#and that they might be the audiences first exposure to gay people period

[princessmuk]

Here is the most simple problem every human experiences: If you are not familiar with X group, then any individual member of that group must represent the whole.

Your sister likes horses? Well, every girl must like horses then.

You meet someone from a different country that has a strange quirk? Well, everyone from that country must be like that.

Your gay friend is bad at math? Well, every gay person must be bad at math.

Your friend of X race has great skin? Well, every member of that race must have great skin, too.

This happens to everyone. Everyone. Trying to act like it doesn’t happen to you just stops you from examining your biases. And yeah, when you learn more about the world, it can be easy to make assumptions so you can more easily understand and interact with it. Cultural customs, trends, and characteristics are useful.

But with assumption comes bias and prejudice. And assumptions cannot lead you forever.

That is why you need to delve deeper. Expose yourself to different cultures and ways of thinking. Meet people who are different than you. Listen to them. Find media from their cultures, separate the stereotypes from the culture.

One does not represent the whole. Every human being is unique.

[whetstonefires]

Your post about romance was so spot on and this is from someone who really likes reading romances some of the time. I just wish there were more books where friendships (which after all make up the majority of people's relationships!!) were given the same weight and importance as romance gets unthinkingly. Like, I want books or fic which show the development of two (or more) new friends *as the plot and main part of the book*, and the same thing for the progression of pre-established friendship.

Human relationships are varied and complex and interesting and limiting writing to mainly concerning romantic or dating ones is infuriating! I enjoy reading character driven stuff, which is why I like some romances but I really want to see similarly detailed deep studies of friendship. Friendships are so important, and romantic relationships do not supersede them.  Obviously there is gendered bias against romance as a genre but that is not the only reason to be uninterested in romance damnit!

Sorry for ranting in your inbox about romance and thanks for the post

Hah thank and welcome. Very true!

Yeah, the problem is not just how ubiquitous romance is but the inevitability of it. So many people are so much in the habit of hanging their emotional investment on ‘couples getting together’ that not putting one in is a risk, as a creator, and the faint suggestion of a possibility that a romance might eventuate between two characters constitutes a promise that the audience will be outraged to see not followed through.

So making a story focus at all on a relationship between two people who are considered valid potential romantic partners means having to go through incredible backflips and contortions as a writer to get away with not pairing them up, or there will be outrage. There will be outrage anyway, but hopefully on a contained scale that doesn’t have people throwing your book away.

(The easiest way, of course, is to give one or both of them an alternate partner, but then you either have to build up that relationship as the central focus instead, because you aren’t allowed to love anyone that much and not be romantically involved or be romantically involved For Real with anyone but whoever you love most, or accept that you’ve plastered on a beard of some kind in a way that at this point makes your main duo look even more romantic to people who are looking for that in the first place, even if it lets you write a plot that doesn’t acknowledge this.)

This has contributed enormously to the cultural truism ‘men and women can’t be friends.’ They aren’t allowed to be. And this weird intense romantic pressure is now increasingly extending to same-sex friendships, and it’s like...it’s good that gay visibility and acceptance are growing! That’s great!

But it means that all relationships are increasingly exposed to this honestly fucked up set of expectations. That every single love of any intensity is romantic and probably sexual. That that’s the only love that’s real, or that really matters. With occasional exemptions carved out for parents.

And that’s cultural, I want to say. The inclusion of and an interest in the romantic lives of characters in fiction is definitely natural and practically inevitable, but the outsize role it occupies in our current media culture is abnormal and totally non-compulsory. The central role of romance in so much of narrative is just...a pattern, a narrative schema that currently holds sway, born of an assortment of historical accidents and trends, and I don’t think it’s a good one.

I think it would be better for us as a culture and all our individual relationships for that particular social construct to be broken down.

Because this cultural obsession with The Romance in media mirrors and continually recreates the obsession with The Romance in real life. You know how many people are making themselves miserable by either being in a relationship predicated on the need to have one, any one, rather than actual mutual affection, or about not having a love interest currently at any given moment?

Like, quite separately from the actual frustrated romantic feelings themselves, people feeling like they are less or failures or just...unfinished somehow, because they don’t have a romantic partner. It’s so harmful and absurd! We all know this!

And there are of course a lot of sociological factors that have led to that point as well, but it’s linked particularly closely I think to the atomization of modern society.

You’re not likely to retain any particular community for long--we move around so much over the course of our lives, anything you have is designed to be taken apart. School friends are only rarely retained after school, work friends are only until you get a new job, family is quite often something to be avoided or something you have to leave behind, and not usually an extended network anymore anyway.

We are always moving into new contexts, or knowing we might be moved, and holding onto relationships from one context into another is generally regarded as an unusual feat betokening particular, though not lionized, devotion, and leaning on these relationships ‘too much’ or pursuing them with ‘too much’ energy is regarded with deep suspicion.

This, too, is not particularly normal in the human experience. We are not psychologically designed for this level of impermanence. And we have developed very few structures as a culture thus far to make up for it, which is why the modern adult is so famously, dangerously lonely.

But we have all these social protocols for acquiring a person and holding onto them. A person who’s just yours, all yours, who it is promised will fulfill all those gaping needs all by themselves, and if they don’t it’s because you or they are wrong, and need either a different partner or fixing.

The fact that this is insane and not how romance works over 90% of the time is irrelevant to the dream of it, and the dream overwhelms and controls the reality. I agree that codependency is really fucking romantic, and having a kind and supportive mutual one is a lovely fantasy! It’s just...

A lot of harm eventuates from pursuing this fantasy in reality with a media-based conviction that it is 1) a reasonable thing to expect and 2) a necessary precondition for wellbeing and worthiness.

But we have poured so much cultural freight and need into this one single relationship format. At this point having need in any other direction is regarded as disordered and suspect and probably a misdirected application of sexual desire.

The law, too, has put a lot of energy into supporting the focus on seeking the romance as life goal, because the nuclear family is built on the codependent marriage, and capitalism likes the nuclear family very much. The nuclear family is extremely vulnerable to market pressures and bad at collective action, and tends to produce new tiny humans whose main social outlet has been within the school system, which is specifically structured to condition you to accept abusive workplace conditions as a normal precondition of existence, and not to attempt too much intimacy.

Ahem. Spiraled there. But! It’s all connected! Many of the privileges piled onto the institution of marriage were put there specifically because the nuclear family was considered desirable for the expansion of the economy. That’s clearly documented historical fact.

So yeah, the modern cultural obsession with the romance is a symptom of collective emotional disorder, and it chugs along at the expense of the more complex emotional support infrastructures most of us need and deserve.

It’s not just about me wanting representation, wanting an image in the narratives of my culture where I can see myself with the potential for happiness. Everyone needs this. We learn so much about how to be, how to relate to others, from media at this point, since the school system and other weird age-hierarchy stuff keeps us largely segregated from human society for a majority of our growing years and limits our exposure to live examples.

So the paucity of in-depth explorations of friendship, of mutual support, of widespread narrative acceptance that you can have a good life without a romance as its central support pillar, is harmful to people in general.

-

It’s funny, I get frustrated about this periodically, when a piece of media lets me down, or even when I’m following along a funny piece of meta and then the punchline is ‘and the ace character is obviously in denial about how they’re already dating their favorite person’ or whatever.

