Fiction

21 Watchmen Alan Moore
i found it difficult to follow, a little dull, and its subtext was ciompletely lost to me, but some of teh drawings were jaw dropping, and i know its good, brilliant even--i think moore's mileage will vary depending on how close you are to the source material.

20 Gatsby

this, and proust were both mentioend in a few places, so i read it again. the writing is as good as i remember, its an incredibly quick read, and i dont think ive ever had a deep thought about it, or any thoughts about it....(i also wonder how the hell bechdel 's father used it to seduce anyone, as is alluded to in fun home)

though this line heartening, in the publishers note on the text:
his spelling was idiosynctatic, he had difficulty with details of geography adn arthimetic, he relied on his editor...to check his work...

things about the wedding (in no narrative order)

i went to the hospital, with steve, jerome and a nurse who was related to tracey, a big one, due to lack of sleep, anziety, adn booze, but fun, real fun.

the wedding itself was delightful, a modernist church, with beautiful modernist, hand carved wooden icons, with almsot no details, jsut shadwos adn outliens, of people and events...not even carved as much as cut--should do a bit of research out there if i ever get that 68/modernist thing together--or that essay on vernacular statiosn ive been thinkign about constructing as well

the wedding, there wasa hymn that clsoed the event twice in two days, adn there was a hymn that added feti to the list of groups we shodl protect, its never been something ive been comfortable with, and that added to the vague threatenings against controception in teh wedding mass, made me realize how obsessed rcers have always been with fecundity (oestere/easter) and this no rubbers, no pills, no abortions, no anal, no oral, is w/i a long tradition--revisionist history needs to be put into context, etc
etc

sometimes mikhael is frustating, cause he buys into what hes todl by the right w/o much thot...i think i could argue gay into submission, using the standard left tools of identity poltics, but i dont thik thats the way desrie works, adn i think, it would make me dishonest, so coming out as queer, as having the possiblity to fall in lust with farmers, cowboys, irish immigrants, and butch aussie boys as much as big portguese girls is something ive found realtivley easy, it took a while, but i really think that sexuality is a lot like the holy spirit, warm, free, descending, adn uncontained...or at least only contained by social convention and personal history. b/c my sexual history fits so well into bad freud, i have to work esp. hard to make conserative/orthodox religious members not play those games as well--or realise that game doesnt work as well for some as it does for others (ie for me, absent father, too close mother, sexually abused, badly socialised with men, et al)

ive missed the 3 am conversation, walking, tumbling words, sorting out questions unanswered and answered, and the thrusting and parry of new people and new quirks, was really powerful this weekend, not only mikhael, who kept me on his toes with his surity, but jerome, with his calmness, and his love, and esp the lutheran john, who kept using the word heretic and made me think about what it meant, (i liked also his rigour) realiznig how open i was to other traditions, and how much of my religious life, was a settlign, arunning and a wrestling towards god, adn how that wrestling moved to and fro, not with church but with christ, and now i am in a new match with a new partner, who knwos me too well, was impt

gerard, dancing, the release and the happiness and the joy...
me dancing, how i missed dancing, and the dj was like any other lds church dance, maybe i dont like dancing in clubs, cause when it comes to moving my ass, i perfer comfort (and country, i loev me dancing to country)

the trip down was good, though they need to work harder at making fun of my love of vernacular modernism.

jason is difficult, he got hit by a train and found a very literal jesus, and well you cant really make fun of a guy for what he believes, even if he recites prayers about drwoning in the blood of christ, or demons blaming as opposed to other things (whats teh difference in blaming demons and blaming medicine, sicence, luck, other gods) the problem is that i talk to god or i got hit by a train, or god talked to me and told me this when i came from a coma, shuts down discourses immediately--what the fuck do you say to that? how can you argue with that? esp if you mantain others ability to identify and process what happened to them? i dont pray publically often, and god has talked to me maybe 2x in my life, and this is what makes me a bad xian, is that im mildly angry about that...(i get 4 words?!)

