five questions for quinford and scout

1. the indie aesthetic is just another kind of porn category, or is there something fundamentally different b/w yr work and scm, for example, if so what is it (oblique angles, weird lighting, hair)
2. what happens at the intersection of base interest and formal interest
3. is there with the intertubes, and the social networking culture, etc a new kind of depection of sexuality that is outside the traditional ways of defining those who look and those who create images for looking
   
4. all of the resulting issues of scopophillia, etc,
   
5. how do these images work in a historical context, realting to the indie print culture of the early to late 80s
6. these guys are anglo-irish, but zac and teds work, meybeu (sp), and a dozen plus that i cannot think of now, but give me 10 minutes or so, is there something new here, am i reaching
   

James Stirling Andrew Mellville House, brutalist complex in the green english countryside. one of the things i love about this kind of modernisim, is that it's utopia is agressive, it refuses to be polite.


Bea did Shopper's Drug Mart in the 80s.


Strip clubs of Louisville from Joey Harrison on Vimeo.
The Strip Clubs of Louisville, a black and white silide show by Joey Harrison.

utamaoras shell, bird and insect books digitalised by the Fitzwilliam musuem in Cambridge. Elegant translations, beautiful web design, and some really excellent repros.

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F Holland Day, Saint Sebastion, 189?

quniford and scout are a queer longdistance couple, one in limerick and one in manchester, small intimate moments, documentary work, and intensely moving.


Hilary Clinton owns the republicans on reproductive issues and global aid.

beagles are cute, even if they howl.

aylssa peterson an american military translator, committed suicide instead of commiting torture. this suicide was covered up.

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graphic design tumblr

grotto of redemption one of those immersive folk reglious sites, so popular in america, this time in west bend iowa, designed and constructed by a german immigrant roman catholic preist.

photos of grey garden after the death of big edie, and little edie moving out.

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Lynda Benglis. Quartered Meteor, 1969.

fuschia woodgrain notecards

masters and johnsons faked their results.

rice okayed torture

this is me

Goat Button

Anthony and hte Johnsons, Epilipsy is Dancing, great video, with some solid James Bigood influence/

best nursey school ever in Santa Isabel spain, by Finner architechts.

i am sort of a sucker for these post modern updates of pottery, painting 21st century signifers on 17th century pots. Jane Irish does it really well.

the centre for home movies in LA, says what it does on the tin.




Belloc reads two cautionary tales for children (watch these, d)

anne lass does that post new topos, surban langour thing, excellent compostion though, and the website is sort of fantastic


Diana Krall sings I'm thru with love, the video features Ingrid Bergman, Rita Hayworth, Gene Tierney, Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Vivien Leigh, Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn and Ava Gardner. Interesting that they included CLift and not Hudson.

paul newman was a drunk and had sex with women who were not joanne woodward, and also had a limp dick.

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matt tabbi dessicates the yankees, in an old school, foul mouthed rant.

gold standard no copper standard maybe?

darby scott is a pretty amazing jewler, esp with malachite.

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these nudes of a blonde behind a wooden shutter, have a sort of mid 60s naughty european vibe, which i like.

a family portrait tumblr

american cops try to expand the dna databases to those arrested and not those just caught, which seems to be a violation of habbeous corpus.

full transcript of american operative steve schimidts recent address which basically asks the gop to give up the whole gay marraige thing.


slow loris being tickled.

my grandfather was a stoic man who did not get angry or say much, but he hated magpies, profoundly, they ate his grain, and got caught were they shouldnt, and so i sort of have this love/hate thing going on with them, not pure unadualrated love like crovids. the guardian publishes a really elegant essay about perserving them

The trust's reasoning comes down to the same old misinformed chestnut - that evil magpies are causing the decline in smaller songbirds. It's kneejerk ornithological racism, ignorant and counterproductive. It's true that some magpies prey on the nests of smaller birds during the breeding season, but this is for perhaps three or four months of the year and only affects young birds that are easily replaced. The magpies never kill the more valuable breeding adults (unlike cats, which do so 365 days a year). No predator would thrive by dramatically reducing its own food supply; indeed, in areas where there are more magpies, there are typically more smaller species too. So how could the trust get it so wrong? I can only assume that this fringe group is still clinging to outdated views built on a foundation of medieval superstition.

moon sort of looks like a 2001 rip off, but with digital cameras, and a more interior, domestic setting, it might be an interesting revision. (less of the epic creaiton myth)


ufc president dan white hates journalists, and is a homophobe.

original ny times review of crash, about what oyu would suspect.

The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge
By Michael McKeon
Edition: illustrated
Published by JHU Press, 2006
ISBN 080188540X, 9780801885402
873 pages

The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the seizure and control of the state, but the fight between state and non-state (humanity): an unbridgeable disjunction of the singularity qualunque from state organisation. (The coming community) Gerogi Agamben

121 versions of st james infirmary, my favourites include blind willie mctell,hokum boys, louis armstrong, and rosa king.

on the precesion of technocratic language in relaiton to torture.

majestic photos of saturn

three new mike skinner tracks, all quick&dirty, some good rhymes, released over twitter.

three start french michelene chef creates the first totally synthetic dish

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All shapes of the UFO seen by 1961, in chart room.

long expose on steve misel.

hard on enducing concrete hosue by fkl in dublin.

tumblor of sexy, sexy cars

sketches of storefront memorials, done in the weeks after Lincoln was shot.

ballard interview in frieze, from 1997:

RR: But if their behaviour constitutes a ‘profane mass’, it’s an extremely alienated one.

JGB: The characters in Crash are trying to find the basis for human contact, which at some future date will carry a freight of emotion. At the beginning of both the film and the book, we see the husband and wife describing their separate infidelities, and in a sort of loving, affectionate way they’re trying to rekindle their affection for each other. But they’ve exhausted the existing forms of social interaction. This is what it’s all about, in a sense. They’re trying to explore new points of emotional connection, and the car crash represents the extreme ‘n’th position of a whole set of new possibilities which aren’t necessarily violent.

RR: One of your interests, then, is the way that our libidinal drives are sublimated into relationships with mass-manufactured commodities?

JGB: Well, I think the unconscious collisions between the primary psychic drives are now transferred into the world of consumer design. The car, of course, has to embody contradictions between safety and fashion. Its interior has to be a cosy extension of the home, whereas all those blinking red lights and gauges signal danger. You don’t have to look very far to understand its appeal. As we drive a motor car, we literally have our own deaths at our fingertips, and all sorts of connections between cars and sexuality have been evident for years.

the ipod touch and it's use in iraq

though this high school pitcher is amazing, with four no hitters in four games, he might be too trying too hard, and doing some permanant damage

verve photo is a new agency for young(ish) documentary photographers, who have absorbed the new image bank culture, and understand their position with people like capra. sadly, it has slightly less diversity in gender or race then magnum. samantha appleton's long term documenary project of lagos is a highlight.

when can i start using the pedisedate as a recreational device (helmet connected to a game boy, playing the game boy allows for nitrous oxide to be delivered thru a mask, to sedate children for dentristy.


Oceans 11 with Muppets

ethopian art first contact and the jesuits.

collection of qoutes in defense of torture.

nice analysis of the republican spin machine.

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eli roth, publicity photo from hostel 2

Dear Anthony,

Thanks for your excellent proposal! Consider it accepted. I believe it will fit in well in the area.

Please send a title, as well as your contact information and any A/V needs you have. I'll send you more information in the coming weeks.

Thank for the proposal!

David Schimpf, Marian University
Area Chair, Religion and Popular Culture, MPCA



Just before the end of Growing Pains, Kirk Cameron found Jesus, and in that finding of Jesus he has made a large body of work about what it means to be a Christian, over a wide variety of medium: the net, television, straight to video releases, and movies bought and paid for by Hollywood. Through a careful, anecdotal study of five texts: The Way of the Master encounters in West Hollywood, the film Fireproof, the last season of Growing Pains, the first Left Behind movie, and the straight to video movie The Miracle of the Cards, and auxiliary commentaries to these texts (blog entries, television appearances, magazine articles, internet forums, and the like), to discuss the rise of the evangelical right in the last 20 years.