(The meta is annoying on a surface level and distressing on a deeper level because it’s a threat; so many times a good platonic relationship will buckle under public pressure and it doesn’t matter how asexual, how uninterested in romance, how emphatically platonic the affection has been established as being, The Romance arrives in the next installment of the story because it’s what people expect. Which reinforces the general perception that any other love is illegitimate, lesser, and as soon as it’s meant to be taken seriously it has to be crammed into that one valid shape, and invalidates future insistences in the same mode.

Seriously people stop doing this, we long since reached the point where a character saying in words ‘I have no romantic interest in [person]’ is perceived as a glaring neon sign that they’re destined to get together and that does not do good things for fostering a culture of consent. Obviously people are in denial sometimes but it should not be understood to be the rule.)

But I don’t get upset about it until someone starts in with reasons I’m bad and wrong for not liking these norms.

Like, whatever, media does not cater to my needs, I’ll cope, but when people start trying to get in my head and make me not only responsible for my own discomfort that I’m managing thanks but dishonest and malevolent I...get upset. There’s history there, okay.

‘You don’t care about this ship because you’re homophobic’ ‘you don’t want a love interest in the sequel because you’re racist’ ‘you don’t like romance in stories because you’re a misogynist’ fucking stop.

And occasionally it’s like ‘i guess you have the right to feel that way but how dare you talk about it where other people might hear’ which...well, is particularly common and particularly ironic in the context of people hung up on gay representation.

If we as a society had a healthy relationship with romance, there wouldn’t be negative side effects to that crowd’s pursuit of their worthy goal of applying that schema in places it has been Forbidden, but as it is we don’t, and there are.

[pittarchives]

“Coming Out” via Print Media: Speech Acts and Queer Identity

This post was written by Joe Wozniak, a recipient of an Archival Scholar Research Award for the 2021 Spring Semester. 

Sifting through Pitt’s American Left Ephemera Collection for the ASRA project has been a true exposure to many ideologies focused on social progress. Publications from 1960’s-1970’s that center around Women’s Liberation, Civil Rights, and Gay and Lesbian Rights are plentiful. Each one allows the reader to take in a conversation from the time. While some have a single vision, many were starting to acknowledge the intersectionality of their causes. Lesbian women were no exception and created many independent publications to add their voices to the conversation. Lavender Vision is one example that aimed at creating a larger community of like minded, “women who love women”. In their own words, “We will not be forced into being a single issue liberation movement. Our struggle against sexism includes fighting all forms of domination because we believe sexism to be the first and most basic fucked up power relationship” (Lavender Vision for the Lesbian Community, vol. 1, issue 1, (1971): 2).

Excerpt from Lavender Vision. While some passages are calls for action, some were more centered around romance. Lavender Vision for the Lesbian Community, Vol. 1, Issue 2, (1971): 2-3. American Left Ephemera Collection, 1875-2015, AIS.2007.11, Archives & Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library System

The time period was no cake walk for anyone who may have lived an alternative lifestyle. Creating spaces to find one another was crucial not only for the group’s progress, but also for the well-being of the individual members spread across the United States. Being a woman was hard enough, couple that with a queer identity and you’re bound to encounter problems. Despite this, inside Lavender Vision are pleas for companionship, pronouncements of identity, and inquiries into what it means to be queer. A particular question asked by columnist “Sue Sappho” begs, “Gay people speak of “coming out”. How does one come out when there is nowhere to come out to?” (Lavender Vision for the Lesbian Community, vol. 1, issue 2. (1971): 2-3).

Excerpt from Lavender Vision. Above, columnist Sue Sappho asks, “how does one come out when there is no one to come out to?” Lavender Vision for the Lesbian Community, Vol. 1, Issue 2, (1971): 2-3. American Left Ephemera Collection, 1875-2015, AIS.2007.11, Archives & Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library System

Lavender Vision responds to that question with a grand proclamation on the opposite page, “WE ARE LESBIANS”. With a queer afflatus, the writer lays down a manifesto for lesbian women everywhere (see full transcript of image below). The constant use of the plural “we” shows the idea of a unified group with a shared vision that, “creates our own way of making love…of fighting… of making a revolution that is not just on walls and in leaflets but in our daily lives.” The jagged lines of the border which might be seen as forming the shapes of open mouths reflects a group shouting this affirmation with resounding effects. While mostly empowering, the piece makes clear that being a lesbian is, “historically dangerous…Gay sisters know what it means to be underground.” But more importantly Lavender Vision answers Sue Sappho’s question with an underground example: she could come out through this publication. While not traditional, there would be others to hear her announcement and acknowledge her as one of their own. This may seem trite in an age where just owning a cell phone allows access to a queer community, but in 1970’s America this potentially was a life-saving statement. Another of Sue’s statements hints at this, “please do not keep us waiting long. We need your help right now.” (Lavender Vision for the Lesbian Community, vol. 1, issue 2. (1971): 2-3.)

Excerpt from Lavender Vision. The above statement from the publication reads as a manifesto, not only for the writers but for the lesbian audience dispersed across the nation. Lavender Vision for the Lesbian Community, Vol. 1, Issue 2, (1971): 2-3. American Left Ephemera Collection, 1875-2015, AIS.2007.11, Archives & Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library System

The act of “coming out” closely resembles what linguists call a performative speech act. A “performative”, first coined by J.L. Austin (Austin 1962), is the act of uttering what one is doing (performing) and in doing so creating a shift in reality. This could be as simple as a bet or a promise, but sometimes holds a bit more weight. A well-used example is a Western wedding ceremony. When two partners have reached the end of the ritual, they utter the phrase “I do (take you as my partner).” In doing so, they have entered into an agreed upon (and in most cases legally binding) contract committing themselves to one another. Of course, this could be considered infelicitous, a fancy linguistic term meaning null, for many reasons. For example, I wouldn’t be able to marry someone by just performing a ceremony and saying “I do” if no one else were around to hear me say it. “Coming out” for many queer identifying people is an affirmation of identity. Without an audience to hear that soul-bearing statement it may feel to many, like our friend Sue Sappho, as if it weren’t the same thing. Publications like Lavender Vision, whether passed around in queer spaces or read alone in a bedroom, allowed this conversation to happen.

Works Cited

Lavender Vision for the Lesbian Community, vol. 1, issue 2. (1971): 2-3. American Left Ephemera Collection, 1875-2015, AIS.2007.11, Archives & Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library System 

Lavender Vision for the Lesbian Community, vol. 1, issue 1, (1971): 2. https://voices.revealdigital.org/?a=d&d=CCGDEFA19700101&e=——-en-20–1–txt-txIN—————1 ( accessed February 25, 2021).

Austin, J.L., How To Do Things With Words. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA (1962): 12-38.

[hellogoodbye741]

All the book reviews I should have been doing in real time, but imma piece of garbage(tm)

Please ignore this second (or possibly more if i don’t have enough space) long ass post

Reading Lolita in Tehran:

I really enjoyed this book. I’m not a huge fan of a lot of nonfiction writing because of how monotonous they can be, but this wasn’t like that. She really told a story about her (the author) and a bunch of young woman in Tehran reading Lolita and other banned books, and it really resonated with me.

