Farewell

This was fun, but I needed a change of pace. If you'd like, find me on tumblr.

is the better part of valor

I have slowly learned discretion. It has seeped into me like radio silence, it hums at me, muffling words. Not in my head, but in the auralscape around me. I find this makes some people less inclined to trust me, and some people more inclined to tell me things I didn't need to know. Certainly some take this silence for inattention, boredom, judgment. And sometimes it does shelter those very things. But much of the time, it is beause I have realized there are no answers to the things people will want to say to you. There are no answers to other people's foolishness or passion or anxiety. It's easier to listen than to try and comfort, and perhaps it is more comforting.

I didn't understand discretion, a year ago, maybe more. I didn't understand that it is sometimes better not to say anything at all. My tongue, clicking against my teeth, found ruptures in the social fabric and stretched them. It stretched them until it broke. I have stretched words until they lost their meaning, until they were sounds embodying feelings embodying frustrations and loss.

But in this year while I have been learning the goodness of a stilled tongue, I have been called many things. Chief among them has been the word cold. But my downturned eyes and cocked head, pointed as if listening to something else, is actually considering the very thing you have said. I have found smiles more slow to reach, and humor more ironic than passionate in this last year.

Chiefly it's been disappointment after disappointment. I know I'm a pessimist, but the more I talk to people, the more a certain sort of pettiness begins to set my teeth on edge. Three times has my current roommate (in a study abroad) brought up in ire the mosque being built near the site of 9/11. Yes, her uncle and his employees were killed in the event, but her very skittishness at visiting a mosque (as we're doing tomorrow) and her entire anti-Muslim sentiment, along with her tendency to judge people on the littlest things, has gotten me less and less willing to communicate with her. I respect her grief and even cannot challenge her dislike, but her pure prejudice--that is, her blindness--will be nails on a blackboard to me.

Part of the reason is, I have been more willing to have my mind, my opinions changed recently. I have been more open to the fears and the reasoned discussions of others. This has come with that humming silence that descended on me with little warning. But with it has also arrived, in the form of a parasite clinging to its back, an absolute intolerance for those who are casually and consciously cruel to people they barely know.

Everyone is casually cruel at some point or another, it's true. But some people are almost universally cruel. Perhaps I was one of these people. Sometimes I think I was, and sometimes I think I never got to that point. But there are very few people whom I absolutely refuse to have my mind changed about, and if I do it is out of a sense of self-preservation, not of malice. These are people who had personally and deliberately wounded me, not people I could talk to, and especially not people I have not met.

Nonetheless, the sense of loneliness persists, because the kind and good are few and far between. And it is because of this that my lips have tightened, and the same words that used to pour relentlessly from my throat have begin to dissipate behind my teeth.

tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

Somehow, within the last six to nine months, I've given up on pop culture.

I don't know any of the new artists, haven't heard any of the new songs, haven't seen any of the new movies. I haven't even gone back to watch the old ones. Glee is a mystery, MIA anathema, and the World Cup absurdity.

Which makes maintaining this nibbling little blog ever the more difficult.

In all these past few years, I've been attempting transformations I'm too little to accomplish, under a paradigm that's becoming more and more irrelevant to me. Desiring newer horizons, taller perspectives, keener scopes, I've aimed for becoming like idols who stand at a blurred distance, recognizable only by their daunting qualities of gentleness, mercy, competence. But in the last year, with time away from the family and encountering genres of people who engage in peculiar patterns of relation, I gave up trying to be other people, and worked on just being me.

I realized, I'm boring.

These days, moved back home, my grandfather passed and my father overseas, my sister too small to see sense and my brother too listless to listen, I've done things I've never wanted to do. I've sopped up urine and organized dinners and found it my job every day to drive the children around in the minivan, feeding and washing and clothing. And I've made worksheets and weeded gardens and I've been feeling older than my years.

Walls of glass have crystallized my view of people my age. "Feeling my age" has been a slippery thing since childhood, but my condition now seems to be completely different. In the penultimate days of my 18th year, I feel other teenagers I know are so much more carefree, spending their days in whirlwind romances and hangouts and adventures. Their conflicts and their desires, which I used to so love to watch and urge on, sound like the alien jabberings of the already dead. Or perhaps that part of me is already dead, and can't recognize "life" when it sees it.

To put an emphasis on human agency seems to me to be a ridiculous thing. Do we really "choose" what we do? Or do what we're compelled to do and come up with rationalizations afterward? I doubt my fragile nest of bones and sinew houses an individual evaluating and making "rational" decisions as to future actions. I have desires and aversions that spring from both emotion and thought, but these aren't processed objectively, independent of the world around me, for whence do these desires and aversions stem but the system I reside in?

