Verses (Merry X-Mas edition)

Maybe Next Year (The X-Mas Song)
Meiko
(note: I strongly recommend everyone reading downloads it. It has a strong L.O.V.E. quality.)

I don't think Santa's coming this year 'cause I've been a bad
A bad girl

I've made my bed now I'm lying in it without a care
A care in the world

And I took his heart
I tore it apart
I left him outside in the cold

I shot him down in the middle of town
I left him outside in the snow

I won't have no presents this year 'cause I've been a bad
A bad girl

I've made my bed now I'm lying in it without a care
A care in the world

And he took me in
He made me sin and I never wanna go back again

So I took him in
I made it all in
No
I never wanna go back again

Maybe next year I'll be good
Maybe next year I'll be better

Speak On It

I just wanna be a domestic animal!

Come and Get Your Love--Hombres de los 70s

Contrary to Gus Van Sant's vision of men in the 1970s (note: multiple perm offenses perpetrated against Hollywood's beautiful-est young actors in new film Milk), we think they were really onto something in the appeal department back then—as evidenced by Robert Redford in Jeremiah Johnson (1972), or in a better-coiffed period piece, Almost Famous (2000), which features Jason Lee (recently estranged from his wife!!) and known dastard Billy Crudup playing scrappy rock stars. All of these are of the frontiersman/Allman Bros. variety. But there are many types of covetable, groovy menfolk from that fitful era . . . this will be a recurring segment!

Merry Xmas, part I

It's really a shitty shame we live in a world of unembeddable videos...
regardless, merry xmas...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40qTXlNJj9s

Spot the Sublime

Still from the 1932 film version of The Most Dangerous Game.

Video Store

One more gift from our holiday journey to the tip of Manahatta—

I first saw this film years ago on television. I loved it, thought it truly stylish, and passed it on to P.M.C., who brought it up as we tipsily shuffled past the shuttered (but transparent) office buildings Tuesday night. I then read a mention of it in this v. bizarre ELLE article (do read it friends, I need your opinions). So, I tucked in and watched it once more last night. It is still really damn stylish, a thrilling lesson in 1986. We love the way everybody and every place looks, but we are a little confounded by the relationship between Basinger and Rourke (two people since proven to be bonafide lunatics and bonafide fine actors). I mean, his "sexually adventurous" financier is really just a mentally ill underminer, right? Again, do watch this friends (the whole thing if possible). I need your opinions. Aside from aesthetics, I'm bewildered.

Addendum

In the midst of our Massachsetts cum Financial District Christmas Adventure, my dear P.M.C. suggested an adendum to this Timberlake post of last week. I had already spent several days reading and re-reading it uncomfortably, knowing that I had made the hypothetical anti-Timberlake argument much more effectively than my chosen pro-Timberlake argument. The whole felt over-long and wishy-washy. Well, (and I can't take any responsibility for this bit of brilliance) I revisited the track "Señorita" from Justified, the 2003 first solo record from which I drew "Cry Me a River" for the earlier post. "Señorita" was not the first single, though I misremembered it as such. It was the very first track of an album that I unwrapped and began to play in the record store parking lot and many subsequent parking lots thereafter (in Memphis, at seventeen, parking lots are muy importante). The song is loose and confident, a gilded example of the perfect pairing of Pharrell and Timberlake, at dual zeniths when it was recorded. In it, Timberlake initiates a male and female call and response by singng both male and female parts, making a clever, secure sort of joke with/about his famous falsetto. Listen and mull the politics—it's all the reason we need for his success. Justin has humor on his side, a sparkling comic actor in a terribly self-serious landscape of pop music (imagine what might happen if you dared to laugh at Prince).

Am I Angry?

