#also yes. powerful homoeroticism I really enjoyed it.

[malvolios-yellow-stockings]

Okay, but hear me out-

That fucking alleyway scene. It fucks so hard with Leonard Cohen's Avalanche.

I mean come on.

[thewholedamnboulangerie]

hello friends it’s going incurably critically insane o’clock ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

THE FULL INTRO IS BACK OH WE LOVEEEEEE TO SEE IT

…Laia Costa is SO early in the cast credits WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN

moiraine and lanfear………. powerful homoeroticism I really enjoyed it. I realise that this is not a very original statement but it’s the only one I have sufficient brainpower for rn

THE IMPLICIT POLY AOL VIBES IM GOING TO EAT MY ENTIRE ARM

THE BRAID???? HOLY FUCK RENNA NEEDS TO SUFFER TIMES ONE BILLION

GODDDDDDDD ISHAMAEL SETTING UP MAT TO KILL RAND IS SENDING ME FULLY AROUND THE TWIST

ohhhhh I knew it was coming but “you have always been my better” still made me literally cry 😭😭😭

ANSBCNSNSNDNFNFNGN THEY REALLY SAID WE ARE GOING TO HEIST THE HORN OF VALERE AND WE ARE GOING TO DO IT ENTIRELY OFFSCREEN. like okay I don’t like it but if we can’t have 10 episodes I do have to respect the sheer audacity of that Narrative Choice. though also: WHOMST was the lady from Cairhien. and of even greater importance: was she played by Laia Costa???????

(I assume it was ~Selene~ but like. we are in Laia Costa tunnel vision modus fuckin operandi)

oh Loial my BELOVED 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺

wait whatttttt no turok duel OR darkfriend reveal for Ingtar?????? bro we are speedrunning this city

“they were best friends” listen we know two out of the three were fucking so if we’re describing all three in the same way I will not be held responsible for the conclusions I draw tyvm

SIX OF THEM

SIX OF THEM

HEL FUCKING LO

ITS TIME FOR MORE FORSAKEN BABEYYYYY GOD I CANNOT WAITTTTTTTT TO SEE THE REST OF MY EVIL BLORBOS

(admittedly I’m only far enough through the books to have encountered Graendal a grand total of once thus far and also I don’t actually give much of a fuck about Sammael yet but oooooooh my god when Asmodean and Moghedien show up it WILL be over for me bitches)

wait omfg is Lanfear staging this entire drama as a distraction so she can release all the remaining forsaken while ishy and rand are too busy fighting each other to stop her oh fuck meeeeee I’m gonna go in ZANE

THE PHYSICAL RUSH OF ADRENALINE I FELT SEEING MAT MAKE A BLADED QUARTERSTAFF OUT OF THE DAGGER WHILE THE S1 TWO RIVERS MUSIC PLAYED MY GODDDDDDDD

IM JUST CONSTANTLY SCREAMING NOW FR

MAT IN THE SAME LOCATION AS THE HORN… HRRRRRRRRR

no sign of rand for a hot second 👀

HOLY FUCK EGWENEEEEEEEEE

HE’S GOT SHIT HAIR BUT HE’S ALIVE AJSNCNSNSNDNFNDJDNFNFNDJNDNDN

MAT WITH THE HORN THIS IS NOT A FUCKING DRILL

“…Two Rivers???” SPECTACULAR

NOOOOOOOOOO NONONONONO I KNEW IT WAS COMING BUT THIS IS STILL THE ABSOLUTE WORST

OH GOD OhH FUCK I RECOGNISE THE START OF THAT SCORE IM ABOUT TO GO FUCKING FERAL

MAT LEADING THE CHARGE WITH THE MANETHEREN BATTLE CRY OOOOOOOOOH GOD THATS MY FUCKING BOYYYYYYYYYYYYY

I SPY BIRGITTE!!!!! AHHHHHHH SHEEEEEEEEEE

UNO!! FUCK YES

nynaeve saying that egwene needs elayne not her… oh my god are we getting a full main babies towertop avengers assemble moment im gonna fucking evaporate

ALSO WE HAVENT SEEN MOIRAINE IN A HOT SECOND………. HMMMMMMM!!

I KNEW WHAT WAS GONNA HAPPEN OOOOOOOH I FUCKING KNEW IT AND I AM STILL. LOSING MY MINDDDDDDD

THE CRADLING. THE CRADLING. THERE IS A TRULY EXCEPTIONAL LEVEL OF HOMOEROTICISM HAPPENING HERE ON EVERY LEVEL

EGWENE’S BATTLE MUSIC OH MY GOD MY GIRL YESSSSSS GO NUCLEAR MY LOVE

SCREAMING AT THIS AVENGERS ASSEMBLE COMBINATION FATED SOULMATES FIRST MEETING CROSSOVER EVENT BUT WHERE THE FUCK IS AVIENDHA GET MY GIRL IN HERE!!!!!!!

