The Twerking Class

Let's throw some Oscar Wilde at this whole Miley Cyrus thing: "Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike." 

I think all the people who are bitching and moaning about Miley's "performance" on the MTV Music Video Awards last week don't like her.  Period.  But I think they are more than grateful to her for the chance to be moralistic about the whole she-bang.  They live for this stuff, even while they dislike the "she" of the "she-bang."  In fact, the more they dislike her, the more it seems to fuel the outrage, until the whole thing tips over into somehow pitying her, and the backlash gets a backlash.  Case in point: at the beginning of the week Extra-TV was interviewing the morally outraged, anti-Miley contingent.  By Thursday, they had "style expects" on the show, talking about the evolution of Miley's style from "Disney pop princess" to "MTV vixen."

I guess you don't have to like her.  You just have to bloviate until it all collapses in on itself.  Then you have yourself a bonafide media circus.  Even Lester Holt has to talk about it.  Everyone wins!

What it comes down to:  pundits and feminists and activists etc. all need the Mileys of the world.  It's a cluster-fuck ecosystem.  They have to get outraged in order to be relevant, and the bigger and stupider the target the better.  All this 20-year-old pop star was doing is what pop stars have done since pop-stardom started.  She made a spectacle of herself using whatever cultural props and tropes were at hand.  At this point in the 21st Century, porn has become a second language, a way to usurp moral codes by just not being moral.  Porn equals fun now.  Its referenced in detergent and fast-food commercials.  Fine upstanding ladies have sex-toy parties in their mini-mansions.  It has become the go-to when you want to show both how open-minded you are and how "freaky" you can be.  Porn is now the primary religion practiced by pop-stars, and twerking is one of its primary forms of worship.

Miley went for it.  And it paid off.  She got exactly what she wanted.  She even probably wanted all the insults and memes and late-night-talk-show jibes.  This is her art.  She has become the neo-neo-neo-Madonna.  Madge almost thirty years prior did a rolling-around-on-the-floor-in-a-wedding-dress stunt on the VMAs that got her in "hot water" too.  And remember her glossy, awful Sex Book?  Remember her flaunting her "transgressive sexual power"?  Remember Camille Paglia?

I'm not going to go Paglia on this one.  I've never loved Miley.  I don't know if I like her either.  But I do kind of respect her just because she's blatant enough to cut through the bull-shit and create one of those media pandemoniums everyone in the media world loves to participate in, even while they act like it's the end of Western Civilization.  Miley has become a C-F industry this week. 

So I'm not defending her, or even pitying her.  Just appreciating her for what she is. 

All I am saying is "Give twerk a chance."

The Horror, the Horror

Some movies aren't movies as much as atmospheres that take over your consciousness for a while, and then linger, like cigarette smoke in curtains, leaving a taint that doesn't ever go away. 

Snowtown, a true-crime movie directed by Justin Kurzel and written by Shaun Grant, is one of those.  Based on the exploits of a serial killer named John Bunting that took place in a ramshackle Southern Australia suburb in the early 1990s, Snowtown has the depth and contemplativeness of a Terrance Malick movie with the hideous overlay of great horror:  it's a solemn mix/homage to Silence of the Lambs and Days of Heaven that could have been titled Nights of Hell.  What sets it apart from both those movies, however, is its dedication to not getting everything right.  The movie blurs and does not explain, which is totally to its benefit.  Kurzel and Grant want to give you experience, not exposition or explanation, so the movie feels dreamed up and hyper-real simultaneously.  It's a tone, not a show.  Moments collapse into other moments, banalities and horrors uniting effortlessly. 

The center of the horror, its architect and chief engineer, is John Bunting, played by Daniel Henshall.  Henshall's performance anchors Snowtown so deeply that you often forget he is acting or even in a movie.  Bunting is one of those big-mouthed working-class guys having breakfast at McDonald's with his other out-of-work buds, his big mouth and bravado making him the gang-leader, the chief executive officer of all losers and haters.  He has that charisma you can't really describe except to say it creeps most people out.  Most people, except for the lost, and Bunting stumbles onto a group of lost boys at the beginning of the film.  The boys have all been abused and neglected in a variety of ways, but their neighbor across the street, a pedophile, has taken lewd photos of them, so Bunting is able to use their hatred and vulnerability to get them to be his legion.  They harass the "pedo" until he leaves.  (The photo above is right before one of their "pranks."  Bunting buys them ice creams cones, and then directs them to use the ice cream as paint on the neighbor's windows.  They write "faggot" in soft-serve all over them.)

