, cajoling, compromising and plain hard work, our efforts to produce Rufus Stone the movie culminated with the premiere of the film at Bournemouth University in November.

Bringing this concept of a ‘performative social science’ to fruition in such a major way (£226K of funding by Research Councils UK and three years of research by a dedicated but small team supported by citizen advisors) certainly was a milestone personally. Working on the film production with director, Josh Appignanesi and Parkville Pictures, along with what to me seemed a huge cast and crew of more than 45 talented individuals for a 30-minute film, was the icing on the cake. The week of location shoots in rural Dorset and surrounding counties (thank you, SATNAV) in July was truly a personal learning experience I will never forget. The response that the film received at the premiere was reassuring and heart-warming.

I can only look to the year ahead with many more screenings of Rufus Stone, both for citizens in rural communities as well as in film festivals and at a few conferences. It should prove reassuring to all of us for our faith in the project and all of the hard work that went into making it happen.

Something else happened late this year, however, that tickled me pink.

More than ten years ago now, when I was living in a bedsit in Leicester and had just finished my PhD, I decided to write a conference presentation about Ken Gergen and Klaus Riegel. Both scholars played important roles in the development of my thinking for my thesis. During this time I came across a volume (Life-span Developmental Psychology Dialectical Perspectives on Experimental Research, edited by Nancy Datan & Hayne W. Reese,published by Academic Press 1977) that was a result of the Fifth West Virginia University Life-Span Developmental Psychology Conference held at Morgantown, West Virginia in 1976. The conference centred on the work of Riegel and the book included a chapter by Gergen.

My imagination got the best of me. What if these two, both influences on my own work, had a conversation following that gathering? As I recently explained, reported in a Times Higher Education article, "Gergen is a giant to our generation, so it was good to look back to a time when he was insecure...I wanted to examine how breakthroughs come, and the price people pay for them". Thus, “On a train from Morgantown” was born.

It seems a short time ago now, but we must not forget that in 2001 digital production was limited, at the personal computer level at least. I found video-cassette recorded footage of trains that would have been in service in West Virginia in 1976 then convinced a techy at my university to help me cut and edit it. I wrote a script (much like a radio play) and found people to record it on cassette tape (one in Germany, the rest in Leicester). I produced overhead projections for some of the visuals and created lots of sound files and edited music (again, on cassette) to fill out the imaginary train journey.

I packed up all these production materials and caught the ferry to Hamburg and then a train to Berlin and a conference at the Free University to present my grand production … to an audience that would include Mary and Ken Gergen. When my allotted time came, I spent it dashing about starting up a TV, co-ordinating a cassette player, an overhead projector, etc.—a bit like the Wizard of Oz behind his curtain.

Ken Gergen responded quite emotionally following all of this. The mostly German-speaking audience seemed a bit confused by it all.

I recall this as a bit of madness on my part at the time, but also in many ways as the public birth of performative social science, or at least the seeds for its future development. Being a visual person, I wanted to ‘show’ as well as ‘tell’--and this frustration became central to my efforts in developing PSS.

Because publication is/was the end-all of an academic’s life, I began to think about how to possibly publish ‘Morgantown’. Because of my visual inclinations, I thought that a film script with all of its optical instructions might do the trick. So I wrote ‘Morgantown’ up as a screenplay, looking at many scripts in order to get a sense of how to present a visual story as text. A bit of a Pollyanna at publication, I actually submitted the script to a few publications which I naively thought might be adventurous enough to publish it. They were not and it was rejected.

I put ‘Morgantown’ in a drawer somewhere and so it languished for almost a decade. About a year ago, the editor of a special issue on the work of Ken Gergen for Springer’s Psychological Studies contacted me and asked if I would be interested in submitting a paper for the issue. I responded that, yes, I do have something that may be fit for purpose. Go ahead, I told myself: ‘I dare you.’ I submitted the script for 'Morgantown'.

To my great surprise, the submission was accepted with little change and now is published as a film script in the special issue on Ken Gergen in Psychological Studies. In my estimation, this represents a great breakthrough for Performative Social Science, or the use of tools from the arts in dissemination of social science research. It gives others a reference in support of their own work in moving academic publishers to being more open, even inviting, to alternative presentation formats.

Two major events, one year. Rufus Stone is so important to me personally and a concerted effort of which I am very proud. I am grateful to all involved in making this happen. The initial resistance of some to its subject matter in fact played a major part in driving me forward and insuring that I did not give up.

‘Morgantown’ and its eventual acceptance holds a special place for me, however. In so many ways it represents ‘working in the dark’ against unknown forces and circumstances, but still being driven by our muses to create and invent.

Morgantown represents what I like to call ‘kitchen sink’ work—work produced because creativity compels us to find the means, the ways, the materials and then the outlets. I never want to forget that it is in these personal efforts the potential to make a difference lies.

Some of the responses to the publication of ‘Morgantown’ are repeated below. They convince me that efforts to open up channels previously closed to innovation and experimentation are not unfounded and offer support and encouragement to others:

· Congratulations. This is really amazing. Thank you for your courage. And for the work that you are doing for all of us.

· It’s just wonderful to see the glimpse of barriers breaking down between interdisciplinary research and innovative work. Well done!! It is happening a step at a time and we just need to keep on pushing those boundaries.

· breaks the waves for academics like me
dreaming of more than the written words
to portray researched life

· I got very inspired, though, when reading about your publication as I share PSS' engagement and ambition to intensify publications moving in between arts/social sciences/performance …I say/shout "GREAT!!!" from Copenhagen! Thank you for sharing!!

· I continue to watch your career with great interest and derive much hope for my own work from your example.

· fantastique!!! gives me hope

· Think it is really important to share this kind of news as it gives all of us who research in creative ways hope!

· A massive achievement in the current climate!

· This is fantastic … and I received this just perfect for our course in qualitative research methodologies where I am teaching narrative and performative approaches. Will use your article as a brand new example and hope to encourage some of our students to be more daring!

Rufus Stone

2011-11-14T08:32:00.006Z

From the programme for Rufus Stone the movie which premièred on 16 November in Bournemouth after more than five years of preparation:

Kip Jones (Executive Producer and Project Lead). Kip Jones was born in a trunk in the Princess Theatre in Pocatella, Idaho. Not really, but that old Judy Garland tune has had its effect on him. As a child, Jones loved finding large cardboard cartons, cutting a hole in them, crawling inside and putting on a show for neighbours and family members. In spite of recent academic achievement and success, he still insists on putting the razzle-dazzle back into scholarly outputs. Theatrical haze is his favourite device.

Harry Kershaw, Josh Appignanesi, Martha Myers-Lowe, Tom Kane at the world premiere of Rufus Stone in Bournemouth, Nov 2011.

“No horses were frightened in the making of this motion picture”

2011-09-11T14:27:00.002+01:00

Actor Tom Kane, who plays the role of young “Flip” in Rufus Stone, relaxing between takes.

Just to be clear: I’m not a wigs and whistles kind of guy. That is, I have never fancied a day out at a gay pride parade. All right for some, but for me the idea of being gay, even celebrating it, is not about being ‘outrageous’ in public for an afternoon and then thinking I have won over some disbelievers or bigots.

With my serious mortarboard on: How does such activity open up dialogue, located in human interactions and their social contexts? How does it promote inter-subjectivity, being-together, the encounter and the social construction of meaning?

Frankly, simply writing about that sort of approach does not seem to me to have changed some attitudes either.

Perhaps making a film with the intent of beginning to change hearts and minds is, ironically, a middle ground: an activity somewhere between ‘Shout it loud; I’m gay and proud!’ and tedious intellectual rhetoric published in unread journal articles.

Five years ago, I thought I would give it a try, anyway. This is when the scheming for the film, Rufus Stone, began. Could we, through the use of film, both set to one side typical critical response to academic research and, instead use the outputs of that research to create a place for shared dialogue amongst the very citizens that the research is about? By sharing stories, could we all warm up a bit around the communal campfire?

The personal irony of taking this ‘road less travelled’ has been that the process has made me somewhat more militant. Much of my newfound exasperation with ignorance has been ignited by some of the responses to our proposed film, its story and (importantly academically) the findings from the in-depth research in which our script is grounded.

A tendency towards denial continues to astound me. Included in the storyline of Rufus Stone is a prevalence of suicide amongst older gay men, frequently reported in both our biographic interviews and a focus group as well as in the press. When this is mentioned, a typical response is, “Well, that may be so for their generation, you know, older gays”. I ask, “Why then is there an international campaign to raise awareness of the increase of suicides amongst gay youth?” This fact is typically met with silence. (For example: 'Gay Buffalo Teen Commits Suicide ...')

The British do not like to seem to be complaining. Brits often will silently endure a poorly served restaurant meal rather than object to bad service. Bring up a subject like gay rights, prejudice against gay and lesbian citizens often leading to isolation, even despair and harm amongst many older community members and the British penchant for avoiding awkward conversations goes into overdrive. The dialogue typically goes something like this:

“I doubt that there are any in our village, anyway. We hold traditional values in our community”.

“Well, we don’t care what these folks get up to exactly as long as they don’t do it around here”.

“We have grandchildren. We need to protect our values for their sake”.

A phrase that is well over one hundred years old now is often repeated in these conversations as a response to calls for understanding and compassion towards gay and lesbian citizens. When a Victorian actor showed too much affection for the leading man, actress, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, replied: ‘My dear, I don't care what they do, so long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses’. The fact that a Victorian attitude frozen in time is today seen as an ‘amusing’ response to an ‘uncomfortable’ conversation simply boggles the mind. ‘Traditional values’ such as tolerance and fair play seem to have no place in this version of community standards. The lark ascending, indeed.

That line, ‘We don’t care what you do as long as you don’t do it in the road and frighten the horses’ is included in the script of Rufus Stone. It is delivered in a speech excusing village attitudes, even making light of a plea for compassion. In the next scene, the lead character discovers that his boyhood friend has just hung himself. The point of this juxtapositioning in the storyline is to emphasise that what we say often does have consequences, often, serious ones.

Now for some good news. Between takes of the scene described above, I was waiting with some of the young crew, sheltering ourselves from a sudden shower behind a van packed with leads and sundry cinematic equipment. The boom operator, Dan, fresh from film school with an unbridled enthusiasm for his role, factiously quizzed me. “So Kip. Are horses afraid of gay people?”

We all laughed.

“It is less painful to learn in youth than to be ignorant in age”.

—Proverb

A summer holiday, three books and a story

2011-08-20T09:28:00.016+01:00

I left New York for Philadelphia on an early morning train and never heard from Jason again.

Group portrait taken at Andy Warhol's Factory (Warhol is fourth left, in the bottom row) New York, New York, March 6, 1968. Pictured are, left to right, bottom row: Johnathan Lieberson, Andreas Brown, Penelope Tree, Andy Warhol, Catherine Milinaire, and Jason Fishbein; second row: Lil Picard, Frances Steloff, Lita Hornick, Al Hansen, Viva, Charles Henri Ford, Kenneth King, and Ruth Ford; third row: Bruce Miller, Buddy Wurthshafter, Ultra Violet, Taylor Mead, Jack Smith, Sally Chamberlain, Wynn Chamberlain, Ron Zimardi, Ken Jacobs, Florence Jacobs, and Maurice Hogenbaum; back row: Bob Cowan, Fred Hughes, Paul Morrissey, Donna Kerness, John Wilcock, and Willoughby Sharp. (Photo by Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images)

I treasure my solitude but choose a table for ten on my holidays. It encourages me to interact. Even on vacations, I am quite content with my own company. My dining arrangement is always, therefore, full of surprises—for me and certainly for my tablemates.

Getting away from Rufus Stone the movie for a few weeks provided a good percolator for what is next for the film. I also wanted to think about my future, where I would like to be a year from now and what I might be doing then.

Three books helped with this process.

I began with Patti Smith’s Just Kids, a book recommended to me by Mary Gergen. I was soon turned off, however, by Smith’s approach to her own story and her conviction that she was the only child to ever grow up feeling slightly different or alienated. I thought that was what childhood was about. When she referenced Proust in the midst of her tales of preteen angst in New Jersey, I put the book aside and turned to Michael Kimble’s slim volume, Us.

I am a great fan of Kimble’s writing (I refer to his and the work of some of the other writers whom he has interviewed as ‘the new writing’). I often recommend his books to fellow academics as a kind of intellectual colonic irrigation for the scholar’s literary outpourings.

This will not be a review of Kimble’s book, but just to say that it is the first book I have read in a long, long time that, when it ended, I wished it hadn’t. His ability to describe minutia precisely in a conversational tone is astonishing. Kimble is someone at whom Proust would have smiled. He constructs, through simple sentences, complex situations and ideas. He is particularly skilful at describing innermost thoughts and feelings and the meniscus that both separates and joins those two intertwining elements in our lives. I love his writing.

I then turned to a quite silly book about Truman Capote entitled, Party of the Century (that would be the last Century) by Deborah Davis. Perhaps I should explain why I was reading this book before I loose all credibility here. There are definite reasons for my reading it, which can only be explained in my usual tangential style and detail. Please indulge me.

Firstly, I am giving a party next month for the cast and crew of Rufus Stone the movie. I was so impressed by how hard they all worked for little or no money the week of the film shoot that I wanted to thank them personally. As Mildred Pierce said, ‘Let’s get stinko’ and I thought that we should gather again to celebrate.

In 1966 Capote, when not comparing his own talents to Proust’s, was spending months and months planning and plotting his black and white masquerade ball at the Plaza Hotel in New York. The event was to be a celebration for nearly 400 of his ‘closest’ friends to mark the huge success of his book, In Cold Blood, supposedly. It turns out that creating the guest list was just as much of a production of preparation as the party itself. One detail that particularly fascinated me is that he would not permit anyone invited to bring a husband, wife or partner if both parties were not on his guest list. Instead, Capote invited a ‘hundred extra men’ to ‘partner’ lone women guests.

This is where Jason Fishbein comes in.

My story here relates to our story of Rufus Stone in that this simple country boy (me) went to the big city (Philadelphia) way back when (then) and enrolled in art studies (Philadelphia College of Art). Philadelphia has more art students per capita than any other place on the planet.

