transitional stuff...including a new panel and old friends...

Hello there lesser-known fans of SaveMe Oh...

The video documentation from the REACT2010 performance series (see the post directly below this one) will be online in time for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.

More importantly, I am getting back the energy needed to write more optimistically...this is because I have found a new sense of hope and purpose over these precious few days.

I am tragically in love with SaveMe Oh and I find everything lacking in myself to be found in her...she has everything I wish I could have and more: looks, smarts, (real) guts, a loaded inventory and much more...She IS the ideal representative of the next-generation of avatar performance artists in Second Life and I am glad just to be near her. If I must prove my worth at all, it must be to her and her only.

I know she has many admirers but I plan to be her #1 fan...in fact, I think it is my last worthwhile goal as a washed-up old-skool performance artist from the golden days of 2006.

I need to be worthwhile to someone again since I no longer am with Second Front to back my antics up and all I seem to resort to is nostalgic naval-gazing - the kind of which can be found in some recent archival material below. I am in desperate need of a creative renewal as an ALT...I wish to be beyond postmodernism, beyond critique...I want to donate the entirety of my pink, blue and purple being to SaveMe Oh as the ultimate ritual sacrifice towards the greater good of performance art in virtual...er... synthetic worlds...

Anyway, please come witness my special dedication ceremony to SaveMe Oh on Valentines Day...It will be my last performance as Wirxli...everything below are mere archives from my past self that do not mean anything as dear to me as my aspiring relationship with SaveMe Oh...having said that, all of these people below represent aspects I was proud of from my past...even if some of the past was from a few days ago...

I think you get the picture here...words say it all..and it is just the words that say it all, right? ;-)


Here is was the first presentation of a panel I was part of a few days ago. It was hosted by Ars Virtua and was for a Virtual Worlds course at the University of California in San Diego (UCSD). The first presenter was Jay Van Buren from a series of events called Brooklyn is Watching...

Here is another slide by Jay.

Did I mention that Jay had some great slides for his presentation? :-)


For my presentation, I just showed archives from my avatar performance past as I seriously have nothing much new to offer in Second Life as Wirxli other than my unflinching devotion to SaveMe Oh... In this slide, you can see one of my earliest avatar performances. There was a time when I was a young female asian named Clara Tang. I performed with a bunch of friends in one of the earliest social networking sites targeted to a niche community. It was called Asian Avenue and we performed this series around 2001.

This slide shows my first performance art group (and band). I was in a duo called The Gates with my good friend Alberto Guedea. We "produced" the Gates, but were NOT the Gates, if you know what I mean ;-) ;-) For our first performance in 2002, we performed in a couple of washrooms in Digitalspace Traveler. Vito Acconci comes to mind here...

Here is another pic showing The Gates in virtual...er...*synthetic* action.


We then had my old friend and colleague Man Michinaga aka. Patrick Lichty present about his own work in virtual worlds and his work with me and many others in Second Front...it was a great historical overview with tons of bases covered...yay!


Here is another angle showing Michinaga's epic retrospective installation.

..and yet another glorious angle showing my once glorious past with Second Front...

Here I am posing with 2 very old friends (Alan and Kabuki) from my Digitalspace Traveler days from 2001...They are now also in Second Life...this is a cross-worlds reunion of sorts.


Here is another picture of me posing with Alan and Kabuki from Ye Ole Traveler days.

Here I am posing with Josina Burgess' fashion runway on Diabolus. I am now spending all my time on Diabolus since this is where SaveMe Oh is based and I want to be as close to her as legally possible!

I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME, I LOVE SAVEME...etc etc etc...


P.s. Caravaggio Bonetto gets first dibs on my free gender neutral purple ass(!)

From the recent archives vault #1 - Second Front at LIVE2007...

Here I am arriving on the scene just in time to switch from my curatorial role at the LIVE Biennial to that of an avatar performance artist... This performance was a direct cross between Hermann Nitsch's Orgies and Mysteries Theatre (including Hermann's organ soundtrack) combined with well...ummmm...Second Front's own retrospective legacy of mutual pan-narcissism ;-) For your info, the foxxy lady in the foreground is the Western Front's camera avatar, Westernfront Obscure.

