Issue No. 34: Another FCK H8 Video

      

Issue No. 33: Funny How History Repeats Itself

                       

Issue No. 32: Responses to the Smithsonian's Censoring of Wojnarowicz

(The underlined and colored text below are links. Please click on them.) 

The National Portrait Gallery's description of Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.

If you don't know the backstory, here it is.

This photograph by AA Bronson is part of the Hide/Seek Exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery in the Smithsonian Institute. 

AA Bronson, Felix.

“I made this photograph of Felix a few hours after his death. He is arranged to receive visitors, and his favorite objects are gathered about him: his television remote control, his tape-recorder, and his cigarettes. Felix suffered from extreme wasting, and at the time of his death his eyes could not be closed: there was not enough flesh left on the bone.”

AA Bronson

Felix died of AIDS on June 5, 1994

Bronson wants to pull it from the show.

The Warhol Foundation threatens to pull $375,000 of funding if the Wojnarowicz video is not restored.

Issue No. 31: For Ivan Cazzola (Animated)

Issue No. 30: Tavi on J. W. Anderson

Please have a look at these beautiful juxtapositions.

Issue No. 29: VISIONS OF EXCESS DVD

PRODUCT DESCRIPTION

Unbound x Eds. Lee Adams and Ron Athey

Visions of Excess was a non-stop, 12 hour voyage into the heart of darkness, a communion with the ragged spirit of Georges Bataille, exploring the philosophers key themes of death, eroticism and the forbidden. This DVD features documentation from Visions of Excess London. Easter Sunday, 2009. Commissioned by SPILL Festival.

Curated by Ron Athey and Lee Adams, and hosted by David Hoyle the event featured live performances, installations, film screenings and DJs. This dvd features excerpts from work by Lee Adams, Ron Athey, Franko B, Gio Black Peter, Bruce La Bruce, Christophe Chemin, Peter Christopherson, Zackary Drucker, Flawless Sabrina, Dominic Johnson, Mouse, Kira O'Reilly, L.Gabrielle Penabaz, Lazlo Pearlman, SmaxXx, Suka Off, Samantha Sweeting, Julie Tolentino and Veenus Vortex.

Every purchase from CultureLabel helps to support the arts. Our partner art galleries, museum shops and independent stores work with us to ensure that the price you pay is the same as if you were to buy direct.

Order here: VISIONS OF EXCESS.

In case you are unfamiliar with the Visions of Excess events, there is documentation on Lee Adams site. 

Issue No. 28: Divine David's Resume

                         


{David Hoyle}

Issue No. 27: SALVATORE LIBERACE MUSEUM CLOSED OKTOBER 17, 2010

Please click here to listen to the NPR story
[Originally aired September 14]

Issue No. 26: Gay Adoption

Before you knew me, I was sold to the Russian mafia as a white sex slave. They made me have six abortions a year. I always aborted to a packed house of at least 200. I think tickets were about $5. a pop (no pun intended), but I'd only get about $9. per show. My pimp said that it was because they always put too many heads on the guest list, but I know better. It really burns me when - not only when I urinate - but when I think about how I'd insist on getting anesthatized locally so I could recite the works of Baudelaire while they scraped those dead babies outta my pussy. Now, my uterus is permanently prolapsed. Every morning I have to numb it with cocaine and then shove it back inside that that cold, clammy tool. It's hell.

Since that experience with the Ruskies has left me barren, I have decided to adopt. I have narrowed my selection down to the contents of this tape:

Which kid do you think suits me?

[Source: 'WYANTREETIN' on Youtube.]

Issue No. 25: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Will Make an Appearance

Legendary musician, performer, and human being Genesis Breyer P-Orridge will appear
at Desert Island Thursday November 18th to sign her recent book, chat, and offer some
rare posters and prints from the archives.

Don't miss the chance to get a signed copy of "30 Years of Being Cut Up," an amazing
book of visual art and collages by Gen and published by Invisible Exports.
www.invisible-exports.com

We will also have available copies of THEE PSYCHICK BIBLE, rare show posters, and a
new print produced for the occasion by Desert Island.

Please see Gen's site for more information about Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and more:
www.genesisbreyerporridge.com

[Source: an email from genesisbreyerporridge.com]

Issue No. 24: Military Queers

Issue No. 23: Comme des Garcons: late 1990s.

Issue No. 22: PAYCHECK FAIRNESS ACT & the New Homophobia.

