Archive for March, 2011
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This comic is based partially on a conversation that was part of the reason why I decided to draw the boy from Santa Cruz I’ve been writing about in a Caravaggio homage that I drew a while ago, and which can be seen HERE.
The connections and associations of that image for me, though, are a little bit more complicated, but I don’t think there’s a point to spelling them out completely, since one of the things I like about it is leaving it open to interpretation, and hopefully meaning different things to different people based on their own life experiences. The Michelangelo statue that I reference here is one that I like because of that sort of ambiguity. I haven’t read too many people referring to the old man in the Victory stature as a self-portrait of Michelangelo, but that’s what it’s always seemed to be to me, even if in an emotional way rather than a literal way. The old man does look quite a bit like Michelangelo, though, who was around fifty years old when he made the statue, and also around the point in his life when he was having a relationship with a younger man whose role in his life is often debated by people talking about Michelangelo. People who like to deny or downplay Michelangelo’s homosexuality like to cast his relationship with Tomasso dei Cavalieri as one of friendship and admiration, which it obviously was, but like to turn Michelangelo’s religion-themed comments about the beauty of the male body that God created into a denial that Michelangelo had anything other than an aesthetic appreciation for those bodies. Michelangelo wrote about 300 occasionally erotic-themed sonnets devoted to his “friend” Tomasso and, while I live in San Francisco and know some pretty metrosexual heterosexual guys, not a lot of them write 300 romantically-tinged sonnets for their bromance buddies and consider it all to be about their straight, manly appreciation of God’s creation.
The fact is that attitudes toward sexuality have evolved and changed as human society has in the time since Michelangelo, and whether or not Michelangelo would have considered himself gay in a way that matches up with the modern ideas about that, there’s an obvious sexual undercurrent to a lot of his work. People who like to downplay that are also eager to point out supposed relationships he had in life with women, but he also chose to go his whole life without being married or having children, and if you look at his paintings of women and his paintings of men, it doesn’t take much to figure out where he was looking. Irving Stone in The Agony and the Ecstasy, which is a good novel, by the way, goes to some pretty elaborate lengths to explain the spiritual nature of a man’s obsession with other mens’ bodies, but those rationalizations always say more about the time in which the author of them lives than they do about the time in which Michelangelo did.
The reason I go on about all that is that one of the reasons that I think Michelangelo’s work has endured the way it has is that it seems to be very often a vehicle for personal expression for him, whether he was making the tomb of some crazy Pope or whatever else, he always seemed to manage to put forth an enormous amount about his own life experiences, his own joys and sadness. The way that his sculptures are often partially rough are almost unfinished toward their bases is in some cases deliberate, and a very ahead of his time and bold way to almost show the figures breaking themselves free out of the marble rock from which they came, and with the revelation of that transformative experience they say a lot about what it felt like for Michelangelo to go through the process of creating the statues, and what he felt like he was doing by taking the raw materials of the earth and transforming them into something that could communicate what he felt to be beautiful.
That’s part of what I find so poignant about a statue with an older man who looks close to Michelangelo’s age, and that man’s relationship to a subject that has a lot in common with the subject of many of the things that Michelangelo chose to create. It’s about the man’s relationship to beauty, and to creation, and to the desires that govern us for a large part of our lives. That’s why people who resist the sexualization of the statue are completely missing the point. They think that acknowledging the sexual tension between the two subjects in the statue somehow adds something “dirty” to it, or puerile, or reduces the aesthetic perfection. Of course, it does exactly the opposite, and those knee-jerk reactions to it are denying the universal themes of the work that could actually hold great personal meaning for the people denying them, but instead they get hung up on the gay thing. That’s too bad, ’cause the gay thing is there whether they want it to be there or not and, like I was saying above, the reaction about the idea says more about the people reacting than it does at all about Michelangelo or his art.
That all said, one of the reasons that I bring up the Michelangelo statue is to show what I feel are the universal themes of the Caravaggio David and Goliath painting that I referenced in the drawing of the boy from Santa Cruz that I link to up above.
This comic I’ve posted today is meant as a part of the longer storyline of me dating that boy, and eventually it’ll probably, or hopefully, become clear why the drawing I did of him in the Caravaggio pose was something I chose to do. People don’t seem to deny the sexual nature of a lot of Caravaggio’s work, because you just can’t. Michelangelo has some sort of place in peoples’ mind as kind of this benevolent great master, which of course, he is, but somehow with him the gay thing seems to be a taint for people, whereas with Caravaggio, people seem inclined to view the whole rebellious, bad boy artist thing as part of his mystique and appeal. Really, they lived less than a century apart, and one of the reasons their art looks so different is simply that they were both geniuses who took what they did leaps and bounds ahead of anybody who had done it before them. The truth is that they both lived too long ago for us to really know with any certainty all that many details of their sex lives, but one thing that I see in common is how personal the expressions that they seemed to get through in their art are. Caravaggio, though, seems to have more of a sense of humor about himself sometimes, choosing, as opportunities for self-portraits, and ill drunk Bacchus and a boy sitting in the middle of a small band of boys that he obviously thought were attractive, playing instruments, and with a cupid behind them also in the painting. That one is the painting I did an homage to a while ago.
