NYT Article about youtube

Yesterday I came across this interesting New York Times article: Pixels at an Exhibition

It's gotten me to think a bit about youtube videos as an art form in their own right, rather than as a depository for other art (clips from TV, music videos, etc). My own mashups use slideshows in a way that I borrowed from common youtube practice, just as one example of youtube having its own forms. After reading this article, I spent a lot of time on youtube looking for mashups other people have made, and I got excited about the idea of youtube videos not being a way to view something else (a music video or a mashup) but being their own thing. I will work on a post about the videos I found this afternoon.

Irony?

I started reading a chapter of Working Like a Homosexual: Camp, Capital, Cinema by Matthew Tinkcom (which is one of the best scholarly titles I've encountered). I was particularly struck by this paragraph about irony:

We discover, though, that irony is a depleted term for comprehending the variety of contemporary cultural practices encompassed in its name, and perhaps worth recalling is that the term carries with it its classical meaning, whereby irony was defined as a form of feigned ignorance. To be ironic in this sense is to maintain a pretense of not knowing in order to produce an alternative knowledge of a statement, object, text, or performance: insisting that one is not perceiving the conditions under which the ironic message is dispensed, not possessing its different registers of signification, not acknowledging that one is perhaps the perfect recipient of the statement that one claims only to be overhearing, irony captures a form of complicity between producer and recipient, one allowing for a form of textual camouflage that provides for a hidden, ambivalent interpretation to arise around the message. (156)

I think that irony as a means of reading culture, as it is practiced now by a lot of people, is not about ambivalence, it's about entirely disliking or having disdain for a cultural product and consuming it ironically in order to play up or perform that dislike. It's almost a way to disavow any ambivalences towards the cultural product. This is why I find camp, with its ambivalences, much more interesting. Of course, as Tinkcom points out, "irony is a depleted term." His revisiting of the original meaning of irony is fascinating to me. It comes near the beginning of a chapter about John Waters. I'm excited to see how ideas about irony and its relation to camp play out in the rest of the chapter.

Queer Mashups

I made a couple more "mashups" today. I wanted to make queer mashups / use mashups to "queer" pop songs. Here's what I came up with:

Kelis' "Bossy" with Shareefa's "I Need a Boss"



Cher's "Take Me Home" with Lisa Lisa's "I Wonder if I Take You Home"



The Cher and Lisa Lisa songs, like pop songs in general, are in second person, they address someone, a "you." This "you" is a man, but when the two songs are put together, they are addressing each other. Cher becomes the person trying to convince Lisa Lisa to take her (originally him) home.

As hip-hop-tinged R&B / pop songs, "Bossy" and "I Need a Boss" are not sung to another character, they are sung to the audience. So, while Cher and Lisa Lisa seem to be having a straightforward conversation with each other, Shareefa and Kelis seem more to be flirting when the songs are put together. Shareefa says, "I need a boss" and Kelis replies, "I'm bossy."

My original thought was that, with the mashups, the mode of reception is listening - you listen to the songs together. However, they're pretty much unlistenable. Since most of the queer meaning of putting these songs together is in the titles, anyway, I think that the mode of reception is thinking the songs together.

Finally, these mashups are both women / women mashups because I mostly listen to female vocalists. I would love to make some male / male mashups. Any ideas?

Queer Booklist

One goal I have for this quarter is to create reading lists for myself, so when I graduate I will have a list of academic books I'm excited about. With that in mind, I compiled a list of queer books I want to read as a start. First, I found this list of "the now canonical texts of queer theory within the U.S. academy" in Douglas Crimp's Melancholia and Moralism:

- Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter.
- Edelman, Lee. Homographesis.
- Fuss, Diana. Inside / Outside.
- Halperin, David. 100 Years of Homosexuality and Saint Foucault.
- Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet and Tendencies.
- Warner, Michael. Fear of a Queer Planet.

I've read Gender Trouble and Saint Foucault, though I read SF before I read any Foucault or any queer theory, so I could stand to read it again.

I sat down with Google Books and a bunch of names I've come across in my reading to find the following list of other books I'm interested in:

Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender.

Week, Jeffrey:
- Sexuality and Its Discontents
- Between the Acts
- Against Nature
- Invented Moralities
- Making Sexual History
- Same Sex Intimacies: Families of Choice and Other Life

Bersani, Leo. Homos.

Patton, Cindy.
- Inventing AIDs
- Sex and Germs: Politics of AIDs
- Globalizing AIDs
- Fatal Advice

Edelman, Lee.
- Homographesis
- No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive

Rubin, Gayle. Misguided, Dangerous, and Wrong.