Through these intertextual means, I hope to use Cameron as an example of how American Evangelical Protestants have historically used populist texts and technological innovation for their own means, and how this adaptation has mutated in an age of social networking, the free distribution of information, and an increasingly lack of trust in what is called the main stream media.

There is an intertwining between technology, the dissemination of media, and the protestant culture of the book. Using current research on copyright, book culture, ephemeral print, and digital media I want to use Cameron as a test case to discuss what it means to be a logophillic Christian in the midst of a post-literate age.

ballard, technolust and isolation, just finished cocaine nights (a copy i bought at a nola public library), of course, but shockingly, i have only read 4 of his novels, a novella and one collection of short stories: super cannes, crash, cocaine nights, atrocity exhibition; running wild, and chronopolis.

same with eks, i failed to read her last three books and they are not anywhere in edmonton (i assume i will find them in TO) i will re read crash and super cannes and running wild again, but do not have the others.

1) Favorite Biopic
Kinsey. (because it reworked his reputation, esp the scenes with Lithgow as the father)

2) Dyan Cannon or Tuesday Weld?
Cannon. (the late television work,esp the 17 episodes of Ally McBeal i like to see the caftan wearing, too thin, leather faced woman, speaking vague wisdom in highly fashionable anonymous american offices, there is something Ballardian about it)

3) Best example of science fiction futurism rendered silly by the event of time catching up to the prediction

Logan's Run maybe, because people do not need to be killed when they are 27 anymore--surgery and diet, and the general idea of money has replaced eugenics, plus the aesthetic has been used and abused, so maybe not catching up, but the idea of pleasure and leisure are similar, though those ideas have not changed much since the 70s.

4) Annette Funicello & Frankie Avalon or Troy Donahue & Sandra Dee?

Troy Donahue for this:
(for their movies, i enjoyed the blank, bland handsomeness of Donahue, and Sandra Dee was in Imitation of Life, with that great opedial obsession over Steve, that required acting)

5) Favorite Raoul Walsh movie?
Saskatchewan. Shelley Winters, Alan Ladd. best movie about mounties perhaps ever

6) Sophomore film which represents greatest improvement over the director’s debut

Badlands, Malick.

7) Ice Cube or Mos Def?

both choose roles poorly, both have wasted their dramatic skills on silly comedies, neither have done work as interesting as ice t or but mos def tries the most work, on stage, television and screen, from cadilliac records, to top dog and under dog, sitcom work and proceduals, and i look forward to more of Def's work.

8) Favorite movie about the music industry
the honky tonk's, long roads, isolation, exhaustion, and at the end, the disappointment of making it, in Coal Miner's Daughter.

9) Favorite Looney Tunes short (provide link if possible)

Duck Amuck http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Os_sDDDXro

10) Director most deserving of respect or upwardly mobile critical reassessment
Brett Ratner.

11) Ruth Gordon or Margaret Hamilton?

Ruth Gordon.

12) Best filmed adaptation of a play

Angels in America. (perhaps better, because the show is so ambitious that it almost needs to be filmed)

13) Buddy Ebsen or Edgar Buchanan?
Buddy Ebsen

14) Favorite Jean Renoir movie?
i like when reno appears in big budget american trash, you can see that he is just in it for the paycheque, that he is better then the material, and his contempt works with hte world weariness that is required for the role, it roughs up the smooth surfaces of otherwise too well crafted, too expensive follies (cf Godzilla, The Da Vinci Code, Flyboys)

15) Favorite one-word movie title, and why
Them, because it encorpated all of the paranoia and xenophobia that surrounded the cold war, and made an already stretched metaphors absurd.

16) Ernest Thesiger or Basil Rathbone?
Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes is one of Cinema's most refined pleasures.

17) Summer movies—your highest and lowest expectations
Highest--I Love You Man, because I have seen two or three Rudd movies a year for the last 3 years, and have never gotten sick of him, and have never been disappointed, so the time is coming.
Lowest--Crank II, i know exactly what i am getting, i know that I will love it, and i will work v. hard not to pay attention to the politics

18) Whether or not you’re a parent, what would be your ideal pick as first movie to see with your own child (or niece/nephew)? Why?
Pinocho, because people have to feel fear and the uncanny, and awe, and to be safe at the end of it, and the early Disney films do that, Pinocho being the prettiest.

19) L.Q. Jones or Strother Martin

20) Movie most recently seen in theaters? On DVD/Blu-ray?

21) Do you see more movies theatrically or at home? Why?

22) Name an award-worthy comic performance that was completely ignored by Oscar and his pals.

23) Zac Efron & Vanessa Hudgens or Robert Pattinson & Kristen Stewart
I hate Robert PAttinson on a gut level, I cannot consider him critically, have not seen adventure land, think Efron has a capability of making fun of himself, and never cared about Hudgens.

24) Name a great (or merely very good) movie that is too painful to watch a second time (Thanks to The Onion A.V. Club)
Irrevesible. The formal conceit does not suprise after the second veiwing, and the fercious, furious violent intensity of the work

25) Beyonce Knowles or Jennifer Hudson?
Jennifer Hudson is basically Jennifer Hudson, but Beyonce is so slippery, so well crafted, her personae elegant in its seperation from reality. But Hudson has one great film role under her belt, and I do not think that Beyonce can extend past 3 minutes


26) Favorite Robert Mitchum movie?
Cape Fear or the Lusty Men (the lusty men is pure shit and spit, with great aeiral shots, and i think he actually rode in it)

27) Favorite movie featuring a ‘60s musical group that is not either the Beatles or the Monkees
Gimme Shelter

28) Maria Ouspenskaya or Una O’Connor?
don't know enough

29) Favorite Vincent Price movie?
Witchfinder General, Edward SCissorhands, the Poe movies.

30) Name a movie currently flying under the radar that is deserving of rabid cult status.
Gigli (more weird then bad)

31) Irene Ryan or Lucille Benson (or Bea Benaderet)?
Irene Ryan

32) Single line from a movie that never fails to make your laugh or otherwise cheer you up. (This may be obvious, but the line does not have to come from a comedy.)
But You are in that Chair, You ARe

33) Elliot Gould or Donald Sutherland?
Donald Sutherland (but only because I saw him in Outbreak the other day, and he was so smooth in his pyschosis, plus i really loved how he interacted wiht Peter Krause in that Darling show, that he is excellent, almost Lear like in roles that require simple coasting, and he has worked consistently) (Elliot Gould's three or four movies in the 70s that are indespensible)

34) Best performance by a director in an acting role
John Waters on Homicide

35) Favorite Barbara Stanwyck movie?
too many to name

36) Outside of reading film criticism or other literature about the movies, what subject do you enjoy reading about or studying which you would say best enriches or illuminates your understanding and appreciation of life, a life that includes the movies?
Art History, Art Theory, for the formal visual working thru of narrative ideas

20 Images, some not credited:


from the tumblr blog, yr mom fan club, which does not credit it's images:

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here

From the film blog some came running:

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Antonia Watts in the mid 70s sex farce Percy

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James Caan and Shirley Knight in Coppalas' The Rain People

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Still from Pinochio

blog here

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Joel Meyerwitz, Dairyland, Cchrome, 1972

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Mony Clift, Beaton, mid 50s?

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Mariska Hagirty and Jayne Mansfield, in Pink Palace, Hollywood, shot by life, early 60s

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Shore, American Places, title and date unknown

'Homo sapiens is a reformed hunter-killer of depraved appetites, which once helped him to survive. He was partly rehabilitated in an open prison called the first agricultural societies, and now finds himself on parole in the polite suburbs of the city state. The deviant impulses coded into his central nervous system have been switched off. He can no longer harm himself or anyone else. But nature sensibly endowed him with a taste for cruelty and an intense curiosity about pain and death. Without them, he's trapped in the afternoon shopping malls of a limitless mediocrity. We need to revive him, give him back the killing eye and the dreams of death. Together they helped him to dominate the planet.'
'So, psychopathy is freedom, psychopathy is fun?'
'A natty little slogan, Paul, but it does contain a certain fiery truth.'

