“If you promise to stay alive just a little bit longer I promise that we are going to make this world a place worth living in by any means necessary. I ain’t giving up. I swear.”
[ if you promise to stay alive just a little bit longer I promise that we are going to make this world a place worth living in by any means necessary.
I ain’t giving up. I swear. end caption ]
Saxo Grammaticus (c. 1160 – c. 1220) explaining the importance of understanding that all creative work is inherently derivative once you study the oral tradition of storytelling and history and that’s okay because generations have always reformatted tropes and themes to make them relatable to their current audiences
Shakespeare (1564), Kimba the White Lion (1965), The Lion King (1994), The Lion King (2019), Cats (2019):
BUDDY you're a BOY you're a BIG BIG BOY you're a BIG BIG BIG BIG BIG BIG BOY you got mud on your face you BIG BIG BOY kicking your can all over the place singing WEE wee WEE wee WEE wee WEE wee
my brother and I don't say "mcdonalds" when referring to the fast food chain. we've always said "mcnaldo's", then it became "naldo's". now it's simply "nald". and we always refer to it as a single unit. like "do you want a nald?"
so yves klein was a color field painter, also known as those guys who just paint a canvas blue, all blue, all the same color of blue, and sell it for a shitton of money. actually when it came to blue, yves klein was kind of The Guy.
BLUE
but back before all the fame and the blue, he made “yves peintures,” which was a catalog of his monochromes, pictured here:
the joke is that it’s bullshit! it’s just squares of construction paper glued on the page with little titles written below them. even the preface isn’t a preface -- it’s just horizontal lines that he had a buddy of his sign with his name. one time yves klein and his art pals all hyped up a big big gallery show that he was opening. a solo exhibition! very exciting! all the critics and fancy motherfuckers showed up -- three thousand people came. with great drama, they were led into a completely empty gallery. “welcome,” yves klein said. “I call it THE SPECIALIZATION OF SENSIBILITY IN THE RAW MATERIAL STATE INTO STABILIZED PICTORIAL SENSIBILITY, LE VIDE (THE VOID).” he was, in every way, a total fucker who loved bright colors and pranking the art world.
meanwhile, ad reinhardt -- what’s ad reinhardt’s gig?
ad reinhardt’s gig isBLACK
more specifically, black-on-black grids of very slightly varying shades of black, applied in a very matte, powdery way that left the paintings with almost no sheen. it’s a pretty cool effect in person (if vantablack 2.0 had been a thing in the 50s, ad reinhardt would have busted a nut)
unfortunately, the way he did the paint makes the paintings incredibly difficult to maintain. if you touch one, the oils on your hands will immediately stain the painting, and it can’t be cleaned or repaired.
“no prob, bob,” ad reinhardt said to the flustered museum curators and collectors. “if you mess it up i’ll just replace it.”
“but what about our original ad reinhardt!” said the curators and collectors
“yeah i’ll replace it,” ad reinhardt said, “with the same original painting but not fucked up.” this caused some consternation
incidentally, he also made this small comic, which never fails to tickle me:
YOU, SIR, ARE A SPACE TOO!
