i feel a bit ungrateful, because i appreciate the hospitality, but i am staying at my friends house and he has the two worst couches for sleeping on, one has a huge bar in the middle, and one is half again too small. also, because of the ice storm, no eggnog. but, last nights church service was moving, and the sky is lovely, and soon a small child will come down the stairs with full wonder, and lifes good. thanks for everyone.

Album List Blurbs:

Vampire Weekend--Modern Vampires of the City.

When all of the discussions of capitalism and the city are about spectacle (Great Gatsby) or Burlesque (Spring Breakers) or satire (Bling Ring) or apologetics (Republicans); one about loss and ennui, taking up all of the best things that James Murphy ever had to offer is necessary. It is solemn and pious, but those are virtures.

Kanye--Yeezus

I hate its misogyny, I cringe at its homophobia, I worry about its racism--all of that needs to be said, but that he could chart a record that sounds this ugly is only half of his audacity. The other half, is how he interleaves all of that ugliness into genuine desires for political change. I don’t know if I hate him, but he never bores me. Plus, it’s only 40 minutes long.

Janelle Monae--Electric Lady.

A queer feminist reclaiming of an Afro-future, with much more hope than the apocalyptic future presented on the previous, equally brilliant Archnoid.

Montanna Roberts--Coin Coin Two

As a practicing Christian, who practices liturgics, and occasionally preaches, there is a conversation on how hymns are used. Priests can be authoritarian, and quite snobbish, and so there is much dismissive about popular favourites. In a keening, often difficult, always prophetic discussion on the nature of African American speech and music, Roberts makes an optimistic argument about a people’s faith. That she ends with the often lambasted hymn about walking with Christ in the garden, and  that she earns that sentiment, was this year’s spiritual highlight.

Miley--Bangerz

For a year that finally proved that Disco won--the song for the after party, and for someone whose godmother is Dolly, she channels Stevie less self consciously than anyone who tries to hard has (Ryan Murphy, I’m looking at you).

Earl The Sweatshirt--Doris.

His narcohaze flow, and the angular beats, sound like wind through a deserted street corner. It might be the most self aware album of the year--in the art of making music, and the failures of making lives.

Teagan and Sara--Heart Throb

The lesbian folk singer in the late 1970s, released a song called I Love Women, that worked the middle of a venn diagram of the first wave of liberation music, somewhere, between Olivia Records and Casablanca. Folk disco never really took off, but everytime I hear this, i think of the possiblities, and how much sense it made that the folk singers took this left hand turn somewhere north of Xanadu. (sorry, wrong Olivia)

Lorde--Pure Heroine:

I wasn’t convinced until Ann Powers on NPR placed it in conversation with Smells Like Teen Spirit, and  then the loneliness made sense.

MIA Mantangi:

The politics are dumb, and she isn’t any more naive, but ignore the words, and how the flowing of intellectual capital stiffens and she builds, further, wider, stranger. The excitement of the thing, is spending more than an hour for the thing to collapse, and how it never does.

Daft Punk--Random Access Memory:

For proving that Analog might matter still, for the rise of a disco paradise the Garage never imagined, for working new and historical, but not being nostalgic, for the cult of Giorgia Moroderer, who I will never not pay homage to, for hearing it in and out of deps, from car windows, in the mall, in night clubs, in clinic waiting rooms--how it stalked me from Edmonton to Toronto to Gaspe to Montreal, through the summer, not relenting past winter.

Singles:

Luke Bryan--Crash My Party

What might be the most controversial album on the list--his voice is calm, authoritative, and seductive. His surety, and his commitment to pleasure remixes what American music might mean.  

Titicia--Don’t Touch Me

A gorgeous, open, and polyrhythmic masterpiece of erotic longing, breezes through without losing a consummate vocalists skill.

Yoko Ono--Bad Dancer:

She doesn’t gloat when she notes she has been playing the Avant as Pop game for longer than most of her collaborators have been alive, she just invites them to a studio and lets them groove. The most open thing I have heard, in a fairly open year.

Blurred Lines--Robin Thicke.

