I'm loving it. (Part three--Regions, Successful Compositions)

The second season of Jersey Shore will premiere any minute now (next week?). It's passage, from odd, low-budget, themed, Real World-modeled house&party show to straight-up phenomenology, has been a pleasure and a surprise. And that "phenomenology" is both the same and different. Like, it was a "meme" and Twitter accounts and paid party appearances and makeovers in magazines, but also, really REAL and HAPPY. That's the cast. The cast is full of friendship. (Also, they are dancers.)
Critically, I'm not coming from a place of mistrust-of or disrespect-for reality programming. It is the lion's share of what I watch, and as I don't believe there is such a thing as "guilty pleasure," I take its actors and creators v. seriously. I'm used to fame-for-fame's sake. I've written here before about Paris Hilton's genius, por ejemplo. There is something so wholesome and enlightening about her (and Kim Kardashian's) work ethic (pushing those perfume portfolios on at least three Continents). It's nuts to me (to me) that folks still portion out "real celebrities" and "fake celebrities," like movie actors and the movies aren't a big WHATEVER right now (except for Zac Efron, Twilight and cartoons). Anyway, Snookie, Pauly, JWoWW, Mike, Ronnie, Sammy, and Vinny are, among those who make a living appearing as themselves, sort of special. Just especially candid, nervy, but nice.

I have previously (privately, publicly) decried the rise of shamelessness in American (Youth) culture. There is something dangerous in the group-mind habituation of "bad boy and girl behavior," or the obsessive uptake and reuptake of avatars. But perhaps, there are two forms of such: "shamelessness" and "unashamedness." Like, "shamelessness" is hubristic and unstable, over-delusional and sort of line-stepping (disruptive). But "unashamedness" is simply a way of not being burdened by self-doubt, of being brave and transparent and CELEBRATORY. I don't know. Advocating shame doesn't sound quite right to me. Personally, I'm mortified by (the prospect of my own) self-promotion (though I don't lack in self-absorption). And I am beginning to think of it as a personal failure, a kind of parochially educated cross to bear (that drives me offside). Self-promotion and Unashamedness are (here we go) essentially American manners, processes. Americans know how to think themselves blessed, how to be certain about their own rectitude or beauty or anything without much angst, like the 'dumb' and 'ease' mentioned in the last part. The Jersey Shore cast derives their glamour and likability from straightforward, unashamed realness, from confidence in their estilo, their avatars (which are like surface souls? wishes and dreams for the self made semi-material?), their paths to success (their belief in the very fact of success...).
Then the clever duality of/in Jersey Shore is like this: the broadcast of the self, like a product, a brand, an idea is a piece of our New World, our Web and stuff (the patriotic eating of television commercials, celebration of Better Brands), while the regionalism, the extreme, charming specificity of this group of Eastern Seaboarders is a piece of our Old New World.

As a Southerner, I have witnessed the slippage of Regional styles (no one talks quite like people's grandmothers anymore, unfortunately), and felt the need to keep whatever of the old, local stuff I could (if only by remembering how some forebears looked and sounded). To 'keep' The Region feels imperative for us now. We must 'keep' a balance between the Universalized and mega- (which, as I've outlined in the first part, are important and embraceable) and the local, regional, personal, small. America must have everything she wants, both ways---down-home and Global (even, Space-y).
Petrova started the conversation (at home, not en blogsite) some months ago about Jersey Shore's success as a regional program, and about her desire for endless, continual regional programming. Shows about everybody, everywhere, ourselves included--as in, "I wonder what's going on in ____ right now..."--And then I was like, "OH WAIT, that's what Youtube was supposed to be about! Right?"

So, I'm loving this exchange of local and super-Global objects and ideas, like the Coors commercials of the first part: from The stylized Rockies to your market, proud, shining, fast, loving, self-loving, lucky (blessed), happy, just a little careless but somehow steady, unashamed. The ads thrive on a benign tension; they are general and specific at once, contradicting themselves so contradicting themselves.

********************

I hate to indulge her attention-trix-ery, but Lady Gaga persists (demands post and repost).
There's this Japanese television interview I found from last summer.....

