Neo Classical Homoerotic raunch, while basically the foundation for naked boy art for most of the 20th century, or at least a large swath of it, has always left me cold, either its kitsch, badly done, laughable, or fails to compare to the boysluts of the italian reniassance (see carvaggio). its not porny enough. some of the amg attempts
i dont really find them erotic, i mean they arent nearly as erotic as sodoma, matengna, carvaggio, or the like, but they are impt.
daniel skarmesto is his name






(if it matters he qoutes both carvaggio and odd nerum, i see both)

Americans:
Ashuntz, The Ironworkers Noontime, 1880


Eakins:

Wrestlers 1899

Henry Wallis DEath of Chatteron 186?



William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Dante&Virgil, 1870s

John Singer Sargent Two Men Wrestling, 1890s


Harry Lamb, (60 years later, 1940)


Italian Mannerist Examples
Sodoma:

Pieta, 1590s

Mantegna

1480s

Carvarggio:

crucifixion of st peter, 1601

I think what im saying, is that what is difficult about these works is that this radical anthologizing of 1000 years of flesh into flesh, wrestling and not quite conquering, and attaching itself to the porn of mass mediated 20th century. By knowing about that history, the anthologizing, the source material, places distance, takes away the cryptic voyuerism of the working class nudes, or the religious excuses of the mannerist examples...all of the ones above have been assumed to be male to male identifed, but the frisson of mystery, tension, and danger is no longer present...we know that daniel fucks men, and takes place in a cultural, social and economic pattern that provides if not tacit permission, at least a set of normative contexts for fucking men. i dont know if he is constructing himself as part of a metanarrative context, by using carvaggio as an example he seems to be, or if he is tacitly critquing all examples of men struggling against men is explicity homoerotic, the deserpate seeking of historical other as wank material.

i remember seeing that ashuntz in an american history textbook, when i was young, and also seeing eakins paintings about the same time, maybe when i was 10 or so, and they made me hard, they were one of my first attempts at hottie men.

(also when it comes to the american and english examples, there is a matrix of meanings and narratives that surround the idea of working classes that continue with porn)

Two more fiction:

35 Astro City Home Stories, well written, poorly drawn, too inside baseball for me

34 Douglas Coupland Eleanor Rigby I am not sure that i liked the book, it was an easy ridem and a combontition of consumer grade ennui and low grade feverish meloncholy, bsessed with bodies broken done under the weight of technology, and also about a safe, domestic apolyptica, so nothing new, but i always find myself comforted by his "sentimental pessimism" (welterschermtz)

apartment therapy chose one of my photos, so i think its picked up the meter gallery, in new york

Professional artists/Institutions should include the following materials in their application
* contact information for applicant, including phone, fax, mailing and e-mail addresses
* current curriculum vitae or organizational history
* brief written description of the project, outlining:
* its conceptual content
* its physical details (artifact list, presentation media including hands-on components, technical specifics, square footage of gallery space required for exhibition, and number of exhibition cases included in the exhibition or required from the Provincial Museum)
* set-up and take-down staffing support and requirements
* security and environmental requirements
* the preferred time for exhibition and the proposed booking period
* list of curatorial and exhibit design team and brief resumes of previous experience
* supporting images, if available
* relevant support materials (if applicable) including exhibition catalogues, reviews, critical texts, etc.
* Anticipated loan fee, shipping costs, travel expenses of preparator (if required) and insurance value of exhibition and collections
* Any other relevant material

For the Floors, Banff.

Oprah 1 Hannah Arendt 0

(question for discussion, who is going to have a more ironic example of the banality of evil and the death of tragedy, the pope going to auschwitz or oprah)

i bought two dozen or so c90 tapes from a thrift store today, and i think im going to make a collage or monoprint or something else, cutting and pasting all of the handwritten legends, into one sheet.

(ideas of memory, dead technology, digital and social memory, etc)

im not sure how to do it though, or whether it would be a decenet idea

a story of almost being shot, by a gun happy neighbour. With fantastic pix, including this:


(The guns, the gold flecked lino counter and the ammo in the same colour, the bright pink soap, the shattered glass bullet hole, right at crotch level, the motel discount faucets, maybe its too fucking obv. but the ubquity and banality of violence in american life always almost amuses me, this one is a vernacular larry clarke.)


