Sunday, June 27, 2010
I Hoard Sorrow: Musing on the Cupidity of Consumption or In Defense of Working Class Shame
Yes those were the reasons I told myself that I HAD to acquire these heels regardless of the fact that I had to eat off of Wendy's 99 cent menu nearly every night from the expense that came with living in Southern California. The real reason I so desperately wanted these to adorn my feet was that I wanted the women who treated me with the disdain of an S.S. Guard doing overtime in Dachau to say to themselves, "Wait a second! How did she get the editorial dream shoes? I'm going to have to treat her with less contempt now since she actually can afford Yves Saint Laurent".
Afford being the operative word. I couldn't afford these shoes. Instead it began a cycle of being able to use a department store card in order to continue to compete with women who I wouldn't have saved if they were on the Titanic. If you knew me personally you might ask, "But were'nt you also in the Communist Youth League during this time?" well....YES, but that the same working class pride that my mother had inspired me with during my childhood, even my fervent beliefs in Papa Stalin wouldn't quell the reality of being treated badly for being poor.
The next completely ridiculous "must have" item came from Stefano Pilati's first collection for, you guessed it, Yves Saint Laurent. The dress ended up on Ebay a few years after the famed Spring 2005 Ready-To-Wear show and I was convinced that if I just HAD this dress that my entire life would stop spiraling into a pool of sadness. For real. In my mind the beauty of this hot pink concoction would somehow envelope over me and I would no longer be a short, goat-herding calves, pinch more than an inch nose, girl who was still pouting about college being a "ruse". The truth?
I've never even worn this dress. Every time that it MAY have been appropriate there was always something newer and better that I had to have...the void remained unfilled and the debt continued to accumulate. There was also an incredible fear attached to the potential for "ruining" this dress if it actually ever made it off the black velvet hanger. A complete contradiction of care vs. absurdity and distorted thinking, because we all know the vision that I had as a female, and the last time I checked dresses don't make you grow 7 inches when you put them on.
The Miu Miu Baroque Wedges from Fall 2006. When I went to go pick these up from Neiman's (put on the card so therefore the smoke and mirrors act of purchasing was justified) I was ecstatic after having been told by my "Shoe Guy" (i.e. DEALER) that I had scored the only size 35's in the entire company. The words, my friends, were magic. Delightful, glorious and competitive words that made me prance around thinking that no one else with size 35 feet would be able to get these hand-carved testaments to gaudy excess. The sense of power, albeit buying power, cascaded over my 4' 11" frame. A member of Chicago's noise scene had accompanied me that day and sat in the over-stuffed chairs eyeing me as if I was a high-heeled tank crushing the bodies and spirits of Tiananmen Square.
Carolina Herrera's "Swimmers" dress remains one of my most preposterous Ebay purchases. The dress is a gorgeous silhouette featuring women of color diving into the luminosity of the azure fabric and is perhaps one of the most unique uses of the novelty print in the past decade. While those previous statements are an accurate description of said dress there's a just a small catch. You're a dress with black women on it! This is a difficult dress to wear, let's just be HONEST, we're all adults...I don't need to explain institutionalized racism to you.
As a white girl parading around in Ms. Herrera's creation the novelty of the novelty print elicits a different response depending on the amount of gentrification that Chicago neighborhoods have gone through, and let me just tell you the ONE time I've ever worn this dress I got a good taste of how people feel in Avondale, Logan Square, Wicker Park, Ukrainian Village, and Lakeview.
Would someone respond differently if the dress was worn by an African-American woman? Well...DUH. Does the dress make other people uncomfortable or does it merely make me self-conscious? All I know is that I truly love this dress, but the reality of what seems like an appropriated image seems too colonizer for me. That's just being honest.
The final pièce de résistance of my financial Trail of Tears are the Christian Louboutin "Mondrian" wedges that were, once again, the ONLY ones that Neimans bought in my size. Serotonin and endorphines gang-banged my brain.
It seemed to make perfect sense to me because they were the most outrageous shoes in the entire collection, they were literally "museum worthy", and evoked the approval of Cynthia Rowley during a store event. I was hooked! These were the greatest shoes in the universe.
Unfortunately these shoes go with nothing. A reader can correctly assume from the myriad of images above that basic black is not a part of my wardrobe and instead I gravitate towards items that can only be loved and appreciated by fellow magpies. What was I thinking? I wasn't thinking! I was feeling and clearly I was feeling like masquerading around in material items that I loved for their beauty, but also was driven to drape myself in order to garner compliments from people whose opinions shouldn't have mattered to me anyway.
