The Beastliness of Bacon, Michael Glover, Hyperallergic

Francis Bacon, “Man with Dog” (1953), oil on canvas, 152 x 117 cm. Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr., 1955. K1955:3 (© The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021. Photo by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd)

… i had intended to share an image of a later work that seemed more visually compelling, but then i looked at Man with Dog and… after a moment… um, wow!… something really dark about the painting as, apparently, there was with Bacon himself…

… the idea that darkness of the soul is a frequent walking companion of genius is one that came up a day or two ago as H and i watched a news segment on the four part mini series We Need to Talk About Cosby, in which…

Writer/director W. Kamau Bell’s exploration of Bill Cosby’s descent from “America’s Dad” to alleged sexual predator. Comedians, journalists and survivors have a candid, first of its kind conversation about the man, his career and crimes.

… when a great creator turns out to have a parallel self that is a horrible self, what do we do with the creative legacy?… in Bacon’s case there were “sadomasochistic excesses” though there was no suggestion in the article that any of it was non-consensual… still, by most of our standards, there were demons in his psyche and those demons flowed out onto the canvas… psyche and creative output walked hand in hand… in the case of the alleged sex crimes of Cosby, one has the sense that psyche and creative are split, with the dark self a presence lurking outside a comfortable suburban home, peeping through windows, stalking its next victim…

20220213-03

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn

… i read the review in AnOther magazine which i have been avoiding for days, largely because it was primal me that was interested in looking at it and i was trying to resist primal me… it surprised (disappointed?) me that it was not about the porn industry and was instead about societal attitudes towards sex and woman and largely about the polarization we are experiencing around the globe… i now want to watch it though with subtitles and it’s subject matter it will be a more difficult sell to H… a link to the trailer…

Derek Jarman, Modern Nature

… this:

Quid sit futurum cras fuge querere et quem fors dierum cinque dabit lucro appone, nec dulcis amores…

Try not to guess what lies in the future, but as fortune deals days enter them into your life’s book as windfalls.¹

… sounds a bit zen to me…

… DJ describes a work, party and social life that is/was definitely not Zen… a whirlwind of parties and fucking… and then, back to his garden at the cottage near the nuclear power plant… the power plant seems a symbol of something sinister, disease perhaps?…

… as i read about the garden and the seasons and the discoveries on walks through the countryside, i think, rose hips, where are the rose hips on the beach roses… they seem to have shriveled on the branch… was hoping to try and make jam again… last time i burned the sugar, took ages to scrub the pan clean…

First Thoughts

… we are installed in the cottage… slightly frustrating day doing so… cleaning lady late, dogs pooping and peeing in the cottage… no desire to cook, only the news available… H able to pursue their news addiction, sound pollution for me…

… HCR meter all about how it is increasingly evident that there was a full blown coup attempt… that it only barely failed… that the attempt is not over… the white patriarchy is desperate… democracy hangs in the balance… is the clock running out for dems to do something about it?…

… the internet is so pathetic at the cottage, which has wifi, or supposedly has wifi, but it is utterly useless… even in the wee hours of the morning when nobody else would be using it there is no bandwidth… there might as well not be any wifi at all…

… thinking about Modern Nature… thinking about the promiscuity of cruising parks and hooking up… thinking about the anger towards heterosexuals who would think such behavior among themselves ill advised… sex was rarely just sex to me… i dated one girl at a time and that girl had a chance of becoming something more to me and i to her… there were a few one night stands that were not satisfying… the idea of cruising the park seems crazy to me… that was the gay culture that DJ participated in, embraced, even after being diagnosed with AIDS… he claimed that little penetrative sex was indulged in once the gay community understood how the disease was transmitted… just hand jobs… still, it all seems risky behavior… behavior that was only about sex, not love… i don’t insist on heterosexual love… i just prefer sex in the context of a loving relationship…

… insects chirping outside, grasshoppers?, katydids?, cicadas?, what do they have on the island?… i wonder whether the noises they make leads predators as well as lovers to them… if so, what a risk they take for love…

** Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex**

… a book about the politics of sex?… from a philosopher no less… sounds interesting… might want to get…

… as much as i try to be an enlightened man, the sexual lead in image hooks me most of the time… hoping being conscious of it will be good for something… i scanned the article for further sexual eye candy, found little, moved on…

Kristina Shakht, To Be Or To Become

… an article, This Zine Celebrates the Female Body in its “Raw and Authentic” form… the artist is a survivor of sexual assault i am told… she has made a zine representing how women see themselves i am told… the photographs are various, women, some flowers, some landscapes, the women in various states of undress and exposure… the lead-in photograph is of a young woman, naked, crawling across gravel, she is thin, angular, almost childlike… one feels the pain of gravel on knees… i suppose it is raw and authentic if one thinks that nudity is raw and authentic… i find it mostly engages my male gaze… that is, it is mostly sexual… the images are well made, artistic…

_ “(The zine explores the) modern-day female experience: the way we feel ourselves, the way we move, think, and live that’s beyond sexuality and being sexual. I wanted to show that naked body doesn’t mean sexual, that it can be just body._¹

… i would like to see the Zine itself, but i discover it is being issued in a very limited and very expensive format… book formats and zines in particular are not generally meant to be so pricey, a larger audience is being courted, usually…

… i am left with the images in the article, which mostly seem to objectify the women… that is my older white male take…

… another example of sex selling, it almost always works on me… i wish i could say that was not true, but it is, and perhaps i shouldn’t feel so bad about it because it works on the majority of us and maybe we should have less prurient idea of sex and the naked body… though, its her nakedness that sells, he’s just a prop… the male gaze sought and secured…

… it turns out that the film still is from a movie that will be discussed in the pilot episode of the podcast series reported on in the article…

_The season’s pilot episode will dissect Paul Verhoeven’s second feature Turkish Delight (1973) – an intensely violent and erotic film charting the fallout of a stormy love affair. Although unsung on an international stage, it has been named the greatest Dutch film of the 20th century by critics in its native Netherlands, and played a significant role in the country’s countercultural history.¹