From Chelsea, NY

some first ppghs
THE Bishop of Chelmsford, the Right Reverend John Gladwin, and 20 curates have been abandoned in Africa by the Anglican Church of Kenya after its Archbishop discovered his liberal views on gays.
the rest of the story here

Tony Blair today insisted no offence was intended over the auction of a copy of the Hutton report on the death of Dr David Kelly reportedly signed by his wife Cherie Booth QC. According to a Commons motion put down by a Tory MP the report, signed also by Alastair Campbell, raised £400 at a fundraising event at the Arts Club in Mayfair last week, although the Labour party has denied it was a party occasion. full story here

Pop star-turned-doll maker MARIE OSMOND has launched a personal crusade to clean up the Internet after learning her two teenage daughters have been posting sexually explicit correspondence on their MySpace.com websites. The PAPER ROSES singer felt compelled to give a statement to US tabloid National Enquirer after the publication uncovered outrageous content on her daughters JESSICA and RACHAEL's blogs. On her site, 18-year-old Jessica, who was adopted by Osmond as an infant, claims she is a bi-sexual who craves sex "as many times as possible," while her 16-year-old sister describes herself as a "slut" and a "whore" in correspondence and opened up about her dreams of having sex with DAVID BOWIE. In her statement, shocked Marie, a devout Mormon, says, "I am saddened by some of the choices that two of our children have made. "The insidious potential for harm from adolescent Internet sites like MySpace.com only exacerbates these kinds of problems. full story here

Random Facts:
North Korea is finacning its stalinist reigme with peasent theme resturants in Vladivastok. here

There are 30 offical religions that have ebelems on file at the Veterans Affairs dept. If not paart of those 30 religions (including atheism), there can be no offical marker in miltary graveyards. wicca isnt on the list. (I emailed VA for a list, with images, they havente gotten back to me)


Random Links:
hundreds of examples of american aborginal languages.

a great article on Audens tricky realtionship with jesus

a vietnam pastor is on the road to be cannonized. I dont think that Vietnam corresponds to the offical just war doctorine of the catholic church, and i wonder if being active in the conflict would be enough of a sin to get one of the holy list. i know where I stand, but im too far on the edge, and dont know enough about the case, to offically give notice.

Pictures from the first Moscow Gay Rights Rally, where police, the church, and orthodox nationlist facists arrested and beat the shit out of activists) are to be ound here here. Story here

James Tiptree, one of the best of the 70s new wave sfers, and perhaps the most under rated (still taking votes for Phillip Jose Farmer) hd a very strange life here is some of it

Lord Black bought his title no one is suprised

one of the most beautiful peices of animaiton ive seen, with monkeys, squids, snails, and a giant magical tyger, but better.

sublimated homoeroticism and hazing (the liminal space b/w homosocial and homosexual is one of the great themes of the 20th century, and left really unexpolred, this is a minor varation of that)

According to John Doyle, the Globe TV Critic, 34.2m people voted for the winner of American Idol, amd just over 32m voted Bush for president. This inst apathy, this is smart people realizing that the only thing they can control is the media.

Sometimes Hal Foster is a delightful bitch, and thats why we love him. Here he is on Putin's Potemkin Village, this years russian art show at the guggenheim here

Cornell is a lot like Darger, in questions of innocence, sexuality, bricorlage, etc but I think that Cornell knew more, was more self concious, less self contained and maybe sadder. Saefer Joher, the novelist, wrote this long peice on him in the gaurdian, and i was literally crying at the end of it. here It continues to shock me, how little his work is held for most people, it seems to be a cult. Speaking of the cult, I found this story first on Metafilter, nad there were several stories about Cornell told, these are my two favourites:
I have deeply mixed feelings about Joseph Cornell as a person. I do love his art. I was introduced to Cornell when I was 11. The person who introduced me had been told by a renowned art collector that "Joseph likes quiche lorraine and little girls". I walked through an unkempt, dimly lit, dismal front room into his kitchen in back. It was well lit and there was another girl washing dishes. She was about 15 or 16 I think. Joseph said she was from the neighborhood and came to help him with housework. I was relieved not to be the only girl there.

I asked to use the bathroom to get away while the quiche was reheated and the grown-ups talked. the bathroom was upstairs and I explored his house quietly then and didn't see anything weird, no dead bodies, lol. That was a relief. Later that day Joseph took us all on a tour of his house with his basement below, an interesting, creative mess that was well organised in its way, full of box-making gear, hardware, paper, trinkets and all sorts of stuff that he put in his boxes. It felt full of energy in that room compared to the sense of depressing neglect in the rest of the house. He also had a large storage place under the eves. It was packed with his work, hundreds of works, a lot of flat images too.

Anyway, over the years I was used to procure Joseph's art, as was my 6 year old sister and another little girl I knew. The adults using us in this way groomed Joseph to some extent in his 'interests' in little girls, fanning the flames by sending him photographs of us and our classmates, enticing him into the city to see us, getting us to speak on the phone with him. Joseph wrote me love letters in which he couched his sexual interest in metaphors. I was told he used the image of a bird for penis and nest for vagina. His letters were full of birds and nests. He gave me a book by Novalis. "HYMNEN AN DIE NACHT (1800), was dedicated to his first great love Sophie von Kühn, who died in 1797. Novalis had met her in Weissenfels when she was barely 13". Joseph said he felt a kindred spirit with Novalis.

