Then again, I feel that lots of smut seemed to have a joie de vivre didn't completely collapse under this pervasive creepiness. Women's lib and political correctness aside, I quote Marlene Dietrich; "In America, sex is an obsession, in other parts of the world it's a fact." I would add that movies were better in the 70s, it seems.
Not to appear insensitive about objectification of Women and the representation of an ideal form: on the contrary, the role of gender representation in reaction to and as a continuation of traditional roles; pink for girls and blue is for boys. I've always loved when, paraphrasing the Rolling Stone review of Frank Zappa's We're Only in it for the Money, active participants within a medium fling mercilessly derisive raspberries at the very form itself. As Gordon Shearer said, "Stuff it down their throat. Do it with panache."
I sat in front of the huge sculpture of a pregnant her atop the plinth in Trafalgar square and thought about the Venus de Milo. Michelangelo's slaves are oftend cited as being unfinished works, but I felt as though they should remain trapped uncarved as they're slaves. We're all chained to the stone of form, burdened with nothing but the flesh. The Hunchback of Notre Dame was one of my favorite movies as a boy; it wasn't until I was a teen reading the book that I realized Quasi-modo means partly-formed.
This has been sitting unfinished for a week. Lately I feel like I've been lost in a subdivision and driving fast. Let's just drive right on through the next cul-de-sac. Juxtapositions...
I get in these phases where people seem so remote. I get the feeling, when I look in peoples' eyes, that they don't know that I am, and, by extension, I doubt that they are. I feel like I'm on the moon of another planet doing very important work. I study my array of screens and interpret transmissions through a web of filters.
I was five-years-old in a traffic jam outside of Oklahoma City: my brain exploded with the idea of all the people in all the cars being that; people in cars with lives all their own and consequential experience threads that brought them out in the sun outside of the city, from where and when and which they would all continue on forward. The man in the car next to me was so much older than me. He was with a beard, driving and smoking; and I thought about everything he'd done in his whole life and all he would go on to do: that was one man in one car and I could see dozens of cars; I was certain there were at least hundreds. Someone in one of the cars around us could be a person to whom I was or would be connected by means of a circuitous tangle. The family in the car behind us could be direct descendants of Abraham Lincoln: I pictured the lot of them with stovepipe hats. 100 yards ahead could be a station wagon holding the Great American Hero, a super-villain in a Fiat. The potential of where they'll go just boggled, so I concentrated on their stories. That was the central appeal of Sherlock Holmes to me as a child; his superhuman powers of deduction told him so much more about a person upon first meeting than the rest of us could deduce.
I stumbled over this collection of pictures. I could ramble all day about them, but the story they tell... a thousand words and all that. This guy took a polaroid every day for years and years and years. I thought it was a quirky interesting thing I could skim through, looking for a goofy picture I could post; two hours later I was crying my fucking eyes out. It goes from 1979 to 1997, when he stopped.
Music soon.
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