one of my real favorite artworks in this vein is by robert rauschenberg, and i’m going to include the story of it because it makes me very happy. rauschenberg was an insane post-modernist -- one of his most famous pieces includes a taxidermy goat with paint thrown all over it and a car tire around its neck, that kind of thing -- and i love his piece titled “erased de kooning drawing”
so willem de kooning was the husband of elaine de kooning, who painted sick abstract expressionist portraits and was slamming hot
wow
willem was also an artist, and kind of a big deal in his own right, and friends with rauschenberg
one day rauschenberg calls him up like “hey i have an idea for a collaboration between us two art bastards. i need you to do me a drawing, in pencil”
and willem said “why”
and rauschenberg said “wouldn’t you like to know”
and willem said “why”
and rauschenberg said “because i’m gay, give it”
and willem said “that’s not a reason”
and rauschenberg said “fine, i wanna make a commentary on the value of art even after it’s destroyed and palimpsests and ephemerality and shit i guess, so i need a drawing by a famous dude to erase, and you’re famous”
willem de kooning said “okay” and proceeded to find the wettest, most difficult to erase grease pencil in his studio, which he then used to make several drawings until he came up with one he liked and sent it to rauschenberg
and to his credit, rauschenberg erased that motherfucker. he put in the effort. in a spectacular show of spite countering spite, he very nearly got rid of it all. look at this shit:
if that almost-blank piece of paper isn’t a work of art, i don’t know what is
in junior year of highschool my art teacher would let our ceramics class play music of our choice off of her desktop. we usually used spotify or youtube but she did have one album downloaded on her computer. it was a halloween sound effects/ambience collection. i dont remember why she had it. there was a track on there called "burning screams" which was exactly what it sounds like. just a cacophony of screams alongside crackling fire. she only let us play it on very special occasions, and we would cheer and jump with joy every time. it was like a pizza party to us
please imagine 6 teenagers with giant sad puppy eyes looking at a dear sweet 50 something year old art teacher and asking "may we please hear burning screams"
Disney vs. DeSantis is so funny because it's like. Neither side even wanted to get into this. Here's how it's supposed to go: Politician does something stupid. Corporation disavows politician after public pressure. Politician disavows the disavowing. Nothing changes for either party.
But then the Florida governor got stars in his eyes. He saw an opportunity to bolster his standing before the presidential primary. He wanted to be the one who took on The Mouse and won. So in retaliation he decides he's going to tear down the decades-old agreement Disney uses to govern Disney World's district.
And just like that, Disney's batshit insane legal department turns towards Florida like the Eye of Sauron spotting the ring at Mount Doom. They smell lost profit. They smell blood.
Disney will use any and every strategy they've accumulated over the last century of lobbying congress and DeSantis can't back down lest he admit Mickey Mouse beat his ass. He's lost control of Disney World's district even more than he already did. Now he's getting sued.
This all started because Disney was pressured into backtracking their political contributions to Florida and disavowing the Don't Say Gay law. Now they're fighting for something they actually care about: their profit margin. Disney is not an ally to queer people and they're an enemy to progressives, but damn am I rooting for them to keep humiliating the greater evil for the time being. This is high comedy.
"No Child should get Gender Affirming Care" turns into "No one should get Gender Affirming Care".
"No Trans Person should be in Children's Media" turns into "No Trans Person should be in Media".
They use Children's "Safety" as a method to get a foot in the door.
They then expand their previous statements to ensure the near complete erasure of Trans People and Queer People.
Another way they get a foot in the door is going after smaller parts of minority groups that are not ‘well-liked’ within the group.
For example, they go after trans people first because there’s unfortunately a lot of transphobia within the LGBT+ community. There are plenty of LGBT+ people who are for some reason transphobic, so the transphobes side with the bad guys just to make trans people suffer.
The bad guys use hurting trans people to find out what loopholes they can exploit. After that they can successfully go after the rest of the community, as well as other minority groups. And the transphobes within the community have the audacity to be surprised when this happens. It’s basic logic that pleasing the bad guys is never gonna work.
One of greatest tricks bigots ever pulled was convincing queer people that other queer people were the enemy. Don’t fall for their bullshit, the bad guys are just gonna use trans people and drag queens to find ways to hurt others.
Anyone who sides with bigots to make others suffer is a traitor to humanity and a fucking moron. Anyone who deliberately inflicts suffering on innocent people deserves to be personally affected by what they’ve done. Trans friends publicly break up with them, other LGBT+ people shun them for their actions, etc. Lie down with dogs and you’ll wake up with fleas.
Anyway, fuck transphobes and similar traitors. Thanks for listening.
"No Child should get Gender Affirming Care" turns into "No one should get Gender Affirming Care".
"No Trans Person should be in Children's Media" turns into "No Trans Person should be in Media".
They use Children's "Safety" as a method to get a foot in the door.
They then expand their previous statements to ensure the near complete erasure of Trans People and Queer People.
