some more on meritt:

i think one of the things that is making me struggle with this meritt essay is that at the core, i am trying to reconcile the sheer hard feelings that permeate the work, and meritts retreating into camp and artifice. or to put it another way, to dismiss and to feel at the same time, becomes like the push me pull me creature from dr doolittle...

his artistocratic lack of genroisty, to other musicians, to critics, to analysts and to fans, is so at odds with the genorousity, the dramatic over flowing of emotions that come in his work--and for him to say all of that work is a literary deconstruction, or lingusitic game playing, i find inscrutably blank, and i like blankness...

this is charles hughes on his blog, paraphrasing the emp stuff:

Beyond his comments about race, though, I must admit that I was far more taken aback by his repeated refusals to acknowledge that - like me and others - many of his fans actually appreciate his music unironically, finding a beauty and power in his best work that renders it a cut above. At one point, when moderator Ann Powers asked Merritt what she should say to her friends who put his song "The Book Of Love" on their "love tape" or wedding mix, Merritt drolly replied that she should "get some new friends." Later, he rather mockingly suggested that people who write him letters saying that they love his music and even that it helped them come out of the closet makes him want to vomit. I was stunned by this remark far more than any of his comments on race, and wondered how it is that such a talented pop songwriter could so dismiss those (like me) who hear something in his gentle, affecting melodies beyond the intellectual deconstruction that he seems far more comfortable discussing

now this camp refusal of emotions is a way of dealing with homophobia, pretending that you dont want the same things as the rest of the world, that you are better then the rest of the things that everybody wants, that you are in this tower picking apart, is a queer and academic thing, it is the patrician, hipster continutation of a drag queens mocking of hetero normative desire...but i dont think i have seen anyone whos corpus of work had all of the weight of feeling, and his public personae had all the weight of abstracted intellectualism...whats bothering me about the essay i think, is that i love the song, because i connect to the geography and isolation and its conflation with precise, clean, modernist emptiness (if you dont cry, you just dont feel it deep enough--if you dont cry)

(reading thomas waugh's essay on fassbinders realtionship to sirk, and thinking the same thoughts--fassbinder refused the gay world, and in works like the bitter tears of petra van kamp, he made fun of the domestic melodramas that he so dearly loved, he didnt want to reveal his hand. Waugh doesnt like Fassbinder, or his desire to like him is complicated by poltical landmines (ie my realtionship with montogromery gentry) but at the end, he writes For me his major libablitiy is his suceptiblity to misniterperation by his foreigh and nonspecailsit audiences. There is an undeniable tempetation to read his highly stylised exaggared use of melodramatic conventison as camp or parody, a sensiblity that Fassbinder ephatically disavows. I occasionaly find myself asking how a certain particullay outreagous gesture or detail of design is meant to be difested, it not with those distinctive squeals with which those of us who have a weakenss for Divine, say, sometimes greet her presence in our more vulenrable moments... (Fruit Machine 57)

Fassbinder is to Sirk as Waters is to ?

One of the things about staged masculinity or femmninity, of performing gender, is that it becomes something in between, (does being aware of the performance means that another gender is created?) i keep thinking about brokeback, atching it again last night, noticing how cleverly it is made--its not a western, its not a cowboy movie, its sirk, the landscape passages are a mcguffin

the other weird thing about gender and brokeback, is the formal bifurcation. the story begins as a work of setting up domestic lives, and then obligatory heterosexaulkity splits it in two, and we get a 1/2 (not half, one two) pattern, first we see jakes life and then we see heaths, and together, they talk, apart its silence and lacunae. its like the split screens, b/w rock hudson and doris day in pillow book, where the screen fractures in order to handle the strangeness of the conversations, and thinking about pillow book, or camp, or gender, or that split b/w feeling and artifice, one is reminded of Warhols the film maker, there was a reason why Chelsea girls ended up on four seperate screens, it was a fractal of gendered readings

with meritt the obsession to move away from feeling, however authentic, means that it is to the role of the interperter to other people, refusing to believe that his songs mean anything translates to anyone finding meaning in them has to do it alone, and so listening to kelly hogan eek out a genuineness from it, is (odd/weird/belaboured/strangely casual/something else?) (is tht why claudia gronson is such an impt part of the band) (is this where we talk about limony snickett and his new grown up adverbs book)

the thing is, that there were fractures in the personae of other 20th century camp figures, they let their mask down, they let a private feeling escape from feelings (not only the men: ie oscar wilde and his fairy tales, robbie ross, and his children; the jewishness of barbara and the sandras; judy and the pills; liza and judy; warhol and the ersatz family, the poverty, the wrong side of the tracks; quientin crisp's filthy apartment; annie oakley's desire for children; the cacaphony of liz taylors marriages; the conversation that loretta had with tammy about standing by yr man; dusty singing wishing and hoping when all she was wishing and hoping for was pussy; the little pink suit of jackie o; maria callas and the failure of voice; no more wire hangers; i want to be alone; but you are, you are; etc etc etc)

the flaws, the pricks in public conciousness, the loss of control, the disasters that connect us to the stars, the fan club sadness that transgresses interior and exterior isoating landscapes are all absent from meritt, perhaps thats one of the reasons why even those savy with a queer semiotic are unable to read meritts, because there is only one half of it...