Tanenhaus! You Peckerwood! Cover 'Em Up If You Got 'Em, 'Cause Us Ivy League Bitches Is Packin' Now!

[purejuice]

I love New York City better than life itself, actually, but the newspapers -- my life's work -- can be so head up ass sometimes, and on the very same problems, for decades, I do despair of human nature.

Sam Tanenhaus' remarkably cretinous essay on how Hollywood and Karen Finley didn't predict the Amy Bishop massacres. He's the editor of the NYT book review and his cultural references are schlock movies????

My response:

this is a curiously anaerobic piece of logic which conforms to what i call the charlotte fedders syndrome: it's not news until it happens to a white girl.

the essential question here is the same one that got bishop off the hook when she shot her brother 20 years ago and refused to drop the shotgun when ordered to do so by the second of two policemen. a woman of color or a man in those shoes? would have been dead by now. or in jail for fratricide.

what has captured mr. tanenbaum's attention is the whiteness of the criminal. which is all too typically provincial of male supremacist newspapers.

two words: khieu ponnary.

and consider the cases of the child soldiers of the khmer rouge and everywhere else in the world, including your local gangsters: give a child a gun and he becomes a killer. imagine that.

I called him Tanenbaum.

So shoot me. You know where to find me.

Comments

[villagecharm.livejournal.com]

If I read it right, he's somehow holding it against artists that they didn't see this coming. That seems like an odd complaint. Surely Amy Bishop's husband might have seen it coming, but Karen Finley?

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

it is an odd and ill thought through, and perhaps also an oblique, complaint. the essence of it is, finley and other "feminist" artists play the victim and never the perp. which is fair, i think. on the other hand, who wants perp art? unless you consider that the entire canon is, as can be persuasively argued, perp art? as fengi has recently pointed out, by linking to an interesting piece (http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/film_salon/2010/02/24/bigelow/), which argues that that woman movie director up for the oscar this year, what's her name, is succeeding basically by being an uncle tom and making the most macho perp art.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

he's also saying that the zeitgeist of violence by women, or the empowerment of women represented by their parity (which he thinks has been achieved by bishop????) should have been reflected in popular or low art. i'm not at expert at that, but i'd say wonder woman et al, plus rocker chicks, plus in the fine arts painters and sculptors of my and previous generations (bourgeois, the polish sculptor magdalena whose last name i can never spell, abakanowicz? mostly remarkably the painter of newborn babies...whose name i'm not remembering, and other late 20thc reconsiderations of "beauty" and the male gaze. indeed that whole show of high art, for which i'll get the url, was addressing the issue of "beauty" as a perp criterion. there's the young black woman who does silhouette paper cut art of lynchings, and the whole idea that non-perp art has to address victimization even in precepts of "beauty" is something that tanenhaus, in a remarkably philistine display, doesn't come close to addressing. art is addressing the problem, high and low, perhaps in terms too subtle for A MAJOR ARTS EDITOR to understand? yow.
marlene dumas is the high art painter who is doing violence in the flesh or decay, fascinating.
Regarding Beauty (http://www.amazon.com/Regarding-Beauty-View-Twentieth-Century/dp/3893227792) is the name of the show which addressed perp art as "male gaze", incredibly touching and humane and full of hope.

[minniethemoocha.livejournal.com]

Silhouette lady: Kara Walker. And she rocks.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

she does, not least by avoiding the feminist performance art trope of damaging your own [lily white anorexic] body. no need for a black woman to put her body on the line. again. good choice, ms. walker.

dumas and one of her baby paintings

[purejuice.livejournal.com]