Sunday, January 20, 2013
“Gesamtkunstwerk: Addiction, and an Artist’s Final Work of Art"
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Sunday, January 13, 2013
"'Go F**k Yourself!', or Narcissism as Queer Aesthetic"
 |
| Mr. Dave Franco |
Over drinks with the homo-homies last Friday, my friend Jeff
asked me if I had seen the video of Dave Franco fucking himself. “Um, who is
Dave Franco?” I asked, cocking my eyes to the side to see if the table of
ladies nearby had heard us use the “F-bomb” before 7pm. What followed was a meta-explanation from
four men, employing graphic hand gestures, and feigned-looks of quelle surprise in effort to explain
that Dave Franco, younger brother of star James Franco, had done a one-up on
his big bro’s video about kissing himself by making a short film that portrayed
him romancing and then having sex with himself.
“It is the height of narcissism, but so good!” Jeff assured.
The next day I found the video online and watched it. Jeff, of course, per
usual, was right. But this led me to contemplate the following idea:
James Franco—enigmatic, dark, idiosyncratic—gets read as
“gay” quite often in our culture. Yes, he has opted to portray a number of
queer male characters over the course of his young career, but it seems the
rumors (and let’s be honest, hopeful desires of many a man) rest on something
more. His brother’s video only seems to heighten the anxiety over the Franco
sexuality. But my reading is that these are just young talented men, thrust
into the limelight, and navigating it vis-à-vis a certain type of exaggerated,
narcissistic bravado. So why is narcissism in men read as “queer”? [Click Here for this extraordinary video]
Here’s another case study.
_3Alt1.jpg)
Like a fine Sonoma County pinot noir oak-barreled and then
stored to perfection, George Clooney is flawless. His career and bearing speak of a life of
fine-tuned choices and adroit navigation of an entertainment market ravenous
for the next big thing. Elegantly, but simply dressed, well-spoken, that
always-present twinkle in his eye, Mr. Clooney is the consummate Bruce Wayne, simultaneously embodying the
dualities of elder statesman and rogue with a carefree, though subtle edge. He
is the Beau Brummel of our age. He is also famously guarded about his private
life and is not married. The gay rumors have been swirling around him for a
decade or more, and the question is: why? Are we so afraid of the power, the
supposed-loose-canon-ness, the precarious possibility for creative good or
destruction of an unattached, attractive man that we must write off his selfish
desire to lead a life unencumbered by assigning him a sexual desire with no basis?
 |
| 1881-Gyula Benzcur |
The origins, plot-points, and lessons to be garnered from
the Attic myth of Narcissus prove as sundry as the potential dimensions of the
“closest” constructed for the Messieurs Franco and Signore Clooney. Possibly
derived from the Greek word for sleep or numbness, Narkissos has been written as a hunter, a fool, a child, and a god.
Whereas Ovid’s myth adds the character of Echo, a young nymph whose love for
the boy whose affections were notoriously hard to win, ends in both wasting
away, earlier versions have Narcissus committing suicide when his love is not
returned by his own reflection. Still others frame the myth with the goddess
Nemesis taking revenge on Narcissus for his abhorrence for all human affection,
while others make him into a bit of a trollop who falls in love with his twin
sister (this last is very Manfred a
la Lord Byron). In all these versions,
however, the pool in which the youth espies his reflection, and by which he
perishes, whether knowing it is himself he sees or not, remains a
constant. Like Galadriel’s mirror, in
the cerulean depths, Narkissos
glimpses his past, present and future, and, in choosing a beautiful,
responsive, yet shadowy reflection as the beloved, the youth actively turns
away from reality, forfeiting his life for an echo of the real.
 |
| N.B. Liepicie, 1771 |
From Lord Byron to Oscar Wilde to Langston Hughes, from
Caravaggio to the pre-Raphaelites, such a theme, a renouncing of the real for
the momentary divine, has proven a theme for the decidedly, and culturally
‘queered’. In adding a female deity to
the myth, Ovid heightens the boy’s hubris by making him prefer the image of a
mortal boy he could not have (because he always-already owned) to the promise
of eternal union with the divine. For
Langston Hughes, in his elegant poem, “Suicide Note,” the pool becomes the
Hudson River, and it is not merely gazing at a reflection that satisfies
Nemesis, but a kiss.
