The Most Pompous Thing I Have Ever Done Yet. Quizilla is like Old Faithful, only for quizzes, instead of geothermically superheated steam. Every week or so a new "Must Do" quiz comes out. Since I've written before about my dislike of academic jargonism (which has nothing to do with real intellectual inquiry), I thought it would be fun to take the What 20th Century Theorist are You? Quiz. The Result:
I am Jacques Derrida! I founded
Deconstructionism in 1966, and have been a
thorn in people's sides ever since. I argue
that texts cannot be reduced to a single
meaning, among other things. I am dense,
impenetrable, and not dead. I was kinda hoping for Noam Chomsky.
brought to you by Quizilla

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posted by Japhy at 11/19/2003 05:39:00 PM || #

Let's Never Marry A Gay against Gay Marriage Dearly Beloved, We are gathered here today to celebrate the union of Love and Law as expressed by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. How glorious is the Divine Creator who looks down upon these two anthropomorphizations this magical day and says unto them, "Lo! May mankind legislate every emotion under the sun!" If any of you know of any reason why these two should not be joined in holy matrimony, speak now or forever hold your peace. Um- hi there. Marriage is a sacred institution that is defined as being between a man and a woman. I'm no Jerry Falwell loving, self-hating fag, but really, that's what marriage is. From Biblical times up until today, marriage has always been there for the hets and really, it's on their home turf. The straights invented marriage. Imagine if, all of the sudden, the NBA decided to make Judy Garland their official mascot. Get the drift? I'm all for inclusiveness, but if homosexuals want their culture and lifestyle accepted, then they have to respect the heterosexual culture; a culture for which marriage is their yellow brick road and Oz all rolled into one. Marriage is religious. The less our presidents and our priests snuggle up to one another, the better. The question of who can marry whom is one that individual churches should be left to decide. It is the governments job to afford all of its citizens equal protection under the law. In that respect, civil unions are a must for any two consenting adults. They must be given the same essential privledges in regards to healthcare, property and custody as any traditional married couple, but I see no reason why the government is obliged to marry anyone. Those supporting a constitutional amendment to define what marriage is are frankly, idiots or political grandstanders. It's unlikely that Americans would stand for what would ultimately be a Gay Dredd Scott Decision. The wiser move is to support an amendment that would recognize that the sanctity of marriage is one conferred upon by God, and as such is not under the domain of the State. The amendment should then go on to define a civil union and what it's rights and protections are. I may get accused of being a turncoat here, but before you get you start pelting me with your fish taco bridal bouquets, here me out. I'm all for marriage. It's a beautiful wonderful thing when two people, of any gender, decide to commit before the world their love and devotion to each other, however, the ritual of marriage is more than that. Why should gay men and women take on the baggage of an institution that has never been their own, and more importantly, why does the state need to be involved? I don't need the State to tell me who I love, nor do I need its permission to declare that love publicly. What I require of the State is that it provide me the same privledges it admits to heterosexual couples- no more and no less.

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posted by Japhy at 11/18/2003 05:46:00 PM || #