  Next Wednesday 17 November, the Paycheck Fairness Act appears before Congress.
The American Association of University Women describes the situation here:

A much needed updated of the 47-year-old Equal Pay Act, the Paycheck Fairness Act is a comprehensive bill that would create stronger incentives for employers to follow the law, empower women to negotiate for equal pay, and strengthen federal outreach, education and enforcement efforts. Championed by longtime AAUW friend Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), the bill would also deter wage discrimination by strengthening penalties for equal pay violations and by prohibiting retaliation against workers who ask about employers' wage practices or disclose their own wages. Together with the Ledbetter bill, this critical piece of legislation can help create a climate where pay discrimination is not tolerated, and give the new administration the enforcement tools it needs to make real progress on pay equity.

With a record number of women in the workforce, wage discrimination hurts the majority of American families, both in terms of their economic security today and their retirement security tomorrow. Due to rising employment rates, an unprecedented number of women are now the family breadwinner – making pay equity even more critical, not simply to family economic security, but also to the nation's economic recovery.

[Taken from the AAUW website.]

You can take back the democratic process that Bush hijacked by telling your senator to vote in favor of the bill. It's a totally free call. 877.667.6650. The same number for everyone living in the US. You don't even have to know who your senator is. If you cannot call during normal business hours, you can leave a message that will be forwarded to Congress.

The fact that many employers (some of which I have worked for) ignore the federal legislation granting everyone equal pay regardless of gender for the same type of work that has been on the books for nearly fifty years blows my mind. But, what really disturbs me is the huge amount of women employed by corporations who just roll over. I have known several women - some of which are single mothers - who are dedicated to holding key positions within the structure of large companies who force themselves to go into denial about not only being paid unfairly, but the generally anti-woman atmospheres of their workplaces.

In Illinois, where I live, it is mandatory for employers to place a poster supplied by the Board of Labor announcing that women in this state only make 71 cents to every dollar earned by their male counterparts somewhere where it can be read by all workers such as a breakroom. Yet, at every office job I have had, female employees routinely sublimate addressing this issue in favor of campaigns which inundate workplaces with sets of namby pamby rules prohibiting things like setting the air conditioning lower than 72 degrees at the height of summer, devoting a certain amount of company time to organizing office bridal or baby showers or ensuring the office manager keeps a spare supply of tampons in the supply closet. Or else! This mentality often allows sexist humor and attitudes insensitive to gender differences to go unchallenged even in an office predominately populated by women as the herd will most often abandon the individual that speaks up for fear that questioning male authority will burn the bridge that accesses power. There is a paranoia that if one women burns this bridge, all other women will loose power-accessing privileges as well. Afterall, 'boys will be boys.'

Being able to depend on your employer to prevent you from getting period stains on your dress, indulging in the celebration of archaic sexist rituals on the job or using powers of manipulation to normalize a physically uncomfortable environment for men are not rights. Sadly, these have nothing to do with the rights the Feminist Wave of 1965 - 75 (the ERA-ers) fought for. If not in direct opposition to those rights, they are a passive-aggressive reaction against progress. They are symptoms of a possession of the collective female super-ego by the notion that femininity (is desirability is approval) is sacrificed by ambition. The product of fulfilled ambition is loneliness.

It is also the backlash of the pervasiveness of gender studies in colleges and universities who have during the last two generations decided to divulge the secret that 1965 - 75 Women's Liberation Movement was at it's heart the first phase of the Lesbian Liberation Movement. Therefore, if a woman in the corporate workplace perceives herself - or is perceived - to be succumbing to ambition en lieu of making sure the boys put the toilet seat back down, she puts herself in danger of being branded DYKE. Before participating in this new exclusively anti-Lesbian form of homophobia, remember that American women are two times more likely to retire into poverty. I'd rather be called a dyke by my boss today and have a comfortable tomorrow.

What really disgusts me is the lack of response my announcement of the 11/17 vote got on Facebook. Out of 227 friends who all seem to identify themselves as being keen on the advancement of human rights, civil liberties and all the other shit that goes with it, not one indicated liking my post or shared it. Well, actually one did. I take my pants off to you, Billie Jewell. Could it be that gender-based wage inequity is generally considered inevitable or even acceptable? Maybe that's why everyone wants to get married these days. I guess that's the topic of a future post.    

