we need to talk about kevin, nearing so close to camp, and heavily aware self parody in swinton's almost meta performance, oblique, difficult, ravishingly beautiful (seamus mcgarvey)and an isolating sound track by johnny greenwood, i am not sure if it was the best movie i have seen in the last few months or the worst. (i kept thinking thru-out it how unsentimental it was, and how it refused questions about both redemption and evil; the book was startling for admitting in public how terrible in many ways mothers feel about their sons--and Tilda as a mother is often loving, but it is a love that is wry, ironic, often harsh, and intellectual)


also, i like to think in my mind, that the message of the film was that if you move to the suburbs yr teenage son will become a murderous psychopath (joking aside, Shriver's Book, the film, and the magisterial piece of long form journalism about Columbine by Dave Cullen is that all of the apologies we have for the boys; they were bullied, they were bored, they were forced by a culture of complacency, they were evil, they were crazy, are never true, that the overwhelming sense of the problem is that there is a hair breadth between the usual adolescent acting out and the acting out that results in such violence) (also, teenagers are lousy at impulse control)


one more thing--there was a scene in the doctor's office, where tilda asks if kevin might be autistic, the line of awkard cats laughed at that one

“Nice shape. Looks like the circumcision was botched, with that extra dewlap of flesh hanging down on one side. Milk white skin with that ropy blue vein rushing down the shaft. Neither big nor little. Just big enough to satisfy anyone. Long straight hairs disguising its full size; it looks like one of those mad medieval Japanese heroines in the movies with their pale faces drowned in hair pushed forward.”

qouted in Christiansin's book review:

for the times

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/books/review/jack-holmes-and-his-friend-by-edmund-white-book-review.html?pagewanted=all">Kate Christensen's review in the times talks about some of the issues.

the sex in edmund white's novels is always well written--he writes about bodies in the midst of sexaulotiy, and the melolncholy of erotic loss better than most--and his new one, about the love of a gay man for his straight best friend over 40 years, talks about sex better than most...

but it is also about bodies--about nipples of both men and women, of how chins move when laying in bed, of assholes, and vulvas, of the small of the back, of a perfect calf, of cocks; even a cock with the drip of the clap, resembling drowned women in japanese prints and films--so all of the sexualised bodies, straight and gay and queer and everything, it is about in a lot of ways, how the devolpement of a core sexual identity post war, and aids lead to the closing of an identity, and it is about the failure of bodies...he is also perhaps the great american poet of masturabation

but not only the failure of sexualised bodies, there is a scene where the straight charachter's (will white) son has asthma, and the depiction of the child almost dying, or about perfect details of matrons that the gay charachters eventually escorts thru upper echelon society.

and the obsession with materality, does not limit himself to bodies--he talks about furniture, about the potential of a certain kind of wasp splendour when the gay character (jack chambers) talks about pink riding coats and worn out rugs--and this detail, of the domestic--of furniture, of the dishes one eats 3 am dinners on, and the plates at the plaza hotel, and the back rooms of bars, and all of this social mobility--that the materality of it all becomes one thing.

it hints at other things--of the problems of pining, of the nature of desire, of always wanting and never getting, of the consquences of the libertine, about class in america, about europeans and about clothes--the depicitons of clothes are some of the best writing in white's career (and white always writes about costumes well); and there are some useful critics (it's too local, too much about new york, it still thinks of the suburbs as exotic, it has problems with race, the depictions of women are problematic in places) but as a tone study its beautiful.

Best Picture: The Artist Best Director: Terrence Malick for The Tree of Life Best Actor: George Clooney for The Descendants Best Actress: Meryl Streep for The Iron Lady Best Supporting Actor: Christopher Plummer for Beginners Best Supporting Actress: Bérénice Bejo for The Artist Best Original Screenplay: Bridesmaids: Kristen Wiig, Annie Mumolo Best Adapted Screenplay: The Ides of March: George Clooney, Grant Heslov, Beau Willimon Best Animated Feature Film: A Cat in Paris Best Foreign Language Film: In Darkness (Poland) Cinematography: Hugo: Robert Richardson Editing: Hugo: Thelma Schoonmaker Art Direction: Hugo: Dante Ferretti, Francesca Lo Schiavo Costume Design: Jane Eyre: Michael O'Connor Best Makeup: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2: Nick Dudman, Amanda Knight, Lisa Tomblin Original Score: War Horse: John Williams Original Song: The Muppets: Bret McKenzie ("Man or Muppet") Best Sound Mixing: Transformers: Dark of the Moon: Greg P. Russell, Gary Summers, Jeffrey J. Haboush, Peter J. Devlin Best Sound Editing: Transformers: Dark of the Moon: Ethan Van der Ryn, Erik Aadahl Best Visual Effects: Rise of the Planet of the Apes: Joe Letteri, Dan Lemmon, R. Christopher White, Daniel Barrett Best Documentary Feature: Pina: Wim Wenders, Gian-Piero Ringel Best Documentary Short: God Is the Bigger Elvis: Rebecca Cammisa, Julie Anderson Best Animated Short: Dimanche: Patrick Doyon Best Live Action Short: Pentecost: Peter McDonald