The title of the post comes from the Red Eye cable show where the commentators went open season on Lindsay Lohan's infamous Insider interview whereby the Red Eye crew refers to her as being a celebrity "whore-der". The clip can be viewed here and is indisputably hilarious in mocking the troubled Lohan as both a tragedy and a farce. The statement, "I hoard sorrow" is what really articulated the underlying nature of people irrationally consuming these endless items while tap-dancing around our own uncertain financial and emotional futures.
Unless you're Fred Astaire tap-dancing just sort of makes you into a minstrel show.
This post was directly inspired by the blog Godammit, I'm Mad! and even more due to Sister Wolf's latest posting called "Because I'm Stupid" in which she describes the condition that so many of us find ourselves in, questioning our purchases and our state of mind. In the comment section the very same statements echoed from others coming forward with the world in which we all play dress up in our minds...carefully clothing our idealized selves in the Emperor's New Clothes.
All of this being said I know exactly why I continue to make the financial decisions of a three year old because I'm still playing paper dolls and imagining a world where I'm not being taunted for having "elf booties" from Payless. No recovered memories are needed here! Thank you mean middle-class white girls!
There is also the undeniable appreciation for beauty, quality, and rarity that comes from being raised to admire these works of art from afar, but the pain of the compulsion and the obsessive fetishism at some point becomes the leaded shoes upon which we drown.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
The Rats, The Maggots, The Cigarette Butts: Aurel Schmidt's Death and Decay
Reasons why I adore Aurel Schmidt like she is my abducted twin sister:
1. She has reconciled with her paranoia.
2. She's obsessive.
3. She didn't go to "Art School".
4. She has an extreme attachment to objects, such as a necklace her friend made her.
5. She creates an entire universe in her work.
The most unfortunate aspect of viewing Aurel's art via the internet is the sense of being cheated out of the full scale and vision that is apparent when the image is seen in the way it was intended. Specifically in regards to the above image which can been seen here , the difference is incredible...the lush texture of the fern-hair coinciding with burrowing maggots, the multitude of serpents inside the form with no visible heads, and the negative space behind the spider webs make me want fall into it's embrace and be consumed. Aurel, in essence, gives the viewer the reality of our own eventual consumption by nature and in the words sung by us all in seventh grade, "Life feeds on life feeds on life feeds oN LIFE FEEDS ON LIFE..."
One of her latest exhibitions entitled, "Burnouts" features thirteen drawings using cigarette burns, noses drawn out of Band-Aids and blood, old beer cans, and condoms in order to create macabre Smiley Faces. When I first viewed these pieces there was a simplicity that hadn't been shown in her previous work, and since Aurel appears to be greatly influenced by her surroundings it is of no surprise that a critique on hipsters would manifest itself. Now being that I am not the "artiste" I don't claim that this is the intention of the exhibition, however the pieces do seem to represent the vapid, mask-like faces of the urban narcissists swilling PBR specials and discarding their HPV-filled rubbers out of Williamsburg windows.
"I moved here and I was extremely lonely and paranoid." While Aurel may appear to be some sort of a zonkey centerfold, particularly in Terry Richardson's "Purple Magazine" spread of her faux urinating with a PBR can and draped in derivative cigarette necklaces, she has continued to document the world emulating itself only to cycle towards rebirth without the tackiness of celebrity or the fleeting nature of popularity. The video linked above is perhaps the most gorgeous work since it is of herself, and I can't help but share her paranoia of consumption and the terrifying nature of the world if only to know that by purging those racing thoughts and images and by opening all the boxes do we truly come to terms with our own imminent extinction.
If you fall in love with Aurel and you aren't living on the coasts to see her art in person you can snatch up her first book on Amazon.com entitled, "Man Eater".
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Candyland Appears Each Time You Smile- Dean Corll and The Boys of The Heights
The intensity surrounding Dean's insatiable desire to rape, torture, mutilate, and eventually murder young boys was seemingly in direct contrast to the image of a man that co-owned the Corll Candy Company with his mother. Yes, Dean was quite literally "The Candy Man".
In fact Dean's reputation and social interactions in and around Houston paint an entirely different portrait of a man whose mother continued to insist that her son was being framed in death by his teenage accomplices, David Brooks and Elmer Wayne Henley.