- J. G. Ballard, Super Cannes (London: Flamingo, 2001), p. 263."

back home on friday morning early

A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he's being photographed and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks. He's implicated in what's happening and he has a certain real power over the result. avedon

and note the use of anecdotal rhetoric, and the usurping of identity politics, including rainbow language, in this one.

adams wins the hasslebad award for life time achievenment, the first new topographer to do so.

sharon tingley has perfected that northern california 70s lightening. which makes sense, because they are 25-30 yrs old. no details about her bio.

aussie womens day explains to mothers teenage subcultures.

alberta could learn from texas's whole hearted absorbing of wind technology to produce nrg.

birds nesting in signage.

clement freud, who passed this week, tells a vomit centric drunk joke, the best bit is the 30 seconds of laughter at the end though. and the independent obit, which mentions but does not explain why he refused to talk to lucien.

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Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, Publicity Shoot.

indian farmers are killing themselves in massive numbers, due to drought.


Avi Lewis interviews Richard Armitage, about torture, where he admits that the Bush adminstration tortued people, but tries to escape from prosecution, and claims he did not know what was going on, and qoutes Obama's (enraging, disappointing) refusal of justice. more informaiton about Obama's policiy about inheriting Bush's torture

wendy plomp prints updates of arabic carpet motifs on cardboard, lovely.

spring court makes anglo style trainers, since the mid 30s, like PF Flyers, beautiful.

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Padma nude for UK Allure, this month.

todd palin is the most cryptic of the whole johnson/palin situation, and his taciturn, laconic nature, has much to say about the nature of current masculinity, this story from esquire talks about the anxiety of being outnumbered, the nature of working class extended families, and what exactly it means to be a father now, some of the best writing on class and gender i have seen this year.

the world trade centre logo preservation project, uses flickr and street photography to note examples of the wtc post 9-11 in new york.


small town musuems, slightly decript, out of fashion, with a definite edge of boredom, educationol in no real sense, in towns like grenville ky, decatur al, and oakridge tn, have a weird unsettling informational control---Gideon Barnett's Heritage of Humanity depcits all of these things.

anyone know anything about the brainfuck or whitespace programming languages?

girls gone grabbling

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this must be parody?

10 small drawings or works on paper (defined as smaller then 18 inches by 24 inches), as inspired by modern art notes.

1. robert adams, dead palms near ontario calfornia, 1977 (central drama, a concise visual impact, and a brutality that betrays its size--sometimes photographers do not seem to think about the size of their prints, but i cannot imagine this one being bigger with out being almost bathetic, and being smaller it would be inappriotely blurry)
   
2. Kline, Telephone Book drawing, 1952 (his whole set of these drawings are really interesting ways of packing as much formal innovation, in an obv restrictive form, the expressionist tendencies of his paint handling are constrained by the material choices, in ways that add paradox and complixity to his usual simplicity. this one, in its use of collage media, fucks with the found material even more, adding literally and symbolic third dimensions)
   
3. Moghul Architechtural Drawings (the exterior and interior at the same time, the floating of reality and fantasy, the use of decorative elements and colour, i like this one, which is from the Khamasa)
4. Durer Rhino because although it does not have dozen of allegorical figures, it still manages to have the almost manic level of detail expected from durer, but with just one object
   
5. some of Schwitters Merz Collages, they are often larger, but the smaller they are, the more effective they are. the ones the size of a playing card, or the palm of hand, they are not smothered in the context of larger works, and have a sameness and an intimacy.
   
6. Chardin's Dusky Plums, and the brown jug, so little colour for so much expanse
   
7. Raphael Lady of the Pinks (intended as a small, private devotional image, so that there is a domestic intimacy that works in delightful concord with the precise, and smooth compistion, nothing wrong, nothing out of place, and hyper real)
8. Holbein's Miniature of Cromwell (the midnite blue colour on the background, and the severity of his black costume)
9. Kieta, Two Women on Bikes (because i like snap shots, becuase this is a good one, because its one of the happiest works like ever, and because of the colonial politics in blowing up private moments for rich first world tourists)
10. Warhol's sex parts polaroid (i like polaroid's for their colour, for their tightness, and the like)
    

5 small sculptures as defined as smaller then 18 inches high, as inspired by modern art notes.

1. George Ohr, Glazed Crumple Pot, 1892
   
2. Korean Celadon Vase, 1450
   
3. Greek Archaic Cycdealon Figure of a woman
   
4. edo era Rabbit Netsueke (about the size of a thumbnail)
   
5. raymond duchamp villion, head of baudielare, 1912
   

judith butler is like thomas aquanias for faggots

growing up lds, was to acknowledge that men did things together, social things, that did not include women, and those things were inscrutable to me. this inscrutabilty was and is central to my life, from the sexual games i played in sjsa, to my complicated life in highschool, from my realtionship to my grandfathers, to my love of ray...i think this homosocial ambugity is central to a lot of gay men's lives, and in many ways, regardless of how unstable and unsimple the tag gay is, i am a homsexual in a world that rewards homosociality.

eve sedgewick died last night, on easter sunday, just as i was praying for the reseruction, her work esp. in between men provided the rosetta stone that translated "boys together clinging", to the secret works of men. when she said this to the best of my understanding, the sexual context of that period is too far irretrievable for us to disentangle boasts, confessions, undertones, overtones, jokes, the unthinkable, the taken-for-granted, the unmentionable, but often done anyways, etc.” (Between Men, 35). about shakespere, it was the closest she got to the eternal.

at the cemetary today, shooting digi and polaroid for d, woman comes up, asks why i am shooting, tell her, she asks me to shoot her parents grave, do so, give her the shot.

you cant do that with film or digi. makes we want that new printer

ase

top 10 paintings and art stuff at the noma:

1) otto marseus van schick's serpents and insects, 1690
basically a dutch still ife from the 17th century, with the harsh lighting and dark colours that implies, but swarming with black flies, red ants, jungle leaves, almost phospercent mushrooms, and a perfect phallic python curling up around the bottom of the compostion (intersting, a game painting from about he same peroid had a hanging hare, by a different artists, the dutch sure knew how to paint shit dangling)

2) large screen illustrating the tale of genji, edo era.
the screened porches holding women are hidden and visbile, the flatness working in oppoistion to a general narrative compoistion in some places, and in congurence in others.

3) qi dynasty battle camel
earlier then the tang dynasty camels i previously loved, this one had gnashing teeth and a fully armoured warrier on its back. BATTLE CAMEL FOR THE WIN.

4) vuillard, interior, 1850.
chalk pastel on paper, with a perfect mustard yellow lamp in the middle of a muddy purple and black compoistion.

5) carl wuffi drawing
the drawing was included with braque, boccini, calder, picasso, and davis, among others, so he was not ghettoized as part of an outsider tradition, which is nice, that the colours and patterns are of the time, not sui gensis, they also placed it outside the wall, so both recto and verso could be seen, though they did not translate the german on the back (its a nice wuffi, with some great line work)

6) one of Rbergs Hoarfrost, 1972
a) it was severe, more severe then i am used to with rberg.
b) it was almost monochromatic.
c) the use of white cotton and grey satin had a funeral qauilty, and that the work was basically human sized had the qauilty of the shroud, that the white cotton panel was included about three feet down the peice, and ended about 3 feet from the bottom, where on the body that would cover from the heart to the genitals is suggestive.
d) the white cotton section had only one major image, a triumuphant gymnast.
e) the rest of the images are reversals, or transfered lightly, implict instead of explicit.

7) Anne Truitt Large Square in Red and Orange
almost a puzzle box, uneven with a large horizontal compoent in bright red, and smaller sections in yellow, sculptural in ways that her towers are often not.

