Agony freak
Some links again
Hello! A small update and a small amount of links. I’ve been trying to pick up work and deliver a new novel draft and a proposal of some kind. Pride month, it seems, for better or worse isn’t the season for freelancers it once was. So once again, I don’t have that many of my own non-paid thoughts. Instead, I have a small round-up of other people’s work and my own.
The new MUNA album is fascinating. Can pop music move past the corny and into the visceral? Certainly there are hooks. “Big Stick” is a fascinating modern protest song. Escaping the florid, innocent, naive quality to some queer art is difficult. There was a sea of Mapplethorpe and Hartley imitators in the wake of Tom of Finland and the commodification of Keith Haring. There's an initial wave of aesthetic imitators: scrawny twinks and BDSM muscle gays in painters alongside the prototypical photographer of male nudes who admires Classical art and arched backs. While this visual art movement gave way to good artists too like Hockney and Gregg Arakai both of whom parodied gay aesthetics, it also gave way to rainbow murals and queer capitalism, artwashing and worse. Campiness became key to the personas of Elton John, Liberace, and RuPaul--only to birth Queer Eye and gay influencers like Connor Franta. Queer Joy is Resistance became a slogan slapped onto watercolors and woodblock prints. Coming our narratives and sponsored posts became a way to make money, a way to write a memoir, and perhaps even get a TV deal. Text art was a big part of this, but so was writing itself as Paul McAdory wrote in a great essay about the sentimental gay novel. Tenderness has become taboo. Satire and irony reign supreme, we want our queer art but at a slant. Down with the earnestness of Sam Smith and music videos full of yearning. Hopefully I’ll write something more on this eventually.
In other music news, the shift of trans musicians to electronica continues with Jane Remover and underscores, both extremely talented pop artists with great vision and catchy gems. I’m glad they’re having a moment that seems to reflect SOPHIE’s legacy while moving it forward.
I’ve been thinking a lot about right-wing influencers and the way they’re scaling up their streaming efforts. The left has yet to really find a corollary they’ll embrace—Hasan Piker has received a lot of flack for supporting Palestine. This was a really interesting piece by Will Alden in Jewish Currents on Curt Mills.
This was a great read, a sharp review of the MJ documentary by Paul Thompson.
Zefyr Lisowski’s great piece on the state of trans publishing. It’s a necessary piece I highly recommend.
Like many, I’ve been enjoying the Wallace Shawn renaissance. Watching The Designated Mourner reminded me of discovering Ingmar Bergman as a college student in film school. Highly recommend. I’ve also been watching and enjoying Widow’s Bay with D and we both enjoyed going on date night to see Hokum in Astoria.
I am teaching a class on finding an agent! Sign up!
On Katherine Packert Burke and the trans killer myth for The Baffler.
Interview on criticism for Red Pepper.
Appearance on Translash about trans art.
The tenderness question keeps pulling at me. There's something specific about how irony became the default register for queer art. Not just as an aesthetic preference but as a survival mechanism. If you don't name what you want directly, it can't be taken from you or made corny by someone else's handling of it. The camp and the slant and the satire aren't just style. They're protection. Which makes the artists who risk earnestness — who just... mean it, straight-faced. Doing something genuinely harder than it looks. MUNA is interesting precisely because the hooks work and the sincerity holds. That combination is rarer than it should be.