k-punk

Ladies and gentlemen, the Divine Grace Jones... who (so we're told) has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with cold rationalism or Spinozism.

Maybe the animal machine Grace is not sufficiently homely ? Machinic talk is not enough

And of course, she was only a black woman, a model and a pop star, so she can't be taken seriously as a visual artist or conceptechnician. Not like privileged white drunkards and _indulged_ whingers and Saatchi (=leisure Kapital) poodles such as Whiteread, Emin and Lucas whose fifteenth hand cult studs 'feminist' 'work' (whenever you hear art referred to as 'work' you know you're deep into the heart of the bourgeois indulgence; anyone who can refer to that tat as work clearly does not know what work is) must be revered and respected, otherwise - horror of horrors - you might be a 'philistine'...

Why do you say 'indulgence' Mark? Well, Mark, don't you think - I mean really - that there is more indulgence, far far more indulgence, in people being required to take seriously something that clearly took two minutes' thought to come up with and about ten to 'make'; don't you think that is way more indulgent than a shoe advert or some item of Prada clothing? At least they have a sensual dimension.

Sensuality? (Morphs into Miriam Margolyes puritan character from Black Adder). Sensuality? We'll have not of that in this house....

Yes, what would Spinoza say?

I'll happily trade my copy of Deleuze's 'Coldness & Cruelty' for, you know, THAT.

Well, what would he say? Surely ILG involves deriving sensual enjoyment from the world.

Carter, Coldness and Cruelty? Ooo I wouldn't mention that.. Masoch, isn't that just 'teenage fantasy' and indulgence? Doesn't it involve a terrifying beautiful woman? Isn't that disempowering for women, man? Because it's sooooooo degrading for a woman to be found attractive by a man, and basically any man who expresses attraction for a woman should be sent to the Department of Cultural Studies at Birmingham University for retraining into right thinking. There's simply nothing worse a man could do than swoon over a woman. It's so laddish!!!!

Update: even the Department of Cultural Studies at Birmingham has closed now.

But it takes time for the news of the death of middle class subjectivist moralizing to reach some parts I suppose.

Posted before the other posts appeared. But, yeah, if he's anything like me, that's what Spinoza would say too. LOL.

Yeh, lol....

Coldness & Cruelty, yes. Gives a new meaning to C'n'C-s Mithering.

Besides, where there's beauty, there's terror. Cf. Grace Jones. (Let the middle classes fret over that one and bemoan the loss of the "sensual". Well, there's always old prog art album sleeves for them to seek solace in.)

Ask yrself this:

Which notion of the sensual do YOU prefer? Ms. Jones or these prog-ified Victorian kitsch-fests? (Click on the individual titles for laughs) -

http://home.online.no/~schoenen/covers.htm

As I said — way back in 1994 — you really do have to keep from making friends with people.

Excellent. I'd have no problem being in that cage.

On this whole objectification of women issue I'd like to say that I have absolutely no problem with it. I objectify women and enjoy it (perhaps see the fabled glueboot strip club romp post if it ever appears), I also have no problem being objectified and even subjected myself to it (subject/ object, I hate those words... so many problems). I'm sure if those 'sad-eyed beautiful girls' saw Oliver's post they would be quite pleased by it. Who wouldn't like to be called beautiful? And 'sad-eyed- gives them a certain depth that I probably wouldn't afford them.

To say that men are not allowed to speak of women as beautiful or erotic or as object is ridiculous because it tends to be that that is how people look at other people. It is exactly what I hate about this so-called feminism which deprives women of their right to be beautiful and to be adored. I have close friends who work in the sex industry and the modelling industry and they don't feel objectified but love every moment of it. Men look at them as objects and they don't care, nor should they. And while I (in my folly) engross myself in books and attempt to compete on a male dominated platform they are out affirming their feminine difference.

So, there you go Mark... at least one female who reads k-punk is happy, more than happy, for you to post pictures of naked women. And Oliver writes beautifully, about women and all the other things he writes about; to have problems with it because of a few lines is a perfect example of the scourge of political correctness (blergh).

Note: far worse than becoming an object is becoming an acronym!!! Glueboot - gb.... dear me.