D’Emilio, John.
- The World Turned
- Making Trouble

Delaney, Samuel. Time Square Red, Time Square Blue.

Duggan, Lisa.
- Our Monica, Ourselves.
- Sex Wars.
- The Invention of Heterosexuality.

Somerville, Siobhan. Queering the Color Line.

Shah, Nayan. Contagious Divides.

Boag, Peter. Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest.


I'm not sure yet how to collect the citations for books I want to read. I want to be able to tag them. I found librarything.com, where you can create a catalog of books and tag them. I haven't used it enough yet to see if I like it. Another idea I had was to create a blog in blogger and make a post for each book I'm interested in, which would allow me to tag them as well as add information about why I'm interested in it.

Let me know if you have any reading suggestions!

And the Band Played On

Recently, I have been reading a lot about the AIDS crisis, starting with Douglas Crimp’s Melancholia and Moralism, which is fantastic. In one of Crimp’s essays, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,” he critiques Randy Shilts’ book As the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, a journalistic book about the crisis. Crimp writes that Shilts irresponsibly places blame for the crisis on gay men and promiscuity, particularly in his creation of “Patient Zero.” I wanted to read And the Band Played On because I’ve been reading so much critical writing about politics and art in the AIDS crisis, but I don’t know much of the history. I was also interested in reading the book to see if I agreed with Crimps’ critique.

I’m almost 200 pages in now, and I think Crimp was definitely right. It’s clear from Shilts’ focus on promiscuity as what is at fault. For example, he repeatedly refers to bathhouses as “the commercialization of promiscuity,” to the point where it almost becomes a euphemism. On a few occasions, he describes gay men who were promiscuous before anyone had even heard of AIDS as “playing on the freeway.” For example: “Perhaps the new virus was like some lurking jungle predator, striking the stragglers first. That would explain the extreme life-styles of the early cases; they were out dancing in the freeway, ensuring they would be the first to get run over.” (153). On page 157, Shilts writes, “Jim Curran passed up the opportunity to meet Gaetan, the Quebecois version of Typhoid Mary. Curran had heard about the flamboyant attendant and frankly found every story about his sexual braggadocio to be offensive. Stereotypical gays irritated Curran in much the same way that he was uncomfortable watching Amos n’ Andy movies.” (157) Here, gay men acting “stereotypical” is equated with blackface. Perhaps a more appropriate metaphor would be straight men acting a gay men and portraying these stereotypes, but that is not what is happening here. Curran is a straight doctor who is the head of AIDS research at the CDC. Shilts has created a story where a straight doctor is one of the heroes of the AIDS crisis, yet expresses such offensive sentiments. He wants to save gay men’s lives, but he doesn’t want to meet them if they act “stereotypical.”

What I actually like about And the Band Played On is how (unintentionally, I presume) campy the writing is. For example, Shilts writes, “The sun melted the morning fog to reveal a vista so clear, so crystalline that you worried it might break if you stared too hard.” (11). Or, a few pages later, “His body was superbly toned. He carried himself with increasing confidence, much like the body politic whose ideals he was articulating.” (14). Personally, I find this writing laughably bad. This amusement is helping me enjoy the book through the offensive sentiments.

On "Young Gay Rites"

A few weeks ago, the New York Times Sunday Magazine published an article about young gay men getting married called Young Gay Rites. Today, they published letters in response.

The first letter is my favorite:

As a gay man of a certain age (I was 18 when Stonewall happened), I realize that much of what I have valued overall in my life — virtually all of it “out” — has been access to a much wider landscape of sexual and relationship possibilities than most of my straight confreres felt they had. In fact, being gay in this culture has required me to forge my own identity — cultivate it consciously — rather than have it handed down through societal institutions like marriage. I think there have been benefits to that.

That everybody has a right to get married surely is obvious. But how lovely to feel you don’t have to.

When you’re gay, it can be difficult to explain to people why your views on gay marriage are negative or apathetic. I think this letter is very well articulated. I like that it expresses how a lack of marriage rights can be of benefit to queers without attacking the institution, which would cause a lot of people to close their minds to the sentiment.

The third letter I am not as fond of:

I dunno . . . after reading the article, sounds to me like gays get married for good or dumb reasons, impulsively or after careful or neurotic consideration, exactly like straight couples.

But as a 42-year-old gay engaged man, still giddy to be on the receiving end of a marriage proposal from my Julian, I do shudder to think what the gay-marriage opponents would think of our hypergay lifestyle, which I’m hoping California will condone soon by granting real marriage rights.