 |
| Caravaggio (notice how the artist has rendered his own portrait in the reflection) |
There seems to be a cultural crisis of semiotics attached to
the un-attached, narcissistic man selfish of his time. The choice of self over
another is an act which destabilizes the bounds set forth with Oedipus answers
the riddle of the Sphinx and enters, for better or worse, into “culture” and
the rules of societal taste. By selecting himself, Narkissos’ beauty cannot be
shared, only endlessly admired in the myopic ripples of an endless pool. “What
a waste!” one may proclaim, “what a selfish cow!” One may sigh, and shake their
heads, complaining that a woman spends too much time before the mirror, or
spends avid attention to her person, but no pitch forks are gathered, no tweets
blessed with the letters “G-A-Y” draw followers. The self-imposed kingdom of
the narcissist may be the one concept or value where the female doyenne is more
tolerated, and look upon more favorably than her male counterpart. But while
this explains how Narcissus and his male ilk are queered through subversion
(conscious or no) of hetero-normative marriage-desire-children paradigms, it
does not explain why they are queered as homosexual, especially when the object
of desire is unknown or non-existent.
I do not have an answer ultimately, but I do have a
corollary observation. Lately, I have been intrigued by “decadent” literature:
those novels of the last 150 years that speak of desires a rebours (against nature). Gide, Genet, Waugh, Julian Mitchell, Huysmans,
Wilde, Highsmith, Poe, Forster, and Baldwin come to mind, amongst others,
(including the novella, “A Secret Sharer” by Joseph Conrad) and what is so
incredible is that in each of these works—whether consciously or no—evokes the
trope of a physical double, remarkably similar, if not identical in appearance,
whose constant presence leads to the revelation of a desire that heralds the
destruction of both. In Andre Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name, the two male
lovers go so far as to call out their own names during sex, naming the other as
a second-self, and investing the act of anal penetration as a masturbatory
communion. Can the thread connecting narcissism and anal sex be a slippery
slope muddy with K-Y jelly, meth pipes, and Gatorade? Is the link between
self-love and so-called deviance so assured?
More than anything, perhaps, the narcissist, especially in
the case of famous ones, hints at a knowledge the rest of us do not know. The
preference of self is an unanswered question, whose answer could lie anywhere
in the spectrum between existentialism, Freudian trust issues, or proof that
aliens in Hollywood not only exist, but walk amongst us. The gaze of the male narcissist echoes back
to us through time a fear we had hoped to bury: that a truth beyond good and
evil exists, and that both heaven and hell reside not in the clouds or in
Sheol, but within ourselves.
Thursday, July 12, 2012
How Hipster Are You?
With Providence being selected as one of the top ten hipster cities in the U.S., and my interest in hipsters from the sixteenth-century to the contemporary moment, are we surprised by this assessment? Not in the least. For your own selective truth-comeuppance, check out: www.howhipsterareyou.com
The Burr-Hamilton Duel
On July 11, 1804, around six in the morning, a boat carrying
Alexander Hamilton, two additional gentlemen, and the rower, reached the shores
of Weehawken. The gentlemen discharged, and immediately starting clearing the
brush and debris from around the shore. A portmanteau concealing pistols was
carried ashore. Thirty minutes later, a second boat from Manhattan reached the
sandy shore under the colossal cliffs of the New Jersey Palisades. Current Vice
President, and NY gubernatorial candidate, Aaron Burr, alighted with his two
seconds, and the rower.
Once the gentlemen acknowledged each other, and the seconds did
their duty, according to the code
duello, Messrs. Burr and Hamilton went to the portmanteau to retrieve their
weapons and the rowers turned their back to face the water in order to maintain
under oath that they 1) never saw weapons, and 2) never saw fire. What proceeded has colored American politics for 208 years.
What is interesting about the Burr-Hamilton duel is that so much is unknown. Hamilton wrote a letter the night before, outlining his "disgust" at the practice of dueling and detailing a pledge he made with his seconds that he would not shoot to wound Mr. Burr. Neither Burr, nor his seconds, knew of his pledge, of course, and thus, when Hamilton's gun sent a bullet whizzing past Burr's ear (Hamilton having reconsidered his thoughts and missing? Hamilton's gun misfiring? Hamilton warning Burr?), Burr took aim to defend himself.
