STUFF THE STREETS

Young Fag Looks Back on the Latter Aughts -- Animal Imagery

The early days of 2011 arrived ominously, heavy with promises of doom and dread, when 1,000 blackbirds fell dead from the sky in Arkansas. This strange, sad, and very southern Gothic occurrence got me thinking about how us kids idealized and dreamed through the animal kingdom in the late-2000s, a time before flocks of birds fell mysteriously ill and the sky rained fowl. In the latter aughts, for some reason or another, a defining visual trend emerged among young creative peoples: lots and lots of animal imagery.

Enter the deer.













Yes, deer are beautiful, magical creatures that evoke lots of inspiring thoughts, feelings and dreams to many. They’ve floated through American cultural currents for years, probably because of their constant, visible presence in North American landscapes both natural and pop-cultural (e.g. “Bambi”). Also, deer are just plain beautiful: stately and strong, yet typically harmless creatures, deer are aesthetic specimens pleasing our eyes with their elegant beauty and our hearts and minds with their gentle, timid natures. The ubiquity of deer in the North American consciousness can also be read in the slaying and subsequent wall-mounting of our gentle, furry friends as they appear in rustic lodges and taxidermy offices across these great states.

The aesthetic echo of deer and, specifically, this wall-mounting icon has reverberated among young, art-making communities:

Lots of deer heads and silhouettes in the last years of the 2000s. However, though the deer motif began as an inspiring symbol appropriated by younger, creative communities, it soon seemed trendy, and that trend eventually became commodified:

The kids initiated another development (and arguable trend) of the latter-aughts that utilized animal imagery: the use of animal masks/heads on human bodies.

The visual shock of seeing an animal head on a human body might be read in several ways: as an escapist fantasy, where young human souls, wide-eyed and hungry with animal energy, could be and become animals, inhabiting a world removed from our own shitty one. Yet we could also, by keeping our bodies intact, remain ourselves and continue to enjoy our human lives and pleasures.

Or perhaps this animal-appropriating reflects a little postmodern American irony and cynicism: maybe we wanted a new way to shock the world, taking powerful, non-human, typically unglamorous animals and placing them on writhing, human, model-bodies. Maybe we ran out of irony and the unexpected, and the idealized purity and fury of animals we could corrupt by pairing with our own superficial, base human bodies.


For whatever reason, these phenomenons occurred. Celebrating deer and buying deer shit, or adopting the look and spirit of animals, looked cool and felt powerful. Though these images eventually became trends and, in some cases, commodities, the creative potential of animal imagery was, at one point, inspiring and vital. And hopefully, the aliens and robot inheritors of our doomed earth might see how animal heads on human bodies looked, to the kids at the 21st century’s beginning (of the end of days), unsettling and weird, bizarre and fun, and maybe even hopeful and idealistic. Someone might see our deer fetishizing as joyful and sweet, nostalgic and unique to our quaint little culture. Or maybe there won’t be anyone looking back. Regardless of the legacies we may or may not leave, as these latter faggy days come and go, at least we will know and remember how, at some point, we dreamed our dreams through animals, and that we even had dreams at all.

yes i am a hermit and ecstasy's my game

this is "puce moment," an incredible short film by kenneth anger. not as faggy as the seminal "fireworks," but awesome nonetheless. especially great is the music, which, if this blog (http://rabbitscgi.blogspot.com/2009/04/music-of-kenneth-angers-puce-moment.html) is to be believed, was written by someone named jonathan halper, who possibly became a tibetan monk and/or played mental hospitals around edinburgh.

kenneth anger is legendary and bizarre, a devoted follower of aleister crowley's church of Thelema. my biggest regret: i was once in cefalu, italy, where crowley and his thelemites built its one temple, the Abbey of Thelema -- and i didn't visit it. the group was later forced to abandon the small, ramshackle building when they were run out of the country by mussolini's fascists.

i want you like a kangaroo

i have desperately tried to force this song and music video on all my friends and loved ones, with varying success.

my beautiful, cultivated former boyfriend introduced me to this song/video, and we later covered it in our band. this is a cover of a big star song, which i am too afraid to listen to for fear it will taint my love of this version. the bizarreness of the final line: "i want you like a kangaroo" -- i understand it more as an illogical, excited expression of love and desire, rather than a statement that makes obvious sense.

the video is a gem: i love the truly gender queer presence of the singer, and the ache in his singing and gestures. and i love the part where he/she/they stand on a spinning wheel, holding a bouquet of flowers. very what-the-fuck and precious. beauty still exists in these faggy latter days.