8) two nice rosenquits, including the spiky and perhaps misogynist hibsicus and woman

9) One of Borgeuious Spider's was ready to dismiss it, because the noma sculpture park also had an Indiana Love in red and blue, and one of Oldenberg's saftey pin's, sculpture by a catalog (also a hepworth, a chadwick, a malloi, a rodin, etc) but this peice was before the mammon peices, slightly smaller, and reaching out instead of reaching up, with the egg sac much less promient, so it was a different work

10) sam taylor woods big print of hayden crying, from her men crying seires, that was all pink excess, his skin, his lips, his shirt, in a hotel room, so femme, so hott.

other things:
a bunch of cornell, mostly collages, put in a room b/w early and late modernist, working as a functional arguement about his place in the cannon, mostly collages, with some boxes, including what you would expect (the mirror, the parrot, the pipe, the doves, the rabbits, work with his brother, etc) though the only nude adult female ive seen him make. (mostly donated by the cornell estate, something to look into)

the obligatory warhol

alot of semi pornographic french 19th century portraits, none of them nudes, english decorative furniture, and the dross of a medicore encloypedic colleciton (though there was half a dozen 13th century italian saints that were nice, and a decent pretty boy tintoretto, and some polynesian head dresses that had excessive black feathers, and four decent but not out of this world moghul drawings, and one laquer samuri suit, and etc)

the photography and depression show, from the collection was pretentious, unguided, theory heavy, and fell apart, it lacked genuine rigour, and though some of the work were obv. around the theme, there were too many exceptions and misunderstandings to make it genuinely work, too many wtf moments, though it had a great freinger, a beautiful vintage muybridge of herons, a nice eggleston, one of julia cameron's maidens, and a great friedlander nude.

in nola, wonderful town, gotten fed, gotten drunk, sawn art, and the easter bunnies cock.

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46 photos of bats.

beard meme as tumblr.

fascinting case study of the generation gap in technology.

justin david cox is a graphic designer who works hyper minimal, graphicly clean and textually pure gig posters. The Crystal Castles one might be my favourite non ironic use of the rainbow motif like ever

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New still from Inglorious Bastard, which will premier at Cannes.

red river flooding photos, via the big picture

the blue whale of catoosa, ok.

turkey hunting as a way to bring youth as jesus.

the one vessel, is a way of heating water on the stove, making tea with it, pour it into a cup included, without dirtying a pot, a kettle, and a cup.

the daily mail's paranoia about google street view infects their coverage of protestors using social media to organize.


Maddow speaks to Colin Powell about torture, Powell evades.

paedophiles priests were known by American bishops as early as 1952, and by the Vatican in 1962, according to the records of Servants of the Pertaclate, who were in charge of dealing with this shit. The founder, Rev. Fitzgerald, thot that the problem was unsolveable, that he "Father Fitzgerald, who died in 1969, even made a $5,000 down payment on a Caribbean island where he planned to build an isolated retreat to sequester priests who were sexual predators. His letters show he was driven by a desire to save the church from scandal, and to save laypeople from being victimized. He wrote to dozens of bishops, saying that he had learned through experience that most of the abusers were unrepentant, manipulative and dangerous. He called them “vipers.”"

From Untitled Album

via warren ellis.

insanely complete essay documenting james bond's sexual conquests.

a nice article about the lacunae of discussion vis a vis' rberg and johns fucking. and a repro of katz's article on the couple, which is a really telling example of homophobia in the art world.

fantastic graphic design blog, the first two entries are on swiss medical illustrations and florid victorian type.

From Untitled Album

Black Quartz Lamp, PDC, Los Angeles (want)

the wisconsin historical society has a set of international harvester scouts, on flickr. i love international historical trucks.

68 photos of surfing by ollie banks

people call polticos whores all the time, but whores are honest, they will fuck you for the set rate,and at worst will only steal yr watch, plus they provide something useful. Polticos (and pseudo academics working as polticos), like Lawerence Summer attempt to look poor wile getting millions from the wall street he is trying to save. fire him obama.

zombie stripper heels.

From Untitled Album

chesney in vegas after the academy of country music awards hooking up with two blondes

apologies do not result in concrete actions in a hawaiian soveringity case.

castle and things make elegant, tiny, and highly conceptual felt peices, i like the grids, and the song lyrics in the style of sr corritta kent.

ecma and the american presbyterians are finding a solid, american protestant higly localized soultion to hte fag situation.

decimation, of the anti vaccanine idiots


Cookie Monster does Waiting for Godot.

us postal serviceglossary

From Untitled Album

In the last few years, country music has moved from its desire for formal purity, to incorparting traditionally verboten rock and pop stylings. But in that loosening, there has been an increased, almost reactionary desire to mantain traditional lines of gender and sexuality. In 2008, these instincts of musical prolifagacy, and moral severity, combined in the figures of Eric Church and Heidi Newfield. These two artists, and espeically their singles about teenage pregrancy Two Pink Lines and Knocked Up, worked in conjunction, with the trouble that the Republicans had with Bristol Palin. These texts could be contextualised by Tim McGraw notaligc pro choice fable Red Rag Top These narratives seek but fail at finding of consistent discourses of class, gender, sexuality, and desire.

Heidi Newfield, who is the youngest artist, and perhaps the least famous, introduces these themes easily, and is a good beginning. Her first single, about Johnny and June Carter Cash, and although it mentions how Johnny kicked out the footlights, it is mostly a lachrymose ballad, contiuning the
sentimentalizing/cannonizing of Cash (Cannonzing in the sense of reasserting his place in the Nashville hierachy and in the sense of making him a moral/religious model of behaviour, in that capacity it ignores Cash’s drug use, adultery, conserative christianity, or his equal partnership with June Carter Cash.

That Newfield looks up to Cash/Carter though suggests that she is of a new wave of female artistss that have emerged from the country scene in the last few years, a group that refuses to particpate in territorial disputes around rock and roll vs country. These pererinal skirmishes are so persistent that it has lasted until Alan Jackson and George Strait's 2000 single Murder on Music Row—with it’s chorus: “For the steel guitars no longer cry/And the fiddles barely play/But drums and rock 'n' roll guitars/Are mixed up in your face”

Newfield's first two singles heavily emphasizes drums and guitars making it’s musical status as country unsure. Her second single, Knocked Up cannot be claimed, formally as country. What makes it country, is then is the lyrical content, from the vernacular use of language (“Here comes what Granny's been dreadin'/Belly full of baby in a shotgun weddin'), the signifiers of a rural working class poverty (“Hand-me-down crib in a pick up truck”), the moral edicts (Knocked up, shame shame/I'm gonna ruin my family name”), the vague references to country music history, and her presence as the second youngest in a multi generational, matriarchal line.

That she depends on a hand me down crib indicates that she is part of a culture of child rising, and that others have done the preparation for her. Southern critic and memorist Dorothy Allison, born poor provides the moral context that Newfield lacks: “I understand we were the bad poor: men who drank and couldn't keep a job, women invariably pregnant before marriage, who quickly became worn, fat, and old from working too many hours...” (Skin, 15) Just as the rock and roll guitars are considered criminal in “traditional” music, the idea of having babies before birth is considered systematically broken in the working class argot that Sanders employs. In order to prevent shame and being bad poor, she gets married.

This moral languge places the song in the nashivlle history of sentimental songs about young kids who get married, and survive. Tanya Tucker calls these young folks “two sparrows in a hurricane” , who have “a head full of dreams/and faith that can move anything”. A few years later, Trisha Yearwood's She's In Love with the Boy discusses how difficult and how close to literal starvation children who marry and have children can be.

Sander's skims over these dangers in just two lines: “Daddy, he's a good lookin' guitar man/I was his from the very first kiss”. The line good lookin' guitar man is so historically minded that it includes basically anything. What means even less, is Newfield's explicit claiming of the work as a sequel to Loretta Lynn's The Pill—this is confusing, because Newfield seems to be building up a brooder house, though thirty years ago Lynn was tearing it down. Lynn’s writing mannifests itself in emotions like anger, or contempt or exhaustion, emotions that Newfield has either not internalised or failed to hire out. In fact she uses the rollicking fun of rock and roll as a way to formally mask the turmoil of young pregrancy.