The way she looks.
But also, the oblique straining toward an Asian audience (as interpreted by an American private schoolgirl)-------all the talk of piano lessons!!!
There's also this embarrassing 106 & Park appearance from the same season, where all reference points are for black audiences-----I worked with Kanye, Jay-Z, "You all must love Beyonce!"

She is reshuffling her product line for this demographic, then that demographic. And she has been successful, has achieved cross-demographic appeal. But how kinda ugly when you stop and pay attention, set one appearance beside another. It's sheisty, condescending, very suit...not (keeping it) REAL.
Gaga is, like any of us 80s babies, a student of The Brand, The Market, The Branding and Marketing. But I feel like the great branding work is in the universal, the image, the sound (the humanity!) that crosses borders without losing its home-country, its regional identity...not this thin maneuvering and shapeshifting...? Right? Gaga comes by her false and uncomfortable regionalism honestly...Manhattan [as opposed to the other 4 boroughs], her homestead, hasn't been a region for some time---what with the turning out of the lower and middle classes, the strict, to-the-letter Capitalism that has no sympathy for history, no sentiment, that tolerates fakes and users, anybody with cabbage...maybe I just hate the theater, butI thought it was worth mentioning that working on this essay has helped me to understand my ultimate resistance to/with Gaga, whose voice and hooks I like so much (because of their glitzy emotionality), who I find endearing as a worker in the way of aforementioned Paris and Kim. She is an overnight icon of "our New World, our Web and stuff (the patriotic eating of television commercials, celebration of Better Brands)," but she pointedly eschews the other half, the realness, our Old New World. There is all kinds of consternating bluster about growing up in "The Upper West Side Arts and Culture District" (pardon?) and being a "dirty L.E.S. Artiste" (barf and bull-----a Dad-subsidized apt. [not that I have a problem with that] above Max Fish is not the look she meant to look for, or meant for us to see) and how "New York" the middle finger is (lol whatever) and how she has been in straight-up Madonna costume all summer. Her regional identity, and, in turn, her whole identity, is stuffed to the gills with affect, because she came from post-'86 Manhattan, the island of affect, of neighborhoods and ways of life dictated by real estate agents and club promoters, defectors from home (the Middle and South), people who often hate (out loud) their native regional identities. Though of course, until two minutes ago, Gaga--née Stefanie Germanotta--was doing something brilliantly regional. She was a guidette (a total compatriot of the Jersey Shore cast). But self-conscious about it. Because Manhattan, unlike Staten Island or Jersey (where most of that cast is from), is full of that affect that must needs degrade the outer-boroughs and regional identities, The Bridge and Tunnel (with callous inattention to the class repercussions of such narrowness and dismissiveness). The second Miss Germanotta saw the way to shed her (perceived unsophisticated) regional self, to become a costumed non-citizen (a "true" Manhattanite), she did, and HOW. So, I see her and I say, "Where's Stephanie?" And The Brand is incomplete, unfinished. It's not a good commercial.

I'm loving it. (Part two--a note and then,)

In June I wrote myself a note:


EASY
(TRUE)
YES
THANK YOU

too blessed to stress
lol whatever
the secret (catalogue)
realness
regionalism---jersey shore youtube



I have been listening, bit by bit, to an audio-recording of self-help blockbuster (film then book and Oprah-show episode chainlet), The Secret. It isn’t a book on tape really, but a teleplay with ambient sound and endless actors, hosted/drawn out by soupy Aussie (ooof), Rhonda Byrne, its “author”....bank teller, sales executive, social worker.
I play it on my iPod for fifteen or twenty minutes at a time, train rides, generally the evening rush. It's the primer for a Universe-worshiping cult in which one is led to believe that, through The Law of Attraction, The Universe brings our desired objects/states/projections to our doorstep. Like, if we run around imagining that we have already received everything we want (vibrating on the frequency of satisfaction and "receiving"), then we will actually receive everything we want. Successful implementation of The Secret requires multiple simultaneous delusions, then--like, in order to receive wealth (several hundred million dollars?), I must pretend (and believe) I am already wealthy (even as I schlep to and from the Stop&Shop on Flatbush and Tilden, or get a load of my paychecks, recognize that I can't afford such and such on the wine list or super-hot luggage or a race horse or...).
An example given early on has impressed me very much: one is meant to "order" what one desires from the Universe just as one would order items from a catalogue: choosing, calling and placing the order, waiting for items to arrive, all the while certain (casually certain...unthinking and undoubting) that the items will arrive.
All of this really jibes with my olde misappropriation of Adorno---"To be pleased means to say YES"---which was meant as invective about Capitalist piiig softness (because socialists say "NO" to pleasure?), but has come down to me as a mantra for shopping and eating and looking and running around (everything). When keeping with the mantra, I keep my distinctly American (Capitalist) brand of hope and "dumb" (and easy? lazy? blessed?)-----vibrating on the frequency of "receiving." ("All I do is win win win no matter what.")

