Saturday, August 07, 2004

Wrestling is a spectacle. That's the classic Barthes structural interpretation in his book Mythologies. This reading is no longer enough. Barthes actually admitted that it is in the instability of the sign, the tension between the signifier and signified where a new manifestation occurs, which Kristeva, his former student, came to call "signifiance." But all this is academic.

The bottom line is that Rhodes is very sexy! I mean, look at him in those tights. He be tight!

Wrestlers' bodies have really changed. Take Gorgeous George, for example, he may not only have made sequins popular in Wrestling, but he also had a body that came closest to the ideal wrestlers strive for today. Of course, The Rock has redefined the ideal body of a wrestler, once again, while exposing it as the true vehicle of the spectacle, moving on to be a way of life, a way of defining the self, as a space of politics, being the rhetorical mat--the platform from which to bounce off to become a Hollywood star. Hulk Hogan tried it before The Rock, but The Rock has proven he bounces best. Rocks bounce best against instability, one could say--cutting through signifiance itself. Long live the Scorpion.

Now we have a new Gorgeous, and one can't help but wonder about the allegorization of Gorgeous George, I mean anyone aware of wrestling history will tend to recall Gorgeous when looking at Gorgeous, well, those who care about history, that is. Andy's account of Randy being apprehensive while hanging at a fairy bar hints at the basic code imposed by male-wrestling to be macho. Got your macho-man?

Andy took photographs of Makos and Makos took pictures of Andy. The book Warhol by Makos consists of a selection of photographs from a ten year span. Andy: "Christopher Makos is the most modern man in America." There's also a memoir. And as we noticed in the Dandy diary, Makos is still doing the cock theme--which is not likely to go out of style any time soon.

According to Hackett, Andy charged about $25,000.00 a portrait. Nice, considering he did not deal through the gallery, but it was his own office (Fred), who made the monetary arrangements. The office, by the way is what he came to call his studio in the later years of his career, when his movies started to die out and he moved his energy toward Interview magazine. Before it was called the Factory, as many Warhol fans are aware. While Andy got commissions through his office, he also showed with Castelli. According to his Bio by Bockris Castelli initially did not want to show Andy's work, but eventually Andy prevailed. Yet, he was not considered of the same caliber as Johns or Rauschenberg. Then again there seemed to be a hierarchy between Rauschenberg and Johns, since Castelli, according to the history books I read, really liked Johns.

The rivalry between Lennon and McCartney could not be clearer than the mustache incident described by Andy. I think the whole Ono thing separating the Beatles is just a scapegoat to some degree. I mean, she had a very strong personality, I am sure, but anyways, I am not to talk-- she is intense though, well her work is. This is quite obvious when studying her art and listenting to her music. Ono is an intellectual, I love her Instruction Paintings. Lennon has his own museum now.

Andy's story of the whore, in an odd way, reminds me of the current transparency in advertising.

60 minutes had a segment on the new ways companies are selling their products. It's called "word of mouth advertising." Basically it works like this: You are at a party smoking and an attractive person comes up to you asking for a light, while pulling a pack of cigarettes and casually asking, "what brand do you smoke?" Then the person shows you his/her smokes, and tells you how good they are, perhaps even gives you one to try, maybe flirts with you a bit and even exchanges numbers, if it goes that far. But that person may have been hired by the cigarette company to sell you the product without you knowing it. They are everywhere, and consumers are not supposed to know about them. They are also online, in chatrooms, selling a product by commenting heavily about it as though they really like it, but in reality they work for an advertising company. This book apparently has some play in it.

Andy's story of the whore inverts the process and makes value in social exchange transparent. It may be forecasting the future of human behavior where people will have absorbed this next stage of covert advertising as part of everyday life leading them to put the money upfront, or talk about their relationships to others in pure terms of exchange value. The labor and exchange values, then, become fully exposed and people would appear to be more "honest" about their social interests with each other. And issalllgoood, right?

But maybe Bill Copley lived a cheap version of a Hollywood Mogul's lifestyle, where he would divorce his wife to marry a young attractive model. It appears, once this stage of advertising is absorbed by popular culture, just like all other previous forms, the transparency will be there for the average consumer, and they may not mind to openly relate their money to their personal relationships in an extremely overt form.