The 'Code duello' also maintained that both sides decide on an 'until' point: the moment both parties would cease fire in satisfaction that mutual honor had been avenged. When friends quarreled with pistols by the 18th century, this was often a shot upon the ground by one side, a practice that caused so much unforeseen injury that the Irish Code duello forbade it. When sides dueled with swords, the idea of "first-blood" was practiced until people began to find it cowardly as pricking one's finger in accident could stopped a duel. Thus, a doctor (and this was the case in Burr v. Hamilton) was nearby, and a duel was fought--with guns or pistols-- until either the doctor called a cease-fire, one side was wounded or disoriented such as to be incapable of going on, or a second called a halt.
What is clear is that by 2pm the following day, July 12, Hamilton died, and Burr an even more despised personage than he was before. An Oudin bust of Hamilton was placed in Thomas Jefferson's entrance-hall of Monticello, along with Benjamin Franklin, Voltaire, and the Marquis de Lafayette, across from Jefferson's own portrait by Thomas Sully: "Both Respected and revered, but opposed in death, as they were in Life" as we say in Virginia.
Thursday, July 5, 2012
My goal in life,
in addition to learning to ride a horse, learning to sail, and playing the cello, is being on this list by the time i'm 36yo (give or take a few years).
NYC's Most Eligible Bachelors
NYC's Most Eligible Bachelors
Thursday, June 21, 2012
Purple Label--Ralph Lauren
Gentlemen: the ads for the re-launch of the 'Purple Label' line from Ralph Lauren have been out for the past three months. I found this synthesis of the campaign this morning and figured, if it's good enough to be cut + pasted into my "Style Guide," it's damn well good enough for the web. Enjoy.
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
"ekphrastic men: an expanded rumination on the hipster"
The June issue of Gentlemen’s Quarterly features the new
Ketel One Vodka ads, models in white linen suits, and recommendations for parted
haircuts and colorful socks with ravens (the latter I already owned). Such
visuals adduce the temps of summer are now upon us. Thus, I have been prompted
to expand my analysis of the hipster just in time for summer backyard soirees,
the sixty-ninth anniversary of the Zoot Suit Riots, and for the unveiling of
the new American Apparel khaki short for men (brace yourselves, gentlemen: the
thigh is back).
Like modernism,
tracing the origin and terminus of la
hipster is directly proportional to the version one is interested in
exploring or perpetuating. There are many hipster-doms in the temporal realm of
modern life and each inhabits a different spatial relation to mainstream
culture. A postcolonial-structuralist read on the hipster might take John
Leland’s approach and equate all ‘hip’ movements with one hundred years of West
African semantics and designations of a counter-culture in urban America. For
this read, Leland’s hip: a history does
a fantastic job. A poststructuralist rumination on power and subject formation
a la Foucault might find great material in beginning a search for the American
hipster in US policies on the home-front during the world wars. The beats and
Hollywood would figure prominently in such a read, as well as McCarthyism and a
nation’s egocentric need to define itself (relative to other nation-states)
through gender and self-fashioning.
In my own work, hipster
is a phenomena best reached and exegeted by the Frankfurt School’s
neo-Marxist contemplation of the ways in which media coverage of world events
become integrated into human systems and then performed through culture. As
such, the avant-garde responds immediately to the mainstream and vice versa,
creating a cycle of visually-performative feedback. In this essay, the era of
the hipster –as I define it – is coterminous with media coverage of the release
of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990 and the continued broadcast of the events
of September 11, 2001. Television shows
like “Freaks and Geeks,” “Saved by the Bell,” “Felicity,” “Daria,” “Celebrity
Death Match,” and “Doug” proved just as integral to the hipster-subjectivity as
films like Titanic. Monica and
Brandy’s wistful, half-hearted throw-down in “The Boy is Mine” typified the
half-hearted attempt of hipsters to embrace even fights over a good man by a
good woman. Furthermore, while I would not go so far as to proclaim that the
hipster is dead, I would say that, in my estimation, the hipster is now in its
second or third generation, and should be called la hipster ironica. Like the writers of the beat generation who
were either dead, drunk, or living in California as part of the San Francisco
renaissance (and hip to new thrills and new politics) by the time On the Road was published in 1957
(leaving the mean streets of NYC to their black-stocking and beret-wearing
“beat-nik” siblings) the original late twentieth-century hipsters have joined
their brothers and sisters in the land of Bobos[1]
In my recent
article-cum-post-cum rant, “The Hipster, the Popinjay, the Dandy, the Aesthete,”
I proffered that the hipster was the younger sibling of the late
twentieth-century grunge set for whom ‘authenticity’ became the asset to be cherished.