its dark, we are at the end fo the trip, im exhausted, and anxious, 3 other people in teh car, and i just want everyone to shut up, and we start saying a really dark, really violent series of prayers plus the rosary, there are moutnains, pine trees, a wide green river, and im watching out the window, having thsi holy thing and it feels like i have to distract myself in order to make concrete the abstraction im feeling.

lots of photos up on flickr. polaroids scanned tomorrow.

getting in, on the doo, the four of us, large men, sort of therating, and the first thing that happens, we get fed, and then the fridge at the cabin we are staying at, has a full fridge adn full cabinents, bursting...lovely people, fantastic, lovely traceys family, more genoursou tehn they had any right to be (sarah, mike, john, jason, mikahel, ugo, david, emily, and me so 9 people over 4 days, and we still had food left over)

im still realtively happy.

prince rupert, tourist trap mostly, but some really interesting things at he musem of northern culture, a really great cedar lodge house, with beautiful light, adn a back room for new shows, with a glass curtain towards the sea the outside was grey adn warn, but had a vestibule of warm red, so tehy worked together)

the northwestern examples, some brilliant boxes (i find the haida totems, much more inrteresting and powerful then he totem poles, the balancing of curvelinear forms in a rectangle space, formally have always impressed me, and teh red cedar, with the red and black paint--there are 6 or 7 examples here), a full long boat, a mask for sail, of three men in a lunar shape, made of pale stripped pine, the masks had a wide smile of perlsecent teeth, which resembled abolone, but made of the hard edge of a snail, that kept the body cavity free of debris (i guess a coloaca), a cheifs blanket from the 1800s, with chinese tokesn, european beading, and haida forms which proves multicultralism is at least 200 years old, a agulite (glossy black stone) carving of john rohnson, two hand carved cedar saints, a decent show from the foto club, including some great colour shots by peggy lam.

we also went to the fire musuem, which was AWESOME for its photos of buildings being burnt down, at least 10 of them, in a straight line, like ruscha but better.

im off to the wedding

I bought this today

acres of hot pink ultraseude

Link Dump

How to write women if you do superhero comics.

Las Vegas makes being homeless illegal.

a great photo essay of the london east end ghettos

the squid they harrass pollock fishermen


Model for A Sex Musuem in Rio...


I forgot who did this parody

elephant footcare


golden fiddle illustration for the miss universe pagaent.


I really like Sarah Hinkley does those abstracted/landscape/colour field things


Aaron Resen for visual resistence, die cut paper.


monkey paintings


Karen Reimer, Embrodiery on Linen


Jesus Soto, from his LA show.


Panda Ice shaver, super cute



The badly beaten and mutilated corpse of Gianmario Roveraro, one of Italy's reputedly most pious financiers, was discovered "cut to pieces" under a motorway overpass near Parma yesterday, some two weeks after he was kidnapped while returning home from a meeting of the conservative Roman Catholic group Opus Dei.

From The Independent

What is fascinating about this site, is how seductive, with enough examples, such lunacy exists. here are dozens of examples of something called the sign of satan, with famous people making a horn sign, including several presidents, the english royal family, liz taylor, spider man, and others. full site here here

Arkansas episcopials realtionship to gays and lesbians suprisingly sane.

Fiction:

23 Left Bank Gang Jason
not his best work, adn the presence of famous writers detract from an amusing bank job story--does feature panels about fitzgerald and hemmingway measuring each others pricks though.

22 Gary Panters Inferno--masterful in its use of drawings, and its creation of a sort of pop cultureed hysteria, the atmosphere si dangerous, the plot less so.

Questions for the Meeting on the 1st:

Acquisitions Records
What is in their collection, why is this collection extant, where did it come from, who paid for it

The Flood
image rights, when painted, under which circumstances, etc full title. provence

1970 Retrospective:
Catalog, to see if it matches the toronto show
Clippings, reviews, press. interviews, etc
the realtionship with the isaacs gallery
if kurelek attended
listo f work in the retro

What Else is in that collection

To Do Before Thursday (not finished, then no trip)

edit and reconstruct meritt (ie try to find an essay in those 45 pages of notes)
resource list together for kurelek (aga)
call the galleries and artists that you have for the ruscha list
email the floors
talk to zeke in montreal
find other places for deer
talk to terry about finding hunting work
finish a draft for the unruly bodies peice
resize, edit artist statement, fill out form, for 44 richmond

thus says rachel (about emin)
the camera is not exposing emin, emin flashes the camera.

