aerialiste

amanaday:

so this seems fair.  you can go and see a movie about a women who is the usual- angry and hysterical and i guess has no mirrors, or you can check out a ‘dayinthelife of men.’ naked men with their weird collection of upside down leg bouqets.

I think this kind of advertising is really good, because it’s so accurate and speaks for so many people. 

right.

amihumanpress:

I can’t make friends outside of California, or the Internet, which is like California but with artificial sun. In the place where I live now, people make friends like adults. I, however, make friends like California. …

oldloves:

Bill Murray on Gilda Radner:

“Gilda got married and went away. None of us saw her anymore. There was one good thing: Laraine had a party one night, a great party at her house. And I ended up being the disk jockey. She just had forty-fives, and not that many, so you really had to work the music end of it. There was a collection of like the funniest people in the world at this party. Somehow Sam Kinison sticks in my brain. The whole Monty Python group was there, most of us from the show, a lot of other funny people, and Gilda. Gilda showed up and she’d already had cancer and gone into remission and then had it again, I guess. Anyway she was slim. We hadn’t seen her in a long time. And she started doing, “I’ve got to go,” and she was just going to leave, and I was like, “Going to leave?” It felt like she was going to really leave forever.

So we started carrying her around, in a way that we could only do with her. We carried her up and down the stairs, around the house, repeatedly, for a long time, until I was exhausted. Then Danny did it for a while. Then I did it again. We just kept carrying her; we did it in teams. We kept carrying her around, but like upside down, every which way—over your shoulder and under your arm, carrying her like luggage. And that went on for more than an hour—maybe an hour and a half—just carrying her around and saying, “She’s leaving! This could be it! Now come on, this could be the last time we see her. Gilda’s leaving, and remember that she was very sick—hello?”

We worked all aspects of it, but it started with just, “She’s leaving, I don’t know if you’ve said good-bye to her.” And we said good-bye to the same people ten, twenty times, you know. 

And because these people were really funny, every person we’d drag her up to would just do like five minutes on her, with Gilda upside down in this sort of tortured position, which she absolutely loved. She was laughing so hard we could have lost her right then and there.

It was just one of the best parties I’ve ever been to in my life. I’ll always remember it. It was the last time I saw her.”

- from Live from New York: an Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live

I want to go out like this, please.

Chris Kraus | Summer of Hate (via elanormcinerney)

(via theilovedickproject-deactivated)

queermuseum:

QUEER HISTORY MONTH, DAY 19:

George Hannah, “The Boy in the Boat” (1930)

Now, did you ever hear the story ‘bout that boy in the boat, 
Don’t wear no shoes or no overcoat. 
Broad told me that it happened like this. 
He love to dive and also to fish. 
He went roaming in that shallow boat. 
With his head hardly rising and his eyes hard to cope. 
Face is all wrinkled and his breath smells like soap. 
Talking about that boy in the boat.

When you see two women walking hand in hand. 
Just look ‘em over and try to understand. 
They’ll go to these parties have their lights down low. 
Only those parties where women can go. 
You think I’m lying, just ask Tack Anne. 
Took many a broad from many a man. 
Face is still wrinkled and his breath smells like soap. 
Still talking about that boy in a boat.

Ever since the year tooty-two
Lot of these dames girls have nothing to do
Uncle Sam started giving a fighting chance
Packed up all the men sent them off to France
Sent them over there those Germans to hunt
The women at home can try all that new stunts
The face is still wrinkled and his breath smells like soap. 
I’m talking about that boy in the boat.

-This obscure song about sex between women (“boy in the boat” is a euphemism for the clitoris and the clitoral hood) is sung by the gloriously effeminate-sounding George Hannah. He references Word War One as a time when women were “left alone” to experiment with each other sexually, and Hannah was also known for singing another queer song from this era, entitled “Freakish Man Blues.” Very little is known about Hannah, but he recorded several times between 1926 and 1931 in the Midwest.

-Cookie

In between his voice and his subject matter, wonder if George Hannah might not have been passing? (h/t theredshoes!)

