Laconia: 1,200 Tweets on Film
"There's something about the way Masha Tupitsyn's mind works when she addresses gender and film. It's different from how pretty much all other contemporary feminist theorists do it. Amid so much detached deconstruction, Tupitsyn's criticism is refreshingly full of life. Laconia, a document of Tupitsyn's public thoughts on film, is a stream of intimate, immediate, and specific reflections on movies, as well as a broad and sustained interrogation of things like whether we can any longer truly see corporatized cities like LA and NY other than in old movies, how to understand David Lynch's women, and whether there is any real possibility for connection in social media, or for that matter, in watching films."-Jessica Hoffman, writer and co editor, Make/Shift Magazine"The 1200 tweets that constitute Masha Tupitsyn's LACONIA are, each one, an aphorism in a bottle set adrift into the midst of all the other crisscrossing messages that movies and the media universe have spawned and continually and more or less blindly emit. Everything is happening in real time – not recollected in tranquility but intercepted in passing – even when the messages emanate from the deep past or (perhaps) a future around the next bend. It's a collage of the present moment, a continuous and unyielding dialogue, open-ended and alert to the barrage of signals that has become our home."-Geoffrey O'Brien, author of The Fall of the House of Walworth: A Tale of Madness and Murder in Gilded Age America, Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks And The Masters Of Noir, The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the 20th Century."LACONIA--1200  tweets linking everything from Fellini to Jaws--is no gimmick. It's  complex and engaging: a minimalist flaneurie, a fantastic syllabus, and a  way-smart rebellion to boot. Twitter is a device, not a  short-cut…LACONIA is beautiful book--about movies, sure, but also about  privacy, feminism, and industry, all linked by an encyclopedic knowledge  (covering not just films but cities, soundtracks, bodies) and a deep,  un-syrupy nostalgia. Tupitsyn writes about movies she repeat-watches or  just can't stomach, scenes that illuminate politics or fashion. She  drops bull's-eye aphorisms. Everything is sharp, light-catching. By  setting one dramatic observation on top of another, Tupitsyn's using her  medium--Twitter--as cleanly as possible. She's building not a book, but  a model; a solid matrix standing out against all the unedited online  hullabaloo. In the end, the shape the dots make is dazzling. I read it  twice, then went to the movies."     -Make/Shift Magazine: Feminisms in Motion"The  sheer number of films and books to be encountered in Laconia: 1,200  Tweets on Film is remarkable: 421, as indexed in order of appearance at  the back of what is an extraordinary (and somehow unlikely) book: ‘1,200  Tweets on Film’ by film critic, cultural theorist and fiction writer  Masha Tupitsyn. Tupitsyn’s 2007 book Beauty Talk & Monsters blended  film criticism with fiction and memoir, not getting into any of those  categorical wardrobes, but leaving them all wide open with the contents  disturbed. Movies in Beauty Talk & Monsters are a part of the  experience of reality, and reality as full of special effects and  elaborate Hollywood trickery as any movie; both above all potent arenas  for feminist critique and politics. In many ways, Laconia: 1,200 Tweets  on Film continues this project, replacing the fictional framework  of Beauty Talk & Monsters‘ with the structural scaffolding provided  by Twitter. And the importance of their origin on Twitter makes itself  strongly felt throughout the text; it’s a very different book to what  1,200 Aphorisms on Film would have been, for example. It’s impossible in  Laconia to get away from the fact that this book forms just a part of  the long stream-like text that Twitter users compose everyday, and  beyond that the long text we’re all always writing with every utterance,  every email etc, etc. There’s an awareness that the text is in the  broadest sense a part of the culture it’s critiquing...With Laconia,  Tupitsyn does for Twitter what Kevin Killian did for the Amazon review  in his two-volume Selected Amazon Reviews. They’ve taken the structures  and conventions of networking features on internet mega-sites and  attuned and altered them into art forms and vehicles for their  particular, nuanced, extraordinary artistic intelligences." -3 AM Magazine                                                                                                       "...The  walls between the novel