watching the film sexual instructions for trainables ca 1975, from the NHS, i was suprised that the tools they suggested using, were used when i was in the hospital in 95.

kirk cameron's theology is suspect

Those who say Yuskavage’s figurative skill makes her paintings good don’t grasp that if rendering figures realistically equals skill then the makers of nineteenth-century Victorian nudes and painters like Bouguereau would be the greatest artists of all time. Yuskavage’s beanpoles, voluptuaries, and ugly ducklings make it clear that her work is less connected to classical art than to calendar illustration, cheesecake, dirty playing cards, Vargas, and Thomas Kinkade. These aren’t meant as insults. Yuskavage’s influences also include Hallmark greeting cards, Russ Meyer, the Hudson River School, Maxfield Parrish, seventies Penthouse, Impressionism, third-string Italian masters, and the kind of naturalist kitsch the Nazis liked. This mix is kinkier and more interesting than any discourse about technique and critique.

Saltz on the New Yuskovge show

sharry boyle is the new anslem keifer, fashionable, properly polticial, with a solid historical background, and passable formal skills, who is not saying anything new and mistakes cliches for some sort of universal depth. like keifer, she will be forgotten in a decade, and the work she is ripping off might be more interesting then the work she is creating.

the irish famine was mostly due to the fact the more nourishing crops went to england, and the potatos were used to feed the natives.

i think maybe information control is a nessecesity, and privacy is not a bad thing, and i over rate, or misdefine transparency.

1. 40 thots on 1998's wild things
   
2. sunshine noir is about los angeles, where the sun refuses to correct, or the city is so corrupt that even the sun cannot correct the filth, it cannot be bleached clean. to move the sunshine noir to flordia moves it into some kind of swamptrash aesthetic, where the sun aids in the mold and festering
   
3. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_6_45/ai_n24242080
   
4. or at least the sun/shadow become an explicit symbol of class, the sunny and the shadow side of the street, just as lizards in terrines, fished barracudas, and the like extend the idea of predator thru out the ecosystem of people, esp. women. (no one is sure about what is happening, the cops play less good/bad then suspsicious/gullible (the father of neve cambpells carachter wrestles alligators) (more about woman, the judge is, the two girls who ocherestate the double/triple cross, the cop who actually knows what is going on, the matriach) (not that it is a film of female enpowerment
5. the colours, the lurid green of the hotel room where the champagne is unveiled (the gun as a champagne bottle?) (modified phallus?)
6. neve campbell smoking grass while the sounds of frogs, crickets and cicadias in the background, and kevin bacon in an undershirt and a uniform hanging open, seduces and then threatens, he becomes one with the snakes, the alligators, even the cicadias,
   
7. the best thing that richards has been in, is this, which mocks the heavy acting, think of jodie foster in the accused, and then think of a teenage girl who is thinking of that as a way of learning how to play for the audience, and then think of a 30 year old pulp actress playing a teenager, who is learning from a teenager, how to be a teenage victim
8. the movie careens between bad and good, between over acting for the sake of charachter devolpment and over acting because they are just lousy at there jobs, esp the court scenes, the difference between good, good/bad, bad on purpose, and bad bad is a minefield.
   
9. the question then, is how self aware camp, can camp be created on purpose, can camp be defined as the gap b/w drama and melodrama, the after effects of wanting to do the right thing, and failed, ie is camp a textual mark of failed ambition, if that was the case, what about a movie that has an ambition of being trash, about not being about anything but guns and tits, but becomes a fable about class, money, gender, sexuality, desire, and genre.
   
10. if you shoot things low enough, then you can only extend the reach then, right?
    
11. the film is shot thru with oblique angles, thru video tapes, thru tracking shots that suddenly end, mise en scene crowded with tropical foliage, fog and mist, concentrating on the furniture and wpa murals of the courtroom thru first person shots that radically merge or whipchange into third, how the obligatory cat fight is shot in hypercloseups, mostly under water, and how exxaggerated that is, and how that turns into porn ( the formal choices of the film maker add it to the plotting.
    
