.: What Is Going On People!

Monday, September 14, 2009

What Is Going On People!

Ya know I don't like to rant but I gotta let this one out! I am losing it! When did we completely lose civility?!

Lets start with last nights MTV Video Awards. A giddy Taylor Swift was in the midst of her acceptance speech for Best Female Video when Kanye West rushed onstage, grabbed her microphone and let loose an outburst on behalf of singer Beyonce Knowles, who had lost out in that category.
Taylor said "I was excited to be onstage because I just won the award. And then I was excited that Kanye West was onstage. Then, I wasn't excited anymore."

Taylor, I'm really happy for you, and I'm gonna let you finish, but Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time," he said, snatching the microphone from Swift after she had won her award.

Kanye was appropriately asked to leave the auditorium before the condemnations started to come fast an furious!"F--- u Kanye," said a tweet on Katy Perry's Twitter feed. "It's like you stepped on a kitten." Pink's Twitter feed made several references to the incident. "Kanye west is the biggest piece of s--- on earth. Quote me," one tweet said. For myself...I think Kanye is a shallow, selfish, punk and I was only to happy to divest my itunes of anything that had his name on it!

Beyonce showed allot of class "I remember being 17 years old, up for my first MTV award with Destiny's Child, and it was one of the most exciting moments of my life," Knowles said, referring to the girl group with which she had her start. "So I would like for Taylor (19) to come out and have her moment."

Earlier in the week it was Joe Wilson (REPUBLICAN) who called President Obama a Lier! in front of a joint speech to Congress!... This is completely out of hand for this kind of behavior period... Do these guys know they work for us? I have come to believe over the past few years that the Republicans are nothing but a group of shallow, frightened old men who have all but destroyed our country with these senseless wars, inhumane treatment of detainees and allowing for the deregulation of the banks... They have brought nothing but anarchy to the world in the name of conservatism... Lincoln is rolling in his grave right now!

Add to the tasteless moment is this sign.. its incredibly tasteless and in appropriate given that Senator Kennedy just passed away... Again Republicans need to come to the table and stop being frightened of the future!

I dunno what to say here... I mean damn at this level of the game the infraction here was just about as uncalled for as the resulting outburst.... I mean if she came up to me and told me she was going to shove a ball down my throat it would grab my attention too! But still it was pretty vile and she was fined appropriately... Now I think NIKE's response is funny and could underline whats really going on here “Serena has publicly apologized and has stated she let her emotions get the best of her,” the Nike spokesman Derek Kent said in a written statement. “Nike stands behind Serena and looks forward to her outstanding career continuing.”

Its about money and notoriety, the new way of getting attention to your career, or your agenda is to just act like an ass.. As long as you are making money or gaining power its ok today to be an ass.

Civilization is truly falling apart.
Note: All images and text (not specified) is copyrighted by Christopher Cushman. This site does not specify or denote the sexual orientation of any model and as such please post your comments accordingly.

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The Dance Through Life Project

Photograph project dedicated to capture the Art of Dance within the parameters of everyday life. The project hopes to capture the innate relationships between dance and everyday life. Images of dance performed in non-traditional locales hopefully demystifying dance as being inaccessible and drawing the obvious metaphor that while all can not express life with such movement and physicality, we all love with our own signature grace. Therefore we all dance.

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Through New Eyes: The Photography of Christopher Cushman by Rinaldo Walcott

The Black male body remains an enigma despite its over representation in the public sphere. The dominance of hip hop culture globally, driven in part, but not exclusively by the innovative sounds of rap music have made Black men a standard by which Black men and other men judge themselves in contemporary culture. However, there is a paradox, because despite the prevalence of hip-hop’s popular global impact, Black men are also still some of the most despised men in Western culture. Stereotypes of criminality, disease and danger still abound and organize Black men’s lives, even within hip hop culture. Thus representations of Black men tend to be much more restricted, than open-ended. The struggle to bring Black men into complex open-ended representations has been an on-going historical struggle. One of the most potent forms of representation in the last one hundred and fifty years has been the photograph. Photography has offered the promise to represent the real in a manner that has both seduce its viewers and baffled them with its artifice. Black male photographic representations in the last half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first have promised to rescue Black men from the confines of mis-representation and stereotype. One of the most difficult and complicated circumstances of Black male representations has been in the realm of representing their sexuality. Black men’s sexuality is still over-burdened by a perceived threat and danger, especially now in the hyped-up era of the downlow. Then along comes Cushman. I first hear of Christopher Cushman’s photography from my boyfriend. He told me of a guy who was taking photographs of black nudes based upon how they wanted themselves to be seen, not how he posed them as his models. When I met Cushman he confirmed that he did indeed work from the models’ suggested posed and not impose his own. The idea is a great one because it allows the models agency in choosing what they believe to be an adequate representation of who they are. While it is now true that in contemporary culture subjects have learned to play for the camera, offering us artifice on command, this artifice can be understood as exposing inner senses of self and being. Cushman’s photography captures and reveals those inner desires. Look at me, many of the models seems to say. But look at me anew, is also what they seem to project and insist on. Cushman’s eye lavishes these Black male bodies with glimmers of light revealing their nuance personalities. While most of the men are naked their individuality comes clearly through. And yet, their eyes too reveal that they belong to a community, a family and possess desires, fantasies and needs. In these photographs, as viewers we are given new eyes to see beyond our inner voyeur. Cushman channels, Robert Mapplethorpe, Rotimi Fani-Kayode and many other artists, commercial and amateur photographers who seek to rescue the Black male body from the disastrous depths of mis-representation, and who almost always fall short. The conversations that his models create between his work and others whether unconscious or not reveal the profound influence of the image in our time. However, in Cushman’s eyes the Black male body is not being rescued, instead it stands on a self-made pedestal, not arrogantly announcing its existence but coolly (its signature) singing its own praisesong as swathes of light and behind the camera love washes over it. In each moment a small but significant revelation is made. Each revelation offers us the opportunity of an Epiphany – to think a thought about a Black man that we have not thought before. Professor Rinaldo Walcott is a cultural critic and Canada Research Chair of Social Justice and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto. He lives and writes in Toronto.

FIERCE! Being Black, Being Gay in America

"What Chris has done with this important collection of images, Fierce: Being Black, Being Gay in America, A Photographic Essay, is to seek, lift, and affirm the identity and visibility of men-who love-men and express it in many ways. His photographs display Midwest American men from the outlandish and flamboyant, to the subdued and subtle. You’d think these were “ladies who lunch;” muscular men dressed for the “Park” in lace, and floppy hats to give effect for all to see. Brothers connecting in places we know are safe, such as our nightclubs, the discos, and special events targeting our interests.

The importance of Fierce is paramount: all men are created equal, and share a space on earth. These portraits of men have to be recognized as God’s beauty and not His damnation. Time will thank those who were strong and dared enough to express themselves for all to see and appreciate in a manner that’s loving and creative. Time will also thank us for not living in a paranoid state of mind, and afraid of our own shadows. Remember, this cluster of work isn’t Robert Mappelthope’s approach to black imagery, but the approach of documenting men as they wanted to be seen: with and without sexual stimulation, for shock value."

Curtis A. Lipscomb
Executive Director Kick – The Agency for L-G-B-T African-Americans
Detroit Michigan / 2005
www.e-kick.com