Kurelek is in the middle of a really interesting career shift right now (came back from the retrospective at the AGH), his rep as an illustrator of small town semi rural prarie stuff has swung onto an understanding of him as a visionary religious painter--but work that does not fit into either of those spaces (mostly the still lives and the landscapes) or work that does not fit into the narrative where he got better and went from Bosch to Brughel (the abortion work from the early 70s) is left behind; i think that he did so much work, and work that carried a large variety of emotional responses, mean that we have trouble absorbing one contradiction without narratizing it, two is too much.

I have read and thought about Kurelek for years, and thot i had a general overview; but even this narrative supprised me, this time a half dozen super tight landscapes from 74 to 77, including a grey and black night time scene of a winnipeg flood and a hitchhicker in winter both no more than a foot or so long; and these four trompe d'oilel paintings from 1959 of currency and other paper ephemera, (in the middle of the paintings done in london hospitals

that's kind of the point--i keep thinking that his compoistion got better in the 70s, the tumbling point of view vistas, the radically stripped down quality, the less is more minimalism about it--but its not better, its different--his most visionary work edges towards kitsch, but it pulls back just enough--he can paint himself in the middle of a composition as a dead rat, or the mayor taking money from a factory of abortion doctors, or dogs eating all of christ but his hands and his crown, or a painting with an atom bomb and a crucifixon and it works; but he can also paint the smallest tightest, loneliest painting of saskatchewan highways; or the funeral of a child, and have that work--or he can paint a prarie landscape that is mostly trees or fields or lake instead of cliches of big sky, or these paintings of fields that work somewhere towards reinhardt or noland.

i went with two painters--gary and victoria, who were great company, and they reminded me of the composition of them, how difficult they were (there were some drawings, but a photographic practice was hinted at in the didactic panels but not repro'd in the catalog, and his graphic works were not shown at all, and his drawings were vastly under rated)

i think i am going to email the hamilton curator and ask about some of the abortion issues.

reading about medeival responses to the song of songs and the eucharist while in the middle of breaking up with the guy you've been fucking for a year doesnt help.

images (i have a pinterst account now, so i am going to try to use that for images)

Source: scrncapped.blogspot.com via pinkmoose on Pinterest

Clint Walker, Cheyenne

Source: t.co via pinkmoose on Pinterest

Athens Graff

Source: texascowboys.tumblr.com via pinkmoose on Pinterest

Pheasent Season

Source: artistandstudio.tumblr.com via pinkmoose on Pinterest

Ruscha, Joe Goode.

something is funky about the links, and blogger here...

http://50watts.com/2406579/American-Tint" AMerican Hand tinted tourist postcards from the Edwardian era

http://bhof.tumblr.com/">the burlesque hall of fame tumblr.

The major auction houses have no vested interest in keeping forgeries out, because of how their economics of risk work, the case of Wolfgang Beltracchi, who has been convicted of producing dozens of forgeries over more than a decade kind of proves that.http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/True+scale+of+alleged+German+forgeries+revealed/25235">art newspaper story here

http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2011/november/polish-cold-war-neon"> polish cold war neon

http://annyas.com/airline-logos-china-hong-kong/">2 dozen or so logos of China and Hong Kong airlins.

http://www.elijahwald.com/dozens.html">elijah wards new book on the Dozens and AAVE, due in June from Oxford UP works well worth reading

5 minute doc on the importance of punk to Indonesian teenagers.

http://www.irishcatholic.ie/site/content/choosing-electors-benedicts-choices-michael-kelly">michael kelly's run down on some of the new cardinals, is really smart, and points out many of the problems.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2012/president/us/republican_presidential_nomination-1452.html"this chart of the Republican road to the White House in the last year proves how much of a clusterfuck this has been.

http://www.christoph-engel.de/index.php?/fotografie/tugendhat/">the best thing about Christoph Engel's recent photos of the Mies residence in Brno, is that the tension b/w material fetish gorgeousness, which mies never really loses, and the entropy that perservation can never quite acheive, does not collapse into either fetish or mourning.