12. compare the use of juried/judicial language, the language of investigation, guilt, innocent, and heavily mediated desire in this movie, esp in the complicity, and the difficult questions of guilt/innocence and the same questions used in to die for, van sant was more obviously working with satire, the line is clean and sharp, there is no question of guilt and innocence. though there are elements of satire (perhaps bill murrarys great lost role as a shyster lawyer)
13. the plot for the first hour or so, 45 minutes or so, does not indicate conspiracy, it seems to be a pretty standard procedual, the threesome is where everything hinges, and is as shocking because of issues of consent and conspiracy, it becomes an arguement about the liberation of teenager, and it is incredibly hot
    
14. the phyiscality, the sexualised swagger of matt dillion, and his every day boy kind of non acting acting, is really interesting here, because it might be his most self aware roll, and it is where he refuses to play simplified heros or romantic leads, he is better here then the oscar fest of crash.
    
15. it is also a movie, even if it has denise richards and neve campbell, it eroticises the flesh of men and middle aged men, with as much of the gaze as it does nubile women, it does not discrimiate, the steam that rises off the bayou makes everyone grimy and sweaty and wet.
    
16. or at least it as much female as male, the scene where denise richards and mat dillon talk on the phone after the murder, both are shirtless, both are shot from the waist up.
    
17. kevin bacon with the white short sleeves, the conserative ties, the avaitor glasses, looks like how he did in jfk
18. the interesting thing about bacon and dillion in this film, is that they are the two actors who are in everything, (Dillion: 15 Roles as an Actor in the Decade since the movie was released) (Bacon: 20 Roles as an Actor in the Decade since the movie was released)
19. Daphne Riga who is the only person of colour in this whole movie, is the moral centre, no one knows what is happening, but she is the first to disbelieve the rape, and the first to suggest a conspiracy, and does not want to look for the body,
    
20. great one lines: ken, i dont fuck my students; you wont shoot her will you, i dont believe she is armed; what if someone was trying to strangle me or fuck me in the ass even; you skank, you slut; i want you to nail that shysters balls to the walls, why dont you start fucking her again you can spend it together, you dont think that little freak susie is gonna hold out, do you?, if you want to give this idiot something to do, you can get him to look into the kennedy assination; was this before or after little you whacked little susie with a wine bottle; thats just like you sam, you always wanted to cruise
    
21. the sound track, all salsa, merinuge, cuban drums, sinous drums, swamp rock, that upbeat rap rock shit that was popular for 30 seconds in the late 90s
    
22. this could have been made with robert mitchum in the 50s, or by cassevetes in the 70s, or even as a 60 minute pre code thing
    
23. goth equals reading celine's death on the installment plan,
    
24. the outsider, the goth becomes a truth teller, the first 60 minutes work in the template of perry mason or law/order, but with actual language, with sex, with fucking, with scandal, of the words, all of the acts that you cannot say
25. except everything is voiced
    
26. the sex cliches are a mark of american trash, the scandal and the opedial under currents are expected, the thing that isn't the thing that becomes shocking, is that it becomes a trenchant study of class--like erin brokovich, but outside the oscar winners model--the scene where the van ryan woman is visiting the wrong sign of the tracks, with the pen used as a weapon, with murrary being contemptous of money, is much more of a transgression then even the threesome, that the teacher of the year trophy is shattered by richards charachter, over anger about breaking the family trust,
    
27. The second third of the film, after the first being the procedual, is a study then of how to get out of debt, how to aquire capital in ways both nefearious or not, it becomes an illustration of woody gutheries line in pretty boy floyd about the fountain pen
    
28. best scene with bacon: his whole little speech about the inherent instability of a triad, that he delivers both scenes back to back, one at the pool house, one at the shotgun shack of neve's charachter, giving just enough informaiton in just enough way, one realises how good of a sleaze he is
29. egoyan;s where the truth lies, which is a high class version of the same themes, less poverty, more hollywood, but with the three somes and the tits, and the eye for real estate, has the same kind of sleaze, and so did jfk, and there is great pleasure in bacon doing that repteillion evil thing, and how little he gets to actually play it---(one is reminded of hickey's essay on hank williams and how money makes everything cleaner, that you have more kinds of soap)
30. the second threesome scene, where the first is about unadularated pleasure, the second becomes a geniune rape murder scene, where the champane bottle becomes the murder weapon, and that 5 second scne, with three whacks, then crimson liquid, like blood, like semen, splattering across the screen, and dillion looking like mitchum in cape fear, they kill the poor one, and then him in hip waders and a black t shirt, thru the swamp, burying the body
31. a deliverance thing? (Walter as the blind banjo player)
    
32. my mom would kill me if she knew i took the rover (one liner, but one deserving its own point, because its such a nice coda to the death)
33. i wonder if those two muder scenes that are shot in an oblique angle, is done because it is cheaper (the scene where van ryan tells about the murder to the cops, begins with a tracking shot thru venitan blinds though)
34. bacon's ia investigation qoutes the kissenger line about enemy action
    
35. the only true nude scene is bacon's
36. and it happens, when they are together, and the discussion is only vaguely about the deaths of two women, it is mostly about money.
    
