So I met a lovely young anarchist on
the way to Venice. I don't actually know if he was an anarchist but
it's a fabulous first line for my first blog post, eh? But yes,
lovely, young, and if not an anarchist then at the very least an
activist; he had the tattoos to prove it and his eyes still shone
with visions of mischief. But that was later...
I had arrived in Venice without a map.
I thought I had an app for a map but my apps weren't working, in fact
neither was my phone. I was completely in-apperable and it suddenly
struck me that I had no idea where I was supposed to be staying, or
how to get there, or how to find out where there was. Of course over
the course of the journey I had developed a relationship with the
young anarchist already. The sort you have with someone you've never
spoken to but who has happened to be sitting nowhere near you, reading a good book, at the same time as you, in several disparate locations – from The Bus Stop at
Derby train station to the Piazella Roma in Venice - over the past 5
hours. The three mini bottles of wine I had drunk on the way to
Venice assured me that we were basically best friends, we had a
history, we were fatally entwined together by a shared love of
precocious holiday reading and budget airlines. Brazened by the booze
and with a nod (or perhaps a staggering Kate Bush hair toss) to the
spirit of Venetian serendipity, I decided to ask him if he had a map.
Of course, being an anarchist, he
didn't have a map either. So I proposed we go to a bar for Spritz
and, in between desperate texts and emails to Kathy and his
girlfriend, through which I managed to establish a vague sort of plan
to meet Kathy 'at the Rialto Bridge in a bit', we – Lewis and I -
got to know one another, liked what we found out, and pledged to meet
again on the last day and travel home together.
The next night I met a lovely young
artist called Ed on the balcony of a beautiful Palazzo overlooking
the Grand Canal. What?! I'm only saying this shit cos it's true. No
doubt my next 2 years worth of blog posts will be stuff like 'one of
the kids headbutted me and then poured cereal milk all over the
carpet and then I cried', or 'I went out to look at the woman in the
moon and it felt like she was giving me dead eyes and I couldn't work
out what I'd done wrong and then I cried'; or 'I went into the garden
and this one flower had produced so much pollen that it had
overburdened itself and drooped over and I realised that all of
nature was a metaphor for the inevitable destruction implicit within
fecundity itself and then I cried'. So indulge me...
So I was on a balcony, drinking
prosecco and watching the setting sun bleach out the domed roof of
the Santa Maria della Salute (ahem) and I met this artist Ed, and
his lovely boyfriend Simon, and another wonderful man called Simon.
And they were ace. And over the next few days I massively gegged in
on their scene. It was incredible and we had so much fun and it felt
like I'd made friends for ever.
On the last day Ed and I were sitting
on some steps (I'd love to tell you where but I didn't have a map),
waiting for Simon while he went to some exhibition that I couldn't
get into, and who walked along but Lewis, the lovely young anarchist!
Venice is like that. We decided to all go for some food and some
Spritz and then we spent the next few hours wandering around, eating
gelatos, looking for coral and being gently educated by the
infinitely knowledgeable Simon. It was ever so dérive
and utterly wonderful.
At some point, conversation got around
to the US Military 'Call Me Maybe' youtube video, which I had never
heard of nor seen. A discussion ensued about whether it was a
consciously gay parody (Team Lewis) or whether it was unknowingly uber camp (Team Ed). Being
a massive perv, upon hearing all this talk of semi naked men prancing in front of a camera my interest was, as you might expect, piqued. So when
I got home, I mentioned it to John and we watched it. It is amazing
and if you haven't seen it then you should go and watch it now. It
turns out it is actually a response, 'a tribute', to a version by
Miami Dolphin's Cheerleaders, which you should also watch and which,
as a point of reference, goes some way in 'heterosexualising' it for
those that want it, but far from clears up the whole 'is it massively
gay?' issue.
(Video shows Dolphin Cheerleaders & US Military simultaneously but watch them separately if you're interested)
So after watching the videos with John
I was so hyped that I decided I needed to start a blog just so that I
could write about it. And look! I'm doing it! I spent the last hour
before I began writing this blog watching the videos one after the
other after the other after the other after the other. I decided I
would write a serious art history blog about it, on.... the
homosocial continuum: Walt Whitman's Guide To War?... the
contemporary omniscience of male gaze: the 'feminization' of (any and
all) sexual display?... the weird racial pairings going on between
the respective actors in the two versions (unless it's a really
gay bit – White Men Can't Grind?)... But then....
But then... Watching the US Military
version second time around, things started to get a bit sad. I got
distracted by a sort of weird, tugging melancholia; a low, insistent
hum droning along behind the sashays and lip-synching, the butt shots
and pec flexing. It was there in the bulky, unfathomable weaponry
around the soldier's waists; it was in the endless sand; in the
tanks; in the pitiful row of too-narrow camp beds; in a gun run up a
leg. It was the persistent, insistent signifiers of real life war.
And I started to think about how fucked things were for these guys,
so far, far away from their loved ones and so dissociated, so
expatriated from their 'real lives' (and yes, so, so subjugated to a
male, male gaze). I started to think how terribly, horribly sad it
was that they were out there, fighting for fuck knows what. Bored,
missing their loved ones (male and female), desperate to make contact, to stake a claim
for existence in the real(er) world of the internetz. Dying for someone
to Call Me Maybe. And then I cried.
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