The paucity of emotions and the formal masking that occur in Knocked Up are also seen in Eric Church's Two Pink Lines, though it's use of a more lyrically complex narrative mediates these difficulties. The song is sung in real time, with a teen-age couple in the back of a car, in the forecourt of a gas station, waiting to see if they are parents: “one means none and we're home free/two means three and a diamond ring”.

The song rockets through the narrative, and the mix does not dip perceptibly in the middle, unlike Newfield. There are differences in the narrative as well. The narrator in the Newfield song is already pregnant, and is keeping the baby. Church has decided what he is going to do if his lover is with child; there is again no discussion of options, just a diamond ring and a life together.

There is less shame in Church’s track. He will do what is required of him, but is glad that this is unnessecary. Everything is okay, and there lives are not ruined. The difference then, is that Church refuses to judge pleasure, and Newfield refuses to acknowledge it’s existence. This attitude towards pleasure, even the pleasure of the rock and roll, is heavily gendered. The woman is receptive and the male is active. That they are both basically rockabilly tracks, muddies the water though.

Country Music once feared the sexual power of rockabilly, so it becomes ironic that the push and pull of sexual shame and being with child is now places on it’s cradle. David Shapiro talks about this history in his essay Blue Moon of Kentucky, Rising Over the Mystery Train, "It may well be that the struggle to suppress country music, 'this deep sense of fear and resignation' by which it was constrained, provoked the eruption of country's deviant offspring rockabilly, and caused so many to rail against it as a threat to their livelihoods, if not their souls. Rockabilly, in the words of (Bill) Malone' gave vent to impulses that had long been impeded, if often dormant, in southern culture, a hell-for-leather hedonism, a swaggering masculinity, or in the case of the women, an uncharacteristic aggressiveness and strangely a visceral emotionalism among both men and women that seemed as reflective of the church as the beer joints” (30)

Rockabilly is no longer threatening to Country Radio and country promoters, because the men who listened to it, and its antecedents in the last few decades, are now the same demographic. (ie white, working class, young men, from the west and south) This demographic is delineated in a brilliant essay by Adam Watts, collected in White Masculinity in the Recent South. A Real Place, Attitudes and Environment in a Southern Deer Camp uses the heavily localized space of shooting deer, to make two cognizant points about this new masculinity, both of which are talked about in Church’s work.

Watt’s initial observation, (and it helps to think of the Deer Camp as a metonymy of places where working class men gather recreationally, away from the influences of women) is “"Few would claim to be working class, although all would claim to be working men...” making a self identification about what one does, as opposed to what one is, class becomes a series of cultural signifiers that are outside traditional Marxist language. Church has written extensively about this new mutability especially in the song, Guys Like Me with lines like “I spend Saturdays working on my truck/I don't like to fight/But I ain't scared to bleed/Most don't mess with a guy like me/Guys like me drink to many beers on Friday after work/Our best blue jeans have skoal rings/We wear our boots to church/So rough around the edges”, here he outlines a set of specific cultural significations.

The mutability of class another point that Watts makes. He talks about his membership in the deer run that he visits, that he uses to shoot... “Members of Clear Run, like those of other white Southern men, view the pursuit of white tail deer as a natural, even necessary reason for white Southern men and boys, increasingly suburban, or urban with predominately indoor lifestyles and careers, to enjoy the outdoors...” though Country is usually ex/suburban, and increasingly function as service workers as opposed to manufacturing, there are a variety of self-identifying moral signifiers. The ability to take responsibility for unforeseen actions, to provide for women and children, and in the words of Two Pink Lines: “yeah her Daddy's gonna kill me and that’s a fact/maybe we'll just leave town and never come back/or I could stand there and tell him/face him like a man” or “not being scared to bleed” or the ability to kill deer to feed family for a living, are all things that are not only about working for a living, but an ethical desire to serve. It is the same ethical desire that gives Newfield the new crib, or prevents her from aborting the fetus.


All of these narratives with their hygenic use of previously filthy genre music , bleach out the details of lives lead when one is 18 and scared, the choices about keeping the baby or not keeping the baby, about aborting it or adopting it, or even a song that mentions high school or morning sickness or what it means to piss on a stick in a filthy bathroom in a gas station or even discussions of what it means to have sex at 18, so the listener is forced to complete the narratives on hand.


This desire to keep things clean, leads to long gaps that hint and do not tell the whole story, in Tim McGraw’s Red Rag Top, recorded in 2002, and included in his greatest hits. It is the only song that talks about terminating the pregnancy. This termination is encased in a narrative of nostalgia and completion. In this way, it becomes a normalized text of regret and personal history, a discussion of youthful indiscretion.

If one reads McGraw closely, he posits an ethical structure of choice that Newfield or Church lack. You can hear it in songs like Drugs or Jesus, where the narrator (and he frequently writes in the first person, so they become confessional), allows that “Everyone needs to get high” to escape from the dull routine of small town life. Though he makes a personal choice for Christ, and the song hints that this is the more positive choice, it acknowledges both the isolation of rural/exurban/suburban existence, and the possiblity of less ecclestical form of redemption.

The first lines of Red Rag Top introduce a couple, one 18 and 20, both legal (Church also mentions tht he and his partner were legal, that Church and McGraw are older then Newfield, suggests an interest in legality allows for only one scandal, more then that might sink the song commerically)

The legality might be the center of this song, it mentions that they broke traffic and curfew laws, and also moral laws outside of the state. But if they are 18 and 20, and he is speaking of an adult with a wife and a child, can we assume that the abortion was acquired after 1973, when it was legalized in the United States? The narrator avoids parents and cops, to commit minor traffic violations. Could the transgressing of the ethics of a small town life be extrapolated into the more adult task of taking responsibility when the fun stops?

Compare it to Kinky Friedman’s Rapid City, South Dakota, recorded in 1974 is an interesting contrast. Both songs use oblique references to discuss abortion, and both describe the desire to avoid having a child. But Friedman’s song comes from a place of rural isolation and criminality, it is an outlaw song, and not a song of suburban ennui. With his broad accent, and the lone guitar, the song starts as a song about a man leaving a woman—though he has to leave “Rapid City, South Dakota, might fast”. There are a number of reasons why he might have to do so, but the penultimate verse discusses exactly what is going wrong: “There’s A Doctor In Chicago/I Know She’ll Be Alright/He told himself as he stared into the night./And he said, “I hope to God she finds the good-bye letter that I wrote her/But The Mail Don’t Go To Fast In Rapid City South Dakota”



Comparing what is said, and what is unsaid about the song sung in 1974 tell us a lot about what it means to live in places like South Dakota. Friedman tells us spefically that the father in question is working class, McGraw hints at it, Friedman talks about money, McGraw hints at, neither and the question remains, how would they pay for the termination?

Most importantly is the motif of choice. Friedman’s protaginist has none, he is forced to leave his small town, for Chicago or Minnepolis or the coast, the consquence of his actions is exile. McGraw’s realtionship fails to surrive, but because both chose to separate. McGraw alludes that they broke up a year after the procedure and never talked again, was it the abortion that resulted in the lack of communication and later relationship? If they had the child, would they be married like Newfield, or would he be willing to foot the bills like Church? Could Friedman’s frightened farm boy kept the realtionship surrive, would it have resulted in marriage, in 1980?

In this way, the only thing that changes the Deus Ex Machina ending of Church, or the family obsessions of Newfield, or theexile narrative of Freidman, is that McGraw was the only one who made a choice. The narator never uses the words abortion, or terminatiom or even baby, but says he “made a choice not to have a child”, that line underlines the thesis of all of those songs about nostalgia and loss that centre American country music. Nostalgia becomes less of the action mourned, but about the possibilities that could occur if a choice never had to be made.