Viscerally affected by the media representations of major world events (i.e.
the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mandela’s release, the Clintons leaving Air Force
One hand in hand post Lewinsky, 9/11), the hipster became a twice-removed, doubled
reflection of the times: a strange ekphrastic representation of the televised image
of the sublime. Unlike their grandparents who witnessed the broadcast of the
atomic bomb and whom, in the words of John McClellon Holmes, became beat “face[s] which could only be deemed
criminal through an enormous effort at righteousness […] Bright, level,
realistic, challenging,”[2] the hipster hid all of
his/her angst and questioning within a disaffected, devil-may-care intellectual
façade, chanting, I shall not want or
rather, I shall not show that I want. The
hipster of today-‘ the ironic hipster’ – is equally effected by media representations
of events; however, WiFi and broadband have made this stimulation constant,
with little time for digestion or comparison. The irony of the age of the
ironic hipster is that dis-affection for the latter generation stems more from
a physical inability to process rather than a sense of distrust. How can one
trust anything that is not explained, that moves too fast to even purport
itself as truth?
What connects these
two or three generations of the hipster are there inability to fathom utopian
harmonies. From their birth, the hipster has never experienced peace-time
activity, and, as such, remains a product of the postmodern sensibilities of
anti-truth and declension narratives. Wars and rumors of wars abound—domestic,
international, and broadband. The V-neck-tee-wearing, scrawny (but toned) man
who collects soul records, the grown woman who looks like a twelve-year old boy
with just as much vitriol against the world, the beefy, tatted flannel-draped personage,
with the smartphone and the bangs, and the beard are all typologies and
material emblems of a yearning for a “good ole days” that never existed. The
hipster is a mirage, a visualization which calls into question the very notion
of a future worth investing in or sticking around for. Even the bringing back of the horn-rimmed and
black plastic eyewear of the Fifties and Sixties reflects the centrality of
distorted visions of reality to the movement. Or, put another way (as my friend
Matthew attests) the hipster has been disaffected so long that dis-affectation
has circled into an emotion all its own.
Enclaves such as Bushwick,
Williamsburg, Providence, Silver Lake, Portland, and the Red Line of Chicago
attest that for the first time in sartorial history, hipsters of either
generation equal a collective that draw little excitement in consuming (and
buying) into the bourgeois class but
prefer, rather, to sculpt out of the
commodities privilege has denounced an effigy, or false god, to whom they can
belong. Using their own bodies as the canvas onto which tattoos, hair, and
cosmetic accessories can be collaged and inked, the hipster’s life is a form of
critique of the ‘real’ of the culture industry. What is real? What is true? Nothing. So then, what is the narrative?
Everything is sooo meta! Opinionated ennui is the religion of the hipster
because boredom and distrust prove authentic in their constructed-ness. Opinion
for the hipster is sacrosanct as fact cannot be trusted and may not exist but
affect (no matter how misguided) is, at least, part of one’s subjecthood, and
therefore, tactile and inherently critique-able. While a hipster will not
sanction a friend for having the wrong opinion, they will curl their lips and
sneer if a person has no opinion.
Baudrillard’s
“Simulacra and Simulation” can be used here as a lens through which the
hipster’s negotiation of urban life becomes plain. As Baudrillard attests, "The simulacrum [system of signs] is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true." In other words, the hipster is composed of a system of both interrelated and non-correlative signs that simulate both the inaccuracy and the nonexistence of truth, rather than the beat generation, or the lost generation of the Twenties, which merely responded to the idea of truth's non-substantative veracity with malaise. Thus, to be a 'hipster' is to be a visual system of reverse ekphrasis (vis-a-vis Heffernan): a representation in image of a mimetic language of truth which does not exist.
