Haunted

I wanted to write to you about the title of this blog and the meaning of pretty to me at this time and in this context. I wanted to write about my first post to expound and dissect. Im sorry I cannot be so linear, you will have to wait for those entries.

I am haunted day and night. I am haunted by those I've held dear and let go in into the clamor of letters and emails not responded to, into the chaos of daily life and forgetting. I cant sleep for these memories of love left to desiccate and dissipate in the air like ash. I carry them like lost souls and they wait for quiet moments, when I try to dream, and they wont let me rest. The television can distract me sometimes as do sex and sensual desire. Drinking drowns the memories for a while. Making art culls the memories into another form, telling the stories of my spirits, so thats why I stop and start with my art. The missteps and the mistakes, the loves I have forsaken. I am haunted every day... good or bad poetry the following says it all:

Worry Song

I worry this air,

an old clothe worn thin at the hem by tremulous fingers.

I worry this minute this hour like an old house floor

Longing for the afternoon’s innocence.

I worry these arms

cramped and lonely

two branches

twisted in wind

dipping into fast unconscious waters.

I worry these legs,

these feet and

the unyielding gravity

wrapping me in memory like a widow.

I worry my eyes and my mouth

forlorn

for smooth bellies and a

a finger tracing my spine.

I worry my days like a mother

Sure of the pain in everything

Even in the sweetest delight.

I worry my life like a fugitive

Running tender footed onto and under the sheets of strangers

To forget why

to stop

to smother the worry

So

For a moment…

I can breathe.

me, circa sometime in 2004 or 5

Hesperus is Phosphorus, a manifesto.. of sorts

Transgression isnt a hat, hair color or a new pair of boots. In an age of entitlement* people wear otherness like a new summer frock, a hollow conceit. True otherness is felt in heart muscle and radiates out like a pheromone eliciting a primordial response from normative society that is manifested in one being ostracized, reviled, dismissed and ultimately alienated.

What arises from this marginalization are the subcultures and an underground in which innovation in art, music, literature, film as well as myriad other artistic disciplines flourish.

With rapid succession many of those who function within normative society seek to co-opt the innovations manufactured in the underground by those they have marginalized in the first place.

The paradoxical relationship between the transgressors and the dominant culture is both symbiotic and parasitic. The controllers of wealth and commerce within society seek to normalize and commodify these innovations in an attempt to dislocate them from their source.

Hollywood has had one of the most parasitic relationships with those who live on the edge of society. The corporate machine of American cinema simultaneously manipulates and capitulates to the cultural climate through cloyingly sentimental depictions of the underground. Hollywood attempts to laud the plight and heroism of the individualist living amongst the conformist strictures and the social tyranny of normative society yet in the process they condemn the transgressor to misrepresentation, vilification and melodramatic stereotypes.

Identification with the outsider and the romantic arc of his or her struggle has long been a compelling formula in popular literature and film. Why societies find such empathy on the page and screen with those who transgress cultural norms while at the same time they seek to silence the individualist is the essential paradox between normative society and the underground.

The creation of the modern film industry had a watershed effect on human ideas about identity, desire, and success. The Hollywood fame machine has created a global cultural phenomena that surrounds and informs modern ideas of identity, individuation and the need for adulation.

Many of those who function within the underground, or more broadly on the margins of straight societies, in particular queer artists and radicals, are deeply influenced by the glamor, artifice and camp aesthetic of old Hollywood. Queer artists and performers were the gender radicals of the 60's and 70's and reinvented glamor as political by challenging traditional gender roles and ideas about beauty, sexuality and power.

I am curious about the development and existence of identity in regard to its fluidity and its stasis in relation to social systems and individual psychology. The social systems of class and gender, fame and infamy, conformity and transgression and search for individual ratification of ones identity through these systems.

* full disclosure: After writing the line "in an age of entitlement" I recently discovered a book has been published in the past few years with that phrase in the title. The book is called " The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the age of Entitlement." It sounds like its right up my theoretical alley, along with quite a few other things mind you, and i look forward to reading it and I think you all should too.