:)

Hidden Figures:

I had been told several times that this book was not going to be what I expected and that I should read the children’s version of it instead because that was more like the movie. Should have listened. I enjoyed the book, but it focused way more on the scientific side of things instead of the more story-line aspect of history. Not saying that it wasn’t great and a fascinating read into such pivotal people in America’s timeline, it just wasn’t my thing.

:/

Virals:

I had been putting off reading this series by Kathy Reichs because it wasn’t the Tempe Brennan character, and therefore I did not care. BOY WAS THAT A WRONG OPINION. This book (and the subsequent ones I have since read) are amazing! They were written with teens in mind, but you can enjoy them at any level. They are chocked full of sci-fi fun that keeps you begging for more and more. I say this about very few novels, but I would totally read again.

:)

Noir:

I absolutely adore Christopher Moore books. I have read several of his, and have never found any at fault. This one, however, wasn’t up to par. It was okay, but not like his other works. I couldn’t get into as much, and it wasn’t as funny. The story is written very much like a noir-style movie, so I could find no fault in that, but the twist at the middle/end was very unexpected and left me confused. I think I would have to give it a read and more pay attention to more finite details to make sense of it.

:/

Number One Chinese Restaurant:

I was expecting to really enjoy this book, but honestly, it kinda sucked. I didn’t really like any of the characters, and never felt any sympathy for any of them even when they were going through struggles. The writing was a little choppy, and the constant POV change was jarring. It was a little bit of a struggle to get through, not gonna lie.

:/

The House That Lou Built:

I know this book is meant for younger audiences, but I absolutely adored it. Like I have nothing else to say, it was adorable and I will protect it with my life.

:)

Crazy Rich Asians:

I enjoyed this book. I’m not a huge fan of multiple POVs, but the way they did it in this book wasn’t bad at all. I really want to see the movie and see how it compares.

:)

Da Vinci Code:

Tis a classic I have read several times over. Dan Brown got it going on.

:)

Post Mordem:

I love the Kathy Reichs books and have read several of them (unfortunately not in order).  This is the first book in the series, and I really liked seeing how it all got started. Kathy Reichs tries to make sure to make the science aspect of the book both for the idiots and the people who know their shit, which is great. Gotta represent my North Carolina ladiesss

:)

77 Shadow Street:

This book was all kinds of fucked up. Every time I thought I got the plot and what was going on, they fucked me over again. I said “what the fuck” at least once every chapter.

:(

Raisin in the Sun:

Don’t know how it took me so long to read this play. Absolutely adored the characters and the storyline, and the resolution at the end was bittersweet. Would love to see it performed and get the true experience and emotion.

:)

House on Mango Street:

I have read this book a handful of times too, and I enjoy it every single time. The book is short and sweet, and the poetry graceful and moving. Will probably read again and again in the future.

:)

Whipping Boy:

I first read this in the 4th grade and it has resonated with me ever since. It takes like an hour to read, but it is filled with so much in the meantime. All about dat bourgeoise bullshitttttt and how it can be rectified.

:)

In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson:

Haven’t read this since elementary school, and had forgotten how sweet this story is. The trials the young girl goes through and how she triumphs, in the end, leaves me with the biggest smile on my face.

:)

Red Scarf Girl:

Also been a while since last reading this book. It’s a beautiful and tragic story about the rise of communism and the struggles that everyone in their country faced. I think it was based on a true story but honestly can’t remember. Would definitely read again.

:)

Journey of Little Charles:

This was an endearing ‘growing up’ historical novel. I enjoyed it.

:)

Ivy Aberdeen’s Letters to the World:

This was absolutely GREAT. Such a beautiful way to explore and introduce the LGBTQIA+ community to younger audiences.

:)

Children of Blood and Bone:

I really enjoyed this book, and want to read the rest of the series too. It was a very immersive story that kept me on the edge of my seat throughout the whole story.

:)

Chaos/Code/Exposure:

I’m just going to do these three as one since they’re all part of the same series. I really enjoy the Virals series, and each time you think there’s nowhere else to go, Reichs and her son introduce something you would have never expected.

:)

Sing, unburied, sing:

Thought I was gonna like this one more than I did. It just kinda lagged for me and was hard to get into.

:/

Lucky Broken Girl:

I thought this was a beautiful and heartbreaking book (and true story) about a girl who is confined to her bed practically paralyzed. It was nice to watch her get through her struggles and come out on top in the end.

:)

Finding Langston:

This was a very cute story about a poc country boy going to the city and discovering himself through a love of books, and though it is meant for younger audiences, I enjoyed it immensely.

:)

The Dollar Kids:

Another cute story meant for kids about finding one's self and working through trauma in a way that children can understand.

:)

Winnie’s Great War:

It’s the absolutely true story of the English army adopting a bear in the 40s told through the POV of the bear. I do not need to say more.

:)

Ballet Shoes:

I’m a sucker for three young girls following their dreams and one of them being ballet. Yaas queen.

:)

Song for a Whale:

An absolutely stunning tale of following your dreams and fighting through all adversities to get there. Also, the main character is deaf, and being HOH myself, loved having the representation (even if the story if for younger children).

:)

It’s Not a Perfect World, but I’ll take It:

Told from the perspective and real-life story of a girl living with autism, and some things that can help others learn how to accept that they are just like anyone else, and some things on how to make life a bit easier. Loved seeing life through that perspective, even if it was only for a little while.

:)

Rapunzel’s Revenge:

Loved this comic’s twist on the classic tale of Rapunzel. Rapunzel takes her life into her own hands and kicks ass

:)

Ghost Doll and Jasper:

This was a perfect mix between cute and creepy. A combination most would find weird, but I loved it!

:)

Color Purple:

I’ve been hearing about this book for as long as I could remember, but never at any point had anyone ever talked about the plot?? It wasn’t what I expected at all, but it really made me feel something,

:)

We Will Not Be Silent:

NEVER AGAIN MEANS NOW, NEVER AGAIN MEANS NOW

:)

The Woman Who Smashed Codes:

A fascinating read, but on par with Hidden Figures where there was a lot that I just didn’t understand.

:/

The Lowlands:

It took me almost 3/4 of the way into the book to actually get into the plot and understand what was going on. Maybe another read-through might help, but eh.

:/

1776:

I love history, but the sheer length of this book and the unending quality about it was #strugglebus

:/

Born a Crime:

Nobody should be born illegal, nobody should be illegal period. Trevor Noah, I’m sorry a rude ass country did that to you.

:)

Stalking Jack the Ripper:

Yooooooo, read this shit!

:)

Winnie the Pooh:

You already know who it is

:)

Eragon:

It has been so long since I have read this series. I had forgotten how long the books were, but #worthit

:)

Titus Andronicus:

Did not understand it while I was reading it. Saw it performed the next day and was like “ohhhhhhh, i get it now”

:/

How to Train Your Dragon:

Nothing like the movie, at all. Still cute tho.

:)

Howl’s Moving Castle:

Was just like the movie, except even more. There was a whole other plot point that just added to the concept of Howl that made it even better.

:)

Other Words from Home:

Beautiful story of a young girl moving halfway across the world and dealing with the hardships that come with it.