The boys have a gullible, sad, used-up mom, and their household is chaotic, dirty, but somehow so static and dull it turns into a den of lions without anyone noticing.  Serial killing just starts to happen, as if it is supposed to.  Boom.  Bunting uses the gullibility of James, the middle kid, to his benefit, eventually mentoring him into helping him kill his own brother, in one of the most bracingly gruesome scenes I've ever witnessed in movies.  It's like the bath-tub/chainsaw scene in Scarface, slowed down and transformed into a music-less horrible vignette that has both a gory power and an atmosphere of mundanity, cold-blooded and matter-of-fact yet feverish.  Kurzel shoots the whole scene without a lot of cuts, so you feel forced into being there, just like James is, until your gaze becomes coopted, and you feel an inability to escape, or even to look away.   

This is truly a horror movie at that moment, and in many other moments.  By "truly," I mean the carnage is not manufactured to amuse you; it is meant to horrify.  This is a movie that has such stellar technique to it you can't separate yourself from the surroundings; you are inside the trance.   A blood-hot, animal morality surges through Snowtown's bleak veins.  Kurzel isn't making a movie to teach you anything either.  He's making a movie that hypnotizes you into knowing (not understanding) what being there is like.

How Dare You!

Jared Dreyer did this.

W. C. Fields once said, "There comes a time in the affairs of man when he must take the bull by the tail and face the situation."

On the events page this week for "The (F)art Show," our new art exhibit curated by Golden Brown and opening tonight at Thunder-Sky, Inc., someone commented on another person's acceptance of the invitation to the show with complete and total outrage.  The thread has been taken down, but still it remains in my head, something along the lines of, "How can you go to this show?  It sickens me!  This is what is wrong with the art world today!  Instead of learning the craft, just doing these kinds of stunts.  It really is despicable."

Again I'm paraphrasing. 

But I think what the dude wrote was even worse, stilted and outraged and hilarious, concerning an art show that considers farting, instead of, I guess, the human form.  Or why women are mistreated in the workplace.  Or fame. Or any number of prosaic and lovely themes used for group shows all across the art-world universe.  (And what the hell is the "art world"?  Where is it?  Point it out to me on a map when you get a chance.)

What I'm getting at is that any subject an art exhibit tackles is completely arbitrary and doesn't necessarily mean anything.  The meaning comes from the work done, and how it's used in a show. Juxtaposed, installed, curated, the works in group shows spark off one another, and then you have a sort of compendium that addresses a subject without hopefully nailing it down, or even defining it at all.  "Farting" seemed like a really interesting and crude way to support this theory, and now that Kenton and David have installed, curated and juxtaposed the works they asked artists to make I feel pretty confident that you can make a really cool show out of anything, if you have the will, a sense of humor, and the balls to do it.

So back to the outraged dude on the Facebook events page.  Why did he feel the need to school the guy who had the unmitigated gall to accept the invitation to "(F)art"?  Beats me.  We're just small potatoes at Thunder-Sky, Inc.  Non-profit, not a lot of overhead, and absolutely no pretentiousness.  We scrape by and try to make shows that are funny, strange, thoughtful, and stubbornly what they are.  Because Raymond was all that and then some.  

Would Raymond like the show?  I bet he would.  Every toolbox we've archived is filled with joke-toys (like false-teeth with feet you wind up and they scuttle across the tabletop, etc.).  Plus he fashioned himself into a makeshift, slightly terrifying clown for Christ's sakes.  He had the unmitigated gall to go out in public in a clown costume and construction helmet, drawing buildings being torn down.  I'm sure that sickened a few people. 

Definitely not us.

“The (F)art Show” Official Statement by Kenton Brett and David Jarred

“The (F)art Show” is curated by  Golden Brown’s David Jarred and Kenton Brett.  Featured artists include:   Antonio Adams, Joel Armor, Mark Betcher, Emily Brandehoff, Kenton Brett, Golden Brown, Emily Caito, Jared Dreyer, Jen Edwards, Jonathan Hancock, Dave Jarred, CT King, Robert McFate, Bekka Sage, Philip Spangler, Anh Tran, Philip Louis Valois, Joey Versoza, and Carol Watkins. 

You might be asking yourself, “What is the fart show?”  To begin to answer this viscous question I would point to Philip Louis Valois’ “Recettes de Cul Puant.”  In this finely crafted recipe book Valois lists ingredients for dishes that can create exceptional and unique farts. Valois’ book is emblematic of The (F)art Show itself. Ultimately our visual feast was concocted so one could enjoy many incomparable courses in a flavorful buffet which mixes surprising materials with complex ideologies.

