One year ago on February 16, 2011, as Odd Future made their television debut on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, maniacally performing “Sandwiches” in their nerd/hipster-thug stage presence, a girl dressed as Sadako from Ring (1998) and/or its remake The Ring (2002) listlessly stood around in clear view on stage with them, as if recently excised from hikikomori, a “midbrow” pop-conscious nod which I’ve always found interesting, if not brilliant. Where Warhol and Koons seem to didactically curate their references, attached to their affected semiotic detachedness, it is rap’s erratic and somewhat manic collision/collation of culture which is our “true,” or at least more effective commentary. At one point, near the loud climax of the song, cymbals crashing, bros screaming, Sadako cowers with hands over her ears — as if suddenly transported into the NBC studio on 49th street. Though it may be her fault, one imagines, her voluntary entry into our real world as she climbs out of the television, scaring the shit out of everyone in front of their own televisions at home. The artifice’s protective medium of the screen was now broken, its very transgression part of the narrative. And when Tyler the Creator jumped on Fallon’s back as the latter bid his audience adieu, the former made odd (somewhat unfortunate, immune to irony) Blackface expressions with almost apelike movements. It’s hard to know how subtle, if any, his sarcasm was. Was it the self-critique of concession to corporate complicity (a la Cobain’s “Corporate Magazines Still Suck” t-shirt for their Rolling Stone cover), or Tyler simply now had a friend in Fallon, a fellow conspirator in the conspiracy of success. One year later, they are not news anymore, the future turns old; another group of young highly intelligent men in an alt-rock or rap band will be heralded as the real deal. Every generation wants to believe what they see before them on a screen somehow transcends the shallow vapidity from which it cometh, even a cute girl on your floor, actually smiling behind all that hair.

In Manhattan (1979), for about one minute, the characters played by Woody Allen and Diane Keaton sit in front of the Queensboro bridge at dawn after an all night date — both strenuous and romantic it seems, as I’ve never been, though I can imagine the slow light creeping onto someone’s lovely face as bakers and newspaper boys wake up, and cats return to porches with heads. Keaton concludes the scene by saying she has lunch with a friend. In a lesser first attempt, in front of the Brooklyn bridge in Annie Hall (1977), Woody tells Diane in response to if he loves her, “Love is too weak a word. I lurv you, I loave you, I luff you,” the middle sentiment which I always hear as “loathe” because I’m a Nietzsche kind of bro; I appreciate more “The most beautiful words in the English language are not I love you, but It’s benign,” which he says in Deconstructing Harry regarding a tumor. Much of Manhattan is drawn in silhouette, black shapes eclipsing grey backdrops as moons before a muted sun. Artists are always going to a city for the low and high rent and culture, respectively, until that get’s flipped, and they move. Never say “gentrification” at a dinner party, it’s dumb. Paris may in the past, but their bakers’ butter still wafts in the air. In Les Misérables (1862), Jean once passes an “l’invalide du pont” (the invalid of the bridge, here Pont d’Austerlitz), a disabled war veteran given a job collecting toll. Georges Seurat’s, L’invalide (Conté crayon on paper, c. 1881) does not have such a task, but merely gazes across the waters. Most known for his laborious pointillist paintings, I’ve always preferred his studies for them, the brief encounter with form from a meandering hand, as if only loosely attached to the eye. It’s so sad how both the artist and his subject’s aloneless are contingencies for their very collision. I will take anyone who jumps off a bridge seriously. I bet Diane has a salad with a French word in it. I bet Woody had some pills, imagining them as almonds for her salad. If only time could yellow a .jpeg the way it does a drawing. This post should be $2.50, but I’ll let you pass.

38-year-old “ironically”/”prophetically” morbidly obese and visibly jaundiced Tao Lin, author of 9 novels and 2 illegitimate “hapa” children, at Columbia University’s Creative Writing 2021 annual symposium “The Otherness of The Other: Other Ways to View Oneself Besides Boring” panel discussion (seated far left, visibly deflated after answering “seems like…I don’t know” to the three questions he was asked) vaguely “squinting” with left (and only operational) eye at group of semi-anorexic ~22-to-23 year-old recent graduates from Sarah Lawrence now fashion bloggers, all of whom he envisions having non-detached relations with, simultaneously, “on” 2x slow-release 20 mg Ritalin tablets, 3-month-expired NyQuil gel-caps, and a “sex swing” adorned with dried eucalyptus leaves imported from Australia affixed in PPOW gallery installation w/ speakers playing koala bear mating sounds. Lin is heard mumbling something about defunct literary enterprise Muumuu house, “needing only 217 twitter followers until [he] reach[es], like, one million maybe” and something about a pâté smootie moments before MDMA-induced seizure, by which gasps of Diane Williams-esque “odd” and vaguely passive-aggressive NOON worthy dialog followed.

