Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Rick Barber is a Republican from Alabama, his politics are odious, but i would shove my cock down his throught, if only to keep him shut up.
last time in SF, i went to the archives there to see a show by etienne, and overheard about the presence of these photographs--i did not have time to see if they actually existited, but the idea of bathhouse polaroids from the 70s was wonderful. Three photos, and a possible book (though a book i hope will feature names, academic footnotes, works and the like to contextualise the work) have popped up---they look hopeful, happy, cross racial, and hot as fuck. yah!
LDS officals have been found guilty of 13 charges of malfesance.
gertude stein as advice columinist
show noteS for nafl, at the lat site.
Bishop Scholari's sermon preached at southwick.
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| From Untitled Album |
play off beard slash fiction.
queer men who have been convicted for buggery, with men over the age of 16, in the UK, have had their convictions wiped--i worried that this would mean a loss of glbtq history, but we tell stories, and these stories move under g round, and the discourse is not gone because the rercord is gone.
a xian sect in malawi refuses measles vaccacines, causing 100 people to be sick.
janelle morae's many moons, an offical short film to document the release of her concept album, has a solid afro-centric space culty vibe, which makes me horribly happy.
my thotS on the g20 mostly moved b/w fbook and twitter, with email making a quick third space, and so i did not do a lot of blogging--Christopher Bird's exhausted, frustrated, and genuine befuddlement about both the cops and the far left--the failure of rhetoric on all sides, the theatrical compoenet matches how i feel.
beautiful photos, documenting signboards in a small town.
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| From Untitled Album |
Jurgen Teller, for New York MAgazine, 2010, Helen Mirren--who when asked about this shoot, said, that she trusted Teller, because he was an artist, and she expected her art to be respected, so his should as well.
>A href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/20/kyrgyzstan-uzbekistan-ethnic-civil-war">uzbekistan ethnic cleansing.
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| From Untitled Album |
Eva Mendes, new W--i wonder when Mendes will stop being the best thing about bad movies
sarah palin is going to meet with margaret thatcher--i wonder if thatcher can hold onto her contempt.
Texas and Montanna GOP platforms seek to criminalise gay male sex, and the AZ immigration "reforms" makes me wonder if the republicans are moving far far right because they have nothing else to do.
kitten eats ice cream. in a top hat.
lake ann reston va. one of the most beautiful, best designed, examples of late modernist instincts for public spectacle, but human scale...makes me delighted.
human scale story about the heart break that happens with the never ending set of disasters that happen in the gulf coast.
neon cross bulb 50s vintage, for sale, in the uk.
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| From Untitled Album |
i think i might devolp a fetish for sock garters.
happy ice box cake. D, can you make this for me?
49 photos of Derek Jarman's stark, difficult, and at the same time,quite welcoming ive been thinking alot about jarman, just because of the queer liturgy i am doing, that includes jarman.
i really love the bright colours and over saturated intensity of the urban colours, of MAttias Hendrich's photos of berlin.
the implications of masturabtion on human devolpment.
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| From Untitled Album |
Lichenstein, from black and white drawings, 1965
Monday, June 28, 2010
Sunday, June 27, 2010
the cop on the c24 right now, has spent the last 20 minutes or so, talking about two groups of people, citizens and protestors, but people who protest are using their democratic rights to speech and assembly as a way of fostering change. he is also saying things like saftey, and people being safe, literally dehumanizing those who in engage in dissent.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Friday, June 25, 2010
Production Notes, Final Performance, We The Story Tellers:
Spiritual Notes:
I intend to rework the story of Magdalene washing the feet of Christ with her hair. The piece is about giving what is essential to the church, but also being an outsider, theatrical excess, and the tension between what is allowed to be done, and what is done anyways.
It is a vital story for me because I am interested in what is proper, and what happens with that which is in excess of propriety. If we continue this metaphor; the church is becomes the body of Christ, and so by cleaning the steps with my body, I embody the devotional excess of that woman but in the shadow of the institutional church.
Theoretical Notes:
This performance was also based on two prominent works of performance art. The first is a 1976 work from a feminist collective, who scrubbed the steps of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Not allowed into the main galleries, and assumed to be good for only one thing, they made an exterior spectacle as a response to their lack of presence in the gallery. They made this response collectively. The second is Janine Antoni's Loving Care, from 1996, where she took a bucket of hair dye, and painted the floor of a gallery with her hair. The excesses of the body imposed on, and the frustration of living within the cultural context of limited self lead to pseudo-monastic interiority which expresses the essence given to her by a culture that refuses to accept. Her work in this piece, not only literally forces the people of the gallery away but results in her literally painting herself into the corner. In this context I start from the inside of the church because I do identify as a Christian. As the story teaches us, our excesses mark us outsiders. For me, the political matrix of interiority/exteriority placed in stark contrast through exaggerated motion, will provide an analytical lens where a variety of bodies, and work, and architectural spaces, and movement in those spaces, will provide a pointed critique of the institutional church.