SHRIEKINGGGGGGGG AT THE (almost) ENTIRE CREW BEING RIGHT BEHIND RAND IN HIS BIG MOMENT

OH GOD OH MY GOD ITS HER SHES FUCKING HERE

AHSBCBFB OKAY I HAD IT BACKWARDS BUT FUCKING SCREAM???????? THATS HERRRRRR THATS MY CREEPY PATHETIC BABYGIRL HOLY SHITTTTTTTTT

“All five of them” uh huh. uh huh. uh huh. any- any of them in particular??? perchance??? huh moggy???

AND CLOSING WITH A NEW VARIANT ON MAT’S THEME OHHHHHHH AND IF I SOBBBBBBB

[zoophagist]

My main take on "Renfield" is that for a movie that was supposed to focus on trauma/abuse, they sure defanged their characters a whole lot. So your Renfield doesn't have any explicit psychiatric trauma and goes to serve Dracula just because his wife and kid have gotten annoying. Willingly. You have a Dracula whose attacks are never sexual and who actually kinda-sorta gives a damn about someone. And the familiar magic doesn't even have any side-effects worth writing home about. Also Teddy Lobo is a bae and he deserves more than this antisemitic narrative all the goys have eaten up because "he's so pathetic uwu"

^^^ real. i said it the second i came back from the premiere but teddy lobo was the only bitch in this movie with true renfield energy. tedward deserves respect and also many fanfics.

yeah, on the whole though.... i think they were much too worried about appealing to a mainstream action audience and didn't let the project do the fun, weird, dark things it could have been capable of. i get what they wanted to say with the "you chose this willingly and you need to take back your agency willingly" (i do. i REALLY, really get it) but that is a silly thing to say about familiars - that you gave dracula your power and you need to take it back for yourself. like. materially, no. and RE: the wife and child - yes, that's something i found phoned in. i kept waiting for another shoe to drop about that family relationship that explains what drove renfield to dracula or made it more interesting (at least when barbara hambly did the wife and child shtick in 'renfield: slave of dracula' it had a fun, fucked up twist in the end!) but it really just never came. they just existed and he just left them to go be dracula's twink-on-demand. for fun. messed up that that's not even played for laughs OR homoeroticism. dw it's still inherently gay tho. falsettos vc: so the situation's this (i do not wish to offend) - i divorced my wife, i left my child, and i ran off with a friend :)

i definitely understand your take. i think i never expected it to go that hard in the darkness so i wasn't as let down, but the glimpses of something more serious or dark were the moments i enjoyed most. the ren/drac confrontation in renfield's apartment, for instance, that lets dracula really command the space and show us what's kept renfield stuck for 90 years. but alas, only glimpses of the movie this could have been in a better timeline.

[qqueenofhades]

Having just sent you a message the other day about how much I love your historical asks, I realized I have a question myself that you might know the answer to. I’m a Christian and I have never been able to figure out why Christianity has historically viewed non-procreative sex for pleasure as bad. (And none of my family, including my clergy father, have figured it out either. I think my dad has a bone to pick with Augustine? And I feel like Aquinas also has something to do with this.) But given that Jesus had a body and gives a speech about “the Son of Man came eating and drinking” as though he enjoyed it, how did this whole “the body is sinful especially the sex part” thing happen? I have been thinking about this a lot recently for Old Guard reasons, which should surprise no one.

Oof. So, a short and simple question, then. (Sidenote: did they expand ask limits? Because I’ve definitely gotten a couple asks today, including this one, that are longer than usual, rather than forced to space out and hope that Tumblr doesn’t eat them.)

The entire history of sexuality in the West and its relationship with Christianity throughout the centuries is obviously a topic that far, far exceeds anything I could possibly cram into this ask, but let’s see if I can hit on some of the highlights. First off, one could remark that some aspects of Jesus’s teaching managed to disappear from the official doctrine of Christianity almost immediately, and for a variety of theological, cultural, and social reasons. As anyone who has a passing knowledge of the late Roman Empire is aware, they were known for being sexually liberate (at least if you were a nobleman, as the freedom certainly did NOT apply to women), and the notorious run of emperors who were having orgies and sleeping with boys and their sisters and hosting nonstop sex parties did a lot to sour early Christianity’s relationship with it. Because pre-Constantine/Theodosian Code Rome was Christianity’s enemy (since Christians refused to perform the traditional civic sacrifices to the Roman gods, which was all that Rome required alongside permitting its citizens to practice whatever other religion they wanted), and because the emperors were such a high-profile example of sexual excess, that became an easy point of critique. Obviously, the Roman polemicists, like every other historian, should not be trusted on EVERYTHING they say about the emperors, but the general pattern is there and well-established. So Christianity, trying to establish its religious and moral bona fides, can easily go, “Well, Caligula/Nero obviously sucks, come join us and live a purer and more moral life!”

