5/24/2011


We went to see the Alexander McQueen thing at the Met on Sunday.  All those faceless women in feathers and bones, leather and silk, borne on the backs of working class satyrs. Women addicted to saying yes, yes, maybe—McQueen's conceit is to buck them up. This show is truly a sunrise for a setting brain. It's like watching a man being devoured by lions. The first thing I thought was how many extraordinary people there are in the world and thanks to my impenetrable ego-dome I miss them all. When I get depressed and rained out like a Friday night Yankee game I head for the TV or the bottle, or pursue some bleak Bill Styron scenario. Take out my aggression on the scrambled eggs. But this suddenly dead McQueen is a bolt of brown meth, a textile tornado. A David Wallace for the glitter set: so far into performance truth that he makes Gaga look like a poseur, although she has honestly copped his knob (I’m not saying she’s lying because I do like her; oui, I sup de vez en cuando on her indelicate broth). For she has successfully digested his seed to sprout leaves of her own; as will we all once the Republicans stop trying to staunch the juices we’d happily started oozing till the business class got a lucky break and made religion out of commerce and forced us to eat data bases for breakfast. Don’t worry; those assholes will get theirs. Which is really what McQueen's "art" is about: giving them theirs, hoods and dark music, blood-drenched tartans and rain on the runway notwithstanding. Ultimately he stands up for liberation of body, mind and soul. Of course what Wallace proved, McQueen seconds: there is danger in total freedom because depression, denial and fear of extreme unction always exact a price. You see, in spite of all his outbox and bravado, this pobre moke went down at the age of 39, hung himself with his favorite belt in his clothes closet. IronĂ­a? Asi es la vida? Of course, but with his talent and vision we hoped (like we hoped for Wallace) that he’d go on forever, producing endless inimitable out-of-this-world shit. But we know that’s absurd. Like so many of the best of us he was an imploding star, a black hole sucking the universe along behind him. A one-way ticket to oblivion, which is where he no doubt resides today—laughing and happy on the other side of paradise. RIP McQueen. I for one will keep you in my heart.

5/17/2011

Bored

I am so bored with everything that is. So bored that a bridge collapse in East Squeedunk, RI, covered exclusively by CBS, where the few survivors are swimming around in the the flood like lost water bugs, and the soon-or-later-to-be raped reporters with novels on there minds are pleading for their lives at the hands of a sexually deprived mob of Arab construction workers makes me scream for a commercial.

I wait...and the wait is worth it. The cast of Glee, dressed entirely in white, is selling an American automobile forgotten by most of us for the last fifty years...selling it with their fake high school innocence, their patented smiles and wrinkle-free bell bottoms, singing, singling: "Drive your Chevrolet through the USA. America's the greatest land of all..." Ah, somewhere, way back then, I heard that refrain--over and over again until it became part of my Yankee blood, and then it died and I was overjoyed to hear it die, for its death meant the end of an era which, as does this one, bored me to death. And now, after all these years, here we go again, come full circle, driving our Chevrolets across the USA, happy together...