In 1988, I spent my month’s allowance on Guns n’ Roses’ “Appetite for Destruction,” and was unwittingly yet gleefully met by a stunning illustration on the inside cassette flap of a disoriented woman having just been sexually assaulted or raped. At 12 years of age, I think I understood the sociopolitical significance of the image — that it was “bad”; that rape and physical violence towards women was “bad”; that a hard rock band had a vested economic interest in conveying the image of themselves as “bad,” yet there was still a part of me, perhaps the majority, that simply, essentially, found the cotton stretched panties and exposed plump breast extremely erotic. I may have even unsuccessfully masturbated to the picture; I kept saying “this is a cartoon” to myself as I eventually grew flaccid. More than two decades later, today, knee-deep in Occupy Wall Street media k-hole, I came across a picture of a young protester, perhaps in need of some originality, reading a book that could be anywhere from Twilight to Chomsky’s greatest hits. And guess what I thought? What image immediately came into my mind. I know this is “bad,” that my adult male brain has been hijacked and permanently fucked by the images, album covers, videos, proposed by “bad” rock n’ roll boys who ostensibly were writing songs about how I felt, my unsettled and unsettling emotions, somehow, somewhat, probably not. David Bowie’s “Song for Bob Dylan” (1971) offers the lyric you gave your heart to every bedsit room / at least a picture on my wall / and you sat behind a million pair of eyes which honors Dylan’s voice as being that of his generation. Decades only happen once, but they take ten years to happen, and that is a enough time to get bored. I was born already tired of the 60s. Children dream of perfect worlds, and adults resent and lament the missed opportunities. It is touching, really. This slow dance between frowning parties that never ends. Cobain is dead, and Bieber’s voice is still of a eunuch’s, so maybe our reposed protester can only settle for a sign printed in caps, a sign she doesn’t hold, but places between her legs.

In 1960, Yves Klein set a tarpaulin on the street, leapt off a building onto it, later altered the photograph to make it all seem cooler, and called it “Le Saut dans le Vide (Leap into the Void).” No one expects the artist to have hurt himself in the making of said image, so we’ll give him the haha-ok nod. Of his other works, my favorite, is “Le Vide (The Void)” (1958) in which he showed an empty display case in an empty gallery in order to present nothing; of course, somewhat unfortunately, the presence of the display case in itself was necessary in invoking the theoretical absence of what might have been there. On the opening night, 3000 classy Parisians waited in line outside waiting to be let into the empty room. Some 30 years later, a then-disgruntled singer of a rather popular grunge band leapt off a stage set into his fans, lending an Olympic component to the “stage dive.” The fans braced the imminent collision with extended hands, together in a mutual crowd wave which I’ve always found endearing. To carry your fallen hero back to the alter is well worth the ticket, and chance of a sprained wrist. If the acceleration of gravity is godless physics, then the assumption that your fans will catch you is faith in one’s art. For your own personal Klein painting, this contributor encourages you to google map any of our vast oceans (zoomed in, satellite view); or, in his avoidance of work, this.

There is a moment when a human being walks into a camera’s view which, devoid of any narrative we might honor it, is simply that, a moment, a dot on a timeline as a bee’s stinger suspended above a meadow. Yet it is profound, the semblance of immortality. The same camera which killed painting is insentient, judgeless, uncaring — yet turned into an ethical machine, as we appoint it objectivity, the auspices of “what happened” via residual files inside a memory card smaller and smoother than a cat’s tongue. We expectantly look and point at shapes similar to us, no longer inside the camera, but displayed on screens by signals detached from the original event, now portrayed in numbers, binary code, recollated into bands of color, thru four channels, or something, physical parameters we barely understand like the spill-shaped universe itself. And here, somewhere in a parking lot, in the western hemisphere, at some point in this current century, two people displaced light’s refraction, inadvertently asserted their contours, the man observing the evolutionary pause of his member’s intraface with his partner’s mouth, how funny and endearing that act is, and multiple men weeks or months or years later would semi-emotionally reappropriate these images by funneling them into their minds, to the smaller universe between their synapses, forever lodged in some lobe in their brain, some desperate corner, the original event now something greater, surgically deeper. This is porn.

