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, Hard-boiled 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

"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

"Masha Tupitsyn helped establish the genre of 'micro-criticism' with LACONIA--a series of studied, architecturally arranged tweets on cinema."
--Flavorwire, "A Brief and Incomplete Survey of New Types of Online Literature"