I met Jason who had graduated from another of the city’s art schools that year, having just completed a year’s sojourn in Europe on a fellowship. He was a star of the student art world and the son of the owners of Philadelphia’s very exclusive (and oldest) jewellery store. He was living at the time in a townhouse with the owner of the city’s trendiest and most popular gay bar where he conveniently had a studio in the atelier. In fact, the first time I ever nervously entered a gay establishment was in the daytime when the bars were closed to help Jason remove some paintings from his studio above the building’s three uninterrupted étages of gaiety.

He was handsome, talented, so sophisticated, slightly older than me and about to embark on a career move to a New York City West Side loft. Oh, and he listened to show music. I was overcome with glee! At that time I was not so sure of my own sexuality, but certain that Jason was attractive. He made overtures to me, but I shyly fended them off, nonetheless continuing to fawn over him at every chance I got. I was dazed and confused, but certainly smitten.

I offered to help him make the move to his New York loft. We packed up a rental van and left for NYC and a real West Side loft situated in an old industrial building with worn wooden floors, lots of windows and little else. The grimness and decay of this particular West Side neighbourhood was never reflected in West Side Story that was for sure. Jason had crammed the van with paintings, a chandelier, bags of clothes, a small refrigerator full of booze (from the bar I assumed) and some mattresses. After the unpacking, drinking and merriment, we (Jason, a young woman who always seemed to be hanging around him, and a male friend of Jason’s from New York who met us at the loft to help) settled down to sleep on mattresses on the loft floor that night. Jason bedded me with this other guy and put himself on the mattress next to the girl because she was feigning fright at her first night in the “big city”. I knew little of the subtleties of social manipulation back then but quickly learned that night.

Without going into detail, I spent the long night on the floor of that loft pushing this stranger off of me. I was very upset that Jason had put me to bed with this unfamiliar person as some sort of loft house-warming gift for his friend instead choosing me for himself. As a reluctant, shy country boy, I reminisce that I would have finally been ready to ‘give in’ to Jason that night, if he had shared his bed with me instead.

With little sleep and cast off in such a cavalier way, I left New York for Philadelphia on an early morning train and never heard from Jason again. I returned to my girlfriend in Philadelphia, turning my back on the complexities of a world that I was yet to understand. My relationship with a woman seemed a simpler solution, except for the ever-increasing awareness of the painful dishonesty of our situation, of which I was becoming more and more conscious. (Who’s invoking Proust now?)

A few months later I opened the newspaper to see a photo of Jason on the front page with the inscription, “Jason Fishbein, artist, whose mask was a sensation at the Capote ball at the Plaza last night”. Jason had “arrived” in New York.

Recently by chance, I came across a photo from 1968 of Andy Warhol and his entourage, taken by top photographer of the 60’s counter-culture, Fred McDarrah. Sitting at the far right on Warhol’s left in the front row was Jason Fishbein. I guess he did okay after his success at the ball as well.

I was really curious about what had happened to him since then and that is why I wanted to read Party of the Century. Jason isn’t mentioned in the book by name, unfortunately, but his having been one of Capote’s “single escorts” now seems conceivable. I assume that in Capote’s Upper East Side world of New York high society, inviting gay males to such an upscale party needed some sort of plausible ‘social justification’ and Capote had come up with this rather bizarre solution.

What is the purpose of this story? Well, I suppose it is to say once more that being gay and stories about being gay are never straight forward (no pun intended) or simple. Our life stories are played out in an entrenched heterosexual culture and society, which often produces not only our angst, insecurities and complexes, but also the variety and richness of alternative lives and lifestyles as solutions for many of us.

No Patti, being a Tomboy is not life’s only young struggle.

Rufus Stone: Reports from locations, Part 2

2011-08-01T08:09:00.002+01:00

Rufus Stone: Reports from location, Part 2

Video by Trevor Hearing

About this video:
"A second location report about the set of the film Rufus Stone, directed by Josh Appignanesi. Rufus Stone is a film about love, sexual awakening and treachery, set in the bucolic countryside of south west England, and viewed through the lens of growing older. It is based on knowledge gathered as part of the research project "Gay and Pleasant Land? - a study about positioning, ageing and gay life in rural South West England and Wales." The project has been funded by the UK Research Councils. The research has been led by the film's Executive Producer, Dr Kip Jones."

Rufus Stone: Reports from location, Part 1

2011-07-30T10:31:00.002+01:00

Rufus Stone: Reports from location, Part 1

Video by Trevor Hearing

About this video:
"A location report about the film Rufus Stone, directed by Josh Appignanesi. Rufus Stone is a film about love, sexual awakening and treachery, set in the bucolic countryside of south west England, and viewed through the lens of growing older. It is based on knowledge gathered as part of the research project "Gay and Pleasant Land? - a study about positioning, ageing and gay life in rural South West England and Wales." The project has been funded by the UK Research Councils. The research has been led by the film's Executive Producer, Dr Kip Jones."

Rufus Stone: nascita/finale

2011-07-28T13:30:00.002+01:00

The road from inception of the idea to the making of the film, 'Rufus Stone', has been a long one. This video represents that beginning in scholarship and inspiration and ending in art.

A page from my notebook inscribes the first time I thought of 'Rufus Stone' as the character and the title for the film. Some of the books that I consumed along the journey are included in the shot.

During the shoot of the final scene for the film I remarked how the process of capturing the scene was a small film in itself and began filming on my tiny Canon camera. It reminded me of Fellini, but also of a ballet, the crew and equipment as dancers. Minghella's 'Butterfly' also came to mind and his use of character movement across a static horizonal platform.

'Rufus Stone' the movie goes into post-production shortly. I wanted to capture here, however, the spirit of the making of that film and represent what it meant to me emotionally.

Music: Puccini's "Elegy for String Quartet - Crisantemi"

Follow Rufus Stone the movie on its blog.

‘What goes around, comes around’ or Making a movie again.

2011-07-01T11:23:00.013+01:00

Assembly Room, Independence Hall, Philadelphia PA

I have dined out for years on my story of being on the set when John Huston directed the short film, Independence, shot in 1976 by 20^th Century Fox for the US National Park Service in Philadelphia. The film starred Ken Howard as Thomas Jefferson, Patrick O’Neil as George Washington, Anne Jackson as Abigail Adams and Eli Wallach as Benjamin Franklin.

At the time, I was doing a course in Museum Studies at Independence National Park and the course leader asked if I would like to represent the Museum on the shoot. I guess I was supposed to make sure that none of the priceless historical antiques were damaged. Of course, I agreed, simply to be present during the filming.

We are currently moving through pre-production and into the shoot of our short film, Rufus Stone and this reminds me of that other film in my distant past. In some ways, Huston’s production staff had it easier, because their locations were all within a few city blocks of each other and the furnishings already correct and in place.

We are finding that shooting in rural Dorset and being true to our research on ageing, sexuality and rurality is not as easy. The myth of rural Britain is that it is comprised of restored thatched cottages, stately homes, and an Aga in every kitchen. Missing in the myth is much of the poverty that exists, the isolation, the downturns in and disappearance of ‘village life’, including scarce resources like post offices and even pubs. No one seems to walk in villages anymore; the car is King.

Many of the locations we are finding are former workers’ cottages joined together into one dwelling, their brickwork or whitewashed plaster scrubbed to within an inch of its life, thatch roofs plopped on top, and then the rear roof incline given that 21^st Century country house necessity, several skylights. Because part of our film represents the countryside in the 1950s, these dwellings become particularly problematic for us to film. Still, we are getting there, after several weeks of location scouting. The team has come up with some great places that really have the feel of the story. We strongly believe that the locations will tell the tale as much as any dialogue.

First sighting: John Huston

The scene: Independence Hall, Philadelphia

Characters: Members of the Continental Congress; men in white hose and wigs abound

Everything was in place to film the scene, the actors near the front of the Hall near the famous desk. Cast and crew were ready, equipment in place, waiting for John Huston to arrive.

The doors opened and in he came, escorted to a period chair set up just behind the camera with one of the Hall’s antique side tables next to it. On it was a Martini shaker, a glass and an ashtray. Huston took a moment to look through the lens of the camera without saying anything. He then sat, took a cigar out of his jacket pocket and lit it, sipped at his Martini and shouted, ‘Action!”

Needless to say, smoking, let alone drinking, was forbidden in Independence Hall. Somehow, Huston must have received a governmental dispensation. Since he had said ‘Action!’ I figured I couldn’t interfere; too late to exercise my lightweight, supposed powers as representative of the Museum, even if I had been brave enough to object.

After a few days, the interior scenes finished and filming moved to exterior shots outside of Carpenter’s Hall, with horses and carriages to manage through the narrow cobble street. There was much use of fog to give the scene a kind of period authenticity. I love a bit of theatrical haze so was quite excited by this effect.

On the next to the last day of the shoot, there was an unscheduled meeting of all cast and crew called for early morning in Independence Hall. We all gathered as requested. Huston made his entrance. This time he went to the front of the Hall and leaned against the table where the Declaration of Independence was signed.

A hush fell over the room as the bright lights placed in the south-facing windows replicating natural daylight were turned on. Huston began by telling the cast and crew that the production had run out of money to finish the film. He then continued his speech, peppering it by mentioning the founding fathers by name, the historical importance of the film and a bit on his love of show business thrown in for good measure. He appealed to cast and crew ‘as Americans’ to work for another day and a half, no more, for no pay. The assemblage applauded his speech at the finish and agreed to work on and film for free until the project was completed.

I am learning my role as Executive Producer of Rufus Stone on the job. I knew from the beginning that a big part of my role would be making sure that the Research Councils’ money is wisely spent. The second part is insuring that our film represents our three years of research on ageing, sexuality and rurality as truthfully as possible.

Turning research into a professional film is a big gamble on my part. I have been convinced of the possibilities of it for some time; now is the time to face the reality of it. One thing I am learning in the process is that small details matter: they can best represent the research ‘findings’, but also can be the first things that are overlooked or ignored in the creative rush of making a film. For this reason, I need to pay attention to decisions around locations, casting, costumes, interiors and so forth to insure that the details ring true to what we have uncovered in our investigation. It would be easy to ignore them in the heat of filmmaking. My job is to convince the filmmakers that they are not.

Art and Science are strange bedfellows. Or so it would seem. I have always believed, however, that the impulse to investigate and produce scientific discovery is the same compulsion that moves artists to create. For this reason, I am willing to gamble with our research, the Research Councils’ money and our film.

Who best to translate the excitement of discovery to an audience but an artist? How better to take sometimes dry and tedious data and transform it into story and action? Who better to help us to achieve impact on a wider public with our research findings than those who are capable of entertaining (‘instilling interest or consideration in an audience’) through art? This is the premise behind our current filmmaking efforts. A side benefit is that through the process we are picking up some additional skills as academics as well.

When Huston’s filming was done, the crew and cast packed up and gone, the Museum Director and I made an inspection around the Hall. The historical antiques were all in good nick, the room clean and tidy. We then took a stroll outside of the Hall. On the south side of the building where the banks of lights had been stacked on scaffolding two stories high to create a daylight effect streaming through the Georgian windows, we noticed something. The heat of the lights over several days of shooting had burnt off several layers of the official, historically correct, Independence Hall Colonial White No. 3 paint from all of the window frames.

I guess I was too busy getting caught up in the Hollywood of it all to notice this disaster.

Details, Kip. Details.

Rufus Stone the movie weblog goes live!

2011-06-04T09:57:00.007+01:00

Rufus Stone the movie | Rufus Stone – A film by Josh Appignanesi

The weblog for our short film, Rufus Stone, has just gone live!

It’s a virtual space for both background and updates on the short film, Rufus Stone, being produced as the major output of our three-year research project on being gay or lesbian, growing older and life in the British countryside.

We will be using the blog to update on the film’s progress over the next weeks and months, including daily video reports from the shoot in July.

Learn more about the project and the film on the blog and stay tuned for further developments from 'Hollywood on the Bourne'!

Check out the blog or join us on facebook.

Rufus Stone: 4 What have you done with Rufus?

2011-05-19T10:20:00.012+01:00

One of the frights/delights of writing background for Rufus Stone here is how easily the character takes over when I am writing him. I have heard and read about this phenomenon from fiction writers often, but never experienced it personally before. As researchers, we often (too often?) speak of the ‘embodied’, but when do we actually physically experience it? I think that I finally have in writing background story for this film’s characters.

Through developing the craft of ‘fictive reality’, I have learned to let the characters take over. One example is Abigail. Her character began from two directions—first, the contemporary neighbour of Rufus. Secondly, the character of young Ellie, Rufus’ sister, who came to me in a dream. I subsequently incorporated her into the story. Then, at the suggestion of the film’s director (who will create the final script), young Ellie became young Abigail and a triangle between the teenaged Rufus, Flip and Abigail was born.

We are now at the stage in the film’s development where the director and I are consulting on the ‘treatment’ or plot of the story. As each twist and turn develops, it is my responsibility to ensure that characters and their behaviour are grounded in the research. Fortunately, because of the thoroughness of our investigation, there is a plethora of background and story from which to create composite characters and actions that move the story forward. Because of my familiarity with the research and its biographies, this information has become part of me, embodied, in a sense, or at least at my fingertips. It is subsequently over to the director to then use his skills and creativity to come up with the best ‘story telling’ from this material.

Writing gay characters can be a challenge as well. Because I love it, but also because it is crucial to biography, history (social, political, cultural) is central to this film’s story. The characters in Rufus Stone ‘came of age’ at a time when homosexuality was illegal in the U.K. Although the law changed in 1967, history had a profound effect on the particular generation whose story we tell and the film will describe that. In speaking recently with a young reporter from a UK gay news source, the other end of the phone went very quiet when I said, ‘When they were youths and “coming out” (or not), the term “gay” did not even exist; neither did the concept of “coming out”’. Our story is enriched by these facts; with this knowledge, the characters’ actions become more understandable.

How much of Rufus Stone is my story? This is a difficult question. As an older gay man, of course I identify with the characters. Nonetheless, I grew up in a different country in a different time and under different circumstances. Still, there are similar memories and these are helpful in writing the background for the film. It also makes it easier for me to say to the director, ‘No, they wouldn’t react that way, rather this way’. There are certain experiences (or perhaps ‘memories’ to be more exact) that we share in common. In conducting a biographic interview with one of the volunteers, I recall clearly his reaching a point in his story when he was also telling my story. It was quite a moment for me and reinforced a fact that is so often overlooked in reporting on lesbian and gay experiences: outputs are not simply findings on sexual encounters; they are stories about relationships which are often complex ones with histories grounded in family, community, place and time.