                                                    








 {Donna Summer}

Issue No. 21: THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL by Michael Mouris

                       

Issue No. 20: Tavi Gevinson Halloween Apparel Available at Target

Target Advert

In the spirit of Tavi Gevinson's collaboration with Rodarte for Target stores, Target is now offering the Tavi Gevinson Halloween Look. Target is calling the ensembles "looks" rather than "costumes" in the hope that buyers will view their purchases as non-seasonal after the holiday and wear down-played, less accessorized versions throughout the year, incorporating the pieces into their daily wardrobes.   

Tavi herself says, 'The beauty of working with a retailer like Target is that their looks are so affordable. I recommend investing in both, premiering each separately and then interchanging the pieces. This is how two outfits can become twenty!' She continues, 'The more high-end consumer who wants to look like me can dress up the wig and mask with something like a fur coat by Karl Lagerfeld for Fendi or one of the many faux furs creations that have graced the Autumn/Winter 2010 runways. ...Underneath? Skin. Or, you can mix and match any of these pieces with that one-of-a-kind vintage piece. Clogs go with everything.'   ~EP  

The Tavi Halloween Looks are Multicultural

Tavi (photo pilfered from her blog)

Issue No. 19: SCOTT WATERS: Investigating Queerness in the Military.

The Ginch Camp

Depending on the nation and the army, the homoerotic element is pushed or pulled to varying degrees. It’s always there. But most often it’s something more than camaraderie but less than sexual. It’s just this intense closeness that is indescribable if you’re outside, and maybe even for some of us who were inside. I don’t want to say it transcends description, that’s probably blowing it out of proportion, but there is an unknowable relationship between men that occurs in the military.

I’m sure the people who make these decisions in the military are well aware of walking a very fine line between masculinity and eroticism. You see it more in movies than actually within the military. Specific to my own experience, I noticed that play was a common occurrence, but it didn’t usually cross the line. What develops is this fringe culture which dictates that the more comfortable you are displaying gay acts the straighter you are, because only a really straight guy would be comfortable flaunting his body like that.

The above is an excerpt from "Painter Scott Waters - Major Text & Photo Essay on His Work in Border Crossings, Nov 06"

For more: http://www.craigscottgallery.com

Repo Man vs. Screw: A Buddy Movie

He Was a Dick (But so Were We All)

Assume the Position

Splitting a 60

Songbook Redux

Issue No. 18: FEVER RAY

Issue No. 17: DIVINE: Today would have been her 65th. birthday.

Issue No. 16: OSCAR WILDE: Today would have been his 147th. birthday.

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish writer, poet, and prominent aesthete; who, after writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. Today he is remembered for his epigrams, plays and the tragedy of his imprisonment and early death.

{Wikipedia}

Oscar Wilde and his lover,  Lord Alfred Douglas

Issue No. 15: The FCK H8 Campaign.

     

        



I learned about this on Scooter LaForge's blog. I like it. I wish they played it on TV during the commercials for Denny's and Netflix. Wouldn't that be hot?

Issue No. 14: Vicissitudes of the Damned 2

I created an annex to this blog on tumblr.com called Vicissitudes of the Damned 2. The address is http://cissitude.tumblr.com. It's not quite as serious and more visual. Enjoy!

Issue No. 13: Harry Smith (Avant Garde American) Part 2

                          








HARRY SMITH (1923-1991)

Harry Smith was an artist whose activities and interests put him at the center of the mid twentieth-century American avant-garde. Although best known as a filmmaker and musicologist, he frequently described himself as a painter, and his varied projects called on his skills as an anthropologist, linguist, and translator. He had a lifelong interest in the occult and esoteric fields of knowledge, leading him to speak of his art in alchemical and cosmological terms.

Harry Smith was born May 29, 1923, in Portland, Oregon, and his early childhood was spent in the Pacific Northwest. Smith's father, Robert James Smith, was a watchman for the local salmon canning company. His mother, Mary Louise, taught school on the Lummi Indian reservation. Robert Smith's grandfather had been a prominent Freemason who was a Union General in the Civil War. Harry's parents were Theosophists, who exposed him to a variety of pantheistic ideas, which persisted in his fascination with unorthodox spirituality and comparative religion and philosophy. By the age of 15, Harry had spent time recording many songs and rituals of the Lummi and Samish peoples and was compiling a dictionary of several Puget Sound dialects. He later became proficient in Kiowa sign-language and Kwakiutl. In addition to developing complicated systems for transcription, he also amassed an important collection of sacred religious objects, one of a number of museological endeavors that occupied Smith throughout his life.

