Monday, March 17, 2008
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Essay:
Listening and Watching Kenny Chesney on videos, in music, and in concert footage, is watching someone of great popularity do something strange and radical, all of the dichotomous pairs that we have to discuss gender and sexuality, he erases. The lines between audience/performer, gay/straight acting, butch/femme, and top/bottom disappear under the weight of his power as performer. By looking through videos, songs, interviews and other mostly primary texts, I am reminded of what Eve Kowosky Sedgwick has said about the sonnets of Shakespeare.: “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). The difference, of course, is that the work is contemporary, so the sexual contact of the period (our period) can be immediately retrieved, but even when retrieved, taxonomy is not immediate or even possible. That the public personae conflicts with songs sung in first person, that the corpus spoken in third person shares themes with work made in the second, or that the homosocial instinct intersects and often corrupts the homosexual one—or that homosexual desire often fetishizes homosocial contact, any attempts to disentangle becomes sticky, it sticks to history, to memory, to sexuality and to genre. This, then, is a set of propositions and questions, not only about Chesney himself, but of what it means to be queer, to be working class, to be male, to be in an audience, or a performer currently in this media climate.
Audience/performer:
Among the best ways of figuring out how an audience and a performer work together, how the roles wax and wane, is by watching concert footage. With the rise of country's popularity through the 1990s, videos began to be shot in stadia, each of them fairly similar. Garth Brooks is the best example of this; with DVDs of him live in concert, over half a dozen short form videos, he sets the precedent. This video, was not shot by Garth Brooks, but by his audience, during 2001, a half a minute of noise, in the dark, shot by an audience member and not a professional, is a good record of the noise and power of a combined spectacle. The fourth wall is safely in place, with the roles of the audience and the performer securely in place. Even when, in videos that Brooks has shot, he reaches out to the audiences’ hands, it is his grace that breaks the audience. The hierarchy is strictly present.
In the post Garth era, the fourth wall has become more pliable. Tim McGraw 2001 video for Cowboy in Me is typical in how it features footage from before, after and during the concert. As well, instead of the camera showing the audience, the gaze is directed towards Tim's sweaty, hairy, flesh. Here is a brief excerpt of Cowboy In Me.
Though subject to the audiences gaze, he controls it, by masculine power, and physical distance. Laura Mulvey, the psychoanalytic critic, writes, “the cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes further, developing scopophillia, in its narcissistic aspect” (Varieties of Visual Experience, 17). McGraw, though not in the cinema, has a visual component to his work that is typical of this lens. He seduces the camera, lusty and forward, getting off on the obsession of not only the live audience, but also the audience that will later look forward to watching the work on CMT or GMA or DVDS. That he tours with his wife, who is equally powerful, suggests an instinct towards having an immediate partner, but also hundreds of thousands of partners by proxy. At a concert in 2007, this split, between the proxied partner and immediate partner was made explicit. A woman reached up while McGraw was in the middle of the audience, on a thrust stage. She grasped his balls, which resulted in Hill coming out, and yelling about the ignorance of this act. She sounded like a woman scorned.
Kenny Chesney's 2005 video Living in Fast Forward shares stadium footage with cowboy in Me, but Chesney’s work fractures, talks about himself in the abstract, obsesses over the audiences desires for him, and formally innovates; there are scenes shot in moody black and white, other sections that look like super-eight, in addition to the usual slick concert footage. Scenes alone, scenes in the midst of crowds, and scenes controlling crowds mingle promiscuously. The formal and symbolic weight makes him being alone; being part of his audience, and being in front of his audience have the same social weight, deconstructing Tim McGraw or Garth Brooks' theatrics.
That his videos, at least in the context of videos, Chesney seeks the gaze of the audience, like McGraw or Brooks does directly, but looking through the 2005 video, he wanders through the crowds, not worried about his own security, and he also spends time, seemingly alone but with the presence of the camera, so in one video, he processes the immediate audience in the stadium, outside the stadium; the audience finds him as a performer using the typical fourth wall hierarchy, and outside the stadium, the audience recognizes him as one of their own, refusing the high/low audience/performer roles. In addition, for any one who cannot be part of the audience, he gives a small private performance, just him, his island and his guitar.
Returning to Mulvey, and moving slightly outside of the audience/performer realm, she talks about the male gaze thusly: “Pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly” (Visual and Other Pleasures, 19). Depending on the video, the gaze that Chesney projects, includes but is not limited to his current self, his past self, his future self, in addition to men, women, and giant crowds of adoring fans. In the concert videos, especially, but elsewhere, the camera’s gaze is projected like a slut, the active/male/passive/female construction of traditional psychoanalytic feminist theory is replaced with something much more slippery. This slipperiness is also found in the rumors of his sexuality, and how he both embodies and displaces them.
"Gay/Straight"
There have been rumors around Nashville for a decade that Chesney likes to fuck men. Online gossip sites call him "the gayest man in country music” (D Listed), claim that “Kenny Chesney isn't gay, he just plays one on stage” (Jossip), “Kenny Chesney is gay! For those of us who have gaydar, we know” (MJD Sports Blog), Q: Who is your favorite Gay Artist? A: Kenny Chesney (Wanderlist). His short lived marriage to Renée Zellweger, and the later annulment using the grounds of fraud, added fuel to the fire. In a Feb 18, 2007 interview with 60 Minutes shortly after the marriage’s breakdown, he addressed the rumors for first time. Anderson Cooper, who has been written about in out magazine, as being in a glass closet, and who shows up at events in New York City, with men assumed to be his lover, did the interview. The two talking together was a masterpiece of sexual ambiguity; the answers were delicate and well placed. He says, “Maybe I should have come out, and say, no I’m not...but I didn’t want to draw more attention to it”
That double negative, and the use of the phrase come out, to come out as straight, suggests that he knew both the public perception, and also the politics of language. That he wanted to keep it private, though typical of closeted stars, was made more discursive by the original non-refusal, refusal, especially in relation to Cooper’s involvement.
All of that said, the interesting thing about Chesney, though, is not the assumption of homosexuality, but how homosociality overlaps. Both fags and good ol’ boys share the aesthetics of nostalgia and young men. The best example of this might be the video for 2006’s Young, is filled with so much young male flesh, that it seems almost to be homoerotic. About his life in a small town at 16, the boys he hires to play him, as teenagers are rock and roll jocks.
Wearing tight jeans, wife beaters, or often shirtless, looking dark and petulant, they have the fetish of heterosexualised masculinity has been a gay man's provenance for decades. Watching this Chesney video is like seeing a bleached clean version of Larry Clarke or a less pretty Bruce Weber.
That the video begins with Kenny in a Letterman's jacket makes things more interesting. The letterman’s jacket was first worn by straight men, then as an almost literal fetish for gay men, so much of one that it was written about, photographed and filmed. There is an iconic Champion Studios shot, of a naked man, in nothing but a letterman’s jacket, and a hard cock, there are the drawings of Harry Bush, Maupin wrote about it in his second tales from the city novel. For the last half of the 20th century, a grown man (especially one who looks as boyish as Chesney) who wears a high school lettermen's jacket meant two things: that he couldn't get over high school, or he liked straight acting boy cock. Chesney did letter in both baseball and football while in high school, and he does seem to appreciate the boys he casts in his videos.
There may be another way to view the text, though. That the song is called Young, and that it is mostly about how Chesney wants to return to the glories of high school, and that he made a hit out of Keg in The Closet, about the utopia of frat boy life, his desire to return to earlier times is well documented. This suggests that he does not want to have sex with other men, but with a younger, more perfect version of himself.
There are other texts in which the liminal spaces of homosocial and homosexual are impossibly unclear. In the video of On the Coast of Somewhere Beautiful, he drinks in seaside bars, hugs and holds boys, with great tenderness. Backlit shots make silhouetted figures gender ambiguous. In concert footage for Don't Happen Twice Tim McGraw piggy backs him on stage. Later, on the back of his tour bus, instead of groupies, there are almost a dozen good-looking men. In Old Blue Chair he uses the phrase: "I let go of a lover" a word that is often used to code relationships outside traditional gender norms. This doesn't include the song titles "Soul Of A Sailor"," The Tin Man", "Keg In The Closet", and "Island Boy".
Discussions of Chesney's sexuality (including this one) usually center on the masculine center of his image creation, but it under rates his position as a writer of heterosexual love songs. There are several, which are tender, difficult, and profoundly, unstably erotic, including She Thinks My Tractors Sexy, Anything But Mine, and How Forever Feels and Mine.
The earliest of these, is How Forever Feels, in which he sings that he "has done almost anything a boy can do" but then wants "to kneel on mama's front step". The desire for permanence is the chief argument for marriage. There is a hopeful vulnerability to his desire to be married, and also the under stated assumption, that marriage, especially heterosexual marriage is the logical extension of youthful experimentation. There is a grounding there, that is touching.
The single She Thinks My Tractors Sexy began his rise to the stratosphere, and it is the most complex of his texts, especially in terms of gender relations. Maybe it is because country music has been more equal in terms of gender then other genres, for longer, but the video is profoundly equal. It refutes the Mulvey assumption that “women without a phallus have to undergo punishment by…fetish objects ranging from tight shoes and corsetry through rubber gloves and leather” (Visual and Other Pleasures, 8)
In the video, she is serving him, there is no doubt in that, which would make it seem that the woman is being subservient. But it understands rural culture, farm culture suggests an even division of work, and she has her high heels off, displayed from the side, the fetish object is discarded for comfort, plus she rides regal on the back of a tractor, she is assuming sexual and physical power over Chesney. It also ends, with the trading back and forth of bodies, an almost perfect mirroring of sexual positions, which mirrors a guiltless, casual trading of phallic positioning. It is the queerest thing in Chesney’s canon and perversely, the most focused on the eroticism of women.
Finally, in Anything But Mine, Chesney's masterpiece, maintains the sexuality of his earlier work, but undermines the stability of How Forever Feels. In it a summer relationship ends in the fall—and any of the promises made, will be spoken but not believed. When the narrator croons "In the morning/I am leaving/making my way back to
Cleveland/and I don't see/how you could be ever be anything but mine" no one believes what is being sung, there is something resigned about hope failing. Phrases like "sting of summer on my skin", and "I tell her I love her and we laugh because we know it isn't true" and "there's so much I long to do to you", take what is supposed to be a
generous and open memory containing it in tragedy. The desire in the song is genuinely heterosexual; the protagonists John and Mary love and is confused by that love.
Chesney's best work is nostalgic, but an authentic desire to return rots the utopia of youth. In this way, his sexuality has an explicit connection to the ambiguity of teenage years. His "adult" songs often are about second-generation childhood, about a teenage dad, or him being unable to maintain that adult relationship (I am thinking of Good Stuff, here, where he gets advice from a sage bartender.) In this way, he manages the polymorphisms of youth, without the perversity.
In fact, much of what could be constructed as adult sexuality, is reflected as performative. This is made especially clear in Dancing For The Groceries, from 2007, about a stripper who dances to pay for her child's basic needs. Though intended as a plaintive epic about the sacrifices of a single mother, the work is camp, it it's attempts to discuss class and desire in a way that does not function as a nostalgic signifier. Lines like "in sequins and in laces, she dances for their braces" suggests a narrative construction unrelated to reportage, unrelated to the actual life of not only the referrer but the referent.