It's a commonly recognized fact amongst my loved ones and a smattering of therapists in Memphis and Greater Boston that Able is incapable of expressing anger. I can get tragic with the best of them. And once, I keyed a someone's Beemer (with a little help from Pillow and Veuve-Cliquot). But neither weeping a lot, nor attacking a vehicle serepticiously are actual straight-forward, healthy ways of expressing one's darker emoticons (>:-< . . . ?). Clearly I'm not above it; rather, I'm downright jealous of those not imbued with my bizarro, antiquated fear of being unladylike and displacing matter and energy (or something). Today, a little punchy as the work day wears on, I find a few things have gotten me going: 

1. This monstrous baby-child working next to me keeps excusing herself from the desk to go to the bathroom and DOUSE herself in body spray. I may be sick all over this joint before long.

 and 

2. I overheard that this fellow I have a crush on (also in la officina), a well mannered, prepston good ole' of the variety I rarely see since my Northern transplantation, is engaged to be married to some trick who is taking him skiing for Christmas, or she was, but then he had foot surgery and now he's on crutches and he can't ski and did I mention that crutches really do something for me in this WWII nurse and soldier kind of way?! I mean, no bigs, it's just a crush. I wouldn't mind if he was married, but there's something about engagements that makes me boil. They're so sober, earnest, ringy . . . glitter, purple . . .? 

If I told this child that her body spray is gross, I would sound really classist, and if I got visibly upset about a stranger's whole perogative to get married to a person that he actually knows I would be a lunatic. Here's to not doing a thing about it . . . better luck in 2009?

Santa Baby

I want this late (1932) Bonnard painting. It's at MoMA. Thanks.

I'm OK. You're OK.

Most glorious segment of most glorious early HBO confection:

Santa Baby

One more stop at Newel on 53rd street (if you please)--I want Inventory Number 036705, Russian Neoclassical mahogany side table with brass gallery over a frieze drawer and splayed legs joined by a fan parquetry inlaid stretcher. Без перевода.

Verses

Excerpt from the website of Duet35, the #1 karaoke bar in Koreatown--

Since we opened in 1997,
we've seen many people became crazy about Karaoke!

Having birthday parties, bachelor's parties and just having fun would be the best usage.

Everyone can be "Britney Spears"
and everyone can be "John Toravolta."

Folk Art for Wintry Mix Tuesday (and What Comes of Image Searching Kiyonaga Woodblock Prints)

New Administration Unveils First Weapon of Mass Peace

Santa Baby

I want Inventory Number: 051785, French Art Deco black laquered sleigh back recamier with white satin upholstery and Inventory Number: 035746, Pair of French Art Deco gilt and cream carved swag and fringe design bracket console tables, both at Newel, 53rd street. Merci.

Lemon-scented. Heaven-sented.

Civil War Letter for Sunday

On the eve of his death at the battle of Bull Run, July 4th, 1861, Union Major Sullivan Beaulieu wrote—

My dearest,

Indications are strong that we shall move in a very few days. Lest I shall not be able to write again, I feel impelled to write a few lines that will fall under your eye when I shall be no more. I have no misgivings about the cause in which I am engaged and my courage does not falter.

My love for you is deathless. It seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but omnipotence could break. And yet my love of country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me unresistably on. The memories of the blissful moments I have spent with you come creeping over me and I feel so gratified to you and to God that I have enjoyed them for so long. I know I have but few claims upon Divine Providence but something whispers to me. Perhaps it is the wafted prayer of our young sons that I shall return unharmed. If I do not my dearest, don’t ever forget how much I love you, and when my last breath escapes me, it will whisper your name. Forgive me my many faults and pains that I have caused you; how gladly I would wash out with my tears every little spot upon your happiness. But oh, my dear, if the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those that they loved, I shall always be near you, in the gladdest days and the darkest nights always, always. And if there be a soft breeze on your cheek, it will be my breath. And when the cool air fans your temple it shall be my spirit passing by. Sarah, do not mourn me dead. Think I am gone and will wait for thee. For we shall meet again.

I'm Sorry Pillow. I Didn't Mean to Make You Claw Out Your Ojos.

Pillow, you're so right. Miami is just the place for a nutty Eurotrash fay-shun foto expo. It is also just the place for Cory Kennedy to go see a gallery full of dubious tee-shirt design cum screenprints, injure her foot, and take mesculin at "the Nike party" for to hop up and down to some twee jams and light a sparkler.

