& on to homosexuals!

Gavin Butt's (nope, ya can't make this stuff up) "the Greatest Homosexual? Camp Pleasure and the performative body of Larry rivers." continues a complete waste of a perfectly good sunny day in Portland.

Larry Rivers could kinda draw. I remember (one of the few things that I remember) from his auto-biography, that when he first started to paint he wanted to be able to "draw like Rembrandt- we all did." Well, isn't that nice?

There was this first wave of what would later be called post-modernism, before it de/evolved into POP, of some marginally talented and not all that witty wannabe raconteurs who happened to include Larry Rivers. A not too great Jazz musician, and an ok, but also not that great painter. What Larry was as an early early adopter of as an art form, and people such as Andy Warhol perfected, was his ability to know what was cool, avant garde, &/or nasty. In other words, he knew how to have bad taste well. That's really all there is to say about Mr. Rivers.

However, I thinkit's funny that a 7 sentence article in Life magazine in 1959 got almost 2 pages of analysis. Same Life article featured the dying of the pop and an article on the first lady, as well as innumerable adds for cars, cigarettes and liquor, all that had more information and were more interesting than the article on Rivers. It's amazing how far just about every aspect of culture has come, even the catholic church, compared to the discourse on art.

"What Did I Do?" Mr Rivers' biography is POrtnoy's Complaint written with a lot more salacious details, and a lot fewer complaints.