The Body Transformed

Friday night—watched first 3 episodes of the series Atlanta. Good script but uneven acting. GH hated it. The black body as brute and brutalized, as tender and tenderness.

Saturday night—Gina Apostol read from INSURRECTO for Second Saturdays. She began a little unsteadily, as I've seen her do at other readings, and then she settled into it and delivered a passionate voicing of the many characters in her novel. The novel restores my faith in the literary form, in its capacity to revisit the atrocities of history and not merely to recount them, but to re-view them. The colonizer is in me just as I am in my colonizer. There is an essential mystery to the large-scale horrors of history, just as there is to final act of the suicide.

Sunday—The Met's "Epic Abstraction" show was a big disappointment. After two gigantic rooms of Pollocks and Rothkos, one of this and one of that, in a misguided attempt to show the influence of Abstract Expressionism beyond American shores and to be tokenistically inclusive. Much better was the Jewelry: The Body Transformed show. Beautiful stuff from all over the world at different time periods, organized in thematic categories, such as the Regal Body, the Divine Body, and Redefining Resplendence (for avant-garde revisionism). There was the Seductive Body, but no Erotic Body. I guess the show was too PG to show cock rings. The spiral as the form of reconciling contradictions.

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