Reading the third verse, where he as an adult sees a girl who looks like the woman he knew at 16, he shuts off the passivity of what could have happened:

No I cant say where she is today,
I can’t remember who I was, back then
Well you do what you do and you pay for your sins,
And there's no such thing as what might’ve
Been, that’s a waste of time; drive you outta your mind


Red Rag Top becomes twofold, it is about the ability of two scared barley post adolescents who are allowed to access abortion, and choose to do so, but it is also about the mourning for the potential of a relationship, and perhaps even a life, that can occur post abortion. In this slippery move between the two rhetorical positions of the Right and Left, namely it is always a women’s choice, and abortion is murder, and never taking a side, he allows for the moral possibility of either or both or neither, or something else entirely. In this way, it becomes an interior criticism of popular country music. while still managing to chart as another popular song of nostaliga.

Nostalgia presupposes a perfect past and an imperfect future, it allows the creation of a narrative that is clean and precise, and the precision is achieved through excising the inconvenient. Basically, then what is real and what is not real can be determined by an ability to control the narrative that is being created. It is interesting that these songs were popularized in the election year when the vice presidential Republican candidate had a pregnant teenager of her own.

To put it in its most simplistic way, the goal of a presidential campaign, especially in the television era, post-Nixon is to collapse complicated and human lives into one seamless and simple story, via vetting and speechwriting, (talking about what went wrong with the campaign in the New York Times, republican operative Paul Costello makes this exact point “ “That’s the best you can do, turn it into a narrative that gives the American people a positive story”.) With the Republicans these narratives are often about self-control, and bodily continence.

This bodily continence is about not having sex before marriage, and being fecund afterwards. This contience is central to the confusing the timeline of what was said to whom and when, reminds us that a girl who is with child, is a state who is always under threatened, and who’s life cannot be easily plotted. The unruliness of Bristol Palin’s body becomes the de facto permission for media representations of chaos and uncertainty. Bristol Palin becomes the blankness where people can write their own texts. Friedman, McGraw, and Church facilate this blankness as well, it is telling that what has been discussed is mostly men talking about women.

There are some correctives of that, Newfeild is one of them and Sarah Palin introduces a community of matriarchs taking care of the child in the interview with Greeta Van Sustreen for example, or the presence of Michelle Malkin, who wrote in a column on her blog: “the Palin family values the sanctity of life. Or “They talk the talk and walk the walk…all of those narratives are present,” But not all discourses by women for women are positive, and not all of the discourses about Palin are this clear.

There is also a narrative of class, from Levi Johnston referring to himself on his Myspace page fucking redneck, or if the Star tabloid is to be believed, Johnson’s sister calling the Palin’s white trash. There are some attempts to synthesize a variety of these narrative, a Fox News editorial before the election within the space of two paragraphs, notes “many obsessive’s noted the pregnancy served to humanize the Palin's and showcase the candidates rejection of abortion” and “Johnston, an avid hunter, hinted at the time that they were expecting a boy. He said he was already looking forward to taking the boy hunting and fishing”, just as his parents, and the grandparents of his child had done.

For all of the rhetoric of choice, each of the texts discussed up to this point, has been about the limiting of choices, about the options that exist or fail to exist, in a small town, or with family pressure, or with political desires pressing into you. In this way, it becomes the choices you are allowed to make, as opposed to the choices that you want to make. The negotiation of limited choice is not something that is often discussed because it is in direct opposition to the American mythos of manifest destiny, but it is very much within the pragmatic ethos that the US has placed as a corrective, as an alternate discourse around that myth. The cleverness of the writing, the allusion rich and narrative heavy desires of these texts have an enormous formal sophistication, but that sophistication has any number of seemingly contradictory polysemic functions.

That polysemic quality, combined with the plain speech, makes country unique in telling American stories that complicate the hope. There are few answers, because attempts to document quotidian lives, and the past. Its narratolgies are one not of seeking, or answering, but of sorting, about finding patterns in lives that seem to have meaning imposed from above. In this way, the singing and the writing becomes a searching for autonomy, to suggest a solid this is what x means, betrays the function of the text. I am too far away in age, in location, in sexuality, to truly understand what it means to be an 18-year-old war widow, or 16 and knocked up, or even whatever the heck Bristol Palin is feeling. I am reminded of Loretta Lynn in the mid 70s, who praised birth control, but decimated the women’s movement for not taking her life seriously, who loved her man and threatened to kick the shit out anyone who crossed him. Think of this then, as a way of bringing these narratives to others, with respect, and humility, fully recognizing they are not my stories.

In the last few years, country music has moved from its desire for formal sameness, and musical purity, to incorparting traditionally verboten rock and pop stylings. But in that loosening, there has been an increased, almost reactionary desire to mantain traditional lines of gender and sexuality. In 2008, these instincts of musical prolifagacy, and moral severity, combined in the figures of Eric Churc and Heidi Newfield. These two artists, and espeically their singles about teenage pregrancy Two Pink Lines and Knocked Up, worked in conjunction, and the lessons that they taught us about current day Nashville could be interlaced with the trouble that the Republicans had with Bristol Palin, or be placed against Tim McGraw hit Red Rag Top, with its nostaligic tale about abortion. Going through each of these performers, and the Palin’s methodically, leads to a seeking of consistent langauge that allows readers to understand discourses of class, gender, sexuality, and desire, that have traditionally been ignored by progressive academics, polticians, musicians, critics, and audiences.

The youngest performer, and the one with arguably the least media attenion or studio help is Heidi Newfield. Both of her biggest singles are about traditional marriage. The first is about Johnny and June Carter Cash, and although it mentions how Johnny kicked out the footlights, it is mostly a lachrymose ballad, contiuning the sentimentalizing/cannonizing of Cash (Cannonzing in the sense of reasserting his place in the Nashville hierach and in the sense of making him a moral/religious model of behaviour.)

The song is indictiative of Newfields performance style: the music contains rock and roll plus pop, so it is not musically country, but the lyrics ignore a myriad of burrs under the saddle, including Cash's first wife, his infidelity, his drug use, and his contempt for Nashville.

Newfield is of a new wave of sexually sophisticated, and musically synthesizing female artistss that have emerged from the country scene in the last few years. This group (Kellie Pickler, Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lamert, Skye Sweetam, etc) . They refuse to particpate in territorial disputes around rock and roll vs country. These pererinal skirmishes are so persistent that it has lasted until Alan Jackson and George Strait's 2000 single Murder on Music Row—with it’s chorus: “For the steel guitars no longer cry/And the fiddles barely play/But drums and rock 'n' roll guitars/Are mixed up in your face”

Newfield's music has a mix that heavily emphasizes what would traditionally be called Rock and Roll, the drums and guitars are so central, that if it were not qouting Johnny Cash, it would be difficult to taxonomize it as country. Her second single, Knocked Up cannot be claimed, formally as country. What makes it country, is then is the lyrical content, from the vernacular use of language (“Here comes what Granny's been dreadin'/Belly full of baby in a shotgun weddin'), the signifiers of a rural working class poverty (“Hand-me-down crib in a pick up truck”), the use of moral language (“Knocked up, shame shame/I'm gonna ruin my family name”), the vague references to country music history, and how she is in the middle of a multi generational, matriarchal line.

The song is written by Angaleena Presley / Mark D. Sanders. Mark D Sanders wrote Lee Ann Womack’s I Hope You Dance, a song of great manipulative power, filled with the kind of aphorisms that on the surface would appear to suggest taking great risks, but only those risks that will not result in seismic changes. Knocked Up is about radical changes to an adolescent's life, but is dismissive of the effort required to birth a child, and refusing any option but the keep it. To be an unplanned mother is a gift, that can not be given away or gotten rid of, regardless of how surprised or unprepared a teenager is to raise children.

That she depends on a hand me down crib indicates that she is part of a culture of child rising, and that others have done the preparation for her. Southern critic and memorist Dorothy Allison, born poor provides the moral context that Newfield lacks: “I understand we were the bad poor: men who drank and couldn't keep a job, women invariably pregnant before marriage, who quickly became worn, fat, and old from working too many hours...” (Skin, 15) Just as the rock and roll guitars are considered criminal in “traditional” music, the idea of having babies before birth is considered systematically broken in the working class argot that Sanders employs. In order to prevent shame and being bad poor, she gets married.

