Throw on Your Best Cardigan and Celebrate Fall 2011 with the Gays of ILX

surm today i had a conversation with a girl in my class about my so called life and she brought up how rayanne does an angela chase impression in the our town episode

she's like "and then your face falls"

it was a major bonding experience

I wonder if you gays will like Noel Coward's letter counseling a heartsick Marlene Dietrich

About as much as this series:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2N2vNpHR0a0

i'm sure it was plaxi, ur very bondable

at the NY FAP last night, I threated to get a mobile device as soon as there's an app to find older gsy men near you, which would be activated by answering questions about Judy Garland films or Queen albums. It would be called Limpr.

:|

Here's an enema, old man.

lolll DR MORBIUS

i'm listening to a radio pgm from the late '60s with gay men talking about bars/hangouts/cruising spots of the time in nyc. there was once a bar in north bergen, nj called Charlie Dickens

one of the hosts says he goes to cruise bingo halls in east village churches at least once a week

It would be called Limpr.

Eldr

goitr

one of the hosts says he goes to cruise bingo halls in east village churches at least once a week

― vitameatawalloginavegamin (donna rouge), Thursday, November 3, 2011 2:44 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

nice boys with their mothers?

oh man that nyt thing about the salon, barf city

the vampiric way that older-n-wealthy transacts access to young-n-cute by way of a supposed passion for "poetry" is really grotesque

the Lillian Vernon angle is hilariously naff too

I mean, yeah, twas ever thus- looks help, and who you know helps, and that's always been true in life, duh, but still . . . this is so blatant

I've always been annoyed by this phenomenon in the art world, what my bf and I call "Cute boy art", that is young/emerging gay artists whose work is heavily narcissistic and which tends to commodify and sell access to either the (attractive) artist's body or the hot bodies/faces of the demimonde of their friends/lovers/peers- and you can see this across the arts scene- the breakout of Anthony Goicolea, Ryan McGinley in the last decade- it perpetuates this proximity between "gay" and "goodlooking"/vapid/narcissistic/shallow/looks-ist which I see as implicitly different from, say, the "queer" abjection school- of a Robert Gober or a Jerome Caja or the more humane and measured presentations of, say, Cathy Opie

I never really thought that poetry would be amenable to this kind of bimbo-ification because it's mediated through texts and, y'know, not about "looking" in the first place

guess I was wrong

I wonder if he's getting invited:

http://gawker.com/5785017/this-awful-poetry-video-is-not-a-spoof

The way to put a stop to the cute boy objectification is to ask the twink-poets how well they know Raphael's parts in Paradise Lost.

paul mpagi sepuya

ugh THANK YOU xp. i hate cute boy art. i can't even tell you how much i hate it.

omg and i was JUST thinking of paul sepuya! i've met him, he shows at our gallery once. i hate his stuff.

i've met him too, he's a sweetie

but generally, yeah, "cute boy art", meh

i started a thread about something related to this a while back, and i mentioned sepuya's fotographs in there, tho i don't think by name Sex, drugs and art (and you)

n+1 had an article recently about the "two ryans" of contemp art (mcginley/trecartin) and how they represent a divide in thinking about/expressing queerness post-21st c and what have you. my allegiances are pretty firmly with the latter (messy and boisterous and exclamatory over tasteful and "looking"-y and overly, uh, aesthetic or something)

I mean it's not that I don't love looking at beautiful people- of course I do- but we have a pornography industry and a fashion industry and a movie star / TV / media "hotness" factory already- yes we also have an art practice that is free to draw on everything in order to fuck around with what gets called art- yadda yadda- but so often I feel like "cute boy art" is dog-paddling along on cuteness/hotness in ways that are so derivative of industries which are a lot more honest about their agenda- a jeans ad knows it's a jeans ad, porn knows that it is porn, but "cute boy art" stands in bad faith to those domains thinking that it is art if it's in a gallery and for sale and made by somebody with an MFA from some program in which they were graded more easily by their older gay mentor because of their entitled cute lil face- I'm not saying it's not art, just saying that it's bad art in that it contributes nothing other than "hey! a cute person! over here!"-