Props, Costumes, etc:
25 Liters of Water, in an office cooler type. Black pants, and black t shirt.
Speech:
Wendy Tefler has agreed to be a plant, in order to bring the audience from the church, to the outside steps. The dialogue from the audience will be improvised, and not scripted. I will be silent, concentrating on body movement, as Antoni and the Collective were.
Ritual Action:
There will be the 11.2 liters of water on the font behind the altar. I will be coming from the far left aisle, either crawling or slouching, moving from being close to the floor, to standing up. When I reach the altar, I will be at full height. Working as a high status, slightly haughty character, I will move to the back of the font, and take the container of water on my hip. Moving slowly, with self confidence, and just a little bit of fear, move through the central altar. Wendy will start calling me out at this time, ignoring her, I will move out of the left door, down the sidewalk and around to the front stairs. Walking up the stairs, I undo the lid on the water container, slowly lift it above my head, and pour all of the water on the steps. After the water has been poured out, I wash each step from the t-shirt that I am wearing. Moving down the left side, and up the right side. After I am finished, I lay prostate in front of each person in the audience. The performance will be ended at this point.
Spiritual Notes:
I intend to rework the story of Magdalene washing the feet of Christ with her hair. The piece is about giving what is essential to the church, but also being an outsider, theatrical excess, and the tension between what is allowed to be done, and what is done anyways.
It is a vital story for me because I am interested in what is proper, and what happens with that which is in excess of propriety. If we continue this metaphor; the church is becomes the body of Christ, and so by cleaning the steps with my body, I embody the devotional excess of that woman but in the shadow of the institutional church.
Theoretical Notes:
This performance was also based on two prominent works of performance art. The first is a 1976 work from a feminist collective, who scrubbed the steps of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Not allowed into the main galleries, and assumed to be good for only one thing, they made an exterior spectacle as a response to their lack of presence in the gallery. They made this response collectively. The second is Janine Antoni's Loving Care, from 1996, where she took a bucket of hair dye, and painted the floor of a gallery with her hair. The excesses of the body imposed on, and the frustration of living within the cultural context of limited self lead to pseudo-monastic interiority which expresses the essence given to her by a culture that refuses to accept. Her work in this piece, not only literally forces the people of the gallery away but results in her literally painting herself into the corner. In this context I start from the inside of the church because I do identify as a Christian. As the story teaches us, our excesses mark us outsiders. For me, the political matrix of interiority/exteriority placed in stark contrast through exaggerated motion, will provide an analytical lens where a variety of bodies, and work, and architectural spaces, and movement in those spaces, will provide a pointed critique of the institutional church.
Props, Costumes, etc:
25 Liters of Water, in an office cooler type. Black pants, and black t shirt.
Speech:
Wendy Tefler has agreed to be a plant, in order to bring the audience from the church, to the outside steps. The dialogue from the audience will be improvised, and not scripted. I will be silent, concentrating on body movement, as Antoni and the Collective were.
Ritual Action:
There will be the 11.2 liters of water on the font behind the altar. I will be coming from the far left aisle, either crawling or slouching, moving from being close to the floor, to standing up. When I reach the altar, I will be at full height. Working as a high status, slightly haughty character, I will move to the back of the font, and take the container of water on my hip. Moving slowly, with self confidence, and just a little bit of fear, move through the central altar. Wendy will start calling me out at this time, ignoring her, I will move out of the left door, down the sidewalk and around to the front stairs. Walking up the stairs, I undo the lid on the water container, slowly lift it above my head, and pour all of the water on the steps. After the water has been poured out, I wash each step from the t-shirt that I am wearing. Moving down the left side, and up the right side. After I am finished, I lay prostate in front of each person in the audience. The performance will be ended at this point.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Sunday, June 20, 2010
“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”
Monday, June 14, 2010
Chantal Nadeua's cultural history of the fur trade in Canada extends and complicates the homosociality that marks the origins of the Western Canadian fur trade, but her complicatations and extending suggest that the politics and social policy that allowed for a theological and social openness were retained: “Most studies on the Hudson's Bay Company advocate a purely mercantile and racially sanitized approach to the colonial excutsions into Canada and North America. Such accounts frame the Company's interests as strictly a matter of the colonial exonom,oy and later on the nascent capitaliziation of exploration. In the HBC World, there is no room for religious conversions, priests, “slaves” or finical deeds with the church, and no room for misisons, wives and contentionus interracial marraiges: just a bunch of adventures in the w ilderness and the bliss of fur plets (Nadeua, 32).
