reading this week's nyer, about a sex scandal at Horace Mann (one of two or three there), the author buries this ppgh: in recent years reports have surfaced of sexual abuse at St Paul's, Andover, Exeter and other prominent private schools. (51). He then goes on to mention Buckingham Browne and Nichols. Canadians can add Selwyn Hall in Montreal, and UCC in Toronto.

Reports here, mean that those who have gone to the police, or have resulted in settlemants—reports that have been made part of the official discourse. The schools have a number of things in common—they were at the time of the reporting, or continue to be single sex, they encourage a kind of secrecy, they cost a lot of money to get into, they are boarding or have compoenents of boarding attached to them, etc etc.

Ironically—the closeness of a boarding school, might have been the schools undoing. Just as the homosocialness suggests a kind of boundry policing that allowed teachers to have sex with students to isolate them, into thinking that they were so special, that no one would understand the practice—when students returned to schools or found each other online, they found they were not alone, and a reversal of the loyalty kicked in. each of these settlements came when a group of boys got together, and worked collectively in order to find justice. There is something in the effort to make butch corps d'espirt

(personal overshare—though some of the recent renuinons online and in person have occurred since sjsa have shut down, so many of the people in the school are committed to it's program, and the loyalty does not seem to allow for this reversal to occur. The idea that what occurred at sjsa was abusive is not allowed to be part of the discourse. Also, the other schools mentioned had a sexual breach—the homosociality was breached sexually—noone at sjsa has admitted that they were fucked by other students, or fucked by other teachers, much of the role that other teachers had, was not to isolate and seperate students as a way to make them part of the elite, but to strip any indviduality off them, and working against the instincts of Selwyn or UCC.)

(which makes me think—is there scandals that are left to emerge re: Lynn Ward or Fork Hill or etc. Also, b/c of Byfield's influence—sjsa and most likely the other ones, were so fucking weird, that their might not have been distincit similarities)

Tried to explain to a flustered Adrienne Clarkson how the library at Mags worked today, and watched John Ralston Saul scare a baby into silence in the Communion Line. Didn't talk too him at Coffee afterwards, because i wasn't sure whether to say: Yr idea of the Metis concept of Canadian Identity is brilliant, or Yr reading of Foucault is hella fucked up.

four thots post dinshaw

a) So if we can agree that the essentializing project of modernism seperated sodomy, making it a social identity (and this social identity was later politicised); the medeival traditon stated that sodomy was interlocked with a set of other sins (ie lust, simony, usury, gluttony, heresy), these sins could be described as sins of excess--does the question for a queerness that seeks historical context, but refuses the essentializing instinct, become one of intergrating this history of excess?
b) could this excess of practice be seen as an excess of flesh? (thinking of Dinshaw's discussion of enlarged clits, Seneca's writing about dildos "sewn on", the dildos themselves, and how all of that could be considered a collapsing of sign and signifer?
c) does the devolpment of a theology of transubstaiton in the 14th and 15th century be a way of making the metaphorical body of Christ a self contained system, that avoids these excesses of flesh (i.e the idea that one could not perform the sacaremnt if one had a wet dream the night before?)
d) can we think of queerness in its idealizing the unstable and the liminal returning sexuality to its medeival orgins in sodomitical discourse, but w/o the prohibitive langauge?

when it comes to the queerness of Rberg and Johns, its two steps forward and three steps back

Rita Abrahamsen  explains why the intervention in Mali is not the same as the interventions in the middle east, and that Islam is not the same world wide.

The New York Transportation Department  Graphic Standards Manual was leaked. and speaking of type, the 1923 American Type Foundray Specimen Book.

Chuck's brilliant, haunting essay, on the implicaitons of McCready as a musician.

the mugsum of nothern cameron's use of mud buildings

Finnish Cabin in the woods.

Jaymanne writes brilliantly on the problems of  assuming video games are non linear, or they are the same kind of non-linearity as other kinds of texts.