1991

Art Stuff

Pretty much the only thing that happened at Art Basel Miami that doesn't make me want to claw my eyes out (although the people being interviewed do inspire that reaction)—

Put a Ring On It

Las Huelgas Apocalypse, attributed to the monk Beatus of Liebana, completed in the year 1220 A.D. 

Forty-nine images of a tricyclic narrative survive. Here we have a standard, dare I say, "civilian" end-times image: Four Horsemen, four Evangelists, glorious Agnus Dei, and the ubiquitous beast crouching daintily behind our boy Saint John. But the colors, the treatment of space—these are anything but standard. Oh, of course someone has always thought to take the usually quasi-obsessive focus on backgrounds and middlegrounds away from the apocalyptic image. But something always remains. Something to remind us of the physical. 

But here we see nothing. Nothing but color, reflection, smudge, fire, moon, eternal damnation, eternal salvation, interplanetary tension . . . We feel through color and treatment of space a level of tension that has only before been achieved through use of the figure. Take all figurative elements out of this image and does it become something else? Does the feeling change? Does it lose any of its intensity or bravado? No. So what do we have? A giant leap towards abstraction, even a kind of abstract expressionism, in what some view as the most dead and uninspired chunk of history? A hidden genius? A guy who never got the hang of nature drawing? Who knows. Gotta love Spain!

To Your Health! (Happy Weekending)

The Best Thing Going (For Friday)

http://mugshotss.blogspot.com/

Sculptural Head for Friday

Anima Dannata, 1619

Gian Lorenzo Bernini

Can't you just feel the heat?

Founding Fathers: Janis Joplin, Beautiful and Unconcerned at Tampa Central Booking

Beat on the Brats with a Baseball Bat

This article is a little old (from May of this year), but one of the kids at work asked me about the infamous Bushwick dormitory, McKibbin Lofts, this morning, and I saw it as my solemn duty to do some research and convince her that it was indeed a whitey scourge ghetto, a deeply uncool, irrationally self-important cesspool of Midwestern transplant filth. Unfortunately, the author of this Times profile, while making it clear that the living is unsanitary, does, in her own loserlyness, give these dummies too much credit--"This could have been Greenwich Village 60 years ago, or SoHo 30 years ago, or the East Village in the 1990s." Hardly! And SoHo in the 70s is a family matter. I take it personally. Plus, it's just really lame and boring to be constantly referencing New York's past in fumbling toward a future (or present even). Granted, I've been posting a bit about 1992; I think all of the time about New York poets of the 50s and 60s; I am nuts about Gordon Matta Clark's FOOD, and, for that matter, my beautiful parents who ate there and lived beautifully and had beautiful babies. It is our generation's strong suit, deconstructing and repackaging recent history. But pretending that you're recreating the Factory is not being a historian or a nostalgia-ist--it's just being an egotist (and an uncreative, sad-sack one at that). Plus, NO TELEVISION??!!

(Don't) Beat on the Brats with a Baseball Bat

You know, I don't totally hate the younger generation. I do not take kindly to people being all flagrant about bad taste, which happens a lot down our way, but I have taken kindly to these two fourteen-ish-year-olds who I often see on the train going to and from school. They are a gangly, unconventionally pretty girl and a super cute black boy with an afro and a skateboard. They're clearly sweet on each other, but they play it pretty cool--no gross, underaged displays of affected affection. Mainly, I like how they dress, in brazen jewel-toned denims and backpacks, clean t-shirts, and sneaks, none of the curated rapscallion tatters and glamorous in-line-for-the-Dole ensembles that we favor. They choose new-ness, where we choose vintage. It seems to me that, for the first time in a while, there is an actual teeny-bopper and a teeny-bopper style. Looking at them, I feel as if we, at fourteen-ish, always tried to look older (and smuttier), and they allow themselves to revel in their particular age of school clothes and mall clothes and movie-going clothes.