Crime scene photo of Dean Corll's body after having been shot by Elmer Wayne Henley
The tale of torture and murder unfolded quite unexpectedly in the hands of the Houston Police Department after Wayne Henley shot Corll in self-defense after discovering himself as the next victim for having made the mistake of bringing a female into the butcher's abode. One of the more disturbing details surrounding this case is Henley's delusion about being set free since he was kind enough to show the cops where all of the rotting bodies were for nearly all the area's male missing persons cases from the past decade. While both David and Wayne are serving life sentences for their active roles in the deaths of more than 28 teenage boys neither has provided any illumination as to how they participated in acts of rape, torture, and murder. What we, as a society, are left with is the question of how murders are more or less sensationalized based on the comfort of the collective memory. Had Dean Corll created a female teen bloodbath perhaps we would be renting "The Candy Man- Based on true events" from a Red Box machine. Pedophilia does not do well in theaters.
One of the media coup's in this case came from a radio station who procured an interview with a nineteen year old who had a three month tryst with Dean Corll, and went under the assumed name Guy. The young man told a similar story as Dean's mother about a quiet, reserved man who was extremely gentle and sensitive. As it may be, Guy's interactions with Dean may have been the personality that Dean hoped would conquer the person capable of castrating boys while still alive and then storing said genitals in plastic bags along side the plastic and lime encrusted bodies.
*"The Man With The Candy: The Story of the Houston Mass Murders" by Jack Olsen is available through Amazon.com
Monday, September 28, 2009
I AM T-PAIN "ashy elbows" Bertona Diss Song
We're all hoping that through the mention of Johnson & Johnson product placement in the track that the higher-ups in the advertising department will recognize an entirely new population in order to sell their hygiene products to, thereby exhalting Bertona's plight into the spotlight.
The track can be played via the link and I highly recommend figuring out a way to make this your new ringtone.
Goodbye Sonic Youth's Bull In The Heather"...
YOU HAVE BEEN REPLACED.
http://iamtpain.smule.com/mysongs/uid/1/92711/?did=422159
Bertona's ashy elbows can clearly be seen in this photo-op taken during one of the 6 days of summer in Chicago this year. Also featured is me yelling at Anubis, who clearly thinks that he's still running people's lives in concentration camps, and by that I mean he knocked into me multiple times.
Monday, September 14, 2009
I Realize With Selfhood Subtle and Gross Homeostasis Equilibrium of My Humanness That Is Oscillating Consciousness Beyond An Ensnaring Veil.
The "BLACK IS, BLACK AIN'T" exhibit took place April-June 2008 at the University of Chicago and was curated by The Renaissance Society using a line from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man which, in my opinion, should have been noted in the brochure instead of assuming that each person had it memorized from their junior year high school English class. I take issue with pretense for the sake of pretense..let's turn the mane down a tad, Skidd Row.
In the celler of the main character's racial consciousness the preacher's sermon begins,
"I said black is...an' black ain't...black will git you...an' Black won't...It do, Lawd...an' it don't- Black will make you...or it will unmake you."
And so, we begin with some of the more cerebral pieces in what was an exquisite aggrandizement to the ongoing discussion on race and racial identity, one that will conceivably continue until Saul Williams gets his money back.
The image above, created by Carl Pope Jr., was used as a two-sided poster and brochure for the exhibit which was a lovely parting gift that had remarkable potential for re-postering across this great city. Imagine walking down (insert whatever Chicago street doesn't make you ralph thinking about the zonkeys that have taken it over) and within eye-site an ombre concoction sets the records straight in the nigga/nigger debate. Just like THAT. There's your 12th member of the jury, man, the verdict is in.
The "ER/A" contention becomes nil when the ace of experience is dropped onto the table, and like various identities before, most notably the Jewish Holocaust experience (which was Jimi Hendrix's first band), the discussion becomes revitalized in the conscious reclaimation of empiric identity. Just like how certain Chicago scenesters from Schaumburg will never quite get that romanticization of poverty right, certain areas of racial identity do not belong to those outside of that ethnicity. My apologies to the pro-appropriation egg-heads, or as Gabriel Shadwick says, "I prefer steal".
Another personal favorite was Edgar Arceneaux's "Failed Attempt At Crystallization" (above) whereby the artist has taken the novel "Roots" and turned the book upside down while using sugar crystals to begin to sensuously devour the work of literature. Arceneaux's focus in his work is the connectivity of poetic and literary (that is, published) language and the experience of daily life, and while he attempts to seek these invisible patterns within society it is impossible not to note the paramount importance of choosing "Roots" as the medium upon which to make that critique.
The notion expressed is simply that the ideas expressed in "Roots" have not crystallized within our consciousness; that we have not learned from the past and instead remain static in our dealins with race and oppression. Albert Memmi had right back in 1957, "it is what it is because they are what they are, and neither one nor the other will ever change", but then again he also gave us the gem, "racism sums up and symbolizes the fundamental relation which unites colonialist and colonized". Arceneaux begs the audience to break its' obsession with masochism and begin to ferment the experiences of our shared pasts if only to stop being our generation's sloppy racial and racist seconds.