LOL --- sorry I won't do that again glueboot.

But this means everything to me. I was so upset by the DCS cops that I really felt like doing a woebot and jacking it in. I mean what's the point if you get vilified by people who you thought had intellectual integrity? It's just so tiring......

Basically, Carter and you have convinced me of my continuing sanity. Because if what PCs R and R said had any merit whatsoever, then I'm afraid I am completely delusional.

But good, steamprog soon.

Thanks Siobhan.

blimey...away for a few days and so much to catch up on. Enjoying trying to work out who said what vis-a-vis the 'objectifying wimmin' debate. Agree with Gluey for the main, tho perhaps not quite so eager to big up the sex thing ('sex is boring' - Foucault said that, he did, he did!). But would die for the right of anyone to seek sadness in the eyes of beautiful girls. I adore that kind of thing: I love beauty in men and women, or when flashes of beauty cross the bodies and faces of 'average-looking' people....s'great, all that stuff...what else is there?!

Yeh, agreed Nina ; sex is boring.... I've never really understood the appeal of it _as a set of physical sensations_ ; its appeal seems to me entirely bound up with emotional exchanges, surely that's the point of Lacan, and why it's so stupid when students say, 'Freud, he says everything's about sex doesn't he?' --- as if they know what sex is, as if sex is just this brute biological datum ----

But glam is/ was much more about courtly love or masochistic type diffusion of libido across the whole scene (literal ob-scenity in Baudrillard's sense) ---that's why I like Helmut Newton --- it's almost Marxist --- in that you never know what is the agent of libidinization, what is figure and what is ground... i.e. does the woman make the chair erotic or vice versa?

Ferry's whole melacholy schtick was about the inevitable vacuity and ephemerality of beauty, about knowing that, but being unable to resist it; 'I've been looking for something that I've always wanted/ but could never find/ now I see that thing/ just out of reach glowing/ very holy grail.' 'Mother of Pearl' is the best song for this, but the first two albums are full of that bliss-in-sadness uncanny nostalgic ache, that tremulous reaching for that which, he fears, is to beautiful too touch. 'Your swimming pool eyes/ in sea breezes they flutter...' ('Beauty Queen')

But glam disdains consummation. 'Dim the lights/ you can guess the rest...' ('Love is the Drug')

And actually 'Love is the Drug' is the song that Grace Jones covered on the incredible Compass Point sessions, in which she out Duchamped Ferry in her re-staging of songs as found objects.

Glad you're back Nina btw... with you and mark s returned, we're getting back to full power here....

Am I the only person who caught Dido on the cover of Time Out (or was it ES magazine?) with a pull out quote that read, "everybody thought I was boring until I started talking about sex."

I thought that was an amazingly depressing thing for a 30-something starlet (well, a 30-something anything) to say. I assume she wasn't coaxed into saying it by her communications officer; or, if she was, would that be worse or better?

I even remember reading the interview in which she DID talk about sex, and all she had to say about it was, "I want some."

That's not interesting at all! Almost everybody wants sex! (It would have less boring, maybe, if she'd said, "I don't want any. I abhor sex. I hate bodies. I can't stand physical contact. It disgusts me."

The fact is, is that, ahh, gah!

I can't talk about this anymore.

heh heh! Dido as ascetic eunuch pin-up girl for the 21st century...I think what Monsieur F. meant was that the discourse on sex is inherently boring - 'repression', expression, etc. (though not the systematic unpicking of the machinations of said discourse...no siree!). But, erm, obviously the non-spoken about bits are ....

mark k-p in a robot suit wrestling with Grace Jones in a cage filled with rotting meat and demands to pay overdue broadband bills...!

Conversation fragment.

"It's like the orgy at the end of 'Sexus'."

"What is?"

Read this (cut/paste):

http://cittaviolenta.blogspot.com/2003/11/body-war-gucci-end-louis-vuitton-venom.html

I can't better that.

dido is interesting though.. 'Life for rent' is one of the most amazing songs of recent years... the aching heart of consumer feminism... Carrie Bradshaw if she'd read Sartre...

oliver is a gay man who fancies women instead of blokes.
(sorry oliver, your secrets out now!)