37. does it become a variation of 10 dead indians, with the last person left
38. but the interesting thing is, to explain no loose ends is an orgy of expoisiton, for a movie with almost no exposition about mystery, that it ends with "no loose ends", plus it has that great little suprise hook of one of the kids who should have been dead killing kevin bacon as shark bait
    
39. and matt dillion is poisoned, by the person we think is killed, the question of who is alive and who is dead becomes an almost permenatly unstable task
40. so the last one alive at the end of it is the swamp trash
41. and what we know is stattaco coda, little anecdotes caught in between the closing credits
    

Irony ruined everything. I wish my movies could have played at drive-ins, but they never did, because of irony. Even the best exploitation movies were never meant to be ‘so bad they were good.’ They were not made for the intelligentsia. They were made to be violent for real, or to be sexy for real. But now everybody has irony. Even horror films now are ironic. Everybody’s in on the joke now. Everybody’s hip. Nobody takes anything at face value anymore.
john waters

why is there no art from gay men about how awesome/awful meth is?

my dad is fucked up, beyond help, and unwilling to change himself, he is living in sqaulor, he is sick both phyiscally and mentally, and one of the reasons i left to go out east, is that living near him meant that i was stuck in the qaugmire. i no longer want him in my life, i no longer want him anywhere near me.

but mom does, and so i have to negioite ever subtly, and mom needs his company, so the question is, how do you work the middle, how do you avoid dad and not piss off mom. (breaking my moms heart is the worst thing i can do, my dad being proud of me, is take or leave)

how many soriroty girls does it take to screw in a light bulb
they dont screw in a light bulb they screw in a puddle of vomit

Heidi Newfield has come to prominence quickly, and both of her biggest singles are about what it means to be married, in a fairly conservative and traditional way. Johnny and June is a lachrymose ballad, continuing the sentimentalizing/canonizing (both in the sense of reasserting his place in the Nashville hierarchy and in the sense of making him a moral/religious model of behavior) that has worked as a corrective to the establishment ignoring his presence for decades. The song is not very interesting, and it should only be noted because it makes the chaotic narrative of Cash's life clean, and pedantic. The song ignores a myriad of burrs under the saddle, including but not limited to Cash's first wife, his infidelity, his drug use, his affiliation to the outsider movement, and his contempt for Nashville politics, it even (weirdly) does not discuss the profound protestant biblically conservative desire for order and justice that saved his life as much as Carter-Cash's hard work and long suffering.

Newfield is a contradictory figure though—she is young, of a new wave of pop influenced, sexually sophisticated, and musically synthesizing female singer songwriters that have emerged from the country scene in the last few years, including Kellie Pickler, Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood, Sunny Sweetam and half a dozen others. This is not a new thing, Country Music has a new wave every 5 or 10 years, from Patsy Cline in the 1950s, to Martina McBride in the 1990s, the only thing that might be new, is that the controversy about keeping country, or remaining a purity of voice, or avoiding the pernicious influence of Rock and Roll (a controversy that has been so persistent that it has lasted until Alan Jackson and George Strait's Murder on Music Row—which includes the lines: For the steel guitars no longer cry/And the fiddles barely play/But drums and rock 'n' roll guitars/Are mixed up in your face”

Newfield's track very explicitly contains drums and guitars in a mix that would horrify the traditionalists like Jackson and Strait, so what makes it country, is then the lyrical content, from the vernacular use of language (i.e. Here comes what Granny's been dreadin'/Belly full of baby in a shotgun weddin'), the signifiers of a rural working class poverty (Hand-me-down crib in a pick up truck), the use of moral language (Knocked up, shame shame/I'm gonna ruin my family name), the vague references to country music history, and how she is in the middle of a multi generational, matriarchal line.

