wootchristywoot - Tumblr blog

[wootchristywoot]

Ha.

i bought a cheap, disposable camera a few months ago, which i finally developed. most of the pictures are completely obscured because i didn’t use enough light. i don’t know anything about cameras or photographs. captions:

1. the overpass near dunkin’ donuts in yonkers, 1.

2. the overpass near dunkin’ donuts in yonkers, 2.

3. carolyn in fleetwood.

4. robert, somewhere.

5. my bedroom in mount vernon.

6. the exterior of my apartment building in philadelphia.

7. the gang in riverdale. john is wearing a yellow shirt.

8. tom and christy on the schuykill trail. tom is holding a biscuit for amanda.

9. a sandwich restaurant in philadelphia that i would not recommend.

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/ we all need a monday nite dance party /

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ripen for color / color for nutrients / nourish ripe colors

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A Terrifying Not Titilating Trifecta: R. Kelly, Lady Gaga, Terry Richardson

So, there is /news/ today about Lady Gaga’s video for “Do What U Want with My Body,” news that the video was made and that the video was scrapped. A //generous// reading of Gaga’s hit song might suggest female empowerment:

You can’t have my heart And you won’t use my mind but Do what you want with my body Do what you want with my body You can’t stop my voice cause You don’t own my life but Do what you want with my body Do what you want with my body

Yeah! You can’t have my heart or mind or my voice! Totally! But, //do what you want with my body// — hold up. The purported concept for the song is that it was created as a means of dealing with the way Gaga’s body was treated in the press. A commentary on the negation of physical agency regarding women’s bodies sounds completely great — but what happens when that concept — which appears to be in its most basic form an empowering interaction with objectification — becomes a collaborative project with two highly questionable individuals, both with documented and popularized accounts of sexual misconduct?

Here are some facts, facts which should be immediately troubling to any human with sense of any kind. We must examine the //context//:

-Gaga performs “Do What U Want with My Body” with R. Kelly

-R. Kelly is one of the song’s co-writers

-Word of the video having been scrapped has brought back to the surface R. Kelly’s long engagement with the sex crimes unit of the Chicago Police Department, and Kelly’s various trials, settlements, and accusations of sexual exploitation of young teenage girls.

-Note, it’s not the song itself, or the lyrics — which specifically posit the female body as what Susan Bordo calls a "docile body" — it was the //video// in which R. Kelly supposedly performs //rape// upon Lady Gaga as she sings “do what you want with my body.”

-Of course, the image of R. Kelly engaging anyone sexually brings to mind his shady history, which seems to have been buried somewhere deep within the collective consciousness, //almost// forgotten. Luckily, Jessica Hopper at the Village Voice, recently conducted a very smart interview with Jim DeRogatis, who originally broke the R. Kelley story at the Chicago Sun Times in the late 1990’s. The interview is incredibly valuable for numerous reasons; I’ll provided you with these two gems:

—> ”The saddest fact I’ve learned is: Nobody matters less to our society than young black women. Nobody. They have any complaint about the way they are treated: They are “bitches, hos, and gold-diggers,” plain and simple. Kelly never misbehaved with a single white girl who sued him or that we know of. Mark Anthony Neal, the African-American scholar, makes this point: one white girl in Winnetka and the story would have been different. No, it was young black girls and all of them settled. They settled because they felt they could get no justice whatsoever. They didn’t have a chance.” —Jessica Hopper, The Village Voice

//and//

—> "Songs like "Sexasaurus" kind of makes [Kelly’s legacy of sex crimes] novel. The ironic, jokey Trapped in the Closet series airs on the Independent Film Channel and features Will Oldham — that has these other hallmarks of ‘art’ that read to a white, hipster, indie-rock audience, then, because we are not taking certain things seriously, we can choose not to take the lives of these young black women seriously." —Jim DeRogatis

-Instead of R. Kelly’s crimes or the faces and stories of his numerous victims, what seems to stick in our brains is Dave Chappelle’s "Piss on You," which only supports DeRogatis’ point. Because of this, I find myself wondering about how much Gaga’s //white// subjectivity has to do with the controversy of the music video’s simulated rape. Because, as Hopper comments, Kelly’s victims were disenfranchised black //girls//, Gaga’s positionality — her whiteness— makes the //simulated// rape of the “Do What U Want” project offensive on a level that is ‘safe’ for cultural digestion — hence the countless headlines drawing attention to the topic today.

-The relationship between Gaga and Kelly is explored in an article by Jocelyn Vena, wherein Gaga is quoted saying the following on the coming together of “Do What U Want”: “’Well actually I’ve been living in Chicago and spending a lot of time there, and that’s where R. Kelly hails from. I was working on ARTPOP and I wrote [‘Do What U Want’] on tour. It was about my obsession with the way people view me,’ she said. ‘I have always been an R. Kelly fan and actually it is like an epic pastime in the Haus of Gaga that we just get f—ed up and play R. Kelly. This is a real R&B song and I [said ‘I] have to call the king of R&B and I need his blessing.’ It was a mutual love. He’s a very, very, very talented man. I’m so excited to be on this album with him.”

-We must recognize this fandom, this collaboration, as a kind of blatant complicity with Kelly’s crimes. ‘Choosing’ to forget makes Lady Gaga responsible for introducing R. Kelly to a new —unknowing— generation with a clean slate — and yet the pop star also manages to reinscribe Kelly’s sexual indiscretions upon herself while singing about the way the press mistreats her body.