The younger and more male the subjects are, the more authentic both their sexual and domestic longings seem to be. That country music is mostly a cult of the authentic, and is mostly written for women consumers, the ambiguity here is difficult to parse. I am reminded of David Beach Snider’s potted history of similar incidents, in his essay Performance Anxiety. “the new macho image of the gay man as it emerged in the 70s” contested this strategy of marginalization of the homosexual and thus disrupted the definition of the masculine by integrating the ideological assumptions and by demonstrating the performative nature of gender subjectivity.” This may be straight, may be gay, may seek youth, may seek wisdom, regression and progression that are typical of his work and that slipperiness, is not only found in the genders of his partners, but also in the gender of himself.
Butch/Femme
Chesney's public presentation is a good ol' boy. He has the sleeveless shirts, the frat boy aesthetics, and the muscles to come across as a man's man. His relationships have been clouded in mystery, with him being discreet, not for any reason of shame, but because of his fear of revealing emotion. He talks of working hard, and that hard work being the problem with his relationships.
His work has been centrally, about what happens in the company of men,
not in a homosexual but homosocial sense. Steve Kandell's article for
Chesney in the December 2005 issue of Blender talks of all kinds of
frat boy bonding. Starting with an explanation of "sixth gear: "an advanced, almost transcendent state of drunkenness that generally requires physical assistance to get home". The drinking is part of the aesthetic of masculinity that permeates the story. There are girls, fishing, barbequing, beer and ESPN on the television. He works hard at making South Padre Island at Spring Break, a permanent fixture—or talking about it like it is. The protestant work ethic a slight of hand trick hidden between the no shirt, no shoes, no problems vibe.
Chesney doesn't look butch. He's short, and until the 1999 break out album, sort of tubby. He grew muscles at that point but never really bulked up. There is a preening, careful, and well-constructed vanity here. Publicity photos taken in St John show him half naked, lounging on boats, and sitting on the beach, encouraging cameras to sexualize. His coquettish way of seducing and avoiding the camera has a clean mechanical precision.
He has been rumored to have pectoral implants (this comes from a web gossip site, called the superficial, “Last summer I was in Nashville eating dinner with a good friend who works out with Chesney's ex-trainer. Apparently, the trainer said Kenny has pectoral implants, in other words, Kenny has a boob job! Ironically, he can't actually lift heavy object due to the implants. I'm sure if you peruse through photos of Chesney you'll find quite a dramatic difference from the days when he was first beginning to present day. My friend, a musician who writes songs for several well-known country artists, claims that Kenny is like the 'Britney Spears of country music.' He really isn't that great of a singer and everyone makes fun of him” This is interesting, because his vanity is attached to his popularity, that he sells records without being very good, and only because of his own sexual personae, but inserting that all into a narrative that rewards obsessive looking, makes his body a spectacle in a form familiar to frankly girls.
This rumor he publicly disavowed on a 2005 CMT special, called Top 20 celebrity myths busted. This show was in part about spectacled bodies including segments on Terry Clarke’s posing for playboy, a Lady Godiva like singer songwriter, Billy Ray Cyrus as a Chippendale dancer, and Chris Cagle as either getting a woman pregnant or he himself gay) place Chesney in amongst the vain, the female, the desperate, or the sexualized. That he disavowed the rumours at his gym, among the male flesh, adds fuel to at least the homosocial fire.
His vanity fails, sometimes though. The constant presence of the cowboy hat reminds us that without one he looks fetal, the close ups of his face have a leather handbag aesthetic that occurs amongst all women who have spent too much time in the sun, and sometimes when he intends to look pensive, he looks stupid.
No male country pin up has the hairless, sculpted idealism of Chesney. Tim McGraw is too hairy, Brad Paisley never takes his shirt off, Toby Keith still looks like the rigpig he was before the albums, Keith Urban is too greasy, Clay Walker isn't famous enough, and Joe Nichols is lupine in a way Chesney can't contend with. The frat boy life style
that abuts the smooth aesthetic makes Chesney sexually safe enough to be loved by women and share an aesthetic with the skater boy, straight boy, pro/am porn that is in favor among gay circles. He wouldn't look out of place on places like Straight College Men, College Dudes, or Just Us Dudes.
The texture of flesh, and how that texture relates to text, was placed in stark relief, by Renua Bara’s essay Outing Texture. He writes, “The language of texture, involves liminal erotic play, between shiny/matte and smooth/rough distinctions” (from Novel Gazing, 94) The smoothness of Chesney’s flesh, the shininess of his body, the hairlessness, can be compared to the rough, hairy, secondary sexual characteristics shown by country stars like Tim McGraw or Toby Keith. The textures of Chesney’s body, requires the maintaining of a permanent adolescence, the smoothness of his corporeal presence attaches to the smoothness (read: the studio perfection) of is vocals. There is then the contradiction between the studio gorgeousness of the voice and the hairy, butch presence of Tim McGraw (c.f. the Cowboy in Me video, or the Franklin Wrestling press photos) and his voice, not quite rough, but also not maintained in the same way as Chesney. The pairs that Bara talks about are pairs that are at the core of how country music is used to discuss how gender sounds.
Bara continues "Fetishism can also lie in not in the shine, but in a kind of fluffy, hairy, feathery, furry, leathery coarseness" That list of adjectives, is a list of gendered adjectives, that can be used to describe both flesh and the word. It is a list that will be useful in applying, supplely to the aesthetics and public presentation of Chesney. Fluffy: as in porn fluff, as in pop fluff, as in non-substantial, as in not meaning much, as in too ephemeral for the real thing. To be fluff is to be not worth serious consideration as a performer, be it musically, sexually, or personally. Hairy: the words that come to mind are of butch gay male presentations. Those who are hairy include the bear, and the leather king, but they also match people who are so confident in their sexuality, that they can be schmaltzy or sweet and not risk losing an audience. This dichotomy, between super butch and cuddly teddy can almost be a fight between Toby Keith and Tim McGraw. Toby Keith sings songs like "What Stays In Mexico" or "Running Block" (i.e. fuck songs) versus Lets Make Love or Don’t Take the Girl (ie erotic odes to fidelity). It is significant that Tim McGraw, of al the country music singers, became the subject of a song that was about teenage devotion. Taylor Swift’s ode epitomizes the daddy and the teddy, safe enough to be worshiped, but dangerous enough to be obsessed with. Is there any difference in the distinctions between furry and hairy, except maybe furry is the end of a gradation of hairy? Going from smooth to hairy to furry, furry as in the usage of woof in the bear subculture, a signifier of a certain kind of animalism, that the careful refusal of adult wantonness that in general country is criticized for? Leathery is not leather, it does not have the butch quality of bikers and cowboys. Leathery is what Chesney has in the photos from St Johns in the Caribbean, to much time in the sun that results in looking like an elderly handbag. Coarseness is a subset of bawdy, and an excellent example of textural words to describe textual positioning.
That he is incapable of hair, of feather, of fury, and his leather is not the kind that suggests fetish in the most popular kind. His lack of fetish able cling, his refusal to be butch or femme, but maybe under the right circumstances, both—does not have a panty wetting androgyny—this is not Byron or Elvis, but a kind of effect of being all things to all people. His refusal of either categories, and his negation of the middle, makes analysis or meta-textual positions problematic. This does not mean that he fails at an erotic personae, it means hat his erotic personae is non standard.
Top/Bottom
The phrase Top/Bottom leaked from the BDSM community, to the general gay male world, and onto mainstream culture. Chesney himself has been cagey personally about how he fucks and who fucks him. There are places where his versatility becomes clear. There is the coda of She Thinks My Tractors Sexy, which we have already talked about, and there is he and Gretchen Wilson, on his ABC television special.
They are singing Hurts so Good, by John Mellencamp, as a duet. The song in itself has a certain S/M vibe, but how they sing it, is a jostling for power. Kenny introduces Gretchen as Miss Wilson, placing himself as the owner of a space, and talking about her in terms, which must at least be partially arch. She comes out singing. They lock eyes, and move to the center of the stage from opposite corners. Cheney begins pulling Gretchen by her arm roughly. Gretchen sings, to Chesney, Chesney looks goofy and sort of in love. She tops Chesney, pointing and almost shaming him. They face off, staring at each other, and sing/shout the lines about teeth "sinking right though my bones"
There is an exchange of power here; both taking each other's personae on. They run to the opposite sides of the stage, retreating from the aggressiveness for a few seconds, then run back and face each other. They twist lower and lower, Chesney has his mouth somewhere near Gretchen's crotch, and it looks like what Bowie or Jim Morrison did in the mid 70s, simulating cunninlingus instead of fellatio—but more so because Wilson doesn't have a guitar on her, so the excuse of watching the fingering is not present. Wilson pushes Chesney away. They end, tenderly, with a side-by-side hug and some non-sexualized intimacy.
The whole run there, bodies moving together, too close, then far apart, that sexuality dissipating into something less threatening is central to Chesney's public personae. The photos of his wedding to Renee Zellweger are interesting for this reason. One where Cheseny is kissing her hand, being as far away from here as possible, and her looking at him with an almost regal disdain, suggests she has all of the power in the relationship. The ones where she is fitting herself under his arm, her looking down and across, he looking at the camera, makes Zellweger have less power. She is taller then Chesney, she stoops in deference.
These two photos, and the footage with Chesney and Wilson, suggest that he is aware of what his sexuality does, publicly. Allowing for a free flow, between his female counterpoints, means that his audience will be aware that he can be trained, and that he can take charge as well, it adds a small frisson of danger to a safe performance.
Looking at all of this---of the public personae that is unguided, that moves between the lines that are expected of performers might risk a larger career. But selling 25 million records, and having among the highest concert revenues for a half a decade, suggest that Kenny isn't hurting for anything.
Thinking about that lack of excess, and putting it into a more personal spin. Academia has a similar desire for sobriety, for critical distance from the subject. Martha Mockus starts her essay on fellow Albertan, kd lang in Queering The Pitch thusly: "I've never been a fan of country music. I find that I am vaguely aware of who’s who in country, but I have never experienced a great desire to listen to country tunes or cultivate a taste for any particular country musicians." (261) I grew up on country, and I have cultivated sexual, personal, emotionally, aesthetic and spiritual tastes for a wide variety of country musicians.
The thing is, reading about Chesney, in the conventional press, they are all so surprised, at his success, and at how his normalcy--my friends accuse me of having a fetish for normalcy, but the thing is, things are never as normal as they seem. Griel Marcus talked about the Old Weird America, and how country is about death, about anything but the Sunbelt and the suburbs. The snobbish kibitzing around alt-country, and of the freak folk movement, that calls itself the New Weird America add to this rhetoric against pop country, against the normalcy of people like Chesney.