He never touched me once. His interest was only in this artistic expression. But I felt violated as a child, not only by the person who used me but also by Joseph. Strange to feel violated by letters and collages, not the sort of thing most people could understand or that I could tell anyone.

I truly hated being used in this way and even though I felt his interest in me was pedophilic/ephebophilic I grew attached to him over the years, felt sad he was being used as well. I accompanied him to his first exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum walked with him in Central Park, made collages for him and made a small box for a Christmas present for him the year he died, which I asked be put on his grave.

When Deborah Soloman came out with her book in 1997 I phoned her and said that Joseph wasn't such an innocent child fetishist as he seemed and she said she knew that. I asked her why she hadn't written about his pedophilia more explicitly in her book and she said had tried and came as close as possible to detailing what she knew. She said there was an uproar by the art critics and her editors when she tried to be more complete about it. She said the art world wanted to perceive Joseph as an innocent because his images appear that way and bring up that kind of child-like wonder in people. I think it's possible to experience that wonder in Joseph's art and also know his dark side. A more informed wonder.

Anyway, all the art that Joseph made for me was taken away and sold, except one birthday collage of an owl, which I sold in 1976 for $6000. That's the money I used to leave America and go to live in India for a decade. I've always been grateful to Joseph for that.
Nyky Shye

Back in the middle '90s, I did some computer work, some word processing and accounting, for an extremely rich woman. The ex-wife of a major American publishing magnate, she lived in a vast apartment on York Avenue on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

She was also a bit of a nut case, a bit Collyer Brothers. Despite living in a 17 room apartment, there was random junk and newspapers and cosmetics and God knows what else scattered all over the joint. Complete disorganization.

So she set me up in a little unused room with a card table covered by a table cloth, and the computer, and a chair, and gave me the stuff she wanted me to do.

She left the room, and I sat down at my desk to start working. Suddenly, my foot bumped against something on the floor under the table. I reached down, and pulled up what I thought was a small carboard box, around 10" square.

But it wasn't a cardboard box. It was an original Joseph Cornell diorama, signed and dated on the back and everything. It was beautiful, it had a little glass window on the front, and a collage of birds, clouds and clock faces inside.

An original Joseph Cornell. On the floor with some other junk. Under a table.

I was dumbfounded, and fascinated. Of course for a moment I thought about how completely easy it would be to just take it home; she seemed to have no awareness or interest in it at all. But seeing it was worth about $30K, I realized it might be a better idea just to leave it alone (an understatement). So I set it up on my table, and looked at it with pleasure all the way through my assignment there.
Nicholas West

Four Favourite Cornell Works:

Anthony,

These are all fine proposals but upon looking at your sample writing the
editorial board agreed that we would like to see you develop your voice,
strengthen your interpretation of the work a bit more before we can publish
a review.

Your writing has a fresh light poppy feel bringing in relevant allusions, reference,
personal association. Though we have an interest in encyclopedic pop cultural
knowledge we are not interested in fast and loose resemblances to both high
and low in passing. This is a relatively unreflexive cultural studies approach for
us. For example with your review of Gum Blondes if a connection is made to
some cultural artifact then what does this resemblance or similarity mean and
why? We are interested in close contextual reading. We would like to see
deeper analysis into the work at various points. Stick to the most key moments
in the work. Diversify sentance structure some more, avoid "weirdly" and
"amazingly", You don't need to say the work "references" something else.
You can invoke the connection via your discussion of a related subject.There
is no discussion of pop or neo-pop as a more general tendency within contemporary
art and what this might mean. What is at stake in this work? Is there no deficiancy? Strengthen the argument. The article is strongest in the section on orality. We
would like to see some more of your writing in the future. However for this issue
we will have to pass. Thanks again for your interest.

Best,


Jordan

Examples of Il'la Zdanevich's Radical Typography from MoMA:NY

weird devolpment in the people abusing me from pick ups tendency, black pick up, jock, usual shit, but at noon, bright and sunny out, he stares at me, and then shines a flash light at me, one of those old school 9 volts one, obv meant to be threatining but unsure of the symbolism,

recent obsessions

closeted film stars from the 50s
hygenine films from the 50s
the religious work of william kurelek
the genre of suburban apocolyptica
the first season of project runway
porn

is blogger sad

BEHOLD THE SACRED WOMBAT, WORSHIP HIM

BEHOLD THE SACRED WOMBAT, WORSHIP HIM

BLDGBLOG: In an earlier, essay-length version of Planet of Slums, you write at some length about the rise of Pentecostalism as a social and organizational force in the slums – but that research is missing from the actual book, Planet of Slums. Are you distancing yourself from that research, or perhaps less interested now in its implications?