It has the best chorus of the year. Pharell completely changed his game, which might be the third or fourth time he has done that. The falsetto is so un-natural (and the song is about the problems of nature) , and is used so well. It might be dumb, but it is hyper aware about being dumb, and that is one of the secrets of  the come on song. It’s hot. I don’t want to hug him. I want to fuck him. Or more importantly, I want him to fuck me. In an age of song, then response song, the pleasure filled, archly ironic remix by New Zealand Law Students bring pop this year to a full circle.

Carrie Underwood--Two Black Cadilliacs:

Domestic melodrama at its finest, the story song could be something straight out of Sirk, with the heavy formalism. That it manages to have a chorus so monstrous, thunder sounds, and keening guitars, that it becomes so formalist, and is not operatic or ironic, is a testement to Underwood’s  consummate skill.

Brigett Everett--What I Gotta Do

I got most of my music off of Youtube this year, and this cabaret icon, without an album but with a live show at Joe’s pub, is the gender queering soul anthem to the nature of what one can and what one cannot get on a New York Street Corner. Made even better by the fact that she might be the best belter since Mama Cass (and don’t lie to me, you can imagine Cass singing What I gotta do to get a dick in my mouth” )

Sissy Nobby--Loopy

A hedge maze of quotes and refutations, becomes the anti-eminem on the way to making the best bounce track of the year.

Laura Mvula--Green Garden

The percussion, including handclaps, are so summer, and so peppery, just a refreshing roll across the tops of Mvula’s gorgeous voice.

Kelly Rowlands--Dirty Laundry

All of those Spector produced artists, trying to work out what they feel, against the power of bad men, and monolithic producers--Rowland is one of those tell-alls, but with an autonomy. By making a record to dispute the records, she provides the best testimony that Beyonce, like all sorts of geniuses, might have been monstrous. The production is so spare, it makes this, and other revelations (domestic violence) even more stark in relief

Mapie--Don’t Wait:

Even over crappy laptop speakers, how this production doubles up, splits, and doubles again, like a slightly paranoid five line skink, is a masterpiece, made even more complex by a voice that roars towards the oceanic. If this is the future of Swedish pop, their future is long assured.

Angel Haze--Echelon

Such an angry dis track, so delightfully specific in its rhetoric, so well constructed in its pure hate, she enters the boys club almost to fuck shit up.

Ciara--Overdose

The overdose as love metaphor seems so overdone, so played out, but how Ciara sings Doctor, how she pops that middle c, and how she ends up sliding around a track that just plays at being taut, suggests a possible new way forward for pop vocals.

Best Coast I Don;t Know How

Messed up, roughed up, torn apart harmonies, stitched up, and made up into a perfect Frankenstein’s monster, but more Califonia, and less arctic moors.

http://harmonicait.tumblr.com/post/70932306726/country-music-is-only-awful-when-youre-slut-shaming

Wombat Tunnelling!

gorgeous example of hypertext writing.

Parr's photos taken out of car windows in Lagos, work on the problem in a different way than Friedlander's incorporation of the car into the frames of the shot, or Ruscha's building of an infastructure. IT might be an element of technology.

ellen altfest is like pearlstein, without  all of the still life elements, and with men, she paints hair really well

gary panter and charles burns monster mashup  by eric reynolds on vine.

extensive photos  and written text on drum kits from the 20s and 30s.


60s lutheran kitsch reworking of the creation.

on the 12 dollar phone

on cunninglingus and hiphop

Los Angeles' funiculars are democratic, and an example of excellent public transport, and this history suggests a kind of revival.

brilliant, heartbreaking reporting on the final days of Randy Savage.

i want to go here and learn how to auctin cattle

the naitonal instutie of mental health in the uk, is changing what it means to be treated for schizophrenia, suggesting more autonomy for people who have the disorder. 