and the notebook are falling, and some of the  most interesting current writing, like Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia,  gleefully razes any barriers between the two. Masha Tupitsyn seems to be  attempting to do the same for the barriers between the notebook and the  essay. This is why her decision to make the book different from the  Twitter feed, or her acceding to the inevitability of its difference, is  so conceptually interesting. LACONIA: 1,200 on Tweets on Film,  highlights the new limits of the material book. Further it highlights  how limits are not inherent to a form, but are evoked and changed over  time. The material book can only wade so far into the sea of digital  information and, like any swimmer who has just come ashore, it looks a  bit exposed. Many of Tupitsyn’s tweets concern this fragility, caused by  overabundance. Films that slip away from popular awareness, which exist  but don’t affect. And of course the very format selected, 120 minutes  on screen, years of human labour off, concentrated into an 140 character  observation, requiring seconds to write and seconds to read, furthers  this sense of fragile super-abundance. In our historical moment, we are  re-realising the fragility of writing as we simultaneously re-realise  that the prevailing ideology is also a fragile actuality, created by  daily human action, rather than an unchangeable fundamental of  existence...LACONIA and Ai Weiwei’s Blog are early attempts to combine  the two worlds, and their keen insights and  great strengths point not  just to our current situation, but also to the uncertainties of the  future."-Jonathan Anderson, Glasgow Review of Books                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 "Masha  Tupitsn's  LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film considers the question of  intimacy and  visual culture at large through the private/public sphere  of the  internet. LACONIA is a fascinating experiment in both form and  thought,  creating what cultural theorist Lauren Berlant would call an  'intimate  public:' What makes a public sphere intimate is an  expectation that the  consumers of its particular stuff already share a  worldview and  emotional knowledge that they have derived from a broadly  common  historical experience. A certain circularity structures an  intimate  public.' LACONIA, written entirely on Twitter between April  2009 and  June 2010, uses popular culture to a create a personal world.  It stays  focused and intimate; personal albeit public. Tupitsyn seeks  to do what  seems almost impossible--inhabiting the present moment to  its fullest.  The book calls to mind Blaise Pascal’s Pensées or Simone  Weil’s Gravity  and Grace, fragmented texts or aphorisms that are  innately spiritual and  political in nature. LACONIA, however, is not so  much steeped in  religious mysticism as much as it is a demystification  of image,  celebrity, and consumerism. It is at once diary, film  criticism, and  cultural collage. In a time when self-expression is a  form of  entertainment ready to be monetized by social networks,  Tupitsyn asks:  “In a performance culture like America, what happens if  you’re not seen  performing? Are you as good as dead?” Yet Tupitsyn is  not performing for  others; instead, she is draining the socialness out  of Twitter, using  these “small gestures” as a means to navigate her own  poetic  investigations."-The Brooklyn Rail"Reading   Masha Tupitsyn’s LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film, you make notes in the   margin in the same aphoristic manner as the content. I came   to LACONIA cynically and sceptically. I was suspicious of the delegation   of content’s role to form; that by tweeting about film Tupitsyn was   hoping that this device would hold far more than it should: the burden   and necessity of argument. Because the form itself already made oblique   comment on the subject at hand, the content was relieved of its   obligation to be rigorously argued. Yet somehow the opposite is true,   content sweeps up form, and LACONIA creates a rigor all its own, a   remarkable series of tumbling thoughts through and about visual culture.   At points it is quite stunning. They carry over to one another,   reflect, argue with one another. The potential problems of this sort of   formal construction – that each tweet would be isolated, irrelevant to   anything beyond itself, a casual observation that has no particular   interest or quality – dissolve as you read. Because you read. You make   narratives, connections. Including Tupitsyn herself."-Mark West, Glasgow Review of Books