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In 1919, Marcel Duchamp drew a mustache on Mona Lisa and titled it “L.H.O.O.Q.,” phonetically Elle a chaud au cul, or “she has a hot ass,” and more loosely, “there is fire down below.” He made multiple versions, including one called “L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved”; that her mustache was not shaved directs our attention elsewhere. It is a cynical piece, as with most of his work, though if one considers the fury of cameras as cicadas coming out in the Louvre, their masters’ faces sharing the frame with hers, then maybe that’s warranted. In 2011, Urban Outfitters would sell a sort of non-functional shade (Sunstache, $8.00) adorned with a plastic mustache, mostly a gag gift. Its wearers would be seen going to or coming back from a party, ostentatiously on public transportation in that loud oblivious yet confident twenty-somethings manner, saying to the world #toomuchfreedom. The one time I went to the Louvre, I waited in line for three hours while the soft balm of French spoken by young girls behind me inspired me to “hold on” a little longer for the fleshy canvases awaiting inside. To render light loyally finding the full contour of an arse ends the argument of what is art. That night, I ate a crepe along the Seine, gazed up at Notre Dame, and felt an odd bulge growing on my back; some hours later, three Irishmen would find me in our hostel room, on the top bunk, another odd bulge growing from under the sheets as I imagined the slender pale hands which had made my crepe, reconfiguring each finger around my poetry. I was sure to peek, and did, inside the Mona Lisa room for good measure, of grave responsibility almost. Her smile could only flicker in between mounds of black asian hair in front of me, the entropy of a million languages as a car bomb under the Tower of Babel. In the room the asians come and go, talking of Michelangelo (which rhymes better than da Vinci). I’ve always wondered where that winding road past her right shoulder leads to, ideally a monk’s hut, if we consider the asian landscape-y vibe, paper light and flecked with ink. “Let us go then, you and I,” is the solicitation to come back to my hostel which I never used. She handed me the crepe, said voila and smiled. And should I then presume? And how should I begin?

I existentialized via photoshop Adrian Tomine comic to commemorate preceding david fi卐hkind post; original after the break. “Seems bleak” or “fml” was supposed to be in thought bubble, but then I felt was it better with nothing.

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Cornel West got hipstamaticed recently carrying a funny sign. He, among his compatriots, want to occupy wall street. I walked down wall street once, remember seeing a bronze bull with huge testicles. If males had two penises and one ball, everyone would want to suck the ball. This is called market economy theory. Hipstamatic makes photos look older than when they were taken, the inverse way old sci-fi movies tried to make everything look new. Though they were filmed in black and white. Somebody with borderline personality disorder is said to see the world in black and white, as in impulsive and erratic abstractions of “good” and “bad,” implying that well rounded people see things in grey, like an old dog. Movements with hashtags feel like phone numbers, like if I called #occupywallstreet I’d get put on hold with Rage Against the Machine playing. A cutie like Miranda July shouldn’t talk about holes and fingers without my thinking about her MFA. (I liked her “))<>((” thing more than Salinger’s parenthesis bouquet “(((((((((()))))))))).”) I like corporations because they take care of things. Sure it’s dishonest, but so is love. They’re like bad parents who don’t care enough but at least there’s food on the table and running water. If it wasn’t for Comcast, I’d be without internet and tv and I would have to binge on Indian food, and two hours later Pepto-Bismol would have themselves a “return customer.” I’d have no choice but to pick up War and Peace and use it for a pillow. In 1965, Bob Dylan was supposedly “[...] on the pavement, thinking about the government,” which is called loitering. Robert Zimmerman found himself a more gentile name on behalf of America; sorta sad, jew know what I’m sayin? Most revolution logos include a fist, a family of fingers inside a cave. I would rather they just flip me off.

A rare Vermeer painting “The Little Street” (c. 1658) shows the side of a street in Holland spotted with a cast of the painter’s usual subjects, who may be taking a break from their role at the windows above. His sole painting of this nature, nobody knows why, that day, he decided to leave his room and paint from outside. Some art historians suggest that the scene in entirely imagined. I imagine the daylight, however dimmed by the clouds, entering the black windows — the soft angular light, the new shapes presented, and the intricate narratives unfolding inside. Neutral Milk Hotel’s “Holland, 1945,” which begins the only girl I’ve ever loved/was born with roses in her eyes/but then they buried her alive/one evening 1945 may well be about Anne Frank, her legacy one of edifice: of her building, of the bookshelf that led to her secret annex, the published cover of her diary proposing how one might look at it. This one sees her in her room, the way Vermeer would have imagined, reading a letter from a boy, or writing one; and while history congratulates composing letters, decomposing bodies has the final say. Buildings haven’t changed much in Holland, at least I’m guessing. I’ve never been. Who needs Amsterdam when you have rush hour traffic jam in front of you. At a red light, I imagine things in a glass room moving in an anthropologically sound way. We list our wars I and II, as if we were counting on something.

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Thanks to Lorian for counsel, and deflecting any calls of misogyny.