kdays was super fun, happy in the best sense, expensive, but i will be getting some of that back.

john burrows, an artist, attacked and yelled and abused me verbally beause i said his paintings were shit, his paintings are shit...you can see them here and his "folk art" here. on brown wedge next week, i am planning on writing about the conversation we had, commerically, poltically, aesthetically, and personally.

more about british art now:

the chapman brothers did a series of etchings, modifying, often violent, sometiems cleverly, something called the big giant colouring book. the work was yellowed in such a way that i thot it was his infamous goya paintings, and of course it wasnt, maybe a preview of that work. the chapman brothers are treating goya and the giant colouring book as synonomous texts. i thot about that for a while, and i realised something--i should find the work, cheap, easy, lazy, badly construted, adn shocking for the sake of shock, vapid in the worst ways--and i do, but i still like them, and im not sure why. its like douglas coupland, who wrote the introductory essay, who i know who is a shit writer, but who moves me emotionally, who makes me feel bad in a good way.

tracey emin, i dont think i like her, ive been annoyed with her for a decade, for no real good reason, mostly i think for extranous ideas of romanticism, or offputtign misogyny, or because i dont think her work is elegant enough, but i keep returning to it, it sticks with me...the work on teh show, is a large, embroided wall hangign, of a nude woman, (scrawled, but with dleicate care, because the stictching is perfect) with a hundred or so coins pouring out of her cunt. the coins are sewn with similar coloured thread, the background a mushroom brown, the coins copper, the hread almsot chocolate...and the stictches go in several directions, acting as a delicate pocket...for something that was supposed to be clumsy, or broken, or falling apart, or scrawly, there was so much work into making it work, delicately, adn with much prescion. that irony is central to emins work, or if not irony, then tension, but its a tension that bothers me on a gut level, and i dont knwo why. talking to ashley about emin, i said to him, ive spent a decade being annoyed by her, and that means here is power there, but i cant get over the block into admiring or liking her work. (i am talkign about the embroidery here, which i think is what she will be famous for. the drawings i hate, the writing i dont bother with, and the neon i am fascinated with---usually i can divorice an artist from their work, the autobiography of emin makes it difficult)

here is the peice i saw:

i cant find a clsoe up of the coins

Sarah Lucas had the same collection of self portraits. the same ones ive seen in london, toronto and vancouver, they have a visual sedution, adn sarah lucas looks like the butch, anglo women ive always found incredibly exciting (tilda, or rachels friend sam, both have the same bone structure). the pyschosexual symbols are both modern adn ancient--the skull could be hamlet or the ambassadors or some goth kid, the fish could be constable or van eyck or any of the performance artists, but i wonder if they are too slick, too obv

gillian wearing makes me happy. that is all.


link dump:

dobson take down, written in denver. he seems to be a cruel, distant, adn often violent man.


Atta Kim, From the Sex Seires, long exposure photograph. makes making love seem cosmic


From a seires of ghost walls, from about to be destroyed buildings in barcelona (tehy are so common, that there is a word for them: Medinaras. more examples herehere the text is in spanish.


WPA mural, in seatle, called dangers of the mail, is at risk of destruction, and is already screened, because of a panel featuring a rape and scalping of a white oman by indians. the work is pretty standard wpa, but im not sure it should be lsot because of poltical concerns...an interesting case of what is considered obsecene over time (like the racism of early windsor mckay now causing them to be classified for mature readers)

an online exhibiton on themes of voyuerism and photographry, advertising a book by the name of voyuer. the photos are the usual noirish, black and white, which adds a visual cohesiveness, but makes it a bit cliched. the combo of known and unknown fotogs, artist studies, papparazzi, porn, and fine art photography are wonderful, as is the timeline (about 90 yrs) though. some excellent examples though, esp:

Roswitha Hecke
Prostitute on Her Street
(image 2)

Pedro Meyer
Eye Bar
(Image 7)