dozens of examples of vernacular typography in florence

some interesting behind the scenes shots

photos inside the 70s era nagakin capsule tower in toyko

jack peirson Her ancient solitary reign 2006

great historical photos o women in mens tailoring

judges son kills himself on the edge of the temple grounds in vegas

119 assanaions ranked

okay, the lds ended up sending missonaries to the following places b/w let's say 1890 and 1950--Samoa, New Zealand, Arizona, Southern Utah, and southern Brazil. Assuming that after 5-10 years, the impetous to convert eruopeans in New Zealend and Brazil died off, and that in the Us and Samoa it never happened. 

each of those places had a third gender, the maori (20 000 maoris were lds) esp. so, five questions: 

a) could we do a queer reading where the proclamation of the family and its discussion of eternal gender could be used to discuss these people . 

b) according to Quinn (Same Sex Dynamics, 82-89) some Zuni were baptized by yound and compartiats, who were berdache...so when did the baptizing of the berdache end. 

c) was it b/c the folks were marginalized or b/c no one knew what to do w/ them or something else, that this discussion did not end up in the standard works of the lds and nz for example? 

d) if maoris practiced plural marriage until the 1990s, and were still mormon, or if they had both lds stake presidents, and tribal chiefs, who simultaneously held religious leadership i the ocmmunities, than third gender lds maoris must exist, and in significant numbers, why did not they not work in a similar capacity to race and brazil, was it b/c we did not have the language? 

e) the rise of queer language and queer theory enveloped and absorbed radical otherness in western plains cultures (a berdache is not a homosexual, though the universalizing instinct of liberationlist rhetoric would suggest otherwise), and this occured in the 70s, with the rise of gender and sexuality...failure of intersectionality and all that--this is going to be an awkard construction--but did race become unflattened in the 70s while gender became flattened, and if this is the case, did they sepeate then--because t he discourse arouind both the south pacific and plans aborgibanal people tied othernig languge to race and gender...

the hunger games movie was disappointing, too long, badly paced, dumb ending, cgi was ugly, but with some fantastic small performances, esp. with phillip seymour hoffman and donald sutherland, but it wasn't even good spectacle (we all get the dystopias we deserve)

frustrated by this paper in ways that i cannot even describe (well its the usual lds problem, people either avoid the lds, are unreliable, have gaps, or ask the wrong questions, this is esp. true about sex and gender.

hate the weather outside.

getting home from guy concordia, a woman was choking on her own puke, the two guys with her had no idea what they were doing, and the other woman who was with her was yelling at the pukey one about the coat and sweater. they were going all the way to angion, and i helped her get on the subway, held her hand, convinced her friends to take a cab from the end of the line, but i am worried that they aren't safe. left my half finished big mac to help them out, and i only have the yucky kind of oatmeal left in my variety pack.

major tooth problems still.

P1010506

P1010506, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

P1010509

P1010509, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

P1010330

P1010330, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

P1010391

P1010391, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

corb lund and ian tyson had this fantastic mentor/mentored rship, with lund suprised the old coot wants him around, and tyson recognizing that he led the way for tyson. that and tyson, at 80 has been performing steadily for half a century. wiped away tears at the group sing a long to four strong winds

P1010262

P1010262, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

P1010168

P1010168, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

1920s masonic chair

Finland, later in his life, disavows his drawing of fantasies were political.

Christian Big Game Hunting Safaris

fantastic long form essay on Kael

some notes on philipino horror

texas on the foreground  of decimating abortion funding.

19th century leeds circus poster moe here 

Rich Jurqaicz does some of the best long form cultural writing, and this one on the seminal disco producer Patrick Cowley is pretty fantastic, it's too bad he writes for gawker. 

Mickalene Thomas 's work, in how it refuses white taste, how it uses african american vernacular work from jet or ebony, how she piles up signs, how she plays on the edge of camp, often using material like veneers and glitter. the interview with kara walker, as smart things about what the politica implications of that might be 

20 covers  from US Space programs. 