Hey there LIVEly art-historians and pixel-dust collecting choreographers,

First of all, I would like to announce that yesterday was the 1-year anniversary of my blog (well, my very first posting was actually on November 20th, 2006 but there was no picture in that entry).

Ok, lets fast-forward to the present-day....

Some of you blog-readers may have attended two of Second Front's recent performances within the past month or two and might be wondering where all our recent archives are, right? Well, we have been too busy focusing on the next performance that is always looming in the near future to really reflect properly on our classic performances from the recent past.

For better of for worse, Second Life works on an extremely fast time scale and it can be exhausting to try and keep up with all the bloggings and such especially when one has a real life to maintain behind the scenes.

I actually have hardly any time to even blog these relatively moldy old performances tonight because quite frankly, I am premiering my new music composition "Riesenrad" with the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse for the Wien Modern Festival in Vienna this saturday and then on December 6th, I have to perform with Second Front yet again for the Art Basel Miami festival in Miami Beach - coordinated as part of the TELECULTURE festival via the Pace Digital Gallery. Oh, and I did mention that the Canadian representatives of Second Front just presented last week at the Interactive Futures Conference in Victoria, B.C. (my RL hometown)?

How can one be grounded in the "now" when the future is always in your face?

Anyways, Second Front are still in the process of digitizing some archived video-documentation and figuring out what to write. I should mention that I was also curating some performances for the LIVE Biennial (also known as the LIVE "Biennale" because I guess no one can agree on how to spell the festival's name) and only a few have been digitized so far because Tea Chenille's (my RL Wife) computer for editing video has stopped working (that is a long story in itself)...SIGH! I know... This is starting to sound like the classic "Dog Ate my Homework" excuse.

Ok, no more excuses, here is some (virtually) tangible evidence for you that Second Front did indeed perform for the LIVE 2007 Biennial of Performance Art in Vancouver. The date for this was October 20th, 2007. We projected our performance into the Western Front building in Vancouver. Our performance, "Theatre of the Subliminal Front" was co-curated by Rubaiyat Shatner (James Morgan) from Ars Virtua and former Second Front member, Loveless Finsbury (Natalie Loveless) as part of the Participatory Dissent event.

Some raw footage is available online at Google Video (as you will see below) and also, my Second Front colleague, AliseIborg Zhaoying (Penny Leong Browne) has posted some official reflections on our group's blog.

Below are 2 more measly pictures I took of us performing which are not really that exciting to look at because obviously, I was too busy performing to take quality photographs....sigh!

Here you can see some more of the stage and you can also see some additional members of Second Front (there are 9 of us in total).

In this picture, you can see more audience members arriving including such luminaries as Bibbe Oh and the Italian film director Finally Outlander.

Some friends of mine have submitted additional photos but I will have to go through them to make sure I have the photo-credits and hyperlinks assembled properly for a proper posting session.

In the meantime, here is a sneak preview of the raw video footage that I will be cross-blogging very shortly...



Here is another video from this performance that was documented by Maxxo Klaar. He recorded this footage during the time when Second Front crashed the entire sim (virtual property).... How about this for a piece of Film Noir, eh?


Find more videos like this on Odyssey Contemporary Art and Performance


... stay tuned for blogged archives of Second Front's gig at PERFORMA in NYC ...

Appointment with Gabissa Sun...

***UPDATE FROM THE FUTURE - GABISSA SUN BLOGGED THIS EVENT***

Hey performance art and embodied academia fans,

I just had an in-world appointment with one of the leading SL academics, Gabissa Sun.

In RL, she teaches at Exeter University in England and is also part of the Presence Project at Stanford University in California (aka. LindenLand).

Gabissa met up with me at my PR office to discuss writing about my solo and collaborative work with Second Front and others. She may also be part of a theoretical thinktank to discuss my curatorial efforts with Ars Virtua as part of the LIVE 2007 Biennial of Performance Art in Vancouver.