Each of those can be critiqued widely, and delicately. The song is written by Angaleena Presley / Mark D. Sanders. Mark D Sanders wrote the Lee Ann Womack I Hope You Dance, a song of great manipulative power, filled with cliché and the kind of aphorisms that on the surface would appear to suggest taking great risks, but only those risks that will not result in seismic changes. Knocked Up is about radical changes to an adolescent's life, but written in a way that is light hearted and jokey—dismissive of how much effort it will take to birth a child, and completely ignoring the other options, to be an unplanned mother is a gift, that can not be given away or gotten rid of, regardless of how surprised or unprepared a teenager is to raise children.

That she depends on a hand me down crib suggests that she is part of a culture of child rising, and that others have done the preparation for her. In her collection of personal essays, Dorothy Allison talks about the difference between good poor, and bad poor—about maintaining a gentility and order about not having the resources necessary, and she succinctly talks about the moral language that is used to discuss the disordered: “I understand we were the bad poor: men who drank and couldn't keep a job, women invariably pregnant before marriage, who quickly became worn, fat, and old from working too many hours...” (Skin, 15) Just as the rock and roll guitars are considered criminal in traditional music, the idea of having babies before birth is considered systematically broken in the working class argot that Sanders employs. In order to prevent shame, in order to prevent being bad poor, she gets married.
This use of moral language puts it into stark relief to the country history the song embodies. There is a history of sentimental songs about young kids who get married, and survive. They get married against parental permission, and as Tanya Tucker writes “a head full of dreams/and faith that can move anything”. Unlike that song, or Trisha Yearwood's She's In Love with the Boy, both of which mention the dangers that these lovers go through, Sander's dismisses the dangers of desire in just two lines: “Daddy, he's a good lookin' guitar man/I was his from the very first kiss”. The line good lookin' guitar man is so general, and so historically minded that it can be expansively used to include basically anything. What means even less, is Newfield's explicit claiming of the work as a sequel to Loretta Lynn's The Pill—this is confusing, because she seems to be building up a brooder house, though thirty years ago Lynn was tearing it down.

Lynn wrote her work from a specific personal history, and so the song is a bit closer to One on the Way, but that song has explicit details of what it means to mother, and is actively contemptuous of those who are not mothers, or at least those who do not understand what it means to parent with unruly children and an unwilling husband. 40 years later, everyone mentioned in the song becomes a cipher; there is nothing explicit, no details in Knocked Up. There is a granny, a daddy, a teenage mother, and a guitar-picking boyfriend, but none of these characters have details needed, because the whole thing would become too dark, and too serious too quickly.

It is a problem that one also sees in Eric Church's Two Pink Lines, though it's use of a more lyrically complex narrative mediates humour. The text is sung in real time, with a teen-age couple in the back of a car, in the forecourt of a gas station, waiting for the results; “one means none and we're home free/two means three and a diamond ring”.

There are other similarities to the Newfield track. They are both rock and roll, though the Church track has a much more traditional, and much less studio based sound, and it is much less of a studio creation. The song rockets through the narrative, and the mix does not dip perceptibly in the middle, unlike Newfield. There are differences in the narrative as well. The narrator in the Newfield song is already pregnant, and is keeping the baby. Church has decided what he is going to do if his lover is with child; there is again no discussion of options, just a diamond ring and a life together. That they manage to avoid having a child, there is no discussion of the complexities of giving birth as a child.

Though there is a noticeable relief to the Church track, there is much less shame, though in Knocked Up, Sanders has made the prescriptive depiction of love, and Church has only included details of anxiety and the natural consequences of the wildfire sexuality of adolescence. The narrator claims to be willing to marry the woman, but makes no real discussion of love, even in the most conventional, heterocentric, and obligatory usages of those terms. The ironic use of the conventional expectations of the desire—is that the music has a raw edge, it would not be outside what would be called Rockabilly, 40 years ago. Bill Malone wrote about Rockabilly, "It may well be that the struggle to suppress country music, 'this deep sense of fear and resignation' by which it was constrained, provoked the eruption of country's deviant offspring rockabilly, and caused so many to rail against it as a threat to their livelihoods, if not their souls. Rockabilly, in the words of Malone' gave vent to impulses that had long been impeded, if often dormant, in southern culture, a hell-for-leather hedonism, a swaggering masculinity, or in the case of the women, an uncharacteristic aggressiveness and strangely a visceral emotionalism among both men and women that seemed as reflective of the church as the beer joints”
Quoted by David Shapiro, Blue Moon of Kentucky, Rising Over the Mystery Train, 30)