:)

Hunting Prince Dracula:

Do you like UST between two dork scientist badasses??? READ DAT SHIT

:)

Sweep:

This was both incredibly sweet, and absolutely sad, while also throwing in some kill the capitalist bourgeoise and I loved it.

:)

Errant Prince:

Four words-

Gay.

Trans.

Wizard.

Knight.

:)

Diary of Anne Frank:

You get so enamored with the girl she was, that you forget that she never got to the be the girl she could have been.

:’(

The Help:

EAT

MY

SHIT

:)

Black Leopard, Red Wolf:

Not a big fan of the random and multiple rape scenes, and the plot was hard to follow.

:/

Hunger Makes me a Modern Girl:

It was a good, short read.

:)

In Another time:

I got straight and happy couple baited and I was denied but in a beautiful way so #allowed.

:)

A Place For Us:

Another one where the plot was a little hard to follow, but I actually enjoyed it nonetheless.

:)

Sun is Also a Star:

Thought I was gonna be denied my happy ending, turned it around on the last page. Hell yuss.

:)

Prodigal Summer:

Thought I was gonna enjoy it more since I too am from rural Appalachia. Nah

:/

Zombie:

Alright, okay, a little fucked up, okay, okay, WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED, the end.

:/

Fox8:

I cried at work reading this????

:)

Fire and Fury:

Not my thing, nice to see what’s up tho

:/

Song of Achilles:

GAAAAAAY

and

TRAGGGGIICCC

:)

Genesis Begins Again:

No matter what anyone says, you’re beautiful

:)

[anvh89]

Shadow Hunters, Malec and what I consider the biggest issues

So for some time I and some of the TW meta group have been watching Shadowhunters and discussing/ranting about it. It’s been interesting enough to garner interest and rants and continued viewership, mostly to delight in the things that are going on which are nonsense and also appreciating the Malec story (and ranting about it)

I will admit I have not read any other the source material for a number of reasons *couch*plagiarismfanficscandal*cough* and the writing being meh at best, so I’ll keep to what the show has been telling us and maybe the wiki if something had to be looked up.

So a lot of the issues stem from world building problems, much of it is clearly borrowed from HP considering the origin, but beyond this much of the world building is almost random.

Let’s keep to my interest in Malec for the first bit , so early on the budding relationship meets resistance from Alec, he’s shown as very reticent he’s clearly got a crush on Jace but it’s secret and he’s ashamed of it, now could be many reasons, but then he makes the decision to marry for duty and family because that’s “following his heart” (this after an episode where he’s told by Izzy their parents are trying to marry them off and he just goes not a chance), which implies there is probably a taboo about being gay, but the show never brings that up, there is no homophobia it seems which makes it weird how strange Alec was about his homosexuality to begin with.

And just to get back to that Marriage story line and what it implies and which I think everyone will agree makes zero sense and I’ll tell you why. So the implication of the story line is that SH society is feudal, you see that in the way they talk about families, the Lightwoods, the Herondales, the Branwells etc. (This is almost certainly borrowed from the HP universe) so we have this society which values family power and prestige, that’s what we’re told during the marriage debacle, the Lightwoods were circle members who went back to the clave but lost status (but not that much of a loss since they just got bumped out to the NY institute) but the Clary shenanigans made them lose more favour and the solution the parents came up with was marrying off their kids to a family in better standing.

I’m not sure exactly why it had to be Alec, some weird reason for Izzy not to do it like being a diplomat to the DWers which makes little sense, there is no indication that Maryse stopped working when she married her husband, and Izzy was clearly more open to the idea in the first place.

At any rate this is an interesting storyline with far reaching implications about how SH society functions, but then Alec just decides not to go through with it and there are no consequences? This is where the world building fails, for a number of reasons, including “we’re a dying breed”, we’re led to this conclusion that the SH society is very traditional and set in its ways, that families and family ties are important, that SH are dying out. So basically we have a situation where you’d expect marriages to be based on politics and not something you could decide to get out of on a whim and with the Dying out part you’d expect there to be the expectation of no homosexuality or at least the need to perform the duty of breeding new SH’s for the war.

That could have been a very interesting story line, Alec torn between his love for Magnus and his duty to his society and the expectations of his marriage. Marriage in feudal societies and their view on fidelity was very different so you could have had him in a political marriage with Magnus as his lover on the side no problem. Lot of potential there, but instead it was used to leap frog the Malec ship into something totally romantic without having to spend any reasonable amount of time convincing the audience that Alec and Magnus had developed real feelings for each other (we’re talking about a timeline for the whole show of something like 2 months) and that leapfrogging into a romantic relationship really hurt the shipping potential for Malec, because it’s hard to be convinced that they’re so much in love when most of the scenes were Magnus being thirsty for some SH butt and Alec being weirdly maybe into it but also maybe not?

@flower-of-the-desert live chatted the first season recently and had some things to say about that.

Another massive is just how blind the show seems currently to the fact that the SHs are basically white supremacists and the shadow world is a police state.

It’s really blatant if you just pull the veil off for even a second.

Shadow hunters are the pure beings with angel blood so they can wield divine power (and they can be tainted as seen by Izzy not being allowed into the iron sister’s castle thing, another inconsistency, celibate women in a feudal society where the race is dying out…) to protect the mundanes from invisible demons, and also maybe Downworlders which is a horrifically racist word, I mean downworlders? And this is something they call themselves as well? Bad worldbuilding again, I mean surely no one would care to be called downworlder it’s clearly oppressive just from the word down.  

I looked at the wiki and the accords is basically the SH and the Clave acknowledging that the DW’s have souls and can’t be hunted and killed for sport.

It’s also clear that because they have demon blood in some way downworlders are looked down upon by the clave and SH and Valentine is just the logical extreme of a fundamentalist who wants to commit genocide on the unpure DW’s (which on the show you might have noticed just how many DW’s are POC, it’s where the show gets their diversity)

Then the show keeps telling us (important the complete disconnect between show and tell on this show) that the new generation is a more tolerant generation and such, but here is the thing.

Banging a Downworlder does not make them tolerant!

Seriously when we’re told they’re more tolerant of DW it’s basically because they’re out there having sex with them, Jace and Maia there in season 2 when he was hung up on Clary was basically him slumming it to get bury his manpain…  but the thing is more often than not we’re shown the SH’s exploiting the DW’s for whatever they need at that time, Alec going to Magnus for every little thing, Clary to Luke and Izzy to Raphael and it’s always for something they need help with.

That also goes to the Police state thing, but the most clear examples is during the time where the Seelie woman was killing shadow hunters and making it out to be vampires and werewolves, the shadow hunters decide it’s time to demand DNA tests, to insert trackers in werewolves and Imogen “A downworlder cannot challenge our authority . not in times like these” and then of course there is the fact that Izzy straight up kills the Seelie with impunity and there was no repercussion for her at all. I was stunned I thought oh no now you stepped in it, killing her was the wrong thing to do… but nope and it’s not the only case. They routinely threaten DW’s and such to get their way, Izzy even takes that picture with Raphael’s sister and Simon and that was distasteful too.