That's not to say we don't have intentions. But we are not the only intentions shaping the world.

I've been reading Deleuze and Guattari, you see, and feeling the weight of the entirety of the past (the virtual) hovering over me. And who am I but pure desire and a Body?

Humor is the trait I admire the most now. Humor, and good humor. It's easy to be clever, said someone wise, but so hard to be kind. Being clever, that's a gift. Being kind is a goal.

Alejandro: Alterior Relations

This is a response to here.

In Gaga's new video, the set of relations that comprise Gaga and the blatantly masculine, homosocial back-up dancers is highly referential, but not knowing the context of where she might have drawn a lot of her ideas, I want to just discuss it as it appears, on the most literal level. This is without reference to Madonna, fascism, etc. I think reading the video in terms of DADT is also not doing it a service; it may be about that, but to do that much extrapolation takes our attention away from what's actually happening, down to the level of mechanics between camera and dancer, Gaga and the men, in the piece.

Instead, Alejandro is, as it always is, about Gaga as artist and art object.

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Gaga: technocrat, dominatrix, nun, abject body, ice queen. She is the only blond in a sea of black-headed men, the only woman, the only one with a voice. She is the odd one out; we jump back and forth from understanding it’s her gaze, her perspective, that counts—either through the emphasis of her seeing ability (the spectacles) or through the camera’s adoption of her perspective—and observing her in her various guises, dancing with the boys.

Again, the posedness, the almost artificially prominent bodies of the dancers, whose moves are as deliberate as Gaga’s; they are self-consciously unnatural in order to defamiliarize the viewer with their body formation (is it too gauche to say body-expression?).

The video has gotten publicity for Gaga stating that it is about her frustration for never being loved by the loyal gay men she knows. But it would be too easy to call Gaga the perpetual outsider, looking in, that this is about unrequited affection and rejection.

Gaga may be the odd one out, but she participates; the video highlights her inversion of traditional gendered positions. She possesses the traditionally male role of the viewer, the one whose desires shape the performance of the dancer. She observes the man writhing on top of her; he sits astride her, riding her perhaps in slightly altered (alterior?) performance; they are blatantly switched in perspective and accordingly nonreproductive in position. The very self-consciousness of the sexual performances, and the fact that they are on grey prison beds, suggests that the homosociality which Gaga’s video appears to be displaying (in simultaneous celebration and lament) is a put on, entirely a spectacle.

And here’s where my interpretation gets kinda crazy. Take it as you will.

The alternate homosociality and singular (self-flagellating) sexualities of the men belie the fact that these don’t exist but for Gaga’s viewing them, or Gaga’s view of them. But Gaga simultaneously doesn’t exist as she is in this video without them, because she is constant reaction toward, standing against; they are the ones propelling her skyward. In their black and blue-grey midst, she is the crimson and albino queen, the spot of homogenous white light.* To watch the beautifully choreographed dancers circle around Gaga, making her the center, one realizes she is the “heart” in her white and red... but an at-times sexless heart, her body appearing androgynous and slyly covered by crosses.

The homogenous “gays”—take this with a grain of salt, I don’t think they even have to be read as gay to qualify as Gaga’s army of Others—are those with whom Gaga’s body rejects reproductivity in terms of both a) children and b) dominant heteronormative bodily/sexual relations. These men are not representing relationships she wish she were having. The plurality of men supporting her, tossing her around, passing her back and forth, creates an alterior set of relations that is moving in and out of subjectivity: her relation to them is constantly deterritorialized and reterritorialized. Her subject position isn’t king, despite what the video appears to tell us, because of Gaga’s very ambiguous but real reliance on being the one desiring object within the crowd.

Gaga is simultaneously the narrating one and the one created by her narration; her body’s actions do not correspond with her narrative.

This why those beads go backward into her mouth, her orifice. As the desiring abstinent nun, her voice isn’t stopped up. It provides the soundtrack to the entire spectacle. But there’s a disjunct of her voice/her singing and her body. It’d be too easy to read this imagery as some sort of “regressive state” or “swallowing her words,” but I do think it’s important that she’s incorporating Christian/religious symbolism in her “body” [of work?].

To read this as a text about “teh gays” misses the point for me. Yes, it’s about homosociality and gendered relations, but it certainly isn’t about gender relations and homosexuality.

I still haven’t figured out what the riot stuff is about though. But I don’t think it’s supposed to point directly at Stonewall. So there.

*There is a whole other reading here of the fascist/Weimar Germany undertones and Gaga’s pure-whiteness.