Eric Church has managed the emotionalism of Rockabilly, the roaring of sex, and the destabilizing pleasure of raw fucking, but he manages to contain it in a terror of the body, of the consequences of sex. So instead of maintaining the hegemonic requirements of musical purity, as was previously required by the Opry establishment, he decides his priorities, he is capable of discussions of class, of gender, of sexuality, and of morality, but his songs are very much grounded in a southern rock tradition. Or to put it another way, he is someone who is recognizes that the working classes, especially in the south and the Midwest who sing along to his songs, were raised not only on country, but a history of rock and roll—and there is an attempt to synthesize both of those instincts. (Eric Church sings about this instinct in the double entdre song, She Won't Leave My Willie Alone—where he talks about his love of Lynrd Skynard, the Rolling Stones, Madonna, the Beatles, and of course Johnny Cash, but “she keeps coming back, for the only thing that turns her on/she won't leave my Willie alone”--where a desire for musical purity is negatively contrasted with a musical profligacy)

To put it another way, Rockabilly is no longer threatening to Country Radio and country promoters, because the men who listened to it, and its antecedents in the last few decades, are the same demographic, one that is delineated in a brilliant essay by Adam Watts, collected in White Masculinity in the Recent South. A Real Place, Attitudes and Environment in a Southern Deer Camp uses the heavily localized space of shooting deer, to make two cognizant points about this new masculinity, both of which are talked about in both Two Pink Lines, and in other Church songs, including Guys Like Me, and These Boots. Both are ballads, and both are less guitar driven, less formally clever then the real time structure of Two Pink Lines, but all of them are excellent examples of Watt's thesis.

His first observation, (and it helps to think of the Deer Camp as a metonymy of places where working class men gather recreationally, away from the influences of women). The first is “"Few would claim to be working class, although all would claim to be working men...", the desire then, is to make a self identification about what one does, as opposed to what one is. Class becomes a series of cultural signifiers that are outside the Marxist language, of class identification. When Church sings “I spend Saturdays working on my truck/I don't like to fight/But I ain't scared to bleed/Most don't mess with a guy like me/Guys like me drink to many beers on Friday after work/Our best blue jeans have skoal rings
We wear our boots to church/So rough around the edges”, he outlines a set of specific cultural significations, related to how he interacts with his environment, that are outside of one immutable class.

The mutability of class is the other point that Watts makes. He talks about his membership in the Deer Run that he visits, that he uses to shoot... “Members of Clear Run, like those of other white Southern men, view the pursuit of white tail deer as a natural, even necessary reason for white Southern men and boys, increasingly suburban, or urban with predominately indoor lifestyles and careers, to enjoy the outdoors...” Though country is usually ex/suburban, and though increasingly those who are part of the working class function as service workers as opposed to manufacturing, there are a variety of self-identifying moral signifiers. The ability to take responsibility for unforeseen actions, to provide for women and children, and in the words of Two Pink Lines: “yeah her Daddy's gonna kill me and that’s a fact/maybe we'll just leave town and never come back/or I could stand there and tell him/face him like a man” or “not being scared to bleed” or the ability to kill deer to feed family for a living, are all things that are not only about working for a living, but an ethical desire to serve.

This ethical desire to serve is also found in how more working class people serve in the military, and the general military culture of the south and west, and is well documented in the widows/orphan military melodrama of Carrie Underwood's Just A Dream. The work begins with the first two lines of Eddy Arnold’s Make the World Go Away, and in the video, these lines play on the radio of a red convertible, where a blonde and handsome man sits next to her. He promises that they will be married, that there life will be eternal. He is a solider though, and he has died, and when he comes home, it will occur in a box. Since the war in Iraq has actually killed a large number of people, and since the war has killed more people from the south, then it has from any other region of the united states, this is one more track, like Travelin’ Solider by the Dixie Chicks, or Whiskey Lullaby by Brad Paisley and Alison Kraus or Arlington, by Trace Adkins.
Each of these songs is a ballad. They are all in minor keys, with glistening strings, a tremulous voice that is at the risk of breaking down as a literalazation of emotional break down of the characters. Each of them is about war either in general (Just a Dream, Arlington) or historical wars (Travellin’ Soilder about Vietnam; Whiskey Lullaby about the Second World War). Each of them are melodramas, often about sexuality and desire in the context of going off to war, or returning broken. The songs about the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan written within the boundries of music row are required to triumphant. (Because the audience of so called alt country is so politcally different, the expectations are radically shifted, which explains that they are capable of an explicitness that has to be spoken of in code for Nashville—the most obvious examples being Dress Blues by Jason Isosbell, and Steve Earle’s song about John Walker Lindh.)

