Archive for October 2008
>the best quotes from David Halperin’s "Saint=Foucault"
>”For the effect of sexual liberation has been not, or not only, to free us to express our sexuality but to require us to express – freely, of course – our sexuality.” – pg. 20
“…to come out is precisely to expose oneself to a different set of dangers and constraints, to make oneself into a convenient screen onto which straight people can project all the fantasies they routinely entertain about gay people, and to suffer one’s every gesture, statement, expression, and opinion to be totally and irrevocably marked by the overwhelming social significance of one’s openly acknowledged homosexual identity.” – pg. 30
“…to shift heterosexuality from the position of a universal subject of discourse to an object of interrogation and critique, and to shift homosexuality from the position of an object of power/knowledge to a position of legitimate subjective agency…We must make allowance for the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy.” – pg. 57
“The most radical reversal of homophobic discourse consists not in asserting, with the Gay Liberation Front of 1968, that “gay is good” (on the analogy with “black is beautiful” but in assuming and empowering a marginal positionality – not in rehabilitating an already demarcated, if devalued, identity but in taking advantage of the purely oppositional positional location homosexuality has been made to occupy by the logic of the supplement and by the fantasmatic character of homophobic discourse.” – pg. 61
>the tyranny of karl lagerfeld (aka GO AWAY)
>Dude, my sentiments exactly about that stupid Chanel exhibit in Central Park:
“The Chanel Pavilion may be less convoluted in its aims, but its message is no less noxious. When I first heard about it, I thought of the scene in the 1945 film “Mildred Pierce” when the parasitic playboy Monte Beragon sneeringly tells the Joan Crawford character, a waitress toiling to give her spoiled daughter a better life, that no matter how hard she scrubs, she will never be able to remove the smell of grease. We have been living in an age of Montes for more than a decade now. For strivers aching to separate themselves from the masses, the mix of architecture, art and fashion has had a nearly irresistible pull, promising a veneer of cultural sophistication.
Opening the pavilion in Central Park only aggravates the wince factor. Frederick Law Olmsted planned the park as a great democratic experiment, an immense social mixing place as well as an instrument of psychological healing for the weary. The Chanel project reminds us how far we have traveled from those ideals by dismantling the boundary between the civic realm and corporate interests.”
>A weird story
>A weird story that I read about in Thomas Mallon’s essay on Lincoln, and then got an excerpt from the original Time Magazine piece about Nixon slinking off to the Lincoln Memorial to meet with hippies. Should someone write a short story about this:
“Nixon was trying his best to reconstruct consensus, to show that if he was not embittered by the protest movement, neither was he cowed. He also attempted to display flexibility. He was not about to muzzle anyone, he said, but he counseled his subordinates that “when the action is hot, keep the rhetoric cool.” He defended the Cambodia decision anew, but he also added that the troops would be coming out faster than anticipated. While not withdrawing from his tactical rationale for the Cambodian venture, Nixon gave an impression that was very different from the belligerent patriotism with which he announced the foray.
Singular Odyssey. Before dawn the next morning, Nixon impulsively wakened his valet and set off with a clutch of Secret Service men for the Lincoln Memorial, where he talked for an hour with a group of drowsy but astonished demonstrators. His discussion rambled over the sights of the world that he had seen — Mexico City, the Moscow ballet, the cities of India. When the conversation turned to the war, Nixon told the students: “I know you think we are a bunch of so and so’s.” He said to them, the President recalled Chamberlain was the greatest man living and that Winston Churchill was a madman. It was not until years later that I realized that Churchill was right.” He confessed afterwards: “I doubt if that got over.”
Before he left, Nixon said: “I know you want to get the war over. Sure you came here to demonstrate and shout your slogans on the ellipse. That’s all right. Just keep it peaceful. Have a good time in Washington, and don’t go away bitter.”
>reality gnaws!
>
Blossom mixed with the “Rachel”:
Till I hear it from youuuuuuuuuu (hear it from youuuu)
I APPROVE THIS AD:
AND THIS ONE
>MALE OBJECTIFICATION ALERT
>”I felt like the girl in those teen movies that pops out of the hot tub topless. I was like, ‘All right, it’s Gus Van Sant, I’ll do whatever.’ I was just happy to be there.” – James Franco about his full-frontal scene and marginilized role
>idiocracy
>From here about Leonard Bernstein
“It’s no coincidence—though it was Bernstein’s immense good fortune—that his zenith came at a moment when some powerful people shared this desire. The Kennedys made their White House, in the words of Richard Hofstadter, “a center of receptivity to culture.” Bernstein performed at the Inaugural Gala, and, like Pablo Casals, E. E. Cummings, Robert Frost and other high-art luminaries, found a warm welcome throughout the Camelot years. Swept up in the notion that Americans might be able to meet not at the lowest common denominator but at the cultural peak, Bernstein was devastated by JFK’s death, which was also the death of Camelot. He dedicated his Third Symphony, “Kaddish,” to the late president….
…Still, Bernstein continued to show that the pursuit of excellence could coexist with American democracy. (It is one of the qualities that made him such an effective cultural emissary during the cold war.) But that position became decidedly lonelier after 1968, when Richard Nixon replaced the old economic resentments of presidential campaigns with obnoxious new cultural ones pitting “the silent majority” against assorted decadent elites. By the time Bernstein died in 1990, the very things he hoped might unite us had become a tool for driving us apart.
Anybody reading the papers can see how vicious the culture wars have grown. Just about any personal quality with a whiff of distinction—a hobby, a vegetable preference—can get you branded an elitist and a threat to our values. Remember how, in a desperate bid for self-preservation, John Kerry pretended four years ago he didn’t speak French? Or consider how, at this year’s Republican convention, Barack Obama was mocked by the multimillionaire former mayor of New York City and prominent opera buff Rudy Giuliani for being “cosmopolitan.” Maybe Tocqueville was right about us.
Nobody thinks that if only Sean Hannity listeners had a subtler appreciation of Mahler, they’d cozy right up to Nancy Pelosi fans, or that a wave of “Bad Dicky” revivals might heal the wounds of the body politic. But the Bernstein festival reminds us that one of our civilization’s triumphs has been finding ways to reconcile “elite” and “popular,” to stop treating the words like opposing epithets. At a time when so many other echoes of Camelot are in the air, we may yet see the return of its cultural spirit, one that few Americans have embodied as fully as Lenny Bernstein.”
helloweimarrepublic 