It’s especially annoying since we’re presented with the idea that the SH are good, and then we have the way Imogen talks about the downworlders – “Valentine wants those people dead, I am trying to help them” incredibly patronizing and racist it seems almost ripped from the history of slavery (those people can’t think for themselves, they need the help of us good civilized people) and of course her little speech about how Jace is from a line of strong shadow hunters who are revered and feared by those who oppose all that is good and just.

I mean this stuff is so blatant I can’t believe that fandom isn’t in more uproar about it!?

And perhaps it’s because my exposure to fandom has been mostly through Malec and the shiny Malec scenes distract people from the clear truth.

I have to make something clear, I don’t ship Malec, in fact I don’t ship anything on the show, I want to be able to ship Malec, I was all geared up to be able to do so, I appreciate the Malec as a gay relationship and the representation, but the show failed to make me feel the romantic & sexual tension the potential for something more before throwing the two together.

So last episode 219 Raphael and Izzy had more tension together than Malec has had through most of the relationship, even though they should have faced the same issues, and they did, we had a string of episodes where Alec kept fucking up because he didn’t believe in Magnus or he didn’t trust him or he allowed his own privilege to cloud him from the truth of just how awful he was being. Instead of resolving these horrible events in any satisfying way we got the no resolution “Sorry I love you” Smooch that just put Malec back where they started before the episode happened.

That’s not even mentioning how utterly disappointed I was with Magnus big dark secret, what he considers his most ugly side… he’s 400-ish or more years old first we’re expected to believe that he’s never told any of his many loves that he accidentally killed his step-father as a child? And then there is the disappointment that that’s all he is ashamed off? That’s the extent of his dark past? He didn’t have an Angelus period where he didn’t care about human life at all or something, maybe started a war or something… nope all he has to be ashamed off is that one thing and he’s never told a soul for 400+ years…

That’s nit-picky maybe but Magnus has just been continually portrayed as one would a young girl in love for the first time, super doormat and all.

To another nit-picky world building issue

Portals

They make absolutely no sense, when Valentine is being brought to Idris and he gets sprung… when we’re told you can’t enter a portal you don’t know where is going because you’ll be lost.

There are no damn rules about Portals, they do whatever is necessary for plot reasons, sometimes you can enter a portal without knowing, you’ll go where the last person went, but sometimes if you enter a portal you’ll end up where you’re thinking off as you go in…

This is just terrible world building, you have to have a clear rule for how magic stuff works, which brings us to runes and how they’re facing the same problem, they work how the plot needs them to. So the episode where Clary is hallucinating they have to active the healing rune on her to heal her, but instead Jace hugs her and activates his own healing rune and somehow that heals her too? What? And when they were looking for Jonathon they shirtless hug because they can search him out with a new magic rune Clary received from the angels which is terrible deus ex rune writing and could have been done so much better a different way if you’d tweaked the world building and didn’t needlessly have to have the main character be uber-speshul.

But yes they’re tracking jonathan through Clary’s blood and nothing makes sense because they don’t have the same blood or DNA and Jonathon is filled with demon blood versus Clary’s angel blood and don’t even get me started on why Jace had to do it… The whole thing was proxy-sex so they could be weird around each other for no reason, it could have been comedic if they’d have had Alec with them also shirtless hugging because parabatai bs power, at least it would have made it genuinely awkward.  

Another thing, where did Luke’s tattoo runes go when he was turned into a werewolf? And why is he not a shadowhunter werewolf? How is it that he’s no longer a shadow hunter because he got werewolf std’d but Jonathon who’s got demon blood out the wazoo and spent years in edamame or whatever it’s called, the demon realm, he is still a SH for some reason.

World building I tell ya.

I’m sure I’m forgetting something but my mind is all ranted out except for the Malec break up, which damn they should have used those old no-resolution slights to make it better and not have focused so much on the lie and the political aspects because while those are big there are big betrayals that were just glossed over during the season that could have been brought forth to really put a wedge between them for them to overcome or not.

[barrypurcell]

[Title Redacted]

 How Not to Address Holocaust Denial and Anti-Semitism

When initially asked about Facebook’s refusal to remove the InfoWars page, John Hegeman, head of Facebook’s News Feed, said, “I guess just for being false that doesn’t violate the community standards.” More recently, however, InfoWars was banned from YouTube, iTunes, Spotify and Facebook, all within a twelve-hour period.

Although it might seem uncontroversial to keep objectively awful content off social media, historically, censorship and de-platforming has done nothing at all to slow down its spread. In fact, as many conspiracy theories are centered around a victim complex, censorship of any kind can make that complex worse. What has, historically, slowed down the spread of false information is exposure.

In 2009, when Facebook was initially asked to remove holocaust denial pages, their official position was that “being offensive or objectionable doesn’t get it taken off Facebook.” More recently, Mark Zuckerberg said that he wasn’t going to remove Facebook pages advocating holocaust denial, because “there are things that different people get wrong” and it’s more or less impossible to “understand the intent” of such pages. Conversely, the AskHistorians subreddit has pre-emptively banned all Holocaust denial, and strongly urged Facebook to do the same.

Does Facebook Have a Point?

To the delight of an unlikely alliance of authoritarian left wingers and right-wing Israelis, Holocaust denial is explicitly or implicitly illegal in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovakia and Switzerland.

While there can be no reasonable doubt that the Third Reich did its best to eliminate an entire race of people, along with Jehovah’s Witnesses and gays, inter alia, a problem arises when you legally prevent people from saying that this never happened. These governments have taken it upon themselves to censor people’s opinions. The fact that these opinions are incorrect or that they stem from people with a Nazi ideology is irrelevant: freedom of speech is meaningless if you are only free to speak the right opinion.

Anti-Semitism

In 1979, French academic Robert Faurisson was fined 21,000 francs and given a suspended sentence for denying the Holocaust on national television. Hundreds of people (most notably Noam Chomsky) signed a petition, registering their concern about the consequences for civil rights in France. The following year, Faurisson used a copyright-free essay by Chomsky in defense of the general principles of free speech—without Chomsky’s permission—as the preface to his book, “Mémoire en Défense: contre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’histoire”. Although he specifically rejected the idea that he was defending Faurisson in the piece, Chomsky was subsequently vilified as a Nazi sympathizer and anti-Semite.

Claims of anti-Semitism are so commonly used to silence everything from the mildest criticism of Israeli government policy to genuinely egregious attempts at historical revisionism that it’s almost impossible to assess such accusations objectively. It doesn’t make things any easier that the Israeli government is quite open about its official organization, hasbara, which trains and deploys people to intervene in any and all criticisms of Israel found everywhere from Facebook comment sections to campus debating societies, and has been criticized by the Israeli press for acting as a “substitute for policymaking.”

What we can say, with some certainty, is that anti-Semitic attacks have been measurably on the rise in Europe and the United States. We may not know for some time whether this alarming rise is causing, or caused by, the recent lurch to the right of the electorate in the developed world.

The Holocaust Denial Mind

The more you learn about the Holocaust, the more grotesque and horrifying it seems. The human mind recoils so much that you may even momentarily entertain the thought that surely such a thing could not possibly have happened. But it is important for the study of history, politics and the human mind to understand that it did.