I love Michelangelo, but what I really love about Caravaggio is that when he wanted to paint a boy he wanted to fuck, that’s what he did, he painted a boy he wanted to fuck, and while there are any number of levels of symbolism and statements to the way that he chose to do it, you don’t stop to wonder if he was stressing out about eternal hellfire the whole time.
That’s the painting in which Caravaggio did a self-portrait of himself as Goliath’s head. The story of David and Goliath was obviously something that was returned to a whole lot of times by painters and sculptors for a very long time, and one of the reasons is that the symbolism of the story is so powerful and can be applied to so many things. A lot of times the story was used as a patriotic metaphor, or as a moral which applied to battles and assured armies that god was on their side, but at its most simple level it’s a proud, assured youth who is victorious because he’s endowed with the skills and physical perfection necessary to what he’s accomplishing. Michelanglo’s David is probably the most famous statue of David, and also probably one of the most homoerotic ones, but one of the reasons that it’s so much more universally appealing to people than, say, films starring Brent Corrigan, is that you can take it innocently, as an admiration of pride, assurance and psychical perfection in a context that is an affirmation of the value and beauty of human life. And it is all those things. Just because Michelangelo probably got hard a whole lot of times when he was carving it doesn’t mean that the other meanings aren’t valid too. That’s one of the things that makes it great art. And one of the reasons I really love Caravaggio’s David and Goliath paintings is that you can successfully take any number of meanings from them, too. There’s a melancholy to his David, and he also plays on the childish innocence, and in some of the versions his squeamishness or repulsion about either the person that he just killed, or the fact that he just killed a person. The fact that Caravaggio did a self-portrait as Goliath’s head in one of the paintings is, when you find out whose head it is, a great joke. It’s also, once you go a bit deeper, something melancholy or sad, and he might be talking about his own defeat, his own frustration with life or with his own sex life, who knows.
Alright, here it is, the final strip in the Boy From Santa Cruz epic. I don’t think I’m gonna pontificate too much at the moment on what this one means or what its place is in the overall storyline, but it’ll make sense when everything’s all arranged, and when I do that I’ll post a blog explaining a bit the reasons for why I wrote and posted it this way, and talk a bit about its place in the book I’m planning.
Until then, new post tomorrow of a revised older strip, and then on Friday I’m planning to post the first page of the next storyline coming up, which is the origin of Rickets the robot, Marching to “The City”, which I’ve alluded to on here in the past and posted bits of. More on that soon, thanks to everybody that’s been reading!
This wasn’t strictly my motivation, obviously, and this particular comic was written more as sort of a joke, but I like that it plays to the theme of trying to convince someone they want to be with you. I’m not all that great at trying to “court” guys or whatever, because I don’t really want to be with someone that doesn’t want to be with me, so if they seem passive or in need of persuasion, I’m usually more inclined to think, alright, it wasn’t meant to be. And then, if I liked them a lot, go off and sulk and feel wounded and rejected, of course.
I think this comics says a lot about how I feel about relationships right at the moment, and I think more discussions of relationships should include adorable cartoon foxes talking about getting spanked. I mean, no relationship’s gonna be perfect, and I’m assuming that most people are gonna go through a lot of bad ones before they find one that isn’t– either that, or I’ve really been doing something abnormal– but even the good ones are gonna hurt sometimes, that’s just part of being alive, but I think that some people either run from that, or their solution is to be sure that they’re the one inflicting the painful parts, rather than the other way around. Either that, or I’ve just dated a lot of idiots. Which might be possible, now that I consider it. I’m aware that some of these blog posts accompanying my comics recently might seem a little bit bitter, but actually I don’t really view myself that way or feel that way, it’s more that I’m interested in how these things work, and have just been giving a lot of thought to it recently. Plus, you know, I wouldn’t keep trying to have relationships if I didn’t like something about them. Either that or I’m compelled to have them by crushing loneliness and existential panic………… hmmmmmmmmm.
I’ve spent a lot of today wondering whether it’s actually easier to have a good date or a crappy one, having just had a good one but then, being me, spending a good portion of the day agonizing over what stupid things I might have said and done, how it’s possibly been fucked up, and whether we’ll see each other again. See, when you have a crappy date, you don’t worry so much about those things. Being me I’m also wondering if, should he see this post, he’ll find it strange or off-putting that I’m writing about it like this, but I’m figuring that’s just the way I worry about things. I mean, I’m not saying that I’m in love or considering a marriage proposal, I’m not picking out towels and curtains just now, I’m not, after all, a lesbian. But I did like the guy, and I’d like to see him again, and I don’t think people should have to be worried about saying that.