I am loving working with Josh Appignanesi, who was chosen to direct Rufus Stone. His creativity and enthusiasm coupled with his skill and knowledge of filmmaking, guarantee that the film will be exciting and worthwhile. I am enjoying learning about the intricacies of bringing a story to life on film and picking up a few new skills as well in the process.

I know that I have left readers here hanging with a story without completion. Is it fair of me to say that all will be revealed in the film? After all, I never promised more than background story here. Writing these short essays has been beneficial to me and, I hope, helpful to the director as well. Rather than diving directly into writing treatment or script, it has allowed the characters of Rufus Stone to become more rounded and defined in my own mind.

To make up for this a bit, we are creating a website for the film and a dedicated YouTube channel (URL soon to be announced). We will post background information on the film, crew and cast, once they are chosen. We are also planning to have daily video reports from the shooting locations during filming the week of 11 July. There is already a facebook group where you can also keep up with our progress (Rufus Stone the movie).

For those who love story (I am one of them), I can tell you that things in the countryside do not go smoothly for Rufus. His becoming reacquainted with his childhood companions, compounded by memory and retrospect, creates a caldron of disappointment, disruption and suspicion. In the end, is Rufus a better man for this experience? Does he transcend these encounters and revelations, disappointments and complexities? Or does he succumb to life’s tragedies and become bitter?

We will have to wait for Rufus Stone, the movie, to know.

_________________________________________

Read the first instalment here:

Rufus Stone: 1.

Read the second instalment here:
Rufus Stone: 2.

Read the third instalment here:
Rufus Stone: 3.

This is the fourth instalment of the background story for the short film, Rufus Stone, to be produced as the key output of our three-year research project, "Gay and Pleasant Land? -a study about positioning, ageing and gay life in rural South West England and Wales ". The Project is a work package in the New Dynamics of Ageing Project, "Grey and Pleasant Land?: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of the Connectivity of Older People in Rural Civic Society" and funded by the British Research Councils.

The first of several articles on the research process is now available: 'Connecting Participatory Methods in a Study of Older Lesbian and Gay Citizens in Rural Areas' in the International Journal of Qualitative Research.

A second article, 'Exploring Sexuality, Ageing and Rurality in a
Multi-Method, Performative Project' is now available electronically from the British Journal of Social Work.

Two short A/V pieces we created for conference/workshop dissemination are also available. They both give the background and an overview of the methods used in the project.
Gay and Pleasant Land?
Exploring sexuality, ageing and rurality in a multi-method project

Rufus Stone: 3.

2011-04-10T10:48:00.019+01:00

‘Tall, dark and handsome’ was always the first response to Rufus Stone. Six feet, two inches tall, his thick, dark brown curly forelocks cascaded on his brow. It was the intensity of his electric blue eyes, however, on which most strangers commented enviously.

Upon arrival in London at 18, his youth and good looks could have been his meal ticket. Nonetheless, Rufus concentrated on his love of photography and eventually got a post as assistant to a Notting Hill photographer. He consequently went on to take his own pictures of some of the most famous celebrities of the Sixties and, from those connections, later moved into advertising then television production—first as a cameraman, then an editor and later a director of some important documentaries made at the BBC.

Rufus never had problems attracting men, or women for that matter. His looks, talent and career were the calling cards that engrossed his admirers. He is one of the lucky ones, because as he aged he held on to his good looks too. In fact, some compare him now to older stars such as Terrence Stamp or even Sean Connery. His hair is now silver grey, but he hates the nickname, ‘Silver Fox’, with a passion. He still possesses those chiselled cheekbones, a slim build and his famous blue eyes. At 70, Rufus continues to turn heads, both male and female.

His country upbringing produced by necessity a quiet boy who turned into a quiet-spoken man. In the hustle and bustle of London, this actually became another asset. A man of few words suggests that he means what he says and this is a welcomed relief from the insincerity familiar amongst some Londoners, particularly in the midst of the glitterati of television and film. Rufus’ most famous remark in response to the luvvies in the film crowd, when asked if he enjoyed meeting celebrities at the Groucho Club, was his admitting, ‘Never been’.

∞

Whenever I prepare the motor for a long trip, it reminds me of those Saturday journeys to the market as a child when we neatly packed my father’s automobile with wooden boxes of vegetables. There were so many boxes that there was hardly room in the back seat of my parent’s saloon for me and my sister Ellie.

Today I am stuffing the back seat of my Mini with my cameras and boxes of photographs and a few bits and bobs that wouldn’t matter to naught but me for the long trip back to Chadsford Village in Somerset. I am returning to my birthplace after 50 years of London life and its adventures. The removal van went down to Somerset a day ahead of me with my furniture and the rest of my belongings.

London is now just a routine to me, nothing to get excited about these days. After years of fighting the Tube, the crime and grime, the congestion charge and getting around London, I am ready to leave it behind. The rushing, pushing and shoving—‘Sorry, sorry, sorry!’—that hollow apology ringing out from every pub, street and shop, I’ve had enough. I think I am now ready to finally return to a quiet life in the countryside.

When my parents sold their Somerset farm, quite a few years back now, they bought a small cottage in the nearby village of Chadsford to live out their retirement. My father passed not long after. My mother recently died, but not before she had one last go at me over the telephone about what a disappointment I had been to her and my father and how their life in the village was made a misery after that ‘fuss’ around the ‘filthy’ business that I stirred up just before I left for good. She said that she never would forgive me for that. I suppose I was still 18 years old in her mind, even though I was by then approaching 70. Perhaps if she had forgiven me all those years ago, she would have died more peacefully and I might not be making this journey now. Time will tell.

The money that remained from the sale of the farm went to my sister who emigrated to Australia. She married out there and has three children. My parents' small worker’s cottage was deeded to me along with my grandfather’s tall case clock that I am particularly fond of. Their generosity took me by surprise, actually. I don’t think it had anything to do with their forgiveness though, more to do with family duty and doing what was expected of them, doing the “right thing”.

Fed up with London, I decided to finally retire to Somerset and that cottage. Most of my friends say that I am mad and will regret it. Still, they promise to come down for long weekends if I will entertain them properly. Most are involved in television production or the theatre. They would create quite a picture invading conservative Chadsford! At least I think they would, since I haven’t lived in the village of Chadsford for half a century.

As I prepare to head out of Islington and make my way towards the A-4, I wonder if I can go back. Can we ever go back and expect things to turn out differently? Of course, I am not the same person today. I have a lifetime of experiences, working as a photographer and making films for television, and the relationships that I have had certainly changed me. I am no longer that young lad who was driven out by the villagers because of their ignorance and my fears all those years back, that’s for certain.

∞

Rufus turns on the SatNav in his red classic Mini, happy to rely on a posh but strict recorded woman’s voice telling him which way to go. He has named her “Sadie”, after his deceased mother. Such nomenclature is a London kind of cheekiness that would have provided Freud with a field day in this case. For Rufus, the decision to leave is finally no longer in his hands, but has been taken over by a programmed voice. “Sadie” knows what’s best for him and what he should do and what his next move should be.

As he turns off early morning Upper Street, it’s cafés’ workers cleaning up the pavement real estate occupied by drunken revellers the night before, he turns on the radio. The Adagio of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G is playing. Rufus makes a mental note to himself that this piece of music would provide a perfect soundtrack for some film of the more rural segments of his journey. His mind is never far from the editing room. Rufus sinks into the Mini’s leather upholstery and deeper into his memories. His driving becomes routine.

Who is it that keenly waits for a conclusion to our story of Rufus Stone? Is it us, impatient for a happy ending? Is it young innocent Rufus who wants to finally go back and change the ending of this story of his first love? Does he believe that by making this return in time and place that he can reignite the love, passion and intimacy of his youth? Or is it wiser and older Rufus who has realised that what matters most to him is to come to terms with the past at the end of his days? Can he even, perhaps, find forgiveness in this tiny pastoral corner of the earth? Can we ever go back “home”? Or is it our memories, with all of their twists, turns and imaginations that propel us into an abyss created by our (re)constructed pasts?

Rufus reconsiders the countryside of his youth as he drives.

It is a memory of a five-year old boy sitting on his grandfather’s lap. Granddad’s hand, rough and worn from working the land, his thumbnail somehow permanently split, reaches into the pocket of his tattered woollen trousers and magically produces a cellophane-wrapped peppermint sweet for the boy. The tall case clock ticks in the background, the same clock that ended up in his parent’s farmhouse hallway. The sound of this clock has always provided Rufus with comfort in times of crisis. It is recollections of his grandfather that most warmly represent the countryside to Rufus.

Rufus recalls pushing his sister’s pram up dirt paths on the hillside, away from the family farm and the village—as far away as he could get the two of them. He remembers the feeling of searching for his own private landscape where his thoughts could finally be free and be his own.

Later, he remembers walks along the railway tracks with his sister. It’s the majesty of the sky and the smell of wild grasses mixed with the scent of oil on the railway sleepers, more than a revisualisation of their footsteps, which provoke his recall. It is the sounds of the train approaching, spewing and hissing steam—these sounds as much an invasion of their privacy as they portend the thrill of travel to unknown, yet-to-be-seen places.

He remembers getting to know the workers on that independent rail line and one of them taking him into the signal box that day. That was the day he learned about the physical stirrings that his body provoked in others and acts that are prohibited between a boy and a man. Pleasure, guilt and the forbidden became joined-up thinking from that day forward for young Rufus.

And it is Flip. Oh striking, beautiful Flip. Years of searching have never produced such innocent attractiveness again. If Rufus could only experience it again, to be in his presence, to walk with him arm in arm!

Rufus imagines one last attempt at resolving his youthful crisis somehow. He knows that he still must seek acceptance in order to love openly and freely amongst his peers in rural England. The law may have changed in his lifetime, but acceptance is still not a legacy for him and his kind and particularly not for his generation in the countryside. This is the kind of tolerance that is fundamentally socially constructed by one’s peers. Life has taught him this hard truth. In his imaginings, Rufus hopes, at least in his case, to make this finally possible.

This is the way in which our story now twists and turns. By consulting his memories, our Rufus is now gambling on his imagined past. This is probably the bravest risk of his entire life, or the most foolish one. This is the way in which he decided to return to Chadsford.

∞

Rufus makes stops at several lay-bys and overlooks along his route to take in scenic views. At each of these breaks in the journey, he gets out his cameras and shoots some pictures or video of the bucolic English countryside with its well-represented patchwork of hedgerows and fields. Particularly noteworthy for Rufus are the points along the narrower roads where they suddenly turn and reveal sweeping vistas.

His journey makes it way, first, through the less familiar Thomas Hardy country of Dorset and then on to Henry Fielding’s Somerset. Here, it is as though he is seeing his birthplace for the first time. After almost 50 years, it may as well be. He laughs to himself when he sees the cows in the fields lying down and remembers that this means that it is going to rain. Once a country boy… He remarks to himself how nothing much has changed, except for the condition of the roads themselves.

The A303 starts at the M3 motorway south of Basingstoke at Junction 8, as a dual carriageway. It heads south west, crossing the A34 road near Bullington before passing south of Andover. It bypasses Amesbury. The route then becomes single carriageway before passing Stonehenge. After Winterbourne Stoke the route once again becomes dual carriageway, meeting the A36 at Deptford. There is then another section of single carriageway road, before a further section of dual two lane road near Berwick St Leonard. It enters a valley through the village of Chicklade. From here it follows the terrain up to Mere, where it runs north of the town as another dual carriageway bypass. Continuing west, it passes south of Wincanton and then north of Sparkford to a roundabout where the road reverts once more to single carriageway. At Yeovilton the road becomes dual two lane again, and connects with the A37 which joins it until it reaches the end of the bypass. This final section of dual carriageway ends at South Petherton. It runs north of Ilminster where it meets the A358 road. After this, the route is more south westerly through the Blackdown Hills, where it is a narrow road following the contours of the land.

Rufus continues on the narrow road from Blackdown, which will then take him past the farm where he grew up. He next motors through the village of Chadsford with its Norman church, graveyard and village hall. He arrives just the other side of the village at the two adjoining cottages stepped back from the narrow road itself by small front gardens—the cottage where he will now be living. These are modest dwellings, untouched by any recent re-gentrification or ‘in-comers’.

As Rufus pulls up, he notices the net curtains rustling quizzically in the adjoining cottage’s front window. Rufus smiles as he begins to unpack the back seat of the car. Could it be possible that, after all these years and all that has transpired in his life in the meantime, that he is lucky enough to have inherited the cottage right next to Flip’s? Of course not, for this is not where our story ends. Rufus must confront his past, not just be absorbed into it. He has been dreaming for most of the journey and this fantasy ending is just Rufus’ daydream finale. We must be patient as an audience and not jump to conclusions ourselves.

Rufus takes his box of treasured cameras from the car and carries them to the front door of his new abode. He fiddles a bit with the lock on the door at first, but it then swings open to reveal his furniture that arrived from London yesterday. These few familiar possessions from his London life make him feel somehow more at peace with his decision and he goes inside. Rufus sees the case clock that has been left to him standing the middle of the front room. It is not ticking. The first thing he will do, before he even removes his coat, is wind it and get it running again.

In the adjoining cottage, still twitching the net curtains at her window and hoping for a better view of this handsome stranger’s arrival, Abigail White begins to grin. ‘What luck!’ she thinks. As she see this stranger enter the house next door, she reaches for her trademark crimson lipstick and applies it hurriedly, hikes up her bra straps and throws on a cardy. She is ready to make her first move.

About to go out the front door, she remembers, returns to the kitchen and fetches a bottle of Chardonnay to take as a welcome gift. As long as she is in the kitchen, she might as well down the remainder of the glass of wine from the other bottle that she opened earlier that morning.

Fully armoured now, Abigail goes to the cottage next door to meet her new match, or at least she thinks so.

____________________________________________

Read the first instalment here:

Rufus Stone: 1.

Read the second instalment here:
Rufus Stone: 2.