This moral languge places the song in the nashivlle history of sentimental songs about young kids who get married, and survive. Tanya Tucker calls these young folks “two sparrows in a hurricane” , who have “a head full of dreams/and faith that can move anything”. A few years later, Trisha Yearwood's She's In Love with the Boy discusses how difficult and how close to literal starvation children who marry and have children can be.

Sander's skims over these dangers in just two lines: “Daddy, he's a good lookin' guitar man/I was his from the very first kiss”. The line good lookin' guitar man is so historically minded that it includes basically anything. What means even less, is Newfield's explicit claiming of the work as a sequel to Loretta Lynn's The Pill—this is confusing, because Newfield seems to be building up a brooder house, though thirty years ago Lynn was tearing it down. This history mannifests itself in emotions like anger, or contempt or exhaustion, emotions that Newfield has not internalised. In fact she uses the rollicking fun of rock and roll as a way to formally mask the turmoil of young pregrancy.


The paucity of emotions and the formal masking that occur in Knocked Up are also seen in Eric Church's Two Pink Lines, though it's use of a more lyrically complex narrative mediates these difficulties. The song is sung in real time, with a teen-age couple in the back of a car, in the forecourt of a gas station, waiting to see if they are parents; “one means none and we're home free/two means three and a diamond ring”.

The song rockets through the narrative, and the mix does not dip perceptibly in the middle, unlike Newfield. There are differences in the narrative as well. The narrator in the Newfield song is already pregnant, and is keeping the baby. Church has decided what he is going to do if his lover is with child; there is again no discussion of options, just a diamond ring and a life together.

There is less shame in Church’s track. He will do what is required of him, but is glad that this is unnessecary. Everything is okay, and there lives are not ruined. The difference then, is that Church refuses to judge pleasure, and Newfield refuses to acknowledge it’s existence. This attitude towards pleasure, even the pleasure of the rock and roll, is heavily gendered. The woman is receptive and the male is active. That they are both basically rockabilly tracks, muddies the water though.

Country Music once feared the sexual power of rockabilly, so it becomes ironic that the push and pull of sexual shame and being with child is now places on it’s cradle. David Shapiro talks about this history in his essay Blue Moon of Kentucky, Rising Over the Mystery Train, "It may well be that the struggle to suppress country music, 'this deep sense of fear and resignation' by which it was constrained, provoked the eruption of country's deviant offspring rockabilly, and caused so many to rail against it as a threat to their livelihoods, if not their souls. Rockabilly, in the words of (Bill) Malone' gave vent to impulses that had long been impeded, if often dormant, in southern culture, a hell-for-leather hedonism, a swaggering masculinity, or in the case of the women, an uncharacteristic aggressiveness and strangely a visceral emotionalism among both men and women that seemed as reflective of the church as the beer joints” (30)

Rockabilly is no longer threatening to Country Radio and country promoters, because the men who listened to it, and its antecedents in the last few decades, are the same demographic. (ie white, working class, young men, from the west and south) This demographic is delineated in a brilliant essay by Adam Watts, collected in White Masculinity in the Recent South. A Real Place, Attitudes and Environment in a Southern Deer Camp uses the heavily localized space of shooting deer, to make two cognizant points about this new masculinity, both of which are talked about in Church’s work.

Watt’s initial observation, (and it helps to think of the Deer Camp as a metonymy of places where working class men gather recreationally, away from the influences of women) is “"Few would claim to be working class, although all would claim to be working men...” making a self identification about what one does, as opposed to what one is, class becomes a series of cultural signifiers that are outside traditional Marxist language. Church has written extensively about this new mutability especially in the song, Guys Like Me with lines like “I spend Saturdays working on my truck/I don't like to fight/But I ain't scared to bleed/Most don't mess with a guy like me/Guys like me drink to many beers on Friday after work/Our best blue jeans have skoal rings/We wear our boots to church/So rough around the edges”, here he outlines a set of specific cultural significations.

The mutability of class another point that Watts makes. He talks about his membership in the deer run that he visits, that he uses to shoot... “Members of Clear Run, like those of other white Southern men, view the pursuit of white tail deer as a natural, even necessary reason for white Southern men and boys, increasingly suburban, or urban with predominately indoor lifestyles and careers, to enjoy the outdoors...” though Country is usually ex/suburban, and increasingly function as service workers as opposed to manufacturing, there are a variety of self-identifying moral signifiers. The ability to take responsibility for unforeseen actions, to provide for women and children, and in the words of Two Pink Lines: “yeah her Daddy's gonna kill me and that’s a fact/maybe we'll just leave town and never come back/or I could stand there and tell him/face him like a man” or “not being scared to bleed” or the ability to kill deer to feed family for a living, are all things that are not only about working for a living, but an ethical desire to serve. It is the same ethical desire that gives Newfield the new crib, or prevents her from aborting the fetus.

The images on screen, of a widow, and of a widow as the only acceptable female position in war, hide the difficulty of female representation, just as the musical forms in Eric Church’s track refuse to discuss all of the options on hand, or how Heidi Newfield’s track heavily genderizes and dismisses the cataclysmic possibilities of an 18 year old with child. Melodrama is a form that it expects certain things from its participants, and the rules of it’s creation become highly solidified.

An 18 year old, who has the desire to marry, to pine and to wait for her solider lover to return from away, is so ancient and so expected, that it can only be discussed in a way that is heavily codified, that is intensified by history, by genre expectation, and by the political implications of both new Nashville, and the pyscho-geographical implications of a working class life. Considering that two of the most complicated narratives of the most recent war both came from the place where country comes from. Both Lyddie England and Jessica Lynch. Those two, who were supposed to be the villain and the hero of this recent conflict, are much less stable, and much able to be melodramatized, or even written about in an easily accessiable way. Even the Pentagon’s attempts to make a new kind of feminized, attractive, and yet strong/resilient hero out of failed.
.
All of these narratives with their hygenic use of previously filthy genre music , bleach out the details of lives lead when one is 18 and scared, the choices about keeping the baby or not keeping the baby, about aborting it or adopting it, or even a song that mentions high school or morning sickness or what it means to piss on a stick in a filthy bathroom in a gas station or even discussions of what it means to have sex at 18, so the listener is forced to complete the narratives on hand.


This desire to keep things clean, leads to long gaps that hint and do not tell the whole story, in Tim McGraw’s Red Rag Top, recorded in 2002, and included in his greatest hits. It is the only song that talks about terminating the pregnancy. This termination is encased in a narrative of nostalgia and completion. In this way, it becomes a normalized text of regret and personal history, a discussion of youthful indiscretion. This discussion has become a standard genre, and a highly popular one.

The industry can be divided into those who listen to music, and those who create it. Using two metrics, the billboard Hot Country 100 chart of singles, and the best single/song awards from the Billboard Music Charts suggest how popular this cult of nostalgia can be. Starting from when Red Rag Top was released (note, this single stalled at no. 5) in 2002: Three songs were explicitly about nostalgia, taking up 14 weeks of that year, with the longest run being Kenny Chesney’s Good Stuff for 7 weeks. In 2003 four songs followed the same kind of flash back narrative, or took the place in the past, and suggested a similar aesthetic to the ones in 2002, taking up 20 weeks of the chart. The longest was There Goes My Life for 7 weeks. This year included the previously discussed Travelin' Solider, and Beer for my Horses, by Willie Nelson and Toby Keith that became so popular that there was a movie made for CMT last year starring both Nelson and Keith. In 2004, three songs following the same pattern, took up 7 weeks of the chart, with the longest being Days Go By, by Keith Urban, for a month. In 2005, 7 weeks, 3 songs, Fast Cars and Freedom by Rascall Flatts, for 3 weeks. In 2006, 3 songs for 9 weeks, two months of those being Kenny Chesney tracks, in 2008 an uptick, with five songs and 12 weeks, Kenny Chesney and Rascall Flatts tying for a month a piece, 2008 3 songs, 7 weeks, the longest being Brad Paisley’s ode to high school and making the same mistakes earlier, Letter to Me, and so far in 2009, two songs for three weeks.

