June 27, 2009 archive

Amsterdam: History and Art (Photo Blog)

Amsterdam means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but to me it is the city of Rembrandt van Rijn. More on that, but first the modern city.

Friday Night at 8: Hip

Zeitgeist, June 2009.

All the irony has been used up and hip is coopted in its pre-embryonic stage, wow.

So the hippest parts of the hippest philosophies are released into the cybersphere and general world culture through various other means and all sorts of people grok this rain of wisdom not just from group endeavors like named spiritual paths but from crazy mystics visionaries witches artists maniacs that emerge individually from their travels in existence.

And coyote howls in the full moon night at the sacred Four Corners in the West.

The old ways have been hip enough to change with the times.  We see it in the blogosphere, new forms for old hidebound traditions.  Dusting those treasures off.

Kerouac, there’s a video somewhere of him describing what “hip” means.

Imagine the beats, it’s right after World War II and in America there’s the boom of imperialism in the air and folks can finally have their own homes with labor saving appliances . . . . and the beats just dug something else entirely about America and about being a human being.

They swam against a merciless tide … them and a nascent musical movement, rock and roll, race music that left no mother’s child unchanged and of course that was the problem, wasn’t it.

Cultural misappropriation.

Old R&B saying, “If it’s in you, it’s gotta come out.”

So it keeps coming out in new forms everytime the old ones are stolen and coopted and twisted to material ends.

The form is only important because of the content.  And the content is love.

* * * * * * * *

Photobucket

Happy Friday to all.  Summer has arisen here in the Big Apple.  I hear our public transportation system infrastructure is not doing well around the country.  As a rider of the W and N trains, in solidarity, I salute and wish courage and good luck to all public transportation riders across the land!

nipples

There’s been a lot of ink spilled on the death of Farrah Fawcett–even the august New York Times has more than half a page today. Like the rest of the mainstream media, it gingerly avoids the n-word: nipple. But nipples are why Farrah Fawcett signifies; she embodied quite an important cultural shift in US society.

I kinda stopped watching teevee before Charlie’s Angels came out, but I’ve never heard anyone argue that it was one of the great masterpieces of the medium or that, with better politics, the then FFM would have rivaled Vanessa Redgrave or Jane Fonda.

Cultural achievement was not why the red swimsuit poster became ubiquitous in the late ’70s. It was because you could see her nipples right through the damn fabric.

Observers have long noted that American males, the straight ones anyhow, tend to have deep-seated breast fixations, and psychiatrists and anthropologists and creative people in diverse artistic fields have responded in their own ways to this fact. But there have been changes within that general pattern.

In the decades before Farrah Fawcett arrived on the scene, the sexualization of breasts in film and photography was centered on the size of breasts and particularly on cleavage. Think Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield. Cleavage is fairly artificial, the product of confining clothing designed to produce it (or fake it). And it has nothing to with the actual erotic zones on the breasts. It emphasizes the preparation of the female as passive object for consumption by the male gaze.

But the claiming of sexual agency by women was a part of the ’60s upsurge and of the modern women’s movement born during it. The red swimsuit poster marked the mainstreaming of the nipple (and underscored the then-shocking symbolic dumping of painfully restrictive women’s undergarb enacted at the Miss America pageant less than a decade earlier).

This was, I’ll argue, a historic advance for materialism and for democracy. Nipples are, among other things, full of actual nerves which can carry actual sexual sensations. Even in guys. And pretty much everybody is born with them. Even guys.

I make no giant claims that Farah Fawcett ended the sexual objectification of women, nor even that the real advances in sexual enjoyment and equality she symbolized are solid-look what happened to Janet Jackson. But she deserves credit for the role she played, not the pussyfooting around we’ve been treated to since her death.

Crossposted from Fire on the Mountain.

Knocking on Hell’s Door

Outside in the distance, a wildcat did growl.

Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl . . .

But according to DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, those rightwing riders who killed Dr. Tiller and a security guard at the Holocaust Museum weren’t rightwing riders at all, they were just lone nuts who perpetrated “terrible crimes and tragedies” because shit happens.          

So relax, America.  All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well . . .

Napolitano said she doesn’t think the recent murder of Dr. George Tiller, a late-term abortion provider, and the shooting of a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum vindicate a controversial Department of Homeland Security report issued to law enforcement about rising right-wing extremism.

The shootings were not evidence of growing violent political extremism in the United States, Napolitano said at a Thursday press briefing in Washington.  “I don’t look at those murders as anything other than terrible crimes and tragedies,” Napolitano said.  Stepping up her criticism of the report, Napolitano added, “I do think, as I’ve said before, that the so-called right-wing extremist report was not a well-produced product.  It could and should have been done better.  We’ve already taken steps within the department to improve that situation.”  She did not elaborate.  

Rightwing nutjobs are elaborating though.  They’re elaborating all over the fucking place.  That well-produced product  of rightwing extremism,  Joe the Plumber, spoke to a knuckle-dragging crowd of mouth-breathers in Wisconsin yesterday, slandered Chris Dodd, and asked, “Why hasn’t he been strung up?”

I could fill this essay with similar quotes, but we’ve all seen them, we all know that the right is inciting and exhibiting extremism at a fever pitch, we all know it’s going to get worse.  From Michelle Bachmann urging rightwingers to “be armed and dangerous” to Hannity and Beck and O’Reilly stoking the fires of rightwing hatred against Obama and Democrats, the right in this country is seething cauldron of violent rhetoric.

Friday Philosophy: Two Chances to Move Forward

They’re here.

After…how long is that?  Forever?  Really?…the Congress has a couple of bills before it which would actually be beneficial to the GLBT community.  And…horror of horrors…to transfolk as well.

What’s up with that?

The two bills go by the unofficial names of the Matthew Shepard Act and ENDA.  They cover two of the parts of what I have in the past considered the heart of The Gay Agenda:

  • the right to not be fired for being GLBT
  • the right to not be thrown out of our residences if discovered to be GLBT
  • the right to be served in a restaurant
  • the right not to be beaten up every other Tuesday

I am aware that other people think that marriage equality and the right to serve in the military are also at the heart of said agenda.  I’m of the feeling that maybe they are more of the lungs.  What I listed in the box affect all GLBT people, including those who are not in relationships or who have no interest in the military (including those who, like myself, who have already served, thank you).

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