But Chesney's complicated and intractable relationship with normality that we have talked about here reflects in finding meaning and pattern in the suburbs I grew up in. Growing up strange, not knowing the patterns, in a town whose industries were prisons and gas plants, growing up wanting to be an academic, a writer, an artist--growing up weird means that that which is normal is strange...Marcus quotes the roman historian Tactius all the time: I am human, nothing that is human is strange to me, but Chesney, Paisley, Keith and the like are strange to me, the middle America is strange to me...this was my attempt to make them closer, to find out why I love that which I love...
I joked, telling people about this essay, that it was about how much I wanted to fuck Kenny Chesney, and I think that not only do I want to fuck Chesney, but I want to transfer myself, to be a truck driver in Dubuque or a housewife in Phoenix. I would like to tell a story that talks about this longing. There is a Canadian singer named Jason McCoy, he's good--look him up--and I was in his concert at Bloor/Yonge in Toronto, at a Hard Rock Cafe. The most touristy spot in the most urban corner in Canada, and I am with these two women who work as cleaners, near the working class town of Barrie. They are drinking Molson long necks, I'm drinking Steamwhistle, they are talking about McCoy's ass, and I say, its a nice ass, they get a little drunk, and I'm a little drunk, its near Christmas, I'm alone, and the concert is good but I'm not having any fun, I go to the concert because I wanted some down home charm.
But they start making fun of my beer, and then ignore me. They think of me as a city boy that is slumming, they don't think I understand the power of McCoy, and one of the reasons why I love the singer, is that all of his filth is oblique, references to being born again sexually being the same as born again religiously, or a sly node to swallows at Capernstria going down south, with resonances of the tingle of a mouth around a cock...but he is also deeply religious, though he keeps his religion close to his chest.
I think here, I am a city boy who is trying to be a country boy, talking about Chesney as a post modern sexual ideal, because I want him to be, because every time I think about Chesney this way, I think of that concert, the sexuality almost hidden, the casual lust and the home town values, the psycho-geographical land mines of class, taste, culture, and that which can be consumed or which consumes. There is something comforting and unsettling simultaneously about seeing his body move through such metaphorical and physical spaces, just like drinking the wrong beer in the wrong crowd confirms and upsets social identifiers, and just like there is something subversive in getting a hard on during a Jason McCoy concert
Listening and Watching Kenny Chesney on videos, in music, and in concert footage, is watching someone of great popularity do something strange and radical, all of the dichotomous pairs that we have to discuss gender and sexuality, he erases. The lines between audience/performer, gay/straight acting, butch/femme, and top/bottom disappear under the weight of his power as performer. By looking through videos, songs, interviews and other mostly primary texts, I am reminded of what Eve Kowosky Sedgwick has said about the sonnets of Shakespeare.: “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). The difference, of course, is that the work is contemporary, so the sexual contact of the period (our period) can be immediately retrieved, but even when retrieved, taxonomy is not immediate or even possible. That the public personae conflicts with songs sung in first person, that the corpus spoken in third person shares themes with work made in the second, or that the homosocial instinct intersects and often corrupts the homosexual one—or that homosexual desire often fetishizes homosocial contact, any attempts to disentangle becomes sticky, it sticks to history, to memory, to sexuality and to genre. This, then, is a set of propositions and questions, not only about Chesney himself, but of what it means to be queer, to be working class, to be male, to be in an audience, or a performer currently in this media climate.
Audience/performer:
Among the best ways of figuring out how an audience and a performer work together, how the roles wax and wane, is by watching concert footage. With the rise of country's popularity through the 1990s, videos began to be shot in stadia, each of them fairly similar. Garth Brooks is the best example of this; with DVDs of him live in concert, over half a dozen short form videos, he sets the precedent. This video, was not shot by Garth Brooks, but by his audience, during 2001, a half a minute of noise, in the dark, shot by an audience member and not a professional, is a good record of the noise and power of a combined spectacle. The fourth wall is safely in place, with the roles of the audience and the performer securely in place. Even when, in videos that Brooks has shot, he reaches out to the audiences’ hands, it is his grace that breaks the audience. The hierarchy is strictly present.
In the post Garth era, the fourth wall has become more pliable. Tim McGraw 2001 video for Cowboy in Me is typical in how it features footage from before, after and during the concert. As well, instead of the camera showing the audience, the gaze is directed towards Tim's sweaty, hairy, flesh. Here is a brief excerpt of Cowboy In Me.
Though subject to the audiences gaze, he controls it, by masculine power, and physical distance. Laura Mulvey, the psychoanalytic critic, writes, “the cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes further, developing scopophillia, in its narcissistic aspect” (Varieties of Visual Experience, 17). McGraw, though not in the cinema, has a visual component to his work that is typical of this lens. He seduces the camera, lusty and forward, getting off on the obsession of not only the live audience, but also the audience that will later look forward to watching the work on CMT or GMA or DVDS. That he tours with his wife, who is equally powerful, suggests an instinct towards having an immediate partner, but also hundreds of thousands of partners by proxy. At a concert in 2007, this split, between the proxied partner and immediate partner was made explicit. A woman reached up while McGraw was in the middle of the audience, on a thrust stage. She grasped his balls, which resulted in Hill coming out, and yelling about the ignorance of this act. She sounded like a woman scorned.
Kenny Chesney's 2005 video Living in Fast Forward shares stadium footage with cowboy in Me, but Chesney’s work fractures, talks about himself in the abstract, obsesses over the audiences desires for him, and formally innovates; there are scenes shot in moody black and white, other sections that look like super-eight, in addition to the usual slick concert footage. Scenes alone, scenes in the midst of crowds, and scenes controlling crowds mingle promiscuously. The formal and symbolic weight makes him being alone; being part of his audience, and being in front of his audience have the same social weight, deconstructing Tim McGraw or Garth Brooks' theatrics.
That his videos, at least in the context of videos, Chesney seeks the gaze of the audience, like McGraw or Brooks does directly, but looking through the 2005 video, he wanders through the crowds, not worried about his own security, and he also spends time, seemingly alone but with the presence of the camera, so in one video, he processes the immediate audience in the stadium, outside the stadium; the audience finds him as a performer using the typical fourth wall hierarchy, and outside the stadium, the audience recognizes him as one of their own, refusing the high/low audience/performer roles. In addition, for any one who cannot be part of the audience, he gives a small private performance, just him, his island and his guitar.
Returning to Mulvey, and moving slightly outside of the audience/performer realm, she talks about the male gaze thusly: “Pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly” (Visual and Other Pleasures, 19). Depending on the video, the gaze that Chesney projects, includes but is not limited to his current self, his past self, his future self, in addition to men, women, and giant crowds of adoring fans. In the concert videos, especially, but elsewhere, the camera’s gaze is projected like a slut, the active/male/passive/female construction of traditional psychoanalytic feminist theory is replaced with something much more slippery. This slipperiness is also found in the rumors of his sexuality, and how he both embodies and displaces them.
"Gay/Straight"
There have been rumors around Nashville for a decade that Chesney likes to fuck men. Online gossip sites call him "the gayest man in country music” (D Listed), claim that “Kenny Chesney isn't gay, he just plays one on stage” (Jossip), “Kenny Chesney is gay! For those of us who have gaydar, we know” (MJD Sports Blog), Q: Who is your favorite Gay Artist? A: Kenny Chesney (Wanderlist). His short lived marriage to Renée Zellweger, and the later annulment using the grounds of fraud, added fuel to the fire. In a Feb 18, 2007 interview with 60 Minutes shortly after the marriage’s breakdown, he addressed the rumors for first time. Anderson Cooper, who has been written about in out magazine, as being in a glass closet, and who shows up at events in New York City, with men assumed to be his lover, did the interview. The two talking together was a masterpiece of sexual ambiguity; the answers were delicate and well placed. He says, “Maybe I should have come out, and say, no I’m not...but I didn’t want to draw more attention to it”
That double negative, and the use of the phrase come out, to come out as straight, suggests that he knew both the public perception, and also the politics of language. That he wanted to keep it private, though typical of closeted stars, was made more discursive by the original non-refusal, refusal, especially in relation to Cooper’s involvement.
All of that said, the interesting thing about Chesney, though, is not the assumption of homosexuality, but how homosociality overlaps. Both fags and good ol’ boys share the aesthetics of nostalgia and young men. The best example of this might be the video for 2006’s Young, is filled with so much young male flesh, that it seems almost to be homoerotic. About his life in a small town at 16, the boys he hires to play him, as teenagers are rock and roll jocks.
Wearing tight jeans, wife beaters, or often shirtless, looking dark and petulant, they have the fetish of heterosexualised masculinity has been a gay man's provenance for decades. Watching this Chesney video is like seeing a bleached clean version of Larry Clarke or a less pretty Bruce Weber.
That the video begins with Kenny in a Letterman's jacket makes things more interesting. The letterman’s jacket was first worn by straight men, then as an almost literal fetish for gay men, so much of one that it was written about, photographed and filmed. There is an iconic Champion Studios shot, of a naked man, in nothing but a letterman’s jacket, and a hard cock, there are the drawings of Harry Bush, Maupin wrote about it in his second tales from the city novel. For the last half of the 20th century, a grown man (especially one who looks as boyish as Chesney) who wears a high school lettermen's jacket meant two things: that he couldn't get over high school, or he liked straight acting boy cock. Chesney did letter in both baseball and football while in high school, and he does seem to appreciate the boys he casts in his videos.
There may be another way to view the text, though. That the song is called Young, and that it is mostly about how Chesney wants to return to the glories of high school, and that he made a hit out of Keg in The Closet, about the utopia of frat boy life, his desire to return to earlier times is well documented. This suggests that he does not want to have sex with other men, but with a younger, more perfect version of himself.
There are other texts in which the liminal spaces of homosocial and homosexual are impossibly unclear. In the video of On the Coast of Somewhere Beautiful, he drinks in seaside bars, hugs and holds boys, with great tenderness. Backlit shots make silhouetted figures gender ambiguous. In concert footage for Don't Happen Twice Tim McGraw piggy backs him on stage. Later, on the back of his tour bus, instead of groupies, there are almost a dozen good-looking men. In Old Blue Chair he uses the phrase: "I let go of a lover" a word that is often used to code relationships outside traditional gender norms. This doesn't include the song titles "Soul Of A Sailor"," The Tin Man", "Keg In The Closet", and "Island Boy".
Discussions of Chesney's sexuality (including this one) usually center on the masculine center of his image creation, but it under rates his position as a writer of heterosexual love songs. There are several, which are tender, difficult, and profoundly, unstably erotic, including She Thinks My Tractors Sexy, Anything But Mine, and How Forever Feels and Mine.
The earliest of these, is How Forever Feels, in which he sings that he "has done almost anything a boy can do" but then wants "to kneel on mama's front step". The desire for permanence is the chief argument for marriage. There is a hopeful vulnerability to his desire to be married, and also the under stated assumption, that marriage, especially heterosexual marriage is the logical extension of youthful experimentation. There is a grounding there, that is touching.
