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.