Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs

I skimmed through the first chapter of “Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs” today, which was entitled “This is Emo.” The author begins by saying he will never be satisfied by a woman and women he finds desirable will never be satisfied by him. He discussed how people find fake love in media, and examples are “When Harry Met Sally” and Woody Allen. The first because people refer to falling in love with one’s best friend as a “Harry Met Sally” deal and the Woody Allen figure (of being goofy) enables nerdy men to get with beautiful women.

He also stated the most dynamic and nonretarded Americans are aware of this notion of fake love.

Has mass media set up impossible notions and ideals about romance? Romance in the realm of fictionalized media and “real life” is saturated with sex images in today’s ever expanding visual culture. Romance and sex is intertwined, especially in a social environment such as undergrad college.

Maybe this is the reason why Stephanie Myers, author of the Twilight Saga, has become so successful despite flaws and lack of crisp description in her prose, her “style” if she has one. Because she latches on young female teenage notions of desire and lust and the constructed “ideal” of a perfect man.

A perfect man, or a perfect woman for that matter does not exist. Yet it is difficult for me to emotionally absorb this as I can in logic.

Art and Space

Vis art is so political, even without words. If music is too, and writing is for sure, and aesthetics is everything to me, then politics is a much more loaded word that infusse into every aspect, facet of life and “the social.” Perhaps something political happens or is implicated even in the simple act of grocery shopping, hopping on the school shuttle.

Art is everything, art is nothing. The ability to write stories and poems may not apply to a job, but developing this intrinsic and intense ability has changed me forever. The most memorable sentence from the Dadaism article perhaps is that emphasis should shift from the art object to the personality of the artist behind the work.

Dadaism's critical view, that people put art and its beauty on a pedestal, reminds me of what Laura Mulvey says in her famous article on Visual Cinema and Pleasure, that “analyzing beauty destroys it.”