Ars et Natura

(www.facebook.com/DomesticWorkerAbuse) Facebook post from a Filipina domestic worker in Saudi Arabia: GOD namiss kuna ung me mgsasabing.. Mama pakis ako Mama kumain kana Mama ang ganda mo Mama ang bango mo Mama haba ng buhok mo Mama tabi tayo Mama dito kana lng Mama sama ako At Higit sa lahat Mama umutang ako ng biskit bayaran mo ha.. — Langga Yenoh Plasus ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧ Translation: God, I miss being told… Mama, kiss me Mama, let’s eat Mama, you look lovely Mama, you smell good Mama, you have such long hair Mama, stay beside me Mama, don’t leave Mama, take me with you And Most of all: Mama, I got biscuits on store-credit Pay for it, yes? (Santa Barbara, CA, 2014) ☙❧ ☙❧ ☙❧ ☙❧ ☙❧ ☙❧ ☙❧ ☙❧                          Found this Facebook post from a Filipina domestic worker in Saudi Arabia. A video of hers circulated on the Internet: a desperate plea to be rescued from abusive employers. It is a supplication we have heard countless times. Her mistress would ill-treat her for

A slave with her child (Salvador de Bahia, 1884) (Marc Ferrez/Moreira Salles Institute) Lágrima de preta Encontrei uma preta que estava a chorar pedi-lhe uma lágrima para a analisar. Recolhi a lágrima com todo o cuidado num tubo de ensaio bem esterilizado. Olhai-a de um lado, do outro e de frente: tinha um ar de gota muito transparente. Mandei vir os ácidos, as bases e os sais, as drogas usadas em casos que tais. Ensaiei a frio, experimentei ao lume, de todas as vezes deu-me o que é costume: Nem sinais de negro, nem vestígios de ódio. Água (quase tudo) e cloreto de sódio. — António Gedeão Quitandeiras (Rio de Janeiro, 1875):  Women street sellers also known as “slaves who earn.” (Marc Ferrez/Moreira Salles Institute) Translation: I found a negro  woman weeping, and begged her for a tear to analyze. I collected the tear with utmost care in a test tube that was sterilized. I observed it from one side to the other, and in front: it seemed just a drop of crystal clear air. So I tested it w

Hand with Reflecting Sphere (M. C. Escher, 1935) I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth… ~ Jorge Luis Borges

New York, 1911 (speed-corrected) From Guy Jones’ YouTube channel:                          Old film of New York City in the year 1911. Print has survived in mint condition. Slowed down footage to a natural rate and added in sound for ambiance. This film was taken by the Swedish company Svenska Biographteatern on a trip to America.

Lysistrata defending the Acropolis (Aubrey Beardsley, 1896) On the excesses of feminism: These are people who are seeking a religion, because the sexual relations are basically a comedy, not a tragedy.            ~Camille Paglia (TVO Interview)

Jean Jacques Rousseau and benevolent Nature; Marquis de Sade and malevolent Nature On the Marquis de Sade and feminism:                          We are still in the age of Romanticism and that for every idealism you need the opposing voice to puncture the false hopes…                          Rousseau believes that we are born good. He is going against Christianity here, which believes we are born with a propensity toward evil. So anything bad in us, for Rousseau, is coming from corrupt society. We have to get back to Nature.                          Now, I’m saying that he was answered in France by Sade who showed, “yes let’s back to Nature, but Nature is filled with aggression and violence.”                          And so the same thing I think happened in English literature, that is Wordsworth followed Rousseau: “Nature is good. We are all born benevolent. We’re benevolent creatures.” And he’s answered by Coleridge in his vampire tales, or in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, where

Jacques Derrida, author of Of Grammatology , seminal text of Deconstructionism On where her ideas come from:                          At the same time that I seem to be a word fanatic—I’m highly verbal as you can see—still, I believe that all my deepest ideas, my most original thinking is coming from a level beneath the level of words. What I’m doing is simply translating into words my actual sensory impressions… This is your id talking...                          Oh, the id, yes—but the language of the body—it’s like Freud’s idea of polymorphous perversity. On French post-structuralists:                          Parasites! Parasites!                          They slap abstractions on top of experience. We do not need Paris to explain an American and North American phenomenon! Oh please! They’re all poseurs. I’m gonna drive them into the sea…                          I feel that my entire generation of the ’60s—the generation most influenced by pop culture—did not go on in the graduate