SCans of the World Wide Diamond Novelty  Catalog.

26 Weird Hockey Fan Signs

Lisa Moore  writes on why poetry was so important to the second wave feminist movement, including discussions of the interactions between Lorde and Hacker.

Photos of the Maldive Pig Slaughter

Bachedlers Pencil Portrait of Ruscha, ca 74.

Blogpost from a physican, about the implications of naming pyscho-somatic conditions,  and what the interaction between body and mind means.

Fergus Filhey is an irish  collagist and abstract artist, who does v, small, messy, historically minded, bright, and quite intelligent works that build up texture thru a combonaiton of hand created mark making (drawing, painting) and thru the building up of found materials (foil, wood, plastic). it continues the tradition of the armeature becoming part of the picture plane--and is a good example of a recent trend (several of the painters in the current Collision 9 show at Parasian Laundry in Montreal, for one)

skiing through an abandonded modernist midrise near anchorage.

for all yr bowling alley side graphic needs.

apihtawikosisan writes about the slippery nature of naming in metis and aboroginal communities in Canada.


Mid 1950s video on Logging PRactices.

hree thots about Benedict:
a) Though he has spent his life working his way to the position (see Earthly Powers by Burgess), i wonder if he actually ever wanted it in the first place.
b) For someone who is deeply respectful of tradition, this is genuinely shocking, esp. considering the health of his predecessor--I wonder if the work got to be too much for him, and i wonder how substantive his inner circle was/is.
c) Uta Ranke-Heinemann was his close friend, and she talked quite openly about how smart he was compared to his predecessor, i wonder if it would have been better if he had stuck as a moral theologian, as much as i profoundly disagreed with him the dude wrote well, and was terribly terribly smart. That his smartness was used to a set of political and social ends was intensely problematic, but being a leader of a billion people is an actively political position, and to think otherwise is profoundly naive. Religion is politics. Theology is politics. Of his politics think that his changes to AIDS policy, his books of theology suggested another way of looking at his role as leader. I mean we won't get a radical, Martini is retired, and Martini was the last of a certain kind of V2 nostalgia, and there are a number of ways that he made me feel very uncomfortable--i left when he became pope, but in the negotiating a western institution becoming post colonial, it's an impossible job, i wonder if we will get a gatekeeper, and be pleased by it. I also wonder if w. this resignation, they would be willing to find someone younger, but is there anyone younger.

The Ford Treasure of Station Wagon Living,

Punctum, who did the book Rachel and I were part of, is publishing this really strong seires of texts on speculative medevialisms. The best one, is this new book on Chaucer, with it's third chapter the best thing I have read on depression and the academy. third chapter, free ebook.

the photographer David Taylor is attempting to record every boundry marker on the US/Mexico border, first put up in the 1890s. Link goes to a discussion of the practical problems of the project, with some strong images of the work itself.

thousands of pictures of monkeys

dozen or so images  of the ebony/jet building, a brillaint example of 70s pop rococo.

Narwhal meeting, Nunavat, shot by NatGeo.


Ezra Stoller's photos of LA, are so utopic, all creamy white light through blackness speaking of LA, inside the capitol building


old matchbooks more old matchbooks  (the best thing about them, is the image that goes through all the matches, so it becomes stattaco when images are absent)

i was wrong about burton--she tones down the aggro a bit from McQueen himself, but adds the sensual pleasures and historical mindedness

Tompkins Square's  work on the history of African American Religious Vernacular Music continues to be heroic.

James Deen on Lohan.

Corrine Day, Kate Moss, 1994 (the braids remind me of Cameron)


n+1 used (and edited, mildly chagrined)  a photo i took of Hirst's shark.