Adorno and
Horkheimer’s formulation of the cultural industry proves central to the hipster
project in the era of irony. The cultural industry has both led young, urban
professionals astray while simultaneously commodifying their image for profit. The
current (or new) hipster functions as its own sign with its own non-correlative
significations to person, place or thing. At this new form of existentialism,
living with mirror-images of the self, hipsters have become a market catered to
by Urban Outfitters, Target, Spencer’s, and the ilk. Instead of “like finding
like” and the lived necessity of such affected pastichios of secondhand and first-rate equipage, tout le monde can don the hipster
‘look.’ Advertisements seem to suggest that one is either part of the
mainstream or a hipster. Yet, in the twenty-first century, twenty-somethings in
either group are marketed to. The hipster is no longer a subculture. The
hipster has become acculturated, discussed, named. Renato Poggioli anticipates
this shift in his The Theory of the
Avant-Garde arguing that it is a natural stage in the capitalist system for
the fringe subculture to become dominant. Thus, when n+1 and the culture cognoscenti of the blogosphere declare ‘ the
hipster is dead’ they do not mean that no one is making their own beer any
longer, or tattooing themselves with needles or passing a wasteland of old meat
packing plants turned lofts and boarded-up warehouses on their McLaren on way
to work , but rather that the hipster now has a sense of itself, that once a
subculture finds a name and a poster-child, it is over…Can someone today move
to Brooklyn, grow a beard, start politicking for a city-wide ordinance on
composting without a sense of self-critical irony? At least asking themselves
how I ‘fit’ into this mode? Probably not. When the hipster became a ‘thing’ it
ceased being an Other and became a lifestyle that people could buy – a sign with significations beyond
itself, meaning nothing.
Americans can now
“buy into” the hipster mode, allowing access to the aesthetic regardless of
locale and income. Such product placement has forced hipster to commit suicide
via the hemlock of successful marketing. Herein lies the pardox: for if the
hipster is not authentic, he or she is nothing. So if the hipster is dead,
finished off during 9/11, or the shunning of Brokeback Mountain at the Oscars, or the end of Daria on MTV, who can lay claim to
authenticity: the now late-thirtysomething original hipster who has a job, a
few kids, and a 401k and has moved to the suburbs for the best Montessori
schools or the twentysomethings who buy their fake gold from American Apparel
(rather than the bodega on 4th Avenue between NYU and Chinatown)? Thus,
the tautology of L’art pour l’art
must be true. For the hipster, art certainly cannot be for anything, or anyone
else. Life, then, does not imitate art but rather constructs new forms of art,
new urban vocabularies from the detritus and secondhand flannels of those who
were supposed to protect the young. Self-fashioning, then, becomes the
anti-affair. Like the Futurists, hipsters are under no illusion of illusion. A
hipster might take forever at his toilet but still emerge looking tired. He
hopes others recognize the ruse. This is why so many hipsters embrace
bisexuality, resisting the categorization of identity politics for as long as
possible, and refuse to hold down a meaningful, monogamous relationship. When
one is under no illusion that there is nothing and no one to trust, how does
one love?
Etymologically, both the late twentieth-century hipster and
the ironic hipster are strange hybrids of the Ivy-League ‘beat’ of the Fifties,
and the Kent State ‘hippie’ of the Sixties. They are well-educated, haute bourgeois, and politically active
to the point of activism or opinionated disaffectation. One could argue that
the hipster would be nowhere if it were not for Wikipedia, independent film,
Prada loafers, and the FIFA World Cup. Hipsters would rather be anywhere than here, are more at home in languages they
do not speak, and in climates of extremes rather than the comfy cubicles of
Wall Street. And while hipsters can be dandies, and some even border on
aesthetes, hipsters will not claim the label of hipster. It is redundant, and
no one cared enough the first time, so why repeat the sentiment?