The Beast Within : Madonna as Whore of Babylon, reading passages from the Book of Revelation On being a fan of Madonna:                          I’ve been a great Madonna fan since the start, back in 1983 and ’84, and I’ve been defending her from the very beginning. She’s kind of like my double: we’re both these Italian-American dominatrixes, we both identify strongly with gay men and drag queens, and I think we both had discovered the latent paganism in pornography and Italian Catholicism. On speaking for Madonna: Madonna is at her weakest when she tries to explain herself in words… She does her deepest thinking in music and dance. And I think music and dance are the oldest kind of thinking—thinking through the body, through the sensory language of the body… The word obsession of current feminism or of current academe is part of the problem we’re in now. On Madonna as the Whore of Babylon: Oh, she is and I love it! [The Whore of Babylon] is really the great goddess of antiquity that S

Is this how you go to a business meeting, Lux? Yeah, it cuts through a lot of red tape. On the New York scene:                          The Dead Boys, The Ramones, Television, Talking Heads were starting out, Blondie. They were all in the audience when we were playing, and when they were playing we were in the audience. It was great… [Then] it went down the tubes. Good rock-and-roll only seems to last a couple of years and then it fades away. And a few years later it rears its ugly head again. Everybody gets concerned and worried. For good reason… There’s no phony trends like the Manchester scene, which is no scene. You got your big business types trying to make this happen all over the place, but that’s not the way it ever happens. You get some nasty little 15-year-old kids who make music in their garage, and that’s the way it happens. They get tired of waiting for somebody else to do something for them, they do it themselves. On European vs. American audiences:                       

What are your musical influences, ’cause it’s a real interesting mix of kind of a punk attitude with the early rockabilly styles?                          We have a lot of musical influences. Everything from The Sex Pistols to Charlie Feathers. Mainly rockabilly though—a lot of early instrumentals from the early ’60s. Stuff like that. But we have all kinds of influences. Hot rods. Non-musical influences. And the really good rockabilly from the ’50s, the lesser known, obscure rockabilly was very psychotic in its day, or even stands up to being psychotic by today’s standards. That’s why all good rockabilly was psychobilly originally. The Cramps MTV 120 Minutes (circa 1990s)

Paglia in a Warhol-style silkscreen portrait There is nothing more important to me than the power of words to describe, re-create, entrance, and provoke. ~ Camille Paglia

The leading artist of Instagram eroticism remains Rihanna, who for several years uploaded one brilliant image after another, often via the intuitive camera of her best friend, Melissa Forde. Rihanna understands magic, mood and mystique—sex as a shimmering state of mind.           ~Camille Paglia           The Hollywood Reporter

                         Taylor enthroned with her Butterfield 8 trophy is probably the greatest post-Oscars photo ever taken. Next would be Terry O’Neill’s picture of Faye Dunaway breakfasting at The Beverly Hills Hotel the morning after she won the best actress for Network (1976). Lounging at poolside in her creamy silk dressing gown, newspapers scattered at her feet, Dunaway contemplates her Oscar with a tinge of ironic detachment and fatigue.                          This bleak, brilliant photo marks the arrival of a new generation in Hollywood, hip, smart, and cynical. The mythic grandeur of old Hollywood and its pantheon of celestial stars is already gone. Camille Paglia Provocations (2018)  

The Writing's On the Wall (Ok Go) Term used as an abbreviation of ‘optical art’ to refer to painting and sculpture that exploits the illusions or optical effects of perceptual processes… Op artists thus managed to exploit various phenomena: the after-image and consecutive movement; line interference; the effect of dazzle; ambiguous figures and reversible perspective; successive colour contrasts and chromatic vibration; and in three-dimensional works different viewpoints and the superimposition of elements in space. Frank Popper Grove Art Online MoMA website                            Ok Go has created a genre of music videos that reflects the DIY aesthetic of Silicon Valley geek culture. Their videos are clever Pop Art creations, fully embracing its commercial and industrial ethos. In contrast to the tortured, agonistic style of Romantic rock heroes, they leverage their ability to create viral hype to get corporate sponsorship.                          Their videos are cha