She said she was more of an academic than a "critic" so I told her that most of the critics here moonlight as academics anyways....heheheheheheh!

My Second Front co-member, Lizsolo Mathilde joined us to chat as you can see in this pic below...


Liz was just working on some building for more of her music-video machinima projects.

And here is a pic that Gabissa took of the three of us...



I cropped the pic a bit to hide the text from our public chat since the content of our discussion at that time suddenly turned to more confidential matters.

Ok, back to RL again 4 me...sigh!

Cheerz,
Wirxli

Bodies in Quotes - My panel presentation at Ars Virtua...

The "Bodies in Quotes" panel from left to right: Xerxes Druart (Stuart Bunt) , Wirxli Flimflam (me), Natberg Sternberg (Nathaniel Stern) and The Unknown (Carlos Castellanos - Moderator) .

To hear Wirxli FLimflam's RL biological alt "Jeremy O. Turner" speaking at the panel presentation, click on Miulew Takahe's pocast link.

Here is a quote from Wirxli's RL self after listening to his own voice on the podcast...

"Wow! That is quite the lisp I have there! My avatar persona must be having an affect on my RL biological voice-tone...I sounded like I was more from LindenLand (San Francisco) than from Canada! Maybe I can go for a voice interview with LindenLabs to get a job there? Heheheheheh... I also noticed that I tended to mumble alot! As for content, it was hard to latch onto what I waa trying to say at the panel...I just hope that my avatar distracted people enough from the actual voice coming through! Now I know why so many people rely on text to get their ideas across...at least there can be a realtime editing process...sheesh! Well, at least they could also hear my RL son causing trouble in the background so they knew I had an excuse for sounding spacey!" -Jeremy O. Turner (April, 2007)

Hello performance art, biotech art and body art fans!

Phew! I just wrapped up my panel discussion at the Ampitheater on Learning. The panel's theme "Bodies in Quotes" that Carlos Castellanos moderated. This was part of Ars Virtua's conference series called Borders. This conference was sponsored by the CADRE Laboratory for New Media in San Jose, California.

I had alot of fun being on this panel and I even got a chance to augment my avatar's overall persona and voice chatted with the rest of the gang for quite some time :-)

Since we were quite dependent on voice-chatting as our in-world broadast medium for the masses - I felt the need to at least type a few words out into the open unless it turned out that no one was actually hearing us. "If avatars chat amongst themselves in Ventrilo, does anybody (else) hear?"

Heheheheheh.. That must be a new koan for SL ;-)

So anyway, when it came time for my turn to talk, I first pasted into the chat-history my point form notes about what I was hoping to blather about in order to completely consume the full coveted 10 minutes of air-time... Normally, I would just spend 10 minutes blatantly hyping Second Front but I knew there were some academics nearby so I had to appear "objective". ;-)

Here is an edited version of my pasted notes that were intended for the audio-less to read and imagine exactly what I was elaborating/rambling about...

Here was my grandiose and academic-esque title...

"The Borders between ALT Bodies: Toggling between multiple SL windows and one biological window."

1) Identify Henrik Bennetsen's (SL name = Lys Ware) difference between Augmentation and Immersion.

2) Discuss both Richard Bartle's and Bennetsen's personality archetypes that haunt the virtual/biological bodies...

BARTLE's Archetype list = Achievers, Explorers, Socializers, and Killers.

As a related sidenote, I found it kind of odd and amusing that Richard Bartle once made an appearance as an avatar in SL to declare the Text-MUD's creative supremacy over visually-based virtual worlds such as Second Life itself and others...

BENNETSEN's Archetype list = Creators, Philosphers, Socializers, Businesspeople...

3) mention my different alts and identify which archetype fits best for each alt and how they address performance "art"

4) Mention also the archetypcal borders between the alts (including the biological body in "quotes").

5) emphasize that the most virtual body in SL when it comes to performance art is actually the biological body..it takes simply a figurehead mythological status until one dies.