Now you may be saying, “Ok, but why fart?” Fartist Emily Brandehoff really answers this question clearly in her bio, “I fart, therefore I am.”  In this show we are striving to make highly conceptual art accessible and stimulating. Since everyone farts there is a common jumping off point for this brilliant group of fartists to play with. From the various artistic forms of installation, sculpture, video, paintings and printed books we have culled together a collection of art that explores the deeply human and even animal connection we all have with farts. From the Neolithic painting of Antonio Adams to the postmodern “fart” insignia of Jared Dreyer, “The (F)art Show” covers a vast territory of human experience and thinking.

These many variations of fart are only appropriate as the influences for the show were so varied and excellent. One can cite Milan Kundera’s Tereza in, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, who cannot bear a fart even during the endless humiliation of the Soviet occupation of Prague, and then juxtapose it with the Japanese He-gassen scrolls of the Edo period, where heroes unabashedly blast enemies with flatulence. These two examples show the profound polarizing attachment farting has in human psychology. This attachment is certainly explored by the many introspective works in the show.  One exceptionally poignant twist on this theme is Jen Edward’s leaded glass work which combines the spiritual and physical in a way that would make Jung blush.

Essentially the artistic variations of “The (F)art Show” explore the idea that every fart is individual and has a meaning specific to its own context. This relativity of a fart suits both Thunder-Sky Inc.’s and Golden Brown Enterprises’ purposes, as these fartworks taken in specific context could be seen as either inflating or deflating art and its pretensions. With all of this relativity, one thing remains certain:  you will never hear or smell a fart in the same way after seeing this show. 

Enough Said

 

 

Yesterday Bill and I went and got some groceries, and in the checkout line I found this.  It was kind of nestled within the candy-bars off to the side, wadded up, and I retrieved it, fascinated as I usually am by something that is tossed aside, used up, and the person who used it now has forgotten it ever existed.   The scribbles are beautiful evidence of a function no longer needed, and yet the lines still exist, and you feel a new purpose is being invented, even if no one else is looking.  "Cupcake papers" becomes something else entirely.  "Hamburger" and "hotdog" roughly marked out are symbols of some dream-state denial, desire moved out of the realm of desire and into cloudy iconography.  

 

I always want poetry not to be poetry, art not to be art.  I want it to have some double-meaning that I never figure out.  The mystery becomes so blurred you don't know anything by the time you've stopped reading and/or looking.  That's what I truly want when I read a story or a poem, or go to an art museum -- that sense of not knowing, or a sort of intended yet completely nonchalant gullibility that blossoms into  red-ink "Cottage cheese" scratched out by black ink deliberateness.

 

Cy Twombly understood.  He was always trying to show off how much he knows by scribbling it out like a toddler with a new box of crayons.  He seemed to know instinctually that instinct creates wisdom, not the other way around, and when push comes to shove the deliberate eradication of knowledge is also about accepting how elementary it all is:  visual art and language merge in his large drawings and paintings like pristine jabberwocky turning into nervous sonnets, and sometimes the other way around.  But the non sequiturs become nests of ecstasy, blurry slides into silliness that seem to satirize academic name-dropping while also elevating the urge to be smart by showing how messy and necessary it is.

 

 

 

Don't forget Jean Michel Basquiat as well:  he found his way through scribbling out what he wanted to say. merging text and image into pictographs that parody Western Civilization while adding layer upon layer of beauty and freedom to it.  His scratches and lines become mathematical and gorgeous, an Egyptian stab at street-gang luxury, rough and tough but somehow uniquely and expansively sensitive. 

  

 

 

 

At the end of the day, that grocery list I stumbled upon has a life like these masterworks.  Done from necessity, lists of meaning no one else can decipher, but somehow completely understand.  Whoever authored the list I found at Kroger probably does not give a shit about any of this, but still I love looking at what he/she wrote, love the thought of those functional words disappearing behind scribbles, only to live another life because of it.

 

And a coda:  Robert Rauschenberg's erasure of a Willem De Kooning drawing.  Take all of that writing and learning and memory and get rid of it, put it in a frame.  Worship it that way.

 

Enough said.

 

  

Beasts of Burden

I'm trying to figure out my reaction to Beasts of the Southern Wild, a critic's darling from last year that seemed like it would be a perfect match for what I like in life and in movies, a sort of outsider-art aesthetic merged with an innocent/sci-fi/bible-story narrative, with a sweet ferocious little girl running the whole show.  Not to be.  I saw it a couple weeks back, after intentionally not seeing it when it was being hyper-praised, and in the cold light of day Beasts feels like a lot of sound and a lot of fury and you know what that means:  it signifies nothing.  There's a guttural, twee spirit here that reminds me of slapstick in silent movies, but in Beasts it's played for High Intentions, not laughs or even giggles, and the Max-Max-beyond-Thunderdome redux at the heart of the screenplay has a hasty sloppy blatancy that doesn't expand, only contract until you feel like you never want to see anyone ever, I mean ever, eat shellfish again. 

