Brainjackin: Francis Bacon Good

All cultures are an instance in a continuum of cultures stretching into the past and future as far in each direction as the term culture can be used to describe what was or will be happening there, and they flow into and out of each other geographically as well.  Parisian urban culture circa 2025 is not the same thing as Parisian urban culture circa 2022 (to the extent you can even draw a line around what constitutes Parisian urban culture).  Close, but not exactly, and the more years pass, the more different those instances become.

Why did I feel the need to open this article with that pretentious shit?  It’s preface to say that art students from one decade to the next will be enamored of different artists from their own past and present, but you can point to any given class and say “those guys sure loved (Artist X).”  Back when the fascist Futurists were saying they hate Goya, you could feel, in that hate, just how popular Goya must have been with the art students around them.  They were being contrarian, and what they chose to be contra must have been well-loved.

I’m told that in the late 80s – early 90s, Francis Bacon was huge with art schoolies.  I’ve seen some evidence of that in the works of my college professors and of my older cousin Dave.  What was going on there, with that moment of Bacon Love?

This artiste du jour thing may be less true of the 21st century, where culture has become much more balkanized.  Can’t think of specific artists that reigned over the schools my husband and I attended.  At the commercially oriented one where we met, possibly the biggest artistic influence was Jhonen Vasquez, but there were lots of people that were not on that page.  My husband also attended a fine art school in the same city, with a lot more rich kids.  What were they into?  I’d term it “contemporary urban art” – the kind of shit you’d see in Juxtapoz and High Fructose magazines – and again, I can’t think of one specific artist with outsized influence.

Shit, where was I going with this?

Fuckin’ Francis Bacon.  Not that one, this one.  I never would have become familiar with his art if not for my husband.  Not because my husband was in art school when I was in high school, but because he has always sought out intellectual enrichment, even as a child, and started learning about fine art way before he actually reached college.  That guy downloaded Eraserhead on a 14.4 modem before I bought my first computer.  (To be clear, we didn’t know each other until later, when he was an adult.  I’m not that creepy lol.)

So my husband knew the works of Francis Bacon.  I might have glossed over them in magazines and textbooks on rare occasions in the years before we met, but the memories never stuck.  His work did not fascinate me, because while I am attracted to goths, I am not quite a goth myself.  Flash-forward to the early days of our relationship, 2005-2006.  We were sharing the things we love, and I was properly introduced to this great artist.

Francis Bacon – seriously stop thinking of that one right fucking now – was an Expressionist in a time of Postmodernists.  Maybe not philosophically – I’m much less familiar with his words than with his visual creations – but in practice, he painted emotion with intensity and a Symbolist nod to the classic.  This was how the original late 19th century Expressionists worked.

If you see the writhing horror of his art, you might imagine it was painted with an torrent of quick brutal strokes.  My husband has seen one of these works in person and says this is clearly not the case.  His canvas is evenly covered.  Someone who attacks the canvas like a method actor will leave exposed little white dots of fabric, or have thick impasto with dubious structural integrity.  Mr. Bacon had a furious vision of his subject matter, but a controlled hand in rendering it.

This might be the only time some of you see his work, so I should choose something to put the best foot forward… eh, my work alarm goes off in seven and a half hours, so this’ll have to do.  His most famous painting, after a Velázquez pope portrait:

Scream all you want, man; no one here gets out alive.

I came into this article imagining I could find lovely hi-res pics of his work all over the internet and was sorely disappointed.  The availability of such things on my bookshelves was misleading.  Maybe someday I’ll upload some pics from the art books we have.

Anyway, if you need an perfect visual representation of your pain, and haven’t found the one artist who will make you feel understood, give this boy a look.  Francis Bacon good.

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Does Bébé Want to Fvck Glenn Danzig?

This article is patently facetious.  Of course it’s problematic – imagine such an article written by some bro about a woman and that is apparent – and of course the person in question is a real and entire-ass human being with thoughts and feelings beyond his public persona, and of course he is to all appearances not interested in getting with fat middle-aged queers, and this fat middle-aged queer is married and also not interested in getting with people who are not interested in getting with them.  Proceeding with these facts in the back of the mind…

There are important questions we must ask of ourselves in this life, to prepare for all eventualities and exigencies, no matter how unlikely.  Given the outsized presence the music and persona of Glenn Danzig have in my life, one may reasonably assume I am a fan.  And as a fan, that I might come into contact with the old man in some way, someday.  And if that should happen, would I want to fuck Glenn Danzig?