As per the notes:
(TRUE)
THANK YOU
realness regionalism---jersey shore youtube
Thanksgiving is the final element of Secret-ish reception, a loop of gratefulness aids in reaching "heightened frequencies." One cannot imagine oneself into this sublime state of having and arriving without a kind of sweet-faced, beatific recognition of "blessedness," ones own lack of effort, the wonders of The Universe, what...and, to me (to me), politeness is next to godliness.
The parenthetical "(TRUE)" is tricky, that's why it's in the in-between, in parentheses. I'm still sort of wary of calling a thing "true." It's clearly not forbidden and hideous like calling a thing "pure" (ick---ethnic cleansing, germ phobia). I mean, I called a ring "true" a few months ago, and it sounded right. The ring was "true." Fear of espousing truth lies in the severe secularism of the ART and IDEAS I came up with, or not always the ART and IDEAS so much as their passing interpretation. Lately, I find secularism (or its severest forms) are lifting. Religion is happening again. Artists are lazy mystics, and critics are furious about it, but we're having such a good time. And the continual doubt, the rationalizing and intellectualizing of this and that (while still clearly part of our [my] make-up) is exhausting, to let go of a few pieces, allow some loose ends, mystery, even non-caring (Jesus take the wheel and all that) is such a *pleasure*.
I find that I am outlining a kind of American view---"I'm loving it." YES THANKS ME YOU THIS HAS ALL BEEN SO BRIGHT AND EASY---around and about things and luck. This is like the self-created, self-concerning version of Brand celebration, rah-rah and commodified convenience and commercials; advertisement is (rarely now, because, as an industry, its overrun with cardboard putzes) a poetics of the American view.
..."Realness" and regionalism are at the heart of my interest in those Coors commercials of the last part (and Jersey Shore and Youtube), but that seems like the meat of the next part to me.....so, till then (probs tomorrow) xoxo...