6) Wirxli's SLebrity body enters and enhances mythological space (mention bodyguards and expanding persona in products).

So as you can see, these were very last-minute notes that I had hastily scrawled onto my off-world notepad application (no, I did not use the in-world "notecard") and only when I found out that voice-chat was going to be the primary broadcasting method, did I realize that I should probably make my notes public... I hope that was a good idea!

I really enjoyed what the other panelists had to say and I hope to hang out with them all in SL again soon... I had so many distractions in RL during this time that I found it very difficult to tune into what my colleagues were saying... To summarize:

1) Xerxes was mentioning how the semi-living biological entires being made in their RL lab were making the public feel uncomfortable, yet ethically responsible...

2) Natberg was bringing up the qualities of living in the grid that caused him some discomfort and intellectual distance..I wish I could summarize his talk better but his audio kept on crashing and also he happened to speak when I had all these essential RL distractions...sigh! I am sure we will be back in touch in SL and he can update me on what he actually said today...I humbly apologize, Natberg! :-)

3) As I said earlier, Carlos was our moderator and was doing a really good job at fielding questions and raising new ones that would engage all three of us panelists....yaaaay!

Other than one fielded forth by Humbert Xingjian, the only quesions we got were from Ars Virtua's curator, Rubaiyat Shatner aka. James Morgan.


One question he wanted to ask seemed to want to put into question the "official" wikipedia definition of Transhumanism. My personal ideas about Transhumanism came from one of the official sources which is more reliable than Wikipedia... Well, I will have a word with Ruby about that later ;-)

In the meantime, here are some other snapshots from my archives for you to peruse on your way down to reading the rest of my blog postings...

Here we all are sitting pretty for the panel...that is all you really need to do in SL...heheheheheh! On the right there, you will see some ad for a Tour-HUD. I knew that in-world HUDs were a dime-a-dozen but had no idea that they would have a special one for touring....KEWL! One of the drawbacks of the design though is that no Superman will request a guided tour. ..heheheheh!

In this pic, you see the front-rows of the audience..I am sure many were hiding in the nosebleed section...heheheheheheheheh! My trusty personal bodyguard, Bear Brooks was keep watch on the audience in case anything theoretically sneaky happened. I told Bear right off the bat to "never trust academics and skeptics"....Heh heh! I think he may have seen a critic or two in the audience as he was reaching inside his coat pocket for his gun :-) But seriously, I not only need critics to prop me and my career up, I also need bodyguards to protect my frail, drugged-up and quoted-up body!


Here is a side-view for you... For some petty and probably narcissistic reason, I really like taking the same situation from different angles. If you recognize yourself and your nametag in the audience and want to ask me additional questions about the panel discussion, please do not hesitate to IM me in-world.


Photo by Miulew Takahe.Special thanks to Miulew Takahe who is my colleague in the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse. He not only took this hi-rez pic, he also recorded the audio so i could have a sneak preview of all the stutters and interruptions I made ;-)

Photo by Miulew Takahe...and here is an additional pic by Miulew. Quite the nice side-profile I have there! :-)

Well, I hope the audio portion of the conference panel is officially posted soon so I can add a hyperlink to this blog! Please scroll down to read more postings...

0100101110101101.org's 3 classic performances at Ars Virtua!

Chi5 Shenzhou sent me a TP (TelePort) to Ars Virtua and the audience as well as the critics and artists were already milling about while gathering their energy and nerves waiting for the retro-performance-bonanza to begin...

Hey there performance art fans!

Today was a special day in that the reknowned con-ceptual artists, Franco and Eva Mattes aka. 0100101110101101.org were back at Second Life's Ars Virtua for another arousing round of exhibitions! This time their retro-performance trinity was being broadcast (possibly projected) into a contemporary art museum in Trento (Italy) known as the Galleria Civica d'Arte Contemporanea.