There were all of the people that Nadeua claims absent with iin the cultural context of the canadian fur trade, but they lacked the social and political power that the Catholic church had in Quebec, or the Presbyterian and Anglicans had in what would become Ontario. The church grew as an outsider tradition in these parts, with their rites and rituals partially devoted to the fur trade, and partially devoted to what was remembered from their ecclestical histories. The western Canadian religious immigration was ersatz and ad hoc; just as the sexual lives, and the cultural and historical lives. 1
This ersatz and ad-hoc construction was found not only in t he presence of religious and social systems, but in family life as well. Naduea quoting the establishment historian Peter C Newman about the presence of what were called country wives, or women (often native or metis) who were married in the colonies, in addition to the wives who were married at home.: “Country wives were common, and increasinlgy tolerated by the Company, right into the 19th century, although mixed race wiman later became the preferred brides. What finally ended the custom, was the arrival at Red River, in 1830 of George Simpson's English bride France, Overnight, she created a shaion for white, church-wed wives” (ibid, 33)
Newman, from Ontario, and understanding the power of cultural influence from the centres to the edges, assumes that with the marriage of George Simpson to an English wife, would suggest that the homosocial tolerance of sexual and religious otherness would have been shut down. There could be an argument made that in calgary society this might be case. But there was a much wider varation in the form of marriage, and of desire in the west then there was in the east. The cultural memory of the country wife, the found religious practices, the suspicion of the east, and the accidental breaking of (or at least refusal to continue) sexual and spiritual codes of acceptable behaviour gave dissidents a palce to breathe; and in many ways a safe refuge.
There were all of the people that Nadeua claims absent with iin the cultural context of the canadian fur trade, but they lacked the social and political power that the Catholic church had in Quebec, or the Presbyterian and Anglicans had in what would become Ontario. The church grew as an outsider tradition in these parts, with their rites and rituals partially devoted to the fur trade, and partially devoted to what was remembered from their ecclestical histories. The western Canadian religious immigration was ersatz and ad hoc; just as the sexual lives, and the cultural and historical lives. 1
This ersatz and ad-hoc construction was found not only in t he presence of religious and social systems, but in family life as well. Naduea quoting the establishment historian Peter C Newman about the presence of what were called country wives, or women (often native or metis) who were married in the colonies, in addition to the wives who were married at home.: “Country wives were common, and increasinlgy tolerated by the Company, right into the 19th century, although mixed race wiman later became the preferred brides. What finally ended the custom, was the arrival at Red River, in 1830 of George Simpson's English bride France, Overnight, she created a shaion for white, church-wed wives” (ibid, 33)
Newman, from Ontario, and understanding the power of cultural influence from the centres to the edges, assumes that with the marriage of George Simpson to an English wife, would suggest that the homosocial tolerance of sexual and religious otherness would have been shut down. There could be an argument made that in calgary society this might be case. But there was a much wider varation in the form of marriage, and of desire in the west then there was in the east. The cultural memory of the country wife, the found religious practices, the suspicion of the east, and the accidental breaking of (or at least refusal to continue) sexual and spiritual codes of acceptable behaviour gave dissidents a palce to breathe; and in many ways a safe refuge.
here is the note that the Centre Pomidu wrote about the Janus peice below, for their 2008 retrospective:
nus fleuri, 1968
Bronze, gold patina, hanging piece,
25.7 x 31.7 x 21.3 cm
It is above all the work’s intrinsic plastic ambiguity that enables transformation, the passage from one form to another and from one meaning to another. “In perpetual metamorphosis, Louise Bourgeois’ forms provide an inventory of the apparently inexhaustible permutations of sexual oppositions (…)”, emphasises R. Storr (in Art Press, n°175, art. cit.) accentuating the oft-erotic connotations of her work. If Fillette was simultaneously penis and little girl, the flaccid penis of Sleep (1967) underlines the femininity of men, through the formal analogy that the work maintains with the female breast.