P1010924

P1010924, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

album list, nearing the end of 2013

1. doris, earl sweatshirt
2. electric lady, janelle monae
3. yeezus, kanye
4. coin coins 2, montnna roberts
5. spring break here to party , luke bryan
6.  long live asap, long live asap
7. saab stories, action bronson 
8. watching the mvoies wiht the sound on, mac miller
9. heart throb, teagan and sarah
10. blurred lines robin thicke
11. wise up ghost elvis costello and the roots
12. , like clockwork. qotsa
13. the harder, etc neko 
14. am, arcitch monekys
15. the bones of what you believe, chvrches
16. bangerz, miley
17. like a rose, ashley monroe
18. build me up from bones, sarah jarosz
19. lets face the music and dance, willie nelson
20. random access memory, daft punk
21. jason isbell 

singles list

1. Blurred Lines, Robin Thicke
2. Get Lucky, Daft Punk 
3. Dusty Money, Sissy Noby 
4. This Lonley Morning, Best Coast
5. Luke Bryan - That's My Kind of Night
6. Sarah Jarosz - Build Me Up From Bones
7. Sleigh Bells - Bitter Rivals 
8. Kcee - Okoso 
9. Chantal Archambault - Tomber Frêle 
10. Xenia Rubinos - Whirlwind 
11. Pet Shop Boys - Love is a Bourgeois Construct 
12. Brandy Clark - Stripes 
13. Justin Moore--Hieney
14. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Despair 
15. Kanye West - New Slaves
16. Ashley Monroe--Two Weeks LAte
17. jason isbell elephant
18. miley look what they did to my song ma
19. drake, 5 am in toronto
20. anna kendrick, vups 
21. Clarity” by Zedd ft. Foxes
22. La Femme - Nous étions deux

often the phone calls, and the social media are about ideas, working thru projects, talking about whats next, o what ive read or what ive had to read or what im writing,

just to convince myself 

get up b/w noon and two (precluding any earlier meetings)

correspondance, email, social media, occasional writing from two until four or so 

dinner or social time or classes until 9 or 10 (including phone calls)

writing in late evening 

online after writing done 

dinner at liverpool house w/ wendy--four kidnso f mushrooms, eggs adn cheese  with polenta sticks, liver au povire avec heritage onions, poached pears wiht ice cream and shortbread. an excellent manhattan, an alsace resigling, a coate syrah, and two glasses of muscat pope, none availble at the saq.

P1010540

P1010540, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

P1010415

P1010415, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

Notes from the Dale Martin Symposium last wek

The questions about what love is should change:

what is ethical love
is ethical love always situational
does xian identity construct itself around these ideas of ethical love
can harm be loving
when is harm love (ie how and when is it ethical for me to hurt someone, when does the hurting help)

Paul leaves out the first commandment and says only the second is vital.

the ethical requirement of the centrality of self

Christanity--who is xian and how it is defined, could be seen as a kind of ramily reseemblence, or poitns of family resemblece (cf wittgenstein)--in this way, the idea becomes that good scholars dont draw liens

the tension b/w religious work and theological work:
in theological work, the body of christ is a real, imperial thing in the world, encompassing not only everything in the world, but everyone who has ever been a xian

We all change, and where you end up changing cannot be seen from the beginning

Self deined as a William James style american Prgamistist
Religion becomes a question of what do people actually do. (which leads to a devolped common sense/habitus, and notes what makes this xian)

Hauwerwas:
He has railed against the sticky liberal ethics of love, seeking to replace it with McIntyre's ethics of virture, construct this ethic of love, but you cannot prescrbe virture either.

sometimes the loving thing to do is to move beyond justice.

train audience in hearing agape eros philos, but those terms are not that neat.

ie in the passage about Peter Do You Love Me, the switch b/w agape and philos--little difference there.

how do we make these dsciourses female, transgender, queer

Maureen Tilley

The erotics of male friendship in augustine

the idea of erotic and platonic love are less of two solitidues, texts that do not cross the stream, and more of a specturum.

calling a body ensouled meant it was alive

the homosocial nature of beranrd of clarvieuxs discussion of song of songs--accounts etc

i don't understand exactly how this works  but apparently manipulating milliseconds of time allowed someone to steal a huge amount of money from the federal reserve.

nice little radio peice on the 50th anniversary of Ruscha's 26 Gas Stations. (He talks about showing it to people who worked in gas stations versus art world conversation)

the best thing about this flickr collection of match books is how they are shot.

private currency  made in Weimar Germany.