The most plesantly surprising out of all of the pieces in the exhibit had to be Andres Serrano's "White Nigger" (above) from his "Interpretation of Dreams" series by which the work showed a welcome departure from Serrano's more explicit and obvious controversial subject matter. I'm aware that in interviews Serrano states that he never meant to create such an uproar with "Piss Christ" to which my father would say, "don't bullshit a bullshitter".
In this piece the audience is more captivated than merely shocked with the question of racial identity placed at the forefront which was precisely the intention of The Renaissance Society curating these specific pieces. The man in the photograph, fellow artist Aaron Olshan, appears to be an African-American man with the exception of the lower inch of the portrait's frame which sneakily hips the audience to the joke. Perhaps the question presently is no longer what are you, but moreover who are you to which Ralph Ellison echoes back, "when I discover who I am, I'll be free".
*I wanted to discuss Carl Pope Jr.'s video installation Palimpsest, which was not included in the exhibit, in another post. The title from this particular post is from the third section whereby Pope's twin sister (and co-creator) narrates a poem while it is tattooed on Pope from the ankle to the back of his neck.
Friday, September 11, 2009
I'm Falling For You: Examining the Hegelian Process of Bildung, 9/11's forced negation of self, and America's Nero Complex
The aftermath of 9/11 has forced each one us to construct a new personality of "Americans" within the context of the rest of the world for perhaps the first time since our own warding off of colonization, along with rebuilding our sense of self in the face of our own Nero Complex. With no direct sensationalism intended I pose this picture of the WTC 'Jumpers' (which sounds like a new band name for my bff and I) in order to illustrate an overwhelmingly concrete feeling that I feel exemplifies post-9/11 developments on both didactic and dialectic levels.
Faced with the realization of eminent death and a pervasive fear of immolation, although realistically the majority of WTC workers near the sites of impact asphyxiated on smoke and chemical debris from the buildings, groups of people began to take flight from the towers; some holding hands as if lovers and others leaping alone seemingly escaping from the albatross of the Towers.
Bildung is the complex process by which individuals and collectives seek cultural formation by both learning, experiencing, and developing various aptitudes of personality, authenticity, and humanity. In the context of 9/11, the attacks are a direct response to the conceit of globalization as well as our own interconnectedness among the diverse cultures of the world, in that, each individual began to experience culture without our own awareness or consent until Al-Qaeda's public declaration of: FUCK YOU WESTERN CULTURE wrested the notion into our collective consciousness.
It is paramount to correlate globalization, which may be seen as a culturally spectral Bildung movement, to the ideologies of Islamic fundamentalist groups as its' antithesis. The growing pains of forced Western globalization is reflected in Nietzsche's letter to a friend, which states:
"First, one has the difficulty of emancipating oneself from one's chains; and, ultimately one has to emancipate oneself from this emancipation too! Each of us has to suffer, though in greatly different ways, from the chain sickness even after he has broken the chains."
9/11 has given, specifically, America the gift of self-negation and the opportunity for an existential crisis by which we can begin disrupt our process of living in the ways we have become accustomed to as well as to question timeless truths that we have manipulated the world into believing. The attack on the towers may be seen, ultimately, as a turn to terror and/or terrorism in order to contest Western globalization as a transcendent truth and in turn created fanatical devotion to an ideology of martyrdom.
Many critics have stated that America has thus had a Nero Complex regarding the effects of globalization on both the developed and underdeveloped nations of the world, by which we continue to eat our Big Macs while watching the telly as commercials of starving African children cause us to in turn to choke down larger handfulls of Ranch Doritos. I feel that the situation is perhaps more dire than the common satire of Americans, and that we have not so much played the fiddle while Rome was burning, but went to a Fall Out Boy concert where pictures of said concert were immediately uploaded onto our personal social networking site.
In other words, this is already America's default picture.
At this moment, I feel that there will never be an honest dialogue not so much as to why 9/11 happened, but moreover why it ultimately had to occur. As many of us understand from our childhood's sometimes an old-fashioned ass-whupping is exactly what an unruly brat needs in order for the concept of wrong-doing to sink into their grey matter.
Slavoj Zizek has most likely best described the entire fiasco in his new book entitled, "First as A Tragedy, Then As A Farce", whose title references Marx's notion of history repeating itself and that the end result is perhaps more terrfiying as a farce. Afterall, the collapse of global capitalism as evidenced by America's "Great Recession" is the just desserts for ignoring the needs of our natural and social world while instead continuing to manifest a culture of celebrity.
Zizek's book comes out October 5, 2009.