Will the Real Metrosexual Please Stand Up? A Phone Call One of my childhood buds is a Red Sox fan, but being an adopted New Yorker, I’m a Yankees fan. Two hours after the Yankees inevitably beat the Red Sox in Game 7 of the AL Championship, my friend called me up, obviously a little bit drunk: “Rooting for the Yankees is stupid.” “If by stupid you mean, being on the winning side, sure.” “You suck.” “You know, my heart goes out to you, bro. I mean, rooting for the Sox is like dating a hot girl with syphilis. Sure she’s hot, but it’s always going to wind up in you contracting a horrible wasting disease in the end.” “Like you even know anything about baseball. You’re gay.” “What does that have to do with anything?” “Please, you couldn’t even play tee ball, gay boy.” “I was on a baseball team and I don’t exactly remember you bringing home any trophies yourself.” His roommate shouts from the background, “Just because the Yankees uniforms are prettier doesn’t mean you should root for them.” I answer back, “No, the fact that they’re a better team is, though. Their uniforms really are pretty, though.” My friend laughs and tells me he has to go and hangs up on me. Now, I’m not exactly sure what just happened, but I’m a little hurt and pissed off that my friend would play the gay card like he did, especially in front of his roommates. My friend, on the whole, has been pretty cool about such things and has been really the only person from childhood I talk to that I’ve been able to share details of my personal life with. In the past few years, however, he has become increasingly boorish and dismissive towards me. Where we used to exchange pick-up tips he now tries to “beat me up” and shows little interest in talking to me, except to regale me with stories about his frat . Perhaps this is the inevitable growing apart that all childhood friends must come to terms with as they go their own separate paths, but it seems to me there’s something else at work here. I Blame The Metrosexual. The term “metrosexual” was coined by British author and self confessed “skinhead Oscar Wilde” Mark Simpson and it was coined to describe a new breed of man whose primary object of sexual desire was, well…himself. Whether straight or gay, Simpson’s Metrosexual was the ultimate consumer, who slept with people not out of any gender preference, but out of a desire to find someone whose skin matched the Prada sheets. Too complex a concept for the mainstream, the term metrosexual was soon appropriated by mass market publications (including MSN, Time, People and Business Week), but with a new more market friendly meaning: the new Metrosexual is simply a straight guy with gay tastes. I’ve watched this semiotic change with irritation. If there is a vast heteronormative conspiracy out there, they surely manufactured this change in meaning. It’s quite clever, really. The main point of Simpson’s definition is to transcend the straight/gay binary; meterosexuality has nothing to do with the type of gonads you get off on, but the attitude you have. The watered down version not only gets rid of any notion of sexual transgression but actually further perpetuates the straight/gay dichotomy by clearly defining things like manicures and mud masks as “gay” activities, while at the same time brilliantly encouraging straight men to engage in the kind of luxury spending indulgences gay men have been practicing for years. This isn’t just a semantical issue here; something really has been lost, or perhaps, more charitably, missed. The original definition of metrosexual could have helped out guys (and gals), straight and gay alike. Men Have PMS Too. Men have, in their own quiet way, been engaging in a liberation movement for the past decade and a half. The Male Liberation movement can be seen in guys lobbying for ending circumcision, guys devoting themselves to gyms and diets, the rise of Mark Walberg née Marky Mark and in the phenomenal success of Fight Club, which is my gender’s Stepford Wives. While women have self-consciously battled their gender stereotypes for more than a century, the men have quietly perfected theirs into this truth: In America a man drinks beer while watching football. If he doesn’t he’s probably a sissy. Guys are told that we’re supposed to be a pretty stoic bunch, so, excluding a brief foray into speedos and long hair in the sixties and seventies, we’ve silently endured our cast-iron macho man mold. The problem is that there is no man alive who could possibly fit