Skip to main content

Reply to "Wigstock 2003 and post-Wigstock events"

Two of the recent points talked about here; underground vs. prominence for an artist, and Sweetie's luscious bitching about the 'demise' of the EV as a kind of freeforall zone: both have to do on a certain level with adversity. I think there is a not so subtle imbalance now that has to do with a kind of, how to say, 'expiration date'. Intitially people who ran the spaces in the EV were committed to being way underground but the mentality about this has changed quite drastically with the newer artists who are very much oriented to publicity and visibility on the scene. Lois Griffith from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe read a very poignant and tough poem in the park specifically about what she said were the "outlaws" who really used to characterize the neighborhood in her view of it. People who thrived on and actually contributed to their own adversity, and whose art was defined by it. Now what makes the EV more difficult to live in is exactly what Sweetie rails against, its being so washed out and cleansed, yet that too, for me at least, as a creative person, is another form of adversity that really leaves me, perhaps in, yes, a perverse way, smiling and quietly saying to myself a sarcastic quote from Aesop, "Please don't throw me in the briar patch." I profoundly miss the very healthy collection of scrappy, defiant venues and their populace that were here. However, I have not had any trouble staying underground, non-prominent, saying with my creative activites exactly what I want, to the extent the prominence-givers and publicity outlets are scared to deal with it. I never really had much interest in the deep aesthetic resignation that has a creative person cop to making the mainstream happy, the pessimism that is selfish, lighthearted entertainment that will just have one become a puppet in the White Order's zoo. I think the whole festival showed a heavy ambivalence about just these points. Wigstock this time may have been the lesbian/gay/trans artists throwing a bone to the audience but bite my ass if I'm wrong, a lot of it was offered up with the wonderful smirk about how this was just a mere pale taste of what one could have had if you weren't so naive, stultified, and just plain late. Oh, and by the way, my next gig will be on the uptown F train platform at the Second Avenue stop sometime this weekend. HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
Last edited {1}
×
×
×
×