An exoticness haunts every scene, but it's a made-up, flagrant exoticness built on the way poverty is often portrayed in movies, as nasty and hopeless and crude, hyper-Brueghelian.  That lavishly accomplished crudeness is supposed to be the aesthetic I guess, but it feels phony because Beasts wants to be precious and mean at the same time, soulfully grimy and full of "life," but it has a lot more bark than bite, and the poetry gets flattened by the movie's undying need to show us how brave and fierce and heroic the little girl is.

And speaking of her, Quvenzhane Wallis is spunky and wonderful, but she does not have enough character to play.  She's a sweet one-note.  In fact all the characters in Beasts are like that, types and not people, rushing around trying to save themselves, but then again also making pit-stops along the way to say something sweet or wicked or profound. 

Sometimes outsider art can feel just as contrived as insider art.  When we used to go to the Folk Art Festival in Atlanta and do a booth, we were always surrounded by artists who wished they were "outsiders," and their paintings and sculpture felt feigned and even a little cynical:  slipshod, catastrophic paintings on old pieces of wood of grinning dogs and Martians, junky, collapsing "found" objects nailed together to create that effect that "outsider art" is supposed to give off, a sense of whimsy and oddness and exoticness.  But for the most part that Folk Art gig felt like a celebration of freaky wannabes, not the real thing.  And that's the Beasts' conundrum too. By trying so hard to be eccentric, the movie turns into a boring little folk song about the end of the world.

Object Lesson

“A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line...To snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time, a passing phase of life is only the beginning of the task. The task approached in tenderness and faith is to hold up unquestioningly, without choice and without fear, the rescued fragment before all eyes and in the light of a sincere mood. It is to show its vibration, its colour, its form; and through its movement, its form, and its colour, reveal the substance of its truth -- disclose its inspiring secret: the stress and passion within the core of each convincing moment. In a single-minded attempt of that kind, if one be deserving and fortunate, one may perchance attain to such clearness of sincerity that at last the presented vision of regret or pity, of terror or mirth, shall awaken in the hearts of the beholders that feeling of unavoidable solidarity; of the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds men to each other and all mankind to the visible world.”
― Joseph Conrad

So I'm working on a short story about a young couple with a new baby.  The guy is autistic; the girl isn't.  It's been fits and starts for a while, but yesterday I had a little bit of a breakthrough, while going for a walk.  I needed to come up with an object that the two of them find together on a walk in the woods, and after going through the litter in my head, and looking out across the real landscape on a bike path in West Chester, Ohio, I came up with a yoyo.  There wasn't a real yoyo on the path I was on, but I suddenly thought about cheap little toys that people either lose or toss out (dropped from a baby-stroller or out of a bookbag maybe), and how they just become part of the landscape, nestled in weeds or floating in a lake, like secrets or odd thoughts that don't really matter unless you rediscover them.  And this yoyo appeared in my head, scabby, having lost its glow-in-the-dark youth, simple and plastic and half-buried beside some tree-roots.  It felt like an object that would carry meaning like the flu. 

I thought about Joseph Conrad too.   That yoyo is a "rescued fragment" everyone will be able to see, and it will "disclose its inspiring secret" as I write the rest of the story.  Right now I have a truly explicit version of it in my head. The photo above, but older -- a Batman yoyo with the decal half-rubbed off, dirty string, that dull, sad color of glowlessness.  The scene I'm crafting involves the boy and girl walking around right after the first time they make love in the girl's aunt's car, after they play hookie together.  They both see the yoyo at the same time, and she makes a joke out of him picking it up and keeping it, and then years later in the story, in the "now" of it, she finds that he has kept the yoyo as a sort of secret emblem of that day.  Discovering that yoyo all over again is the story's epiphany.  It happens just as she is about to leave him.

That's how writing stories works sometimes.  I haven't been doing that much of it lately because I've trapped myself out of it through procrastination and just good old fashioned pessimism.  Throughout this dry period, however, this story has haunted me.   It was inspired by a scene I stumbled upon in a grocery store last fall, a tableau that merged Norman Rockwell with Flannery O'Connor:  a thin, scraggly, tall kid in a toboggan, with a dumpy girl in too-tight jeans and a concert t-shirt, standing in line with a cartful of food, a sad-faced skinny little boy wiggling around in the cart-seat.  The guy had his eyes closed, and the girl was looking at the magazine covers as if she were trying to find a mode of escape.