within the mold, so we’ve all turned on each other. Look, in this country, the only way a straight guy can show affection to another guy is if they are both on their third beer and Bob Costas is on the TV. Guys who are into music are cool as long as the music involves an electric guitar. Being knowledgeable about a subject that doesn’t involve canyons, automobiles or drill saws is a guaranteed way to be labeled a geek. I’d weep for the state of my gender if it weren’t for the fact that it would make me a wimp. It’s not much better for the gay guys, who not only engage in macho Aberfag posturing and competitiveness, but also extend it to the bedroom. For many gay men, it seems bedding as much of the disco dance floor as possible has replaced winning the touch football game. On the surface it seems oh-so-out there, but it’s just as rigid a hierarchy as the straight paradigm. In other words, being able to sleep with a lot of people does not make you sexually liberated- oh, that needs to be repeated, I think: Being Able To Sleep With A Lot of People Does Not Make You Sexually Liberated What this puritanical “Oh My God Look at J.Lo’s Booty!” nation needs is a new kind of sexuality. This isn’t a call for a post-gay America, it’s a call for a post-straight America as well. Why divide sexuality along the lines of what kind of loins you rub up against at night? All the people who want to drink beer and talk sports or be alpha males who backslap or bareback each other can all move over to one corner and make room for a new breed: The Metrosexual. The Metrosexual is not a guy who likes to do gay things, nor is he, apologies to Mark Simpson, just a guy who’s into himself. The Metrosexual is the man or woman who, as the name implies, has abandoned the rural (or seemingly rural) sexual stereotypes that have dominated American culture, politics and lore for two centuries and embraces—no, gropes, a sexuality which is as unique as personality. Unlike the dippy flower children our parents used to be, the Metrosexual does not consider himself a sexual rebel. The heart of the Metrosexual credo is “As long as it’s between two consenting adults, who cares?” Unlike the Act Up Crowd or other grand-dame’s of the queer movement like John Epperson aka Lypsinka who bemoans the “Gay boys with strollers on Eighth Avenue”, the Metrosexual is not about “subverting the straight establishment”. The Metrosexual realizes that all along she has been the establishment. Men don’t do it like Brad Pitt does and real women are more creative than Madonna when it comes to bedroom antics. What’s even hotter is that in the morning, they put on a suit, grab some Starbucks and head off to work. The Metrosexual is Sex Getting Real. Rather than defining what’s ‘hot’ by the pages of Vogue or Details, the Metrosexual instinctively knows you make something hot by owning it. Have a collection of snails? Don’t stash them under your bed when you’re first bringing a girl home. Show those gastropods off passionately enough and seductively enough and you’ll soon have your lady turned on far more than a bottle of Drakar ever could. What makes something sexy? It’s obvious: It’s the passion you imbue it with. The Metrosexual lives in a world where women gather together for sex toy parties instead of Tupperware parties, where the local Fraternity holds a monthly bondage party (Come on- if there was ever a group better suited…) and the High School Sex Ed teacher says to his students, “Each of you are incredibly sexy if you believe you are.” Low self-esteem, that perennial social malady, would evaporate like afterglow sweat. The g-spot is not a place on the body, but a place in the mind. The Metrosexual realizes this instinctively. The Metrosexual is The Self-Actualized Libido. If men and women create their own definitions of sexuality and gender role, rather than being slaves to what they’ve been told, the world will be a much better place. We don’t let anyone tell us what to think, why should we let anyone tell us who or how we can get it on? Hey Geeky Guy with the Pimples!: The next time you’re at the family barbecue and Uncle Ralph starts bugging you about the pennant race, ask him what he thinks about the latest release of Red Hat…and treat yourself to a facial. Hey Confused Kinda Lesbian Girl!: Solve your dilemma by dating both a girl and a guy at the same time. Go on dates as a group. Save money on cabs! It’s not radical, it’s reality. Be your damned self. Every last one of you turns me on.

