what's his address, i'll send him my chapbooks!
even miracle fruit can't make these sour grapes go down sweet
@Unfun: i always thought you were a guy!
@SlickaNicka: i mostly agree... while submitting that gawker, in its very essence as a mirror to twisted popular and media culture, is largely tasteless. so there's a slipperly slope there, and it's interesting to see how the editors necessarily distance themselves while being completely imbricated (i think this is just the plight of the creative underclass in general... but g. editors have to deal with it publicly and then their blogs get book deals). drawing a hard & fast line in the sand is a little ridiculous though(A.H.B.P.), because we're all in this stupid sandbox together, pissing and tragically laughing.
@AndSheSaid: it must be nice to live a life without shadows.
@Bell County: i've actually published on d&g! 1000plateaus4life!
@The Real JR: @CodePink: sort of as an addendum to my previous typo-ridden comment - i feel like gawker is important societally (to the people who come here) because it's an equalizer. because it's okay to look at a famous artist as an aspiring artist who's working a soul-shackling day job in publishing and say "oh yea, he looks a little weird with that forehead." from there you've at least got one up on him, or at least you have something in common, you know? I'm not saying that I think the majority of these comments are classy, and i understand that the Gawker editors - feeling more implicated in the nastiness than anonymous commenters - are anxious to bring the level of discourse up a notch... but this has always been a place where idols are dethroned and normalized.
by banning someone for making off color remarks about physical appearance (when they feed into the general discourse, NOT when they're written with ill intent), the editors are feeding into the dark place within us - collectively - that renounces anything but the beautiful and quotidian PC norm. i realize that there are a lot of counter arguments to this, and that no one wants to spend all their time in the terrible brightness of self-critique (where we are, in a fashion, the media idols we heartlessly pick apart) - but that's what i always thought gawker was about.
read the (admittedly whatever) threat embedded in the previous post and followed the comments wondering if anyone was going to, in fact, ignore the elephant in the room - METAPHORICALLY.
would it be allowable to acknowledge the painting's place within its cultural context, a aesthetically sick, ouruboros society that literally vilifies fat people? to note that the woman herself, while no doubt beautiful outside of the painting, is hardly lovingly rendered by the artist, whose strokes seem a little angry (and certainly unflattering, from a traditional standpoint)?
the first thing i saw when i looked at this painting was A Fat Person. not mockingly, but just as point of fact. the rapport of the painting (for me), it's value as a non-static piece of art, is all a result of Freud's choice of subject. I think we're supposed to acknowledge that the woman is depicted as fat and ugly - her face is squished to the point of being hidden and even her palette is sort of fecal...
but then we reconsider that she's also beautiful, and maybe we recalibrate (or even problematize) our previously conceived aesthetics and notions of beauty.
the sort of devil-may-care pre-censorship from the original post - while understandable given The Internet - effectively criminalized this yin-yang dialogue instead of problematizing the painting and our obvious reactions to it (culturally and individually).
those are just my thoughts, as this chain of events sort of threw me for a loop.
@In Other News...: ha!
but, then again, one can hope.
@Pope John Peeps II: i dunno about new and fresh, i thought it was pretty much a tarted up Society of the Spectacle.
@Priam: see, i stopped at the title. ryan adams won't even get that far with me.
anyone can write a book of poetry. the trick is getting people to read it.
The company that owns dove also owns slimfast, so i think there was actually hypocrasy from the start.
@cassandra: i think you mean great novelists when you say "great writers" - poets have always spanned socioeconomic strata.
when i was unemployed with an english MA and a few chapbooks, looking for publishing work in ny... i felt pretty bitter about the myth of meritocracy (especially as it pertained to me). but there's something to be said for working through the bullshit and becoming a persona independent of career level and circumstance. the old "this guy, what could he possibly know about life" credo used to be mine, but now i could care less - when people burn bright enough to get my attention, this sort of thing usually falls by the wayside. of course, the real stars never end up being trust fund kids...
@debord at work: i just now realized that there's not more outrage about this comparison because you people are - collectively - charlatans. i say that in the best sense - picture it as coming from paul bowles... but come on!
@CopyofBlueboy: phil levine chooses to work hardup minority students at community colleges because he knows what work is; also he's really sweet and has a lot of heart. i don't see the parallel.
i kissed the bottle / when i shoulda been kissing you
@Unfun: why???
@Gayyker: oh, he had this two stringed dave von ronk thing going, it was perfect! but the perfection shattered when he whipped out the web address.