The punctum that occurs in the Underwood track is one of youth, or a self awareness about youth. Though Natahlie Maines, Trace Adkins, or Brad Paisley write about being 18, they are two or three decades older then that. That Carrie Underwood sings at 18 about being a war widow, and both she herself and her audience is around that age, there is a clear transference in the autobiographical details. The song and especially the video then, become a hyper concentrated narrative about thantos and eros.

Within three minutes, and two verses, the happy tears and costumed procession of a wedding, and the the tragic tears and constumed procession of a funeral occur. There is also a Sirkian concentration on the narrative and moral power of costume. The white wedding and the black funeral, mirror reversals of narrative, told in the video, surround gender, and the expectation of gender much more closely then other texts metioned previously.

That she compares the death of her husband to a bullet of the heart, and that she refuses to acknowledge the event as really, provide two ways of working through the text. She becomes a martyrdom for love, in the same way that he becomes a martyrdom for freedom or patrotisim. Every detail, the shoebox of his materials that she carries to remind him before the wedding, the veil of the wedding dress, the trumpets of the military band that occur “two weeks before the wedding”, even the preacher man who prays over the future, and then the soul of the dead soilder, and the hymns of praise, and then the choir “singing the saddest song she ever heard”, the song is an incredibly sophisticated ode to the melodrama of permance and permanance dashed for no paticular purpose.

Reading Laura Mulvey’s essay on Douglas Sirk, the parrells between how he used a female sexuality, costume, décor, and rituals slyly hide narratives of polticial catasophre. The emotional rawness of personal tragedy become larger, they are used to document world scale events. She writes “The melodrama, the genre of mise en scene, site of smoitions that cannot be expressed in so many words, concentrated critical approaches to Holylwood that had tried to find a deceiphering mdode of reading the image on screen... “(29)
The images on screen, of a widow, and of a widow as the only acceptable female position in war, hide the difficulty of female reprsentation, just as the musical forms in Eric Church’s track refuse to discuss all of the options on hand, or how Heidi Newfield’s track heavily genderizes and dismisses the cataclysmic possibilties of an 18 year old with child. Melodrama can be an incredibly conserative form, in that it expects certain things from its particiapnts, and the rules of it’s creation become highly solidified.

An 18 year old, who has the desire to marry, to pine and to wait for her soilder lover to return from away, is so ancient and so expected, that it can only be discussed in a way that is heavily codified, that is intesified by history, by genre expecation, and by the poltiical implications of both new nashville, and the pyscho-geographical implicaitons of a working class life. But there are things that are left unsaid, even left unsaid (ironically) with in the separate traditions of alt or outlaw country, and that is it is not only fathers and husbands and sons that are dying in Afghanistan and Iraq, for the first time in American militiary history, is that mothers and daughters and wives are dying on the battlefield, they have become the same kind of soilder.

Considering that two of the most complicated narratives of the most recent war came from the most recent war, both from the place where country comes from. Both Lyddie England and Jessica . Those two, who were supposed to be the villian and the hero of this recent conflict, are much less stable, and much able to be melodramatized, or even written about in an easy or ready way. Even the pentagon’s attempts to make a new kind of femminzed, attractive, and yet strong/resilient hero out of failed.

There is a great amount of complexity that can occur in a three minute pop song, moral relevenace, and pyschosexual desire abutting personal history and social implications, and in this capacity what is left unsaid, or what is glossed over, or who is speaking, or how they are speaking, become an intergral part of the expereince.