I mean, think about how "meh" you feel as a gay man when you see, say, an American Apparel ad with a hot chick in a tight/skimpy outfit- you see it and you recognize it for what it is and it does pretty much nothing for you from the waist down- that's what the str8 world gets out of gay coffeetable book after gay gallery after gay art show after gay retrospective of "cute boy art"- nothing more than the sense that "wow these gay dudes sure are obsessed with skinny twinks looking bored in sparkly white apartments, aren't they? anyway . . . "- which is, y,know, whatever- but if "gay art" means CARAVAGGIO-to-WARHOL and not *just* WARHOL (and yeah I picked these artists because both are relentlessly aware of male beauty as subject and problem) then "cute boy art" just isn't doing anything that ought to be celebrated or rewarded with our attention and care- the bar needs to be set higher in terms of technique, meaning, consequences, internal relationships- and that would probably bridge the gap from the cute to the beautiful in the process- sepuya's guys are cute, jack smith's art is beautiful; james bidgood is the ultimate problem here because it's "cute boy art" that transcends that to attain beauty (he's the Hegelian synthesis)

i can give or take much of ryan mcginley's work (tho he is occasionally stunningly brilliant) but i have a thing for ryan mcginley the person

I suspect the poetic equivalent of Cute Boy Art is Rupert Brooke. Aesthetic too.

I've been photographed by Ryan, I like his work, and he's hot (otherwise we wouldn't have taken our clothes off for BUTT) but . . . I can still call a spade a spade

i really love what you're saying.

i mean - i would LOVE to have a jeans ad hanging up in my apartment

really would

but not a sepuya :(

i also think that art is often made in a kind of social way, or that milieu and coterie impact heavily on how and why people bother making things. desire and bodies. what irks me more is the self-consciousness of it, the obsession with certain codifications of how that milieu should look, a focus on a certain stylisation: this poetry salon seems so deliberately reverential and referential. my god a salon. or even that butt magazine style revival of a sortof retroed queerness. although really a lot of this is just people with money having high concept parties.

To play devil's advocate: if I'm a queer scion and putting money into a "scene" or look, I want my money's worth, i.e. attractive butts reading fourth-rate homo poetry.

i mean its your money i guess

yeah i think butt mag has a lot to do w/ "cute boy" art, like it's always bothered me how they focus more on the subject's looks and sex life than the work that they do?

than on the work that they do

not trying to blame butt magazine for the phenomenon obvs

best gay male zing line about poetry's relationship to getting laid is frank o'hara's: "As for measure and other technical apparatus, that's just common sense: if you're going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There's nothing metaphysical about it.”

only now we've got the consequences of that flippant remark but not the brains and nous that backed it- a poetry salon scene that is, ala Dr. Seuss, "a pair of tight pants with nobody inside them"

(that said, I can't dislike Eileen or Brenda or Susan etc. i.e. their cast of Ladies They Love has some undeniable greats)

Huh, poetry day. Now I know how Morbs feels when the topic turns to food.

I have to admit that I've always been closed off to the artistic power of poetry outside of the weird exception of Robert Creeley.

heh, i was in a writing workshop class w/ sepuya @ nyu

like wtf is this

http://paulsepuya.com/newsite/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/1120515cb-450x600.jpg

o WOW how insightful

i can't.

rawr, et al, fuiud

haha surm

I try not to think about the whole "cute ____ boy" thing too much bcz it just frustrates me. Like, "Okay we're all going to be wanted and win at everything because of this sorta arbitrary thing that we just happen to have and you can just go stand in that corner over there"

Like, sorry I'm not beautiful. Don't even bother having a conversation with me or anything; clearly I'm not worth talking to and won't have anything interesting to say.

you are beautiful

that picture of you with chocolate all over yourself from a while back - shits all over all of it :)

yeah really stevie