Used to illustrate the article: “Le pourquoi du spectacle : motivations relatives à la consommation de pornographie chez les hommes gais”

The abstract of which: “Pornography consumption appears to be more accepted and normalized among gay males than among heterosexual men. Nevertheless, what motivates the consumption of pornography remains understudied. Using a poststructuralist approach, we conducted an exploratory audience research that allowed us to document the motivations of consumers of gay male pornography through the narratives of twenty users from Toronto (Canada). Using a thematic and a critical discourse analysis, we found that the motivations can be grouped around four main concepts: sexual satisfaction, fantasy exploration, escapism, and finally, protection from others. Our critical discourse analysis suggests that participants construct their subjectivity from alternative discourses on sexuality, dominant discourses on individualism, consumption and health, and contradictory discourses on risk. Using society of spectacle, society of consumption, scientia sexualis and ars erotica as main theoretical concepts, we conclude that pornography is part of the apparatus [dispositif] of sexuality in the Foucauldian sense, an apparatus that maintains sex at a discursive level.”

link

Although I’ve been described as animated, I am not a cartoon. Yet over the years I’ve seen and sympathized with the struggle of the inked and painted – every day, finding yourself drawn into another situation: Your robot maid malfunctions, your pet dinosaur runs away, an evil wizard is out to eat you. Your relationships don’t grow, your waist won’t shrink, and it seems you’re always wearing the same thing. You feel stuck in a rut and powerless over your own life.

Now what if I said rearranging your furniture will change all that?

Sound crazy?  Well, say hello to the new ancient Chinese art of feng shui.

This is the introduction to a book I pitched that will likely never get made so I’m putting some of the pages here. The concept was obvious – apply feng shui principles to fictitious 2-D environments = funny. And i thought it’d be fun to render modern cartoon characters’ homes in an old Chinese woodblock print style.

But there’s always more going on. My other book, Obscene Interiors, makes fun of the decorating found in online male personal ads – but it’s really about how current ideas of masculinity are in contrast to the entire concept of decorating, and how men struggle with this. (I won’t digress into queer theory here.) Point being – i like my projects’ core to contain a significant issue or concept, which is then presented in an entertaining and appealing format as a means to reach a larger audience. I could have kept Obscene Interiors as just a series of images shown in a gallery – which I did – but it’s audience would have been incredibly limited. By adding the captions and making it entertaining, it became a book that would be seen and enjoyed by thousands of people, without diluting the underlying message. Also, people really do need help decorating.

With Feng Shui for the Cartoon Home, the deeper idea was to consider how when one feels lack of control over their life/world they often turn to supernatural beliefs that offer some explanation – or idea of control – over their destiny. I don’t mean to explain the joke but, if the Simpsons say, used feng shui to fix their problems, and it worked – well – then the show would cease to exist because it wouldn’t be entertaining. (And we’d all be putting a plant in that corner there and getting a raise.)

Anyhoo – this book was pitched to all the publishers that I thought were the best match for it and they all passed. Which I find really lame because it’s a cute book and if SEVEN books on feng shui for cats can get published…   I could have kept pitching this until eventually someone somewhere printed it, but really, I get bored. And I have like a million other ideas I’d rather mover forward on. That’s the weird thing about being creative and getting older – is realizing you will never get to produce all your ideas – not even a fraction of them – so you have to get very selective with what you’re going to spend your time on. This can drive people crazy when they see me walk away from what they see as a perfectly good, profitable idea.

But also, i hate being a salesman. Especially when I’m selling my own product. Self promoters gross me out. I’d rather focus on making the product than selling it. So if you’re not into what i’ve got I don’t push it. I’m into projects where people call ME and say omg we have to do this thing – because those are the projects that always happen.

Here’s the whole book, originally published in 1965. Also see his “The Witch’s Catalog.” And send him a message on Facebook, he loves hearing from fans – the man was born in 1928 people. Although famous for his Clifford the Big Red Dog series, via email he mentioned “The Witch Next Door” was one of his favorites and that it was once used in a Sunday school class to teach tolerance of others. O how times change.

I half expected this memoir about a contemporary art curator to be dry, academic, and full of art world nonsense I was supposed to accept. But given the cover photo was of the author, Marcia Tucker, on a motorcycle in the desert. How stuffy could she be? Turns out, not at all.

In 1968, during an interview for the position of curator at the Whitney, after enduring too many sexist questions, she responds with a rant about why they shouldn’t hire a woman. “…once a month I’ll go crazy and no one will be able to reason with me,…and of course I’ll get pregnant within the year so your investment in me will have been completely wasted.” Regardless, she’s hired as the museum’s first female curator.

Years later she’d start The New Museum, which is an amazing accomplishment. I can’t imagine thinking, “You know, I have no money and no property, but I want to start a major contemporary art museum in New York City.” AND THEN DO IT.

I appreciated her constant challenging and questioning the status quo of everything related to art, museums, and running a non-profit. Genius example: Asking her 10  year-old daughter to write a guide for the show “Bad Girls” a show so controversial the NEA demanded their name be taken off it.

And then, after 20 years of curating shows at one of the most well respected contemporary art museums in the world, at 60, she starts taking classes in stand up comedy, loves them, and starts performing. Show me another art curator/stand up comic. This was a woman who lived passionately. Totally sucks that she died two years ago. I hate hearing about great people who just left the party.

I have a piece about Playboy in the gay SoCal rag, Frontiers. (Sadly, the bits about Hef’s bisexual experimentation and my suggestion for a jack-off party were cut.)

And the graphic design mag, HOW, said some very nice things about my “really, really adult-themed book,” Obscene Interiors.

The 1976 Norman Bridwell classic revisited.

In the Sept 06 issue of Blackbook, Fight Club author, Chuck Palahniuk, lists his top 10 book picks over the past 10 years. My collection of online male personal ads, Obscene Interiors, takes 2004. And now I’m taking the rest of the day off to bask in the glow of his approval.

Earlier: Fight Club Author Disappointed

From the Kansas City Star last week:

“You have no idea what it is like to constantly disappoint people. You see it the moment you meet them. You see in their eyes that they expected something so entirely different, and here they are meeting you.”

Chuck Palahniuk chuckles as he says this, steering his pickup down Highway 14 just on the Washington side of the Columbia River. He’s saying you can’t judge an author by his books.

Come to think of it, he’s wearing a black T-shirt that says “Disappointed” in Disney-style script.

Palahniuk (pronounced “paula-nick”) loves the irony of this…

That would be my Disappointed shirt. I gave Chuck one last year after he complimented me on mine at a “Haunted” reading.