In the same year as Fillette, Louise Bourgeois produced other hanging works consisting of human body parts with sexual connotation. Here we have a series of four sculptures in phallic form, with the evocative title of Janus, including Janus fleuri [Flowered Janus]. As the reference to the Ancient Roman divinity indicates, Janus was the god with two faces, one turned towards the past and the other towards the future, the divinity of gates (janua); those of his temple were closed in times of peace and open in times of war. Everything opened and shut according to his desires. It was the bipolar aspect that fascinated the artist in her choice of title. “Janus is a reference to the kind of polarity we represent…The polarity I experience is a drive towards extreme violence and revolt…and a retiring,” writes the artist who also sees in it “a double facial mask, two breasts, two knees.”
The work, in bronze, represents two flaccid penises linked by a central almost formless element that evokes the feminine slit and pubic hair. It is this junctional element whose exuberant matter overflows without precise limits onto the other two parts with their impeccable finish, that makes this work stand out in the series, the adjective “flowered” referring through visual metaphor to the female genitalia as a blossom. Masculine and feminine are once again united in this work with two faces in which, through a subsequent formal shift, penis becomes breast.
As for the modalities of its suspended presentation, it translates for the artist “passivity”, whereas “its interior mass expresses strength and hardness. It is perhaps a self-portrait – one of many”, she notes. Exceeding the limits and the identities of things, Janus fleuri might thus be a self-portrait of the artist, “an undoer of narcissism and of all imaginary identity as well, sexual included," as defined by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Columbia University Press, 1982, p. 208).
nus fleuri, 1968
Bronze, gold patina, hanging piece,
25.7 x 31.7 x 21.3 cm
It is above all the work’s intrinsic plastic ambiguity that enables transformation, the passage from one form to another and from one meaning to another. “In perpetual metamorphosis, Louise Bourgeois’ forms provide an inventory of the apparently inexhaustible permutations of sexual oppositions (…)”, emphasises R. Storr (in Art Press, n°175, art. cit.) accentuating the oft-erotic connotations of her work. If Fillette was simultaneously penis and little girl, the flaccid penis of Sleep (1967) underlines the femininity of men, through the formal analogy that the work maintains with the female breast.
In the same year as Fillette, Louise Bourgeois produced other hanging works consisting of human body parts with sexual connotation. Here we have a series of four sculptures in phallic form, with the evocative title of Janus, including Janus fleuri [Flowered Janus]. As the reference to the Ancient Roman divinity indicates, Janus was the god with two faces, one turned towards the past and the other towards the future, the divinity of gates (janua); those of his temple were closed in times of peace and open in times of war. Everything opened and shut according to his desires. It was the bipolar aspect that fascinated the artist in her choice of title. “Janus is a reference to the kind of polarity we represent…The polarity I experience is a drive towards extreme violence and revolt…and a retiring,” writes the artist who also sees in it “a double facial mask, two breasts, two knees.”
The work, in bronze, represents two flaccid penises linked by a central almost formless element that evokes the feminine slit and pubic hair. It is this junctional element whose exuberant matter overflows without precise limits onto the other two parts with their impeccable finish, that makes this work stand out in the series, the adjective “flowered” referring through visual metaphor to the female genitalia as a blossom. Masculine and feminine are once again united in this work with two faces in which, through a subsequent formal shift, penis becomes breast.
As for the modalities of its suspended presentation, it translates for the artist “passivity”, whereas “its interior mass expresses strength and hardness. It is perhaps a self-portrait – one of many”, she notes. Exceeding the limits and the identities of things, Janus fleuri might thus be a self-portrait of the artist, “an undoer of narcissism and of all imaginary identity as well, sexual included," as defined by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Columbia University Press, 1982, p. 208).
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| From Untitled Album |
noland is getting a big retrospective at the guggenheim.
lindsay west has the best take down of sex and the city 2 yet.
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| From Untitled Album |
Louise Bourgeois, Janus, For the confusion of the signifer and singnifed, for the classical allsuion, for that collapse of material that connects the double phallus, for the myriad of head puns, for the bronze made unepic, for the gleeful castration, for the shine of patinaless bronze on the glans, that it hangs,
oh god fuck the harper governments status on the art.
parents accuse of byu
5 photos of samuel beckett on the seashore in the south of france.
bp thinks that the disaster in the gulf is worth about 26.7m.
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| From Untitled Album |
John Baldressi, text/foto peice. 1972
list of gay and lesbian presdential appointees via obama better then bush, for sure.
the english defesne leauge when the bnp is not nearly nasty enough.
debra baxter threatens to violently realign yr chakras
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| From Untitled Album |
Martin Luther Death Mask, from the Offical Archives of Germany, Date of Photo unkonw.
laist used one of my photos gaurdian used on of my photos
dozens of videos of half naked people of all races and genders dancing along to ginunes pony--works best when you synocpate the players. (the democracy of the intertubes
scientific paper on giraffes swimming
scarfacesque unsourced photos of mexican drug lords.
