by Jean Marie Carey | 10 Jan 2009 | Animals, Dogs!
Astra Carey, 31 October 1992-9 January 2009
My darling girl and the love of my life Astra died at 6:30 p.m. 9 January 2009.
She spent her final day being extremely boisterous for her breakfast at 5:30 a.m., being variously sat beside and sat upon by her young sister, Marcie, and taking in as many B-movies as it is possible for a deaf, blind, elderly dog to absorb, all things she did most days for many years.
Astra was an amazing Italian Greyhound. During her long life she climbed the Bridal Veil falls trail and played in the falls’ freezing spray, ran on Miami Beach at sunrise, chased armadillos and wild boars, aspirated a sandspur, consumed an entire bag of dark chocolate, was stung by a bee, dove into an alligator-infested river, and walked thousands of miles with me in all sorts of environments. Astra survived all her adventures and misadventures with good cheer and a hearty appetite. Over the years I said many prayers to Saint Francis and Saint Mary imploring them to watch over and protect this loving, gentle soul and I believe she is receiving a warm welcome in paradise tonight and rejoining her sister, Queequeg, who went first as always a few years ago.
Until arthritis affected her range of motion these final years, the first sound I heard every morning after the alarm clock was Astra’s tail, thumping the bed, ready to greet another day in happiness and with love.
Astra was frequently infatuated with animals of other species, particularly rabbits and cats, and though her affections were often misunderstood she remained steadfast.
I have no other words to express my grief but also my ineffable gratitude at having had so many wonderful years with such a wonderful child.
by Jean Marie Carey | 30 Oct 2008 | Art History, Italian Greyhounds
Caesarea Mushroom
This post is concerned with “Out of the Closet and into the Universe: Queers and Star Trek” by Henry Jenkins. Even though this piece is nominally about homosexuality vis a vis popular culture, the writer’s unifying field is not an idea, however, but an emotion, the unmoored nostalgia for an unrealized past that manifests as an incurable yearning projected upon the present and future.
Jenkins article, reprinted in 2004 without updates that would have allowed for the recognition of another Star Trek spin-off television series, Deep Space Nine, which provided a deeper consideration of gendering and alterity subjects, discusses a sort of popularly-based movement fomented by fans of the sequel to the original Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation, to have an “openly” gay character join the multicultural, multispecies Enterprise crew. Further wishes included incidental portrayals of gay behavior, such as ambient, non-storyline driven asides to shots of men kissing and so on. There is certainly a genuine sweetness to the Trekkie fandom community amid the fanaticism attendant to the science fiction/fantasy core crowd.
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by Jean Marie Carey | 25 Sep 2008 | Art History
“Enraged by Tea,” one of my all-time photophone favorites, from 2005.
The three essays discussed in this response paper relate to contemporary concepts around the analysis of visual culture through the interpretation of the philosophies of history, commodification, and language as refracted by The Man’s capitalistic hijacking of the involuntary human practice of looking.
While Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels use the terminology typically associated with the social proposals of communism including the expected references to the “proletariat” and the “bourgeois,” these selections from German Ideology constitute less a political manifesto than an intellectual proposal for the active reconfiguring of the recording and interpretation of history. Marx and Engels (and, for the consideration of these works, Barthes) are not particularly known for easily comprehensible prose styles. German Ideology capitalizes, so to speak, on the even more opaque writing of the greatest German ideologue of the time, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Marx and Engels propose that while there is some fundamental correctness to the Hegelian principle of the dialectic – ascertaining an absolute truth through logical dissection and argument – historians and philosophers following Hegel had simply got everything wrong. Rather than intangible evolved yearnings for “immanence” and “transcendence,” humanity is a material manifestation controlled by economics. This definition of “historical materialism” is preceded by “dialectic materialism,” which establishes both the sole existence of the physical (as opposed to ephemeral) world, and, more significantly in connection to visual culture studies, the establishment of the thesis/antithesis paradigm which eventually becomes known as “binary opposition.” (Marx – more Marx than Engels – also takes exception to other “Hegel deconstruction” scholars such as Ludwig Feuerbach and Max Stirner). In a certain titular and textual respect, these selections undercut some of the assumptions endemic to the concepts of alterity politics and false constructions of Otherness raised during the heights of Post-Modernism simply by presuming that such a thing as an ideology based not upon colonial dynamics or Western European cultural dominance but on the national identity of Germans.
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