Stan Bitters cermaics are kind of delightfully ugly, great vintage photos (they are also huge, and the colours just don't work, and thus work)


Sacred Harp Singers sing the Mercy Seat.

scan of evangelical document against D and D from the 80s.

this anthology of american religious writing, starting with whitman and ending with francine prose reading whitman, seems interesting.

the mountain goats  live at this years newport folk fest.

haunting essay on amy grant.

early industrial design possibilities for bell's telephone keypad designs.

chris piuam's poem  based on a text by me

text and photos  of Dom Hans Van Der Laan, modernist architecht of religious spaces in Holland.

P1010387

P1010387, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

P1010291

P1010291, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

So I went to the Dale Martin lecture (Sex and the Single Saviour, The Cornithan body; now at Yale time at Rose and Duke)

We've been sort of talking around this idea of celibacy and xian identity for a while, and i think that Martin really pushed the idea logically forward--and he worked pretty heavily in the bible as well. I have five or six thots below. (Spencer you can mock my spelling of the word thot)

1. The idea that the body in the two origin myths in Genesis did not suggest two complimentary selves, but an ideal androgynous body. Christ and Paul, in their discussions of the return of the flesh, was talking about this perfectible body. (see also Wayne Meeks The Myth of the Androgyne) 
2. That Paul, borrowing from the stoics, not only prioritized celibacy over marriage.But it is impt to remember the Stoic Philosophy suggested that people should be married, that the philosopher should fuck his wife, and that he should not have pleasure in fucking his wife. So, the Pauline ideal is not a love marriage that will provide a steam valve for stray erotic or romantic feelings but that a marriage should be emotionless and sexless. 
3. That the problem then with feelings of sexuality that burns (i,e if it is better to marry than burn, what are the implications of this burning....) If Paul is inheriting a levite concern about the connections between a geographic space and a personal space--that the defilement of the body is defiling of the people which is defiling of the land (cf the overlap b/w Romans and Leviticus)--you can see this esp. in 1 Cor 6, where xian men who penetrate a prostitute plunges the member of Christ into a polluted world--where Christs body is penetrated by the world, where fornication causes Christ to be penetrated. 
4. This continual discussion of the word penetrated, on the idea of the defiling of Christ, is thruout jewish and xian scripture--all of this suggests that the passages which forbid sexual acts discuss the degrading of bodies, which mirrors the failures of patriarchy. ..
5. in this sense, the reinforcement of patriarchy has a numbers of odd off shoots-for example, in Pseudo_Pauline texts, superiors are told to love there inferiors, but not vice versa, and in early  xian texts, that were way beyond even being deutrocannonical, the more a text encourages women the more it is aestetic, and vice versa. 
6. which  is slightly different then the holiness codes of the OT--(i mean the idea that same sex behavior disrupts hierarchy is still there)--so the sexual ethics where men having multiple wives and concubines has been placed aside for example, which suggests that even w/i the xian corpus the meaning of sexuality evolves and changes thru-out a text t hat is not supposed to. 

So I have questions: 

1. Do  men who have sex with women in the prioritized space of the marriage bed, deny themselves pleasure. If they commit explicit acts that Paul guides against--then are they not committing queer acts, and in this queerness, denying their marriage rites, and by queer acts i mean everything from sex for pleasure, women on top, to masturbation, to oral sex, to anal sex to etc etc. Does the possibility of sanctified christian blow job exist? 
2.  If the perfect body is an androgynous body, how does that complete against the idea of complimentary philosophy? How does it argue against the obsession with fecundity? 
3. If queer sex is marked not by act, but by profligacy, which is something Paul hints at, in his discussion of fouling Christ's body, then is non profligate msm possible? 
4. Is there a possibility for a female sexuality to emerge from the dialectical pattern found in the early tradition
5. If we think of the scripture has having a kind of fluidity within a tightly revealed social context, how far can this script move and stay within that tradition? 
6. The more and more I get out of radical queer attempts to push forward this agenda, is not an inclusion, but the idea that all kinds of sexuality that we hold post-enlightenment as morally good, and perhaps even healthy and necessary are profoundly different than the expectations that are given for our traditions and scripture... unless you look at the men of the old testament, which you know, doesn't leave women any place...
7. Which suggests a neo-liberal, heavily codified, state sanctioned gay sexuality, allows for a mainstreaming of queer sex, but will eventually abut the problem put forth by 1. 

it's a mess. 

even tho it was his birthday, owen pallet bought me champagne.