Peter Bienart's two page decimation of Raygun, is smarter, more concise, and more elegant then most of the lefts take down:
"No, actually, you're not. Today's conservatives have conjured a mythic Reagan who never compromised with America's enemies and never shrank from a fight. But the real Reagan did both those things, often. In fact, they were a big part of his success. Sure, Reagan spent boatloads -- some $2.8 trillion all told -- on the military. And yes, he funneled money and guns to anti-communist rebels like the Nicaraguan Contras and Afghan mujahideen, while lecturing Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down that wall. But on the ultimate test of hawkdom -- the willingness to send U.S. troops into harm's way -- Reagan was no bird of prey. He launched exactly one land war, against Grenada, whose army totaled 600 men. It lasted two days. And his only air war -- the 1986 bombing of Libya -- was even briefer. Compare that with George H.W. Bush, who launched two midsized ground operations, in Panama (1989) and Somalia (1992), and one large war in the Persian Gulf (1991). Or with Bill Clinton, who launched three air campaigns -- in Bosnia (1995), Iraq (1998), and Kosovo (1999) -- each of which dwarfed Reagan's Libya bombing in duration and intensity. Do I even need to mention George W. Bush?" 2nd ppgh
1172 vintage photos of nasa.
Matthew Morrison on the Tonys, singing All I Need is the Girl; it's good, solid but the dancing is sort of horribly dull, and the staging is expected, his ennuciation is expected, and he is never r eally a belter, and its you know the same table i've seen a thousand times--plus the whole teacher/student erotic tension he has with lea michelle, adds a slightly odd meta text to the whole unstable sexual ethos of glee (i.e the teacher wants to fuck the diva, but instead he fucks his harridan wife, and then doesn't fuck the subistute teacher, and attempts to seduce sue slyvester, who is obv. a dyke...the whole show is about all sorts of sublimated eroticism, but then thats what show choirs are for middle america.
I am queer, western canadian, disabled. I have autism and depression.
For most of my early life I grew up LDS, I spent almost a decade as a
catholic, two years wandering around liturgically minded non-catholic
churches, and for the last 10 minutes or so I am Anglican.
Each of those identites, is an outsider, I am white and occasionally,
I am male, so that I have known privlege, and engaging myself in this
church, is a way of extending my privelge. For the longest time—i used
agricultrual metaphors of snipping to describe how I felt about my
place in these contexts; I felt like the coyote no longer in the
wilderness, at the edge of the a field, picking off the calves of lazy
farmers, that old trickster, who is fed so that he does as little
damage as possible; in this church, in t hese clothes, reading these
texts, making this choice...and you know self identyfing with the
coyote and not with the farmer is an edgy choice, but I have come from
the wilderness, and come from the desert, and now I need to know where
I belong.
Sam Cooke, the soul singer, wrote this song called a change is gonna
come, I heard it a week ago, when I was thinkign about what I was
going to do with the three texts tht we have heard, what I was going
to say on Sunday, and I was at Yorkville, next to Roots, and this
song came on, and so I leaned on the doorway in the cool air
conditioning, while people came and went, I waited for the song to be
over, and I thought.
Here are the first lines of the song:
I was born by the river
In a little tent, and o
just like that river
I've been running ever since
I am not african american, and it is not the mid 60s, and I didn't die
like Cooke did, but that verse, in a song that I love, but which I
have not thought about for months, reflected where I was and where I
wanted to be. I was born on the NSR, to Cooke's Mississippi, and the
tent is obviously allegorical, but I have been running, shuffling,
desperate and unhappy—and the song continues, it talks about movie
theatres, about going downtown, about the banailty of the every day,
and he talks about the change for good that is going to come, and not
the change that he makes, but the way he sings it, it sounds like the
has done all he could and that is waiting for the change to come
externally, that he is willing to let go;
I have also been baptised, at least twice---I spent most of my early
life as a mormon, and continue to think like a mormon, study mormonas,
act like a mormon, the patterns and the desires of Smith, the clawing
towards a flawed and ultimately failed utopia have infected me, I
moved from the LDS to the catholics because I desisred structure and
liturgy, and in the midst of it's injustice, I was called to the
church of Day, of Berrigans, the tension between the long history,
the history of the rivers and tents—and the current practice, what
Cooke calls when he talks about going downtown was present, heavily
and weighting, a lead bib, a millstone around my neck,
(Kentucky Story)
on the ride home from that monastary, (and this story has become much
more public then it was in previous years, I was convinced that I
would never return to the church, would never be xian again, and here
I am, making another commitment, making another set of moral and
social comprimises. But the river is wide, the church is wide, and so
we cross it, and if we are blessed, a change is gonna come, a change
that allows for the potential of seeing god in the absensces, in the
brokeness, where he allows those who are chosen and those who choose
to be one and the same.