Film Comment on Zero Dark Thirty.  With the great qoute:

Maya’s refusal to watch from the monitor points to her courage and integrity, but it also opens up a whole epistemological can of worms, because even seeing it up close (even making a film as rigorous as Zero Dark Thirty) can still never quite be the same as gaining perfect objective knowledge. So in a way the most terrifying line in the film is the rule Dan lays down for his prisoner-victim late in the sequence: “Partial information is treated like a lie.” There is of course nothing that anyone can give anyone in these circumstances except partial information. Therefore by the code of the interrogator, everything they’re given, indeed every unit of information they acquire, is a lie.

there is an essay to be written about Zero Dark Thirty as a problem of informtaiton control as it relates to bodily dissent, and the increase of taxonomic tasks in post-media ages.

Rasmussen's photo of the Faroe Island Whale Cull are a combonation of hyper tech (the orange plastic suits) and the ancient (the woman in the wool sweater standing beside a pool of blood. Difficult, but nessc. reportage.

Lindal Hall's Online exhibition on the Victorian obsesison wiht the Ant/Arctic, is well worth looking at.



Cornell West on the political and social implications of Obama hijacking MLK's legacy at the inaguration.  (and Caotes explains why America hates the idea of a Black middle class)

Dublin;s Father Flannery was offically censored by the Vatican, for his discussion of Women's ordinaton, and is talking anyways.

Speaking of Speaking out of Turn  This mendell exhibit on aboroginal self portreaiture i hope gets eastern canadian dates.  (and speaking of aboroginal read this: This interview with Adrienne Keene about the implications of first nation depictions is a must read.

6 Japanese Graphic Design Posters

Alison Anders bought Greta Garbo's records and is now reviewing them.

14th Century Mourner, French, Limewood, Bought by Getty this month.

Fantastic article on what the success of the Avett Brothers will mean for NC folk and country music, and the implicaitons of that

What Digital Reproduction means  for Comics, using a recent issue of Hellboy as an eample by Jim Rugg.

I have linked Aylsse Elende's  photos of prison backdrops before, but this interview talks about the implications of them as utopic landscape.


speaking of politics and photography, this history of polaroid film in Apartheid South Africa, and how they devolped a product for police, and Black photographers reclaiming it, is fascianting.

These photos of spybases  are interesting for what they are trying to impart--look at how the uk looks like a corperate hotel, france is totally incognitio, and the us is beaurcratic.

an a-z guide to music journalist bullshit.


This video with a dog and a giant stick is a metaphor for the problems of desire

22 Stairways that lead nowhere.

110 years of film title screens

1980s Weather People  Audition Shots, from SF, shot by Michael Jang.

I haven't read  Donald Westlake, he is a major gap in my crime writing knowledge (I was going to read him last summer but I found a whole bunch of Simeon for cheap), but using the idea of film adaptation with Statham as a hook, this review of the man and his writing, is sreally quite strong.

The Octopus as a Cartographical symbol.


The Icelandic PM asks questions about banks as "holy churches"

Mali Rebels torch timbuktu libraries

globe and mail publishes nortel's lawyers bills

Courtney Love covers 99 Problems

Luigi Ghirir, whose work was a highlight of the Martin Parr recent show on early colour photography, a show that resestablished europe as a source for an aesthetic that was previously thought to be mostly american. His colours were always bright, pop, and strange--his compositions were isolating, adn the work was just gorgeous. His best book is Kodachrome, which is impossible to find, and hella expensive. It has been re-issued, link goes to a review w, some page spreads.  some individual shots

here are my two favourites:

Katie Kline shoots some amazing trees.

Download the new Le1f mixtape.

antique confessional for sale.

Michael Hadad has redesigned all of the provinces and terrotories  as mid century logos

On Lady Antelbellum's Downtown

I can't help but to view this as delightfully meta--after a couple of years of hearing (mostly young men) trying to convince (mostly young women) about the importance of the 40, the back fields, the woods, the sticks, or other generic markers of semi-rural spaces as markers of sexual autonomy; the gorgeous harmonies of Lady Antebellum note the vitality of the flanuer (or more importantly the flâneuse) That it is a flâneuse who encourages pleasure and that the pleasure of the city, of the walking, the lights, the smoking and  even the mannequins in the shop windows might lead to less obtuse pleasures, and that the avoidance of cities might suggest an avoidance of these pleasures, provides a stark rejoinder to the homosocial tensions that have dominated Nashville--even songs about fucking in the woods seem to be wryly intended for a public audience--the intimacy of the secret place remade for public consumption, this reversal, where the lack of intimacy of public spaces now remade for private consumption. Extra point for the last line of the song, with it's flirtatious wink. 

