Musings

We have been watching (in installments) a documentary on Andy Warhol over the past few nights. It's from the PBS American Masters series — quite good, I recommend it. When T picked it up at the video store, I sniffed with disdain, in part at its four-hour running time. More significantly, however, I have just never been an admirer of Warhol or of his work, or at least the parts of it with which I was familiar. T, on the other hand, is a huge fan ever since attending a large exhibit of Warhol's work some years ago; T has frequently cited this in-person exposure to the overwhelming collectivity and scale of Warhol's original work (rather than reproductions in books and magazines) as being key to appreciating the man, and he repeated this dictum at the video store in response to my apathy. I retorted with some pique that an artist should not require that we view their œuvre in person in order to appreciate their greatness.

The documentary served me up a modest slice of humble pie, however. Warhol's early commercial illustrations (mostly of shoes for fashion mags) are really quite wonderful, as well as his more private drawings of dreamy young men in the all-together. His inked line demonstrates, as the documentary discusses, a mastery of the blotting technique — a nice trick that creates a "printed" effect at once clumsy and delicate — but what the documentary doesn't talk about is the "continuously drawn" effect of the line in his figurative work, reminiscent of Cocteau and even Schiele. It's a technique (also called "blind drawing") that I've always loved but haven't had much success with personally: drawing without removing your eyes from the subject, in other words, not looking down at the page. Of course, the truth is that the great practitioners of this technique probably did look down at the page quite a bit, but their genius is in leaving the impression that their drawings occurred in one breathless unstoppable line, as if the act of creation were reduced to the pen and the subject, with the artist subsumed into one or the other.

But I declined a second helping of pie. Warhol was a fairly cold-blooded character — not that this should affect at all our appreciation of his work and, indeed, it was to an extent this aspect of his vision that made for his early Pop Art successes — but sooner or later, I think, this quality began to overwhelm his art. The celebrity portraits become repetitive, ditto the consumerist works, and the film work seems sort of lazy — a laconic quality that feels generally true of all his work from the mid-sixties on, as if once he had obtained fame, he realized he need do only the barest minimum to maintain it.

The commentators in the documentary wax eloquent about his extraordinary grasp of ideas — but these are their ideas, not Warhol's. Sure, Warhol provided an œuvre po-faced enough to support the projection of all sorts of ideas, but is this artistic genius or simply a gift for deadpan? And must I really be an art scholar to be elevated by his work? I don't know. One critic spoke of him as a sort of seer, predicting the furture of celebrity culture — but I don't know that Andy so much predicted it as perpetuated it. And from our vantage point in history, is this really something worth celebrating?

The Birthday of DemonDoll

Today is the lovely DemonDoll's birthday. When I first saw DD, I was just a little scared of her beauty, humour and fierceness, and in my heterosexual confusion, imagined I should bed her in order to overcome that fear. She dealt with it as she deals with most things — elegantly, directly and summarily: she snogged me. A snog (for those of you who are not familiar with the term, or who may be more familiar with the British colloquial definition of "kiss") entails having a hand clamped over your mouth, and then air blown up your nose. It is followed by a fair amount of dizziness and disorientation, as well as, if administered by DemonDoll, the sound of demented giggling and the irrefutable declaration that you have been claimed, just as if you were a branded heifer. And indeed I was: owned by her ever since. She has made me laugh probably more than anyone I know (or at least as much as Yatsu; combined, they are lethal); she has also dispensed some of the most reasoned and loving advice of my life; she is generous and brave and literate and bawdy and she loathes the word "utterly". There is, in short, no one with whom I would rather chew a bun. Happy birthday, I love you.

Tired, cranky

Hello. I'm tired. Why am I so tired? I eat well, I ride my bike about an hour a day. I go to bed early. I don't, however, always sleep immediately: T likes to read himself to sleep, and though he uses a discreet booklight, he has a habit of rubbing his feet together at every semi-colon — don't know why the semi-colons make him do that, they just do. Actually, I have no idea if it's the semi-colons; that's just one theory. I have many theories, as many as the sleepless, self-defeatist minutes I lie there, anticipating and timing the foot-rubs, interpreting, qualifying, codifying them, parsing the satisfied foot-rubs (a particularly elegant turn of phrase?) from the dissatisfied ones (a clumsily hanging participle?). They take on a feel of punctuation themselves, commas and EM dashes and ellipsis for the tedious ramblings of my insomnia. I need more coffee.

Have you been to http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/? Extremely diverting.

Holy expletives

I'm full of adventure-clicking today! I followed one of DemonDoll's "Not so silent lurking" links to Crazy Aunt Purl, who seems like a delightful loon. Her rantings brought back many a fond memory of steaming, gut-searing road-rage on the freeways of Los Angeles. I cannot tell you how unfit I was to drive in that city, possibly any city. That I escaped alive and (so far) ulcerless is a work of the Good Lord. Speaking of the Good Lord (and, boy, did I, during the righteous fury of my daily commute!), Aunt Purl shares a particularly fine example of one of my favourite cursing sub-genres: the Christ-based expletive phrase. Hers, which I intend to adopt and spread liberally north of the 49th, is "Jesus Christ on a cracker!" I love it! In Catholic school, two decades ago, I may have coined (the memory is dim) my stock favourite ever since: "Jesus Christ on a bicycle!" (Of course, Catholic school was a hotbed of heretical fecundity in these matters, including the irreverent alternative lyrics to the Christmas carol, "These Three Kings": "These Three Kings of Orient are,/One in a bus and one in a car,/One on a scooter, blowing his hooter,/Chasing his fat grandma." Also: "These Three Kings of Orient are,/Tried to smoke a rubber cigar,/It was loaded and exploded,/That's why they followed the star." Ah, the religious education.)

