Crazy in Love


I'd like to start by saying that Art Spiegelman is one of the more weirder people I've met. While we were reading Maus in class, the panels consistently seemed to pop out of the page in unimaginable ways. From that, I always thought that this man was deeply enlightened and had wise insight on everything in life, but he's definitely a little bit weirder, to say the least. Now I'm not saying this to try to undermine his reputation as a well renowned Pulitzer Prize worthy author, but after meeting him I must say I've gotten a better idea of who he is. Take for example, the image above. In August of 1991, riots broke out between the black and Orthodox Jew communities in Brooklyn's Crown Heights, fueled by increasingly tense racial relations. In response, Art Spiegelman, editor for The New Yorker, illustrated the cover above and the magazine was released to the public. In an attempt to unite the two communities with this cover depicting a black woman and a Jew passionately making out, Art actually worsened the situation, aggravating both communities. What the heck did he think was going to happen? Although he had good intentions, his perception of love is completely in the wrong here. Why would he simultaneously gross out two already on edge communities by having them "kiss out" their feelings? His original point was to replace conflict with love, but I don't think this is the right kind of love.
Another kind of love I learned more about this week that is taboo and weird was incest. In Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison creates an "obscene child playing dirty games with whatever male was near-be it her father or her son" to portray Ruth as a lover that engages in incest. After the initial disgust had subsided from reading this, I realized that thoughts such as incest and necrophilia are just the result of natural human emotions, and love is just crazy weird. I was taken aback and disgusted at the image of a mother being "with" her father and her son, and I began to relate a little bit more to the blacks and Jews of the communities in Crown Heights. But humans are humans. I am entitled to my definitions of love just as much as any other human being, be it an eccentric comic artist or an incestuous black woman. To me it may seem weird, but love has no boundaries, and even though it may seem taboo, it can't be ignored. Love is still love.

Comments

  1. UnknownNovember 11, 2017 at 8:33 PM

    I like how you related love from Art Spiegelman's work and personal experiences to Song of Solomon. Many people have come up with a variety of definitions of love and have thus used this interpretation in many different ways. Well said!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Really Confident Girl

Image
The Fearless Girl is a powerful embodiment of the feminist movement. The young brave girl is a stark representation of the courage it takes to stand up for equal rights. However, the sole purpose of the girl was to serve as a counterpart to the Charging Bull, which is an "aggressive threat to women and girls - a symbol of patriarchal oppression”. If Di Modica really wanted to move his expensive masterpiece away from the attention-drawing girl, Fearless Girl would then become “really confident girl” as one author notices. But honestly, what’s wrong with that? Feminists have had to consistently prove themselves over and over throughout history. Wave after wave of feminists with slightly different agendas have had to take tiny yet monumental steps for women in order to be taken seriously. Now, in the 21st century, the role of feminism is already well established and very widespread. Feminists are making real change happen. So why do they feel the need to prove that they are bra
Read more

Bubbles!

Whenever you go to an ethnically foreign place, such as a restaurant or a market, you'll notice how the environment that surrounds you is contained within a very finite area - a bubble. The moment you walk in through a door, smells, sounds, sights, and all your senses are struck with the ruminated cultures of centuries of history, often from thousands of miles away. Specifically, the way people speak, the manner in which people address each other, the language that permeates the bubble, is subtly yet vastly different. What I mean is, unlike the very apparent "role playing, side-step, shilly-shally, and vagueness and innuendo" in the English language, my Chinese speaking family is one that does not partake in such mannerisms. English is  peculiar distinct distinctive idiosyncratic particular personal special specific  unique in that there are hundreds of substitutes or complimentary words that mean basically the same thing. Chinese, on the other hand is more direct, requir
Read more

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Call it what you want - totting, skipping, skip diving, skip salvage, curb shopping, trash picking or street scavenging - dumpster diving is just one of the names in that trash pile of labels. It’s not only a means of survival, but also a “way of life.” The show Extreme Cheapskates on TLC highlights some of the most frugal people in the world, who stop at nothing to save money. Sometimes these people aren’t even poor; they are just very tight penny-pinchers. Creating reusuable toilet paper, reusing dental floss, finding gifts in garbage cans, washing clothes while showering, flushing the toilet only once a week, making their own toothpaste, not spending money on telephones, television or new clothes for their kids is just some of the ludicrous extents people go to to conserve their bank accounts. So I ask you. At what point does extreme frugality become near-dumpster-diving conditions? Just because you don’t throw something away and reuse it, for example toilet paper, is it still consi
Read more