Are the Best Artists working in Canada Today, all First Nation? 

1. Terrance Houle, Blood (his recent indian wrestling ring series) http://terrancehouleart.com/ 
2. Faye HeavyShield , Blood, (the bead work)
3. Brian Jungen Dunne-Za and Swiss (has there been a work tied closer to the failures of geography than his plastic whale skeleton?) 
4. Kent Monkman Cree/Irish (more the paintings than the perfomances)
5. Skeena Reece Haida http://www.skeenareece.com/
6. Raymond Boisjoy the haunting, low tech, reworking of photographic history, in rez gashttp://catrionajeffries.com/artists/raymond-boisjoly/works/) 
7. Jackson 2Bears  Kanien'kehaka, http://jackson2bears.net/
8.  Shuvinai Ashoona, Inuit http://viewoncanadianart.com/2009/06/16/is-shuvinai-ashoona-canadas-hottest-artist/
9. Beau Dick Kwakwaka'wakwa (aside from being a major mask carver, his strong belief in working with younger and mroe innovative artstis)  http://www.justart.ca/beau-dick-photos.htm
10. Rebecca Belmore http://www.rebeccabelmore.com/bio.html (venice beinealle) (and we cannot ignore the recent history with her and musuems/galleries)
11. Annie Pootoogook Inuit (and we cannot ignore the explotation of her by galleriests)  
12. Corey Bulprit, Haida http://urbannativegirl.tumblr.com/post/29128378989/corey-bulpitt-and-larissa-healey-to-begin-new (That he makes haida murals in public spaces, reclaiming public land as aborginal, is really smart, and really important) 
13. Nicholas Galanin. Tginlit (http://galan.in/) In the radically reworked, vitally impt show on Hip Hop and First Nations Aesthetics at the Powerplant right now, his work merging breakbeats and traditional dance, recast the history of cross politioan in a matrice of competing signifers. 
14. Larissa Healey Haida, (works with Bulpit)
15. Zacharias Kunuk Inuit,  (Perhaps our best narrative film maker?)
16. David Garneu, Metis, one of Canada's smartest, most techincally proficent, great pure paintters, and really smart. 

Small list--forgetting novelists, poets, dancers, fashion designers, graphic designers, playwrights, craftspeople, film and video makers, etc. et al. 

Post 1970, does Canadian Art Exist w/o Aborginal Contrubitions--and if the answer is no, does this mean that we have to completely reconsider what that image and conception means--Think of Monkmen's porno odes among the romanticism of Cane, sail Coupland's canoe next to Jungen's Cetology, Think of the abstraction of Heaveyshield and then the abstraction of Bush, think of Haida work remade as Kitsch, then look at Reeves mask of Brando or Healey and Bulpit saying "whos streets our streets", try looking at another Richard Prince playing Marlboro Man after Garneua's Cowboys, Indians, and Metis?, Think of Weiland's middle class femminism, and then Belmore...