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/">and speaking of the problems of that tension this defense of the poor image, of the copy of the copy, of the half failed rendered file, by Hito Setyrl in E Flux pretty much nails my aesthetic:

The poor image is an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image. Its genealogy is dubious. Its filenames are deliberately misspelled. It often defies patrimony, national culture, or indeed copyright. It is passed on as a lure, a decoy, an index, or as a reminder of its former visual self. It mocks the promises of digital technology. Not only is it often degraded to the point of being just a hurried blur, one even doubts whether it could be called an image at all. Only digital technology could produce such a dilapidated image in the first place.

Poor images are the contemporary Wretched of the Screen, the debris of audiovisual production, the trash that washes up on the digital economies’ shores. They testify to the violent dislocation, transferrals, and displacement of images—their acceleration and circulation within the vicious cycles of audiovisual capitalism. Poor images are dragged around the globe as commodities or their effigies, as gifts or as bounty. They spread pleasure or death threats, conspiracy theories or bootlegs, resistance or stultification. Poor images show the rare, the obvious, and the unbelievable—that is, if we can still manage to decipher it.

From the Introduction, and it gets better from there.

http://www.npr.org/2012/02/12/146366682/first-listen-sinead-oconnor-how-about-i-be-me-and-you-be-you";the new Sinead listen to it in its entierity from NPR--trying to find a place to review it. http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/154781-sinead-oconnor-how-about-i-be-me-and-you-be-you/"> my fellow singles jukeboxer Josh Langhoff's essential Pop Matters review of the same. (suitable for Decapo)

Stranded in Canton, early Eggleston Work, ca 73.

http://www.platformgallery.com/artist_pages/blind_blouse/bb2.html"Jesse Burke's work on Deer Blinds respects and riffs on the importance of them in rural western culture.

some questions/thots/qoutes about bynum's wonderful blood

a) even in the idea of the effluvium miracles that are about the lack of containment (radical material shifts, icons pouring blood, chalices over flowing, furniture bleeding et. al) there seems to be a continual effort to contain or staunch the flow--either thru devices (i.e monstrances, etc); language (the ritual words of the eucharist, the highly symbolic/poetic language of the mystic, or the governmental language of the papacy (Leo's enyclical against it)
b) also, the collapsing of categories b/w flesh, the host, the blood, the relic, and that which is used to contain them, b/w the open monstrance and hte closed tabernacle, or the like meets like of the sacred relcis in shapes of hands, etc
c) the fail to contain it perhaps is a metaphor of the failure to properly heirchalise the church (Wycliffe and Hus' documents on the blood of christ; the blood miracles that occur under the auspices of abbesses, etc)
d) some of this relates to the rise of what is called the ocular devotion found in the 14th century--where seeing the elevated host was considered a kind of taking the host, or sufficent to eating the host; there is discussion of female mystics who though only seeing the host, feel satiated and report that they have literally tasted what they have seen without touching it--(obv?) connected to the holy fasting of these mystics
e)back to leo and other church fathers documents, in attempts to declare some miracles legit and some not, and to foreground transubstantion instead of cocommittal is a way of tightening power in the church--and could this tightening be connected to the new rules of celibacy
f) are women's bleeding and the discourse of blood libel that surounds the jews--the idea that women's uncontained bleeding makes the contained bleeding of the eucharist unholy and the idea of jews absconding with the host, disorder that which is ordered--and so stories of rot setting in, or the host liquifiying hte wrong hands, attach themselves to that feat of instability.

qoutes:

With elaborate puns and coneits, devotional writers packed much biblical and theological learning in to meditaiton on blood. Playing wiht the opposites "soft" and "hard", "stinking" and "sweet", "staining" and "cleansing", Richard Rolled for example prayed to rest "among the dead that lie stinking foully" yet are "softened in that sweet bath" that washes even while it "makes bloody my soul" . A well-known nineteenth-century manula of Cartusian devotions by Dom Cypien-Marie Bourtrais, compiled from late medevial material and often reprinted, provides many examples of fourteenth and fifteenth meditaitons on blood, living and shed.. (2)

(the idea that this discussion of blood, coming from puns, metaphors, conciets--abstracted language away from the physical substance, while talking about the physical substance, furthers the irony of containment...)