P1010268

P1010268, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

P1010831

P1010831, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

P1010384

P1010384, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

P1010053

P1010053, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

P1010359

P1010359, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

Jimmy Buffet is kind of genius. He parlayed the same kind of music for decades, made a fortune slinging it on tour, had a bit of a cult following, set up a batch of restaurants, made the brand perfect and seamless and middle American. When he figured out he was getting a bit stale, he went knocking to Nashville. Or Nashville figured out that they needed to preserve an aging A-List while trying to convince us a B List could come up from the minor leagues. So he talked to Kenny, and Kenny figured out how to work out making money on a set of side businesses (the specific nature of the Tequila came from Sammy Hagar, and if you were a mathematician, Country's Taste could be straight in the middle of a Venn Diagram between Kenny. Sammy and Jimmy). Zac Brown Band realized that if they were doing a beach album, they would have to play the same game, and they went off and talked to the Sybil of the Keys. They kept playing back and forth--kept recording together, kept working it out. They couldn't quite do the tropical thing, because Keith has been running on creative fumes since Toby did Stay in Mexico in 2009. So, they looked at what was playing--saw how much Brantley Gilbert's Country Must be Country Wide cribbed from I Love This Bar, noticed that they both had a restaurant that needed to be propped up, thought about some excellent cross marketing, stuff that could be played on Wednesday nights at Jimmy Buffet's Cheeseburger's In Paradise or Toby Keith's I Love This Bar and Grill, and make some money on the up-sold margaritas, and put something out that was just gorgeous in it's cynical reserve. Jay Z should bow down.The best thing about all of this--is how ingrained Buffet is in Nashville--he was a song writer in the 60s, and he has been in and out of the market for a long time, and really set the whole thing off with Alan Jackson in 2004. Toby's 2009 song is a five year old attempt at reclaiming something from 2004. The 2013 song is an attempt to reclaim something from 2009 which tried to reclaim something from 2004. But Because Buffet (and really Toby) are so damn good at playing the markets, noting were the demographics are, and making product for a fairly tight niche audience--and are realizing that country, because of it's regional and social cachet, is one of the last few niche markets left, and because that niche market depends both on touring and on localized spaces where those communities can get together between touring--and also knowing that in the suburbs those spaces are usually chain restaurants--and chain restaurants depend on theme and brand...and lastly, that they are brands. It is a perfect circle of working out the product for the money. The song's production, its "fun", its elegance in how it knows its market--it is more a Warholian artifact of working class realism ("What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking" except a blended margarita during singing Karaoke at either of those places has this glamor and anti-glamor--it is Toby or Jimmy, but Toby and Jimmy are just like us, and maybe one day we can have this lux leisure time, and to do that, what we need is another round.  That kind of work can only be done if you spend as much and as much effort in figuring out which way the business is going, and if you have enough wisdom to know where it has been. The hamburgers might not be Edenic in Cheeseburgers in Paradise, but that shit is fun. You might not Love This Bar and Grill, but you damn well know that if you go in on Mondays and you are in the miltary, you get 20 per cent off. That is more than enough. (The song is for the marketing, the text itself doesn't matter much)

P1010777

P1010777, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

P1010472

P1010472, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

P1010018

P1010018, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

P1010563

P1010563, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

"Instead of intersectional wedges, or islands, then, come situated moments of unity and divergence as we examine the lines that are drawnbetween andaround people, the points at which ‘personal experiences’ come together and split apart. The material, relational and embodied consequences of these shifts through time can take centre stage, and affiliations become more than an empathetic gesture. "

Margaret Gibson"Intersecting Deviance: Social Work, Difference and the Legacy of Eugenics"

Trauma and joy abstraction the self from the idea of the self. Both reflect though absences--in not knowing where one’s body is, in aphasia or aphonia, to feel physically separated from the corporeal. The absence or negation from “the real” marks their most explicit similarities.