I don't want this to be a either or, but thinking about this--first nations creators have inserted, and by extension discredited the narratives of art history--a disruption that is needed, and joyous. 

no comments on the pazz and jop, 

It took me months to warm up to "Pontoon," but it went from being mediocre in late summer to the best chorus I'd heard by early winter. It's mostly the craft — plus the almost-naughty double entendre in how they sing "motor-boatin'." —Anthony Easton

Dwight Yoakam's 3 Pears is a slight, spare and solemn record, whose skills at quiet understatement could be read as boredom. Instead we get a mid-career set of small discussions about personal failures and social misconnections — a miniature of perfect songs about terrible emotions. —Anthony Easton

dinner at vices et versa, in montreal, with maggie, ray(!), lana, alex, jill, and me--had a charchiture platter and five ciders.

you don't need to worry

if you need, need

everyone needs periods of balls-out neediness

some people need more or longer periods than others

all this shit is in flux

josh

rihanna review by me

50 corpses were found behind a boys school in Florida, with some evidence of sexual abuse, they were expecting 30.

on the rise of DIY abortions, excellent peice of writing, a combination of personal stories , larger histories and  recent trends. The recent "fetus personhood"  regulations and the refusal to legalise/medically supervise pharmaceutical aborofacients  are important to note.

Africa is a Country's top ten contested image.



I love when O Hara speaks outloud.



Dolly Parton and Hee Haw pinball machines.

if you want context on Django Unchained, Alex Cox's book on the Spaghetti  Western from 1978, is canonical, but has been out of print for more than a decade. Cox put it up on his website as a pdf.

Bill Wyman's article debunking Michael Jackson's album sales, is really about the history of record companies.

i love this alberta themed great horned owl print.

laser cut nautical maps


Taylor Swift and Def Leperd.

the weird, bleached out, almost pastel tones in these photos of tennis courts ironically collapse 80s failures of architechture and the historicizing potential of digital methods into perfect tourist attempts.

burlap and grasscloth wallpaper.

there could be an essay written on british business culture and competing masculinities, as found in these 20s poster.

Enid Chadwick's  Childrens Book of the New Year, has that early 20th century, popululist neo-medivealism, an updating of Morris or a more colourful Gill, just gorgeous.

Looking onto the Mies from Nun's island, artist unknown.

Thanks to Shoup, Brian Joseph Davis' write an epic poem of Xgau's disses.  Brad being Brad, he's worked out the positive mirror image: here

El Antusi did a mural for the highline that is insanaely epic in scale--all across a manhattan midrise.

Irish Farmers Calendar, where they are mostly shirtless

The wood frame, the colour, the bolster pillows that it's Modern and modern and neo-Classical and just a tiny bit regency, the elegant pluralism of this, this courch will change yr life.

In it's own genteel way Toobin's obit of Bork, also for the NYer, is as evisvercating as HST for Nixon.

abandoned amusement parks

one of the questions that i had about  martin, for decades, was how she worked so many hours, but produced so little--full 8 hour days, and maybe 12 paintings a year, and only a handful of drawings, and with a few exceptions, no distinct print practice. This interview with her galleriest, talks about how near the end of his life, that he helped her destroy paintings that he thot were gorgeous, but Martin thot were formally flawed. This suggests that the skill that Martin had was not only (or even perhaps not mostly) object curation but object creation.

speaking of martin, here is a great lecture by Katz on the implications of formal questions and how it functions as a matrice with her personal life:

(how he talks about grids will change yr life)


USDA's collection of State Soils

they are pirating whole buildings now

6 photos of exquistely displayed rolls of coloured tape.

masonic weapons, with symbols in the clockworks.


squid hanging lamps. 



fifteen photos of the SF Streetcar boneyard.

kesha sings her mother's song old flames cannot hold a candle to you miley cyrus jolene.

wpa posters of zoos.

a v. good cover of canticle of the turning.

documentary on Kaneshatake and first nations resistance. 

This article from the star states directly what i have suspected for a long time, namely that the FOIA works as an obsfuctating tool, which might have been a feature instead of a bug, from the view of the gvt.