The single She Thinks My Tractors Sexy began his rise to the stratosphere, and it is the most complex of his texts, especially in terms of gender relations. Maybe it is because country music has been more equal in terms of gender then other genres, for longer, but the video is profoundly equal. It refutes the Mulvey assumption that “women without a phallus have to undergo punishment by…fetish objects ranging from tight shoes and corsetry through rubber gloves and leather” (Visual and Other Pleasures, 8)
In the video, she is serving him, there is no doubt in that, which would make it seem that the woman is being subservient. But it understands rural culture, farm culture suggests an even division of work, and she has her high heels off, displayed from the side, the fetish object is discarded for comfort, plus she rides regal on the back of a tractor, she is assuming sexual and physical power over Chesney. It also ends, with the trading back and forth of bodies, an almost perfect mirroring of sexual positions, which mirrors a guiltless, casual trading of phallic positioning. It is the queerest thing in Chesney’s canon and perversely, the most focused on the eroticism of women.
Finally, in Anything But Mine, Chesney's masterpiece, maintains the sexuality of his earlier work, but undermines the stability of How Forever Feels. In it a summer relationship ends in the fall—and any of the promises made, will be spoken but not believed. When the narrator croons "In the morning/I am leaving/making my way back to
Cleveland/and I don't see/how you could be ever be anything but mine" no one believes what is being sung, there is something resigned about hope failing. Phrases like "sting of summer on my skin", and "I tell her I love her and we laugh because we know it isn't true" and "there's so much I long to do to you", take what is supposed to be a
generous and open memory containing it in tragedy. The desire in the song is genuinely heterosexual; the protagonists John and Mary love and is confused by that love.
Chesney's best work is nostalgic, but an authentic desire to return rots the utopia of youth. In this way, his sexuality has an explicit connection to the ambiguity of teenage years. His "adult" songs often are about second-generation childhood, about a teenage dad, or him being unable to maintain that adult relationship (I am thinking of Good Stuff, here, where he gets advice from a sage bartender.) In this way, he manages the polymorphisms of youth, without the perversity.
In fact, much of what could be constructed as adult sexuality, is reflected as performative. This is made especially clear in Dancing For The Groceries, from 2007, about a stripper who dances to pay for her child's basic needs. Though intended as a plaintive epic about the sacrifices of a single mother, the work is camp, it it's attempts to discuss class and desire in a way that does not function as a nostalgic signifier. Lines like "in sequins and in laces, she dances for their braces" suggests a narrative construction unrelated to reportage, unrelated to the actual life of not only the referrer but the referent.
The younger and more male the subjects are, the more authentic both their sexual and domestic longings seem to be. That country music is mostly a cult of the authentic, and is mostly written for women consumers, the ambiguity here is difficult to parse. I am reminded of David Beach Snider’s potted history of similar incidents, in his essay Performance Anxiety. “the new macho image of the gay man as it emerged in the 70s” contested this strategy of marginalization of the homosexual and thus disrupted the definition of the masculine by integrating the ideological assumptions and by demonstrating the performative nature of gender subjectivity.” This may be straight, may be gay, may seek youth, may seek wisdom, regression and progression that are typical of his work and that slipperiness, is not only found in the genders of his partners, but also in the gender of himself.
Butch/Femme
Chesney's public presentation is a good ol' boy. He has the sleeveless shirts, the frat boy aesthetics, and the muscles to come across as a man's man. His relationships have been clouded in mystery, with him being discreet, not for any reason of shame, but because of his fear of revealing emotion. He talks of working hard, and that hard work being the problem with his relationships.
His work has been centrally, about what happens in the company of men,
not in a homosexual but homosocial sense. Steve Kandell's article for
Chesney in the December 2005 issue of Blender talks of all kinds of
frat boy bonding. Starting with an explanation of "sixth gear: "an advanced, almost transcendent state of drunkenness that generally requires physical assistance to get home". The drinking is part of the aesthetic of masculinity that permeates the story. There are girls, fishing, barbequing, beer and ESPN on the television. He works hard at making South Padre Island at Spring Break, a permanent fixture—or talking about it like it is. The protestant work ethic a slight of hand trick hidden between the no shirt, no shoes, no problems vibe.
Chesney doesn't look butch. He's short, and until the 1999 break out album, sort of tubby. He grew muscles at that point but never really bulked up. There is a preening, careful, and well-constructed vanity here. Publicity photos taken in St John show him half naked, lounging on boats, and sitting on the beach, encouraging cameras to sexualize. His coquettish way of seducing and avoiding the camera has a clean mechanical precision.
He has been rumored to have pectoral implants (this comes from a web gossip site, called the superficial, “Last summer I was in Nashville eating dinner with a good friend who works out with Chesney's ex-trainer. Apparently, the trainer said Kenny has pectoral implants, in other words, Kenny has a boob job! Ironically, he can't actually lift heavy object due to the implants. I'm sure if you peruse through photos of Chesney you'll find quite a dramatic difference from the days when he was first beginning to present day. My friend, a musician who writes songs for several well-known country artists, claims that Kenny is like the 'Britney Spears of country music.' He really isn't that great of a singer and everyone makes fun of him” This is interesting, because his vanity is attached to his popularity, that he sells records without being very good, and only because of his own sexual personae, but inserting that all into a narrative that rewards obsessive looking, makes his body a spectacle in a form familiar to frankly girls.
This rumor he publicly disavowed on a 2005 CMT special, called Top 20 celebrity myths busted. This show was in part about spectacled bodies including segments on Terry Clarke’s posing for playboy, a Lady Godiva like singer songwriter, Billy Ray Cyrus as a Chippendale dancer, and Chris Cagle as either getting a woman pregnant or he himself gay) place Chesney in amongst the vain, the female, the desperate, or the sexualized. That he disavowed the rumours at his gym, among the male flesh, adds fuel to at least the homosocial fire.
His vanity fails, sometimes though. The constant presence of the cowboy hat reminds us that without one he looks fetal, the close ups of his face have a leather handbag aesthetic that occurs amongst all women who have spent too much time in the sun, and sometimes when he intends to look pensive, he looks stupid.
No male country pin up has the hairless, sculpted idealism of Chesney. Tim McGraw is too hairy, Brad Paisley never takes his shirt off, Toby Keith still looks like the rigpig he was before the albums, Keith Urban is too greasy, Clay Walker isn't famous enough, and Joe Nichols is lupine in a way Chesney can't contend with. The frat boy life style
that abuts the smooth aesthetic makes Chesney sexually safe enough to be loved by women and share an aesthetic with the skater boy, straight boy, pro/am porn that is in favor among gay circles. He wouldn't look out of place on places like Straight College Men, College Dudes, or Just Us Dudes.
The texture of flesh, and how that texture relates to text, was placed in stark relief, by Renua Bara’s essay Outing Texture. He writes, “The language of texture, involves liminal erotic play, between shiny/matte and smooth/rough distinctions” (from Novel Gazing, 94) The smoothness of Chesney’s flesh, the shininess of his body, the hairlessness, can be compared to the rough, hairy, secondary sexual characteristics shown by country stars like Tim McGraw or Toby Keith. The textures of Chesney’s body, requires the maintaining of a permanent adolescence, the smoothness of his corporeal presence attaches to the smoothness (read: the studio perfection) of is vocals. There is then the contradiction between the studio gorgeousness of the voice and the hairy, butch presence of Tim McGraw (c.f. the Cowboy in Me video, or the Franklin Wrestling press photos) and his voice, not quite rough, but also not maintained in the same way as Chesney. The pairs that Bara talks about are pairs that are at the core of how country music is used to discuss how gender sounds.
Bara continues "Fetishism can also lie in not in the shine, but in a kind of fluffy, hairy, feathery, furry, leathery coarseness" That list of adjectives, is a list of gendered adjectives, that can be used to describe both flesh and the word. It is a list that will be useful in applying, supplely to the aesthetics and public presentation of Chesney. Fluffy: as in porn fluff, as in pop fluff, as in non-substantial, as in not meaning much, as in too ephemeral for the real thing. To be fluff is to be not worth serious consideration as a performer, be it musically, sexually, or personally. Hairy: the words that come to mind are of butch gay male presentations. Those who are hairy include the bear, and the leather king, but they also match people who are so confident in their sexuality, that they can be schmaltzy or sweet and not risk losing an audience. This dichotomy, between super butch and cuddly teddy can almost be a fight between Toby Keith and Tim McGraw. Toby Keith sings songs like "What Stays In Mexico" or "Running Block" (i.e. fuck songs) versus Lets Make Love or Don’t Take the Girl (ie erotic odes to fidelity). It is significant that Tim McGraw, of al the country music singers, became the subject of a song that was about teenage devotion. Taylor Swift’s ode epitomizes the daddy and the teddy, safe enough to be worshiped, but dangerous enough to be obsessed with. Is there any difference in the distinctions between furry and hairy, except maybe furry is the end of a gradation of hairy? Going from smooth to hairy to furry, furry as in the usage of woof in the bear subculture, a signifier of a certain kind of animalism, that the careful refusal of adult wantonness that in general country is criticized for? Leathery is not leather, it does not have the butch quality of bikers and cowboys. Leathery is what Chesney has in the photos from St Johns in the Caribbean, to much time in the sun that results in looking like an elderly handbag. Coarseness is a subset of bawdy, and an excellent example of textural words to describe textual positioning.
That he is incapable of hair, of feather, of fury, and his leather is not the kind that suggests fetish in the most popular kind. His lack of fetish able cling, his refusal to be butch or femme, but maybe under the right circumstances, both—does not have a panty wetting androgyny—this is not Byron or Elvis, but a kind of effect of being all things to all people. His refusal of either categories, and his negation of the middle, makes analysis or meta-textual positions problematic. This does not mean that he fails at an erotic personae, it means hat his erotic personae is non standard.
Top/Bottom
The phrase Top/Bottom leaked from the BDSM community, to the general gay male world, and onto mainstream culture. Chesney himself has been cagey personally about how he fucks and who fucks him. There are places where his versatility becomes clear. There is the coda of She Thinks My Tractors Sexy, which we have already talked about, and there is he and Gretchen Wilson, on his ABC television special.
They are singing Hurts so Good, by John Mellencamp, as a duet. The song in itself has a certain S/M vibe, but how they sing it, is a jostling for power. Kenny introduces Gretchen as Miss Wilson, placing himself as the owner of a space, and talking about her in terms, which must at least be partially arch. She comes out singing. They lock eyes, and move to the center of the stage from opposite corners. Cheney begins pulling Gretchen by her arm roughly. Gretchen sings, to Chesney, Chesney looks goofy and sort of in love. She tops Chesney, pointing and almost shaming him. They face off, staring at each other, and sing/shout the lines about teeth "sinking right though my bones"
There is an exchange of power here; both taking each other's personae on. They run to the opposite sides of the stage, retreating from the aggressiveness for a few seconds, then run back and face each other. They twist lower and lower, Chesney has his mouth somewhere near Gretchen's crotch, and it looks like what Bowie or Jim Morrison did in the mid 70s, simulating cunninlingus instead of fellatio—but more so because Wilson doesn't have a guitar on her, so the excuse of watching the fingering is not present. Wilson pushes Chesney away. They end, tenderly, with a side-by-side hug and some non-sexualized intimacy.