Marcello Gepetti
Liz Tayor and Richard Burton, Ischia Italy
(Iamge no 10)

the unknown image, that is no 13

Atgets
Femme
(no 22)

Erika Langley
The Lusty Lady
(28)

Unknown
31

Ken Probsts work on a gay male porn set, 36 and 37 (though tehy shold be in colour)

Unknown 51

Lou Stoumen
Perrier
(55)

Unknown 63

(i was going to say that the male gaze, either queer or straight, is at full power here, but there are several examples from teh book carnival strippers, by a woman, whose focus is about that gaze, and is critical of how we look, adn issues of class, sexuality, gender, and banality. i find it odd though there are many images by women, there are few by women of women for women, lesbians are completely absent ehre)


From Ram T Jess LJ.
(is it dangerous to treat this image as only kitsch?)

Wal Mart tries to remake myspace, as The hub, and positions itself as radical in its oppostion to cool. please mock



Ralph ReeD loses LG in Georgia (why did he run?)


Oksana Baiul (i will spare you the image of Paris Hilton looking like Tammy Wynette

France forgives and Britian reduces, Ugandas debt. Good first start, people, lets keep the momentum moving.


Prada this season, the heel is hand carved, and the slick patent leater, with teh crafted wood, clunky, is one of the better examples of formalist aesthetic in fashion--its conceptually brilliant, i dont know how wearable it is

textual excerpts from the rapture ready sites, as currated by harpers, without comment. harpers is good at basic info--the readings section are still vital and fresh in the floatsam adn jetson of he internet--and i am still confused about how the naive opitism of much evangelcal american xianity, extends to every aspect. reading the apolyptic texts of christian and hebrew scripture, one is supposed to be both horrofied, and be humble about oens status post mortem...this rapture obsession is really a fundamentalsit belief in the superioruity of ones god over the other. Reading the boards, and then reading primary texts from bombers in london, in teh same week, i burrowed into the belief that fundmentalism is a kind of delayed ecstacy. dont fuck know, but you shall fuck for ever in heaven. dont take pleasure in anyone but jesus, and jesus will never abandon you. the 72 virgins and the rapture are the same lizard brain place.


Just Watch it

how to get laid in San Diego



Peter Caine, Patroit, anamontric erotic sculpture (i want video!)

on
the political implications of Bush's Font Choices.

art i saw today:

landscapes by phyliss anderson
mostly nafls, with one exception--a small canvas, maybe a foot by a foot and a half...over framed, and badly framed, but beautiful...i really like painting, the formal way shapes and colours interact, ground each other, and frame each other, its retrograde,but it works, this time in this small landscape there were two small sections of green, one in the foreground, a bright, grassy, yellowish tone, in the back a deep, aquamarine, more blue than green, it was a prarie scene near red deer, so the rest of the coloours were browns, beiges, tans, tawny yellows, and dark oranges, some grey, really not very exciting colours, in clearly delinated section--here is a field of wheat, here is a field that is just tilled, here is the sky, but the two greens, framing the rest of the prarie, were really exciting, because the signifier floated--by that i mean, there was nothing clear, they were not lawn or river or lake, and it might just be lazy painting, but it made the work pop.

other things i saw

a chinese fotog at douglas udell, whos work was too precise and too clean, obv fucked with digitally, and printed as bright, oversized c prints, kind disappointg (also an ugly olitski, some bad conceptual fotos, farafard foals and coyotes (which were really strong, i really love farfards work) and some schermann works (hes painting dead sheep right now)

ashleys friend tim at front--she jetissonned most of her collection, which im t hankful for, because the woman was kind but her work was shit---tims work is complicated, the space was wrong for it, sometime he is muiuch to gestural for his own good, and osmetimes hes too cute, sometimes there is just too little presence, but spending time makes the work ingratiing--i think that she wants to get into stranger, more political, queerer, and darker work, so i should send ashley her way.

