cultural commentary from the desk of Don Shewey
CHILDREN
I was too beautiful for public school. I had to be taken out. The other students would bite me. They couldn’t deal with undiluted beauty. Children are irrational. I’m an artist. I dip my fingers in poison and make beautiful things.
— Harry Kondoleon, Rococo
Eve Gordon and Frances McDormand in the 1981 Yale production of "Rococo"
CONSENSUS
Consensus is the folly of control freaks. It is not effective nor expressive. In ACT-UP, if I wanted to do something and you did not want to do it, I would find other people who wanted to do it and you would go do something else. Doesn’t that make sense? Collaboration only works between people with similar goals and desires.
— Sarah Schulman
After my mother died, all my sentences began with “After my mother died.” After my mother died, all I wanted to do was fuck.
— Holly Hughes, World Without End
QUEER AS FOLK
By the second half of the twentieth century folk culture in Britain had become a kind of cargo cult, a jumble of disassociated local customs, rituals and superstitions: uncanny relics of the distant, unknowable Britain of ancient days. Why, for instance, do sword dancers lock weapons in magical shapes such as the pentagram or the six-pointed star, led by a man wearing a fox’s head? What is the straw bear plodding round the village of Whittlesey in Cambridgeshire every January? Why do a bunch of nutters black up their faces and perform a coconut dance in several Lancashire villages? What possess people to engage in the crazed “furry dance,” singing the “Hal-An-Tow” song, on 6 May at Helton in Cornwall? Why do beribboned hobby horses canter round the streets of Padstow and Minehead every may Day, with attendant “Gullivers” lunging at onlookers with a giant pair of pincers? The persistence of such rites, and the apparent presence of codes, occult symbolism and nature magic in the dances, mummers’ plays and balladry of yore, have provided a rich compost for some of the outgrowths of folk in the 1960s and afterwards. Even to dip a toe into the world of folklore is to unearth an Other Britain, one composed of mysterious fragments and survivals – a rickety bridge to the sweet grass of Albion. As Bert Lloyd mentioned, “To our toiling ancestors [these customs] meant everything, and in a queer irrational way they can still mean much to us.”
— Rob Young, Electric Eden
PESSIMISM
There is immense unthinking cruelty discreetly coiled within the assurance that everyone can discover happiness through work and love. It isn’t that these two entities are invariably incapable of delivering fulfilment, only that they almost never do so. And when an exception is misrepresented as a rule, our individual misfortunes, instead of seeming to us quasi-inevitable aspects of life, will weigh down on us like particular curses. In denying the natural place reserved for longing and incompleteness in the human lot, the modern world denies us the possibility of consolation for our fractious marriages and our unexploited ambitions, and condemns us instead to solitary feelings of shame for having stubbornly failed to make more of our lives.
— Alain de Botton
another eye opens 