Back to the Christ-based expletive: though while not strictly a phrase, "Jesus H. Christ!" is probably the oldest living relative of this form, which counts amongs its ancestors such bygone gems as "'Sblood!" and "'Swounds!" And then there is the ne plus ultra of Christ-based expletives, the one that makes even a heretic such as myself blush, that I reserve for only the most insupportable moments of crisis (or no more than three times daily on the 101), the appalling, the effective, "Jesus Fuck!" And yes, it is with a considerable amount of shame (and just a soupçon of wicked pride) that I must confess to being its progenitor.

Next blog deux

Oh dear, sometimes "Next Blog" yields some very dirty results. Does "Horny Asian Girl"'s mother know what she's up to?

Next blog

I have never clicked the "Next Blog" link in the header before — until today. I was taken at first to a goth blog called RESURRECTION, written in Spanish. I returned to my blog and clicked "Next Blog" again: now, one called "Poor Since 1959". A delightful, time-wasting feature.

In other developments, the emoticon labs have come up with thrilling new technology: the unibrowed smiley-face, l:) , and the unibrowed grumpy-face, l:( . A momentous step for multi-culturalism. [Credit to DemonDoll and WGD for inspiration.]

Nouveau look

My blog needed to feel pretty again. Does anyone know how to change the little image at the top-left?

(Dear faithful DemonDoll...when all others had abandoned hope! ;) Which reminds me of a little-known fact, or to be precise, not-at-all-known by me prior to recently: the adorable smiley-face emoticon turned 25 this week. I think the winking emoticon is somewhat younger, and younger still its party-hatted cousin. I wonder, among the emoticons, which is the youngest? And are they agreed on their various ages, or is there acrimonious, ageist in-fighting going on behind the scenes?)

In the wind

Hmmm, seems nobody's reading. Well, come on, what does one expect? Absent for seven months, people have lives! That's fine, though...sort of comforting, the idea of not being heard, sort of like talking to yourself in a public place, something I love doing but so rarely indulge in, for propriety's sake.

This California same-sex marriage thing is getting my goat good. WTF??? This law has passed twice now, twice! What difference does it make to Schwarvbcjhgvznegger? And what right does he have to ignore the will of his legislature and millions of Californians. He stupidly claims that prop. 22 indicated the people's will to ban same-sex marriage, but this was passed seven years ago! Things are heating up, though: first, a call for his lesbian chief of staff to resign in protest, now the news that San Diego's mayor will sign the resolution to overturn prop. 22 and become a "friend of the court" in constitutional hearings currently underway, after learning that his grown daughter is a lesbian. This is what needs to happen. People need to start realizing their interconnectedness. Your Republican mayor has a lesbian daughter, your Republican governor has a lesbian chief of staff, your friends, your neighbours, your co-workers are queer. I don't think most people want to discriminate, but I think these connections are not easily made for many people in conservative communities: the media offers only stereotypes and provocations, and the queers who occupy these people's lives are in many cases too terrified to come out for fear of repercussions. I was just ranting off about Jodie Foster the other day: no, I'm not asking her to become a political mouthpiece for queers, all I'm asking, expecting, is that she realizes that her silence implies shame (whether she feels shame or not), and that she should not in any good conscience be able to continue profiting from silence while millions of queers are suffering for being out. Visibility is going to turn the tide, and one celebrity (for better or for worse) can count for thousands of non-celebrities. I am considering a boycott of The Brave One.

Here's an abstract nude I just drew; started out as a doodle, but I sort of like it. Not sure yet, but it may still be in progress.

Anger-management yogi-style

My therapist-counsellor who told me I had difficulty expressing my anger — the same therapist-counsellor who ditched me to go into private practice with nary a hint that I might follow him with sliding-scale benefits (express this, dick-sweat!) — offered the following constructive, non-combative technique for dealing with anger:

• Kneel beside your bed
• Raise your fists above your head and breath in deeply
• Bring your fists down forcefully on the bed, at the same time pushing the air out of your lungs
• Repeat until serene

I tried it once with good results — however, red wine, preferably half a bottle, combined with a slab of dark chocolate, is most consistent.

(Two in one day, nay, one hour — impressive, no?)

Long time coming

It has been almost seven months to the day since my last post, and though I've experienced the odd twinge of contrition, I can't say I've lost too many hours sleep over it. Am I not suited to the blogopshere? What makes for a compelling blog, anyway? And by that I mean compelling for the blogger. Most blogs are about the blogger; the blogger is, therefore, the main subject. Does it follow then that if a blogger is not interested enough to maintain her or his own blog, said blogger is not interested in themselves? I am starting to suspect I require a more compelling subject. Take this dedicated soul, for instance: pancakerecipes.blogspot.com. Clearly this is a compelling subject, for both blogger and reader ("bloggee" is not, I believe, an appropriate term in this case; a bloggee would have to be one about whom a blogger blogs, and despite my fondness for batter-based breakfast foods, I cannot bring myself to anthropomorphize them) — or is it simply a cry for help?