“Vertical-Horizontal Composition” (1916), a small, framed wool needlepoint tapestry by Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Rectangles and squares in black, white, red, blue, gray, and two browns, arranged on an irregular grid, generate a slightly dissonant, gently jazzy visual harmony that is pleasantly at odds with the tapestry’s matter-of-fact, nubbly texture. The work bespeaks a subtle eye, a sober mind, and an ardent heart. If you could make something like that, you would drop everything else and do it. You wouldn’t need any great reason. I was mildly shocked by how unshocking Taeuber-Arp’s work is, amid rooms of strenuous sensations from the epoch of abstract art’s big bang. But, in a show that raises the question “Why?” at every turn, I kept coming back to it

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/artworld/2013/01/07/130107craw_artworld_schjeldahl#ixzz2HHmzvAeS

2012 goals:

a) finish thesis

yep/

b) find place to stay/granting/etc post may.

yep.

c) finish grad school apps for concordia, union, harvard, berkley

got to concordia.

d) work on publications for disability, kurt, rachel

steady progress made.

e) finish the frog piece

most likely funded and ready to go next summer.

f) pitch tormorden mills peice
g) figure out alaska
h) boston conference

dropped due to cash.

i) pay mom back.

nope

j) pysch stuff

ect

k) tooth stuff

working on it.




2013 Goals:

1.  Continue Kurt Work. 
2.  Continue Atlantic Work. 
3. Work on one Application, Conference Pitch, Fellowship, or the Like a month. 
4. Get a minimum B average 
5. Figure out Quebec Disability 
6. Have one social event a week. 
7. Ask someone new for social times once a month. 
8. Find things to do post-April. 
9. Walk around new neighbourhoods. 
10. Pysch Stuff. 
11. Supercut
12. CAMH Art Project 
13. 6 Small Sermons for Satan. 
14. Peice wiht Clint. 

In the 1950s, if you turned on the television, you'd most likely see a western. The television shows with the most episodes are still mostly westerns that originated in the 1950s. These westerns were often about how men lived with other men. They became a set of social codes, working out the limits of intimacy, and the implications of this intimacy. The westerns aimed at male children taught and reinforced specific elements of masculinity, namely that the act of being a boy would lead to the proper ways of being a man.

Watching work like Cheyenne or Gunsmoke or Bonazanna, through this lens, the viewer could wonder why the teaching of masculinity seemed so vital. There are a number of ideas, but thinking about the violence of World War II, and that many of these westerns came from Radio in the 1940s, might provide a solution. It seems that in the 1950s, being a man had stricter criteria. Perhaps, the closeness of men in the barracks, trenches, and on ships suggested that two things—that there should be work that reflected this closeness, but that this closeness could not be mistaken for other kinds of intimacy.

This tension between portraying male intimacy, but precluding other kinds of intimacy seems to be the key to other tensions, and other ways of processing desire.  The children who were told about the “cowboy” or western way of life in the 1950s, who were taught to work through the values of the west, ended up being part of the liberation of the 1970s. In the 1970s, in depictions of men who have sex with men, there was a glut of films, pulp novels, magazines, periodicals, comics, and social groups that attempted to reconcile the almost celibate lessons of masculinity in the cultures that were taught them in the 1950s, with the sexuality that they wished to participate in. The homosocial core of soldier or western life would become homosexual. This is not a direct correlation--one did not automatically lead to another. But the tensions between sexuality and sociality, between male worlds of the west, and male worlds of sexual culture, have a delicate webbing of wish fulfillment, cultural memory, the personal archive, and the social world.

This is not only about how men interact with men though. The stories of the west were attempts to determine geography as well. The westerns of the 1950s were set in Laramie or Cheyenne or Dodge City, Kansas. In the 1950s, the shows indicated a desire for a kind of purity of place. The queer reclaiming occurring in the 1970s, often explicitly featured tension between people from New York or Los Angeles, versus people from the Midwest. The geographical authenticity that marked the policing of masculinity earlier became part of the unstable processing of erotic desire, 20 years later.