                         There’s a difference between what punk was and what it appeared to be. For me, it wasn’t the physical appearance that was the important thing. It wasn’t how the Sex Pistols dressed or the actual records themselves. It was the actual doing of them—and the humor that was involved… Viewed as an artistic thing… it was performance art. It was avant-garde. It was an adventure, something you launched yourself into. It was an alternative lifestyle. ~ Pete Shelley (The Buzzcocks) Ever Fallen In Love? (The Buzzcocks)

Eighties (Killing Joke) Eighties, I’m living in the eighties Eighties, I have to push, I have to struggle Eighties, get out of my way, I’m not for sale no more Eighties, let’s kamikaze ’til we get there                          Cold War-era punk rock.                           Nirvana stole the riff in the 90s.

Like a Bad Girl Should (The Cramps) Oh you look good, oh, you smell good Oh you taste good, like a bad girl should                          High camp: Lux Interior in vinyl tights and heeled pumps; Poison Ivy in a bodice, garter belts, lace hosiery, and Barbarella bouffant.

From the documentary Joan Rivers, A Piece of Work (IFC Films): Oh, you stupid ass, let me tell you what comedy is about… Comedy is to make everybody laugh at everything, and deal with things, you idiot!           ~ Joan Rivers                          Joan demonstrates her scathing rejection of humanitarian pieties and political platitudes. Unlike virtually all American comedians these days, she never preaches to the liberal choir for easy laughs. On the contrary, she goes against the grain and overtly offends and repels… She cracks jokes about Nazis, mass murderers, the handicapped, the homeless, the elderly, starving children, racial minorities, stroke victims and even suicides…                          What Joan represents is power of voice… Jewish-American women already had a startling candor and audacity, producing the shrill ethnic stereotype of the “Jewish seagull.” Joan turned the seagull into a lioness. Although her self-deprecating acceptance of the iron law of female beauty

Joan Rivers on the red carpet for Fashion Police                          Joan Rivers has a keen eye for great popular culture. Not only did she re-invent herself on the red carpet, she also invented the red carpet as a pop culture moment. But when it became stale—the fiefdom of stylists, she complained, who carefully choreographed their stars—she left it to hacks and moved on to other more interesting things.                          At 81, she started an Internet show called In Bed with Joan  consisting of intimate interviews, literally in her bedroom. (Well, a mock bedroom.) Here, she and Bob Saget discuss the comics they liked: Lenny Bruce, Louis CK, Sam Kinison. Then Saget suggested George Carlin, and here’s what Rivers had to say: Saget: I love Carlin a lot. Did you like Carlin? Rivers: Up to a point. Because he’s so studied. Every word was thought out. And if you tell me one more time how many HBO specials he had, and how smart he was, and how he was a man of the people–

Caesar’s Palace Hotel and Casino (Las Vegas, 2017)                          Renditions of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in the style of (clockwise) Picasso, de Lempicka, Lichtenstein, and Magritte decorate the walls of Caesar’s Palace.                          Renaissance classicism meets High Modernism meets Pop Art. The history of Western painting absorbed by the high-kitsch of Las Vegas—the most vibrant art scene anywhere.

The Flamingo Hotel (Las Vegas, circa 1953) Joan Rivers on the lost mobster glamour of Las Vegas:                          Her eye was original. Twenty years ago, when everyone was talking about how wonderful it was that Vegas had been cleaned up and the mob had been thrown out, Joan said no, no, no, they are ruining the mystique. First of all, she said, those mobsters knew how to care for a lady, those guys with bent noses were respectful and gentlemen, except when they were killing you. Second, she said, organized crime is better than disorganized crime, which will replace it. Third, the mobsters had a patina of class, they dressed well and saw that everyone else did, so Vegas wasn’t a slobocracy, which is what it is becoming with men in shorts playing the slots in the lobby of the hotel. The old Vegas had dignity. She hated the bluenoses who’d clean up what wasn’t mean to be clean. No one wanted Sin City cleaned up, she said, they wanted to go there and visit sin and then go home. Pe

We’ve been written off as kitsch, camp, cartoony. But we’re dead serious. ~ Poison Ivy (The Cramps)

