Granted this is wordplay, but it is towards underscoring the way in which female parts, be they part of the domesticated and industrially siphoned animal (udder!) or a female painter painting reproductive parts (clit!), will be monetized by the academy. For example, the monetization of dairy cows is formalized in Animal Husbandry concentrations in state agriculture programs but is also a more oblique relation when one considers Harvard University’s investment in New Zealand dairy industries.
Not unlike the multi-purpose transformative jewels embedded in cartoon characters’ navels. Once activated—pulsing and amplified—the ho-hum of habituated consumption and its requisite demons are temporarily disrupted.
Consider a painter with no honorary degree (unless I am missing the posthumous degree, which is actually awarded without consent). Forrest Bess cannot be assimilated by the academy because Bess literally carved at what we might want to call his clit. Which ivory gyre can incorporate the ritual hack into their graduation ceremony? Maybe the ones that just teetered into and towards bankruptcy in the last decade: Goddard, Marlboro, Antioch, Hampshire, and now Mills.
The Cliterati, a twenty-first century group of heretic sorority “girls,” are not operating within a permaculture framework and, consequentially, do not fantasize about a terra forma that makes peace with plastics and invasive species. Because they are very young, they feel more comfortable with a struggle more epic in its monstrosity and singular. Their fighting mantra: Queer the Smear. This clitted force overwhelms the system by producing smells that ultimately dismantle the system. This includes a lot of fainting and farting, strategic and actual. Later chemical analysis of the Cliterati’s biological scents allow for synthetic versions that disintegrate the university gyres’ ocean doubles ...
The Blob, mid-century US horror film, was supposedly tapping into the specific hysteria around communism. The Blob is literally pink and also a pinko.
Forever chemicals are also known as PFAS. Per and polyfluoalkyl substances form molecular bonds that can take up to 5,000 years to degrade. Once produced, they leak, contaminating air and water. They accumulate in animals’ bodies and there are not enough residual fetal cells to repulse and heal. Forever Chemicals are associated with low birth weights, cancers, and repressed immune systems. The plastic garbage coagulating in gyres brews a particular distillate that drastically alters marine ecologies.
University, your relation to queerness could be likened to Benny Hill’s relation to women’s liberation. The 1970s British television gag show Benny Hill would often include a skit where the grown, white, old, male Benny Hill would dress as a bonneted baby and place himself in a pram. A white woman with large breasts would bend down to comfort the lone baby, and Baby Benny would paw at her tits. He craved stolen milk. You, too, University. You, too, feign innocence in order to lure the revolutionary closer and drain it. Do we taste nutty?
Call them admins or call them gyrenes, for all I care! See traditional definition of gyrenes in Jonathan Lighter’s “The Slang of the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe, 1917–1919: An Historical Glossary,” American Speech 47, no. 1–2 (Spring–Summer, 1972): 5–142: “gyrene, gyrine, jireen, jyrene n (A.F. Moe, AS 37 (1962): 176-88, gives additional variant spellings but comes to no firm conclusion about origin; ATS 897.4; W & F ‘used at Annapolis c. 1925’) Marine 1894 US Naval Academy 68 ‘Gyrene ... A U.S. Marine.’ 1906 Nov Army & Navy Life 498 ‘In the remote period of the origin of the new tongue (ie, Annapolis slang) gyrene stood for marine.’ 1918 Ruggles 135 (USN) ‘Ah, shove off, peddle your war cry to the jireens.’... 1919 Jan 11 Lit Digest 50 (USA) ‘If yo’ finds a fellah with a rooster (“eagle”) on top of the earth on his hat he’s one of dem gyrenes.’ ...1932 Nicholson 209 (current USN) ‘Come back here, you lousy button-polishin’ gyrene!’ ... NYU student age 24 with army service in US 1969-70 ‘I've heard marines called “gyrenes” a few times.’” (The 1906 quote indicates that origin and etymology were unknown even then and possibly that the author had never himself heard the word used).