This problem of the liminal space between the homosocial and the homoerotic in the west is not solved, and has several more ironic turns. Thinking about the politicians who have worked out the cowboy motif, in the 1980s and 1990s--there is the refusal of the homoerotic, but the return of the homosocial, a well guarded place where the impossibility of any kind of ambiguous desire reigns. Thinking about Reagan, who starred in a number of B-Westerns in the 1940s and 1950s, both on film and television--it could be said that his use of masculinized rhetoric was another way of approaching the social memory of the earlier texts. There was not needed a question of sexuality, but there were questions or problems of geography.

Finally, George W. Bush, who used Reagan as a political and social example, became an abstraction of an abstraction. Moving from the Eastern elite, to Texas; from a wasted life, to the presidency, could only be done in a kind of Cowboy drag. This again, works through the problems of homosocial contact, without being homoerotic at all--which refuses the homoerotic conflation of the homosocial. It also reinforces the obsessive seeking of purity in the American West.

In conclusion, and to make these questions explicitly academic: I am interested in how the West constructs concepts of masculinity, especially in the mutability and maintenance of identifiers, and how those identifiers are constructed both by interior reserves and exterior forces. My interest also includes how popular culture mediates common ideas of masculinity, and how heterosexism complicates the liminal spaces between homosociality and homosexuality.

reading about lanza, and the responses to lanza, consdering that many of the responses to mentally ill are about allowing us to speak, i have this fear i am capable of such violence, but wonder if the fear is the culture's internalization.

Propsoal forYork Graduate Art History Conference:

Paper Title:

The Panda and the Jack-Rabbit: Some notes on Recent Porn’s escape from the Monstrous.

 

Paper Abstract:

One of the problems with monsters, is that they refuse to contain themselves—the image of the monster is often constructed as an image of rampant and unrepentant sexuality (see the centaur or satyr, the harpy,  the goat headed Satan, or  the Succubae and Incubi in European culture.)  The transgression of sexual profligacy with hints of bestiality and other more liminal spaces is traditionally terrifying.  So some recent pornography, which uses famous performers in animal masks, unsettles these traditional definitions.

Colby Keller is a gay porn star has a reputation as a writer, artist and educator around issues of sexuality and pornography. In the last month he released a self-consciously “arty” remake of 1970s gay porn classic, Boys in the Sand, where he fucks and is fucked, while wearing a rabbit mask.  James Deen is a straight porn star who has become somewhat of a teen icon, while writing about porn. He also acts in more mainstream vehicles. Last year he released a video where he and five other men dress in panda costumes and have sex with one woman.

These two figures, have positioned themselves as aesthetes who use their chosen medium against its literal intentions (i.e. porn’s purpose is formal and social, not just to get off).  This move from a use function of porn to a more formal capability suggests a set of stagings are occurring--providing an ironic or formal distance.  This distance works obliquely to the text provide a way for the monstrous to escape.

This escape happens through two methods: Colby's self-aware queerness allows viewers to taxonomize this as camp. Deen's self-awareness suggests that he knows he is engaging in a performance. By allowing this work to be simultaneously an erotic and a formal event, we echo the slippages between human and beast, but do so positively. In this sense, the erotic consumer, by allowing the monstrous to work through their bodies, processes and isolates the tradition itself.

 

In Memory of World AIDS Day--living after the retrovirals, after the campaigns, after the memoirs ended up in used book stores, after the art ended up in museums, after the plague years, where fucking was less lethal but nostalgia was more so, after coming out thru history. After the exhaustion, a pure Beckett desire to go on, in a moment of what seemed like endless requiem. Growing up in Central Alberta, hearing that you would die of it, as a curse for pleasures that still seemed disruptive--where if you survived the bashings, the institutional neglect, the desire to kill yrself, yr reward would be dying and then realizing every day that you were alive that you had won. Realizing that fucking would still be criminalized, that not talking or talking about fucking would still be stigmatized, still waiting to see if this trick or that lover would be the one that would result (no matter how careful you were) would be the one that resulted in the l

ong term maintenance of another disease, the expectation and then the living without that expectation. Still, even though you know about the world, even though you know that this is the narcissism of privilege, even though you have read from the beginning about Brazil, about Africa, about India--about poverty, about the problems of the west interfering, no matter how angry you are about all of that...the history and potential of AIDS in yr small community, among fellow faggots, isolates you further from the breeders, makes you less straight--no matter how much you love yr straight friends, no matter how much they are allies, the blue black bruises written on the body, the wasting, and the terror can never fully be read on them. This, this World AIDS Day, let us pray.