The voice that I will have, the voice that is found in my becoming
anglican, is discordant—it is not the smoothness or the exhaustion, it
is the prickly, the outside, I am still the coyote, I am still the
person whose sole mystic expereince was one of negaiton and absence,
which makes these three readings, the three discussions with tradition
and text, especially difficult.
They are readings of exclusion and inclusion, of desire and the
exhausting of that desire...they are difficult texts, texts of
improrpiety, excess, admonishment, theatrics, and frustration. But
they end in welcoming.
Jezebel, the first reading, the tradition and the culture has told us
what we should think of Jezebel, she is insatiable, she is difficult,
she cannot be contained, she has no loyalty---the OT reading that we
are given, with its tissue of long dead nations, and geopolitical
strangeness foregrounds the idea of Jezebel as a liar, a theif,
complicit in the murdering of another, if not guitly of murderrr
herelf—can I admit something heretical, something difficult? I am fond
of Jezebel, I admire her, because she is a coyote, because she
realised that no one would do anything for her, because she realised
that the tribe of Israel was against her, and in that desire to be
secure, at least economically---it is not in my capacity to forgive
her, it is not in my skill set to allow her understanding, but at
least allegorically, at least symbollically, I am closer to that
difficult woman, that woman skiled at guiile, who used everything in
her power to maintain her staus, as limited and as broken as it could
be.
It is too easy to compare Jezebel with the Woman in the gospel—the
woman who might be one of the surfiet of marys, but who is not
named—Jezebel has authority, gravitias, wily skill—and so she becomes
a named person, a named person enamoured of her own power and her own
desires. We can understand control and we can understand committing
acts of transgression, of violence, to maitnain our turf, our
otherness—the coyote eats the fatted calf, because he is hungry, and
because the calf is not under control, and the farmer kills the coyote
to further this protection, and authority transfers, on the blood of
each—like a thick line of red in the snow, like entrails on the
grass...
But the woman in the gospel, that sacred woman, that holy woman, she
frightens me, and being here, talking to you, in these clothes, a week
after corpus christi, admitting that my skills are not enough, that my
isolation will not protect me, that I need a community, that I need
the bodies—the ideas, the souls, the minds, but esp. The bodies of
believers, together.
Jezebel held her own will, her own desire, and her own skills to have
her own land—she is a tale of control, there is a despration, an
eroticism, an untold joy, and a masking sorrow in the woman who cleans
the feet of Christ, an excess---but there is also a loss of self, a
grounding away from then desires of herself, for the desires of
christ, whose eventual sacrifice gave birth/ripped open the tissue of
the world.
I always think of that gesture, the jars of oil, the funerary as
erotic act, the connecton b/w death and life, as an almost camp
gesture, as a out of control means to an end that is still fogged
over, it is not an act of someone who has ever known the coyote, it is
not the wary and cagey hope of Sam Cooke, it is the gesture of someone
who escapes from what is proper and right: “If this man were a
prophet, he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is
touching him—that she is a sinner.”
We live in the world, and in this living, Christ is miasmic, his body
is our body, and the service we construct for each other lacks this
excess—it should lack this excess, and so we move forward, we move
forward together, in the mirror of the woman, like the river of Cooke'
we go on running, and like how the river runs, and like how we move, a
change is gonna come
This is the change for me, this change in the agreeing to be loved by
you, and for you to love me, for my excesses and my strangeness to not
be absorbed, but to be listend to—seperate the sheep from the goats,
and I am neither a sheep or a goat; and I am no longer willing or able
to be sperated...this is my public decleration—a declaration that
someone who is queer, in all senses of that word, who is crazy, who is
ambigious about the nature of god, about Christ, seeks to make public
that he will work through the ambuguity, the realtionality no longer
alone, but in the context of Christ Jesus, and Christ Jesus seen in
the history, in the traditions, in the words and the ideas of
Anglicanism: This commitment is found in the epistle: But if I build
up again the very things that I once tore down, then I demonstrate
that I am a transgressor. 19For through the law I died to the law, so
that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; 20and it
is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the
life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who
loved me and gave himself for me.