More importantly, the two of them are equipped almost identically. I have often decried gender neutralizing as handled by the clumsy fashion industry, but in the hands of these kids, as with their seemingly easy, unself-conscious mixed race coupling (unheard of where I come from), it's part of a true, unfettered sense of equality (they both happen to decorate their knapsacks with Obama/Biden pins). Electing Obama was exciting for those of us who voted, but imagine the faith in others instilled in kids who had no agency, who saw the citizens and system they will be and inherit work for the better. When I was their age, it was the 2000 election that I witnessed (ugh). These kids love the environment and believe in the efficacy of diversity. They're a bit less likely to smoke cigarettes (which is good for them, I guess). In making that list, I realize that we were supposed to possess those three traits; all were heavily marketed to us in school and on television. But it's a process, and in that way, younger people have come closer than we could have.

Really, all of this kid propering aside, I think I like that I can look at them and feel out of it (their world), old enough to see them as children and be kindly and a little maternal.

Miley Cyrus on the other hand . . .

Print for Friday Eve

Famous Beauty
Kaigetsudo Anchi
c. 1714
woodblock print

















I am newly enamored of so-called "Floating World" images. Isn't it funny that this one is titled Famous Beauty, but is clearly all about the Kimono? Her face, as it goes with Geishas, is one of a style, not a rare object. Her costume, however, is just that, a rare, artisinal, complex, abstractable, stunning object.

Excerpt from Catholic Dictionary Definition of "Rococo"

The Rococo style accords very ill with the solemn office of the monstrance, the tabernacle, and the altar, and even of the pulpit.

"But, it came from Memphis!" [read pleadingly]

I found myself in discourse yesterday with two non-fans of Justin Timberlake. They were not virulent haters, just unimpressed. I tried to prove his worth with a few quick strokes, playing "Cry Me a River" from 2003's Justified and "My Love" and "What Comes Around (Goes Around)" from the more recent Futuresex/Lovesounds (2006). They remained luke-warm, "He's talented and all, but the songs don't stand out. He's no Madonna." I sometimes have this charmless inclination to get angry when people disagree with me in matters of music, beauty, politics, history, protocol, what have you. Here, I remained calm. For one, I was intrigued by this Madonna comparison, and, really, all of a moment, I wasn't so sure I disagreed with them.

I mean, couldn't you credit Timbaland and the Neptunes with the candied brilliance of his hit songbook? The lyrical content is forgettable. Timberlake brings us his doo-wop falsetto, good looks, and (questionable) style, but production teams were responsible for the layered sophistication and of-the-moment hip-hop and house fusion that truly drove both records. But even that dim view is a bit rosy, what drives a record is promotion and good timing. Timberlake is madly marketable to both (increasingly pop-conscious) critics and the populous. In 2003, he left N'Sync with a ready-made, millions-strong, international fan base. With a little bit of smarts, all he had to do was prove he was remotely independent and interesting to critics, to whom it would seem that he was a winner with long odds, a dark horse. All the while, for Clive Davis, he was the surest of bets. At the dawn of the 21st century, even the most discerning folks are servants of the Culture Industry. "Hotness" is holiness.

But--OH--I despise this cynical line of thought. Pop is my mountain top. What good comes of me questioning the artistic merit of the moneyed, collaborative process that drove, for instance, Britney Spears' Blackout, the record I'm writing a book about. When I doubt the worth of the vernacular, not only am I being a limited sort of snob, but I'm also lowering the discourse of my critical life to a matter of simple preference, taste that could be deemed--GASP--bad. Clive is right and not necessarily wicked (no more so than Barry Gordy); in pop, it's the product that matters, not the process. We must listen to what we are fed, no Basement Tapes in these parts. In pop music, whether rock-ists like it or not, image and packaging and videos and moment-ness can be content. And, a pop singer's interpretation of someone else's lyric and melody can be the very height of (highly legitimate) appropriation art.

Even after all of this circular stuff, I do pay heed to that Madonna comment. In terms of voice (point-of-view, not instrument), Timberlake is a little bland and unduly smug. Unlike Madge (or Britney), he doesn't seem to have much of a story to tell. "Voice" aside, he's a well-informed cat, clearly bowing to our Memphis legacy, Elvis and Al Green in particular, as well as MJ and Prince and a terribly long list of others--an appropriator appropriator!

(And, argument aside, I love a hometown boy.)