The picture above is one that I drew of the boy from Santa Cruz that I’ve been posting comics about, and it’s the one that I drew myself drawing in the comic that I posted here a couple of days ago. Part of the story that’s going on with all this is that our relationship, or whatever you’d call it, was based a lot of the time on me drawing him. As I do more comics about the whole thing I’ll explain in greater detail, but I can say that one of the first things I did when I met him was tell him that I’d like to draw him, and I meant it sincerely. I saw the times we spent with me drawing him as being very romantic and intimate. I’m pretty sure that sometimes he saw them that way, too, but looking back on it there was probably another level to why he enjoyed it all so much. Part of the theme of all the relationship-themed comics that I’m working on and hopefully compiling into a book is the difference between the views two people in a relationship together might have of that relationship, particularly, in my case, the way that sometimes I seem capable of ignoring reality a bit to focus on the parts of a relationship that allow me to hope that this might be the relationship that, ideally, I’d like it to be. The surprise, I suppose, for some people who might know me mainly through these comics, is that I’ve got all these funny old-fashioned notions about how relationships show involve two people who care about and value one another, are willing to be romantic, silly and vulnerable with one another, and other stuff like that. I mean, I know based on a lot of what I witness that it might just seem naive, but I like to imagine that there are relationships in this world that go on for a long time with two people remaining fond of each other.
While I spent a whole lot of time thinking that I was getting to know someone in a situation where we both liked each other and were gradually gonna become intimate and develop something like a mature relationship, I was taking a lack of intimacy developing as a stage on the way to something better, rather than a sign that things were just gonna get more distant. While I might have thought the time we spent with me drawing him was, at least partly, about us getting closer, I think a slightly awkward fact is that he just really, really liked somebody paying that much attention to him. As I do these comics, I’m also being very careful to try to show something in a way that has value beyond settling scores or venting anger, so I’ll try to say as carefully as possible that he either liked me doing the drawings because he had some really intense weird sorta need for validation that, at the time, I wasn’t completely grasping or was choosing to partially ignore, or because, inside of that skinny twink body that I was so fixated on fucking, and fucking, and fucking again (In a romantic way) there was a housed an ego so enormous that for it to be properly filmed would require the resurrection of Gloria Swanson and the budget to build an enormous old-school Hollywood palatial mansion. Honestly, I think a good chunk of this five month dating experience was based largely on the fact that he loved the attention of me staring at his body for hours as I drew it and worshiping all its details. I understood that it made him feel good to have somebody that interesting in his body and, hey, I totally was, and I liked making him feel good in that way, was more than glad to do it, I just didn’t really think of that as being such a large percentage of the reasons for which he actually spent time with me. Then again, maybe I appreciated having somebody who I found really attractive being that interested in me drawing, and in my art. I can be honest enough that I’m sure that stroked my ego, too, so yeah hey I suppose the weirdness can go in both directions.
When it’s all in order, this one will come a bit later than the last one I posted. I felt like there was a need for this strip because I wanted to clarify a bit some of the tensions about why we were still hanging out. In between moments of genuine closeness and affection, there were times when I wondered whether he was using sex as a carrot so I’d do the drawings, and of course the other side of it would be whether I was using the drawings as an excuse to get him naked in my house, and then of course there’s also the fact that I actually loved doing the drawings, and he liked me doing them, so my obsession as to whether or not one of us was doing it for ulterior motives is probably a good indication about my whole victim complex, but I do think there were a little of all those things going on.
New comic tomorrow.
Now we’re continuing with the saga of the boy from Santa Cruz, which I started posting a while back and then didn’t update to this site for a while. Actually I continued writing comics about this particular boy, but my reasons for not posting much are complicated. Some of the reasons had nothing to do with the relationship, because my life was hectic for a whole lot of different reasons for a while there and hopefully it’s starting to reach a good equilibrium now. I’m gonna continue this storyline, and it’s gonna be an interesting mix of comics that I wrote at the time that the events depicted were actually happening, and comics I’ve written since then looking back. This one, for example, was actually written or partially written a few months back at around the time of the other two comics I posted mentioning the boy in question, and I probably would have posted it sooner except that I spent a lot of time agonizing over whether he’d find it funny or if he’d see it as confirmation that I actually am depressive and unhappy. I mean, of course the truth is more complicated and I don’t think anybody who has anything all that interesting going on in their mind never gets depressed, but the fact that I was agonizing over this at all should have told me that we weren’t on the same wavelength and it wasn’t gonna end well.