In 1980, the right-wing Institute for Historical Review, whose mission was to promulgate Holocaust denial, announced a $50,000 reward for anyone who could prove that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz. Auschwitz survivor Mel Mermelstein applied for the reward. When they refused to pay, Mr. Mermelstein took them to court and effectively won his case. In 1985, the institute issued a formal apology to Mr. Mermelstein “for the pain, anguish and suffering he and all other Auschwitz survivors have sustained” as a result of their having made such an offer.

If you trawl the dark corners of the internet, where conspiracy theories breed, you will encounter lots of Holocaust deniers. They occupy the same mental space (and sometimes the same physical space) as people who question the JFK assassination, or who believe that the 9/11 bombings were an inside job. The psychology behind these conspiracy theories is easy enough to understand. First, it’s much more comfortable to believe that dark forces are causing these terrible things than to accept that sometimes genuinely awful things happen for fairly banal reasons. Secondly—much like praying to a god—holding secret knowledge about the “real” explanations for significant events gives a sense of control to the kind of people who have often been excluded from avenues of power.

There are two aspects to Holocaust denialism. The first, of course, is to deny the Holocaust: to claim that it either never happened, or has been wildly exaggerated for reasons which invariably include the idea that this is all a marketing exercise to ensure sympathy for the formation of a Jewish state—to assert that all the records were faked, all the witnesses were lying. I’ve seen people claim, for instance, that around 500,000 Jews were killed, instead of the generally accepted figure of 6 million. Only an anti-Semitic mind could believe that killing 500,000 Jews for any reason would not itself be noteworthy. There are also those who claim that Hitler wasn’t as bad as he has been made out to be, and that he was perfectly fair to Jews in Germany.

The second common gambit is to explain at length how Jews are destroying the world, how they only look after their own kind, how they run the banks and the movies, how they’re also somehow in charge of the labor movements, and how the whole world economy is just a front for Jews who want to get rich from the labor of others. Some even urge that the Jews need to be stopped by any means necessary. Though it is rarely explicitly stated, there is a strong undercurrent to this sort of thinking—that no one could really have blamed Hitler for killing so many Jews.

So, according to this view, the Jews were not killed in the Holocaust, and anyway, if they were, they had it coming. As it turns out, the anti-Semitic thread running through all these arguments is precisely the same sort of hateful rubbish that led to an environment of acceptance of genocide. At the very least, the more hate you promulgate towards the Jews, the greater the demonstration of how much worse it must have been when hating Jews was socially acceptable.

In 1987, revisionist historian David Irving published a book called “Churchill’s War”. In 1993, historian Deborah Lipstadt published “Denying the Holocaust”, which referred to “Churchill’s War” and accused Irving of using different standards of evidence, depending on whether or not a piece of information fit his anti-Semitic theories. In 1996, Irving sued Lipstadt for libel. Despite the fact that he purposefully filed the case in an English court, where the lower standards of evidence required made it easier to prosecute a case for defamation than in any other jurisdiction in which Lipstadt’s book was published, the judge ruled that “he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist.”

Irving was bankrupted by the case, and his career was destroyed, as historians pored over his previous works in the light of Lipstadt’s book. In the end, what destroyed Irving was not his repeated de-platforming all over the world, but the presentation of Lipstadt’s more compelling view, backed up by more convincing facts.

In 2005, Austrian police arrested Irving on the basis of a 1989 warrant for publicly denying the Holocaust. During these proceedings, he said he had changed his mind: “I made a mistake,” because “The Nazis did murder millions of Jews.”

Stopping Hate

One of the problems with fascism, like other fringe political movements, is that it thrives in the dark. The idea that some things can’t be talked about feeds into the victim complex that far-right ideology requires. Censorship doesn’t shut fascists down: it empowers them. Removing offensive opinions from public discourse does not remove them from our lives, but, like vampires, they explode when sunlight hits them.

For Facebook, whose primary interest is in making money, rather than acting as a fact-checking site for political propaganda, mass action on hate speech is very difficult, given that it’s a demand-side rather than a supply-side problem. Although it probably doesn’t feel like it at the time, people choose when and how to take offence. There is always a risk that people will get offended by worthwhile ideas that are nevertheless very unpopular, and safeguarding people from toxic ideologies could turn into babysitting the most offendable users. Catering to the most sensitive members of the audience has a stultifying effect on public discourse, and presumably the more worthwhile values are not so fragile that they require paternalistic protection from being questioned. The best response to bad ideas will always be good ideas and it still counts as censorship even if the thing you’re not allowed to say is incredibly stupid.

One of the prices of free speech is the risk that charismatic malefactors might influence others to do harm, but free speech is objectively more important than that risk. Freedom of speech necessarily supersedes anything you have to say.

The original title of this article was the ironic “Was The Holocaust Really That Bad?” The fact that the title had to be redacted, to ensure it avoided ending up on a list on a server in a dark basement somewhere demonstrates the need for this sort of discussion. The fact that people would have reacted with outrage without actually reading any of the article is part of the problem. Censoring all references to it merely prevents public access to the information necessary to understand why Holocaust denial is such an odious ideology.

Areo Magazine, 9 August 2018

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: A Decade of New York City Art and Disco in 10 Tracks

Jack Goldstein, “A Suite of 9 Seven-Inch Records” (1976) (image courtesy 1301PE, Los Angeles)

In July 2012, the artist John Baldessari resigned from the board of Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Then under the direction of Jeffrey Deitch, the museum was planning an exhibition that Baldessari cited as one of the reasons for his departure. “When I heard about that disco show I had to read it twice,” the artist told the Los Angeles Times. “At first I thought ‘this is a joke’ but I realized, no, this is serious.”

His comment was telling, but not surprising. The simple distinction of disco as a ‘joke,’ as opposed to something ‘serious,’ is one that has long held sway in the art world, and like all seemingly simple distinctions, it works hard to suppress its true intentions. It can be traced back at least as far as 1975, when David Mancuso — whose parties in his living space, called The Loft, mark the beginnings of what we now call disco — was moving his invite-only happenings to a new space at 99 Prince Street in Soho. Before Mancuso had even opened his doors, there was a vicious neighborhood campaign, promoted in the pages of the Soho Daily News, to stop his parties from happening. Complaints that the existence of The Loft in Soho would cause a spike in real estate values were articulated, but the campaign’s actual motives were strikingly clear. “This is the beginning of an invasion,” Charles Leslie of the SoHo Artists Association was quoted as saying in the Village Voice.

In the mid-to-late 1970s, disco music — associated with blackness, femininity, and homosexuality — was becoming mainstream via radio hits (The Village People) and successful films (Saturday Night Fever). Quickly, it was deemed threatening. In popular culture, this resentment toward the music, and what it represented, culminated in the ‘Disco Demolition Night,’ a promotional stunt gone awry organized by a local rock station on July 12, 1979, at Comiskey Park in Chicago. The destruction of a crate of disco records — many frisbeed into the pile by irate fans from the stands — between games of a double-header between the Chicago White Sox and Detroit Tigers resulted in a good portion of the crowd storming the field in jubilant rage. ‘Disco Sucks,’ the tagline for the event, became synonymous with reclamation for both mainstream rock and underground punk audiences.