The two songs that I have talked previously, are about women, but do not talk about the details of lives lead when one is 18 and scared, the choices about keeping the baby or not keeping the baby, about aborting it or adopting it, or even a song that mentions high school or morning sickness or what it means to piss on a stick in a filthy bathroom in a gas station or even discussions of what it means to have sex at 18, so the listener is forced to complete the narratives on hand, and these narratives change if the listener is a teenager, or an adult, or as children. This seemingly obvious statement is problematized in the Tim McGraw’s Red Rag Top, recorded in 1997, and included in his greatest hits, it is an ur text for the songs discussed previously, though it destablises them, because it is the only song that mentions abortion, and a song that talks about the teenage pregrancy, and its termination in a narrative of nostaliga and completion. In this way, it becomes a standardized or at least normalised text of regret and personal history, a discussion of youthful indscretion, and nostalgia and part of the history of that subgenre within the larger patterns of the industry.

the difference b.w warhols polaroids of sex parts, and the RAL polaroids of sex parts, is that warhol's worked as seperate works, and as part of studies for larger pieces, on their own and communally, i am not sure that RAL's work is anything but studies, and i am not sure his work is interesting enough that i care about his prep work. (there is prep work that is not as polyphonic as warhol that i still love on its own, tho)

lukas also uses american flag.

some opinons and questions i have had about art in the last week

1. robert atillia luckas, like most obscenity, risked losing irrelevance or sliding into kitsch, when he moved out of fashion (ie kees van doegen, beardsly), his recent revival that slides on his love of meth, and his desire for redemption, is a perfect way to make him seem more like goldin or arakai.
   
2. his polaroids are a catalog of the expected transgressive: sailors, men in suits, infantilism, nazis, soilders, people shooting up, skin heads--so you can sort out exactly who is he cribbing from, and weirdly, the aesthetics become a kind of historical slumming--so you can trace his sailors, for example from demuth to cadmus and platt lynnes to pierre et gilles, or from documentation to camp, and you can trace his soilders from sargent onwards, or his working class men all the way from the 19th century edwardians, to hockney, to tillmans
   
3. the impt difference b/w tillmans photo set of the red braced skin head, and lukas, is that tillmans uses piss, the weird thing about these work painting, is though they feature cocks, they rarely feature the fluids that cocks produce, tillmans has used both semen and piss, and for work that is supposed to be about fucking, it is weirdly reclacintrent, or at least uses the political/social implications of neo-classical msm gazing, but does not like to get into the muck) or to put it in another way, the only fluids on this work is the paint
   
4. the weirdest thing about the whole mess, is how little it turned me on, considering my penis has a hair trigger when it comes to the photographs subjects.
5. the work though, with its weird light, the muted colours that a polaroid and a dark room can achieve, the narratives and compoistion that recall the best of hockney's collage instincts, sometimes work despite of their implications.
6. reading jed perls lovely and discursive book on watteau, a nice overlap b/w the instincts of a writer and an instinct of the painter, has yet to convince me of watteaus worth, which is weird because shallow and pretty are two of my favourite things.
7. saw what is hyde's defacto retirement show, a gorgeous low slung, anthony caro, in silver steel, with some nice repeating diamond patterns, close to the floor, and not butch at all, mostly horizontal, and a huge hide painted sculpture, traffic cone orange, framing what ammounts to a square hole, ryan mccourt is negatively influencing me.
8. michaelngo's last judgement, and titan's flaying of marysas painted in the same year, reading the body embalzoned by sadaw, about early reniassance ideas of anatomy, he brings up the connections i have been thinking about, allowing it to be much earlier (late mediveal) and later (milton) then i thot
9. qoute: The potential vioelnce of the act of creation has been supressed by Milton in favour of a rapt and trance like meditation on the nature of mortal surrendar to divine knowledge and yet the congruences between Goldings violent version of Ovid...and milton's dream like version of Gensis are startling . God/Apollo has created within the male body, "a whole wounde" (Golding) or a wide wound (Milton. But where in Goldings verses the subject is left quivering and vulenable to the compu;lisve gaze of sicnece, in Miltons much later account the subject is allowed the possiblity of witnessing not only his or her non bodly displeasurem but also a recompletion as another, a sight which allows the closure of the wide wound with suddenly tumesenct flesh.
10. Naum Gabou lived the last 8 years of his life in Conneticut, and remade some of h is earliest construcvist peices in perplex, the same material that Tim Scott used for Congruences, one of which is in the AGA collection. Both SCott and Gabou stopped using the mateiral because of its instability. Gabou's collectivism allowed him to have no problems with the creation of new work recreating old.
11. more photo shows in edmonton then ever before.
12. blair has four comissions on 118th, each conceptual and text based, edmonton is growingh up?
13. One of the earliest Flavin Flourscent peices, transitioning between the icons of 61 and 66 was a peice for Jasper Johns, leaning on the wall at an odd angle, and bright bright pink, depending on how friendly they were, a wink or a nod or a snide aside about Johns queering of Duchamps readymades?
14. lots of qoutes from Grisellda Pollock coming up.