Davis: Actually, several hundred pages on Pentecostalism are now being decanted in the second volume, written with Forrest Hylton, where they properly belong. But the historical significance of Pentecostalism – evangelical Christianity – is that it’s the first modern religious movement, I believe – or religious sect – which emerged out of the urban poor. Although there are many gentrified Pentecostal churches in the United States today, and even in places like Brazil, the real crucible of Pentecostalism – the spiritual experience which propels it – the whole logic of Pentecostalism – remains within the urban poor.

Of course, Pentecostalism, in most places, is also, overwhelmingly, a religion of women – and in Latin America, at least, it has an actual material benefit. Women who join the church, and who can get their husbands to join with them, often see significant increases in their standard of living: the men are less likely to drink, or whore, or gamble all their money away.

For someone like myself, writing from the left, it’s essential to come to grips with Pentecostalism. This is the largest self-organized movement of poor urban people in the world – at least among movements that emerged in the twentieth century. It has shown an ability to take root, dynamically, not only in Latin America but in southern and western Africa, and – to a much smaller extent – in east Asia. I think many people on the left have made the mistake of assuming that Pentecostalism is a reactionary force – and it’s not. It’s actually a hugely important phenomenon of the postmodern city, and of the culture of the urban poor in Latin American and Africa.

BLDGBLOG: Outside of simply filling a void left behind by the retreat of the State, what's the actual appeal of Pentecostalism for this new generation of urban poor?

Davis: Frankly, one of the great sources of Pentecostalism’s appeal is that it’s a kind of para-medicine. One of the chief factors in the life of the poor today is a constant, chronic crisis of health and medicine. This is partially a result of the World Bank’s Structural Adjustment Programs in the 1980s, which devastated public health and access to medicine in so many countries. But Pentecostalism offers faith healing, which is a major attraction – and it’s not entirely bogus. When it comes to things like addictive behavior, Pentecostalism probably has as good a track record curing alcoholism, neuroses, and obsessions as anything else. That’s a huge part of its appeal. Pentecostalism is a kind of spiritual health delivery system.

From BLDGBLG, one of the points i was trying to make in the jesus book (esp w. american storefront churches, in urban centers, esp, detroit, la, houston, brooklyn, dc, and atlanta) which is kind of sort of still being written, though not really...Mike Davis is the writer of the book City of Slums, which I need to read.

What should a young male of 21 know, and what should he be able to do? There are no conclusive answers to those questions, but they are certainly worth asking. A young man should know how this country is run and how it got that way. He should know the Federalist Papers and de Tocqueville, and he should know recent world history. If he does not know what has been tried in the past, he cannot very well avoid those pitfalls as they come up in the future.

A young man should be computer literate and, moreover, should know Hemingway from James Joyce. He should know how to drive a car well--such as is not covered in Driver's Ed. He should know how to fly a light airplane. He should know how to shoot well. He should know elementary geography, both worldwide and local. He should have a cursory knowledge of both zoology and botany. He should know the fundamentals of agriculture and corporate economy. He should be well qualified in armed combat, boxing, wrestling and judo, or its equivalent. He should know how to manage a motorcycle. He should be comfortable in at least one foreign language, more if appropriate to his background. He should be familiar with remedial medicine. These things should be accomplished before a son leaves his father's household.
Cooper, from guns and ammo.



"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly, specialization is for insects."
Heinlein



Both lists are utter rot. A young man should know how to cook a shot of heroin, fist a man without wounding him unduly, read Latin, strip and reassemble a Ford Escort Mk I engine, calm a troubled wombat, cook al dente pasta to the satisfaction of an elderly Italian lady, recite the colourschemes used on each and every Prince album cover, rouse the proletariat to revolution, identify an Eames chair by year of production, speak fluent Welsh, humourously inflate a corpse using a foot-pump, rig an election, shuck an oyster and perform an impromptu promenade performance of the Scottish play single-handed. FACT.
posted by jack_mo at 6:58 PM PST on May 25

Posted on mefi.

Jack Mo is clearly a nevillest.


Here Neville Frolix in the Snow.

a conceptual hermaphrodite -- the product of what linguists who study the neutralization of oppositions call a ‘complex operation’ (that is not the simple neither this nor that but the more troubling this and that ).

Yves Allan Bois on Eva Hesse, qouted here here