Constantine converted in the early fourth century and the Theodosian Code was issued at the end of the fourth century, which made Rome officially Catholic and represented a huge reversal of fortune for fledgling Christianity, helping it expand like crazy now that it was officially sanctioned. However, the Roman Empire was splitting into two halves, west and east, and the development of Greek Christianity in the eastern empire was strongly influenced by ascetic and austere traditions (if you’ve heard of the Stylites, i.e. the guys who liked to sit atop poles out in the Syrian desert to prove how holy they were, those are them). The cultural context of denial of the flesh and the renouncing of bodily pleasures also played intensely into the third/fourth/fifth century debates over heresy and orthodoxy. Some of the most vicious arguments came over whether Jesus Christ could have actually had an embodied (and therefore possibly inherently sinful) human body, or it was just a complicated illusion, the “shell” of a body that his entirely divine nature then inhabited without actually being part of. This involved huge theological arguments over the redemptive nature of the Eucharist and even Christ’s sacrifice: was it real/effective/genuine if he didn’t REALLY die and suffer the pain of being crucified, and was just assured that he’d be fine ahead of time? So yeah, the question of whether Christ had a real body (because then that might be sinful) was the knock-down, drag-out theological disagreement of the early centuries C.E., and left a lot of hard feelings and entrenched positions in its wake.

Likewise, your dad is correct in having a bone to pick with Augustine, at least in terms of his impact on views of sexuality in the late antique and early medieval Christian church. Augustine is obviously famous for agonizing endlessly over his sexuality/sexual urges in Confessions, his time as a Manichaean, his relationship with a woman and the birth of his son out of wedlock (and if you want a lot of repressed homoeroticism: well, Augustine’s got that too) and how his conversion to Christianity was intensely tied with his renunciation of himself as a sexual being. Augustine also pioneered the nature of the inheritance of Original Sin: therefore, every human who was born was sinful by virtue of sharing in humanity’s legacy from Eve’s transgression in the Garden of Eden. (And yes, obviously, this led to the beginnings of the embedding of clerical and social misogyny. Oh Augustine, I kind of hate you anyway because I had to read the entire goddamn 1000-page City of God during my master’s degree, but bro, you got a lot to answer for.) This involved EVEN MORE obscure speculations about whether original sin was passed down in male semen, and therefore Jesus was free of it because he was supposedly born divinely to a woman without a male father, but yeah, the idea that sexuality itself was already a suspect thing was fairly well correlated and then cemented by Augustine’s HUGE influence over the early church. Everything post-Augustine incorporated his ideas somehow, and so the idea of bodily pleasures as separating you from divine purpose got even more established.

Then we had the Carolingians in the eighth and ninth centuries, who were the first “empire” per se in Western Europe post-Rome, and who were also intensely concerned with legislating moral purity, policing the sexual behavior especially of its queens, and correlating moments of political or military defeat with insufficiently virtuous private behavior. The Carolingians likewise passed these ideas onto their successor kingdoms, especially the medieval kingdom of France (which would eventually become the pre-eminent secular power in Western Europe). Then the eleventh century arrived with the Cluniac and Gregorian Reforms (which were interrelated). One of their big goals was for a celibate and unmarried clergy on all levels of holy orders, from humble village priests to bishops and archbishops. Prior to this, clergymen had often been married, and there wasn’t a definite sense that it was bad. But because of this, and the idea that a married clergyman wasn’t pure enough to provide the Eucharist and would be distracted from his commitment to the church by a wife and family, the Cluniac and papal reformers intensely attacked sex and sexuality as evil. Priests didn’t (or rather, were not supposed to) do it, and if you weren’t in a heterosexual church-performed marriage and didn’t want children, you shouldn’t be doing it either. (Did this stop people, and priests, from doing it? Absolutely not, but that was the rhetoric.) This was about when celibacy began to be constructed as the top of the heap in terms of holy lifestyles, for men and women alike and laypeople as well as those in holy orders. NOT having sex was the most virtuous choice for anyone, even if sex was a necessary evil for having heirs and the next generation and so on. (Which is interesting considering that our hypersexualized present attaches so much value to having sex of one sort or another, and the asexual-exclusion types, but yeah, that’s a different topic for now.)