As for the CMA awards, four songs in 7 years have won either single or song of the year with themes or music that was explicitly nostalgic. Though Kenny Chesney seems to make the most money from this particular meme, Tim McGraw is not immune to it (his hits that talk about the past, that frame moral narratives into flashback parables of suburban disenchantment include Grown Men Don’t Cry, Memory Lane, Telluride, 17, and Please Remember Me and Please Don’t Take The Girl.

Chesney and McGraw have much in common, they speak moral lessons, talk of spefici cities in general stories, have complicated relationships to their own bodies, and to the bodies of adolescents that manifest as a bittersweet desire to abandon fame for the simpler pleasures of youth. Though this narrative sells very well, and on a surface level Tim McGraw provides these base pleasures to his audience, he appears much more aware of the natural consequences of the actions and restrictions of the life he lauds.

If one reads McGraw closely, he posits an ethical structure of choice that Newfield or Church lack. You can hear it in songs like Drugs or Jesus, where the narrator (and he frequently writes in the first person, so they become confessional), allows that “Everyone needs to get high” to escape from the dull routine of small town life. Though he makes a personal choice for Christ, and the song hints that this is the more positive choice, it acknowledges both the isolation of rural/exurban/suburban existence, and the possiblity of less ecclestical form of redemption.

The first lines of Red Rag Top introduce a couple, one 18 and 20, both legal (Church also mentions tht he and his partner were legal, that Church and McGraw are older then Newfield, suggests an interest in legality allows for only one scandal, more then that might sink the song commerically)

The legality might be the center of this song, it mentions that they broke traffic and curfew laws, and also moral laws outside of the state. But if they are 18 and 20, and he is speaking of an adult with a wife and a child, can we assume that the abortion was acquired after 1973, when it was legalized in the United States? The narrator avoids parents and cops, to commit minor traffic violations. Could the transgressing of the ethics of a small town life be extrapolated into the more adult task of taking responsibility when the fun stops?

There are other questions about respobsibility. If they are working class, which seems to be a fairly safe bet, considering the demographic of country music right now, how would they pay for the termination, and though he alludes that they broke up a year after the procedure and never talked again, was it the abortion that resulted in the lack of communication and later relationship? If they had the child, would they be married like Newfield, or would he be willing to foot the bills like Church?

In this way, the only thing that changes the Deus Ex Machina ending of Church, or the family obsessions of Newfield, is that McGraw was the only one who made a choice. The narator never uses the words abortion, or terminatiom or even baby, but says he “made a choice not to have a choice”, that line underlines the thesis of all of those songs about nostalgia and loss that centre American country music. Nostalgia becomes less of the action mourned, but about the possibilities that could occur if a choice never had to be made.

Reading the third verse, where he as an adult sees a girl who looks like the woman he knew at 16, he shuts off the passivity of what could have happened:

No I cant say where she is today,
I can’t remember who I was, back then
Well you do what you do and you pay for your sins,
And there's no such thing as what might’ve
Been, that’s a waste of time; drive you outta your mind


Red Rag Top becomes twofold, it is about the ability of two scared barley post adolescents who are allowed to access abortion, and choose to do so, but it is also about the mourning for the potential of a relationship, and perhaps even a life, that can occur post abortion. In this slippery move between the two rhetorical positions of the Right and Left, namely it is always a women’s choice, and abortion is murder, and never taking a side, he allows for the moral possibility of either or both or neither, or something else entirely. In this way, it becomes an interior criticism of popular country music. while still managing to chart as another popular song of nostaliga.

Nostalgia presupposes a perfect past and an imperfect future, it allows the creation of a narrative that is clean and precise, and the precision is achieved through excising the inconvenient. Basically, then what is real and what is not real can be determined by an ability to control the narrative that is being created. It is interesting that these songs were popularized in the election year when the vice presidential Republican candidate had a pregnant teenager of her own.

To put it in its most simplistic way, the goal of a presidential campaign, especially in the television era, post-Nixon is to collapse complicated and human lives into one seamless and simple story, via vetting and speechwriting, (talking about what went wrong with the campaign in the New York Times, republican operative Paul Costello makes this exact point “ “That’s the best you can do, turn it into a narrative that gives the American people a positive story”.) With the Republicans these narratives are often about self-control, and bodily continence.

This bodily continence is about not having sex before marriage, and being fecund afterwards. There is some discussion about when John McCain knew about the pregnancy of Bristol, and some discussion about when Sarah knew as well. Though she mentions that she told her parents, and presents a domestic narrative that includes having Levi Johnson in the room, and sending her children away, Bristol does not tell exactly when she told Sarah.


The confusion about what was told, and what was left out, and the timeline of what was said to whom and when, reminds us that a girl who is with child, is a state who is always under threatened, and who’s life cannot be easily plotted. The 16th century text, The Instruction of a Christian Woman, tells us what happens when her virtue (and for virtue read hymen) has been comprises: “the threat of ostracism, which are shown here to run like contagion through the community in relentless, ever widening circles, are summoned to police the young women’s sexual behavior, her body and desire are not hers to do what she pleases, for her body posses a significant worth that goes beyond the merely personal.” (Quoted in Virginity, A Cultural History, Anker Berno, 139). That Bristol Palin even bothered to have sex, that she claimed the autonomy of her own body, is the beginning vector that begins the contagation.


The unruliness of Bristol Palin’s body becomes the de facto permission for media representations of chaos and uncertainty. Bristol Palin becomes the blankness where people can write their own texts. One could note how Sarah Palin introduces a community of matriarchs taking care of the child in the interview with Greeta Van Sustreen for example, or be like Michelle Malkin, who wrote in a column on her blog: “the Palin family values the sanctity of life. Or “They talk the talk and walk the walk…all of those narratives are present,” There is also a narrative of class, from Levi Johnston referring to himself on his Myspace page fucking redneck, or if the Star tabloid is to be believed, Johnson’s sister calling the Palin’s white trash. There are some attempts to synthesize a variety of these narrative, a Fox News editorial before the election within the space of two paragraphs, notes “many obsessive’s noted the pregnancy served to humanize the Palin's and showcase the candidates rejection of abortion” and “Johnston, an avid hunter, hinted at the time that they were expecting a boy. He said he was already looking forward to taking the boy hunting and fishing”, just as his parents, and the grandparents of his child had done.

For all of the rhetoric of choice, each of the texts discussed up to this point, has been about the limiting of choices, about the options that exist or fail to exist, in a small town, or with family pressure, or with political desires pressing into you. In this way, it becomes the choices you are allowed to make, as opposed to the choices that you want to make. The negotiation of limited choice is not something that is often discussed because it is in direct opposition to the American mythos of manifest destiny, but it is very much within the pragmatic ethos that the US has placed as a corrective, as an alternate discourse around that myth. The cleverness of the writing, the allusion rich and narrative heavy desires of these texts have an enormous formal sophistication, but that sophistication has any number of seemingly contradictory polysemic functions.

That polysemic quality, combined with the plain speech, makes country unique in telling American stories that complicate the hope. There are few answers, because attempts to document quotidian lives, and the past. Its narratolgies are one not of seeking, or answering, but of sorting, about finding patterns in lives that seem to have meaning imposed from above. In this way, the singing and the writing becomes a searching for autonomy, to suggest a solid this is what x means, betrays the function of the text. I am too far away in age, in location, in sexuality, to truly understand what it means to be an 18-year-old war widow, or 16 and knocked up, or even whatever the heck Bristol Palin is feeling. I am reminded of Loretta Lynn in the mid 70s, who praised birth control, but decimated the women’s movement for not taking her life seriously, who loved her man and threatened to kick the shit out anyone who crossed him. Think of this then, as a way of bringing these narratives to others, with respect, and humility, fully recognizing they are not my stories.