Approximately 0:34:51 into American Pie Presents: Beta House (2007), Erik Stifler, sexually inexperienced and effeminized cousin of the notorious Steve Stifler, “prematurely” ejaculates on love interest Ashley’s childhood teddybear Mr. Biggles, whose odd spectacles vaguely  nod to “Cum on My Glasses,” a porn site in which glasses are fetishized as worn by nerds, students, and secretaries. Before it hits Biggles (along with a framed graduation photo, from peripheral splatter), it passes slow motion (~35-40% speed) through the air in front of Ashley, who looks both shocked and fairly irritated. Shooting across where a mustache could be drawn, one is reminded of Duchamp’s treatment of Mona Lisa. Ashley (no last name given) had inadvertently induced this scene by applying ointment to Erik’s inner thigh, which had been scalded with a prophetic-y clam chowder a waitress had spilt on him two scenes prior. The reason this post is not tagged NSFW, arguably at least, is because (a) semen “alone,” even in this eroticized context, is not pornography without a clear view of its target or emitter; and (b) the semen in mention is not actually semen, but a mixture of cream, cornstarch, corn syrup, and gelatin, a well known culinary recipe for cum. Mere representation is not liable to having meaning. We imagine a special effects assistant with a turkey baster, or perhaps more elaborate contraption designed for expelling said fluid. Both men and women will agree this “load” is on the profuse side, which may point to either the overall excessive nature of the American Pie series, or to imply that Erik did not “clean his pipes” the way Ted (Ben Stiller) was instructed to in There’s Something About Mary, leading to their more pop-historical cum scene involving Ted’s earlobe and then Mary’s hair. In horror film, and even action movies, blood is splattered and sprayed everywhere. We almost relish in it; and while we are more subdued and embarrassed by cum, it is piss and shit which remain truly subversive, never film friendly, as if we were ashamed of our waste the most. To induce blood or cum takes so much more conviction and indiscretion, yet it is the prosaic biologically inevitable urine and feces upon which we bestow our deepest morals and fears. It is not we who are not safe for work, but work which is not safe for life. To your boss or co-worker looking over your shoulder at this flying jizz, tell them simply to come on as in get over it not my face.

That The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (1922) was posthumously made into a film (2008) may be ironic — to brave a word perhaps deplete of any meaning by now — given the author’s self-perceived degradation of writing for Hollywood as he grew older and financially more dependent in his maintenance of a vapid lifestyle. His last lover was a gossip columnist, proof that blogging has always existed. They say a writer’s best work is in his late twenties, before the soft middle-age limpy interval, but that only a great writer will make his best work near his death, alluding so some moral component and/or mortal imperative of great writing. It is sad to think of a drunk Fitzgerald, a loopy sentimental Hemingway, or a blind ass jibbering Joyce; we look towards Tolstoy, Shakespeare, as examples of work whose maturity lies in correlation with their age. We may see Benjamin Button as an inadvertent commentary on the mediocre artist, the fated infant. In 1935, at the age of 68, Pierre Bonnard painted “Self Portrait in a Shaving Mirror,” two eye socket holes hidden in the shadow of his own face, perhaps seared by the southern France sun of younger days before locking himself in the bathroom — something he may have learned from his wife Marthe, an obsessive compulsive bather (hence, the bathing series), on whom he cheated with one Renée Monchaty, of sunnier disposition. In his paintings of the former, the latter is often hidden at the edge of the canvas, camouflaged in the quivering aggregate of floral brush marks which consumed him. Bonnard didn’t name it “Self Portrait in a Shaving Mirror” — an art historian came along later to distinguish it from the all the other ones, to make discourse when discourse was not intended easier. But it’s hard to comment when you’re dead, and other perilous times as well.

Her response:

On Saturday November 23, 1963, a day after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Dallas Police took a mugshot of the alleged shooter Lee Harvey Oswald, who would himself be shot a day later and die. It is odd how the verb “shoot” is used to describe the act of firing a bullet at someone, taking a photograph of them, and as a substitution for “shit” when expressing frustration or dismay. A conspiracy theorist (or, Gore Vidal’s wonderful “conspiracy analyst”) would say that the acute shadows formed by Oswald’s face in the infamous rifle holding photo are not consistent with the other native shadows, an impulse which implicates painting’s long forgotten task of matching light and shadows — that the latter’s convincibility, the black weary shape it finds across a cheek, legitimized the former’s absoluteness, emitted by a candle, in a dark brown room somewhere, if we are to still believe those dark brown rectangles, hanging by wires on walls, dusty on the side that matters. In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg erased a drawing by Willem de Kooning solicited by the former for the sole purpose of doing so. De Kooning caved in, as his mind would also years later from Alzheimer’s, his slow fingers pinching at sculptures which — without commentary — looked like shit, like actual pieces of literal shit on a pedestal. A true misogynist, he called them women. Like their ghost pencil marks, you can kind of see the erased drawing behind Rauschenberg’s right shoulder, or not. It was an asshole art move, which are always the best to write about. But while art grasps for history, a man, or boy, can change the world with a gun. That the right to bear arms is only the Second Amendment is telling of what has always been on American minds, though countries born of bloodshed tend to continue that path. In 1964, Rauschenberg assimilated Kennedy, presumably around the time of the one-year anniversary of his assassination, into “Retroactive I” and “Retroactive II,” two near-identical paintings only distinguishable after some amount of concentration — the light variances of the silkscreens, the purposefully similar yet inextricably unique dabs of paint — visual signs depletive of meaning, an orgy of detached signifiers, the commentary of no commentary, which might have been his entire point, so sharp, silent, and unseen, like the tip of something shiny in the air, pulled to its target over time.