Teddy Boys in London circa 1970s (Source: www.huckmag.com ) Do you consider your music as teenage music?                          Yes. It should be teenage music. It’s music that should horrify adults and please teenagers. That’s how it started out anyway. I think that’s what’s wrong with rock music today. It’s music for adults. It’s respectable, it’s good, and it’s art. And it’s all these kind of things. That’s fine for music, but people kind of don’t understand the difference between rock-and-roll which is a lifestyle, a fashion, a music. It’s sexual intercourse. It’s a lot of things–and rock music is just merely music. Rock-and-roll is much bigger than that. Some people confuse rock music with rock-and-roll. Rock-and-roll is much better. But the times have changed since the ’50s…                          Yes, but good rock-and-roll is always good. We’re not interested in playing ’50s songs. That’s why we write our own lyrics. But the thing that made rock-and-roll great in the 50’s m

Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood Malcolm and I were probably the straightest people on that scene ~ Vivienne Westwood

I was punk before it got its name. I had that hairstyle and purple lipstick. ~ Vivienne Westwood

SEX boutique at 430 King's Road, London

Vivienne Westwood and Johnny Rotten How the Stewart tartan became punk Uniform for the punk militant: ready to take on the establishment

Woman Into Man (Helmut Newton, Paris, 1979)

The Bible as the first hyperlinked text:                          The bar graph that runs along the bottom represents all of the chapters in the Bible. Books alternate in color between white and light gray. The length of each bar denotes the number of verses in the chapter. Each of the 63,779 cross references found in the Bible is depicted by a single arc—the color corresponds to the distance between the two chapters, creating a rainbow-like effect. Source: www.chrisharrison.net

Saddle I, Paris (1976, Helmut Newton) Fifty Shades of Gray?  Sadomasochism as a marker for cultures in decline:                          Sadomasochism is an archaic ritual form that descends from prehistoric nature cults and that erupts in sophisticated “late” phases of culture, when a civilization has become too large and diffuse and is starting to weaken or decline. I state in Sexual Personae that “sex is a far darker power than feminism has admitted,” and that its “primitive urges” have never been fully tamed: “My theory is that whenever sexual freedom is sought or achieved, sadomasochism will not be far behind.”                          Sadomasochism’s punitive hierarchical structure is ultimately a religious longing for order, marked by ceremonies of penance and absolution. Its rhythmic abuse of the body, which can indeed become pathological if pushed to excess, is paradoxically a reinvigoration, a trancelike magical realignment with natural energies. Hence the symbolic use of l

The Cramps’ style has that ground of rockabilly, and I wondered why over the years you’ve kept that as sort of the staple to start from?                          ‘Cause it’s the coolest. It’s just the best thing there is. It’s the center of the universe—the heart of rock-and-roll. You mentioned that it was like the dangerous music of the ’50s. When people think of the ’50s, they don’t think of danger in the music…                          It was really dangerous. I talked to people who remember the first time they heard Little Richard, and they said it just scared them. When they heard it. Older people that were young at the time, they said that it was just terrifying to them, the sound of that… And these people had tough lives, the better entertainers of that era. They also mix a lot of sexual innuendos in the songs… the same as you do today…                          They sure did. Well, yeah, Tutti Frutti, you know… Little Richard was also known as Miss Laverne, you know, and did dra

On rock-and-roll and ‘good causes’:                          It’s become respectable, and that’s where the death of rock-and-roll is, in respectability. It should be music for misfits. It should be dangerous. I mean, I’m sure those causes are all good causes, but that’s not the place of rock-and-roll. The purpose of rock-and-roll is instant gratification… Rock-and-roll is juvenile delinquent music, or else it’s not rock-and-roll–it’s just pop music.                          The ’80s were really depressing. There was no rock-and-roll and maybe people are desperate… In America, it’s sort of the ultimate, ultimate hysteria peak for, you know, anti-drug, anti-sex, anti-everything. And I think there’s gonna be a big backlash that’s just gonna cause an explosion, and (smiling), we’ll be there. The Cramps TV Spotlight Interviews (Toronto, 1990s)

Ziggy Stardust Thin White Duke                          Ziggy Stardust was not a drag act—he was a shamanistic daydream, half kabuki, half Weimar cabaret. With the Thin White Duke, Bowie did a rigorous, self-purging exercise in minimalism… As the Thin White Duke, Bowie shifted into Byron-in-exile mode; he was now a haughty, self-shielding arbiter of elegance in the Baudelaire manner… Ziggy Stardust had become too vampiric and had to be assassinated for Bowie to live. Camille Paglia Salon (12 Jan 2016) Note: Paglia's Sexual Personae is in Bowie's top 100 reads list.