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posted by Japhy at 11/12/2003 02:55:00 PM || #

Why The Matrix Revolutions is Great To read the reviews for The Matrix Revolutions, you would think the final installment of the wildly ambitious sci-fi trilogy was a remake of Battlefield Earth. Having just seen it, I have to say to all the detractors, "Give us [the moviegoers] a fuckin' break!" I'm not exactly sure what these people expected, but apparantley a movie that is one of the most visually thrilling, fast paced and epic two hours ever developed to celluloid just isn't good enough. [SPOILERS AHEAD] The argument against The Matrix Revolutions is essentially this: All of the secrets and teases of the past two movies are either a.) not revealed enough, b.) betrayed or c.) revealed too much. I'll admit that Revolutions suffers from the X-Files Syndrome, in which tantalizing secrets always trump actual revelations, but looking at the movie as the Wachowski brothers intend it to be viewed; a trilogy of birth, life and death, you can't help but be impressed. Just as the original Matrix presented us with a hero for whom everything was new and every truth an illusion, and Reloaded gave us a hero who relishes his role, knowing his place in the universe and fighting for it, Revolutions gives us a hero who acts not for his own life, but for the life thereafter. The entire trilogy has been called cold by more than a few, but I find it splendidly expressionistic. The Wachowski brothers give us a wonderful rumination on the nature of endings: the end of love (both in the Trinity and Neo relationship, but also in Morpheus and Niobe's long dead love which in this movie transforms itself), the nature of death and war and destruction and also the end of conflict itself. There are also some amazingly kick-ass action scenes. What I'm saying here folks is that through the course of the three Matrices, audiences have been delighted by fantastic visual effects, have been introduced to some philosophical concepts (admittedly, watered down concepts) and enjoyed a fairly entertaining heroic narrative story. There has been nothing like the Matrix trilogy: it makes Star Wars look like a kiddie pool. Any careful viewer of the Matrix trilogy will see that the Wachowski's never set forth to create a solid-air tight narrative. The discussions that people have because of the ambiguities built into the Matrix are, I believe, deliberate. To turn marketing into tautology: Every ending is a beginning. Also- just to quiet the naysayers who say the ending goes against the whole humans must be coppertops premise: In Reloaded we learn that the humans have found an alternative source of power, so, in theory the new matrix (no longer green and all) could be a virtual meeting place for the machines and the humans to work out how to live in the real world. Neat!

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posted by Japhy at 11/06/2003 07:31:00 PM || #