How can one ‘recognize’ a hipster if the species does not
proclaim itself? Websites such as “My Hipster Kitchen,” “Hipster Puppies,”
“Such a F*cking Hipster,” and memes like “Hipster Ariel” can help. The
following post by Dana A on 17 February 2010 on the tumblr site,
hipsterpuppies.tumblr.com can help us.[4]
rambo's appreciation for the music of r. kelly rapidly evolved from "ironic" to "genuine" to "not at all"
In this instance, disaffection has turned on itself. If we
were to diagram the evolution, it might look something like:
A * B = C àD
àE
Rambo * R. Kelly’s
music = Irony/Scoff/Disaffect àAffect àNon-existence
In which Rambo’s consideration of R. Kelly’s music causes
him ironic nonchalance that grows to actual, genuine emotion toward, which then
becomes disaffect once more. In verbal terms, such a transference might
resemble this imaginary exchange:
A = Rambo
B = the subject of R. Kelly’s music brought up in
conversation by various frenemies:
C = (Rambo): “Dude, what? C’mon. Really? I mean, sure, if we
look at “Trapped in the closet as a metaphor for our time, right?, then, maybe…”
D = (Rambo): “Dude, shut the fuck up, I love this shit. It’s
nutrageous. Been loving it since he appeared in that Aaliyah video, ‘Age Ain’t
Nuthin’ But a Number’”
E = (Rambo): “Wha?? Oh, I’m
sooo over it.”
So let us recount: In the hipster, there is always a bit of
the disappointment….life is shitty, people and things will disappoint, images
and news are updated too fast to be digested so why care? Empathy hurts too
much, why not apathy? A hipster’s irony is the modern dilemma transmogrified
from cultural entertainment into affect. To be hipster (now) is to be unable to
live without any sort of assurance or code of authenticity…the hipster brain
cannot cooperate with the hands or the heart…nothing is without an audience…the
hipster has an internal audience… the subject formation of the hipster is
always meta…there is always a camera watching…always an internet stream
In closing, allow me to pontificate upon a sartorial choice
that leads me to wonder. When did the tank top become a thing? Did I miss out?
Was there a Vogue article I missed,
proclaiming the skinny tank for men comme
il faut? As my friend Matthew and I pondered this, we pointed to MTV’s
reality-television program, “The Jersey Shore” as a probable culprit. Since I
was a child, a week during the summer was spent in Wildwood, NJ, home of one of
the longest boardwalks in the world, the Dragon rollercoaster, the Atlantic
Bookstore, and the middle-class, beer-bellied dude’s tank top. In this
environment, the tank top was the opposite of the farmer’s tan, for the arms
and the neck were fully bared to the raise of the sun and the stars. In solid
colors such as white or black, or with Guns-n-Roses and pirate emblems, the
tank top was the ultimate in anti-white collar wear. “The Jersey Shore” brought
the tank top to the national stage, proudly by characters like The Situation,
Vinny, and Pauly D showing off the tripartite rigors of their modish program:
1) gym, 2) tan, 3) laundry. In their large, moisturized hands, the tank top
went from trashy to ironic parody, from de
rigeur to haute couture, and now,
you can buy semi-respectable, polychrome arm-bearing tanks at Target and
Nordstrom. While middle-class petit bourgeois
tastes have long driven the modes of production and consumption, why must the
ironic hipster embrace such a symbol of anti-elitist-kitsch? Is it the ultimate
in ironic parody? Is it solidarity with the 99%? Is it merely out of comfort in
the summer heat?
If Nietzsche gives us the Apollonian and Dionysian dialectic
of aesthetics, then this current trend of the hipster draws from Daniel
Albright’s formulation of a postmodern relation between Apollo and Marysas: “an
“overdetermination and overemphasis, which may in turn lead to a kind of
ironizing, which may in turn lead to the disaffiliation of the very arts that
are trying to cooperate.”[5]
And while I would not advocate that anyone flay their rival alive, laying their
entrails bare to the elements (as Apollo does to the satyr, Marysas), I would
argue that the tank top might, in some ways, symbolize the demise of even this
current mode of hipster-dom,, or, at least a reorganization of the way fashion
trickles down. If this is the case, then the hipster, in all its forms, truly
has revolutionized American thought and style…An interesting idea indeed.
[1]
See David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise: The
New Upper Class and How They Got There
[2]
Holmes, “This is the Beat Generation.”
[3]
Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulation.” Emphasis mine.
[4]
Once again, I am indebted to Matthew Lukens for sharing his knowledge.
[5]
Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent:
Modernism in Music, Literature, and the Other Arts.
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