                         The music you make is about human soul. That comes from the very soul of you. And what happens to you when you go out on stage, and you feel as if your self leaves you, and you are danced like a puppet on a string, like a marionette on stage, the force that moves you, that’s one of the gods inside of you, that is your soul. And what you are experiencing with that audience is a soul-exchange.           ~ Howard Bloom

On advising Alice Cooper on how to be an icon:                          If you’re gonna be my client, you just don’t owe your audience your songs. You owe your audience your life If you deserve to be a superstar, then you will become an iconic figure, and twelve-year-old kids will paste posters of you up on their bedroom walls, and you will be—you know the concept of the trellis, you grow a tomato plant on a trellis—well you will be the trellis on which people grow. You will be the role model. So your life is one of the most important things that you have to offer.                          But I was not just after their superficial life. I was after this: When you sit down off an afternoon, let say two o’clock in the afternoon, with a blank computer screen or a blank piece of paper, and you need to write a lyric, you feel as if you could… You don’t know how you’ve ever written a lyric in your life. You certainly know you can’t write another one again. And by four o’clock in the afterno

When I die I don’t want to leave any leftovers. I’d like to disappear. People wouldn’t say he died today, they’d say he disappeared. But I do like the idea of people turning into dust or sand, and it would be very glamorous to be reincarnated as a big ring on Elizabeth Taylor’s finger.           ~ Andy Wharhol

                         The 1961 Oscars were still being broadcast in black and white. A week later, a gorgeous full-color photo of Taylor regally seated at the Oscars party appeared on the cover of Life magazine. Her white cigarette holder was elegantly raised above a full champagne glass near a bottle of Dom Perignon resting on ice. The billowing white skirt of her floral-embellished Christian Dior dress was barely glimpsed. We saw only her starkly simple, pale yellow bodice that seemed to be channeling the golden glow of the Oscar statuette, which was offering her its adoration from amid a burst of red tulips, matching her full, crimson lips…                          The Life cover also revealed a strange perversity: austerely presenting herself without necklace or brooch, Taylor seemed to be wearing the vertical, white tracheotomy scar on her throat as a fashion accessory. It was a tour de force of ambiguous eroticism, like a Catholic saint’s statue of a martyr flaunting her wound

Not papers, not final philosophical declarations, but love… not intellectual survival, but the survival of love. ~ Paul Feyerabend

I long for the raised voice, the howl of rage or love. ~ Leslie Fiedler  

2001 Space Odyssey                          There is built in into the whole critical project as it existed from the middle of the 18th century on, certain notions of what literature is and does, which seems to me must be qualified if not abandoned at the present time.                          As long as one thinks of literature as instructing and delighting —instructing delightfully, delighting instructively—then one tends to judge literature in two ways: for the quality of its ideas… or else, or together,… upon elegance of architectonics—form, structure, and texture, and so forth.                          But there’s something else that books do that get’s through that sieve of instruct and/or delight. And I think when we begin to talk about popular literature, we’re driven to talk about the kind of books—there’s no name for this too—which produce ecstasis. This goes back to Longinus, that is to say, books which temporarily release you from the ordinary limits of consciousness. There

The inner trip is not the sole prerogative of the LSD traveler; it’s the universal experience of TV watchers. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Oscar Wilde, Dandy and Decadent Aesthete                          The end of the 19th century saw an apogee of Western civilization: most of the world had been explored and colonized; science reached a universal synthesis of Nature in Newtonian physics and Darwinian evolutionary biology; British Industrial Revolution and the American Gilded Age created tremendous wealth and the new bourgeois class that upended the feudal ancien régime . But there was also a sense of dissipation, a loss of civilization’s former vigor. Culturally, it is also known as the fin de siècle —a period that saw the rise of the Decadent Movement (Charles Baudelaire and the Symbolists, Oscar Wilde and the Pre-Raphaelites) in defiance of progressivist critics who denounced the aesthetic ideology of artifice and extravagance current then in art and literature.                          Decadence follows Romanticism’s passionate reaction to Enlightenment’s enthronement of Reason, but Romantic emotionalism that turned