Consider, if you will, the appeal.  Danzig is a blues man, part of the long tradition of howlin’ about your supernatural sexual prowess and affinity for death and the devil.  Said Bo Diddley, “I walk 47 miles of barbed wire, I use a cobra snake for a necktie, I got a brand new house on the roadside Made from rattlesnake hide. I got a brand new chimney made on top, Made out of a human skull. Now come on take a walk with me Arlene, And tell me who do you love?”  Said Glenn Danzig, “Come wrap my love in your house of ice, Melt you down more than once or twice, Make you shake till worlds align, See your body tremble with the blood of fire.”

Danzig is buff.  I used to draw musclemans when I was a child, inspired by toys and images in cartoons.  That was the body of the cool and powerful.  Once upon a time, comic nerds strongly favored Glenn to play Wolverine.  The fact he is short was a note in favor – comics canon Wolverine is short and thick.  But I lost interest in muscles, especially the more I realized I wanted to get with men.  Some bi people want mans to be buff and womans to be soft, but I’m more like, everybody be soft now.  Still, it doesn’t necessarily repulse me, as long as they’re not popping every vein like they do on muscle magazines.

The main thing is the Dark Sexual Majesty.  Brooding intense guy will own you body and soul with his grand satanic gifts.  Get destroyed and do so gladly, to experience and to serve a lust more powerful than god.  Realistically, no way he’s that good at fucking.  People get a limited number of talents and he’s already got his share before the bedroom door is opened.  The idea, however, can itself serve as foreplay – prime one to enjoy something more than they otherwise would.

This image is ripe for mockery.  Some rude indie comix nerds made arguably homophobic hay with Henry & Glenn Forever, a series featuring Glenn and Henry Rollins as gay lovers.  Reportedly Mr. Danzig is not amused.  I hope this article, should it find his attention (do not bring it to his attention plz), does not hit him the same way.

Would I mock his arch-macho posture?  Never.  Maybe a wee bit.  Let’s talk about that bassist from Hole, Melissa Auf der Maur.  She bought the act, and cut an extremely cringe-inducing duet with him.  The plot is about how cowboy bad boy Glenn shot her dad, but she’s cool with it, because he’s too sexy.  Like The Quick and The Dead, if Sharon Stone gave up on vengeance and boned Gene Hackman instead.  Does Melissa always sing like that, or was she trying to play the role of a pubescent girl?  Glenn played the part fine, if the part existing in the first place could be considered fine, but I dunt know what in tarnation Melissa was doing there.

So it works!  I could suspend my disbelief for it.  What other considerations are there?

Age.  He is now seventy years old – about my father’s age.  Looks a bit like Donald Rumsfeld with a facelift and chronic depression.  But I’m feeling my age and have always been cool with much older partners, so no prob there.  He once had a song about how he doesn’t want anybody to bar his entry to the afterlife when he’s “tired of being alive.”  Let’s hope he isn’t tired yet.

Height.  Some guys are smol, and try to make up for it by getting swole.  The bodybuilding can’t help but look napoleonic, as did his practice of escrima.  This seems Italian to me.  Glenn is Italian as hell, despite stagenaming himself after a place in Poland.  In college I had two professors of visible Italian heritage with Italian-ass Italian surnames.  One looked more northern, with the gold blond hair and impish lil’ napoleon face.  The other looked more southern, dark skinned and prominently schnozzed.  Cute fellas, but tiny.  Didn’t see them pounding HGH flintstones chewables, but different people get by in different ways.  This doesn’t bother me.  Nonetheless, his old drummer Chuck Biscuits could probably chuck him for distance, and it looks like that bothers him.

Erotica.  Glenn puts his erotic imagination into the world for all of us to see.  Part of the blues thing, but he goes farther.  Weird stuff.  He wore black vinyl kitty claws for one music video, a gimp suit for another.  Didn’t he have a video where he drooled on a lady, like we were supposed to think that was hot?  I think he did.  It’s been a minute.  This is all fine.  Sex nerds are fine.