Two of the most obvious examples of this negation, are Ida Bauer’s discussion of her traumatic history, to Freud who later canonized it in the case study Dora, and the 15rh century mystic Teresa De Avila Autobiography. These two texts are useful, in that they provide a chronological spectrum between early modernity and late modernity.

As Helene Cixious argues in her play Portrait of Dora, the creation of Dora as a narrative of trauma was the creation of a separate selfhood. This mark of isolating the self, could be found in how trauma followed systems like melancholy--moving from moods to states to problems elucidated by medicine, to biological systems.

If how trauma and melancholy have a remarkable similarities, then joy must have a similar narrative. But Joy is still considered strange, and it’s relationship to the body is still marked by a different kind of rupture. Comparing these two authors, centuries apart, becomes a way of noting both how the ruptures of joy and trauma can have similar shapes, but how that shape has been molded differently, and how joy’s linguistic presence might displace trauma and melancholy’s prioritized place in the depictions of the lived experiences of modernity.

:  also, can we talk about lucite

 Sent at 12:04 PM on Sunday

 me:  and how much io love mucite

or the luke bryan in nytimes

 Sent at 12:10 PM on Sunday

 Josh:  what's he doing there?

 Sent at 12:19 PM on Sunday

 me:  its an epic  takedown of him and country music in general

i think they are w rong

but its a br illiant peice

 Sent at 12:20 PM on Sunday

 Josh:  who wrote it?

 me:  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/arts/music/luke-bryan-the-leading-gentleman-of-country.html

curracama

 Josh:  thanks

 me:  i think its much better than he does

 Josh:  i agree with his general negativity toward luke bryan

that spring break album was terrible

but i read on

 me:  i kind of loved it

 Josh:  HE WON FUCKING ENTERTAINER OF THE FUCKING YEAR?????

 me:  but it has a v. spec purpose

and that purpose is fulfilled

hes not justin moore

 Josh:  "there is perilously little to say about Mr. Bryan"

Caramanica is SO GOOD

 me:  he has three problems

a) he doesn't think that country ever had a pleasure principle

b) he thinks that Bryan should be doing something more than he is

c)  that Bryan is v. good at his limited range

d) he has a large, juicy ass

 Josh:  wait, are these caramanica's problems?

 Sent at 12:28 PM on Sunday

 me:  i think so

 Josh:  yeah, i guess suburban country's nothing new

but shouldn't Bryan be doing more than he is?

 me:  why

there are other people doing other things

 Josh:  like, picking songs his drummer might enjoy playing?

 me:  do you expect justin townes earles or jason isbelle to write about fucking soriroty girls

?

 Josh:  kenny chesney has written well about that

and sung well about htat

and luke bryan hasn't

i mean, his songs just sound thin and dead

 me:  define thin

 Josh:  the sound of the Spring Break songs seemed really tossed off

not tossed off in a rowdy garage rock way

just like everyone got into the studio and did the bare minimum

demo quality

(bear in mind, i listened to this once and grimaced and returned it to the library)

 me:  i dont know

 Josh:  the lyrical signifiers contained nothing new

 me:  its young, dumb, and full of cum

thats a legit market

and for a genre that has always been tense about explcit sexuality

i welcome that

he has a great voice

and the skeletal quality has a kind of solid quality

i mean its not genius

its often too easy

but ...