the strange and awesome necklaces of robert mapplethorpe

what self-respecting fag boy hasn't encountered robert mapplethorpe before? we all know about the whip dangling menancingly from his butthole, the statuesque lisa lyon, the monstrous black cock peeking through the 80s powersuit trousers, the pristine flowers, and the rest of the gamut. but as i recently began a nascent journey into jewelry-making, i remembered a little-discussed genre in mapplethorpe's oeuvre: his strange and holy, tribal-cum-rosary-bead necklaces. patricia morrisroe's biography of the studly photographer, "mapplethorpe: a biography," briefly discusses the necklaces mapplethorpe made in his early 20s, when he first met punk rock poetess and goddess patti smith! (i haven't had the chance to read patti smith's just-released "just kids," a memoir of her time with best friend and cosmic companion mapplethorpe, but i'm sure it's as awesome and beautiful as both of em.)

i don't have the book on me, but i remember morrisroe describes the artists' time in the chelsea hotel as art-making roommates-slash-lovers. the two had cemented their bond early when patti, attempting to ditch a bad date, encountered robert mid-date and asked him to pretend to be her boyfriend. and, like a true fag friend, the young, studly mapplethorpe obliged!

before mapplethorpe had developed his identity as a photographer, he created, in the mythic squalor of the storied chelsea hotel, amidst the ghosts of other great artists, sculptures of relics, assemblages, and altars. as a tortured ex-catholic fag boy, mapplethorpe imbued much of these works with dark, quasi-religious/sacrilegious energies.

mapplethorpe had made or was making necklaces around the same time that he was fashioning these assemblages and little altars in his apartment. i haven't seen many of these necklaces or read much discussion about them, but the idea of them always fascinated me: strings of relics, collections of teeth and beads and skulls, holy baubles of debris from a faggy catholic boy trying to find his own beautiful, perverted grace.

as mapplethorpe fashioned these pieces, he also began working in polaroids. the polaroids, which combine a low-rent, young-resourceful-poor-artist playfulness with the austere, severe and stark symbol-making that would later become his hallmark, is the work that inspires and speaks to me most.

he later briefly combined the polaroids with his assemblage-ing impulses:

this is the work mapplethorpe made in his early to mid-20s, after leaving pratt institute, where he had earlier studied. late in his college career, life had gotten increasingly bizarre (and awesome): in the campus room he shared with a roommate, he had kept a pet monkey, neglected it until it died, and then tried to taxidermy its remains. later in his life and career, mapplethorpe continued combing the depths of his "darker," more taboo impulses (s-and-m, scat, etc).  morrisroe's biography and the film documentary "black, white, and gray: a portrait of sam wagstaff and robert mapplethorpe" argue that this exploration-slash-descent led to his HIV/AIDS death and hastened the corruption of his personal ethics.

but before whatever alleged descent, before his success and fame as an international photgrapher, and before his days in the chelsea hotel with patti smith, mapplethorpe had been something(s) entirely different: a mediocre student, a struggling army cadet, a catholic. and the polaroids and necklaces, the altars and assemblage creations mark the radical, liberating beginning of his change. his daring to be an artist, a young fag looking to conjure holy and unholy spirits, is what i read in those necklaces, sculptures and polaroids. in these faggy latter days, we can only hope that ghosts are real and fag saints like mapplethorpe are floating nearby.

Katy Perry gets lucky and accidentally references "Pink Narcissus"

Is anybody seeing the visual connection between that Katy Perry "Teenage Dream" album single cover and James Bidgood's singular, beautiful-looking gay fantasia "Pink Narcissus"? The fag photographing Perry sure does borrow a lot of the visual signifiers of Bidgood's strange, seductive and little-seen 1971 film: bright neons bathed in a cool, blue, fluorescent glow; a sex-object subject cast in a half-sunny, half-icy pallor; and a mythological-ish nature motif.

I haven't seen Katy Perry repeat this specific visual reference anywhere else, but the first time I saw that photograph I couldn't help thinking of Bidgood's "Pink Narcissus" hustler boys, laying beautifully prostrate in scenes of glittery, faggy debris:



 

introduction

hello, dark and faggy world!

this fine pizza ass right here heralds my first step onto the well-trodden path of blogging in the blogosphere. here i'll be posting things that may pique the interests of cultured, discerning fag boys and their many admirers.

while any fag or non-fag can scroll through the internet and find things that delight and inspire him/her/zer, this blog will serve as a personal compendium of all the queer things that have delighted and inspired me. so this is my history project, an effort to praise and preserve the faggy things that may have been lost if we weren't invested in sharing and promoting our own interests, nudging others towards the films, books, performers, innovators and subversives who've touched our gay ass hearts and minds. so, let's carve out a tunnel and skip towards gomorrah in these awful, awesome faggy latter days.