Out There
Why should I, or anyone, have been surprised that a few years back, Yoko Ono was number one on the dance-club charts -- with a gay redo of her and John's Every Man Has a Woman Who Loves Him? It was a nice story: a young friend had told Yoko that his once-hip mom cited those old lyrics when the boy came out to her, so Yoko gave him some post-hip ammunition (Every Man Has a Man...) to sing back.
Some of us think of Yoko Ono primarily as a talented, well-funded Fluxus artist; some as an avant-garde screecher; some as a mythic has-been, the demon who broke up the Beatles. How can any cultural critic know exactly which reader, listener or viewer is out there? Pleasing a shape-shifting audience would seem to be impossible, especially when the culture also won't hold still.
During most of my professional life I've been a citizen of two different worlds: the fine and the popular arts. When I was a restaurant critic, many of my arts friends teased me about my frivolous hobby (though no one refused a dinner out). My food friends couldn't fathom why I'd occasionally speed up a meal to go to a gallery opening or make a curtain. The two camps were baffled equally by my lifelong attraction to barrel-bottom TV, tear-churning beach reads, coming-out potboilers: cultural junk food. And real junk food, too.
Pleasure, I told them, was my reason. Material pleasure, I discovered, is never entirely physical: it always latches on to emotions, memories, ideas. And the pleasure of thought is never entirely cerebral: it invariably comes with heart and skin attached.
So that's my starting point. Did I mention that I love stories, and TV remains our narrative cornucopia? That eating is culture? That I'm a gay man who has no trouble getting angry about what is -- and isn't -- out there?
Categories:
Blogroll
More a Ritz Cracker than a roll, but five for the moment:
Save the Deli
ARTicles
The Gay Recluse
Artopia
KERA: Arts + Culture
AJ Blogs
AJBlogCentral | rssculture
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Andrew Taylor on the business of arts & culture
rock culture approximately
Rebuilding Gulf Culture after Katrina
Douglas McLennan's blog
Art from the American Outback
John Rockwell on the arts
Jan Herman - arts, media & culture with 'tude
dance
Apollinaire Scherr talks about dance
Tobi Tobias on dance et al...
media
Jeff Weinstein's Cultural Mixology
Martha Bayles on Film...
music
Greg Sandow performs a book-in-progress
Howard Mandel's freelance Urban Improvisation
Focus on New Orleans. Jazz and Other Sounds
Exploring Orchestras w/ Henry Fogel
Kyle Gann on music after the fact
Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...
Greg Sandow on the future of Classical Music
Norman Lebrecht on Shifting Sound Worlds
publishing
Jerome Weeks on Books
Scott McLemee on books, ideas & trash-culture ephemera
theatre
Elizabeth Zimmer on time-based art forms
visual
Public Art, Public Space
John Perreault's art diary
Lee Rosenbaum's Cultural Commentary
Tyler Green's modern & contemporary art blog

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