What those two groups had in common, for the most part, was their whiteness. This is rarely mentioned, of course, in relation to the backlash against disco, and that silence has significantly altered not just the history of popular music but also the history of art. At the same time that disco was, according to many, rising and falling in quick succession — a fashion that quickly went out of style — there was a loosely associated group of artists, most of them based around New York City, who we now, for lack of a better term besides postmodern, call the Pictures Generation. In the discussions of the milieu in which their work was created, what is most often referenced is the network of musicians that constituted the no wave scene. This is not a surprise. Disco, or even dancing, rarely factors into the equation.

Tim Lawrence, Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980–1983 (courtesy Duke University Press)

This has changed recently. In Tim Lawrence’s Love and Death on the New York Dance Floor (Duke University Press), a historical account of the New York City club scene between the crucial years of 1980 and 1983, two things become readily apparent. The first is that disco, despite popular opinion, never truly died. It changed, as he describes, into a mutant form. It mixed with punk, funk, electro, art rock, and later hip-hop. The true extent of the music that emanated from this period in New York City is more expansive, and interesting, than what can be bundled together under the narrow definition of no wave. The second is that art and disco were decidedly interacting. Artists went to clubs — Keith Haring, Zoe Leonard, and David Wojnarowicz all even worked at Danceateria at one point — played in bands, even stepped behind the turntables. Everybody danced. The boundaries were more fluid, and more acceptable. People traveled between the Mudd Club, where Jean-Michel Basquiat might be spinning John Coltrane records much to the dismay of the dance floor, and the Paradise Garage, where Larry Levan was working up the young, black, and gay crowd into a frenzy, as if there was no difference between the two. They might stop at an opening at the Fun Gallery in between.

Douglas Crimp, Before Pictures (courtesy University of Chicago Press)

The connections between disco, dancing, and the Pictures Generation were further strengthened by Douglas Crimp in his memoir, Before Pictures (Dancing Foxes Press). After discussing an unpublished piece on his experience going to clubs like the Flamingo and 12 West, more diaristic than theoretical, he writes: “What all these places had in common are traits of pariah culture: they were located in out-of-the-way neighborhoods in quickly refurbished spaces with the palpable feeling of being susceptible to a bust at any moment.” Crimp’s use of “pariah culture,” specifically, made me think of the Pictures Generation artists, born of the same era, who utilized those similar fragments — what had been discarded as junk — as material for their work. Each placed an emphasis on the ideas of repurposing and remixing, repetition and movement, and, most importantly, of distance and community. At the same time, Crimp himself, after espousing the pleasures of the dance floor, makes clear his distance from it. “I resisted disinhibition probably because I was trying to get serious about being an art critic right at the time I became a disco bunny,” he writes. Again, that same old separation: seriousness and trivialness, art and disco.

What follows is not intended to be a definitive history of either disco or the Pictures Generation. Using the decade between 1975 and 1985 as a rubric, the idea is to trace the contours of these coexisting groups of artists. Their narratives don’t mirror each other exactly, but by placing the work side-by-side, their shared affinities can be explored and brought to the surface in ways only previously hinted at. Today more than ever, the kinds of marginalized spaces that birthed both disco and the Pictures Generation are under attack. Whether it be the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando or DIY spaces in the wake the tragic fire at Ghost Ship in Oakland, the threats to these communities remain frighteningly real. Hopefully, the result of a new way of looking at the past can be the beginning of new ways of thinking about the present.

1975

Peter Hujar, Hudson River, 1975 David Mancuso’s The Loft (opened in 1970; moved to Soho in 1975)

The photographer Peter Hujar’s images are essential to the structure of Crimp’s Before Pictures in that they present the open spaces of downtown New York as well as capture the sense of community formed around the personalities involved. (Even Zoe Leonard’s pictures , which begin each chapter, bare some kind of resemblance to Hujar’s photographs.) There is a sense in Hujar’s work from the period that everything was connected: terror and joy, straight and gay, loneliness and togetherness. This utopian vision was also built into the ethos at David Mancuso’s aforementioned The Loft. Mancuso, who passed away on November 14, moved his invite-only parties a few blocks down from Broadway to Prince Street in Soho in 1975. Hujar, along with other artists, were frequent visitors. But not all the artists were friends: some, as mentioned earlier, wanted nothing less than the mixed-race gay crowd out of their neighborhood. But Mancuso prevailed, and other clubs opened in the area in the wake of The Loft.

1976

Jack Goldstein, “A Suite of Nine 7-Inch Records with Sound Effects,” 1976 Double Exposure, “Ten Percent” (Walter Gibbons Remix)

Walter Gibbons is said to have discovered the effect of extending the “break” in funk and soul records at the same as DJ Kool Herc in the Bronx. But his legacy is much less cemented due to his alliance with disco, despite his massive contributions to the art of DJ-ing and dance music more generally. His mix of Double Exposure’s “Ten Percent” was the first commercially released 12-inch single, changing the way music was manipulated and presented. Like the artist Jack Goldstein, Gibbons went through a period of total obscurity, and only recently has received recognition. Goldstein’s “A Suite of Nine 7-Inch Records with Sound Effects,” consists of a series of 7-inch singles, created by the artist and pressed in different colors, which contain sound effects he created as the start points for film ideas. Goldstein, much like Gibbons, presents vinyl as material, a household object turned into a creative tool.

1977

Cindy Sherman, “Untitled Film Still #6” (1977), gelatin silver print, 9 7/16 x 6 1/2 in, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired through the generosity of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder in memory of Eugene M. Schwartz (© Cindy Sherman)

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Stills, 1977–80 Donna Summer, “I Feel Love”

There is a haunted quality to both “I Feel Love” and the Untitled Film Stills that is a result of the tension between the old and the new. Donna Summer’s bionic-disco anthem, produced by Giorgio Moroder, sends the vocalist gliding through a stripped-down web of rhythmic, synthesized pulses. It was as genre-defining as Cindy Sherman’s photographs, produced between 1977 and 1980, which recast the artist as a series of B-movie clichés. Both works explore terror and pleasure through a combination of repetition and artifice to scramble codes of femininity.

1978

Faith Ringgold, Harlem ’78 series, 1978 TV Party

Faith Ringgold’s Harlem ’78 series of soft sculptures are not the artist’s most well known work. But the life-sized dolls that formed the installation were part of Ringgold’s attempt to “capture the spirit of Harlem,” as she writes in her memoir, a community of recognizable objects that resembled the “familiar faces I pass on the street.” The backdrop to the installation was a large canvas that viewers were encouraged to write on, like a graffiti mural. A similar sense of community building was happening downtown that same year with TV Party, the public access television show created by Interview Magazine editor Glenn O’Brien and Blondie guitarist Chris Stein. “It was a declaration that we were here and were about to lay down what culture in New York City was going to be at the time,” Fab Five Freddy, a regular guest of the show, is quoted as saying in Lawrence’s book. “Downtown was just an energy at that moment. There was this sense of commonality and reciprocity, this idea that different things could happen and were possible.”