Well-known Filmmaker Josh Appignanesi has been chosen to direct our film, 'Rufus Stone' at Bournemouth U.

Press on choice of Appignanesi and plans for filming Rufus Stone this Summer.

This is the third instalment of the background story for the short film, Rufus Stone, to be produced as the key output of our three-year research project, "Gay and Pleasant Land? -a study about positioning, ageing and gay life in rural South West England and Wales ". The Project is a work package in the New Dynamics of Ageing Project, "Grey and Pleasant Land?: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of the Connectivity of Older People in Rural Civic Society" and funded by the British Research Councils.

The first of several articles on the research process is now available: 'Connecting Participatory Methods in a Study of Older Lesbian and Gay Citizens in Rural Areas' in the International Journal of Qualitative Research.
A second article, 'Exploring Sexuality, Ageing and Rurality in a
Multi-Method, Performative Project' is now available electronically from the British Journal of Social Work.

Two short A/V pieces we created for conference/workshop dissemination are also available. They both give the background and an overview of the methods used in the project.
Gay and Pleasant Land?
Exploring sexuality, ageing and rurality in a multi-method project

Rufus Stone: 2.

2011-03-26T10:42:00.019Z

It happens at sea. The lapping waves and the water’s surface with its shiny viscosity created by the light prompt me to recall those moments. I remember more clearly then, what those flashes of innocent intimacy were like.

Memory is not text, not even remembered action, really. The past is recreated by recollections of an atmosphere, a sound, a temperature. Remembering the arrangement of the furniture often reveals more to me about a moment than the people sitting on it. So is the nature of key moments in our story of young Rufus and Flip.

Images such as dappled sunlight are not a routine physical reality. They are as much a precise instance in the lifecourse as a particular sixteenth birthday. Our first experience of mottled sunlight is a rite of passage, a singularly unique occurrence in our young lives.

Roll the film. Capture it.

Close your eyes and recollect this patterned lightness on the patchwork English country landscape and you will see young Flip—dark, tan, laughing—happy to be with you. There has been no other instance in your life like it. You wish that this moment will go on forever, but, even in your youth, you know it will not be so. You have been taught this in songs and they are sad ones.

Your soul has always been an old man’s, your cautious, fearful, doubting heart. We are forged as we will be early in life and spend the rest of it unravelling that fact. The child somehow knows that as a man you will seek to recreate this moment over and over again and so you prepare yourself for such a journey, even in your youth. Play the Mahler 5th. You understand it intimately.

You and Flip walk over hills towards a wood. This is not a memorised landscape, however. It is a recollection of a three-dimensional physicality consisting of the soil under foot, the sound of the swish of tall grass, and the crunchiness of pebbles mixed with earth. The intensity of the English sky’s summer blueness creates a light pressure against your skin. The warm country air is more uncontaminated than any you will ever breathe again. His arm around your neck as you walk is the last uncorrupted act of commitment that you will ever experience. This is the purist state of coupling.

You are in the stream at a point where the water, the great purifier, creates a deep pool. The chilly water laps against his body, as you will lap against his. The surface of the water makes a fluid partition that allows grazing against his body beneath it seem easier, less obvious, but still dangerous. The pretence is played out above the surface, the risk and the release beneath. If he ever objected … but he never did. The physicality of your relationship remains in its purist state.

You can smell him on his shirt that you have innocently taken home with you. That night in your single bed under the farmhouse’s eaves you lay next to this piece of worn cotton clothing and dream of his unpolluted perfect being. The shininess of his young dark skin, his naturally sun licked hair, his smile’s innocence, his warm arm around your neck, laughing, always laughing.

Flip’s mother rings your mother. Her shrill screaming coming from the telephone reverberates around the farmhouse kitchen. Your father is uncomfortable situating himself so intimately next to your mother who listens with the receiver away from her ear. She turns her back on you as you stand in the doorframe, bracing yourself for what your unfounded guilt convinces you is the earthquake to come.

Flip’s mother says that she has found the dirty letter that you wrote to her son. She screams down the phone line that you are a filthy unclean pervert and she is coming to your parents’ farm with a kitchen knife to sort out the whole family. Then she is going to make sure the entire village knows about their evil son and your wicked intentions. She is going to report you to the police for the criminal that you are.

Your mother is crying. Your father slams the kitchen door and walks out into the barnyard. You can hear him near the barn shouting and swearing, thankfully muffled from inside the kitchen where you remain. The tall case clock in the hall ticks away its heavy unrelenting passage of time. It seems more strident than ever tonight—even louder than your father’s shouting or your mother’s crying.

You know that tonight is the end of innocent intimacy. It is probably the beginning of something else, but you are unsure of what that is.

The next morning, very early, your father tells you that you must leave the village. He will drive you past the junction where you and Flip met up so many times to the railway station in the nearby town. He tells you to pack you clothes. He will give you the train fare to get to London, but then you are on your own.

He then mutters bitterly, “That’s where your kind go, don’t they, Rufus?’

The surface is broken.

______________________________________________

Read the first instalment here:

Rufus Stone: 1.

This is the second instalment of the background story for the short film, Rufus Stone, to be produced as the key output of our three-year research project, "Gay and Pleasant Land? -a study about positioning, ageing and gay life in rural South West England and Wales ". The Project is a work package in the New Dynamics of Ageing Project, "Grey and Pleasant Land?: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of the Connectivity of Older People in Rural Civic Society" and funded by the British Research Councils.

The first of several articles on the research process is now available: 'Connecting Participatory Methods in a Study of Older Lesbian and Gay Citizens in Rural Areas' in the International Journal of Qualitative Research.
A second article, 'Exploring Sexuality, Ageing and Rurality in a
Multi-Method, Performative Project' is now available electronically from the British Journal of Social Work.

Two short A/V pieces we created for conference/workshop dissemination are also available. They both give the background and an overview of the methods used in the project.
Gay and Pleasant Land?
Exploring sexuality, ageing and rurality in a multi-method project

PHOTO: Mikaela Maria

Rufus Stone: 1.

2011-01-25T13:18:00.012Z

It is a typical Somerset January day—the frost-hardened ground, brown and grey, mimicking the sky above. Rufus and Ellie Stone take the trail to the rail junction through the bushes, littered with the rubbish that is now frozen into the mosaic of the landscape. The junction holds a special meaning for Rufus.

Rufus is seventeen, his sister Ellie just ten. She loves walks with her brother because he usually brings his camera and gets excited when he talks about taking pictures. Rufus is her protector—tall, with a shock of curly hair that falls on his forehead—and strong from working on their parents’ farm.

The rail line splits in two at the junction, one part going to the north through a small village. The other line swings east along the ridge to the nearby market town. (Five years later [1963] this rail line would be closed by the infamous ‘Beeching Axe’, but no one knew that then.)

Ellie and Rufus sometimes spend their Saturdays in the town selling vegetables at their parents’ market stall. Ellie likes going to town because she gets to dress up. Rufus hates its and just sees it as more hard graft with no pay.

A six-foot post sunk into the gravel mound between the two rail lines at the junction is topped with a small greyish box. This sheet metal container has a lid on it, but more like a small door. Rufus imagines that the box was used for some signal wiring at one time, but now is empty.

Rufus’ mate, Flip, is olive skinned, dark-haired and shorter than Rufus. He is two years younger and lives along the rail line in the nearby village. The boys met two summers ago when Rufus was walking in the hills collecting berries. They have been best mates ever since.

Flip’s real name is Philippe. His younger brother is Antoine. Their mother comes from the nearby town and married a local villager. Being from the town and having ‘airs and graces’, she insisted on giving her children French-sounding names. Philippe quickly became Flip after a few rounds of bullying at school and Antoine’s father almost immediately shortened his younger son’s name to Tony.

One afternoon, Flip and Rufus discovered the metal box at the junction about halfway between their houses. The lads agreed to use it as their ‘secret hiding place’. From time to time, Rufus and Flip leave small gifts, photos and notes in the signal box for each other. Ellie is the only other person who knows about this secret place, or at least Rufus hopes so.

Flip has also become interested in photography. The lads have spent many days walking the Somerset landscape together, taking photographs with Rufus’ camera, and, on hot summer days, swimming in a nearby stream together.

Flip and Rufus love each other. At first, Rufus didn’t know what these feelings were. Both had always known, though, that being with each other mattered more than anything else in their young lives. They use any excuse to spend time together, particularly in the summer when school is out of term.

They love to lie in the deep grass on a hillside next to one another and stare at the clouds in the sky, making up animals and characters out of the billowy white shapes. When Rufus happens to brush up against Flip or touch him almost by accident, electricity courses through his whole body. This delights him, but almost immediately causes him shame too.

One particularly hot day when they were swimming, Flip didn’t bother to put his T-shirt back on. Rufus hid the worn, white shirt in his canvas army rucksack. He took it home and slept with it next to his pillow that night. He could smell Flip on the shirt and this made Rufus both happy and frightened. Because Rufus is the older of the two, he feels particularly responsible about his growing feelings for Flip. He knows innately that these stirrings could lead to something dangerous or forbidden in his small English country village.

Rufus finished school at sixteen and has worked on his family’s farm full-time for the past year. He hates it and wants to get away from this strict country life. Flip is now in his final year at school.

Rufus recently decided to confess to Flip about his feelings for him. Rufus thinks that maybe they should both leave the countryside together when Flip finishes school and find jobs in the town, or even move to a city where he could try his luck at becoming a photographer. Rufus has decided to tell Flip that he loves him and share his plan with him. He wrote a short, painful note and left it with a photo of the two of them together at the junction box a few days ago.

Today, Rufus is hoping that an answer will be waiting for him.

____________________________________

This is the first instalment of the background story for the short film, Rufus Stone, to be produced as the key output of our three-year research project, "Gay and Pleasant Land? -a study about positioning, ageing and gay life in rural South West England and Wales ". The Project is a work package in the New Dynamics of Ageing Project, "Grey and Pleasant Land?: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of the Connectivity of Older People in Rural Civic Society" and funded by the British Research Councils.

Two short A/V pieces we created for conference/workshop dissemination are also available. They both give the background and an overview of the methods used in the project.

Gay and Pleasant Land?

Exploring sexuality, ageing and rurality in a multi-method project

Beauty and the Bus

2011-01-21T17:15:00.003Z

The usual crowd jostled on to the bus home yesterday. No seats downstairs, so the throng scrambled upwards. Nearly full up there as well, but found a seat. A cacophony of foreign tongue contributing to the high level of noise. A guitar playing behind me somewhere, strains of bosa nova and spoken Brazilian Portuguese. An auditory dreamscape.

A teenager in futbal kit, a young Ronaldo, moved forward, speaking to the girls. The girls averted their eyes, lashes fluttering at the sight of him.

Oh, England, you are a wondrous land.

English to Spanish translation

El público habitual empujado a la casa en el autobús ayer. N la planta baja asientos, por lo que la multitud revueltos hacia arriba. Casi lleno hasta allí también, pero se encontró un asiento. Una cacofonía de la lengua extranjera contribuye al alto nivel de ruido. Una guitarra detrás de mí en alguna parte, las cepas de bosa nova y portugués brasileño. Un paisaje de ensueño auditivo.

Un adolescente en el kit de futbal, un joven Ronaldo, se movió hacia adelante, hablando con las chicas. Las chicas evitó sus ojos, pestañas revoloteando a la vista de él.

¡Oh, Inglaterra, que son una tierra maravillosa.

Don Draper and some random thoughts for 2011

2011-01-09T11:27:00.015Z

Thoughts at sea. These become parenthetical within the rhythm of the waves, the schedule of ports, the resting and relaxation--and the dreams. I report them here in a similar way.

Don Draper is, himself, his own invention. He is, therefore, Everyman or more pointedly, Nowhereman.

He is an idea man and his advertising firm is convinced of his brain-storms which flow like milk and honey from his ever-inebriated lips.

He produces a lot of ideas, but never has to execute them. Luckily, he has a staff of creatives who do this for him.

Which then/who's then, is the creative act?

Art is/creativity is/production is:

- concerned with the impulse of creativity and the proclivities of production.
- creative problem-solving is central to creative decision-making.
- a reflection/a record of the time/space/culture which we currently inhabit.

How I problem solve creatively by listening to dreams:

A Dream at Sea:
The House and the Swimming Pool

Trevor was building a swimming pool next to the post-modern, but definitely retro-modern holiday house that he had designed, much akin to Alain de Botton's contemporary holiday homes. We said that the pool should be at opposite angles to the house, but Trevor insisted on a parallel configuration. We said, "No, no, no! that cannot be right!"

He began to cry and shed his clothes. He looked like a happy Buddha, except that he was crying so he resembled a sad one. We tried to comfort him.

Two rectangles -- how to place them:

side by side, length paralleling length
T-square formation

Change of Scene: Old Japanese woman with greying hair in a bun. I was lying in the grass and finding minuscule flowers, purple and orange--the most outrageous of the opposites on the colour wheel.

I placed the flowers in the old woman's hair.

She then spoke, herself in a dream state:

"The pool should be placed next to the rectangular house like a woman lying next to a man, her curves forming the negative space between the two of them".

So the pool should be curvilinear, not a rectangle. It's length should mirror the length of the house, but it's emphasis remain the shapes created between the two.

My father was right.

Alternative Thoughts for Researchers at Christmas

2010-12-03T13:42:00.040Z

I have been thinking recently about a moment that happened at our Qualitative Conference in September.

In the tangential way that my world works, I came upon photographer, Freya Najade, serendipitously.

Several years ago now, I asked photographer, Richard Renaldi, to use some of his photographs of older people in a community project that we were organising in Leicester. I have also used his project, Fall River Boys, for a short audio/visual piece that I created.

Back to the present, or rather, almost a year ago now, I was reading Richard’s blog and he mentioned Freya Najade’s photographic series, ‘If you’re lucky, you get old’. Since we are currently working on our project on older gay and lesbian citizens in the British countryside and the film that will be the product of that research, I felt that her work might have resonance.

Part of my conceptual scheming for this year’s conference was to see how close to ‘Art’ we could move things, whilst still remaining within some construct of Social Science. For this reason, I invited an African drummer to open the proceedings, asked academic, Norma Daykin, to bring her Salsa Nova trio along to entertain and invited Freya to display her photographs, along with other ‘artistic’ expressions which peppered the conference.