Why, just the other night we went to Target with our straight friend Brian and then, to top off our gay evening, got some doughnuts. It’s just one fabulous day after another.

Or should I say fabulously normal.

This is a typical example of the “gays should be able to get married because they’re just like straight people.” If this particular gay life style is “normal,” then something else isn’t normal – probably some more "hypergay" lifestyle. The use of the word “fabulous” seems particularly offensive to me, attacking certain non-assimilationist ways of being gay (i.e. faggy).

The last letter is very interesting. It’s about the images that ran with the story, campy 50s-style portraits of the young gay couples in the article. For example:



The letter states:

I enjoyed Denizet-Lewis’s article. He created a lively and sympathetic read, chronicling the path to marriage and beyond, a path that is not so different for couples of any sexual orientation. But why the colorized, exaggerated photos, mimicking the most clichéd and self-conscious of coupled moments? Why pose Marc and Vassili in tuxedos when they specifically stated that they will sidestep all the trappings associated with “traditional” weddings? Besides the uncomfortable nod to the ’50s (an era that was not especially welcoming to gays and lesbians), it suggests that gay couples are somehow “play acting” at being married. As a civil celebrant, who has had the great joy to preside over many gay unions in New Jersey, I was offended by the way these couples were depicted, at least visually.

I think this letter misses the point, which is the campiness of the photos. It’s not an “uncomfortable nod” to the 50s, it’s a parodic nod. Pictures like these, send-ups of the 50s, are usually parodic these days even when they feature straight couples. The letter made me think of Gender Trouble by Judith Butler. Butler writes about gender parody as repeating gender norms with a difference – in this case, that the couples are both men. This is not “play acting,” it is a parody that reveals the “original” as being a copy all along (unfortunately, I don’t have Gender Trouble with me, and this is something of a paraphrase from memory). In this case, the photos point out the constructedness of straight marriage as an institution. In my view, the author of this later misread the photographs and was offended by what she read into them, something that she wouldn’t have seen if she had noted the photos’ camp effect.

Mashups

About a month ago, I became fascinated by the idea of mashups, when someone edits together the instrumental track of one song with the vocal track of another song. They were a big phenomenon about 5 or 6 years ago, and I was interested (if not surprised) to find out that people were still making them. I started thinking about the possibilities that came with collapsing two pop songs together, the ways that could change their meanings. I quickly ascertained that I did not have the technical skills or software to make my own mashups, but I figured out something I could make: fake mashups. Here's what I came up with (in the order I made them, the first three over a couple of days and the fourth a week later):

Mariah Carey's "Touch My Body" vs. Leona Lewis' "Bleeding Love"


Britney Spears' "Piece of Me" vs. Rihanna's "Don't Stop the Music"


Robyn's "With Every Heartbeat" vs. Girls Aloud's live acoustic cover of "With Every Heartbeat"


Lil' Wayne's "Lollipop" vs. Aqua's "Lollipop"


As you can probably tell, these are not mashups at all, but simply the two songs played over each other. My method is to import two songs into Garage Band, line them up, then cut off the longer song when the shorter song ends. Then they're finished.

When I figured out how to do this, I was excited by the idea of posting them to YouTube disguised as "real" mashups so people would watch them and leave comments. I wanted to see if I could trick people into thinking I genuinely thought I had made mashups. To this end, I was trying to make combinations that people would want to listen to (at least until they heard them). At the time, "Touch My Body" and "Bleeding Love" were the two most popular songs on the Billboard Hot 100. I made the "With Every Heartbeat" video to see if a more obscure song would get more views because it would have less competition in search results. The Mariah/Leona video has the most views, 463. Britney/Rihanna has 195, Robyn/Girls Aloud has 282, and Lil Wayne/Aqua has 184. Here are some of the comments I've gotten:

this is absolute fucking shit

this is so terrible, i love it. overlapping two songs whether they match in any way or not? excellent dj skillz!

WTF??

Do you really think this sounds good? It's nothing but gibberish! I have a headache!!!

who did this? a 6 year old? I have to vomit now, excuse me.

This is truly awful! lol

its basically 2 song mashed 2gether with no editing. soz but thats basically what it is

doesnt really fit

wow this is trash

not really a mashup- just the two songs playing over eachother.

this is one of the worst "mash-ups" i've ever heard. they don't even fit together

I've gotten a lot of joy out of these comments, but I think I could do more with these than just getting comments from people who think I'm trying to make real mashups. I've been thinking a lot about the possibilities of changing the meanings of songs by mashing them together. I have a few ideas for playing with this, so I might try making some new ones soon.