1979

Installation view of Robert Longo’s “Men in the Cities – Men Trapped in Ice” at the Rubell Family Collection (photo by Hrag Vartanian for Hyperallergic)

Robert Longo, Men in the Cities, 1979 Blondie, “Heart of Glass”

Are the figures in Robert Longo’s Men in the Cities drawing having seizures, or are they dancing? In his large, black-and-white images of suited men, there is a celebration, it seems, of the nervous energy of movement, bound and wound with tension and ready for release. But they are undercut by the technical perfection of the drawings, much like Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” a song that came out the same year. Coming out of the punk scene that formed around CBGB, Blondie was one of the first groups (even before the Talking Heads) to embrace dance floor rhythms, including disco and later hip-hop. “Heart of Glass” used its slickness to frame its fragility — the shattering love of the lyrics — and opened up a new direction for musicians to travel following punk’s decline.

1980

Downtown ’81 Loose Joints, “Is It All Over My Face?”

Further embrace of the mainstream, with a bump and a twirl: Downtown ’81 (originally titled New York Beat) stars Jean-Michel Basquiat as himself, wandering around the ruins of downtown Manhattan attempting to sell a painting after getting evicted. On his journey he encounters artists, musicians, and other assorted street folk, all connected by the maze of blocks they call home. The film was meant to be a translation of downtown energy for the masses, but wasn’t released for over 20 years due to a scandal involving its Italian backer, who pulled out of the project before it was finished. (Wild Style, a hip-hop focused narrative film that came out three years later, would achieve what Downtown ’81 could not.) At the same time, Arthur Russell, an avant-garde musician and former music director at the Kitchen, was becoming more invested in making records for the dance floor. After discovering the pleasures of disco at the Gallery, he began making records under a variety of aliases and with different collaborators. Loose Joints, a joint effort with Steve D’Acquisto, produced what is arguably one of his greatest songs, “Is It All Over My Face?” The song got major play at the Paradise Garage, via a remix by the club’s resident DJ, Larry Levan, and would later be in regular rotation on New York City’s WBLS. The song echoed Russell’s feeling “that dance music needed to abandon its slick, streamlined incarnation in order to reconnect with the floor,” Lawrence writes, “and exemplified the ‘anything goes’ philosophy of the post–disco sucks era.”

1981

Barbara Kruger, “Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face)” (1981), gelatin silver print, 66 x 48 in (courtesy Sprüth Magers)

Barbara Kruger, “Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face),” 1981 Grandmaster Flash & the Furious 5, “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel”

The brash photomontages of Barbara Kruger have become, for better of worse, one of the defining stylistic remnants of the Pictures Generation, and find their mirror in “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel.” Produced entirely of other people’s records, the song popularized the scratching and beat juggling that was already happening in park jams in the Bronx (not to mention in disco clubs), and highlighted the combination of sounds that formed early hip-hop. Its defiant mashup of different styles was as bold, aggressive, and playful in its communication as Kruger’s cut-ups.

1982

Untitled Keith Haring subway drawings from 1982 at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in 2010 (photo by Hrag Vartanian for Hyperallergic)

Keith Haring, Subway Drawings, 1982–83 Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force, “Planet Rock”

“The studio and the subway started growing together, and the subway became like a drawing workshop to develop ideas and for the vocabulary to expand,” Keith Haring wrote of his Subway Drawings, which he began producing more regularly around 1982. The simple figures that adorned poster advertisements in train stations across the city — Haring would draw them quickly, then call his friend Tseng Kwong Chi so he could follow and photograph them — were timed, as Lawrence notes, to the exact period when then New York City Mayor Ed Koch began dispatching dogs to subway yards to curb vandalism. The Subway Drawings also marked a greater emphasis in Haring’s work on the rhythms of the street. Jeffrey Deitch, in an early essay about Haring’s work, noted that the artist “liked to work to the accompaniment of a boom box, to the point where it seemed as though he worked like he was a dancer, with his work a visualization of the music.” Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock,” released the same year, fused the burgeoning sounds of hip-hop rhyming with an elevated form of synthetic funk. The song, writes Lawrence, “shredded the categories that had defined the 1970s — disco, dub reggae, rock, punk, and new wave — and in so doing revealed how, for all their radicalness, they had fallen short of capturing the complexity of New York.” Haring and Bambaataa frequently crossed paths, and the latter’s explorations of space in his music undoubtedly influenced the UFO imagery that became a centerpiece to the moving bodies of the Subway Drawings.

1983

Adrian Piper, “Funk Lessons,” 1983 K-Rob vs. Rammellzee, “Beat Bop”

Rammellzee had already exhibited work at the historic New York/New Wave show at PS1 in 1981, when he made a record with his friend K-Rob and Jean-Michel Basquiat called “Beat Bop.” Produced by Basquiat and featuring his artwork on the cover, the song ushered in a “space-conscious, experimental, often surreal aesthetic into a new downtown-meets-the-Bronx amalgam,” Lawrence writes, with the song’s streetwise lyrics, penned by the two rappers (after they rejected what Basquait had written for them), bumping up against the effect-heavy instrumentation. Like “Beat Bop,” there is a confrontation embedded in the fabric of Adrian Piper’s performance “Funk Lessons,” produced for the first time that same year. One of the few works of the period to directly address disco music and dance, Piper’s filmed “lessons” deconstruct the racial discrimination inherent in the public perception of the dance floor and highlight the mutations Lawrence keenly explores in his book.

1984

Dan Graham, “Rock My Religion” (1983–84) Run-DMC, “Rock Box”

One of the first combinations of rap and rock on record, “Rock Box” by Run-DMC also began to signal hip-hop’s move away from its dance music roots. The song put a greater emphasis on simplicity, with a harder edge and a focus on guitars. This was music meant for the boom box, the car radio, to be played out in the street. Dan Graham’s video “Rock My Religion,” finished in 1984, doesn’t explicitly focus on disco or hip-hop, but in its slice-and-dice construction and multiplicity of influences — shaker dances, post-punk guitar noise, the jittery ramblings of Patti Smith — mirrors contemporary music’s embrace of contradictory forms.

1985

Nan Goldin, “The Parents’ Wedding Photo, Swampscott, Massachusetts” (1985), from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, silver dye bleach print, printed 2006, 15 1/2 x 23 1/8 in, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired through the generosity of Richard O. Rieger (© 2016 Nan Goldin)

Nan Goldin, The Battle of Sexual Dependency Phuture, “Acid Tracks”

“Acid Tracks,” produced in Chicago by DJ Pierre, Earl “Spanky” Smith, and Herbert Jackson (collaborating under the name Phuture), sounds like “[t]welve minutes of a machine eating its own wires,” writes Michaelangelo Matos in his book, The Underground Is Massive, and represents the next mutation of disco music following hip-hop’s sideways departure. Disco had been spawning different forms all over the country, including Chicago House and Detroit Techno, and “Acid Tracks” helped define what was called Acid House, which spread to even more popularity in the UK and whose influence can be felt in all forms of electronic (and even pop) music that followed. Here were sounds, once again, meant for the club, and movement, and the joining of collective energies. Nan Goldin’s The Battle of Sexual Dependency, has been just as important a founding document. The slideshow, set to music and featuring startlingly personal images, represented an extension of the Pictures Generation’s interest in the material object. Goldin’s candid photos are presented by way of the family ritual of the slide projector, but are meticulously shaped into splintering narratives accompanied by a jukebox assortment of songs. The images look inward but were presented, in their earliest stages, at clubs and in performance spaces. Goldin’s reframing of the quotidian as something more meaningful, her celebration of collective gathering and its expression of catharsis, has its antecedent in disco.

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