Smith studied anthropology at the University of Washington for five semesters between 1943 and 1944. After a weekend visit to Berkeley, during which he attended a Woody Guthrie concert, met members of San Francisco's bohemian community of artists and intellectuals, and experimented with marijuana for the first time, Smith decided that the type of intellectual stimulation he was seeking was unavailable in his student life.

It was in San Francisco that Smith began to build a reputation as one of the leading American experimental filmmakers. He showed frequently in the "Art in Cinema" screenings organized by Frank Stauffacher at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Smith not only became close with other avant-garde filmmakers in the Bay Area, such as Jordan Belson and Hy Hirsh, but traveled frequently to Los Angeles to see the films of Oskar Fischinger, Kenneth Anger, and other Southern Californians experimentalists. Smith developed his own methods of animation, using both stop motion collage techniques and, more uniquely, hand-painting directly on film. Often a single film required years of painstakingly precise labor. While a few other filmmakers had employed similar frame-by-frame processes, few matched the complexity of composition, movement, and integration in Smith's work. Smith's films have been interpreted as investigations of conscious and unconscious mental processes, while his fusion of color and sound are acknowledged as precursors of sixties psychedelia. At times, Smith spoke of his films in terms of synaethesia, the search for correspondences between color and sound and sound and movement.

Smith's films cannot be easily separated from his paintings, and in both he was influenced by the abstract work of Kandinsky, Marc, and others who formed the foundation of the collection of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later the Guggenheim Museum) in New York. Smith developed a relationship with Hilla Rebay, the museum's director, and she arranged for Smith to come to New York and to receive a Solomon Guggenheim grant in 1950. He moved to New York permanently in the early fifties. In need of money, he offered to sell his extraordinary record collection of American vernacular music to Folkways Records. Instead, Moses Asch, the label's president, challenged Smith to cull his collection into an anthology.

In 1952 Folkways issued Smith's multi-volume Anthology of American Folk Music. The Anthology was comprised entirely of recordings issued between 1927 (the year electronic recording made accurate reproduction possible) and 1932, the period between the realization by the major record companies of distinct regional markets and the Depression's stifling of folk music sales. Released in three volumes of two discs each, the 84 tracks of the anthology are recognized as having been a seminal inspiration for the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960 (the 1997 reissue by the Smithsonian was embraced with critical acclaim and two Grammy awards). Traditional American music was only one of Smith's musical interests. From the late 1940s, he was a passionate jazz enthusiast, going so far as to create paintings that are note-by-note transcriptions of particular tunes. He spent much of the fifties in the company of jazz pioneers like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk. Smith's involvement with recording continued into the sixties and seventies as he produced and recorded the first album by the Fugs in 1965. His long term friendships with many of the Beat writers led to the release of Allen Ginsberg's First Blues in 1976 as well as unreleased recordings of Gregory Corso's poetry and Peter Orlovsky's songs. Smith spent part of this era living with groups of Native Americans, and this resulted in his recording the peyote songs of the Kiowa Indians (Kiowa Peyote Meeting, Folkways, 1973).

Smith's broad range of interests resulted in a number of collections. He donated the largest known paper airplane collection in the world to the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum. He was a collector of Seminole textiles and Ukrainian Easter Eggs. He also considered himself the world's leading authority on string figures, having mastered hundreds of forms from around the world.

Smith spent his last years (1988-1991) as "shaman in residence" at Naropa Institute, where he offered a series of lectures, worked on sound projects, and continued collecting and researching. In 1991 he received a Chairman's Merit Award at the Grammy Awards ceremony for his contribution to American Folk Music. Upon receiving the award, he proclaimed, "I'm glad to say my dreams came true. I saw America changed by music."

Harry Everett Smith died at the Chelsea Hotel on November 27, 1991.

[From harrysmitharchives.com]

Issue No. 12: Cocks.

These are some of my favorite anonymous penis photos that I have collected on the internet.

Oprah?

God?

Alice?

Issue No. 11: Have You Been Tested?

Issue No. 10: Harry Smith (Avant Garde American) Part 1

Here are some stop edit collage animation shorts by Harry Smith. Please feel free to leave comments.

              

              

              

              

Issue No. 9: THE BAD BREAST by Bruce LaBruce with Vaginal Davis

Film courtesy of Dazed Digital.