Last week, I planned to do it big about America with two more parts of the essay, "I'm loving it," posted in time for Independence Day. And I do intend to finish up that work with an eye toward regionalism and "realness," but more like this week and maybe the next, because "doing it big about America" this July 4th long weekend involved visits and actions and inactions and television (not writing)-----
---I tanned (which is a really big deal).
---I stared at my manicure (red, white and blue) and pedicure (gold and copper glitter) submerged in the pool, and then held up against the sky and sun, the white clapboard garage, the lawn and flower beds, the deck...
---I drove (finally!).
---I (Pillow and I) went to Walmart. I bought a pink t-shirt (elongated baby-tee?) that says, "YOU'RE AS FAKE AS YOUR TAN" in blue and gold block letters (as Petrova predicted in 2009, tanning is very important right now, and I've always loved that sub-genre of teen tops that accuse people of things in a general broadcast sorta way). I bought a pair of NASCAR pajama pants that are covered with Jimmie Johnson's signature and the Lowe's Hardware logo. I bought a NASCAR t-shirt that features the Crown Royal car, riffs on the Crown Royal logo, driver Matt Kenseth's signature. I bought a NASCAR Racing hat, comme ça. It's incredible (totes pertinent to that first part of "I'm loving it") how naked the promotion is on official and non-official NASCAR gear and of course the cars. NASCAR is the height/peak/best of sponsorship, American business celebration. I also bought a pair of men's half-jacket wrap around sunglasses, like baseball sunglasses, with the oil slick blue and yellow and purple polarized lenses, and then a friendship bracelet and some razors, striped composition notebooks...
---I ate (sat down inside and ate) at one of the last last-generation Taco Bells, the kind that still has the green, faded red and brown stripe around the exterior.
---I went to see Twilight: Eclipse. And oh my goodness how fantastic! Taylor Lautner tour-de-force---the dynamism of jean shorts and a deep tan set against snow-capped mountains! Kristen Stewart looks phenomenal in no-make-up and trucks and forests. All of those forest scenes with vampires appeared to be filmed in some super-complex greyscale. Paleness, Darkness. Cold, Hot. Twilight is all about skin and cars and living and dying. High School stories, y'all (are the best)!
---A friend once asked me offhand if I wanted to do a top ten list for artforum.com----I'm not sure she was serious. But I then asked if it had to be about a-r-t, like art shows (because I don't want to go to Chelsea). And she said yeah, so it was dropped, because I can't write that top ten list. I could, however, offer a top ten list of best art on television or the Internet or restaurants or shops and stuff. In that vein, the 2010 Macy's Fourth of July fireworks would take a sure spot on a year's comprehensive list. My mouth was literally agape throughout. I also gasped, clutched my breast and said "OMG" several times. That BIGGEST cruise ship ever made, Epic, made an appearance along with Justin Bieber and Nick Cannon and Sammy from Days of Our Lives! The computer-driven bursts faded slowly, often in time with the music, canned versions of "Yankee Doodle Dandy," Sousa marches. The effect was totally UNREAL. Strange, massive and fleeting jellyfish and jewels, projected creations of planets and moons. The whole show was imbued with this delicious sensation of FIRST PLACE, BIGGEST, BEST, BLESSED. Yes!

------I got to thinking (is that a Bradshaw-ism?), over the weekend, how FIRST PLACE was the American Revolution? Was it the very first of its kind? Can you think of any other colony going post-colonial in that sort of singular, self determined way at any point in history prior to 1776? I imagine there must have been some distant (or unknown to our Fathers) precedent, but I can't think of one....perhaps we can say with certainty that it was the first post-colonial revolution so followed by equally revolutionary government-building? Also, Pillow asked the best question, "Can you believe [the Founding Fathers] had no idea what California looked like?"---OMG!

"Dis beat was bubblegum so I had to chew it."

July last year there was New Boyz' "You're a Jerk." Now (or for the past few months...), Cali Swag District's "Teach Me How To Dougie," which is sort of indivisible from the prior. It's for-and-by THE KIDS, and it's (the style's) from Cali via Dallas, I think. What I know for certain is it's party music (hip hop root music). And "[they] show these cats how to do dat down South dance dat [they] learned a lil' too fast." The whole hangs on cute teen bravado and carelessness, an angle and set of mannerisms quintessentially American (cool).
And also, reading a lyrics site, I find that one guy off the track is called Brody....!!! Cali Swag, of course.

yonkers!

Room at Top STOP

















I love Europe and The Euro, and they're blown-up these days Stateside (Thanks to pop producers and The Jersey Shore cast?).
But, in this multi-task era, both The Euro and The American can be Top for The Euro and The American at the same time, you know (like, look at Lindsay right there, right always)? Like, Tom Friedman was totally off-base with the whole World-flattening, World-shrinking post-Internet theory back when......The World is (and seems) big and bigger. The more we know, the more we cannot say we don't know, and the more we cannot forbid and limit. All of The Decades may look good, at once (no need to say goodbye to 60s volume and 80s avant- because we say hello to the jolie-laide 90s and sun-bleached, nostalgic 70s via 90s). Understatement and overstatement and middling-statement may all be deemed effective, at once. A thing, a style, may be proliferated widely, Globally, and be treated/contained/strained differently in each place, demi-place, school, household, and all look good, at once.
This week, for the 4th, the 234th 4th, I intend to celebrate America, post all about America (good and bad), but none of it framed in opposition to Europe. New World and Old World, like Town&Country, one must needs both! I just think this is a moment for American styles (Tommy Girl) and a moment for Euro styles (Sally Shapiro), both at once (along with everything else...AFRICA, THE WHOLE EAST, THE OCEAN). And, as I write all about America this week, I want that kept clear. Style, as I see it, is just less exclusionary everyday (OMG!). Limitation of others is the only thing that's naff, really.
Now, we find (because we are more able) that we have so much in common with each other, and that we like difference too----WE BROADEN, more, more, more. But at the same time, we are not teleporting. It still took me eight hours (stuck in Jerz Turnpike traffic) this weekend to ride (on a G-d damn bus) from New York to D.C....to cross a border, an ocean takes still more time, and we can feel the distance, feel the scale of our Earth. Last night, on the leg back from the Capitol to home, almost in the Holland Tunnel, we spied a dusky pink moon, low and dim. Then it was orange, higher and higher, clearer. I thought maybe it was Venus (goddess, not planet). So, I made a wish. And I thought about how easy it is for me to pray to the moon, how direct and effortless...and necessary (?) it feels. And I felt Ancient too, like one of many, not simply the many of now, the teeming populations on populations made privy to the same moon at same or slightly delayed moment, but everyone, every ancestor, the oil in the ground.
I felt big (and...so did everything else).