(via borgevino)

(Source: The New York Times, via theredshoes)

zombienormal:

Georges de Feure, from L’Art Décoratif, 1899.

Via.

(via theredshoes)

officehoursareover:

PANTS ARE FOR TOOLS

nevver:

Spring Spleen, Lydia Davis

(via thereluctantlibrarian)

aireaonce:

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to read Amiri Baraka’s criticism of Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, edited by Charles Henry Rowell, on the Poetry Foundation’s website. Baraka’s commentary provoked me to consider the individual responsibility of the poet and what, if any, debt the poet owes to those who have come before. This internal wrangling reminded me why I came to poetry many years ago. One reason was to develop conversations with the poets whose work touched me; one was to transcend the ever-present ache of reality by seeing myself in another’s experience. I found poetry, unbounded by human constraints of temporality, suited to truths that pull individuals together—a grand unifier, so to speak. 

And it is with this personal belief in poetry as a unifier that I disagree with Baraka’s primary assertion that Rowell’s editorial choices are an “anti” to the Black Arts Movement. Understandably, Baraka takes umbrage with the omission of certain pivotal authors, like Nikky Finney, from the text. He also rails against what he views to be an ahistorical perspective of the Black Arts Movement’s significance. Baraka writes, “…distinctive about Rowell’s introduction is that just about every page mentions the ‘Black Arts Movement,’ ‘the Black Aesthetic poets,’ ‘the Black Power Movement’ — all like some menacing political institutions.” However, in my view, Angles’ logical advance illustrates the interrelationship between the works of Black poets from modernism to post-structuralism and thereby implies poetic inheritance. Each section offers an inextricable ancestral tie between the eras. There is no move, either overt or implicit, to sublimate the message or importance of the Black Arts Movement. Rather, Rowell invites the reader to consider the temporal linkages and, through the work, inquire why and how the Black poets’ voice and text corpus changed. These reflections suggest correlations between the poetic body and the political and cultural economy.  

Certainly, one of the predominant ways in which cultural developments can be examined is through individual self-definition. Western cultures have long placed a higher value on the individual than on the collective.  Conversely, one of the significant contributions of the Black Arts Movement was a poetic shift from an individualist to a collectivist paradigm for the sake of responsive action to the political landscape of the time. What we see and read and hear in the voice of the contemporary Black poet is an evolution, of sorts, in the relationship between individualism and collectivism; a new model presents itself in which they are peaceful, non-oppositional co-habitants. Essentially, for the contemporary Black poet, collectivism resides inside the many Black cultures birthed from the work of our poetic and political forebears. Meanwhile, individualism persists in the poet’s desire to be united with the fragmented and the frayed by understanding his or her own position within their context. More than anything, this evolution bolsters the Black Arts Movement’s importance in helping to disabuse monolithic conceptions of Blackness. If we fled from the imposition of the stereotype that all Black people look alike, then our poetic work will equally take part in that flight. And we will see, as we do, a natural migration from “movements” to  “collectives” to independent self-construal.  

At stake then is not the Black Arts Movement’s legitimacy, but rather a progressive shift in the poet’s gaze from allocentric to idiocentric. This goes far to explain Rowell’s position:

          …the work of these poets [third-wave, contemporary, African  

          American poets] are the direct results of what such poets as

          Yusef Komunyakaa, Ai, Cyrus Cassells, Rita Dove, Thylias Moss,

          Toi Derricotte, Harryette Mullen, Nathaniel Mackey—the first

          wave—write, which is whatever they wanted and in whatever 

          forms and styles they desired…

Baraka counters, “I cannot see any stylistic tendency that would render them [contemporary African American poets] a movement or a coherent aesthetic,” but I believe that is exactly the point. This seems a reasonable example of how cultural variation leads to individual “I”-based consciousness in the work. As an offshoot of that, each poet, as Paul Valéry stated in The Art of Poetry, “…lends his expression, adds and transforms, introduces local allusions, new incidents, and his own images. It is a life of a work developing from mouth to mouth.” Furthering this proposition, it is life and experience as lived through the imagination and mouth of the poet. Ultimately, the poem becomes the individual expression of

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