Issue No. 8: ORLAN

   

...Nowadays, maybe out of despair, the only thing you can change is yourself or your body. The art that I am interested in is close to; belongs to resistance. Art must shake up prejudices. Shake our thoughts. Art must be outside of all norms. Art is not there to cradle us. To serve us with what we already know. Art must take risks at the risk of not being immediately accepted. Art is deviant and it is by itself a social project. And even if this stance is romantic or naive, I say that art can - art must - change the world. And that is it's only justification. Art is not meant to decorate people's houses or apartments. For that, we have all we need. We have fishbowls, house plants, doilies, curtains, furniture...

                                                                                                                             - Orlan, 2006

      
  


















                                                                                                                                                                    





            

Issue No. 7: FEVER RAY NEWS (Press Release)

First look at the new Fever Ray live costumes for 2010 dates!  Fever Ray have once again collaborated with Andreas Nilsson (director of the If I Had A Heart and Stranger Than Kindness videos and 2009's spectacular live show) for the forthcoming live dates in Paris, Glasgow and London. The first clues to emerge from this are below, more to follow soon... "Its been medieval times for a while now. Nasdaq have been suffering. The banks and the investors. Fever Ray have been suffering as well. Things have been shit. But Fever Ray rises on 9. Like Wall Street Zombies they are now back to juice out the last drips of humanity. Led by the taskmaster Karin, the warlords of monetary jungle are ready to give you a last piece of monotonic bourgeois joy before you and the world around you implode." Andreas Nilsson Fever Ray by Andreas Nilsson, click here for more. See the new-look live show at these dates: 6th Sep - O2 ABC, Glasgow, UK - Buy Tickets - W/ Zola Jesus 8th Sep - Brixton Academy, London, UK - Buy Tickets - W/ Zola Jesus 9th Sep - La Cigale, Paris, France - Buy Tickets - W/ Zola Jesus 10th Sep - Berlin Festival, Berlin, Germany - Buy Tickets 11-13th Sep – Bestival, Isle of Wight, UK - Buy Tickets New shirt and 'Mercy Street' 7" available to pre-order now!  A new, Andreas Nilsson designed, Fever Ray shirt is also available in both Fever Ray and Rabid stores and as a bundle with the Mercy Street 7" and download: *Mercy Street / Dry And Dusty 7" + Mp3: Fever Ray / Rabid *Mercy Street / Dry And Dusty 7" + Mp3 + Shirt: Fever Ray / Rabid *New Fever Ray 2010 Tour shirt by Andreas Nilsson: Fever Ray / Rabid Some more of Karin Dreijer-Andersson's looks (not in chronological order)... A favorite (above). Brilliant, huh?

Issue No. 6: Rejecting a Christian

Dear Jeannie,

I have been avoiding this, but I can go no longer without saying something. I am thrilled that your new found interest in God and religion seems to be helping you. In this, you have my support. However, I feel the same way I was raised. That faith is a highly personal thing which should not be randomly tossed around in the secular world as if it were an old shoe. I find evangelism of all sorts, narrow-minded, annoying and often very offensive. Not in the theosophical aspect,  but in the fact that you unwittingly flaunt an unsophisticated, way too fundamental view of Christianity which is deliberately too accepting, uncritical and lacks - if not completely ignores - historical context. A fifth grade understanding of the bible is fine as long as you are in fifth grade. Please don't think I am raining on your parade or that I am a stranger to religion. I have done copious amounts of reading over the course of my life about all faiths from Catholicism to Hinduism to being Baha'i and have concluded that in light of the information science and medicine offers, none of them have THE answers. Personally, I do not believe that Jesus Christ is the messiah. I have a strong belief in ancient paganologies, Darwinism, hard science and evolution. I believe in many of the Occultisms. I adore abortion and feel that women who have had them should wear a medal with pride. I'm not even going to get into how Christianity generally persecutes us queers. But, that is definitely another component to my contempt for most churches. I also feel that many non-denominational Christian institutions routinely engage in unconstitutional, if not illegal activities such as allowing themselves to be used as platforms for the dissemination of right wing political views as well as campaigning while continuing to have a tax-exempt status. This must be dealt with. I could go on and on, but I do not have all day. In short, I am asking you to refrain from sending me Christian propoganda of any sort. But, please do keep in touch. Feel free to write letters or notes about your personal walk with faith and how it changes your life. Just spare me the "inspirational" emails. 

Thank you for your time and understanding.

Love,

~Erik

Issue No. 5: Kinderwhore? Nein!