I owe this notion of a lavender institution to Dr. Katie Anania, Mary Beth Matalon, and Claire Ruud: “The specific plans for the queer community college— mostly this came about as the ‘over a beer’ brainchild of Mary Katherine Matalon, Claire, and myself. We generally joked a lot about this, in the context of other jokes about the job market. The idea came into formation in 2010”—From private correspondence with Anania. If these three had managed to open a campus-—by, perhaps, squatting the Roden Crater—would they remain free of the gyre? It seems a little basic, of me, to always insist that power will always reconstitute itself and that no transformation is possible. Go CRATERS GO!!!?
There is a sort of mad, uniform choreography to graduation (circa 1990s): the sun burns bright, synthetic tassel swing, shining trumpet, sunburnt undergrads, mirrored sunglasses, multiplying blonde and/or bald parent-investors, idle convertibles. Be you Miscreant, Flaneur, or Protester, consider a convertible as open-air urinal in crepuscular June. Is its hood a painter’s surface? Gently key or quickly pee.
Where exactly do these schools stow their e-waste while simultaneously vying for Sierra Club Magazine’s Top Green College Rankings?
You can’t disaggregate white supremacy from the supreme court, hence the emphasis of the slippage between two kinds of robed dress.
One of my (step) mothers tacks her Mount Holyoke—a subsidiary gyre—diploma to her shitter’s wall. Years ago, a professor visits me at this home. She is furious when exiting the toilet. She finds the certificate’s location deeply disrespectful given that it was awarded to a woman. I am confused at the time. Is there something I have misunderstood about authority, the ruling class and education? Is there something I do not understand about holders of vulvas that makes them exempt from any castigation of the gyre? In the same toilet, I peer down, but there is no enchanted vagina there, predicting a world healed by female professors. My own genitalia hangs there silent—no hairy soothsayer. My brain and mouth move together: I am no honoree, but I was employed by the gyre. I invited famous artists to come to the department. I blocked admission to some and that was called the admissions process. I graded humans. I had a modicum of authority and honor was fugitive. Like dedicated stoners, the artists AKA professors generally spaced out when it came to exposing their personal collusion with hierarchy at all levels of the process.
And to the honored artist: If this is what language does, what will a painting do? What can a painter do?
Do I include the freshly dead, Chuck Too Close, or do you tut tut “too soon”?! Do I include Helen Frankenthaler or do you grumble, “Too Dead!”
A surfactant is “a substance which tends to reduce the surface tension of a liquid in which it is dissolved.” The term comes into usage in the 1950s. PFAAS come into production in the 1940s. Surfactants are central to understanding the dynamics of ocean gyres.
It is a pure sort of bullshit when financially secure white heteronormative women dream that Georgia O’Keeffe existed in spite of capitalist economic forces; how a racialized monetary set up shapes their white desires is generally unplumbed. This one they hanker for (to be her or to be in her) is an image that hovers outside of the vagaries of earning and its compromises. Consider G O’K’s 1939 commercial deal with Dole Pineapple Company, where she ultimately paints a pineapple, shipped to her home, for an ad featured in Vogue. At that point, G O’K was stuck. She wanted their financial support as there seemed little independence without her open collaboration with a plantation. It is important to note that when G O’K accepted the commission, Hawaii's official status was as a territory. For a brief history of Dole’s role in the plantation system, overthrowing the Native Hawaiian Monarchy, and its colonial missionary ties, see →. / Can we pleasure in her painting when it has been reproduced in mug and potholder form? Can we acknowledge that the figure we wish to fuck is imbrocated in capitalism and still, orgasm? Can we admit that the figure we wish to imitate, in dress and home(s), lives in excess of earth’s ecological capacity, and still, can we come? / Consider pineapple, a colonial settler symbol of hospitality. Reconsider the Dole Pineapple; enough pineapple ingested, digested, metabolized and the taste of sperm is made more mild. Ditch the Dole pineapple, belts Bette Middler in my dreams. (She really did work on their plantations while in High School in Hawaii). Eat some pineapple because it contains quercetin and that helps fight the damages you sustained from COVID, reads the Long Haul COVID Forum. The sickos will juice hard—because political histories melt when they are desperate for sexual or whole body health.