4:58pm

true

and Ive decided that I will never do baptisms like my supervisor

she likes to have the kids involved, which is fine

but she directs the kids to do everything that she doesnt have too

which makes it twice as long as it needs to be, and a little bit too feel goody

Today

i just think you should drown the motherfuckers

in nad out

Today

in under a minute

cut a hole in the ice and do it there

russian orthodox style

Today

find a lion and do it pseduoephgiral style

Wait, the lion is spitting on the kid?

Today

hahahahahahhahah

Today

that makes it so much better

Today

no, the lion is baptiszed

some things i think i think about act up after watching hubbards doc

a) the quote: "irrevance cannot come from consensus" anna blum seems to be central to the tension between the thing doing the acting and the acting that is being done. 
b) i wonder about one of the narratives here--where the radical direct action was intended to pressure drug companies and governments into indirect action--to get a meeting--that the mechanics of the state were used against the state itself (the lawsuits against the cdc) and the death and exhaustion of the later actions was giving up on the desire to get meetings. (esp the ones featuring bodies and cremains) 
c) but that the meetings happened, and the screening was sponsored by drug companies, and the movie was funded by state agencies, and the archives are at establishment harvard. 
d) who got the meetings then, though the second half of the documentary was about women and working class people--and women's health collective's provided the ordering structures act up built on--i wonder if message creep and quesitons of who to include become parts of a still to answer spectrum. David W's poverty and drug use should be noted to complicate the white gay man/women of colour dialectic that perhaps emerges here (are there similar questions of status and access that invade paris is burning?)
e)these questions of access and who gets to talk, suggest one of the things that is unspoken about act up, and one that is. the unspoken is that perhaps the problem of process oriented collective thot requires too much energy, and takes too much effort, it prevents access to those who do not have the energy or the commitment--can act up style direct action scale up or down, was it strangled in a different kind of red tape--not in the red tape of beurocracy, but the red tape of activism. is this what happened to occupy?
f) the one that is spoken is about the movement at st pats--i have many things to say about this. cardinal o'connor was an asshole; the church needs to be morally accountable for the deaths it caused; that we owe those who seek our destruction no fealty; that we would not convince those praying anything; that if i saw the current cardinal of new york it would take all my effort not to spit in his face. the church is not o'connor; that at st vincents or at hospices or among nurses and nuns and convenant house, it was morally accountable; that to be silent and stacked like cord wood in fornt of the altar, an altar that reminds us of the death and rising of the body of christ (and that we are part of the body of christ) has a noetic power; that respecting process is respecting the voice of those who dissent...
g) that i am able to write and say this, that i am able to negoiate a space for myself, because of the work that not only act up, but the radical work of the 70s, that emerged from the 60s, that listened to the movement of the 30s etc, that there is a genology of action here--watching all of those videos of arrests reminded me of nothing more than peter seeger singing go limp. 
h) i cried. there is this line from derrida: "is circumcision itself an exterior mark, is it an archive" our archives are written on bodies. our bodies are exterior marks--not just pussy and prick, but lesions and wasting, the temporary marks of plastic ties, and the permanent marks of tattoos, the exterior mark, the interior archive, and the haunting of voices that make these marks function post mortem--that allow for these negotited spaces on them--the rectum is not only a grave, it is a masulalem; the freudian bed is where the limpness leads to a kind of rot, but that rot allows for the growth of more undergrowth. 
i) never under-estimate the power of fierce fashion, of elegant graphic design, of good font choices, of dressing to fuck, of using politics in order to fuck, to fuck thru the rectum's masuleum.