For this day (evening in Italian time), Franco and Eva focused on remediating the classics of performance art. If you scroll down the blog a bit, you will realize that they remediated a previous performance remediation by myself and Great Escape... How Postmodern is that! heheheheheh ;-)


...as you can see, I have a very historical screenshot here as this was taken at the exact moment in the chat-history where Franco and Evo announced the beginning of their first remediated performance... In fact, I had arrived there so promptly to take a screenshot of them announcing the performances, my pants barely had any time to render...sigh! While my pants were rendering, I read the notecard that they sent me very quickly and knew it was going to be one of the classic performances by Chris Burden but I was caught off guard as I was not expecting the specific performance to actually be...

... "Shoot" by Chris Burden (1972)! As I had mentioned above, Great Escape and myself did that exact re-enactment of this classic performance almost 3 months ago! I immediately told the Italian curator and critic Domenico Quaranta about this and politely asked him to relay this to the Mattes duo. Admittedly, their re-enactment of "Shoot" was probably closer to the original as I am guessing only the arm was wounded. In our version, Great Escape was shot dead (or at least played dead for awhile) ;-)

Anyway, once the shot-wound had sufficiently healed, we are all herded into this tiny makeshift white-cube trailer deeper inside Ars Virtua's main gallery lobby for their version of Vito Acconci's Seedbed. This was also a performance that Great Escape and myself had considered to re-perform in Second Life...I think for this one, we were simply grossed out to actually try this one on for size...even in pixellated version, Acconci's Seedbed piece is extremely creepy! It no longer surprises me that his middle name is "Hannibal" ;-) We did not even have the guts to ask the rest of our performance art group, Second Front about it! As far as we were concerned, it was going to be "Silence of the Seeds"...In retrospect, I wish we performed that one now... many of the audience members for our performers already consider us to be a bunch of art-wankers after all ;-) ;-)

Speaking of wanking, I have replaced the top-secret content of my screen-captured friends-list window with a little bit of foreshadowing for their 3rd performance that was guaranteed to get my rocks off! Being an "avant-garde" type myself, I must possess the quantum ability to visualize the future, as there was definitely some erotic vision in my mind that made me want to join Franco under the Seedbed ;-) ;-)

But, in the meantime....

...we were escorted out of the white-cube trailer for about 5 minutes and were eventually led outside of the gallery itself... You gotta love 1970s art - artists from that time always found ways to eventually bring out of that stuffy gallery and into some fresh air! ;-)

You will notice Second Front's co-member, Gazira Babeli sitting on the curator's desk. She was busy taking upskirt shots of some of the more vulnerable audience members of the "Seedbed" performance. In a sense then, Gazira was also remediating the remediation ;-) Speaking of "Seedbed", have you also noticed that both of the original performance are from 1972? Hmmm...Were all 3 of the performances from this year? I guess this year was the peak period for 1970s performance art? Hmmmmm, I had better ask Franklin Furnace about this.

So, now you want to know what was getting me all hot and bothered during "Seedbed", right? If you were paying attention to that tiny photoshopped modification in my Friends' window, you will recognize the next image...

...yes! Finally! I had now had a chance to get some action after getting all aroused from the virtual Seedbed! Wooooo Hooooooo! Of course, this was all done in the name of "art" so I had the full creative license to make a complete pervert out of myself ;-) ;-) This 3rd and final piece was a happening (probably ca. 1972) by Valerie Export and Peter Weibel. Franco even had Wiebel's loudspeaker remediated to a tee...

Eva Mattes herself had a partially rendered "cardboard" prim box and allowed people to peer through her "box" and fondle her perfectly crafted boobies! Since I knew that Linden Life requires blatant displays of capitalist exchange to get anything done in the world the way you want it done, I bribed Eva in L$5 installments to try and budge into the long line that was preventing me from getting direct access to her cyber-hooters.

I knew this was a time-limited offer and the last thing I wanted was to get only as much direct exposure as an art critic! Time is money, after all! So, I finally managed to get into her "test und tapp kino" just in time! I then refused to let go of her cinematic lucky-dip until she paid me back my L$5.... Sigh! My devious plan almost worked!!!