Geoffrey Chaucer, Tales of Caunterbury/The Canterbury Tales, circa 1400. Written in Middle English. “Brown as a beyre/berry” appears twice, once referring to a man and another time referring to a horse.
Connected to the Victorian penchant for the ruin. William Fox Talbot making many mechanical errors as he attempts to create photography while touring the ruins of Italy in early nineteenth century Europe.
The “Glasgow smile” is a wound made by cutting, with razor, knife, or shard of glass, from both corners of the victim’s mouth all the way to each ear. It leaves a scar in the shape of a smile. This particular punishment was invented by warring Glasgow gangs in the industrial era but persists to the present, transmogrifying any face into a manic flesh version of the “Have A Nice Day” icon. One is also reminded of Jean Luc Nancy’s insistence that the vagina is not a wound, as the penis is not a knife. But in a capitalist gangland gutter, any mouth can be made a vagina-wound that apes the mandated smile of perpetual service, no matter what the stakes.
Dr. Beatriz Balanta, as scholar, sensitized me to smell as cultural object. Odor operates within aesthetics and has its own tools and terrain.
Meaning that the photograph is just one of many tools, in a long line of tools, to not so much document the real as to exit the real. Smell is another tool to exit the real—when the shit is too real, when the sweat is too real, synthetic scents enter and smother our animal life. And yet this can reverse itself, anxious mothers on health boards will note that their sick child smells of maple syrup and the symptom leads to diagnosis. A dog will eagerly smell his owner’s cancerous breath. Here the odor of death allows for death to be averted, to back away from a final exit. When does the photograph do the same—provide an escape hatch when death is everywhere?
I suddenly remember carefully watching a video in a gallery many years ago. A pile of candy in the corner to the left of it. Outside of the frame, we hear an older British male voice questioning and inside of the frame an ethereal little red head girl is replying. There is a heady content in her measured, sometimes halting, replies; but my enthusiasm for the Socratic process is dampened by the power dynamic—a Young Girl desperately attempting to please the Father. It was the 2000s in Los Angeles. There were palm trees. Here are oak trees. It is New England in the 2020s. Is my nonbinary child straining to gain the approval of their nonbinary parent? Initially, but then not. Shit breaks up the interrogation.
Forced Labor (Czech)
Quod, referring to prison quarters versus a collegiate quad.
Chemical shorthand for Meth
A discrete visitor at Ghost Ranch ... takes a simple photo of the painter’s favorite one, Bobo, staring out the car window. Funnily enough, the dog, too, is living inside capitalism and its images. This photo manages to reach across stupid luxury and hold my attention—this Bobo, with the chrysanthemum head.
Andy Warhol’s instant shot of G O’K and Carl Van Vechten’s print of her testify to that habit … of smelling out the money portrait, taking a picture of an opening, neigh, opportunity. They are trophy shots, made without pleasure in the (myth of) the independent genius crone subject or her deep dive into a doggy core. Warhol and Van Vechten are not scrapbooking; they are transactional. Drag it up on your own cracked screen. I don’t want to look again. She’s a total buck. She could be on a dollar, but I can’t spend her. G O’K goes camping with the Rockefellers in 1961; while visiting her dealer in Fort Worth, G O’K attends the Chow Chow club International National Specialty (1973); clever Warhol produces the G O’K Polaroid in keeping with what he understands about value … no punctum, all studium … which means that AWl corrals us in the doldrums of the image … the boredom of looking at famous artists instead of at good art—the windless doldrums of capitalist genealogies? Is he drolly exposing the beloved crone or just rote-ly dissecting the illusory sentimentality that gilds capitalism? Warhol’s turned the symbolic profile into a GW; persistent … it produces vast capital. Warhol’s GOK is listed at $27,000.