The whole run there, bodies moving together, too close, then far apart, that sexuality dissipating into something less threatening is central to Chesney's public personae. The photos of his wedding to Renee Zellweger are interesting for this reason. One where Cheseny is kissing her hand, being as far away from here as possible, and her looking at him with an almost regal disdain, suggests she has all of the power in the relationship. The ones where she is fitting herself under his arm, her looking down and across, he looking at the camera, makes Zellweger have less power. She is taller then Chesney, she stoops in deference.
These two photos, and the footage with Chesney and Wilson, suggest that he is aware of what his sexuality does, publicly. Allowing for a free flow, between his female counterpoints, means that his audience will be aware that he can be trained, and that he can take charge as well, it adds a small frisson of danger to a safe performance.
Looking at all of this---of the public personae that is unguided, that moves between the lines that are expected of performers might risk a larger career. But selling 25 million records, and having among the highest concert revenues for a half a decade, suggest that Kenny isn't hurting for anything.
Thinking about that lack of excess, and putting it into a more personal spin. Academia has a similar desire for sobriety, for critical distance from the subject. Martha Mockus starts her essay on fellow Albertan, kd lang in Queering The Pitch thusly: "I've never been a fan of country music. I find that I am vaguely aware of who’s who in country, but I have never experienced a great desire to listen to country tunes or cultivate a taste for any particular country musicians." (261) I grew up on country, and I have cultivated sexual, personal, emotionally, aesthetic and spiritual tastes for a wide variety of country musicians.
The thing is, reading about Chesney, in the conventional press, they are all so surprised, at his success, and at how his normalcy--my friends accuse me of having a fetish for normalcy, but the thing is, things are never as normal as they seem. Griel Marcus talked about the Old Weird America, and how country is about death, about anything but the Sunbelt and the suburbs. The snobbish kibitzing around alt-country, and of the freak folk movement, that calls itself the New Weird America add to this rhetoric against pop country, against the normalcy of people like Chesney.
But Chesney's complicated and intractable relationship with normality that we have talked about here reflects in finding meaning and pattern in the suburbs I grew up in. Growing up strange, not knowing the patterns, in a town whose industries were prisons and gas plants, growing up wanting to be an academic, a writer, an artist--growing up weird means that that which is normal is strange...Marcus quotes the roman historian Tactius all the time: I am human, nothing that is human is strange to me, but Chesney, Paisley, Keith and the like are strange to me, the middle America is strange to me...this was my attempt to make them closer, to find out why I love that which I love...
I joked, telling people about this essay, that it was about how much I wanted to fuck Kenny Chesney, and I think that not only do I want to fuck Chesney, but I want to transfer myself, to be a truck driver in Dubuque or a housewife in Phoenix. I would like to tell a story that talks about this longing. There is a Canadian singer named Jason McCoy, he's good--look him up--and I was in his concert at Bloor/Yonge in Toronto, at a Hard Rock Cafe. The most touristy spot in the most urban corner in Canada, and I am with these two women who work as cleaners, near the working class town of Barrie. They are drinking Molson long necks, I'm drinking Steamwhistle, they are talking about McCoy's ass, and I say, its a nice ass, they get a little drunk, and I'm a little drunk, its near Christmas, I'm alone, and the concert is good but I'm not having any fun, I go to the concert because I wanted some down home charm.
But they start making fun of my beer, and then ignore me. They think of me as a city boy that is slumming, they don't think I understand the power of McCoy, and one of the reasons why I love the singer, is that all of his filth is oblique, references to being born again sexually being the same as born again religiously, or a sly node to swallows at Capernstria going down south, with resonances of the tingle of a mouth around a cock...but he is also deeply religious, though he keeps his religion close to his chest.
I think here, I am a city boy who is trying to be a country boy, talking about Chesney as a post modern sexual ideal, because I want him to be, because every time I think about Chesney this way, I think of that concert, the sexuality almost hidden, the casual lust and the home town values, the psycho-geographical land mines of class, taste, culture, and that which can be consumed or which consumes. There is something comforting and unsettling simultaneously about seeing his body move through such metaphorical and physical spaces, just like drinking the wrong beer in the wrong crowd confirms and upsets social identifiers, and just like there is something subversive in getting a hard on during a Jason McCoy concert
Friday, March 14, 2008
the believer though earnest and too clever by half, writes one of the better anthro style stories on dungeons and dragons.
worthwhile artcile on the privitazation of public toliets.
guinea bassueas convient position geographiaclly, between south america adn europem pretty much gaurentees its postiion as a narcco state
sextateri, colourhunter, green daily, a dutch blog called de koopman, fafarazzi,one of the expedia sites, senior fd chansonya from japan, the religious blog sight worj, ffffound, revoultion health have al used my photos recently.
three moronic elders destroyed catholic/lds relations in the american west for a decade.
a small but intense discussion of the future of heavenly mother
Deom the 19th Century Mustache Blog.
obama has a flickr account.
this fowler short story is meta on like four levels: ie it rewrites tiptree using the pulps, tiptree rewrote the pulps using her adventures in west africa as a child, but it also rewrites tiptree's gendred analysis of first contact thru the lens of colonial expereinces, it is also a v. nasty parody of the patrichal and sex phobic fears of sf's male elites--i would highly recommend her short story collection black glass, for its strangness, her sexual politics, her metatextuality, and her keen formal abilities.
review of seven magi a manga that seems jaw droppingly weird.
7 questions about teh spitzer affair taht no one is askign. language log discusses public apologies as semiotic speech events.
(i also think hes fuckable)
13 photos of an abandoned neverland ranch, are gatsbyesque in their decadent capitalism.
123 photos of the patterns of security envelopes.
Lightening Field, 111, DAvid Gallagher, 2008.
what appears to be the focus at first glance isnt he has constructed a triple line delineated entirely by colour, and not only one colour, but a dozen subtle tonal varitions of orange, red and yellow--it has a statataco ryhtym going on...(Line one: a diagonal from the Church Roof, Snow route Sign, golden Arches, Hot Bird,and ending at the flags. line two horizontal, the scumble of signs, flags, and the like at the bottom 1/5 of the picture, ending at the flags. third line, the red nets and tenement on the far left--ending at the flags--the flags move out of the picture frame, so the focus of the entire work, both in terms of line, and also that they are red and yellow...and that they drag the eye out of the edge of the frame. what could have been so chaotic ends up being a tennous but well cosntructed anti cacaphony.
more images here hes really food
the uk outdoor swimming society needs help with their map (its god's work--help if you can)
frans maserell woodblock novel the city, is gorgeous--go look at scans.
weird story about paraguay, bush, the moonies, and land purchases has legs.
Toyko Disneyland SEcurity Badge, via Boing Boing
jimmy wales is one corrupt motherfucker.
a gorgeous and difficult queering of kara walker, and her position as cassandra of race adn sex, in the LA Times, well worth reading.
choice qoute:
She goes for the subliminal, just below a sensory threshold that divides the world into comfortable dualities of good and evil, purity and vice, conqueror and casualty. Victimization and desire are represented as externally imposed and internally constructed, while freedom is represented as a contested fantasy that fosters inspiration and calamity in roughly equal measure.Despite the materials of cut paper on gallery walls, Walker's spiritual and emotional world is neither black nor white. Instead, panoplies of gray flood the scene.
roberta smith talks about the colour at the new met modern show. and the villiage voice on the anti modern anti colour grey show. the met also has a big ab/ex show on this year.
william fallon resigns.
flashlight flips into submachine gun.
Interior of The Yellow House, Flims, Switzerland.
I am excited about the Tarintino remake of Faster Pussycat
one in a seemingly never ending story of queers being refused refugee status in other wise semi civilised countries. and a gaurdian story about homophobic bullying in english public schools.
Ernie and Bert Do Grindcore
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
male homosexual desire to begin with is a kind of oxymoron,. "homosocial is a word occasionaly used in history and the social sciences, where it describes social bonds between persons of the same gender...2
the diacritical opposition betwen the homosocial and the homosexual seems to be much less through and dichtomous for women in our society...3
to the best of my undwerstanding, the sexual context of that peroid is too far irretrivable for us to disentangle boasts, confessions, undertones, overtones, jokes, the unthinkable, the taken-for-granted, the unmonetionbable, but often done anyways, etc.
35,
(on shakesperares sonnets0
what modern euorpean style hompphobia delinates is thus a space, and perhaps a mechinaism of domination rather then the agency or motivation or political thrust of that domintuion...so fo as it is possible to do so without mionimizing the s[ecofoty and gravity or european and idenitiy, it is...important to rermmber that the dom,ination offered by this strategy is not only over a minority population but over the bonds that structure all social forces...
87
from b/w men...
questions unanswered about the chesney paper
1) my thesis is that the 20th century diacritical categories of sexuality break down around chesney, but how much of this break down, is a question of will...
2) ie as a white, moneyed, able bodied, famous, male, who is the epitiome of mainstream culture, can he commit acts of queer radicalism
3) how autonomous are these acts and how much are these acts part of the general parry and thrust
4) these text, meta texts and paratexts, not created by a single authour, but multiple authours, who are building a product as well as a personae and social system, so what is the difference b/w chesney the man and chesney the iconic "country movie star"
5) how much of this is then fluidity, and how much of this is ghosting, how much of this was built into the text itself...
6) is he passing--what does it mean to pass in a world w/ little or no stable identities, is the beginning of a new kind of sexuality, who "naturally" as opposed to "conciouslly" refuses to embody finite pairs
7) how much does his idenitiy as a sexual and genre cipher project onto the not rural not urban not even suburban exurban spaces of the new mid west.
8) who does he fuck, if you can find all of what sedgewick finds in his personae, and if country music is filled with texts that are both serious and jokes, both refusing of and capitualiting to gender norms, how do we know how he goes home w. on a saturday night (and of course, info control)
9) if we can make a line, with two wide points, vis a vis women, with one side being taylor swift (ultra femmined, adolescent, yearning, rising, broken) and kd lang (ultra butch, adult, content, risen, complete) can we make a similar line w. one end being who, KK, TK, and the other obv. being kenny chesney.
10) how does someone who violates all of the gender expectations, the good theory, from the male gaze, coming out, the continum b/w homosocial and homosexual, the expectation that homophobia is connected to rural class and violence, the specatcle of gendered bodies, etc, etc, still be the number one selling record in the country?
the diacritical opposition betwen the homosocial and the homosexual seems to be much less through and dichtomous for women in our society...3
to the best of my undwerstanding, the sexual context of that peroid is too far irretrivable for us to disentangle boasts, confessions, undertones, overtones, jokes, the unthinkable, the taken-for-granted, the unmonetionbable, but often done anyways, etc.
35,
(on shakesperares sonnets0
what modern euorpean style hompphobia delinates is thus a space, and perhaps a mechinaism of domination rather then the agency or motivation or political thrust of that domintuion...so fo as it is possible to do so without mionimizing the s[ecofoty and gravity or european and idenitiy, it is...important to rermmber that the dom,ination offered by this strategy is not only over a minority population but over the bonds that structure all social forces...
