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</style><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="safari-resource:/WBSReaderSharedStyleSheet.css" id="article-content-shared"><title>MiMi Nguyen On Epic Dream Dates with Keanu Reeves, Tenure & Obscurantist Labor @ RADAR Productions</title><div class="original-url">She's righteous!!!</div><div class="original-url"><br><a href="http://www.radarproductions.org/mimi-nguyen-on-epic-dream-dates-with-keanu-reeves-tenure-obscurantist-labor/">http://www.radarproductions.org/mimi-nguyen-on-epic-dream-dates-with-keanu-reeves-tenure-obscurantist-labor/</a><br><br></div><div id="article">
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<div class="page" style="font-size: 18px; line-height: 28px;"><h1 class="title">MiMi Nguyen On Epic Dream Dates with Keanu Reeves, Tenure & Obscurantist Labor</h1>
<p><b><a href="http://www.radarproductions.org/mimi-nguyen-on-epic-dream-dates-with-keanu-reeves-tenure-obscurantist-labor/mimi/" rel="attachment wp-att-7937"><img width="231" height="300" title="mimi" alt="" src="http://www.radarproductions.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/mimi-231x300.jpg" class="auxiliary float left" style="width: 231px;"></a>MiMi will be reading at the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/1479333088993468/" target="_blank">November 4 Radar Reading Series</a> at the San Francisco Public Library. We asked her some questions about dating, writing and advice for artists. </b></p>
<p><b>Tell us about something that challenged you during your last (or a current) project. </b></p>
<p>The worst thing about writing the first book (<i>The Gift of Freedom</i>) was that I had to finish it according to an external deadline – tenure. At some point I found I wasn’t writing to answer a question about liberal empire, or to close the circle of the argument, but to meet an institutional metric for a “productive” scholar. And even though I was writing with friends confronting the same metric –we would literally sit in a room together and write for hours, next to one another, chatting about a sentence one minute and leading each other through some stretches another—it was still an incredibly isolating experience.</p>
<p>The moment I remembered that I had an intensely satisfying<b> </b>creative and intellectual life long before I came to the academy was transformative. A feminist literary scholar named Janice Radway came to my campus and in a lecture discussed my work as a zinester (with particular reference to the <i>Race Riot</i> compilations, and feminist critical theory in my zines) and its relationship to my scholarship now. I had been feeling so under seige on the tenure track that<b> </b>I cried for a few days afterward, because I understood so acutely what I had been missing for the last few years – which was writing to the question, for the argument, and of course, for myself.</p>
<p><i> </i></p>
<p><b>You get to have an epic dream date with anyone dead or alive: who are they and where do you go on your date? </b></p>
<p>My friends reading this would know it’s a lie if I chose anyone but Keanu Reeves. That said, I have no idea what an “epic dream date” would be, and having only been on a few “proper” dates, and it seems like it would be awkward to go on a grown-up, straight-person date with Keanu Reeves.</p>
<p>But pretending as if this isn’t the most awkward question, we could just go to a punk show on his motorcycle (or if he still has access to that time-traveling telephone booth, we could take the booth to the Hong Kong Café to see The Bags or The Go-Go’s in 1979), and then spend a few hours going through the boxes of zines and records in my living room I haven’t made time to read or listen to yet. After that, we could choreograph a mash-up of a movie-fu fight with Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” dance and put it on YouTube as a performance piece. I hope he kept his sleeveless denim jacket from <i>River’s Edge</i>, because I would wear the crap out of it in the video. (Also I would be wearing Madonna’s boots from <i>Desperately Seeking Susan</i>, since those are the most epic shoes.) And then we could make a 24-hour zine about making art and getting older, and I could impress him with my carefully hoarded Letraset collection.</p>
<p>I should note that I am answering these questions with a cold fogging my brain. The other night, while otherwise wiped out on Advil, I randomly started a site to archive all the responses to Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety, or The Marvelous Sugar Baby.” I am totally a good time, Keanu.</p>
<p><b>Give us one piece of advice you want to share with artists – about life, bills, process, editing, brainstorming, anything.</b></p>
<p>I don’t have advice as much as I have “random questions about the nature of work.” How do we reproduce troubling measures of civic and capitalist productivity through binaries of activity/passivity in our cultural work? How do we evaluate an artistic process or object or experience? Through what measures of value, accountability – and to whom? As a scholar, I hear from both administrators and activists that the intellectual labor I do “should” yield concrete outcomes – whether in publications or grants, or in something measurable as “social change.” I worry about what these utilitarian (and sometimes authoritarian) demands mean for us, especially because I want to hold out a place for creative and intellectual labors that are slow to unfurl, or otherwise appear to the efficacious eye as useless, obscurantist, impractical, marginal, or wholly unproductive.</p>
</div></div></div><div><br><br>Sent from my iPhone</div></body></html>