-The cover art for the song’s single was conceived of and photographed by Terry Richardson, who has a long-standing relationship with Lady Gaga including their collaborative book, GAGA. The single’s cover speaks for itself:

-Following Lady Gaga’s SNL performance with R. Kelly, the singer tweeted the following in response to the performance which features simulated sex and fellatio:

-The video (of which a partial clip has been released) was also conceived and shot by Terry Richardson.

-It’s important to note Richardson’s complicated social position as notorious photographer / popular-culture-maker, which is not terribly unlike R. Kelly’s. The photographer was recently featured on the cover of New York Magazine, and the highly controversial article unsurprisingly received some backlash. Richardson has gained cultural currency as much for his alleged exploitation of women (not to mention self-exploitative tactics) on set and otherwise as he has for his artwork.

-It is worth considering Terry Richardson in relation to R. Kelly in light of their group collaboration with Lady Gaga. The predatory overlaps marking both men’s personas primes the “Do What U Want With My Body” video project with various shades of complicity regarding the content of the song and the video.

-Given that New York Magazine quotes the photographer as having said, “I was a shy kid, and now I’m this powerful guy with his boner, dominating all these girls” we are forced to reexamine what exactly is happening when Gaga sings “Do what you want / What you want with my body.”

We can’t ignore this web of individuals, circumstances, and allegations, especially regarding a song centered around a refrain sung out //by// a female pop star co-written by a tried sexual predator and visually packaged for our consumption by a man who has built his wildly successful career upon sexual exploitation.

//We just can’t — it’s fucking irresponsible//.

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3711 Melon

Philadelphia, PA

Here is the full story via The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, and here is the NPR coverage.

[wootchristywoot]

In surfaces, perfection is less interesting. For instance, a page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains. Because the tea stains add a bit of history. It’s a historical attitude. After all, texts of ancient Greeks come to us in wreckage and I admire that, the combination of layers of time that you have when looking at a papyrus that was produced in the third century BC and then copied and then wrapped around a mummy for a couple hundred years and then discovered and put in a museum and pieced together by nine different gentlemen and put back in the museum and brought out again and photographed and put in a book. All those layers add up to more and more life. You can approximate that in your own life. Stains on clothing.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5420/the-art-of-poetry-no-88-anne-carson

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The truth is that there is no such thing as a lone misogynist – they are created by our culture, and by communities that tells them that their hatred is both commonplace and justified.

Jessica Valenti on Elliot Rodger via The Guardian 

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Photo courtesy of theparisreview

The Language

BY ROBERT CREELEY

Locate I

love you some-

where in

teeth and   

eyes, bite   

it but

take care not   

to hurt, you   

want so

much so   

little. Words   

say everything.

I

love you

again,

then what   

is emptiness   

for. To

fill, fill.

I heard words   

and words full

of holes   

aching. Speech   

is a mouth.

[wootchristywoot]

Regarding the "news" of her having taken a "healthie" (yeah, a gym selfie -- I know...) E! News "reports" the following, "If only Kim [Kardashian] were as open about her wedding plans as she is about her body..." -E! News, 5/13/2014 I can't say that I am defending Kim Kardashian, but I cannot handle this business. How many binds have we got to manage? Many, too many.

[wootchristywoot]

“With Barbara Guest in Paris”

Oh Barbara! do you think they’ll ever name anything after us like rue Henri-Barbusse or canard a l’ouragan?

have infected a pale white moonish bateau-frigidaire with our melancholy lights and vaguely proud dissemblings?

care for the lap of Mallarmé and the place where heroes fell down is right in our Pushkinesque enclosure as greatness sleeps outside                                              smiles and bears                                              the purple city air

—Frank O’Hara. Photograph: Donna Dennis.

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In a classic scene in The Blues Brothers, John Belushi jokes:

"Your women, how much for your women?" 

//

NPR's morning report about the role single women play in elections only served to reaffirm the definition of single as meaning "not married" (read as queer-exclusionary, and ideologically heteronormative). Single women are "disaffiliated" and less involved in their communities because "single women are less likely to go to church than married women." But these single women vote, and are a much desired group for Democrats and Republicans alike to wrangle. Every time women are addressed as a group in the context of an election, we are grossly diminished--continually objectified: we've got to get The Women.

//

This morning's story only served to perpetuate that objectification, but took it one step further: we must target these "single women"--pin them down -- locate them. Understanding how to get the Single Woman's vote is really an exercise in identifying difference. When a campaign can identify and target a woman according to her marital status, why do we choose to ignore the grossly large set of normative cultural assumptions (and therefor the plenitude of discriminations) inherent in that act? Why don't we see this as violent, or tragic, or as a call to action? Well, I do.

//

The story: All The Single Ladies: 5 Takeaways About Unmarried Female Voters

//

Go ahead -- follow the link, listen to the story. I did; it rung my ears and heated my blood; it pulled me from under the covers, despondent.

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Because I adore everything DeFeo.

This Day in Art History: Wally Hedrick gifted his wife and fellow Bay Area artist Jay DeFeo with a ladder for her birthday. She would later use this ladder to work on her monumental painting The Rose.

Jay DeFeo’s painting ladder, 195-? / unidentified photographer. Jay DeFeo papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

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I cannot begin to convey my excitement about this recent purchase. Only purely elated.

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Mostly just because.

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YES! One must always find a buddy when en-jumpsuit.

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Chimamamda Ngozi Adiche; amazing.