20 photos of the south, black and white, but tender and sort of evocotive (it is weird to think that in the last decade, after Christenberry and Eggleston, photos are still taken w/o colour in that area of the world)

elucha, for all yr lucha libre needs.

a full sized bear suit to wear as a sleeping bag.

an excellent article explaining the ideolgical and social implicaitons of the white house using the free and open source dropal for recovery.org. an article about the art they will choose for the white house, including a late 70s ruscha with the text:", “Maybe yes . . . wait a minute . . . maybe I’ll . . . on second thought . . . maybe no . . .” from the 70s.

From Untitled Album

All of the Possible Sharpie Markers.

botany swarm


Kirk Cameron's Firestorm, I will write more about this at a later date.


On post modern irony, self reflexise comedy, and the nature of drama after the holocaust:the kate winslet case study.

nicely written arguement about point and shoot cameras and good photographers, talking against the amatuer mistake that it is the equipment and not the image. the best example of this, for me is winnogrand as one example which has decent points (the grit and the dirt and the damp darkness of his rodeo work being only availble because of the ambient lighting there) and some cautionary tales (the 20 000 undelvoped images he left post death)

i have been intriguied by european translations of ovid's depictions of marsya as metaphors for the degradation of christ, as a kind of textual violence, but nothing really has come immediately to mind, i talked to chris about it, but he also was not sure. (link goes to an essay illustrated by the titan flaying of marsya (more informaiton in The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture, Routledge, Sawday)

From Untitled Album

Embroidered Knee MRI Slice, Embroidery on Cotton, Becky Stern, 2008.


more sneaky cuts to publishing via the tories.

la neighbourhood signs via flickr.

From Untitled Album

1949 Moto Major 350

paul housely is a young english painter, good/bad, and impossible to tell on the web, i am assuming thick brush work, garish colours, v. reminscent of kees van doegen, w/o the syphllitic tint of misogyny and sex panic, his portraits are less interesting then the random birds/flowers, etc, though i could do w/o the skull imagery.

a nice little essay on the new fred sandblack show, and his place in minimalism, with some great images.

ada louise huxtable reconsiders brutalism for the wal street journal.

From Untitled Album

Random Bullrider, quit looking angry, and love me.

oklahoma passes a weird states rights bill, that seems to be coded as a rebuke to the federal government, but I cannot read exactly what is happening--this seems to the first bill of 6 or so coming down the pike.

rob strong, american photog, really fantastic colours


Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.
Rocky Moutnain News uses the internet to discuss it's demise in print, after more then a century.

world of war craft steins.

G4TV lures young boys into sin, using video games.

jackson eaton does indie porn, but its sweet and well light.

From Untitled Album

Teeth, unknown artist, Rotterdam.


photos of the catastrophic large supplies of cars that remain unsold.

hogspear colonial leftovers, for all of yr imperal needs.

From Untitled Album

From the collection of Michael Jackson.

ray/crow

ray/crow
Originally uploaded by PinkMoose

The variety and conveience stores, so ubiquitously present throughout the entire GTA, from Scarborough to Mississauga, are such a thin margin business that they are constantly at risk of going under, and have to sell everything---lottery tickets and pornography, long distance cards and diapers, potato chips and injera to stay alive.

They become a shrine to ingenuity and multiculturalism, a metonymy of the intersections between culture and capital that occur in a city as large and as committed to multiculturalism as Toronto is. Because I am interested in these intersections, and because as part of my practice, I document the small details of quotidian urban life, I have been shooting convenience stores throughout the GTA.

As a kind of one-one cultural exchange, I want to reproduce the visual cacophony in the outside of convenience store windows with photographs on the outside of the Convenience Store gallery. Using cheap prints in a variety of sizes, I hope to literally commemorate the pyschogeographic history of the old space within the aesthetic confines of the new space.

"Steampunk: what happens when goths discover brown."

thot about doubt:

regardless if the priest in question was a pedophile or not (the text makes surity about that impossible), the film flirts with but does not state directly one of the more difficult problems with paedophilia, namely the people who commit it are often engaged in legitmate paedlogical tasks, and acomplish those tasks with skill and devotion, the problem then, is how does one acknowledge the positive qaulities of the teacher who has sex with his charges, while still recognizing the problematic nature of his or her actions?