douglas clarkes intense, sexy photocollages at the aga (and a doc where he was quite bitter about street photography, those his work where he takes pictures of odd things in store windows was some of the more interesting street fotog lately)

jesse sherburnes art bar==jesse is an excellent interior designer, and should continue that practice, he knows exactloy what trends are popular. as an art work, i am unsure

and a best of the yBa with emin, wearing, lucas, the chapmans, and others--i am going to be writing about this at more length later, but the catalog essay written by coupland is well worth picking up

(snap had a retrospective of bc print makers, some of the work was witty, but none of it was really interesting, though i really think that the three they used in their subscription series (one called lacunae, a bright red one of a boy looking down his pants, and another) are much stronger and maybe worth purchasing.

other stuff
peter at xtra was kind enough to send a large crit of the camp peice, telling me how to outline and what to plan, i think he wants me to engage in narrative, something ive been avoiding for years, but something i doubt i can stop engaging with anymore...which reminds me, for that queer catholic anthology, i think i am going to write 6 narratives, about visual culture that pushed me further into mother church, and about bodies/dicursive pleasure avoiding the fear of autobiography...and im feeling a little more comfortable with the meritt essay, but remain confused and undecided about the wedding...blairs work at the word and mascluinity show at the cambridge gallery in ontario remains the strongest work of his career, esp the work related to the theifs journal, and a good lesson about the tension b/w symbolic and literal, about the fears of being too literal.

watching young by chesney on cmt this morning, i figured out chesneys sexuality, its entirely about himself, and nostalgia. i dont know the word for it, but im pretty sure kennys now ideal sexual partner is kenny at 18.

-- anthony easton (anthonyeaston@gmail.com), July 18th, 2006. (later)

onanopostpedo? Has he ever sung about actually being horny, though? "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy," but what does he think? Great great video, but the girl's doing all the w-o-r-k, slinking down the cabbage rows climbing up to git him, grabbing, twisting,unbuckling, starting to unzip him. He's exultant, but is it just the attention? Anyway, he doesn't touch her, or look like he wants to. Maybe he'll do dairy when the camera stops, but meanwhile, total boytoy bottom! (If Mary Gaitskill can tell the convincing story of a femme top,they is *he* macho enough to be a butch bottom? Would you please ask her, Frank?) Also, I really like "Anything But Mine," cos finally his nostalgia is for something recent, and for something more interesting than standing around in his high school parking lot etc. But the song, though done cool, is really more bout he's satisfied cos he put his mark/logo(not brand, that would be too hotte) on her, not that he had such a great time doing it.

-- don (rudyparkaz@yahoo.com), July 18th, 2006. (later)

thats what im saying, his work really is this obsessive, preening, masculinity, that seems to be above sex, or at least sex with the past...not quite safe but that whole point, of pleasure adn desire, being not connected to bodies but some arcadian construction of space adn time strikes me as the key to his success...

or to put it another way, people want to fuck him but he doesnt want to fuck anyone, (but his desire not to fuck anyone isnt that elegant glacial, refusal, because that being in sixth gear schitck is, in addition to homosocalism, drinking, etc)

there was always a sublimated homoeroticism to the frat boy nonesense, but i never got anything sublimated in chesney...

that said every major male country performer has more of that beatlemania, audience/performer sexual frisson then chesney.

i dont think hes a bottom boy, and i dont think hes butch, i think that he is a really slippery sexual signifer, the binaries we use to talk about people (audience/performer, gay/straight, butch/femme, top/bottom) all fall down around kenny boy.

(how would he be in bed?)

and where would i send this essay if i was to write it

I am in this month's geez, on page 77. pick up a copy at yr local news stand...
info here

toronto to do list

1) CNE
2) The Falls/Buffalo
3) Warhol
4) Research (York, AGO)
5) Redemptionists
6) Allyson (Fastwurms,Banff, Ruscha)
7) Other Art (Poogoook at Harbourfront, Davidson at Bulger)
8) See David
9) See Dave
10) See Lorna
11) Talk to Michael
12) Send packages to 1313, YYZ, and other artist run centers for Ruscha)
13) Performance peice (5 locations, helped by Colleen, D, Rachel, Pat, Ray)
14) the usual photo taking, eating, book buying, orgy of aesthetic loveliness.
15) Attend services at St Peter/Paul on the U of T campus
16) Eat at Phil's

Fiction:

25 Tin Tin the case of the 7 crystal balls
(t was tin tin, tin tin is great)
24 Casino Royale

I was shocked how much i loved this, for its writing. action drags a bit, racist and misogynst in places, but the writing is amazing (oddly, the set peices, which are usually reserved for death or sex in crime fiction are reserved for gambling or cars. i dont care much about cars, but there are several sections on people playing baccarat that are as close to holmes as ive read...i want to read more.