Who knows, but reality shows like The Player is pushing the envelope already. Here, the Participants know that they are "players" and that the whole point is not to get played (meaning falling in love with the other person), while playing that person. So, they are supposedly doing everything they would normally do since they are players in their real lives (that sounds fake now), anyways, only now they are laying all the cards on the table, saying, "I am here to play you, and you are going to be played..." Where as before, this would be disguised in a more subtle set of signifiers and events. This is much like the whore being hired to live as Copley's partner, and she buys him things and hangs around the house like anyone else in a relationship would. The difference is he is paying her directly, and to top it off, he explains his concerns about her to Andy as though it were a "normal" relationship.

"Bs" hanging, stimulating the mind of the disinterested observer.

And it was hard to find Julia. I had to stumble through Ms. Roberts, then Ms. Stiles then Mrs. Child, and Ms. Fordham and Ms. London and finally Kristeva showed up...

I've always confused Spacek with Spacey. It's a Y vs. K thing, or a postcards from the edge thing. No, this edge. No, this edge. No, this edge. Nope. This edge. No. well, maybe.

Jackie O. hits on "motherfucker" de deux, odd name for some cool Jazz cats. Mrs. O. also hits on Bags, lyrics for Breakfast at Tifanny's and Spontaineous Combustion, then hits the opera, and a garage sale.

During his election campaign Schwarzanegger was criticized by his past sexual behavior and his attitude toward women. Here is one of the stories he told OUI Magazine, "...Schwarzenegger even entertained a question about his penis size. When Manso asked, 'Is your cock disproportionate to the rest of you?' Schwarzenegger replied, 'Well, that depends on what you mean by disproportionate. The cock isn't a muscle, so it doesn't grow in relation to the shoulders, say, or the pectorals. You can't make it bigger through exercise, that's for sure.' He added that "women have told me they're curious about its size--you know, outgoing chicks who're just trying to be outrageous or horny. I hear all kind of lines, including 'Oh, you're hurting me; you're so big.' But it means nothing. Bodybuilders' cocks are the same size as everyone else's.'" He's the governator, who called democrats girlie men.

Got totalitariann, Got totallittarian? No ism.

"You have to yell at the help or they don't respect you..." Isn't that what a petit bourgeois would say? A bourgeois would simply fix his hair and change the subject of conversation. Real Brgs sometimes like to call themselves pigs.

But perhaps the reason why the driver couldn't find the black radio station was because these had died politically in the earlier half of the seventies after the 1968 Martin Luther King Assasination. A bit of history here, if I may, according to a particular account, it was the black radio DJs who kept the African American Communities from revolting during that time. Ulf Poschardt, in his book DJ Culture, quotes DJ Del Shields, "But the night Dr. King was killed, all across America every black station was tested and everybody who was on the air at that time, including myself, told people to cool it." And there were no riots. Del adds, "When America looked at black radio in that particular period, it suddenly hit them that this was a potent force. if, in every major city, a black disc jockey had said, 'Rise up,' there would have been pandemonium." and as Del further explains, this was the beginning of the end of black radio.

What's up with the Puerto Rican remarks? Just 'cause Bianca is eating "Puerto Rican food" doesn't mean she is getting fat... "she had the whole house smelled up with onions and hamburgers," said Andy. The "disinterested machine" broke down at that point. Actually it broke down from the very beginning of the diary, I guess. The myth of the man-machine fed to me in art school is out the door baby, this cat was rolling all over. Here are some actual Puerto Rican Recipes. Unless Bianca put some "Puerto Rican" ingridients on the burgers, I am not sure how they could be Puerto Rican...

Andy read Saturday Night Fever in a completely different way. I mean, as I explained in yesterday's entry, I considered the ending as an open-ended situation, where Travolta's character had to reevaluate his life and snap out of the fantasy of the Disco nightlife. But maybe Andy is right. Or wrong as he also thought they should have made a theater play that would run forever. As it is obvious from yesterday's post, this actually happened. They milked it better than he'd expected. Can't be right or wrong about everything, he's only human, of course. Then again, maybe the producers of the musical read Andy's Diary.

As to the man behind the Sex Pistols "doing it right," to quote Andy, it was none-other-than Malcom Mclaren. Now Malcom has been accused of being a manipulator in the music business. Oddly enough, even though it is well known that he was a major player in the development of Hip Hop, he was completely ommited from the film Scratch. I mean, I understand the politics of Hip Hop as I grew up with them, lived them as a kid on the streets, but Mclaren is part of the history. Hip Hop needs to get it together. It must aim to do justice to its players.