87
from b/w men...
questions unanswered about the chesney paper
1) my thesis is that the 20th century diacritical categories of sexuality break down around chesney, but how much of this break down, is a question of will...
2) ie as a white, moneyed, able bodied, famous, male, who is the epitiome of mainstream culture, can he commit acts of queer radicalism
3) how autonomous are these acts and how much are these acts part of the general parry and thrust
4) these text, meta texts and paratexts, not created by a single authour, but multiple authours, who are building a product as well as a personae and social system, so what is the difference b/w chesney the man and chesney the iconic "country movie star"
5) how much of this is then fluidity, and how much of this is ghosting, how much of this was built into the text itself...
6) is he passing--what does it mean to pass in a world w/ little or no stable identities, is the beginning of a new kind of sexuality, who "naturally" as opposed to "conciouslly" refuses to embody finite pairs
7) how much does his idenitiy as a sexual and genre cipher project onto the not rural not urban not even suburban exurban spaces of the new mid west.
8) who does he fuck, if you can find all of what sedgewick finds in his personae, and if country music is filled with texts that are both serious and jokes, both refusing of and capitualiting to gender norms, how do we know how he goes home w. on a saturday night (and of course, info control)
9) if we can make a line, with two wide points, vis a vis women, with one side being taylor swift (ultra femmined, adolescent, yearning, rising, broken) and kd lang (ultra butch, adult, content, risen, complete) can we make a similar line w. one end being who, KK, TK, and the other obv. being kenny chesney.
10) how does someone who violates all of the gender expectations, the good theory, from the male gaze, coming out, the continum b/w homosocial and homosexual, the expectation that homophobia is connected to rural class and violence, the specatcle of gendered bodies, etc, etc, still be the number one selling record in the country?
aside from the conference, 4 things i must do in SF:
for sure:
1) SF:MomA
to see there:
Friedlander Show
Photographs by Adams, Atkins, Fridelander, Sultan
Paintings by Bechtle, Beckman, Deibenkorn, Kline, , Lichenstein, Martin, Mitchell, Morandi, Rauschenberg, Ryman
Sculpture by: Brancusi, Gober, Tores, Haake, Koons,Tuttle
Decorative Objects: Kolaton,Wright
Other: Gary Hill, Naim Paik
2) Asian Arts Musuem
The Floating World show
Chinese Ritual Vessells, 18th Century Edo Woodblocks, Three Kingdom Pottery from Korea, Statues of Kali, Islamic minatures from the 19th Century...
3) Hormel GLBTQ Collection
4) De:Young
Gilbert and George show
American Painting:Ashuntz, Thiebaud, Eakins, Harnett
Revoultion Era Silver, Sergant johnson Work, Poro Society Masks from Liberia, Caroline island figures, Jolika collection of New Guinea art, Uzbekistan Carpets, 18th Century American Samplers, Guston prints.
Legion of Honour:
18th Century English Pottery, Fra Angelico, Two Royal Antelopes, Durer Adam and Eve Print,
5) Good Friday Mass (Grace Cathedrals, Seafarer, St Marys)
maybe:
1) San Jose
2) Berkley
3) Castro
4) Gallery Crawl
for sure:
1) SF:MomA
to see there:
Friedlander Show
Photographs by Adams, Atkins, Fridelander, Sultan
Paintings by Bechtle, Beckman, Deibenkorn, Kline, , Lichenstein, Martin, Mitchell, Morandi, Rauschenberg, Ryman
Sculpture by: Brancusi, Gober, Tores, Haake, Koons,Tuttle
Decorative Objects: Kolaton,Wright
Other: Gary Hill, Naim Paik
2) Asian Arts Musuem
The Floating World show
Chinese Ritual Vessells, 18th Century Edo Woodblocks, Three Kingdom Pottery from Korea, Statues of Kali, Islamic minatures from the 19th Century...
3) Hormel GLBTQ Collection
4) De:Young
Gilbert and George show
American Painting:Ashuntz, Thiebaud, Eakins, Harnett
Revoultion Era Silver, Sergant johnson Work, Poro Society Masks from Liberia, Caroline island figures, Jolika collection of New Guinea art, Uzbekistan Carpets, 18th Century American Samplers, Guston prints.
Legion of Honour:
18th Century English Pottery, Fra Angelico, Two Royal Antelopes, Durer Adam and Eve Print,
5) Good Friday Mass (Grace Cathedrals, Seafarer, St Marys)
maybe:
1) San Jose
2) Berkley
3) Castro
4) Gallery Crawl
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
I am sure that you are getting thousands of emails from Americans from Truth, Free Republic, Concerned Women of America, and others. I am a writer and artist from Alberta, who went to high school in a high income exurban development much like Deerfield, Illinois. There were no queer texts in the schools, no queer books in the libraries. As a result of being out, I was harassed verbally on a daily basis, I was beaten several times, I had death threats against me, and there was very little if nothing done by the administration to stem the flow of destruction.
I came from a family that read heavily, and that believed that one kept to the ethics and morals of freedom of speech, of self identity despite all costs. I pushed so that my voice could be heard, that those voices who were less heard were spoken for. I saw Angels in America at a local production in my grade 10 year, and in addition to my parents--it gave me the strength to go forward. It would have been a miracle to have read that in school--not as an option but as a requirement. The theocratic organazations that are bullying you, want to silence you.
It makes me upset, though, this year, two gay teens shot, and gay teen suicide at its height, and you get something like angels, something angry, holy, beautiful, and raw--that is as adolescent as it is adult--finally, living in a culture that loathes queers, and they get support, and what happens neo-con assholes with no sense of compassion rip it out of its context, do such violence to the text, and as the midrash reminds us, doing damage to the text is doing damage to the people. Not the people, my people.
I came from a family that read heavily, and that believed that one kept to the ethics and morals of freedom of speech, of self identity despite all costs. I pushed so that my voice could be heard, that those voices who were less heard were spoken for. I saw Angels in America at a local production in my grade 10 year, and in addition to my parents--it gave me the strength to go forward. It would have been a miracle to have read that in school--not as an option but as a requirement. The theocratic organazations that are bullying you, want to silence you.
It makes me upset, though, this year, two gay teens shot, and gay teen suicide at its height, and you get something like angels, something angry, holy, beautiful, and raw--that is as adolescent as it is adult--finally, living in a culture that loathes queers, and they get support, and what happens neo-con assholes with no sense of compassion rip it out of its context, do such violence to the text, and as the midrash reminds us, doing damage to the text is doing damage to the people. Not the people, my people.
Monday, March 10, 2008
3 month update
# Publish in Vue and See
nope
# Pitch One Story a Month
have pitched so far to meat magazine, elk and fuse,
# Write one CD Review a Month
published america, kd lang,
# Complete Between 3-6 Grant Proposals.
written two, one for nuit blanche, and one for the humble.
# Send Proposals to Plug In, AKA, Stride, Gallery 44, Le, Works Gallery and YYZ
works is a no-go, others havent done yet.
# Find Shows in proper gallery contexts.
working thru that
# Find place for Post Modern Grid, Deer and Edmonton Erotica shows
meeting with todd, consdering commerical spaces, wrote list of places i want to go
# Write 1000 words a week.
done
# Save at least 100 dollars a month
nope
# Get to Vancouver, Grand Prarie, Calgary, Saskatoon
calgary once, grand prarie in may and july,
# Only Spend 250/wk, write down spending
getting close to the 250/wk--still need to work on the writing down spending
# Organize Books and Cds, other junk
an ongoing struggle
# Do Taxes in a timely manner
still need to do that
# Finish or Continue working on, finding a place, etc the following projects: PNOG, Movie Stars, Lips and Nips, Fruit Project, Mirror Project, Utopia, Purity Balls, Catalog for the Ford Show, Pyschogeography of fort sask. lensculture, apartamento, sunstone, etc
PNOG at Rosedale (artist proofs to do), Movie Stars now at Art Met, Fruit Project at Fuse, Mirror Project at Mandolin Books, Utopia still to be made, Purity Balls still need to be made, Pyscho waiting on Marshall. Lens/Apt waiting to get back to me, Snstone after the Corb tour.
# Tighten Writing
not so much.
# work on drafts, using Norm's revisions for the poems, think about sonnets, learn how to write a sonnet
still to do.
# Work on Controlling social anxiety, aggression, mood, etc
still a struggle.
# ask 4 people out on dates.
none
# Read more conservative texts, esp conservative religious texts, read 25 books of poetry, take notes, write about them.
none of the conseratiev work, read 4 poetry books already.
# Keep processing the radical/conservative split in yr politics
# attempt to get into the Fort Sask Collections
waiting for prints to be made
# Library issues
getting better
# avoid the baths (not for sex negative ways but because it makes me a little lonely)
failure
# Continue work with exposure, and the edmonton arts thing
is edmonton arts such a good idea?
# learn how to say no
# SF in March
# Publish in Vue and See
nope
# Pitch One Story a Month
have pitched so far to meat magazine, elk and fuse,
# Write one CD Review a Month
published america, kd lang,
# Complete Between 3-6 Grant Proposals.
written two, one for nuit blanche, and one for the humble.
# Send Proposals to Plug In, AKA, Stride, Gallery 44, Le, Works Gallery and YYZ
works is a no-go, others havent done yet.
# Find Shows in proper gallery contexts.
working thru that
# Find place for Post Modern Grid, Deer and Edmonton Erotica shows
meeting with todd, consdering commerical spaces, wrote list of places i want to go
# Write 1000 words a week.
done
# Save at least 100 dollars a month
nope
# Get to Vancouver, Grand Prarie, Calgary, Saskatoon
calgary once, grand prarie in may and july,
# Only Spend 250/wk, write down spending
getting close to the 250/wk--still need to work on the writing down spending
# Organize Books and Cds, other junk
an ongoing struggle
# Do Taxes in a timely manner
still need to do that
# Finish or Continue working on, finding a place, etc the following projects: PNOG, Movie Stars, Lips and Nips, Fruit Project, Mirror Project, Utopia, Purity Balls, Catalog for the Ford Show, Pyschogeography of fort sask. lensculture, apartamento, sunstone, etc
PNOG at Rosedale (artist proofs to do), Movie Stars now at Art Met, Fruit Project at Fuse, Mirror Project at Mandolin Books, Utopia still to be made, Purity Balls still need to be made, Pyscho waiting on Marshall. Lens/Apt waiting to get back to me, Snstone after the Corb tour.
# Tighten Writing
not so much.
# work on drafts, using Norm's revisions for the poems, think about sonnets, learn how to write a sonnet
still to do.
# Work on Controlling social anxiety, aggression, mood, etc
still a struggle.
# ask 4 people out on dates.
none
# Read more conservative texts, esp conservative religious texts, read 25 books of poetry, take notes, write about them.
none of the conseratiev work, read 4 poetry books already.
# Keep processing the radical/conservative split in yr politics
# attempt to get into the Fort Sask Collections
waiting for prints to be made
# Library issues
getting better
# avoid the baths (not for sex negative ways but because it makes me a little lonely)
failure
# Continue work with exposure, and the edmonton arts thing
is edmonton arts such a good idea?