Circumstances dictated that Freya couldn’t exhibit her actual photographs in a gallery setting; it would be necessary for her to ‘present’ them using PowerPoint in a more familiar academic seminar setting. Still, I thought that her work had a message for academic researchers and was willing to accept this more formal presentation.

Freya talked a bit about her photographs and shared them with the audience. Then it was time for questions. The key moment for me was when someone asked: “How did you go about deciding who to photograph and what the pictures would be about?” Freya replied simply, “I picked up my camera and began to shoot. It was through taking the pictures that the story unfolded”.

To me this is a key difference between the way we often work as researchers and the way that an artist works. Artists pick up their tools and materials and begin. They work out the problems through their media. They have an idea or concept, but very much allow the materials, the subject, the time and the place to dictate the outcomes.

Perhaps as researchers we spend too much time ruminating and worrying over the details of questions (semi-structured or not), ethical approval, our methods and so forth before we ever begin. Perhaps we need to pick up our tools and dive in more often. Margaret Meade went to the South Pacific with her questions but not knowing what to expect, then invented a method on the spot.

Romantically, perhaps, I hearken back to the scientist in her/his laboratory with all of its equipment, specimens and supplies. The scientist ‘experiments’ much in the way that an artist does. Perhaps as social scientists, we need to recall this and become ‘scientists’ again.

‘Art and science have a common thread—both are fuelled by creativity. Whether writing a paper based on my data or filling a canvas with paint, both processes tell a story’.

–Richard Taylor (2001), Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Oregon

I very much encourage researchers to pick up their tools and create. In order to begin to do this, we need to adjust our approaches to our work. I am grateful to one of the reviewers of my chapter in Phillip Vannini’s upcoming book, Popularizing Research, for making me think about how this happens. I responded to a particular question by stating: ‘Moving our work to arts-based procedures is not a series of isolated acts; it requires an adjustment in how we approach everything in which we engage—including writing for academic publication’.

With these thoughts in mind, I leave you with a holiday list of inspirations. Perhaps one or more of these will encourage you to pick up you brushes or camera, voice recorder or semi-structured questionnaire, and begin to experiment or at least find alternatives to the way in which we think of going about our work.

Film: Peter Greenaway’s Rembrandt's J'accuse
Classical ballet: Roland Petit’s Proust ou les intermittences du cœur
Novel: Michael Kimball’s Dear Everybody
Poetry: Diane Hamilton’s Lizard Licking, Donegal & Other Poems
Photography: Richard Renaldi’s Fall River Boys
Classical Music: Nikolai Lugansky, Rachmaniov’s Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini
Classical Contemporary: Max Richter’s The Blue Notebooks
Television: Mad Men; In Treatment
Comedy: Modern Family
Magazine: Dazed and Confused
Downtempo electronic jazz: Nicolas Jarr, Nico's Feelin' Good

Happy Holidays!

Performative Social Science: What it is/What it isn't

2010-10-16T09:10:00.019+01:00

A Seminar held at Bournemouth University on 13 October, 2010 presented my review of Performative Social Science (PSS) and a re-screening of one of my earlier audio/visual productions, 'The One about Princess Margaret'.

Actor/Director Sharon Muiruri, dressed as a Princess, greeted guests at the door royally with "How do you do?" and "Have you come far?" Bags of popcorn were waiting for audience members on each of their seats. The "Theme from Black Orpheus" played in the background and, at one point, Sharon sat down and pretended to play along to the sax solo on a toy saxophone.

My take on PSS then began as an audio recording. This was followed by the screening of 'The One about Princess Margaret'. The entire 50-minute production was pre-recorded as a Windows Media file, much as a Broadway or West End show is pre-programmed on computer. This amused me. I sat in the corner behind the computer, a bit like the Wizard of Oz.

This was accomplished in order to test some new ideas about presentation and audience, but also to expose, for the first time, my writing for my forthcoming (2011) Chapter, " Princess Margaret in Retrospect: the Story Behind a Short Film ", for a book entitled, Popularizing Research: Engaging New Media, Genres, and Audiences, edited by Phillip Vannini, to be published next year by Peter Lang Publishing.

The room was packed and an enjoyable time was had by all present. Listen to the audio recording, then watch the video below.

Audio Recording of
"PSS: What it is/What it isn't"

"The one about Princess Margaret"

Negative Space and Chance Movement

2010-09-13T14:49:00.004+01:00

This short film tells a story of the Bournemouth University
8th International Qualitative Research Conference, September 2010.

The brief to the filmmakers was to tell the 'B" story, the in-between, the over-heard, the negative spaces of the conference. Negative space involves concentrating on the background—an excellent exercise in observation and listening.

This film represents the activity between events and the inter-connectedness of these negative spaces. The delegates at the conference turn out to be the subject of the film. The soundscape becomes the dialogue.

Fluxus is intermedia. Fluxus creators like to see what happens when different media intersect. They use found and everyday objects, sounds, images, and texts to create new combinations of objects, sounds, images, and texts.

‘Creativity is that uncanny ability to work within rule boundaries while, at the same time, changing them’.—Kip Jones

BU Qualitative Research Conference 2010 from Kip Jones on Vimeo.

Producer/Director: Rob Jones

Sound: Henrietta Rowlatt and Mog McIntyre

Camera: Yasir Khan

Editor: Chris Taylor

Executive Producers: Kip Jones and Trevor Hearing

Prime Cuts

2010-09-09T13:36:00.005+01:00

Prime Cuts from Kip Jones on Vimeo.

By means of a short auto-ethnographic use of stock film clips, Prime Cuts creates a battery of visual memories which have become recurring themes in my own productions. They are, in a way, false memories that are created through the montage, collage and ‘mash-up’ of memory.

These visualisations have morphed and warped into what is now part of my personal visual arsenal of accumulated pictorial memories. These images form my personal visual biography and influence my visual work, directly and indirectly, consciously and subliminally.

As we observe throughout life, certain cultural images become private and iconic. They twist and turn and eventually morph in various ways to be included as our own graphic memories. These images are truly Ethno-Graphic. These visual memories become imbued with both intense cultural and personal meaning. Godard is often credited with having once said, "It's not where you take things from—it's where you take them to."

Originally screened at Bournemouth University's conference on Qualitative Research, Sept 2010 in a gallery-like setting with other works of art. I wanted to see how visitors to the gallery space would engage (or not) with the continuously playing video on the large screen.

What are your Prime Cuts?

Music used in the Mash-ups:
Max Richter
Morgana King
Kylie Minogue
Rufus Wainwright

He didn't leave a note.

2010-09-01T20:08:00.013+01:00

Sometimes, when children are ‘rough-housing’, mothers will warn them, 'It will all end in tears'. What sound advice for life's emotional journey.

Exit: stage right. A haughty exit. The kind only dancers can make. There was not even a furtive glance in my direction in the audience. This is how the beginning of the end began.

I didn’t want to live in a dacha outside of Odessa anyway. I am not fond of borscht or pickled anything. I don't want to spend my last years hearing about your glory days on the stage and then watch you go off to work in an office in your brother’s start-up Russian construction company. I hate the cold.

I have always seen myself retiring to a Bedouin tent in Morocco—an air conditioned one. I would watch the goats all day. A young man, my ‘companion’, will bring me tea. ‘Non, merci. Je préfère un jus d'orange, s'il vous plait’. A boy like the ones in the beach scene in Death in Venice. Young men who naturally put their arms around one another and give each other a kiss on the cheek. Not a French baiser, stylised and studied, but a natural, heart-felt kiss.

In my letter to you I said that I wished you had learned bravery from Masha.

When I was still at Art College, I was offered a job designing sets for a start-up dance company, The Pennsylvania Ballet, in its infancy. How different my life might have been if I had been brave enough then to take that gamble. It would have meant having to drop out of art school (which I did eventually, anyway). I wasn’t fearless enough, however. Or like the time Florence Dorn (of husband, Joel, who helped make Bette Midler famous) asked me to accompany her to London to buy a hat. She said we could stay with ‘the Harrisons’ (George and Pattie). I thought these were things other people did, not me. I wasn’t brave enough.

I was striking as a young man. I wish I had capitalised on my looks. Not in a calculating way, but in an intelligent one. I was too busy wallowing in my own emotional turmoil to see the potential of making the right choices and the right connections, and using my natural assets to help manage that.

So I wanted you to be brave. I wanted you to bridge the age difference, overcome the cultural and language barriers, and manage the impossible ever-changing geography of it all. I wanted you to believe in the potential of our connection.

In the end, your fears took over and made your decision for you.

Perhaps you and all of this so late in life were just cruel reminders of my own past mistakes.

Part of travelling again and seeing you for what I now know was the last time was to have some time away to contemplate my mother’s death. I wanted to be near you when I did that and to buffer any pain with your warmth. That never happened.

Instead, I wrote you a letter (in English and Google Russian) and left it with a book of photographs of you dancing that I had made. I came to your last performance (for me), sitting in the second row. I waited until you were a few feet in front of me, then stood up and exited ... stage right.

In terms of my mother’s death, I came to the realisation that no one would help me with that. My work colleagues mostly ignored it. The ones who did say something saw it as some kind of opportunity to talk about deaths in their own lives. Why do people think that this is comforting? Not one person mentioned ‘compassionate leave’. One insensitively suggested that I watch a documentary on Brian Epstein, ignoring the fact that the question pervading the film is, ‘Did Epstein take his own life six weeks after the death of his father?’

We will never know. He didn’t leave a note.

My mother’s death/falling in love again

2010-08-15T16:09:00.056+01:00

"The sweat on their bodies”

I was introduced to live musical theatre at the Valley Forge Music Fair. It was summer stock for New York actors, singers and dancers performed in a tent on the East coast of Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia.

I lived my simple, country boy life about 30 miles to the west. It was at Valley Forge that I saw shows like Pajama Game and Damn Yankees and, for the first time, fell in love with live musical theatre.

Theatre in the round and being so close to the sweat on the dancers’ bodies made me believe that there was a possibility of connecting somehow. As a teenager, these theatrical encounters were a part of my growing-up world of serious sexual awakening. I had put aside my childish desire to be Robin to Batman or follow Flash Gordon around in his lamé hot pants. These new experiences were comprised of all the senses; but mostly, it was the smell of the greasepaint mixed with the dancers’ sweat. I was breathless from the experience.

Every summer I would look forward to these performances under that tent, the actors in such intimate proximity, darting up and down the aisles, making their exits and entrances. The tension of wanting to reach out and touch them was palatable.

I would hang around the parking lot after the shows, hoping that one of the cast would come along and say hello. I lie. Come along and take me away with them. I wanted to join this musical circus; I wanted to fall in love and get laid. I still get these three things mixed up.

Spiegeltent has arrived at the Edinburgh International Festival with great success. This year it will host a new range of sideshow acts, cabaret and spectacles.

Spiegeltents are hand-hewn pavilions used as travelling dance halls, bars and entertainment salons since they were created in the early 20th century . There are only a hand-full of these unique and legendary ‘tents of mirrors’ left in the world today. The performances at Edinburgh’s Spiegeltent are live, in the round and under canvass.

Marlene Dietrich sang ‘Falling In Love Again’ on its famous stage in the 1930’s and, since then, its magic mirrors have reflected thousands of images of artists, audiences and exotic gatherings. It’s old Cabaret magic that has somehow become new again. It reminds me of my youthful awakening.

Speaking of Falling In Love Again, I did. Not that I expected to. He is a Russian dancer on a ship. We first met three years ago. I have been extremely guarded with my emotions since our first encounter. We see each other infrequently—two or three times a year. The story, retold as it heated up recently, unfolds below:

A conceptual narrative diary compiled from daily Facebook entries:

News Feed

. Time for the sea again....

· I should stop pretending it's luggage and just call them costumes.

· Sea day today. He is dancing his 'starring' role tonight. Me, organising my own costumes for the voyage. Stockholm tomorrow.

· Have to go now. Lunch date with the dancers tomorrow and not a thing to wear.

· 'The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.' –Marcel Proust

· He wants me to meet him at midnight. I am getting too old for this.

· Actually it was magical and moving. Overcoming my tendency towards inaction has been a theme in my life. In reality, it has brought me every reward.

· Having lunch with him today at the ship’s Ben Brittan restaurant; it's become a bit of a tradition.

·Things are getting very close to the edge.

· Someone said: 'Explain this to me'. I said, 'When I was sixteen I swam across a three-mile lake and back. These days I am happy when I can do a couple of laps in the pool. The same for emotional life, really'.

· In spite of all my best effort, planning and resistance, I am a bit lovesick.

· Remembering Carol K and her admonishment, after listening to my tales of love sickness: ‘Yeah, but did you get a painting out of it?’

· Time to forget, put aside and plough on with all of the projects and problems that I left behind. In a way, they will be a welcomed distraction.

· Do I dare? Have I lost my marbles?

· I constantly watch the ship’s webcam now. I watch the ensign change position on the bow. I make mental notes of the breezes. (Get a life, Kip.)

· Sunny, very little wind or activity. Ship in front is refuelling.

Fedor Tyutchev, Russian poet:

Я встретил вас - и все былое
В отжившем сердце ожило;
Я вспомнил время, время золотое -
И сердцу стало так тепло...

I met you and the past

came back to life in my dead heart.

Remembering a golden time,

my heart became so warm.

· The Baltic Sea is peaceful and blue, the sun refusing to set so far North. It’s almost 10:30 pm. He is about to start the second show, most likely.

· Should I be like a Brit and take a mini-holiday on the Bank Holiday weekend? Should I? Should I just turn up on the ship? Should I?

· Decision made. Нравится ли вам сюрпризы? (Do you like surprises?)

· Good-bye, Bette. You're with Dad now.

· ’Everything that passes away is only a reflection...' –Mahler’s 8th

______________________________________

‘Part of my intention in constructing a book out of a seemingly haphazard collection of notes was that these notes, by virtue of their accumulation and juxtaposition and patternation, would end up working overtime (not unlike what we might expect of the bits and pieces of a conceptual art’). –The Conceptual Novel: Michael Kimball Interviews Evan Lavender-Smith

Navigating the personal ...

2010-08-05T13:28:00.017+01:00

Someone said, 'Explain this to me'. I said, 'When I was sixteen I swam across a three-mile lake and back. These days I am happy when I can do a couple of laps in the pool. The same for my emotional life, really'.