But he also publishes erotic comic books.  I dunno if he has written or done art for any, but he publishes them.  This led to a wacky situation in my life.  Early in my relationship with my husband, he and his mother felt the need to get me christmas gifts that I’d enjoy, something personal to me, even tho there’s not many material things I want at all.  They knew I liked Danzig, so they got me Danzig things.  My husband crocheted me a Glenn amigurumi that was truly epic, while his mom just bought seemingly random shit from his online stores.

That included two comics, one being a Devilman translation / reprint, and the other being a kinda disgusting erotic comic.  The dudes all had summer sausage schlongs and no balls.  I get it; people who aren’t attracted to men often think of balls as disgusting, but their absence was felt.  My mother in law is christian.  She did not look at these gifts before wrapping them, and I did not show them to her after I opened them up.  (holy hell he actually made a movie out of that foolery, looks terrible)

High school Bébé wasn’t over the “musclemans is cool” thing yet, and bought his image.  Long black hair, elvis sideburns, and giant meat titties.  What’s not to love?  I sometimes drew rpg characters to look like that.  The songs can still work for me.  Dude is a very good songwriter.  The Misfits without him were such a bad joke that they found jeezis.  Disturbing.  But yeah.  I was totally into Danzig, at the same time I was going big for grunge.  There was room in my heart for earnest heroin boys and meaty satanic posers alike.  I contains multitudes that I would be down to fuck.

And where am I now?  If I accidentally’d into the boudoir of His Satanic Majesty?  Yeah, I’d hit that.  But I’d probably end up on top.

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I keed, I keed!  Is joak, da?  By the way, If the title of this post made you remember something from Blue Velvet, congratulations and apologies.  Have a nice day.

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Delicious Monster Salad

A “fruit salad” to amurricans is a pile of fruit flavored gelatin or whipping cream with a bunch of random bite-sized fruits or fruit chunks within.  The gelatin version, like all the gelatinous culinary horrors of yesteryear, were a kind of display food.  The ideal was a shining mound of shaped gelatin, within which you could see delicate wonders suspended in an aeternal faerie danse.

There are images in art that evoke this visual to me.  Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, and other works in that genre, the design of tanks at aquariums, the hordes of winged babies in El Greco and other baroque art, the hordes of ghouls and skeletons and yokai in horror comic art or that “Night on Bald Mountain” part in Fantasia, toy and candy vending machines, sets of action figures and dolls… You’ll notice this getting away from art into the artificial.  Piles of trash, gardens, tide pools, roadside puddles or culverts with floating litter…

When I was a child I’d dream sometimes of what it would be like to be underwater.  Can’t swim, can’t breathe, gonna die.  I know I’d visited a aquarium or two and I believe I was around eleven years old when I read Jaws.  Of course there were fish everywhere, and some of those fish were sharks.  They would eventually eat me alive, or dead if I’d been lucky enough to drown by that point.

There was a time around age ten when I would be awake half the night imagining monsters into every ambiguous shape of laundry or toys on the floor, seeing the Twilight Zone airplane gremlin in every rainy window, imagining a tall movie monster in the closet or any given hiding space.  I was living in a gelatin salad of monsters.

I suspect it was precipitated by watching cheap scifi and horror movies and TV shows.  I do not know what managed to end it.  Maybe whatever parent had to come give me the business managed to humiliate me hard enough that it broke the spell.  I don’t even know how long that was happening.  Was it weeks?  Months?  Pretty sure it was less than a year, in all.

Anyway, it’s all in good fun now.  Let Halloween never end.

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The Lover Speaks About the Monsters

Note:  I’ve been queuing serious posts as part of my Hope Series for 6:30 AM Eastern time, and a frivolous one like this for 9:30 AM as a chaser.  I mention this because you may have missed previous entries.  There is one per day for every day from 11/6-today, whereupon the series ends.  Check ’em out.

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my husband turned me onto this weird neglected 80s band.  they got on the label of that eurhythmics dude, got as much promotion as anybody could hope for at that level, but never got anywhere.  they probably made a bank full of money when annie lennox covered this one tho.  the whole album this one is on, it’s kind of a ride.  a concept album?  i just love the pretentious dracula weirdness.  i really like it a lot, i don’t know how to express the feeling.  also, a bare booty ass on yewchoob, because sufficiently film grained.  enjoy.

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