Collette of Corbie (d 1447) to whom Christ appeared as chopped meat on a platter, was warned that "the offenses people do against him, tear him into smaller peices than the flesh cut up on this plate" John Mirk, in his Festial for preachers, reported that a sick man who refused to confess cried out "I am damned" when Christ appeared, his wounds all read and cast a great handful of blood from his side into the sinners face" (4)


The eucharist has been much emphasized in recent study of the rleigion of the later Middle Ages--the eucharist as corprate symbol, as instrument of clerical "management" as reflection of the much touted "visuality" of late medevial culture. And it is, of course true, that Corpus Christi as feast and as holy object united and divided medeival society, expressed and constructed its corperate boundries, and defined Jews and heretics as outsiders...(10) (Talking about the Gregory Mass) In the 1473 version from ST Maria zur Weisen Soest, the Christ figure is less a painted panel than an animated gigure who has just alighted before the pope. The paten is empty; there is no host on the altar linen. Before an astonished Gregory, blood leaps from Christ's wounds into the chalice and thence not only from chalice to pope but also from chalice to graveyard, where the poor souls who recieve it appear to rise from the dead under its saving power. The checkered floor (delieverately executed in careful perspective) carries the viewer's eyes not to pope or chalice but to the side wound itself; yet the sharp lines of blood then pull away not from wound but even from chalice and toward the little angular figures in the churchyard. Our eyes move toward Chirst and then away, toward the osuls who need salvaiton. The movement is inwatd, then outward, the picture spinters to our right. Blood savbes, but it spills out in order to do so. Whereas host incorprates and binds within, blood has a more complec valence, tying souls to the body from which it exits in a gushing stream (11)

The wound or wounds of Christ are more frequently hymned as doorway or access, refuge and conslation, than as violation; to penetrate is to open the way. Depicitons of Christi's bleeding on the cross sometimes stress waves pouring forth but often focus visually on discrete red gobles or drops, the blood is always fresh in crucifxion scenes, but it is often bits dropping into chalices to feed and wash as it is torrents leaping onto the heads of sinners....the body parts of Christ and hte saints represented in devotional images and reliquaries are synechdoes for the whole person, indeed for the glorfied person. As Christ is present interger in ever particle of the eucharist and ever eucharistic celebraiton, so the saints are wholly present in every relic fragment.... (14)

sangus/curor

Hus--The Red Thing Does No Wonders.

Following Johnnes Von Dorsten, who wrote in the 1470s, Paltz argues that such miraces are useful to reporach the negligence of priests, to countrer infidelity, and ot excite recerence toward the Eucharist, which (says Paltz( is more doubted than other sacraments (41)

According to a 16th cenutry legend, a Jew who stole or acquired a host found his hands covered with blood and bured the holy object, ground into fragments, at a place of execution beneath a gallows. He later confessed and was himself broken on the wheel. Miracles and visions in whcih blood figured promiently induced the bishop of Havelberg, the margrave, the pastor at nearby PRitzwalk, and nuns from a neibrhoughing house...to establish a clositer on the wite where the miraculous host fragments had been found, bleeding and reassembled. (A very odd moment in the story is the invident of the peasent who supposedly tricked the Jew into confessing by dressing up as a priest)... ((59)

is this a way of narratizing men who do not have the orders, who work the eucharist regardless.

We do find indeed some hesitation before images and visions even among those visionaries, especially ubt not exclusively women, whose understanding of their own union with Christ was not only expressed in increasingly graphic and somatic langauge but also mannifested in bodily phenomena such as levitaiton, stigmata and mystical pregrancy (79)

Yet withdrawl o the cup only increased the people's sense of its power. Desire kept pace with--and circumvented--prhobition...some of the clositered, denied access to the cup at mass, recieved it in visiuon. Others (for example, Beatrice of Nazareth and Catherine of Seina) expereinced the proffered wafer as the withheld bood, gushing into their mouths or over their bodies. What the clergy deinded them, they simply obtained in another way. Miracles of blood erupting from wafers were thus not only illustrations of concomitance to teach those who mistakenly iissted on Christ's blood in the cup, they were also a means of immediate access to that blood. 95

questions

to look up
Hus Tract on Blood
Joahnnes Von Platz Supplementum Coelfodiae
mystical pregnancy
beatrice of nazareth

Eleven Things About Whitney’s “I Believe In You and Me” (written for the Singles Jukebox)

1. This is a song that comes from text that had an explicit church context, and so the song and the film collapsed the preacher and the husband in fairly conventional ways.