 Sent at 12:35 PM on Sunday

 Josh:  i mean, i was impressed by the significance that a Luke Bryan Spring Break album even exists

and he does have an appealing warmth to his voice

but the warmth just seems to sit there

i don't sense he can do anything outside a very narrow range

 me:  i think that blankness works as a channel for the audience

and the range is intended to function as a conduit

and i think the rship b/w the audience and the performer

is something new

 Josh:  really?

 me:  it foregrounds the audience

it tears down the fourth wall

 Josh:  what's different than kenny chesney's relationship to his audience?

oh, i see

 me:  chesney still maintians its authority as performer

i mean i think t hat what people read as blankness or thinness

is really a pulling back

to foreground the audience

to allow for the audience to have a live expereince

 Josh:  but

 me:  which sells records in a time when records arent selling

 Josh:  but

why can't you have a "live experience" with someone who's actually a good singer?

the spring break eps and album struck me as souvenirs

the kind of thing you'd buy to remember your hedonistic weekend where you saw the one third-rate country singer whose name you can't remember

 me:  but they remember his name

the artist of the year is votedo n by fans

 Josh:  because they bought the ep!

 me:  but the fan culture of luke bryan is strong

they love HIM

 Josh:  but why?

and wasn't your argument that they love themselves loving him?

 Sent at 12:42 PM on Sunday

 me:  my arguement

is that luke bryan's warm, congenial

quite smart perfomative quality

suggests a new kind of realtional aesthetic

that country has tried to foster and failed

do you want to pitch this somewhere?

 Josh:  i wanna pitch luke bryan into the roiling sea

no, but

and is his relational aesthetic defined by being warm, congenial, and smart?

(which, i don't get "smart" from him, but let's set that aside)

 me:  his metagame is hella smart

his game game is dumb

hes the judy holiday of country music

 Josh:  yeah, that's what i thought

black and white actresses are where you go over my head

but i'll trust you on that

 me:  born yesterday

 Josh:  but are you saying that country has tried and failed to develop a warm and congenial relational aesthetic with its audience?

and luke bryan has finally succeeded?

 Sent at 12:49 PM on Sunday

 Josh:  because dolly parton

 Sent at 12:50 PM on Sunday

 me:  dolly parton had tragedy

and no one every thot that they were dolly parton

except dolly

 Sent at 12:51 PM on Sunday

 Josh:  so are you saying luke bryan is the first country star onto whom an audience can project themselves?

by which you mean, "think they're as good as"?

 me:  http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/435617?rpp=20&pg=1&rndkey=20130812&ft=*&deptids=11&when=A.D.+1400-1600&who=Bartolomeo+degli+Erri&pos=1

exact opposite

no project

ion

(this is a ne w thesis i am still working thru

)

let me restart

four thots

a) country has always pretended to have this down home roots aesthtic

b) it held in tension t his need to be a performer

and a need to be part of the audience

c) for a bunch of reasons, countrys suburban roots right now have placed most of the money in audience participation venues that reward tailgating, and big auadiences, and partying and

etc

its a difft kind of work

d) so a few years ago a bunch of people asked questions--how do we rework this balance. i mean you see things like fanfair from the 60s that this balance always occured

but the fans now have all the power

and so, chesney, mcgraw etc

had pushed the balance a bit

but were still pretty heavily in favour of boundries

five thots

e) bryan and his ilk gave up on the boundries.

in that his work is entirely constructed to play w/ the fan culture

which i think might be new

and this might be pitchable

and i mean its obv. false--see erick church playboy fiasco

 Josh:  yeah, this is good stuff

 me:  but ITS FUCKING FASCINATING

 Sent at 1:00 PM on Sunday

 Josh:  but still, there's a difference between analyzing how Luke Bryan works

(and the inexplicable phenomenon of why people buy his albums)

and calling his music good

i can't fault caramanica for thinking he's boring to listen to

 me:  i do think hes good

 Josh:  and caramanica's no traditionalist

 me:  in the sense that he does what i need him to do

he makes me dance, he turns me on,

i mean do we get angry at pitbull for making fuck and dance music

why are we angry at bryan

 Josh:  PITBULL HAS A PERSONALITY!

(i do like "country girl shake it for me" -- THAT seems new, absolutely modern, etc.)

 Sent at 1:04 PM on Sunday

 me:  and it took me a long long way to get there

also, do you know

he respects the womens autonomy

this kind of libertine personae is hella more interesting and less dangerous than lets say justin moores new one or kip moores hey pretty girl

 Josh:  "hey pretty girl" is worse than "crash my party", it's true

ok, i should turn in

it's been a pleasure