What is it you want to write about here, Kip? It’s Summer. Nobody wants to read about an old man’s love life.

A while back, I heard sociologist, Howard Becker, play the piano and I wept. How do these seemingly divergent interests in his life influence one another? I wanted to know.

I am known for banging on about how Performative Social Science (PSS) must be both art and social science, not one or the other. Then I went and invited some artists to present/perform at our upcoming Qualitative Conference: a jazz trio, an African drummer, a theatre director. I wanted to experiment and see how close to the edge (of art) we can go and still find meaning for social science pursuits. It will be interesting to observe the response/reaction of informal gaggles of conference-goers to this diversion from the expected. Audience is everything in my personal performative social science these days. The data and the audience. The researcher/scholar/performer simply acts as the vessel between the two, but also the interloper, the gadfly.

‘Prime Cuts’: I am compiling and editing short pieces from films and TV shows into a kind of montage/mash-up for my presentation at our conference in September, entitled, ‘Prime Cuts’. I am attempting to play with the auto-ethnographic by creating a montage of visual memories; not images from my life per se, but rather, images that heavily influenced my life and its work. This time, it will not be strictly ethnography through the lens of the personal observer or her/his experiences. It will be recollections of the graphic itself, those images from our pasts which compress and compel the personal forward and eventually transform into part of our own individual visual arsenals.

As we observe throughout life, certain cultural images become private and iconic. They twist and turn and eventually morph in various ways to be included as our own graphic memories (I shall always remember Mary Gergen’s recounting of Midwest grain storage towers in her interview with me). These images are truly Ethno-Graphic. These visual memories become imbued with both intense cultural and personal meaning. (A single example, previously written about here, is the notorious Kylie curtain, almost as personally iconic for me as her gold hot pants are to many by now.)

I plan to present my short film montage in a gallery setting at the conference. I want the environment to feel like one of those small rooms that you happen upon in museums where a film is playing on the wall in semi-darkness. You watch some of it, or all of it, or just walk by to the next exhibition/installation. I want to see if this contrivance from the curator’s toolbox has resonance for social science. I want to watch the audience watch the film (or not).

Busby Berkeley’s films were dark and aggressively sexual. What? I thought they were light and fluffy, chorus girls tapping to tunes from Broadway and silly story lines. If you think so, I suggest you revisit some of them, especially 42^nd Street.

When I had finally decided that the gay world and gay bars themselves were not necessarily the ‘dens of inequity’ that I had been warned against, I ventured into my city’s most popular one, The Allegro, frequently. Because the bar didn’t get much business on Tuesday nights, they would show Busby Berkeley’s films on the third floor, using an old-fashioned projector. We would sit on the floor, sipping beers and watch that week’s Gold Diggers or other Berkeley films.

I became entranced with Berkeley’s intricate choreography and his particular way of filming it (and, of course, Ruby Keeler). The highpoint of 42nd Street however, is the longish title number. Dark and menacing, it tells a story of 1930-something New Yorkers out on the town, but also the darker side of the Depression, the casting couch, recreational drug use—all these things with the usual showgirl crotch shots which Berkeley became famous for. I was left with a lasting impression of how the presentation of seemingly light musical numbers could also tell a second, much darker story. A short clip from 42^nd Street will be in Prime Cuts.

The editing of the clips themselves will not only reflect personal choices of meaningful images, but also, by the nature of montage, re-invent or ‘re-memorise’ the past through image to create something entirely new. Images from 1930s New York (I hadn’t been born then), for example, will ‘mash-up’ with more current footage. These montages will reflect, but deconstruct their originals, showing how remembered image can morph, change and enter the realm of the personal over time.

Compelling and repetitive, images of water and the sea will also be pervasive in Prime Cuts. Rather than representing specific memories, they become iconic and representational of particular personal emotional states. Derek Jarman’s use of a couple frolicking in the sea, for example, transfigures into more current footage of the sea with more private memories. Without my visual memory of Jarmon’s film, however, my own footage of the sea would not be imbued with the same meaning.

I have recently returned to the sea, or metaphorically that lake that I spoke about earlier, or at least the pool. Not actually, but figuratively. I have realised, somewhat late in life, that the love-sick feeling in the pit of our stomachs is the same, whether seventeen or seventy. The only difference now is that I have the visual reference points with which to tell that story again. If you observe Prime Cuts closely, Nureyev morphs into him, dancing enticingly.

Enjoy the rest of your Summer. ‘September Song’ can wait for September.

Writing performatively

2010-06-17T07:45:00.019+01:00

I have experimented over the past ten years or so with writing performatively, or rather, representing in text what I am trying to accomplish visually and aurally. Several examples are available on my webpage and include the results of an interview with Mary Gerge n, the script for an A/V production about Klaus Riegel and Ken Gergen, the script for my Princess Margaret A/V and a very early piece about Akira Kurosawa and Ge rotranscendence.

The Kurosawa presentation holds particular memories for me. I took a slow boat to Bergen, Norway to present it at a conference. It was mostly me rambling on about my idea that Kurosawa's main character was a fine representation of Tornstam's Theory of G erotrancendence; I played clips from Kurosawa's film, Ran, (with sound) behind me whilst reading my paper (I seldom do this anymore, read directly to an audience, that is), trying to build a 'performative' montage of sorts.

Those were early days. The audience didn't seem to get it at all. No one would sit with me at lunch following the presentation. I should have known then that I was on to something.

I draw attention to these early attempts at writing performatively for several reasons.

First, I think it is important to revisit the initial motivations behind these early efforts and even try to recapture a bit of their naïveté and enthusiasm for finding new ways of expressing our scholarship. As my work becomes more sophisticated (even 'skillful'), it is important for me not to abandon such initial struggles and uncertainties which represent the creative part of the process.

What was involved in all of these early pieces was creative problem-solving --being presented with a particular puzzle or challenge and then finding the tools from the arts (using text as graphic illustration; mixed media including TV, overheads, audio, etc.; radio script writing; and film as background montage) to respond to such questions. This is what Performative Social Science is about and should be doing. I am often reminding myself and others of this fact.

I did not suddenly decide to turn myself into a graphic illustrator, script writer or filmmaker. I remain a social scientist with a particular story to tell or message to get across who is exploring which media would best help me to accomplish that. I don't worry about whether I am very good at the use of a particular medium but rather, wonder whether the medium will serve the purpose. I then begin the struggle with the particular new means of communicating. This process itself holds many of the joys and frustrations of each project, but also the opportunities to really explore the creative process.

I have mentioned recently that the 'writing up' of our projects should be ancillary to our work, not the main reason for doing it. For me, more interesting are the scripts themselves, the notes, the diagrammatic evidence that our projects leave behind as a kind of record. If we must publish, these would certainly hold more interest for me.

(I have a coffee table piled with beautiful books; I do love publications, especially ones with pictures! Illustrated above.)

Publish or perish drives much of academic life. It has its origins in hard science where the first to get his experiment, finding, theory, etc. into publication won. Other academic disciplines followed suit by imitating this system. It has developed both a 'style' of academic writing as well as a vetting process that are both by now antiquated and suspect.

Recently, I had an email from an academic who was exploring the performative and experimenting with the means available to him. The enthusiasm in his message was palpable and I expectantly opened the accompanying published paper that he had attached to his message. I was met with pages of dry 'scholarly' justifications for what he was trying to accomplish performatively, instead of anything I could really find inspirational or even helpful to the work of others.

We have all been caught up in this bind from time to time, me included. Fortunately, publication itself is being forced to change and more and more, multi-media is now often requested as part of the publication process. These changes are driven mostly by economics, but that doesn't mean that it isn't a good time to take advantage of the opening up of narrow prescriptions for publication of our work. Even 'tenure' requirements are beginning to include not just X number of published papers but also the possibility of outputs through alternative media. Funders are looking for outcomes from their investments in us and want to know how we will affect change in the wider world; i.e., the world beyond the very few other academics who happen to read a journal article. This time of flux should be seen as an opportunity to get our alternative responses to dissemination of social science data out there.

I enjoy writing here for this blog. It began as an experiment for me; once again, I started out not sure of what I was doing or how I would go about doing it. I was uncertain of the outcome as well.

One result for me is that I am less and less interested in writing that does not communicate more directly with an audience and include my 'self' in that process. All I really have to share with anyone else is my own experience. It may be flawed and/or of little value to anyone else. For these reasons, I try to find a way in which what I write here will be both of some usefulness to others in their own work, but also attempt to write it with some skill and craft at the same time.

Nice to chat. Gotta go.
Kip

PS Hope to see many of you at the Bournemouth Qualitative Conference in September! About one-third of it this time is performative!

Embracing Serendipity

2010-04-18T10:29:00.010+01:00

I am getting old enough now that I finally realise that certain times/moments in my life were pinnacles, not predictors of things to come.

I recall the dizzying heights of firsts: the initial film that spoke to me personally, the foundational book that changed my thinking, that earliest piece of music that clutched my heart and made me cry. I thought that such moments would continue through life ad infinitum. Never mind a love that I thought would last forever, a body abused that I assumed would always recover, the promise of undying friendship that simply withered away. Indeed, I now find myself no longer astonished when people lack integrity, but am surprised that I still have some. Today, that fetching glance from a stranger is more about what might have been, a beautiful idea is no longer a grand painting, unnumbered days are now more finite, but nonetheless their numbers ignored as they always were.

I write these things down because I think about them. I know that simply thinking up a grand idea, plan or work of art is a half measure and I have grown more and more suspicious of those who think their lives away instead of living them productively and creatively. Roddy suggested that I do something with the first sentence of this piece when I first wrote it. So I have, because it is the nature of the artist to do so. Art is action.

So many people seem unaware of what art is about. What it is about is, in fact, constantly changing. The art of today is often amorphous, gaseous and without formal structure. Some grasp habitually at a definition of the ‘self’, mistakenly constructed outside of community. Much of today’s art proposes a naïveté unavailable to a Western eye, a Western experience. It becomes, therefore, a pre-art-historic pantomime. As art always has, however, it simply reflects the time in which it is made. Within this peculiar parameter (historicity) and with some relief, at least we can call it art.

I felt sorry for the art students at Goldsmiths documented in a recent television programme (Goldsmiths: But Is It Art?) that I watched . Skill seems no longer a requirement for admission or even taught. (Contemporary musicians still learn to play their instruments, thankfully). The study of art seems to have abandoned such practice. This is a pity, because much of producing visual art is about seeing. To become skilled at seeing better, learning to draw helps. The Goldsmiths students were more concerned with ‘concepts’ and the ideas that occupied their heads. They thought about them and made grimaces and worried most about the competition, but in a business-like way. The problem seemed to be that they had little skillfulness to execute their ideas. A shame, really, because some of them seemed talented.

I have been revisiting Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies and other arts-based generative processes to rethink our School’s structure and roles within that structure. Every member of staff has been invited to express their vision (‘ReThink’) for the School in Moleskine Japanese-style sketchbooks. An exhibition of the books will then be held at the end of the exercise.

I love that there is buzz around this project at community level ⎯in some ways, an unexpected one. The unanticipated can be one of life's pleasures, particularly when it is positive. The project proceeds bottom-up rather than managerially top-down, stimulated by creative encounters within the interface between materials and concepts, and a notion quite new to most of the people engaged in this ‘product as the process itself’. Colleagues who are somewhat deadened by systems and structures, formats and formulas are being asked to reinvest the personal in their workplace, be creative and produce an object that documents, even stimulates and expands, their own ideas for a better School.

Many of us are recoiling these days from the tsunami of “business management style” that has washed over academia in the UK. It has resulted in universities that are managed for management’s sake, some calling it ‘a confident, businesslike approach’ (Beer, J. Oxford Brookes University). Once the many meetings have been held, the strategies imposed and the management structures layered with more tiers than a wedding cake, the administration sees the job as a fait accomplis. Except for the counting; there will always be counting.

The actual work of facilitating learning and discovery seems almost abandoned in the need to mimic a management style that would itself be more comfortable in the 1980s. In fact, it is the equivalent management approach that was superimposed upon many not-for-profits in America at that same time. The identical omission is being made again: managers are forgetting that these organisations are about people first and that they will always work best when loosely structured and even a bit messy.

The irony of finding a business academic talking about using oblique strategies or ‘obliquity’ as he calls it, then, came as quite a surprise to me. John Kay, a visiting Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, defines obliquity as ‘an extremely useful strategy for getting the most out of life: stop pursuing your goals and you are far more likely to achieve them’ . It’s like love: we never find it when we are looking for it. Once, it was just standing there, next to a popcorn machine. It took me about 45 minutes to realise it.

Kay believes ‘that most of the challenges we face involve too many intricately connected factors to ever be fully understood. It is only by embracing this fact that we can learn to make better decisions’. He continues that the most profitable companies in the world are not dedicated to profit; the best cities in the world are not the planned ones .

According to Eno and Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies, linear thinking is not the best way to find creative solutions. Mixing it up, serendipity and even chaos all contribute to eliciting ideas that promise freshness and innovation. ‘Breath more deeply’ and ‘Do nothing for as long as possible’ are two of my favourite suggestions from the Strategies. Mash-ups in music and on television (Glee, for instance) demonstrate that freshness and innovation can be accomplished by combining two or more often-old ideas or forms, creating new ones that are more than the sum of their parts. These are all processes that we are suggesting in our School’s ‘ReThink’ project.

When I was writing my PhD thesis, I used to keep a notebook near the television. If some phrase or word caught my attention, I would enter it into my notebook. When I was in the throws of writing the 80,000-word thesis and words escaped me or my language had simply become tediously repetitive, I would flip through my TV notebook and find a fresh bon mot or phrase that would either stimulate my writing or work directly on my page. In fact, I used philosopher Alain de Botton’s clever word that I heard on TV, ‘Proustifications’, for one of my Chapter titles. Later, when I met him, I confessed and sheepishly apologised for stealing his word.

“Wasn’t that plagiarism?” someone once naively asked me.

“No” I responded, “It was art”.

