Le Mots d'Amour

If you don't like the conversation, change the topic.  O.K. . . of what shall I speak?  

The cold?

ICE?

The troubled times in our land?  

T.S. Eliot, Stephen Wallace, or Robert Frost?

It doesn't matter.  I can't think.  I can't get the smell out of my nostrils.  Clamnity surrounds me.  

It is Friday.  The temperature will reportedly drop forty degrees today.  I don't think I will go for sushi.  What then?  What dinner shall I cook? 

I must distract myself as much as possible.  I watched a doc on Carol Doda last night.  Half of it.  She was a real hoot, bright, funny, self-effacing.  The interviews with her are charming.  But the language of academia was killing me, tired and frayed with the same worn memes.  Have you heard of the patriarchy?  Apparently, it is a thing.  It seems to have invented a way of looking at women, if you follow the rhetoric, called the male gaze.  If these seem overly broad reaching terms to you, well. . . you probably need to go back to school.  You probably need to have your vocabulary resized.  It's all part and parcel of colonialism and, by extension, orientalism.  This is because the west was powerful and centered everything around Europe, and later, America.  The attitudes of males in the rest of the world. . . well. . . you know. . . don't speak.  God loves the Moors, you know, as did those Modernist painters who stole their images.  Not just the Moors, of course.  It was a grand theft on an unbelievable scale.  Intimacy beyond objectification.  

And so it goes.  

If I adopt the homosexual gaze. . . is that a thing?  Let me Google it.  

Of course there is. . . only it is called "the queer" or "the gay" gaze: a perspective in media and art that centers LGBTQ+ experiences, challenges heteronormative views, and offers authentic representations of queer desire, identity, and relationships, often contrasting with the traditional "male gaze" by exploring intimacy and connection beyond simple objectification, while also describing specific non-verbal cues like eye contact used for identity recognition within the community. It's a way of seeing and being seen that normalizes diverse experiences and subverts traditional power dynamics in storytelling and social interaction.

Intimacy beyond objectification.  There you go.  See?  But first one needs to understand the relationship between the subject and the object.  That one, in truth, has always confused me.  

I guess the true artists were those portrait studios from the 50s and 60s.  Olan Mills.  

I wanted to make the image diverse and inclusive in the spirit of today.  The boy definitely has that yet to be recognized gay gaze. . . but he's beginning to wonder.  He'll find out when he goes to Harvard.  Or the priesthood.

I can't help but be subversive, though.  I can't be sure as there is no science on this, but I think it might be genetic.  

Well, there you go.  That should do it.  It's been fun, a good comic relief from grim reality.  But I must get back to it.  

I should have made the little girl look like Alfred.  I missed an opportunity there.