Think of all the Libertarians graduating from law school right now and weep.

I'm loving it.
(part one----rangy, rah-rah---am fan of Coors commercials)

I almost got 'God Bless America' printed below my address on the new set of cheques I ordered ayer (chose a waving flag instead). It's in the air, has been for a long minute (G-d and The U.S.A.). All of the sinister xenophobic (even vaguely White Power) implications/warpings/repurposings of stock, regular American patriotism (it's style, it's proclamation) in the last decade have faded (for obvious reasons). And it feels great!
And beyond the flag motif, is THE BRAND, The McDonald's, The Coca-Cola, The Disney, The Wal-Mart---these logos and slogans and whole adverts and store designs and product ranges....lifestylez---in an unremittingly complicated way----are also grand emblems of (U.S.) America and our Americaness, better/worse, sickness/health(?).
I often complain (sorry) about how the poorly stocked, strangely constructed chain megastores and restaurants of New York City (as well as my lack of truck to haul goods with) make me feel unAmerican, not in America, with its promise of big/easy/everything at once, and it bums me out.
Like in Clueless-----
"No shit you guys got coke here?!"
"Well, yeah---it's America..."------
Constant, present availability of new and various (also same, typical, universalized...) goods, franchises one just like the next, parking, air-conditioning, free samples happen here like nowhere else. And to love the flow of product and product-image is like self-love (another American talent/export/thing worth celebrating). And when done proper, self-love is not delusional; it's our stiff-upper-lip. It's our way of reconciling with forward momentum, acknowledging that nothing is wholly good; nothing is wholly wicked; that we're lucky too.....
Global-titan McDonald's originated as a single burger joint in San Bernardino in 1940! Whatever one might think of cheap meat, chemical flavors, Globalism, the Corporate model full stop, it must be noted that such growth, such ingenuity and subsequent power, is impressive, important, inherently American and a big deal. We pursue happiness, money and an idea of happiness, a McFlurry, a cartoon princess, an imprint everywhere.
I feel a little clever and powerful when I hold the symbols, the mini-carton of fries, the can of Cola, the Hannah Montana beach towel.
Irony got so busted and dumb; it seems not a proper descriptor for how we might celebrate the emblems of corporate America. Outside parties might rightly perceive irony in it, but I assure you I love these new Coors commercials straight-up, because they're not nerdy, smarmy and self-loathing. They are self-loving (and good-looking).

bless me

Oil on Canvas for Monday

The Fourth Dimension
Patrick J. Sullivan
1938

Origin Story For Monday

Ca-li-for-ni-a

Cute

A glance at the new White House art collection (gleaned from the old Nat'l Gallery collection)--the first few canvases look like cousins of Michele's smart, Americana garments. The pertinent Ruscha and telegraph-as-ready-made are inspired. The Catlin "Plains Indian" canvases (which will be replacing George's dippy Remingtons) even more so....now how about "blurring the line between art and [executive power]" and pardoning Leonard Peltier...?

Bathroom Ham Party

Culled from this morning's Jezebel. They're livid, naturally.