Yuletide Cultural Bullying

Wow - sometimes backsliding culturally goes so unseen and unnoticed, to where you wake up and think - huh - is it really a 1990-culture war all over again?  Eerily enough - 20 years later - the Smithsonian's move to remove David Wojnarowicz from the Hide/Seek exhibit, namely the "Fire In My Belly" video, is like a sad synchronicity. Something that's not grabbing headlines as it should be, and not angering enough people.  Just in time for Christmas - and even more sadly enough - on World Aid's Day.
It is, however, self-edifying on two fronts - The exhibit is called Hide/Seek: all about that gay and often hidden desire, so subtle and lurking that no one knew (or cared to know). The National Portrait gallery is showing the other "secret history" of America - one that angers conservatives if taught and expressed and causes religious fervor, such that, the artist is hidden under a campaign of intolerance.    The gallery has works that start to evolve and become more prevelant and then show what happened with the epidemic.   Maybe there will be a shift in heart among the intolerant to see an arc of work, then a crisis followed by many deaths.
And secondly, that Wojnarowicz was practically showing the stifling silence and censorship that was killing his friends and loved ones in his work (including this one). It is amazing that this has come up AGAIN. As pointed out in prior posts, the man meant not to go quietly...  He wanted to serve as cultural beacon - and his "One Day" work is very much the anticipated panacea of gay bullying if there ever was one, and this work here is very much a religious work (and derives images from biblical passages and themes) as pointed out by Andrew Sullivan.
So - we must say thank you once again for illustrating our point, Bill Donahue - your timing on World Aid's Day shows you've got real showmanship potential.    Fortunately for us (and unfortunately for you) - the world has a secular device called "the Youtubes", and while we email the Smithsonian to ask that they project this on the biggest wall possible - I'll gladly post this here...

Peel slowly...

Randomness (or this is how I spent my summer vacation while the world spun out of control...):

• 500 Pine Party - You can't return home. Even for a night. We've tried, but good attempt.

• Apparently , late-century art school transgressive passion is back in all it's androgynous Cate Blanchet fabulosity.
  

• But then again, so are hipster beer guts. No, No, no!!!

Idea for a reality TV series: Dinner Party Disorder - 2 people are given a mystery ingredient and a celebrity guest list. They are given one hour to clean their place and create a meal using the ingredient. They then have to entertain celebrities for approximately one hour. Merriment ensues. Guests leave. Last 20 minutes features the cleaning up in silence as waves of melancholy wash over the hosts.

• Ed Varga featured for Homo-a-go-go (*which I quasi-attended this year in SF) on Butt.
• Also featured - Sissy Nobby shows you how to do that thing (that i need to learn how to do by Saturday Night)...
• And while we're on the subject of freak dancing, is there such a thing as too much freak

Ways that my life currently resembles a Wes Anderson film:
Working out to Ziggy Stardust on my MP3 player next to a father and son in matching unitards.
Brightly colored zip covers on book jackets in Viet Wah.
The cab that takes me uptown.
A montage of various activities accomplished over the course of 3 months.
Ways that my life currently resembles a Hal Hartley film:
Repetition.

• You can buy shit from Tao Lin on eBay. Don't though - because he's going to teach us how to Shoplift from American Apparel soon enough.
• Finally - a lunatic fringe of our very own...
  

Precious Moments (in History)

I know that in many ways, it's a cardinal sin to go after people who completely do not have any sense of irony (with your own), and I also know that you should not track-back to someone's site unless you're 'pro' whatever freak flag they are choosing to raise at a given moment, but for some reason, I totally realized that this site here will explain everything to you about white people. No need to sign million dollar book deals from your own blog, or hijack the nation's attention through gay-baiting pranks. This site explains everything: Red States, 2004, Mythology, Creationism, Sense of Empire, Decay, Deliverance and Death. It is a symposium of all that is terrible and terrific in this county and exemplifies the true meaning of Christmas.

Sequins: Sequence: Sequinsissential

Ok - the last gasp from the spectacle that was the Jacko Memorial, and no more jokes: I point you to the quote from my more succesful doppleganger below (in his 96 reaction during the brit awards):



...and this quote from Momus:

Michael Jackson is not just the King of Pop, but the Last King of Pop. Three major factors will prevent there ever being another one: digital culture and its fragmentation of the big "we are the world"-type audience into a million tiny, targeted audiences; the demographic decline of the "pigs in the pipe" (the Baby Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y, who made pop music's four-decade-long pre-eminence possible); and the decline of the influence of the United States...
"I think we're seeing the re-appearance of class and caste. Michael Jackson's fame comes from a cultural period -- postmodern global consumerism -- when the distinction between high and low collapsed. When Pierre Bourdieu surveyed French cultural tastes in the 1960s, he found that blue collar and white collar workers had completely different cultures -- classical music for the brain workers, cheap pop for the hand workers. A few decades later, postmodern consumer culture had leveled that, at least superficially: now, people with college degrees spoke about Michael Jackson "intelligently", people from lower class backgrounds spoke about him "passionately". But everybody spoke about him. Now that postmodernism is coming to an end, and now that narrowcasting and social networking limit our encounters with "the class other", I think we'll see different classes embracing different cultures again. Things will settle back into the kind of cultural landscape Bourdieu described in "Distinction"."