I still keep a TV notebook. For your pleasure, I end with a few entries:

“A new language requires a new technique” ⎯Philip Glass

“This isn’t the kind of job you do to send out precise messages. You do television if you want to send out precise messages” ⎯Italian artist

“You don’t have to be watching a story to feel something” ⎯George Balanchine

“I would rather wear out than rust out” ⎯Dolly Parton

My contribution to my School's ReThink project using Eno's Heroic Strategies and a Moleskine Sketchbook.

18 May 2010

You can now view photos of our School's sketchbooks and exhibition.

A Roundtable Conversation on Tomorrow, In A Year

2010-03-12T10:46:00.002Z

A Roundtable Conversation on Tomorrow, In A Year from The Knife on Vimeo.
With The Knife (Olof and Karin), Planningtorock (Janine), Mt. Sims (Matt).
Performed by Olivia Plender. Images by Hort

Hotel Pro Forma

My (fake) Dazed and Confused Interview

2010-03-08T12:58:00.007Z

Skimming Dazed and Confused online this morning, it finally dawned on me that they probably will never ask me for an interview after all. Hmmmm. Years ago I would have slumped in a corner and licked my wounds. Not today! I publish below my answers to a typical D&C interview (with myself):

WHAT’S…

...so special about you, then?
I find inspiration in the ordinary and don’t act my age

…the last film you saw?
The Singer

...the last song you heard?
Loin De Paname (Paris, Paris)

...the song you wish you had written?
Ode to Joy

...the best piece of advice you've heard?
“It is what it is ‘til it isn’t.”

...better, dusk or dawn?
a dusky dawn

…so good about Bournemouth?
It’s usually one degree (Celsius) warmer than the rest of the UK

...your favourite piece of clothing?
My black, red and gold Diesel trainers

...the world coming to?
a teenager’s idea of pornography in 3-D

...the name of your hero?
Ken Gergen

...so special about your hero?
He wrote academic prose that made me cry

...your worst fashion secret?
I like to wear the same clothes daily in my flat

...this future going to bring?
more art, more performance, more relaxed scholarship

...your favourite website?
kipworld of course

...at the top of your shit list?
Academics pretending to be managers

...at the top of your wish list for 2010?
become a film maker

How would you describe your work?
Treacherous and blissful

Chopin and Me

2010-03-02T14:41:00.010Z

‘I began to wonder what it would be like if the University hired Chopin to compose music, but then asked him to give piano lessons’.

I realised somewhat later that I had been drawn into a ‘debate’. Now the British love debate just about as much as they fancy baked beans (QI fact: 'Britons eat 97% of the world's baked beans'). It’s cultural and we foreigners just have to get used to it if we are going to live and work here.

On the other hand, this was a mistake on my part. It was a blunder because my position is one of congeniality and co-operation, not confrontation. Not even trying to win the point. What’s the point?

In a nutshell, the whole ‘conversation’ or debate was about our time and energies being micro-managed, knee-jerk responses to management’s change for the sake of change and how these changes are ‘sprung upon us’ with little or no input from us in the first place. There is a lot of politics involved in this: positioning to solidify positions. It reflects a warped sense of what management is about in the first place. In the end, it is mostly about people doing whatever is necessary to pay their mortgages. This makes me very sad because any integrity goes completely out of the window-- abandoned in a smug and self-congratulatory way. Congratulations for having a survival instinct.

After this to and fro by e-mail, I needed to calm down. I was hurt and disappointed and even somewhat insulted that no one seemed interested in hearing my position on these changes. I even felt somewhat scorned for having a position or response in the first place. The silence from most was deadening (some did come to me privately the following day to congratulate me and quietly voice their approval).

Later that evening, I decided to tune into Donald Macleod’s Radio 3 Composer of the Week programme to calm myself down. This week it happens to be Chopin. Macleod has presented some wonderful programmes in this series (his week on Astor Piazzolla, the king of the tango, was amazing for its depth-of-knowledge and variety). He also presents somewhat obscure composers as well and they are a real education for me.

Macleod began by recounting the period when Georges Sand convinced Chopin to spend a winter in a run-down monastery on Mallorca. Cold and damp, Chopin became quite ill whilst there. I have visited this very monastery on a cold and damp day myself. The rooms are completely made of stone. On the day that I was there, a Spanish chaperone guarded the room that Chopin worked in by leaning her bosom over his piano and clipping her fingernails … all the while with a military eye on visitors to the room. Anyway, not a great place to compose music, I think.

The radio programme proceeded with some of Chopin’s Mazurkas. I began to fall into a dream-like sleep (I would say I was having another Keanu Reeves-like narcoleptic episode, but my GP says this is impossible). I began to wonder what it would be like if the University hired Chopin to compose music, but then asked him to give piano lessons.

This is the situation I am in. It is not that I would not like to impart my wisdom to freshers, but I think that my energies are better spent doing the job that I was hired to do: secure the funding to produce cutting-edge internationally important research. I write about it, make films and videos about it and it is shared in a very democratic way with all through the Internet. I have been doing this for some time now. My work is easily available to any student who wishes to access it. This very blog is a tangential and free-form educational tool. I have made commitments to write two books for publication which should benefit students for some time to come. My door is always open and I am available by e-mail at least 12 hours daily. I am willing to chat with anyone about my work or theirs.

I just do not have the time or the energy to commit to ‘teaching slots’ for undergraduates en mass who most likely are not up to speed and not yet very interested in the specific field in which I plough. This job is better reserved for those with subject expertise and experience as teachers at undergrad level.

A portion of my time (40%) is committed through external funding to leading a research project. I supervise PhD and Masters students, which is also time-consuming. The remainder of my time is devoted to making my contribution to the Centre for Qualitative Research and its activities and working across boundaries with The Media School. Enough is enough.

I am in the business of doing what I do best. This is as much as I can do.

‘But your no Chopin’, you might say? Oh, yes, I am.

Synchronicity

2010-02-26T15:13:00.007Z

Good authors too who once knew better words,
Now only use four letter words
Writing prose, Anything Goes.

--Cole Porter

I have been hoping to blog about two things: our recent Masterclass in Theatrical Interpretation of Research Data and Carol Channing.

The Masterclass was a great success. Sharon Muiruri, the facilitator, was a real star and the participants, for the most part, really dug in and contributed to developing this emerging concept of using improv as an interpretive tool to interrogate research data. I had a few ah-ha! moments of my own, particularly in regards to the script development for our eventual film for the Gay and Pleasant Land? Project.

With little connection at all (ah, but with typical kipworld synchronicity you might say?), except that I have been rethinking corporeal theatre and how expressing life story metaphors and developing characterizations might be accomplished physically, I wanted to write my Carol Channing story. In a recent interview, Channing talked about Stanislavsky and ‘the spine of the character’ and how, astoundingly, she used Stanislavsky’s method to develop her title role in the musical, Hello, Dolly!

I was going to write my own personal recollection about meeting Channing in the green room of an American television talk show. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she transformed into the character ‘Carol Channing’ right in front of us. This was accomplished with a wig, false eyelashes, crimson lipstick, some spit and a tin of Stein’s theatrical grease paint, much to the astonishment of all, including Mary Kay of Mary Kay Cosmetics who sat transfixed, yet horrified. I promise to tell the complete story at another time.

In the meantime, you may think that I have totally gone off the deep end and all ‘show biz’ on us here! This is not at all the case. I am still a social science researcher, I promise. Herein, however, lies the conundrum (and its synchronicities) behind what I would like to write about now.

Is Performative Social Science (PSS, for short) Art or Social Science? It isn’t either. It is a fusion of the Arts and Social Sciences, creating a new paradigm where tools from the Arts and Humanities are explored for their utility in enriching the ways in which we research social science subjects and/or disseminate or present our research to our audiences. This does not mean that we simply ‘put on a play’ (I have written about this elsewhere) or even make a film (and I need to constantly be wary of that pitfall myself these days in lieu of our Project's promised cinematic output).

It certainly isn’t taking academic prose (or interview transcriptions), leaving out a line or two here and there, and then rearranging it on the page in stanza format mimicking poetry, then passing it off as ‘poetic inquiry’. (Even worse: then calling ourselves poets.) It isn’t thinking that our lives (the ‘snowflake’ phenomenon) are so precious and unique that surely the world wants us to interpret our individuality (too often through the device of painful self revelation and angst). Usually to a captured audience, these academics perform their stories by crawling around the floor for an half hour or so and calling it dance or producing a monologue that seems never to have a conclusion.

Instead, let’s return to what we should already know quite well: academic research. I recall the standard rule-of-thumb suggestion that we make to postgrad students all of the time: ‘Find a research method that best fits the research question(s)’. This imperative applies to PSS as well. Within the vast richness of the Arts and Humanities, which lens, device, technique or tradition might deepen our research process or expand our dissemination plan? Do we automatically put on a play or make a film from our research data because we are so many frustrated actors or film directors, without ever asking which art form best fits the research question and the data that it has produced?

Many of us have turned to the arts for both inspiration and practical assistance in answer to our own frustrations with more standard research protocols and outputs. Perhaps our methods have become shop worn (routinely slotting vast amounts of data into ‘themes’ and then banging on about ‘rigour’ comes to mind as an example)? Perhaps the problem lies within our methodologies? Do we write too glibly about the ‘evocative’ without knowing what it is that is being evoked and how or, better yet, what our work might provoke instead? Do we falsely champion the ‘embodied’ without realising that through this binary by default we risk painting ourselves back into the Cartesian corner of mind/body duality that we are supposed to have abandoned in post-modern times? Yes, we turn elsewhere, rightfully so.

In addition, we have been encouraged to find ways to reach wider audiences by funders and, because of this, we have begun to look beyond academic journals or narrow academic subject groups (conference presentations or what I like to call ‘preaching to the choir’). Funders now want to know the benefits to society of our research and how it might affect society –the ‘outcomes’ of our efforts.

Performative Social Science, when it is at its best and humming along, is a synthesis that provides answers to many of these very requirements. Ideally, our audiences should be almost unaware of the seams where we have cobbled together in-depth, substantial scholarship with artistic endeavour. In my estimation, part of doing this 'performative social science' is the breaking down of the old boundaries, but also the old expectations and frameworks of what research is supposed to look like after it is ‘finished’. I am more and more convinced these days that any academic written texts reporting research should be 'supporting ancillary documents' to productions, not the final results or raison d’êtres of research efforts.

Nonetheless, we are researchers. We are not actors, directors, filmmakers, dancers, poets and so forth. There are vast opportunities and outlets (and frustrations and roadblocks) for those who wish to pursue those professions. We can learn a great deal from these folks who often needed to wait tables and do other menial jobs in order to pursue their dream profession. They may help us look at our own field through new lenses, but let’s not insult them by falsely assuming their hard-earned mantles.

In return, a word of caution to artists who might be drawn to working with researchers: the world of academia is not simply a new venue for you to put on a play, dance a dance or publish a poem. There are both constraints and opportunities in the academic world as well, which we are happy to share with you through our collaborations.

Through interfaces with techniques from the arts and humanities opportunities are presented to work with social science material and expand its means of production and dissemination to novel and creative levels. This requires the fusion mentioned earlier. This necessitates co-operation and collaboration. Communication and common ground are key to successful collaboration and fusion.

A closing word of caution: there are a few reptiles perched on the periphery of our pleasant pond. PSS, as the concept and its terminology become more familiar, runs the risk of providing a phrase or two for academics who would rather incorporate the language of what we are doing into their own outputs without really challenging either their own thinking or work. They subsume the language of PSS, but never really re-examine their own procedural techniques or output methods (and our developing terminology is, in this way, incorporated within standard academic journal writing rather than through any meaningful reinvention of research methods and dissemination). As Pollyanna I occasionally forget that there are a few academics lying in wait like lizards whose tongues dart out as soon as someone else's hard work and new ideas come into view from their lily pads. Let’s call them on this when they do so.

Most of all, however, we need to be careful not to implode PSS through an overblown sense of what we are about. In our enthusiasm, let’s not be too quick to anoint ourselves as poets, actors, dancers or magicians. When we do become one of those, I am sure others, more qualified to judge, will quickly let us know.

Anything goes? I don’t think so.

“It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present, awfully difficult.” *

2010-01-11T14:22:00.023Z

I am glad that I set the TV to record lots of programmes while I was away recently, particularly some movies that I would otherwise have missed. Last night I watched “Grey Gardens”, the HBO movie drama based upon the Maysles brothers 1975 documentary of the same name and winner of the 2010 Golden Globe for best motion picture made for television.

Following the film, I watched the documentary as well. A few things stood out for me: one being how much of the dialogue from the documentary is included in the film’s script. The second was how cleverly the actors took on the nuances of the characters, again based upon attention to the details provided in the documentary, but also by digging deep into archival material beforehand.

Jessica Lange, playing ‘Big’ Edie Beale, is just not acting by means of a fantastic ageing transformation accomplished by make-up. She has also done her homework. In one scene in the documentary, Edie removes and then replaces two horn combs from either side of her aged grey hair. In the drama, Lange does the very same bit of ‘stage business’. It is through this attention to personal detail that the character becomes believable and real. The comparisons between the two efforts go on; what is important here is to note how in-depth ‘research’ is being used to produce dramatic story telling.

These are details that take on importance for me in our writing of the script for our project, Gay and Pleasant Land?. At this juncture (where most of the research has been carried out and we are just beginning to use improvisation for script development), my viewing of these two films has added poignancy. Albert Maysles, one of the filmmakers, has stated that the characters are ‘just like anybody else, but more so’. Elsewhere, Michael Haneke (The White Ribbon) reports: ‘It’s very simple to get a cross section of society within a village; you get a microcosm of the social macrocosm’. Our film about being gay and living in a rural village should do exactly that. This is what we hope will give it its universality and connection with the audience.

Grey Gardens (both the drama and the documentary) has been compared to a Greek tragedy. Describing the mother and daughter relationship, Scott Frankel (composer of the musical version of Grey Gardens) has stated that "in this complicated relationship it is always the parent who both inflicts the severest wounds and also bandages them with the most tender care." A decision has been reached that our short film for Gay and Pleasant Land? should be character driven. By creating ‘composite’ characters based upon our research, our ‘docu-drama’ has a better chance at reaching those wide audiences and changing hearts and minds.