2. This being between the lover and the Lord is very much part of Whitney’s inheritance — there was Dionne Warwick on one side, Cissy Houston on the other, and Aretha pushing up through the middle.

3. The interesting thing about this tension is that it is very rare that Whitney ever gave us full church — but it was not a rejection of the church, or an attempt to make secular through sex and longing the incorporation found in traditional black churches.

4. Houston’s best work is not the rejection of the church, it was an almost refusal of incorporation itself.

5. Her voice is perfect. Her body is perfect. Recall that famous Oprah interview where she suggests “the hair, the gowns, the performance” got in the way of an authentic voice — and what is assumed is that the voice would have the sweat of Sunday morning or Saturday night — and in her best performances Whitney doesn’t sweat. Oprah, in her continual claim for an authenticity that might or might not exist, refused to acknowledge the hermetic seeking of perfection is as good as those two sweat boxes.

6. She brings in melodrama, and there are stories about the filming of the Preacher’s Wife: of Denzel being angry, about showing up past 3pm for 8am calls, of her not knowing her lines, of calling in Cissy to talk sense into her. For all of this mess, that was perhaps the first indication that we had that there was a pre-cocaine and a post-cocaine Whitney — that her stainless steel voice could tarnish.

7. You cannot see the trauma of the performance in the mediocre movie — a rehash of something that might have been too sentimental in the 70s, but even in this. For a song about crisis, longing, needing—it has the simulacrum of longing, but the scratch or hunger of it.

8. One of my favorite things in Christian pop music, is where you are trying to figure out if they are talking about Jesus or lover, or constructing Jesus as lover inadvertently. This is not a Jesus-as-boyfriend song; for a song in a movie called Preacher’s Wife, one would actually expect it to be more about Jesus.

9. What is it about? It is not really about the boyfriend either; though from the breathy first moments, and the call for eternal devotion, can it be anything but a boyfriend song? She even talks about love!

10. The song is about Whitney’s singing, the song is a perfect showcase for everything that she can do with her voice” with the sheen, with the perfection of tone, with something more than Jesus or a lover. How the whole song opens into pure blue when she sings sea; or the Cathedral swoops when she sings “miracle” or “dream” or even “believe.” The tightness of the first chords, and then how that tightness explodes, further, wider, but never wild, and almost robotic.

11. There are genuine Jesus songs that she has done, even songs on this soundtrack; and there is the odd song that sounds like she might have gotten laid — though nothing as wonderfully, filthy as the sex she hinted she was having with Bobby — but the best thing about Whitney was the marshaling of full and uncanny gifts to give operatic power to statements that were mostly clichéd — that the marshaling resulted in high art and low kitsch, but did not result in Christian idolatry was perhaps her unique gift (or maybe not unique — but it meant that she shared more with Grace Jones and Donna Summer than she shared with her mother and aunt).

p2100156.jpg

p2100156.jpg, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

Thomas, and Alfred Soto and popmatters http://www.popmatters.com/pm/post/154220-the-top-15-madonna-singles-of-all-time/P1">put together lists of the best madonna songs