# learn how to say no
# SF in March
Sunday, March 09, 2008
a beautifully written history of inuktikuk.
the most interestnig thing about this mini war b/w columbia, ecaudor and venezula, is that cocaine seems to be a more stable currency then oil. (link goes to LA times, which not suprisingly, has the most thorough and the best written coverage of these things)
beautiful hand crafted work for children, from swedish artisans, divided by material, the robot hooks, ape hangers, and cermaic statuettes are all worth buying (a krona is worth about 16 cents canadian)
the ulitmate minimal cube house some where in ecuador (would look great, but the wind would kill it, in the middle of saskatchewan)
though this project qoutes heavily from de maria's lightening field project, i like how it makes the invisible visible...richard box planted a grid of floruscent tubes underneath a pylon and watched them glow.
the new still musuem in denver looks a lot like the the old aga.
must read editorial from a working farmer, on how fucked up the american ag policy is. highlight:
Sam Weber, Dragon and Tiger, 2007
the condiment packet gallery
chris from council bluffs iowo will be my new lds soilder lover/husband. we shall be danites together.
i sort of love david lasky's not-quite-sexy enough water colours of french new wave film scenes.
Alexander McQueen goes from Strength to Strength, thsi time with a cross-historical salute to elizabeth, with some elements of (fake?) ermine (speaking of dead animals--the fur trim and leather gloves in Lavin 2008 are completely Cruellea De Ville cast as Venus of Furs, hard fetish, in the classically freudian sense, and intensely, unapologetically, insanely erotic (they also have shoes with such impractical, over the top heels--more dirks then stillettos, intended as phallic weapons. they must not be able to be walked in)
photos of the gloves, taken on style.com, by dan ashby and oliver clarisse, thnx rachel.
dan mccarthy's glow in the dark poster is sweet.
kellog brown and root dont pay their taxes)
another marine rape case, this time in hiroshima.
weapons for yr lego minifigs.
desire paths are the lines in parks and across lawns where people want to go, as opposed to where they are prescribed to go.
possible wedding present for john rachel, you should look at this site, lots adn lots of great stuff.
long fascinating article on restoring arabic manuscripts from timbuktu, from the 13th Century. and another
Artist Unknown, Outside KMPG Munich (this is really cryptic to me--yeah it looks cool, but do you really want a symbol of cryptic, solipism with no external soultion, and the antehsis of practicality to be t he symbol of an aconting firm, who should be all in favour of functionality, transparency, and easily recognizable soultions?)
anyone read luce irigray?
santagold is like MIA, but Brooklyn and Mexico City instead of London and Columbo--brilliant beats, general mindblowing bricolouge, and an assshaking of monumental porportions. (she also has a sweeter voice and thus sings instead of breakbeating)
bush vetos the anti-torture bill.
michael surtees is a great street photographer, and im sort of lin love with the umblr format in general.
Lily Cole by Jungen Teller, 2007
the most interestnig thing about this mini war b/w columbia, ecaudor and venezula, is that cocaine seems to be a more stable currency then oil. (link goes to LA times, which not suprisingly, has the most thorough and the best written coverage of these things)
beautiful hand crafted work for children, from swedish artisans, divided by material, the robot hooks, ape hangers, and cermaic statuettes are all worth buying (a krona is worth about 16 cents canadian)
the ulitmate minimal cube house some where in ecuador (would look great, but the wind would kill it, in the middle of saskatchewan)
though this project qoutes heavily from de maria's lightening field project, i like how it makes the invisible visible...richard box planted a grid of floruscent tubes underneath a pylon and watched them glow.
the new still musuem in denver looks a lot like the the old aga.
must read editorial from a working farmer, on how fucked up the american ag policy is. highlight:
Last year, knowing that my own 100 acres wouldn’t be enough to meet demand, I rented 25 acres on two nearby corn farms. I plowed under the alfalfa hay that was established there, and planted watermelons, tomatoes and vegetables for natural-food stores and a community-supported agriculture program.
All went well until early July. That’s when the two landowners discovered that there was a problem with the local office of the Farm Service Administration, the Agriculture Department branch that runs the commodity farm program, and it was going to be expensive to fix.
The commodity farm program effectively forbids farmers who usually grow corn or the other four federally subsidized commodity crops (soybeans, rice, wheat and cotton) from trying fruit and vegetables. Because my watermelons and tomatoes had been planted on “corn base” acres, the Farm Service said, my landlords were out of compliance with the commodity program.
I’ve discovered that typically, a farmer who grows the forbidden fruits and vegetables on corn acreage not only has to give up his subsidy for the year on that acreage, he is also penalized the market value of the illicit crop, and runs the risk that those acres will be permanently ineligible for any subsidies in the future. (The penalties apply only to fruits and vegetables — if the farmer decides to grow another commodity crop, or even nothing at all, there’s no problem.).
Sam Weber, Dragon and Tiger, 2007
the condiment packet gallery
chris from council bluffs iowo will be my new lds soilder lover/husband. we shall be danites together.
i sort of love david lasky's not-quite-sexy enough water colours of french new wave film scenes.
Alexander McQueen goes from Strength to Strength, thsi time with a cross-historical salute to elizabeth, with some elements of (fake?) ermine (speaking of dead animals--the fur trim and leather gloves in Lavin 2008 are completely Cruellea De Ville cast as Venus of Furs, hard fetish, in the classically freudian sense, and intensely, unapologetically, insanely erotic (they also have shoes with such impractical, over the top heels--more dirks then stillettos, intended as phallic weapons. they must not be able to be walked in)
photos of the gloves, taken on style.com, by dan ashby and oliver clarisse, thnx rachel.
dan mccarthy's glow in the dark poster is sweet.
kellog brown and root dont pay their taxes)
another marine rape case, this time in hiroshima.
weapons for yr lego minifigs.
desire paths are the lines in parks and across lawns where people want to go, as opposed to where they are prescribed to go.
possible wedding present for john rachel, you should look at this site, lots adn lots of great stuff.
long fascinating article on restoring arabic manuscripts from timbuktu, from the 13th Century. and another
Artist Unknown, Outside KMPG Munich (this is really cryptic to me--yeah it looks cool, but do you really want a symbol of cryptic, solipism with no external soultion, and the antehsis of practicality to be t he symbol of an aconting firm, who should be all in favour of functionality, transparency, and easily recognizable soultions?)
anyone read luce irigray?
santagold is like MIA, but Brooklyn and Mexico City instead of London and Columbo--brilliant beats, general mindblowing bricolouge, and an assshaking of monumental porportions. (she also has a sweeter voice and thus sings instead of breakbeating)
bush vetos the anti-torture bill.
michael surtees is a great street photographer, and im sort of lin love with the umblr format in general.
Lily Cole by Jungen Teller, 2007
Saturday, March 08, 2008
Friday, March 07, 2008
what is pecurilay postmodern about these celebritiy biographies in the way in whcih biseuxality, though it appears at first to be everywhere, on the jacket blurb, in the headliens, in the index,--is ultimately nowhere but elsewhere. Like Postmodernism itself, it resists a stable referentiality. It performs...
Majorie Garber, Bisexuality and Celebrity, The Sexudtions of Biography, 1996
Majorie Garber, Bisexuality and Celebrity, The Sexudtions of Biography, 1996
Thursday, March 06, 2008
In July 1995, Herndon was arrested in Fort Worth, Texas at Gateway Park by
an undercover male police officer who alleged that Herndon was soliciting
sex. It was reported that Herndon exposed himself in front of the officer,
although Herndon professed to be urinating. When taken into custody, he was
also discovered to be in possession of 2.49 grams of methamphetamine. A
plea-bargain saw the singer sentenced to community service and drug
rehabilitation, and the charge of indecent exposure was dropped.
via kogan, who fact checked for me.
an undercover male police officer who alleged that Herndon was soliciting
sex. It was reported that Herndon exposed himself in front of the officer,
although Herndon professed to be urinating. When taken into custody, he was
also discovered to be in possession of 2.49 grams of methamphetamine. A
plea-bargain saw the singer sentenced to community service and drug
rehabilitation, and the charge of indecent exposure was dropped.
via kogan, who fact checked for me.
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
exxon seeks to reduce its 2.5 billion fine at the supreme court. Roberts is laughed at, out loud, in court.
assquatch art, made from deer's asses.
shaun o boyle's photos of the kennedy space station, have the meloncholy of lost optimism.
fantastic discussion in the new york times, about the infulence and importance of Robbe Gillet:
20 SF novels that will change yr life, mostly done in the last 20 years, unusual choices.
Lawerence Schiller, RFK, date unknown.
history the american 5 dollar bill.
the New Yorker from the 1930s.
encapsulation of russia and their use of oil/gas reserves as a tool of political force.
the marine who has been accused of raping the 14 year old Okinawa girl, has been released.
erotic falconry
Pretap Mehta , for the Indian Express, discusses how nations are made, and worries about the rise of Ethnic Nationalism in Kosovo.
Queens of the The Stone Age Poster, Offset Print, Patent PEndign Collective, Baltimore
13 photos of Obama's Security Detail.
Knorr, The Order of Things, Photo, 2004, via Gembala.
no matter how formally cold and well constructed Knorr's photos of taxideremed animals in British noble houses are, they have a frission of Gossip and scandal. Ironically and Suitably, the nudes have a glacial politeness and even with the presence of a monkey, almost no sexuality.
a teacher from San Franisco was fired for not repeating a loyalty oath.
Robot eroticist Kal Colbert, tells you all about writing Robot Erotica.
lauren nassef, masterful illustator, who's book designs have understated line work, excellent spot colour, and sometimes a nasty sense of humour, combines the domestic and the fabulist--posts a drawing a day. esp. look at man with a beard and dead swan.
Clay Walker was found in a nashville park, late at night, with his cock out, a few years ago. He went to rehab, but a career that was going to be as big as Tim McGraw was sort of derailed. I assumed he was gay, and this photo of him and jackie beat at an AIDS fundraiser in Los Angeles a year ago (that i just found while doing research for Chesney) made me wonder if he offically came out or not--he does not look well, v. thin and sickly. (because he has MS, something i didn't know)
these 11 photos of heavily shadowed domestic scenes would be creepy, even if the subjects were not wearing ultraman masks. look at the last one, balletbots--equal parts balthus and arbus.
i think caleprina adams is a little simple in her gender, but i really like the wit.
lynn cooke's essay on Martin's On A Clear Day Print portfolio, is masterful.
Bruer residence in Duchess County, New York, is an excellent source of local materials.
Two Posters for Olivertti designed by Pinteri, from the 1957 edition of Graphis, via nonist.
myrna hyde destroys all of the rhetoric of honour that surrounds harrys recent advetnures in the colonies.
The Daily telegraph eugelises Paul Raymond, England's jovial pornographer, including the line: "he remained a louche and unhealthy man of vulgar tastes, though he wore good suits."
michelle tsai explains buckley's acent.
fascainting article on braille as translated into japanese and mandrian. and more on braille as linguistic systems.
charming article on a husband and a wife who spent decades collecting comics together
The Osmonds, Ohio State Fair, 1972.
photos of found typography in panama.
scans from a 1884 volume of etchings of the arctic.
