Archive for December 2008
>Yes, I’m still thrilled
>You’re gonna make a fan out of benjamins? You’ve got me. I’ve told you all before, I’m a sucker for this shit!
>Toni Morrison – "A Mercy"
>Halfway through Toni Morrison’s new book “A Mercy” and I am reminded of why I like her books so much. She isn’t a writer of my typical taste.
First of all, her comfort in sentimentality treads on thin ice, a style that could potentially curdle. That kind of indulgence always borders on cuteness at best and self-help shlock at worst. But Toni’s work hardly ever crosses the line into sacchrine. That’s because her work centers around myth much more than it does around melodrama. Morrison is acutely aware that America is only myth, grand narratives that Americans believe in, and she doesn’t shy away from it, never mind how nostalgic and romantic it can all be. Why not let a nation tell stories about itself? Morrison knows many of those American stories are lies that try to cover up the indiscretions of reality – slavery, poverty, oppression, murder, theft, the list goes on. Yet she’s attracted to that American mythology, they are lies that bear fruit for her. In “A Mercy” she mucks around in the mythology of American frontiership. And the result is a hazy, mashed up story about pioneers that are white, black, red, female, and male. If the Founding Fathers are the Gods, the strange bedfellows in “A Mercy” are Titans, much looser and ambigious characters that navigated a world far less stratified. Toni Morrison’s look past is pre-State, before the Constitution and legislative body. Within this adolescence of America, contradictions abound and strange bedfellows are both necessary for survival and under less gaze than in a more structured society. Within the queer families of “A Mercy”, and just like the Greeks with their complicated and imperfect dieties, Morrison foremothers and fathers muck around in a fantasy of America filled with contradictions, and so, ultimately truthful.
>Maneater
>Mikey and I in 2005 looking like we’re about to go to a Cure concert two decades ago.
>A Woman is a (well jeweled) Woman
>Cyd rockin a necklace she made for Subversive jewelry in 2006.
>Pyschedelic
>I just found all these old pictures on my computer in Pittsburgh, so the next couple of days will be archive shots, nothing new (especially because nothing particularly new will happen to me while I’m in Pittsburgh).
These pictures are from a time I took shrooms in Williamsburg three years ago. It had rained horribly and I borrowed clothes from Cyd. She found some old Calvin Klein jeans that were 3 sizes too big for me, and I swished around the apartment all night. She wore these beautiful orange, courderoy pants that entertained me the whole evening. We ate buckets of gummy candy and drew a lot. I remember why I thought each of the subjects of these photos seemed beautiful to me at the specific moment that I snapped them. I really like these pics.
>Cat (last) breath
>Some choice quotes from The New York Times’ obituary on Eartha Kitt, who died today:
” Though her record sales fell after the rise of rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll in the mid- and late ’50s, her singing style would later be the template for other singers with small-but-sensual voices like Diana Ross (who has said she patterned her Supremes sound and look largely after Ms. Kitt), Janet Jackson and Madonna, who recorded a cover version of “Santa Baby” in 1987.” 
…
From practically the beginning of her career, as critics gushed over Ms. Kitt, they also began to describe her in every feline term imaginable: her voice “purred” or “was like catnip”; she was a “sex kitten” who “slinked” or was “on the prowl” across the stage, sometimes “flashing her claws.” Her career has often been said to have had “nine lives.” Appropriately enough, she was tapped to play Catwoman in the 1960s TV series “Batman,” taking over the role from the leggier, lynxlike Julie Newmar and bringing to it a more feral, compact energy.
…
In 1968 she was invited to a White House luncheon and was asked by Lady Bird Johnson about the Vietnam War. She replied: “You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. No wonder the kids rebel and take pot.” The remark reportedly caused Mrs. Johnson to burst into tears and led to the only derailment in Ms. Kitt’s career.
…
“I’m a dirt person,” she told Ebony magazine in 1993. “I trust the dirt. I don’t trust diamonds and gold.”
helloweimarrepublic 