[retrocgads]

[shrimptin]

[mockwa]

tile design

[walterwhitemediocrity]

the two moods

[thestateonmtv]

how did u get such a good sense of identifying what is and isn't camp

i mean ok im not An Expert. and camp is just a feeling.. its a TENDER feeling you might say (susan sontag would say this: https://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Sontag-NotesOnCamp-1964.html: 

but i always link to susan sontag bc…. very little has been written on Camp in terms of what it actually is! its hard to define. Its just a feeling. But i really recommend reading this vulture article: http://www.vulture.com/2017/03/why-are-so-many-female-projects-called-camp.html. 

It delves into why so many female led projects that aren’t camp, get labled camp. 

“Campiness, as a style and sensibility, comprises a set of widely appreciated characteristics: frivolity, a celebration of the ‘so bad it’s good,’ the overwrought, the histrionic, what Sontag calls ‘failed seriousness.’” Camp often walks the line between embracing its subjects and ridiculing them, or at the very least treating them with emotional distance. It’s something you can love and even admire, but never take seriously — it’s just a bit too much. In essence, camp is an aesthetic that privileges stylization over content, artifice over naturalism, and the visceral over emotional truth.

I think The People Vs. OJ Simpson is Camp but Feud is not camp. Sex and The City 2 is camp. John Waters is Camp. American Horror Story is Camp. Hannibal is Camp. Jackie is not Camp. The musical Cats! is camp. The character Prior Walter from Angels is Camp but the play itself is not. Little Shop of Horrors is Camp. Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard is probably The most iconic Camp character of all time, thats not from a John Waters movie. Mother! is an extremely twisted Camp. Can I entirely explain this? not really. 

Seph if you read this i really wish your blog with the tag on Camp was still around it was genius. 

I think it just comes down to individuals but also arguing with your gay friends over whether a piece of art is camp or not is part of the fun! Just like read all these pieces, watch a lot of gay art and come to your own conclusions. 

[jackisreallycool]

You’ll know if something is camp if the gays can take screenshots of it and make memes out of it.

[lesbianartandartists]

Catherine Lord, To Whom It May Concern, 2011

Just as saying the words, “I do thee wed,” causes a marriage to come into being, putting into print, inside a book, the words, “I make you a gift of the words I have written,” causes that statement to be true. It tenders to another, in advance, the very object that the reader holds in her hands. It makes the gift upon the material that makes writing, and the gift itself, possible. Book dedications are gifts of labor and love. To dedicate a book is to hide the private in plain view, to splay intimacy upon a sheet of paper for any and all to see. This status, somewhere between public and private, is perfectly suited to the creation and transmission of “queer” culture. Coded, sly, witty, and polemical, these gifts turn queer into a verb. They queer “culture.”

No database indexes the dedications in the library of ONE Archive. The dedications used in To Whom It May Concern were found by a manual search. The books that contain the dedications have been returned to their shelves without recording bibliographic details. Information about authors, book titles and dates can be retrieved only by chance, or by another laborious search.

source

[lesbianartandartists]

Carrie Yamaoka, The Well of Loneliness (1991)

[queermuseum]

A Google Map of Brooklyn's Lost Queer History

“I felt that blush in my chest as we talked stupid talk never quite revealing our queerness to each other but somehow wordlessly generating volumes of desire like some kind of sublanguage that makes you want to splash into it even with all its tensions.” 

― David Wojnarowicz, The Waterfront Journals

A BLUSH IN A CHEST

You wouldn’t know it from most history books, but Brooklyn’s queer history is just as rich and colorful as Manhattan’s. But perhaps because it was working class, Brooklyn hasn’t always gotten the same respect. Until now.

For the Pop-Up Museum’s “On the (Queer) Waterfront” exhibit, artist and historian Sarah G. Sharp took to Google Maps to create an interactive digital tour of some of Brooklyn’s most potent queer historical sites — from the WWII lesbian ship yards and the cruising grounds of Vinegar Hill to the place where Leaves of Grass was printed, and where ACT UP demonstrators closed the Brooklyn Bridge. If you thought New York gay history was all Stonewall and Broadway, it’s time to take a stroll. 

View A Blush in the Chest: Queer Poets, Workers, Radical and Freaks in a larger map

Sharp hopes to open the map to contributors, not just to mark the headline grabbing stories or protests and poets, but the “soft histories” of the way gay life was lived by private citizens.

(You might also want to pair it with The Impalpable Sustenance, a 40 minute “audio excursion” in and around the Brooklyn Promenade created by Teamworks Unlimited.)

We hope that the map— like this spring's Google Map of the Lost Gay Bars of San Francisco — will inspire others to begin mapping their own neighborhoods, so this crucial history won’t be lost.

– Mike 

ABOUT SARAH G. SHARP

Sarah G. Sharp is an artist with a research-based practice whose interests include alternative social histories, language, place, intuitive processes and craft. She is the recipient of a Getty Library Research  Grant and a BRIC Arts Media Fellowship. Exhibitions include The Aldrich Museum, CT, The Hampden Gallery at UMass Amherst, Frederieke Taylor Gallery and Stephan Stoyanov Gallery, NY. Sarah is the co-founder of Cohort artist’s collective. She holds an MFA and an MA from Purchase College and is faculty in the Art Practice MFA Program at School of Visual Arts in New York. Sarah lives and works in Brooklyn. www.sarahgsharp.net.