Paula Hayes is a new york based landscape architecht adn garden designer. She's pretty awesome.
Trailer for Tarsem Singh's The Fall. I have no idea whats going on her, but it looks gorgeous.
infomration on candiates postitions on executive power.
vintage girly blog has a great system--they scan every page of the magazine, and collage it in a narrative, then you click a page and it opens in a new window, full sized. You get to read the stories, see the cartoons, the ads, and the pictures of tits.
speaking of pictures of tits autumn sonnichsen is one of the best techincal pornographers i have seen recently, with an aesthetic that wanders thru reportage, an apperciation of vintge kitsch, a love of los angeles, and a certain european mid 60s vibe. The work is well lit, well composed, and well costumed.
Bella Freud, Lucien Freud, Oil on Linen, 1981
two reveiws of the lucien freud show at NY:MoMa. The New York REview of Books (second link) one is the most carefully considered, basically negative review of Freud's reputation and work i have read--esp. using Sunny Morning—Eight Legs as an entry into a larger discussion about what realism means in a context of picture making:
Real bodies, then, are the motor to Freud's imagination, he would have us believe. They drive his realism toward extravagance—that is to say, to a wandering beyond normal bounds. To term Freud's art "realism" is to associate it with the aesthetic of Courbet, and that in many ways makes sense. Throughout his long career, he too has dwelt on the substance of things rather than on accidents of light: moreover, the Frenchman's famous retort to idealists—"Show me an angel and I'll paint you one"—foreshadows Freud's already mentioned declaration that he only puts in pictures what is "actually there in front of me." But the actualities in front of Freud—both the bodies and the pictures themselves—have strangely and inexorably inflated during his career's later stages. A longtime specialist in the minute and the punctilious had become, by the 1990s, an intrepid stretcher of over-lifesize canvases.
this real story of scottish orphanges, the found corpses of children, secret punishment rooms, and the church has so much gothic in it, it almost seems parodic--and thus more horrorific--it is like someone took the brontes as a guide to raise children.
One sheet for Bank Job, nice retro feel, and oh wow is Stratham hot.
Monday, March 03, 2008
me: hey adam
Adam: howdy
me: how's by you
Adam: meh, just buying tickets to see David Beckham play soccer in May
me: you can just get the armani ad and a bucket of lube, you know
a couple of quick thing, about the budget, and a personal question
Adam: shoot
(figuratively that is)
me: am i still cool w/ 200?
Adam: yes
what's the personal question?
me: tell me why i should vote for stelmach
im getting really close and its just an antemhea to me,
so i need a prod
Adam: because Stelmach is the only one with realistic platforms and a way to pay for them
me: his party is filled with homophobes, his art's policies are a disaster, he lets himself get reamed by the oil companies,
there is no exit strategy for depedence on petrochemicals
he doesnt have much or anything to say about cities, he still favours heavily rural regions
Sent at 3:59 PM on Monday
Adam: there aren't actually that many homophobes in his party (and even if there are, he has no intention of putting those feelings into law), Arts are basically up to the cities, but he has said he is willing to give some support, and oil companies are going to ream whoever is in office - they are our economy
me: and i am not sure how healthy democratically it is to have 11 straight elections won by the same party, when my mother, who is 60, and a life long albertan, can only remember two parties?
TED MORTON
Sent at 4:01 PM on Monday
Adam: As for the dependence on Petrochemicals, Stelmach's policy may take a while, but it is realistic and can be achieved. I have heard a lot about cities lately, and even Mendel has commended him for his promises for municipalities. As for the rural focus, if we are to become independent from petrochemicals, the other alternative will be bio-fuel, which will come from rural areas
finally, let's not base an entire party on Ted Morton.
really finally, it is democratic to have a party win 11 straight elections if that is the will of the peopl;e
that is the definition of democracy - change for the sake of change is just plain stupid, if it ain't broke don't fix it
me: bio fuels are a disaster, they dont realy end our depedence on carbon, and they mean that food is eaten up by a fools quest, cf the tortilla riots in mexico city
it is broke
there isnt a good party
i hate the PCs, loathe them
The Liberals are gormless, the NDP have no plan,
The greens are all over the place
the Wild Rose Alliance is facist
Adam: the problem is that we have grown too fast, now we need to catch up, and Stelmach is making strides to do that gradually, like it should be done, the Liberals and NDP would order "full reverse thrusters" to try to even out the growth and that is severly dangerous
plus we got out of debt - i don't want us to go back in
also, i convinced one of my friends with the line "better the devil you know than the devil you don't"
me: i know that instinctually, but things that are vital to my daily living, he hasnt addressed, or he hasnt adressed well
i think i am convincing myself to vote
Sent at 4:06 PM on Monday
Adam: that is the important thing
me: i think not voting is as much a statement as voting
i think it says something when the rates are less then 50, close to 40
Sent at 4:08 PM on Monday
Adam: that is where i have to disagree with you...not voting is a statement that you prefer not to participate in democracy, so we shouldn't have it
me: not voting is a recognition that they have not given you an option you find palatable
Sent at 4:10 PM on Monday
me: there is no good reason for a queer to vote for a party that historically has been in favour of restricting their rights constituionally
except that everyone else doesnt know how to fic the 40 years of instutional neglect that has occured
but thats the thing, he keeps telling us ill fix it ill fix it ill fix it, but no one in his party has ever done what was needed to fix things,
but the things that he needs to fix, are boring, they are roads and schools and hospitals and just dull shit, that no one else thinks is vital
Sent at 4:14 PM on Monday
Adam: well, you seem informed, now you need to take that information and decide if it drives you to a polling booth
me: roll the dice?
Adam: no, if you honestly can't make a choice based on who you've got in front of you, opt not to vote
me: yeah, thats where im heading
Adam: on that note, i do have to go vote
me: thanks, honestly, thank you
yr too smart to be dismissed
Adam: no problem
i will talk to you later though
me: GO!
Adam is offline. Messages you send will be delivered when Adam comes online.
I want to shoot four cities named Grand Prairie. One in Northern Alberta, One in Central Texas, one in Nebraska, and One in North Dakota. They are the wide apart geographically, and also economically. The one in Alberta is an oil boom town, growing five fold in less then a decade. The one in Texas is a wealthy suburb of Dallas/Fort Worth. The one in North Dakota has 49 people and is a dying farm town.
What they have in common, is the romantic and psycho-geographic connections with prairies. Traveling, as a pilgrim, across the landscape, I wonder what it means to be from the prairie, a region that is considered the blank quarter, that is dismissed by the coasts, unless it is considered useful. I do not want this to be a collection of images of well shot decay, an elegant depiction of dying and death. I love the wild expanse of my homeland, and it has entered me, virally.
I want to spread this virus, riffing and breaking apart what it means to be a prairie boy, in the spirit of not only the New Topographers in the new west or William Eggleston in Memphis, but writers as varied as Willa Cather, Sinclair Ross, and William Gass. I want to go to the heart of the heart of the country.
artist statement for the humble foundation grant, i asked for 1200 or so.
What they have in common, is the romantic and psycho-geographic connections with prairies. Traveling, as a pilgrim, across the landscape, I wonder what it means to be from the prairie, a region that is considered the blank quarter, that is dismissed by the coasts, unless it is considered useful. I do not want this to be a collection of images of well shot decay, an elegant depiction of dying and death. I love the wild expanse of my homeland, and it has entered me, virally.
I want to spread this virus, riffing and breaking apart what it means to be a prairie boy, in the spirit of not only the New Topographers in the new west or William Eggleston in Memphis, but writers as varied as Willa Cather, Sinclair Ross, and William Gass. I want to go to the heart of the heart of the country.
artist statement for the humble foundation grant, i asked for 1200 or so.
Sunday, March 02, 2008
Saturday, March 01, 2008
Contemporary and Modern Art Day Sale, Sothebys, London (all prices in pounds)
- 5 Sean Scullys for the exact same price (31,700), and that price being 20k over estimate seems fishy
- Riley is still vastly under rated
- Vasserly is making a rise in prices, slightly higher then his rise in critical reception
- Great Bacon Study, of a head, close to the time of his Pope peices, for 468k,
- RB Kitaj's recent death has not done anything for his prices
- Appel is holding solid
- Two v. similar Warhol flowers, same colours, same sizes, minute differences in compostion, sold back to back, one for 144k, one bought in.
- Work similar to the peices sold at the Red Auction, went for a tenth, the wide differences b/w basically the same hirst dot still confuses me
- As for Graffiti---i am mildy pleased that Faile is getting a bit of the Banksy blowback, tehy have a much more interesting, deeper and more wide reaching style, adn are masterful bricolouers.
- Five Banksys sold, for prices ranging from 65k to 650k
- China is doing well, no peics that came from there went unsold, and msot went for more then the YBA work, Hirst expected
- Has anyone shown Peyton and Kliminik together, b/c they are bascailly the same artist, (except that Kliminik is more historical, and PEyton is the better painter)
- Photography did not bomb as badly as earlier in the year, but Untitled Film Still will always sel
- 1983 Warhol's Toy series, the cheif bargin of his mid 80s work, is catching up with the ladies/gentlemen and knives/guns series
- On Kawara again for low 6 figures
- Schanabels film scucess doesnt seem to have done much for his auction prices
- 47 of 297 bought in: three warhols (the most literally relgious of his jacie series), a de kooning drawing from 1964, a 1990 chiroscou smoked Polke, one of Emins porno qorks, a prince joke painting, an eary Ruff nude, and an ultra minimal ruscha
- Best price 1.14m for a Wessleman colalged still life
- Evening always has better work, and higher prices, the dichotomy breaks down a bit in times of folly and prosper, and then confirms itself,
- Best example of this, is the Doig drawings in the day auction and the big Doig painting here, the difference between 65k and 1.06m (for Concerete Cabin, a deftly painted fantasia on wilderness, and modernism) (Though White Creep, a worse and more derritave Alpine study for 1.364 is madness)
- Another is the Head Study, versus Nude Figure with a Mirror, both by Bacon, Nude study going for 19m
- Gursky sells for high 6 figures, one of Richters Candle works (the Daydream Nation one, goes for 3 times its estimate, at 7.9), warhol breaks 10 but fails to reach 35m, like last season,
- Best Deal of the year, is the Twombly drawing Muses from 1963 for under 1m, its just a matter of time that he is going to start reaching De Kooning prices (another, called Rome, from 1961, is a worse paitning, but people dont seem to like Twombly when he uses white space, or when he engages in the aesthetics of erasure)
- Fontanna, no matter how good he is, has been rocketing a little too fast, once he broke the 1m a couple of years ago, people cannot spend enough on his work.
- 14 out of 70 Bought in Marlene Dumas Bought in
- You could have bought masterpeics by Riley, REgo, Peyton, Joan Bitchell, Louise Bourgeious, and Marlene Dumos, for les then hal the price of a decent but not great warhol, or a fairly mediocre Warhol
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