A car crash is the most American way to leave this planet, isn’t it? The freedom of the open road and the promise of auto manufacturing fracturing into shards of metal and glass, airbags blowing into bone, skidding tires squealing before the crunch. And…welcome to the car smash! Certainly, I’m not the only one who … Continue reading
Faint, daydreamy pencil doodles of poised women with 1940’s-style wasp waists, their faces simple with cupid-bow lips and angled Barbie cat eyes, cover a ragged piece of three-hole-punched lined paper yanked from a drug store notebook. Beside and below these figures are mannequin-like heads with less defined faces. What they lose in facial features, they … Continue reading
Volunteering to have your face sat on in public is all it takes to earn my respect. Apparently, anyway. The act of being smothered by a highly sought-after “ass influencer” at a gallery performance was the exact moment when I had to hand it to writer Bianca Bosker: she has dedication. In her art world … Continue reading
“Once upon a time, a wild god zoomed…” Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ new song “Wild God” may be one of the more confounding in their forty-year run. Of course, there is no shortage of perplexing songs in the band’s extensive catalogue from the backbreaking labor of “Well of Misery” to the soupy stringed … Continue reading
In Lucas Hilderbrand’s The Bars Are Ours; Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and After, the pictures, a collection of bar flyers, ads, photographs, gay press headlines, and various ephemera culled from fifteen years of research, are worth as much as—if not more than—the text. “Lick your way through the summer,” beckons … Continue reading
“Paris is a cunt.” These four simple words, muttered in a preternaturally husky rasp by pinhole-pupiled Lindsay Lohan as she snickered in the strobe light glare and high-volume snapping of paparazzi cameras outside of the Roosevelt Hotel (which is now an overstuffed migrant shelter), perfectly encapsulate the gossip rag-driven cultural moment of the 00s (or … Continue reading
Our new Bible (all photos by moi) Susan Sontag may have written the most renowned and widely considered definitive consideration of camp, but let’s be honest, Susie could not be camp if her public intellectual life depended on it. Regarding the Pain of Others, Illness as Metaphor, or even, On Photography aren’t exactly laugh riots! … Continue reading
I’ve recently been suffering from a fever. No, not that kind of fever. I’ve been struck with a Thomas Kinkade fever! Yes, the less-than-esteemed painter of shopping mall schlock (before the fall of malls) and the bane of snotty critics recoiling at the satiated bad tastebuds of Americans enamored with all those little queasily quaint … Continue reading
Eric Sneathen’s Don’t Leave Me This Way, published recently by Nightboat Books, is a ghost story. Ok, the book is not a ghost story in any traditional sense. There are no vengeful ghosts banging open closets or throwing silverware around after being summoned by a Ouija Board or, as in Danny and Michael Philippou’s film … Continue reading
Americans are never happier than when they’re getting in on a scam. Or so said comedian Tim Dillon in a set I saw at The Stand in April (and as a former subprime mortgage hocker, he should know). If he’s right—and as much as I’ve rambled about con art as America’s foremost artistic discipline on … Continue reading