here is my top 20

20 American Pie- American life was mostly a weird concept album, marked by anxiety about her status, and concerns about her status as a performer, but the queer sadness of her version of this had a slippery profoundity.
19 Rainbow Tour--because her singing the line Christian Dior me, had a winking camp nod, against all of the pomp of Evita's vanity.
18 Breathless--Because it was done by Sondheim, and she understood the theatricality of what that implied.
17 Deeper and Deeper Dance as Sex, as Religion, and as Fame--with the Warhol aping video, and the half sheen groove,
16 Frozen Yeah, she was in the middle of a religious phase, but it is odd that she sounds so autobiographical, and on the edge of losing control. and just beautiful.
15 Cherish As sweet as she has ever been, and just this side of cute, given extra gravitas for it's doo wop heritage, and it's cribbing from the Assocation.
14 Papa Don't Preach Mostly for the autonomy
13 Into The Groove I like the studio as instrument in this one--the overdubs, the double tracking, sort of proto-autotune in its elegant artifice.
12 What it Feels Like for a Girl The closest she ever got to a country ballad, and something I want Gillian Welch to cover, windswept, loveley, and heart breaking.
11 Justify My Love Because it's hot and sexy and dykey and it reminds you of a time in the 90s when Judith Butler got you laid.
10 This Used to be my Playground The song about lost innoncence and childhood yearning that Michael Jackson tried to sing for a decade--the video is the first time i remember being transfixed by MTV (or the Canadian Equivalent)
9 Material Girl For the sung/spoken chorus
8 Like a Prayer---Holy. impure but holy
7 Die Another Day I love how it marshalled it's ambition, how it took over what it meant to be a bond song, and i love it's abstractions. Vastly under rated.
6 Dress You Up That typical 80s drum beat
5 Lucky Star Perhaps her best pure pop, 3 minutes, in and yr out, pop song. As good as anything by the Beatles.
4 Vogue The politics are complicated--but I think Madonna as a taste maker, and as a bricoluer are vastly under rated--this is amazing because of the vocals, because of the coldness of it, because of it's cleverness, and it's theatricality--sort of proves Madonna as both democratization and evangelical of queer art.
3 Hung Up Abba as history. Pop as a game of signifers. Fantastic video.
2 Holiday You are singing the chorus right now, admit it.
1 Le Isla Bonita Because it is so slight, so slippery, it might as well float away, and it almost does--transient in the best way.

the thing about the good years re:the depression, is not that it is less severe, but that the wet grey flannel of overwhelming sadness is replaced with a kind of omnipresent weight of panic and anxiety.

If you're a Marxist-Leninist, you must be an atheist. That means you must say that, "God does not exist." I used to tell them, "Ok, I can say it. No problem. But my people?" *laughs* Not in this generation. Maybe the next one, but not in this one. For them God and revolution, religion and revolution are one and the same. [...] Nat Turner was a righteous preacher. [...] Malcolm X was a rigtehous Muslim preacher. Martin Luther King was a righteous Christian preacher. Jesse Jackson is a preacher. Minister Louis Farrakhan is a preacher. So if you look very properly, you'll see for us Africans, religion and revolution has never had this dialectical break. [...]

I'll give you one example. Once in Greenville, Mississipi. When I was doing a program there, of protest against the police. We had to fill the jails, but there were young kids and the discipline was breaking down. So I had to go into the jail to establish discipline. So I picked some cadre to go with me just to go to jail and made two lines to confuse the police.

I looked up on the line and I hand picked and I see an old woman on the end of it.

I run back there, I said, "Ma'am, you're in the wrong line." I said, "this line is getting arrested."
She said, "I know, that's what they told me."
I said, "You ain't going to jail."
She said, "Yes I am."
I said, "They're brutal in there!"
She said, "I know, they brutalized my daughter, brutalized my granddaughter, now I must go."
I said, "They don't respect age nor sex."
She said, "I know." She said, "You worried about me son?"
I said, "Ma'am, I'm very worried about you up in there."
"Don't you worry son, I got a telephone in my bosom. Soon as they touch me, I'mma call Jesus. He gonna take care of me."

*laughs* What am I going to do with that? *laughs* Tell her take the telephone out her bosom?

Kwame Ture

Eric Church's "Homeboy" made me feel uncomfortable the first time I heard it, because I could not quite figure out the racial politics, I was worried that Church was asking for the kid not to be black. I think that he is asking him not to be a thug, not to be taken in with a media constructed African-American identity that it is problematic for white kids to adopt. I was also worried that it underestimated how dull, oppressive, and frustrating small-town life is for people who are a little more ambitious — but that may be me being from a small town, and not being able to make it there. After I got over all that, it dawned on me how well-constructed the song was — the three small anecdotes over a lifetime does not forecast the last verse, and the last verse will break your heart. It's a smart song, and one that reflects issues of family, class and location that country has been wrestling with this year. —Anthony Easton

one print comment

p1260332.jpg

p1260332.jpg, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

Mitt Romney will NOT REST until you eat a pastry. Here’s an excerpt of a Phil Rucker’s pool report from a flight between Charleston and Greenville Friday:

Before take off, Mitt Romney walked down the aisle with a large box of assorted pastries from Panera Bread to pass out to the passengers (including the governors and press).
What follows is a transcript of his exchanges.
“Come on, Kasie, dig in,” Romney said to Kasie Hunt of the Associated Press. “Pain au chocolat. Smart move.”
“Ashley?” Romney said to Ashley Parker of The New York Times.
“Can you just grab me something?” Parker asked, turning to her seatmate, Kasie Hunt, who was holding the tongs poised over the basket.
“What do you want though?” Romney asked.
“Um…” Parker said. “The popover thing?”
“The popovers?” Romney asked.
“Thank you very much,” Parker said.
“Sticky bun?” Romney asked other reporters. “There you go.”
“Snack time! Nothing? Just, you know, use your fingers,” Romney said, struggling with the big box. “The heck with this. There you go.”
“Come on, Emily, dig in here,” Romney said to Emily Friedman of ABC News. “Fingers are fine. We’re among friends.”
“Sarah, you want one? What do you want?” Romney said to Sarah Boxer of CBS News.
“I don’t know,” Boxer said. “What’s in there?”
“We’re gonna solve problem one here by getting rid of these ridiculous things here,” Romney said, handing two pairs of black plastic tongs to the flight attendant behind him.
“Rucker, come on Rucker,” Romney said to Philip Rucker of The Washington Post. “Oh, he makes a good move for the cheese. Take two.”
“No, no, no,” Rucker said.
“Look it, there’s so much in here,” Romney said. “Come in, take more. No, take more than one. Take two, take two, Ruck-man. Come on.”
“Where’d you get it?” Matt Viser of The Boston Globe asked Romney, referring to the pastries box.
“We found it on the floor up there,” Romney said.
“Do you want another one?” Romney asked Sara Murray of The Wall Street Journal.
“No, I’m good, but thank you,” Murray said.
“Who wants some more of these?” Romney said. “Look at this. This is good stuff. This is from Panera. Very high-end.”
“Pain au chocolat in there,” Romney continued. “Look at the sticky buns. Those are the best.”
“Hey, Rucker, there’s still some more of those cheese cake babies in here,” Romney continued. “No? You only had one of these. Come on, Ashley.”
“Alright,” Romney said. “We’ve got to get seated.”

“Look at the sticky buns. Those are the best”—amazing

Holly Bailey, for Yahoo News.
It always makes me really nervous when the press is this close to these folks.

fantastic little article on the cree/objiway hockey tour, in nothern ontario in the 40s and 50s .

i want all of these cruise or be cruised t shirts, including ones based on Jean Rechy's the Sexual Outlaw, Larry Kramer's Faggots and amusingly, one wiht Nancy saying there is nothing left to be post modernized.

88 photos of Ottawa Punk from the 80s.

10 Pan Am posters from 1971. If anyone bought me the Eastern Europe one, I wouldnt be upset.

11 foot long heavily decorotive photo/digital print of dinasours being destroyed, sort of inspired by japanaese narrative scrolls, michal lidberg.


Witchita Lineman, last week in New York, Glenn Campbell is better than I thot.

the problems of sexual shame, adolesence, and lds bishop interviews, a first person account.

four photos of Jellyfish by Alexander Semenov.

some serious lawsuits are coming for Gaogosian selling work that is not his, with extra ripping off old lady content.

subprime lenders purposefully targeted low income african american communities.


Etta James does RAndy Newman--as much as i love At Last, there is danger to her being caught in amber, her later work, corrosive, sexy, difficult, and often intensely powerful, suggests a set of emotions long past erotic longing.

a google map of warren jeffs revelations.

full text of American Type Specimen, 1912.

Disneyland Monorail Guide, ca 1966

When Chinese New Year and Robbie Burns Day happen at the same time, there is this magical thing called Gun Haggis Fan Chuy--or Lion Dance With Bag Pipes



Soviet Scrapbook from the 70s found in a Tajikstan junkshop.

BPRD training camp for kids, in Portland--how come kids these days get all the cool stuff.

in a seires called Mikenesses, Mike Holmes illustrates self portraits in famous comic book styles, including Herge, Chris Ware, Ed Burns, Charles Schultz, Quinetin blake and Jack Kirby.

On Imitation of Life: “I love to what Sirk did with the myth of the natural woman…and the image of Hollywood as a completely vacuous and dangerous machine. He shows the raw edges of race and class privilege and pretension, but he understood that no matter how cynical and revelatory he meant his films to be, they were always taken as straightforward, as just what the characters are enacting. The Left reviles that film, but I’m always saying to them, ‘Watch the movie!’”

Martha Rosler Imitation of Life