Look with your eyes, not with your hands.


Such a minute fraction of this life do we live: so much is sleep, tooth-brushing, waiting for mail, for metamorphosis, for those sudden moments of incandescence: unexpected, but once one knows them, one can live life in the light of their past and the hope of their future.



A grad student muses on her life, film, friends, politics, reality televizzle, and music.

 
In a most disturbing chain of events, Jack and I decided that the conservative backlash against Robert Mapplethorpe's retrospective was warranted. There are certain first ammendment rights that are (and should) unquestionably be applied to the arts, but at the same time, Larry Flynt's "I know it when I see it" pornography criteria should restrict federal funding in certain cases. I never argeed with the content-based restrictions the NEA wanted to impose over artists in the 1980s but after thumbing through a Mapplethorpe book last night, we encountered the most disturbing images either of us have ever seen. I don't know how familiar you are with this debate or Mapplethorpe in general, but suffice it to say that his images of gay men range from the visually innocent & artsy portraits of muscular forms to disturbing (if not horrifying) images of bondage, self-mutilation, and perversion.
posted by lmjasinski at 11:54 PM