But it is also found in the words of Judith Butler: The point is not
to stay marginal, but to participate in whatever network of marginal
zones is spawned from other disciplinary centers and which, together,
constitute a multiple displacement of those authorities.” Will you be
my marginal zone; can my disciplinary centre by Canterbury—because I
am convinced that the church is polysemic, and strange, and beautiful,
difficult, holy, self defeating, and redeemed through the body of
Christ; I am convinced that I want to be part of it's strangeness, I
desire not its wholeness but the wonderful fracturing and coming
together, the attempts at completeness, and the realizing that though
we are the body of Christ, we will never be whole:
For most of my early life I grew up LDS, I spent almost a decade as a
catholic, two years wandering around liturgically minded non-catholic
churches, and for the last 10 minutes or so I am Anglican.
Each of those identites, is an outsider, I am white and occasionally,
I am male, so that I have known privlege, and engaging myself in this
church, is a way of extending my privelge. For the longest time—i used
agricultrual metaphors of snipping to describe how I felt about my
place in these contexts; I felt like the coyote no longer in the
wilderness, at the edge of the a field, picking off the calves of lazy
farmers, that old trickster, who is fed so that he does as little
damage as possible; in this church, in t hese clothes, reading these
texts, making this choice...and you know self identyfing with the
coyote and not with the farmer is an edgy choice, but I have come from
the wilderness, and come from the desert, and now I need to know where
I belong.
Sam Cooke, the soul singer, wrote this song called a change is gonna
come, I heard it a week ago, when I was thinkign about what I was
going to do with the three texts tht we have heard, what I was going
to say on Sunday, and I was at Yorkville, next to Roots, and this
song came on, and so I leaned on the doorway in the cool air
conditioning, while people came and went, I waited for the song to be
over, and I thought.
Here are the first lines of the song:
I was born by the river
In a little tent, and o
just like that river
I've been running ever since
I am not african american, and it is not the mid 60s, and I didn't die
like Cooke did, but that verse, in a song that I love, but which I
have not thought about for months, reflected where I was and where I
wanted to be. I was born on the NSR, to Cooke's Mississippi, and the
tent is obviously allegorical, but I have been running, shuffling,
desperate and unhappy—and the song continues, it talks about movie
theatres, about going downtown, about the banailty of the every day,
and he talks about the change for good that is going to come, and not
the change that he makes, but the way he sings it, it sounds like the
has done all he could and that is waiting for the change to come
externally, that he is willing to let go;
I have also been baptised, at least twice---I spent most of my early
life as a mormon, and continue to think like a mormon, study mormonas,
act like a mormon, the patterns and the desires of Smith, the clawing
towards a flawed and ultimately failed utopia have infected me, I
moved from the LDS to the catholics because I desisred structure and
liturgy, and in the midst of it's injustice, I was called to the
church of Day, of Berrigans, the tension between the long history,
the history of the rivers and tents—and the current practice, what
Cooke calls when he talks about going downtown was present, heavily
and weighting, a lead bib, a millstone around my neck,
(Kentucky Story)
on the ride home from that monastary, (and this story has become much
more public then it was in previous years, I was convinced that I
would never return to the church, would never be xian again, and here
I am, making another commitment, making another set of moral and
social comprimises. But the river is wide, the church is wide, and so
we cross it, and if we are blessed, a change is gonna come, a change
that allows for the potential of seeing god in the absensces, in the
brokeness, where he allows those who are chosen and those who choose
to be one and the same.
The voice that I will have, the voice that is found in my becoming
anglican, is discordant—it is not the smoothness or the exhaustion, it
is the prickly, the outside, I am still the coyote, I am still the
person whose sole mystic expereince was one of negaiton and absence,
which makes these three readings, the three discussions with tradition
and text, especially difficult.
They are readings of exclusion and inclusion, of desire and the
exhausting of that desire...they are difficult texts, texts of
improrpiety, excess, admonishment, theatrics, and frustration. But
they end in welcoming.
Jezebel, the first reading, the tradition and the culture has told us
what we should think of Jezebel, she is insatiable, she is difficult,
she cannot be contained, she has no loyalty---the OT reading that we
are given, with its tissue of long dead nations, and geopolitical
strangeness foregrounds the idea of Jezebel as a liar, a theif,
complicit in the murdering of another, if not guitly of murderrr
herelf—can I admit something heretical, something difficult? I am fond
of Jezebel, I admire her, because she is a coyote, because she
realised that no one would do anything for her, because she realised
that the tribe of Israel was against her, and in that desire to be
secure, at least economically---it is not in my capacity to forgive
her, it is not in my skill set to allow her understanding, but at
least allegorically, at least symbollically, I am closer to that
difficult woman, that woman skiled at guiile, who used everything in
her power to maintain her staus, as limited and as broken as it could
be.