[alxlee]

Pre-starting class clearout

It turns out that for my upcoming semester I have to keep a research blog! how interesting. I wonder if my habits on this blog will be at all useful. I went to melbourne as a pre-semester cleanse; i read a terrible scifi book called Debatable Space and 1800s fantasy epic Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. It was... good. I haven’t entirely figured out how i feel about it but i read all 1000 pages of it so i guess it worked on me. Maybe it’s just because the last good book/big one i read was Fingersmith and i was still in an 1800s kind of Mood. (please read fingersmith. it is so.... good...)

I saw so many good exhibitions in Melbourne! Maybe that should be another post. 

Misc

Is Your Brain Really Necessary?  I am Obsessed with this. Obsessed

Design

Are Home Renovations Necessary?

Artificial intelligence could identify gang crimes—and ignite an ethical firestorm

I don’t necessarily think that we shouldn’t build tools for the police, or that we should,” Lemoine said (commenting, he specified, as an individual, not as a Google representative). “I think that when you are building powerful things, you have some responsibility to at least consider how could this be used.”

GG LEMOINE SILICON VALLEYS ONLY TECHNOETHICIST*

*I’m joking

Social studies/lgbt+

Australian Lesbian Artists of the Early Twentieth C.  such juicy goss!!!

A Serious Man - I was pulled into a Hating Jordan Peterson tunnel for a short period of time, and while most of it was useless and frustrating, reading closely engaged critiques that are well grounded in theory and philosophy has been good for my own learning. Absolutely frothing for zizek vs peterson.

Queering outer space 

I’m looking at Musk’s terraforming language from the position that Mars is already queer. Remaking Mars in Earth’s image, and uncritically assuming this is a great idea, is exactly the kind of process that queering works against. Nuking mars is an unqueer thing to do because it uses the model of razing and rebuilding, cutting it all down to make it possible to build a normative landscape on top of the ruins. We need to think about the ways that terraforming is not always a utopian idea, but can also be seen as a violent imposition of earthly normativity on landscapes elsewhere, a colonialization of existing queer-otherworld landscapes.

Maybe it’s condescending to say i love Weird deployments of queer theory but urgh! i do! i love the comforting feeling of being amongst a recognisable, if not always coherent and justifiable, theoretical position. gay space communism!!!!!!

[alxlee]

Queering the Map  is still down :( :( :( :( 

[queerasfact]

This is secret code used by 19th-century diarist Anne Lister to record her lesbian relationships! And underneath, and sample of her diaries. Anne wrote 6600 pages, or almost 4 million words of these diaries, giving us a treasure trove of information about her life, and one of the only first-hand accounts we have of female same-sex relationships in the 19th century.

Now you too can communicate with your friends in secret lesbian code!

To learn more about Anne, check out our episode and follow-up Christmas special!

[alxlee]

Getting dressed in the 18th C for a Lady, vs Getting ready in the 18th C for a working woman

[alxlee]

[alxlee]

2017 clearout

I am months behind on my journal and it is stressing me out; i havent been using this blog as much as i want to because i’m stuck feeling behind/like i should be dealing with stuff in my drafts. my plan for 2018 involves allowing myself to Not Remember absolutely everything and also Not Record absolutely everything, which will be hard. I am trying to preemptively narrow my focus onto honours related reading/thinking/doing and also encouraging haphazard recording, because then i will be much more likely to keep up with it. (i currently have over 100 tabs of chrome open on my phone, including articles i’ve meant to list here from months ago. free me) 

Design content (about design+related fields and/or design work):

A Crash Course In UX Design Research 

Terrain Incognita (puzzle/game/ritualisation of city and geography) 

Mapping and body diagrams by Minjeong An

A Visual Introduction into Machine Learning 

Visualising Representations: Deep Learning and Human Beings

Visualizing MNIST: An Exploration of Dimensionality Reduction 

Census 2016: This is Australia as 100 People

Mark Lombardi’s work + data visualisation 

A Year of Google and Apple Maps

Idea Mag

Re: Collection - Australian Graphic Design 

Oz Magazine Archives

History of Design in Australia 

Design, but sliding closer to social studies:

Green Honey - Visualising data of colour in different languages

There’s No Such Thing as a Free Watch (+ other Jenny Odell work)

Concrete clickbait: next time you share a spomenik photo, think about what it means

Social studies:

Silicon Valley Is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fear

Detroit’s Grassroots Internet Network (I have been thinking about this ever since i first watched it. it is AMAZING. Motherboard is an amazing series!!!)

Intersectional Identity and the Path to Progress

The Myth of the Barter Economy

A Defense of Abortion

Life is Peachy: Nu Metal in America

Specifically LGBTQI+:

Choice and Chance (This is about the Pulse Nightclub shooting, and is therefore very upsetting)

Postscript: Mexico’s Majestic Lesbian Chanteuse, Chavela Vargas

The love that dare not squeak its name (Stuart Little is Gay; iconic piece of pop culture analysis) 

Magic/storytelling research for an ongoing zine project

Folkloristics

Aarne-Thompson Classification Systems

Example of folklore classification  using the ATU system 

The dual meaning of Charivari (1)  (2) 

Rosicrucianism 

 Misc

Taming the steamroller: how to communicate compassionately with non-native English speakers

Public Enemy

Remote Control: Tonya Harding, Nancy Kerrigan, and the spectacles of female power and pain

[hakobore]

comic for a zine~!

[worb]

[ponyboyfaceshopping]

Wearing Gay History began as a graduate student project at George Mason University in the Fall of 2014. Using Omeka, an open source, archival web-publishing platform created at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, doctoral student Eric Gonzaba digitized the entire t-shirt collection of the Chris Gonzalez Library and Archives in Indiana in an effort to bring attention to LGBT history of “fly over” country. In January 2015, Wearing Gay History began expanding to include other textile collections across the country. The site currently includes shirts from most of the 50 states and over 25 different countries.