Link Dump:

Threearticles on the mexican election, and it basically being too close to call (the last is a blog, from an observer in Mexico City itself, and has graphs)

also the offical ndi report (the ndi being an ngo who cordinates and reports on fair elections worldwide)
here

John Money who gave english phrases like gender identity and gender role died this week, at 84. Though beginning with radical ideas of inclusion, ambiguity and otherness, with his later work at johns hopkins, he viewed those who didnt correspond to the proper gender identity as dangerous enough to be corrected by surgery or other manic interventions. I dont want to get into the case of David Reimer, because the story is too sad, and has been too manipulated by everyone on everysaid, but his genitals were corrected by Money, and he considered this correction a tortue. Money's later work reminded people that intersex, transgendered, or other gender constructions should be given autonomy over their own desicions, and that it should not be considered a pyschological or physical abberation when those descions become impolitic. Butler writes about Money and Reimer in her book Undoing Gender, which is well worth reading. He is a man we should thank for new words, but should be worried about how those words are used.

ew interviews charolotte rampling

Bear Wrestling

Bear Wrestling

both via mefi

the big religion comparasion chart

1600 page African Bible Commentary decolonizes the holy script.

the american prospect says leftist xianity is dead. i think were just in a low end of a 30 year cycle

10 most powerful religous right org. in the US, according to Rob Boston, director of Americans for a Seperated Church and STate


Brendon Routh

The Blackeyed Peas Fergie apparently likes the Crank.

National Musuems"> Liverpool has agreed to give the skeltons they stole from the Maoris in the 19th century back. Isnt that nice of them. There is something ghoulish about how many corpses are festering in the back rooms of musuems, taken from colonial waves. Graverobbing it is.

speaking of grave robbing, this article about Ralph Reed in GQ is one of the best peices of political reporting ive read in ages. Stil doesnt answer the question: If he basically won it for Bush in Flordia for 2000 and 2004, why isnt he getting something better in the deal than a pissiant LG position in Georgia. Why is he running for election at all? His best work, has always been as a choirboy with a meat cleaver, those sort of back room bullying that has none of the subtlety to be called manipultion. he gets people elected, he doesnt get elected himself. (Read this!)

9 year olds talking in tounges and being slayed in the spirit, and other such pentecostal antics...this photo encompassses what you need to know What ever happened to kool aid and puppets

A DVD featuring popular character Elmo and his parents who are preparing for Elmo's dad to be deployed, will be handed out for free in August.story here i thot it was a noble thing, until Wal Mart was involved.


One of dozens examples of the stars and bars, in wildwood new jersey. more photos and commentary at the blog four four here
(i like the irony of this one, One Love Marley in the background, but the ones that say you have my x and i have mine, or I have a dream, over the captial flying the flag rampant are paticulary offensive.

"If we do not develop... Africa... if we do not make available the necessary resources to bring about this development, these people will flood the world..."
Jaques Chirac, on Bastille Day.
(Chirac is a national and racial chavuinsit, sun rises in the east)



link to Milton Rogovins hardscrabble documentary photographs of miners, store front churches, aborigonals, and others...great work, if a little cliched

TMZ footage of celebs leaving Marmount, a sort of warolian energy from it (esp Jerry O Connell's standup act midway thru)


India is blaming Pakistan on the Mumbai bombings. Its really frustrating, these bombings were the best cordianted, and the largest in terms of impact, with 7 in a row, of all the recent terrorist work, and it lasted one news cycle---russell simmons dida great peice of reportage in the globe and mail this week, but that was all. England, Spain, America, can get years out of their sucide bombers and i think its because of the whole isreal/hezbollah hissy fit.