It is too easy to compare Jezebel with the Woman in the gospel—the
woman who might be one of the surfiet of marys, but who is not
named—Jezebel has authority, gravitias, wily skill—and so she becomes
a named person, a named person enamoured of her own power and her own
desires. We can understand control and we can understand committing
acts of transgression, of violence, to maitnain our turf, our
otherness—the coyote eats the fatted calf, because he is hungry, and
because the calf is not under control, and the farmer kills the coyote
to further this protection, and authority transfers, on the blood of
each—like a thick line of red in the snow, like entrails on the
grass...
But the woman in the gospel, that sacred woman, that holy woman, she
frightens me, and being here, talking to you, in these clothes, a week
after corpus christi, admitting that my skills are not enough, that my
isolation will not protect me, that I need a community, that I need
the bodies—the ideas, the souls, the minds, but esp. The bodies of
believers, together.
Jezebel held her own will, her own desire, and her own skills to have
her own land—she is a tale of control, there is a despration, an
eroticism, an untold joy, and a masking sorrow in the woman who cleans
the feet of Christ, an excess---but there is also a loss of self, a
grounding away from then desires of herself, for the desires of
christ, whose eventual sacrifice gave birth/ripped open the tissue of
the world.
I always think of that gesture, the jars of oil, the funerary as
erotic act, the connecton b/w death and life, as an almost camp
gesture, as a out of control means to an end that is still fogged
over, it is not an act of someone who has ever known the coyote, it is
not the wary and cagey hope of Sam Cooke, it is the gesture of someone
who escapes from what is proper and right: “If this man were a
prophet, he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is
touching him—that she is a sinner.”
We live in the world, and in this living, Christ is miasmic, his body
is our body, and the service we construct for each other lacks this
excess—it should lack this excess, and so we move forward, we move
forward together, in the mirror of the woman, like the river of Cooke'
we go on running, and like how the river runs, and like how we move, a
change is gonna come
This is the change for me, this change in the agreeing to be loved by
you, and for you to love me, for my excesses and my strangeness to not
be absorbed, but to be listend to—seperate the sheep from the goats,
and I am neither a sheep or a goat; and I am no longer willing or able
to be sperated...this is my public decleration—a declaration that
someone who is queer, in all senses of that word, who is crazy, who is
ambigious about the nature of god, about Christ, seeks to make public
that he will work through the ambuguity, the realtionality no longer
alone, but in the context of Christ Jesus, and Christ Jesus seen in
the history, in the traditions, in the words and the ideas of
Anglicanism: This commitment is found in the epistle: But if I build
up again the very things that I once tore down, then I demonstrate
that I am a transgressor. 19For through the law I died to the law, so
that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; 20and it
is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the
life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who
loved me and gave himself for me.
But it is also found in the words of Judith Butler: The point is not
to stay marginal, but to participate in whatever network of marginal
zones is spawned from other disciplinary centers and which, together,
constitute a multiple displacement of those authorities.” Will you be
my marginal zone; can my disciplinary centre by Canterbury—because I
am convinced that the church is polysemic, and strange, and beautiful,
difficult, holy, self defeating, and redeemed through the body of
Christ; I am convinced that I want to be part of it's strangeness, I
desire not its wholeness but the wonderful fracturing and coming
together, the attempts at completeness, and the realizing that though
we are the body of Christ, we will never be whole:
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Friday, June 11, 2010
18My joy is gone, grief is upon me,
my heart is sick.
19Hark, the cry of my poor people
from far and wide in the land:
‘Is the Lord not in Zion?
Is her King not in her?’
(‘Why have they provoked me to anger with their images,
with their foreign idols?’)
20‘The harvest is past, the summer is ended,
and we are not saved.’
For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt,
I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me.
22Is there no balm in Gilead?
Is there no physician there?
Why then has the health of my poor people
not been restored?
O that my head were a spring of water,
and my eyes a fountain of tears,
so that I might weep day and night
for the slain of my poor people!
my heart is sick.
19Hark, the cry of my poor people
from far and wide in the land:
‘Is the Lord not in Zion?
Is her King not in her?’
(‘Why have they provoked me to anger with their images,
with their foreign idols?’)
20‘The harvest is past, the summer is ended,
and we are not saved.’
For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt,
I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me.
22Is there no balm in Gilead?
Is there no physician there?
Why then has the health of my poor people
not been restored?
O that my head were a spring of water,
and my eyes a fountain of tears,
so that I might weep day and night
for the slain of my poor people!
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Saturday, June 05, 2010
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