There are two versions of POP Magazine's September 2010 issue both featuring cover star Britney Spears. A collaboration of Todd Cole and Takashi Murakami, I saw the covers and read a review by Miss Tavi Gevinson from thestylerookie.com. Here is my reaction:   

The more I look at these pictures, the more complex I realize they are. Aside from making the ambience pure and virginal, the celestial lighting washes several years off of Britney's 28 year-old face. The odd aerial angle from which they're shot distort the proportions of the body making her head seem too large and her body too small and undeveloped. Her allegedly fake breasts are suddenly tiny and early adolescent looking. The curves of her body are subdued making her less shapely; less womanly. There are two cloud-shaped cut outs in one cover decorated with Murakami characters revealing Britney in more complex virgin-bride-fairy princess scenarios which only add to the peepshow aspect of this work with their promise of an even deeper tour of this plastic fantasy world.

As a gay adult man, I look at images like this differently. All the criteria that I have for identifying what is titillating for str8 men - and therefore the entire universe - is learned. Cerebral, analytical and even academic as opposed to instinctual and primal. (Unless were talking about the obvious which is pornography. I get the fact that if I see a close-up of vaginal penetration it's supposed to be sexy without any help of a decoder ring.) I will confess that I go through most of life, through my daily navigations of the world completely oblivious to the huge amount of potentially arousing material I am being taunted with simply because I walk the city streets and take public transportation. Even commercial expressions of sexuality that come from a homo-dominated industry like fashion cater almost exclusively to the tyrannical gaze of the breeder male. 

But, you know what the penultimate truth is? I look at Britney and think, "What is wrong with her? This is a nearly 30 year-old woman. Did she get dressed in the dark? She's wearing clothing that is made for a 12 year-old and some dime-store bride costume.I bet she is psycho-sexually arrested at the age when she was a shotgun bride. Fucking retard. How sad." Tavi sites Britney, "…as a prime example of the ways in which culture builds up celebrities only to tear them down."  Celebrity can also be built upon vice, controversy and the public's love to hate. Kind of like the way the media treated Courtney Love in the early days of her mainstream career. 

Courtney Love - the archetypal Kinderwhore - cannot be compared to Britney for a few reasons. The main one being authenticity. Compare these shots of Britney by Cole to any photo of Courtney when she rocked Mary Janes and babydoll dresses (circa: 1992). It's obvious that now and then - throughout "the Chronicles of Britney" - that Britney is always pretending. Even the shots David LaChappelle did in her childhood room when she was 17, lack realness and somehow still feel synthetic. Courtney (more comparable to Madonna in terms of background) was exposed to a quasi-Bohemian, music-oriented counterculture from the age of 2 (when she appeared on a Grateful Dead album cover). She was a runaway and a teen stripper by the age of 15 already having traveled to the UK, Europe and Asia on her own. Britney, on the other hand, had a role on the Mickey Mouse Club throughout her childhood and was always surrounded by staff and family. Handlers, managers, assistants, etc. She never lived on her own, never  had independence, never had any of the kind of character building experiences Courtney had. All Britney's hits are about love, sex and romance sung for years while supposedly holding onto her virginity for marriage. Even before Courtney's marriage, the media - or culture - seemed to have always assumed Courtney to be a sex positive/sexually active woman. Every aspect of Britney Spears life seemingly since birth has been some sort of fiction designed to prevent her from developing an intellect, an identity or an opinion. No wonder she went on a violent rampage that ended with her shaving her own head in a strange salon. Will Britney Spears ever be able to attain worldliness?

Courtney Love in her Los Angeles, CA. bedroom in 1992.

Please read Tavi's post at http://www.thestylerookie.com/

Issue No. 4: CREATING PERSONAL MYTHOLOGY: Phoebe Fisher at Book Club

Phoebe Fisher is a Chicago-based mixed-media artist, illustrator, teacher, and friend who will be sharing selected works from her portfolio on Thursday, September 2 at Book Club. A monthly event at Connect Retail Showroom (1330 N. Milwaukee Ave. 312.772.3057) from 6 - 9 pm. She will  be sharing her sources of inspiration and will be providing the evening's soundtrack. She is also going to give everyone free beer so please stop by if you are in town.

For more information about this event, go to:
http://www.simpletypestudio.com/bookclub/BOOK_CLUB.html

Below is a sampling of Phoebe's cute formalism.

One of my favorites.