Our efforts here (as well as in other filmic work being carried out by myself and Trevor Hearing at Bournemouth University) begin to reshape our thinking about what documentary filmmaking is and how we might change it. No longer satisfied with the slick news reporting style of documentary making, we are beginning to look around the edges of production and reinvest the medium with the creativity it deserves. One such way is by looking at how dramatic interpretation (resulting in a renewed and active audience participation in interpretation) can revamp the medium. Concepts such as ‘beyond text’, death of the author (and yes, even ‘death of the subject’, at least in terms of camera focus) are all now in play in our creative experimentations.

The paradox of ‘death of the author’ became clear to me when watching Grey Gardens last night. Although I was involved and absorbed by the story of these two women, it became clear to me that I also had my own story to tell, one that reflected the setting of Grey Gardens, perhaps even some of its story. I questioned if the only story that any of us have to tell is our own? In blurring the relation between the writer and his characters, which am I? How transparent am I really then, in telling someone else’s story? What rings true for me in this case is that Grey Gardens moved me profoundly because I found my own story in it.

When I was 21 years old, I spent the summer living with a family in Chestnut Hill, a part of Philadelphia which was a 19th Century escape from the heat and disease of summer city dwelling. My roommate at Art College came from Chestnut Hill and took me to visit for a weekend at the end of spring term that year. We stayed for the whole summer.

The family in this case was Irish Catholic and, therefore, outsiders in Anglo-Saxon, upper-crust Chestnut Hill (in the 1920s locals burned down the only Catholic church in the area). The family’s two daughters were day students at Raven Hill, the same private school run by Catholic nuns that Grace Kelly (another upwardly-mobile Irish-Catholic Philadelphia family) attended.

The house was a huge Victorian pile with lots of rooms and a widow’s walk perched on top. It was painted shades of grey at the time and a bit dilapidated. The owners of the house and parents of the two Raven Hill girls, Anna and Charlie Meehan, were struggling financially. The house reflected this, with its former glory furnished with the Meehan's well worn fittings that had seen their day. There were lots of rooms, just like Grey Gardens, a big kitchen that surely servants had once laboured in, and floor to ceiling windows on the ground floor which opened onto a spacious verandah. A large standard poodle, Poley, bounded in and out of the door-like windows. Before the Meehans moved in, a small swimming pool had been added to the overgrown back garden, but was still useable.

The parties at the house were fantastic events and the girls had lots of college-aged friends who came around for them. Anna Meehan was ‘liberal’ in her permissiveness in terms of the girls’ behaviour, probably wrongly assuming that Catholic nuns had done their job and put enough of the fear of Jesus in them to keep them virginal. Charlie wasn’t around much because he was trying to get several failed or failing business back on track. Anna was director of a nursing home somewhere and seemed to provide the main source of income for the family. Their lifestyle was one of assume the position and it will follow you.

Anna had invented a background of Austrian Catholic roots and even given her daughters names of which the Von Trapp family would have approved. Adopted by a modest couple of Austrian lineage herself, Anna had used this fact to deny the truth that she was Irish Catholic by blood; this was only compounded by the other fact that Irish-American Charlie got her pregnant and so she ended up married to an Irishman after all.

After I had stayed a few weeks at the Meehan’s and feeling somewhat guilty as the long-term guest who had come to dinner, Charlie Meehan had a heart attack and died suddenly. The family was devastated. Anna, who had fought with Charlie constantly, was beside herself with the kind of grief only guilt can produce. Still, life must go on; the show must go on. This was a test of Anna’s will to survive all obstacles and she rose to the occasion. I offered to pay rent to stay at the house for the summer, and Anna agreed (quietly and in private, of course). After a lavish funeral and a week or two of mourning, the parties resumed. It was summer after all and the girls were teenagers. It made sense to carry on and show Chestnut Hill what they were made of.

It was my Grey Gardens summer. The house itself with it many rooms, many pretenses, its peeling paint and systems in need of repair was like the film Grey Gardens in the early years, some time after the husband left and the money to support their lifestyle dried up. Anna was ‘Big Edie’ with her silver grey hair, sometimes tied up in a bun, other times falling around her shoulders, her lack of grooming and the comfort of a chenille robe, except when business called her away. Anna was full of ambition, full of unfulfilled promise, wanting what she never had for herself for her daughters, whilst at the same time keeping them in check by vetting the boys allowed through the front door. A summer consisting of parties and a funeral, all produced through the mirage of a warped sense of the upper class and its supposed expectations of the newly arrived. We all know, of course, the newly arrived are never really welcome.

For me, it was a summer of love, a devastating platonic love for a sixteen year old boy whose mother came after me with a butcher’s knife. Position and pretense coupled with a romantic youth had convinced me in my naïveté that anything was possible, even this. The hard lesson learned that summer was that this in not the case, and never would be. This was a summer of beginnings, and an end.

* In the film, Little Edie dreamily tells this to David and Albert Maysles.

Call for Abstracts: Bournemouth Qualitative Conference

2009-12-17T15:09:00.007Z

8th International Qualitative
Research Conference

6 – 8 September 2010

Talbot Campus
Bournemouth University

Call for Abstracts

http://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/hsc/international-qualitative-research-conference-2010.html

Including:

Performative Social Science

http://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/hsc/international-qualitative-research-science.html

PERFORM, INVOLVE, PARTICIPATE

Sometimes I feel like Susan Boyle...

2009-12-12T09:52:00.004Z

Jeffrey is using his blog and autoethnography to navigate his PhD at Lancaster. He often asks me short, concise 'just the facts, ma'm' kinds of questions on the blog or in response to my postings.

I feel like Susan Boyle. She is answering questions such as 'What's your favorite meal? What's your favorite show tune?" in videos on her website. Yoko Ono answers 10-15 questions from 'readers' a week on Twitter. The era of the fast and furious, no-nonsense reply is upon us.

Jeffrey asks (Do you like that use of the newspaper-style breezy present tense?):

Kip, I think you hit on the reason why autoethnography may be so contentious a method! From this vantage, how would you define this (especially for those who find it easy to confuse the two)?

'My personal story is simply one of the raw materials used to produce my product. What I construct stands alone for what it is (a story, a painting, an A/V production), but comes to life when it engages with the response that it instils in the reader/viewer/audience, “… those wonderful people out there in the dark!”' Rough talk and chocolate brownies

In the best autoethnography, I am always a minor character and/or a conduit to a time, place and other people. I become fictional through writing. I am the sorcerer who reminds the audience of themselves.

Reflexive writing is more like a diary; private thoughts that perhaps I share, perhaps I do not. They remind me of myself. I get to be Proust in private.

To do good research, it is myself that often that I need to get out of the way, so writing about my self may help me accomplish this.

A 'personal journey' PhD is often boring and usually takes about twice as much time anyway. If you already know the subject of your research, what is the point of investigating it?

Hubris is one of the best Greek words.

[Your supervisors should be discussing all of this with you. You can say I said so!]

... a roving and disconnected type of writing ...

2009-11-26T14:03:00.006Z

'... the exposition of an idea through fragments, through a roving and disconnected type of writing, can sometimes better circumscribe its object than can a more linear approach'.
--Nicolas Bourriaud (2009) The Radicant

Relational Humanism in documentation and dissemination

2009-11-24T12:18:00.006Z

‘We locate in a specifically relational humanism a new and significant means of realizing traditional visions of human well-being’ (Gergen 1997). Social science often has sought new ways of attaining greater "sensibility" to humanistic concerns; nonetheless, the status of new forms of production and dissemination as academic knowledge remains contested and ambiguous, and further development is required (Jones 2006).

Any large and diverse research project benefits from the documentation of its very development. Relational humanism in documentation and dissemination means that personal autonomy, dignity, liberty and responsibility are considered positive values for consideration throughout the on-going dialogue created by the research itself and its dissemination. It is through having a record of this very process that knowledge can be shared with others, creating a continuum on which the outcomes of a project's efforts can begin to flourish. The concern is with ambiguity, process, meaning, totality and history (Plummer 1983) through the continuity and “aliveness” of ideas. Humanising the process of documentation can be achieved by historically accurate ways: by listening to the stories of process and change within the research development itself. In turn, humanising the method of dissemination means consideration of any audience's part in the overall progression and building audience participation into the overall plan. A relational humanism urges us as theorists, human scientists and practitioners to seek ways – multiple ways - of generating integrative conversation.

Relational humanism thus appears not as ‘top-down’ concept but as a practical process of give-and-take by all of the players. Humanism also prompts us to imagine our potential audiences in ways which challenge us to re-imagine the commonweal, common good, or imagined community across disciplines and the intellectual freedom (Wakelin 2007) of our audiences themselves—a relational aesthetic (Bourriaud 2002; Jones 2006). Our considerations, through embodied perception, encourage us to walk around the edges of processes, to see beyond factuality to the humanism hidden on the other side. By extending our gaze beyond the usual, to new technologies and modes of presentation, we open doors to new understandings and resources (Jones 2006).

‘The precise meaning of relatedness, then, remains indeterminate and dependent upon further co-ordinations within relationship’ (Gergen 1997).

References

Bourriaud, N. (2002; English version) Relational Aesthetics. Dijon, France: Les Presses du Reel.

Gergen, K.J. (1997) Social Theory in Context: Relational Humanism. Draft copy for J. Greenwood (ed), The mark of the social. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.

Jones, K. (2006) ‘A Biographic Researcher in Pursuit of an Aesthetic: The use of arts-based (re)presentations in “performative” dissemination of life stories’. Qualitative Sociology Review, April 06.

Plummer, K. (1983) Documents of Life An Introduction to the Problems and Literature of a Humanistic Method. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Wakelin, D. (2007) Humanism, Reading, and English Literature 1430-1530.

Some simple thoughts, some more complex ones

2009-10-30T14:58:00.005Z

Elana wrote and asked me what thoughts I had on social science and artistic vision (in her case, photography) and the merging of the two fields. Are there specific criteria that I hope to see reflected in the creation of ‘scientifically supportive imagery’?

I responded that I still find writing about the visual to be ironic, at best. I strongly believe that we can learn more by looking, reveal more by showing than through simple justification in text. Art and Science are both about discovery and creating a record of that discovery. Both are infused with the time and place in which they are practiced. The 'audience' for any work of art, any scientific discovery makes the ultimate interpretation. This is as it should be.

The visual image needs to be interrogated. Just like a criminal in a police station. We should never accept what we first see as the final truth, but realise that we are peeling an onion of multiple truths (and lies). Sociology, when done well, is a good detective story.

Some of the best 'social photography' today is done on cell/mobile phones and appears on flickr and Facebook. Photography does not always have to have a 'cause' or social issue in order to be about social life. There is much fodder for investigation in the ordinary.

Elana cited Howard Becker a lot. It reminded me of his piano playing. I want both Beckers/I want to be both. I suggested that Elana read this blog. I proposed that it is a non-course in performative social science, an educational process by subterfuge (see preceding blog item).

Next, an anthropological journal sent me a friend’s paper on the use of poetry in social science to review. I highly recommended publication of the paper; then I added:

When any breakthrough occurs in art (or social science or anthropology?), it is necessary in order for it to find its place on a continuum of time that other attempts are made to refine answers to a set of questions that change only slowly (Kubler, The Shape of Time, 1962). This effort in the refinement of the use of poetics in social science contributes to the development of the use of the arts in this arena by astutely placing the case in a solid social science framework. Not the artistic endeavor that will punctuate the historical continuum as a great work of art, rather, this contribution is the quieter and deeper foundation-building labour that is necessary for other great strides forward to make their mark and prosper in the first place.

The author only hints at the audience (or community) so necessary for the dialogic to exist within our relationships with works of art. Further attention to relational aesthetics (Bourriaud 2001) may very well help inform further development of the theoretical base for poetics in social science research. The intuitive aspects of a shared culture, coupled with a more universal response to injustices (and, therefore, an artistic expression of these emotive components), compete for resolution within more rigid ethical frameworks and well-tested methodologies in the discussion. My take is that by developing a trust in personal instinct and intuition and the naturally expressive and moral potential of these resources, social science research will become more comfortable within these new paradigms and more willing to jettison some of the baggage of its old ‘academic rigor’ and procedural ethics.

Shape Shifter, Moi

2009-10-03T09:28:00.003+01:00

To anyone who has 'cottoned on' (love that recently rediscovered phrase) to what this blog is 'about'...
If (Raymon Montalbetti) tweets: 'the professor as the contemporary knowledge dj, re-mixing tapes for the next student blog? - Johannes Birringer' and ' shifting "prof" from traditional transmitter of knowledge to facilitator which disperses, aggregates, queries & distributes ideas'.

Okay, student-y ones: This week's assignment.

Interrogate these images:

K I P W O R L D

Tickled pink: the year behind, the year ahead.

Rufus Stone

“No horses were frightened in the making of this motion picture”

A summer holiday, three books and a story

Rufus Stone: Reports from locations, Part 2

Rufus Stone: Reports from location, Part 1

Rufus Stone: nascita/finale

‘What goes around, comes around’ or Making a movie again.

Rufus Stone the movie weblog goes live!

Rufus Stone: 4 What have you done with Rufus?

Rufus Stone: 3.

Well-known Filmmaker Josh Appignanesi has been chosen to direct our film, 'Rufus Stone' at Bournemouth U.

Rufus Stone: 2.

Rufus Stone: 1.

Beauty and the Bus

English to Spanish translation

Don Draper and some random thoughts for 2011

Alternative Thoughts for Researchers at Christmas

Performative Social Science: What it is/What it isn't

Negative Space and Chance Movement

Prime Cuts

He didn't leave a note.

My mother’s death/falling in love again

News Feed

Navigating the personal ...

Writing performatively

Embracing Serendipity

A Roundtable Conversation on Tomorrow, In A Year

My (fake) Dazed and Confused Interview

Chopin and Me

Synchronicity

“It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present, awfully difficult.” *

Call for Abstracts: Bournemouth Qualitative Conference

6 – 8 September 2010

Talbot CampusBournemouth University

Call for Abstracts

Performative Social Science

http://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/hsc/international-qualitative-research-science.html

PERFORM, INVOLVE, PARTICIPATE

Sometimes I feel like Susan Boyle...

... a roving and disconnected type of writing ...

Relational Humanism in documentation and dissemination

Some simple thoughts, some more complex ones

Shape Shifter, Moi

Talbot Campus
Bournemouth University