Godammit, I’m Mad!

I was innocently reading a thing about the Beats in NYC, when I came across the name Genesis P-Orridge.

What a story! Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is an artist/provocateur who decided to turn himself into his wife, a dominatrix known at Lady Jaye. They spent $200,000 on surgery and other procedures, in an effort to turn themselves into identical beings who would then metaphorically become a Third Person. Or something.

Lady Jaye died before the project was completed but P-Orridge now refers to him/her self as “we.”

Read more here, or google his/her/their name to find more images. Or maybe everyone already knows about this, just like the ponies. No one ever tells me anything!

Neither do I!  But a whole lot of people are working hard at this very moment to perfect their gait and spruce up their saddles in preparation for some exciting “ponyplay.”

Why am I the last one to find out about stuff like this?? My husband showed me an article in the LA Weekly about a 50 year old woman who dresses up like a pony and makes a good living at it. She goes to crazy pony events where ponies and masters hope to hook up, and others where the ponies compete for awards.

Listen, I understand role-playing. Naughty schoolgirl, fine. Cantering around with a bit in my mouth and a tail in my butt, I’m just not feeling it.

Here are some hooves you can buy….”Nice look, clip-clop sound when used on the floor.”

What the fuck is wrong with people, you know? Life is so difficult and complicated and so easy to screw up, why try to live it as a fake pony?

Nearly two years ago, I brought up the subject of antinatalism here, and the arguments that ensued in the comments thread were impassioned, long-winded, and hysterically funny.

I’ve just discovered that the argument about antinatalism is still going strong, so if you missed it, check up on it here and here. I think the proponents of this belief system are not only wrong but tragically unglued. They appear to be desperately trapped in an endless loop of faulty logic, with no evident escape.

Enjoy!

In the current New Yorker, there is a long profile of the performance artist Marina Abramovic that caused me to wonder: Is my life actually Art?

Abramovic has been provoking and shocking people for thirty years. Next week, MOMA is hosting a retrospective of her work, with actors performing some of her most famous “pieces.” That alone is controversial; even her former collaborator and lover, Uwe Laysiepen, thinks it’s fundamentally dishonest to recreate performance art.

Most of Abramovic’s art has involved subjecting herself to pain and humiliation (a genre called ordealism.) Reading about it, you can’t help but feel that this art is beyond parody. My favorite piece is the one where she scrubbed a roomful of rotting, maggot-infested cow bones on her hands and knees, sobbing while video’s of her parents were projected on the walls of the “space.”

In another early piece, she stood still while the audience was offered a wide array of implements with which to torment her.

At MOMA, she will mount a work called “The Artist is Present,” in which she will sit still at a table for ten hours a day, staring into space, throughout the retrospective. Audience members may choose to sit opposite her at the table.

Here is the thing: I personally sit staring into space for MORE THAN TEN HOURS A DAY! I never thought of this as Art, but now I’m mulling it over. Maybe it is Art,  a sort of confrontation with time and eternity, a refusal to interact with gainful employment, and therefore a statement about the subjugation of of modern Man, I mean Women.

Read the article in the New Yorker if you possibly can. It’s a transformative experience that doesn’t even require you to get up off your ass!