The Aesthetic of the Cheap. New York is the capitol of capital. For a city that has been the home of the likes of Duke Ellington, Jackson Pollack, Elia Kazan, Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Laurie Anderson and countless others, the New York of today is a nearly impossible place for artists to both survive and create. The galleries are filled with artists from Pittsburgh, Providence, Berlin and beyond. The theatres, when not playing revivals, mount productions of regionally developed works as a sort of Gotham canonization ritual that eludes me. Musicians seem to have it easy, or at least the sort of musicians that only require a guitar and a trucker hat as an investment. I mention all this, simply to set the landscape. Finishing strokes might include acknowledging that the biggest art show of the decade was Matthew Barney’s multi-million dollar Cremaster Cycle and a brief glance at the American Airlines Theater on Forty-Second Street. This is the town in which I work, and serves as the practical impetus for what follows. As a young artist living in New York, I find myself trapped in the same dangerous cycle that so many of my friends have found themselves in: To create art, you need money- to get money you must work- to work in New York means to work in a cubicle- to work in a cubicle is to kill the impulse to create. I know writers who are dying as editorial assistants, I know painters who design GAP ads. This in and of itself is not a bad thing. If your goal is to make a lot of money, this is a good way to do it, however, if your goal is to create art, it’s a fairly counterintuitive way to go about doing it. Talent is not a rock, it is a sensitive and precisely tuned Stradivarius that must be bowed and plucked by the most sympathetic of hands. If I were to spend the next five years in a cubicle, I would, best case scenario, lose my mind. The dilemma: Short of a trust fund, how does the artist create? I’ve told you all this to establish that there is a practical reason for the theoretical aesthetic that follows. This in itself is completely fitting within the concept of “cheap”; as you will see. Most art today is inherently capitalistic. In theatre especially, the specter of commercial viability looms over every aspect of production- from choice of material, to casting to marketing. This does not hold true simply on Broadway, where over staged musicals (42nd Street, anything by Andrew Lloyd Webber) and upper-class liberal hand-wringing straight plays (The Goat, Take Me Out, Proof) are the norm. The supposed tautology between high quality and high budget also informs downtown theatres, who show their rejection of this ideal through bare stages and self-consciously avant-garde staging. This is a mirror of the audience that theatre caters to, one which in youth rejects the very bourgeois attitudes it will embrace in maturity. The hippie who grows into a middle-management bureaucrat is no longer simply a cliché, but a modern day rendition of Joseph Campbell’s hero myth; that is, we are expected to lose our ideals and so we chose ideals from the outset that we are comfortable with surrendering later. That our nation’s youth are savvy to this carefully constructed series of morphing poses has left them dispirited, ironic and nihilistic. To them and logically so, the act of having ideals, being political and attempting to enact change is not just futile, but folly. They know, if not always consciously, that in the totalizing system of capitalism, even the act of rebellion exists only to be commodified and marketed. It is not my goal to find a remedy to this totalizing force, but to offer an aesthetic response to the total milieu of late stage capitalism. That response is “Cheap”. Cheap is political. Cheap is the enemy of capitalism. Cheap is already a force embraced by youth. Drinking Pabst beer is Cheap. The ‘irony’ of our generation is not ‘irony’ at all, but rebellion. Wearing a trucker hat, while not terribly original, is a political act that rejects capitalism by deliberately seeking out and embracing what capitalism fears most: the tacky, the functional, but above all, the unmarketable. While retailers have quickly started selling designer trucker hats, the ultimate trucker hat is one that can be bought for seven dollars in Missouri. Cheap has nothing to do with things. Cheap acknowledges that capitalism will upscale any object deemed to be ‘popular’, but Cheap will have rejected the object by that time, for Cheap is the material expression of anti-materialism. It sets capitalism on a hamster wheel, vainly chasing after increasingly unsalable things. For an artist, Cheap represents a way to escape the poverty of the capitalism’s gauntlet of success. Cheap allows the artist to arbitrarily commodify and sanctify whatever is at hand. It invites excess as both parody and earnest undertaking. Like all movements, Cheap is not an unexplored country. John Waters has used Cheap not just to shock (Cheap is always shocking to a capitalist) but to politicize. Waters’ films are profane because they are made Cheap and advocate Cheap, not because they include pubic hair and teabagging. That the recent Broadway version of Hairspray totalizes Waters’ cheapness into the rubric of later day capitalism only highlights theatre’s role in America as the ultimate bourgeois institution. It this role that the theatre plays in America that makes it the perfect forum for advocacy of the cheap. Cheap can be found in other places. In performance, there is The Trachtenberg Family Slideshow Players, who create songs and narratives for disused and forgotten memories. Cheap can be found in the impromptu memorial to September 11th near Saint Vincent’s Hospital that was created from individually marked glazed tiles. Its eloquence lies in its cheapness; the memorial is unabashedly sentimental, genuinely heartfelt and simply rendered by individuals who respond with immediacy instead of tortured test-ballooned deliberation. It is virtually indestructible, for even if it is dismantled, it will continue to exist as individual tiles or even individual fragments. Its cheapness allows it to be fractured by design; an assemblage of disjointed parts that becomes an inversion of the tragedy it memorializes. Cheap can be a tin-pot opera, a racecar action adventure told through soapbox derby cars, a king in polyester, the exultation of toilet bowl cleaner as divine and MUCH MUCH MORE!. Cheap reduces complexity into the symbolic. ACT NOW! The semiosis of the generic can be reworked into opulence. TIME IS RUNNING OUT! If we want to insult a woman, we call her cheap. A cheap suit is emasculating at best and oftentimes fatal. When the artist embraces the cheap, she manifests the nightmare visions of the CEO, but reworks them into the sublime fantasia of truth and hope that is the cubicle dweller’s daydream.

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posted by Japhy at 11/05/2003 12:13:00 PM || #

dearest internet, For my Lesbian Love Tragedy version of Othello (I'm calling it 'Othellia'), I need lots of cardboard. Can you get me some or tell me where I can get some? All my love, Japhy P.S.- I also need girlish actors to audition for me. P.P.S- And a pony.

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posted by Japhy at 11/03/2003 01:10:00 PM || #