Of course, when the Cathars (a schismatic Catholic heresy in France and Italy) in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries began attacking ALL materiality and sexuality as irredeemably evil, the Catholic church went a bit like “whoa whoa that’s a little too far, hold on now, SOME sex is good, sex can be nice, we’re not actually like those guys” (even though they had been about a hundred years before). Because Cathar spirituality taught that any kind of attention or indulgence to the body was sinful, that included any kind of sex at all, even married heterosexual intercourse. (Of course, the Cathars themselves didn’t always live up to it either; see Beatrice de Planissoles and her Cathar priest lover.) The Catholic church obviously didn’t want to go THAT far, so they began rowing back some of their earlier blanket statements about the evilness of sexuality and taught that husband and wife both had a responsibility to offer each other sexual pleasure and fulfillment. I’ve answered many asks about sexual behavior and unions in the medieval era, the arguments over the definition of marriage, and how that changed over time in response to social needs and pressures, so yes. We know what the IDEALS were, and what people were legally supposed to do, but the fact that church writers were complaining about bad behavior, sexual and otherwise, literally the whole time means that, obviously, this did not always match up with reality.

The theories of the Roman physician Galen, which prescribed that female orgasm was necessary to conceive, were also well known and prevalent in the medieval world, which meant that ordinary married couples trying to have children would have had some awareness that female pleasure was supposedly necessary to do it. (This ties into my “it wasn’t an unrestrained extravaganza of violent painful rape for women all the time YOU GODDAMN MORONS JESUS CHRIST” rant, but we will recognize that I have Many Rants. So yes.) Obviously, we can’t know what the sex life of individual married couples behind closed doors was actually like, but there were a variety of teachings and official stances on sex and how it was supposed to be done, and as noted in other posts, just because the church thought it is zero guarantee that ordinary people thought that way too. People are people. They (usually) like having sex. They had sex, both gay and straight, married and unmarried, so on and so forth, even if the church had Opinions. Circle of life, etcetera.

Anyway, then the Renaissance arrived (and we just had the “why the Renaissance sucked for women” ask the other day), which prescribed a reversal of all the comparative sexual and political and social latitude that women had gradually acquired over the medieval era. It very much wanted to see women returned to their silent, domestic, maternal, objet d’arte roles that they had occupied in antiquity, and attacked the actions of women in their public and private lives as one of the major causes of the crises of the late medieval era. (Because you know, misogyny is always a useful scapegoat rather than blaming the powerful men who have fucked everything up, as we’re seeing again right now.) Because the Renaissance is regarded, fairly or unfairly, as the start of the early modern Western world, it’s where a lot of modern gender attitudes and views of sexuality became more explicitly codified and distributed faster than at any point in history before, to a more extensive audience, thanks to the invention of the printing press. We’ve obviously had moves toward sexual liberation and agency in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the emergence of the modern feminist and gay rights movements, but now in some ways, we’re back in oddly Puritan attitudes in the twenty-first century. And since America was founded by Puritans, their social attitudes are still embedded in the culture, fanned today by hyper-conservative Protestant evangelicalism. Even though Puritans themselves ALSO, shock surprise, didn’t always live up to the stringent standards they preached.

...whoof. I’m sure I’m forgetting something, but hopefully that gives you the broad-strokes development.

[isingonly4myangel]

Cinnamon and spice for the autumn ask!

Cinnamon: if you had to live in a time period different than the present, which would you choose and where?

God, you know me so well! So I think my soul is originally from Victorian-era England. Well, late Victorian/early Edwardian. I move far too easily in a corset and full skirt, whether sitting, standing, or doing a choreographed formal waltz, lol! I think my next incarnation was in New York in the late 1940s/early 1950s. All the fashion of Mrs Maisel with all the homoeroticism of Carol, hahaha! Also I have a picture of my doppelgänger from the 40s that backs up this theory. 

Spice: have you ever encountered a house that you believed to be haunted?

So that’s a yes, both intentionally and unintentionally. A few places I’ve visited deliberately and either they happen to be considered haunted, or I went there specifically because they’re considered haunted. Exhibit A is the Winchester Mystery House- widely known to be haunted, and I paid for a tour. Exhibit B, The Ahwahnee Hotel- I’ve stayed there a solid handful of times but didn’t learn till later than it’s reportedly haunted. It also served as inspiration for The Shining, and much of the film set was meant to resemble it! I didn’t personally see anything supernatural at either of those places, but I very much enjoyed them. 

A place that I didn’t mean to go and that I did NOT enjoy was this hotel in Normandy. The last time I was in France (spring of 2018) it was on a school trip where I was an honorary chaperone (because I had actually graduated the year before, but I was acting as one of two translators) and our group stayed at this one hotel, I wish I could remember the name of it. Anyway, I was in a room with two other girls, so we got a little suite with a mini kitchen and a baby living room. Initially we’d decided that two people would be on the double bed and one person would sleep on the pullout in the living room, but when we got into the room we all realized that none of us wanted to be alone. It just didn't feel right in there, felt like we shouldn't be there because the space was already occupied. It was the spookiest thing, and not really in a good way. There really was an ever-present sensation of being watched, we didn’t even shower without someone else in the bathroom. And when we tried to go to bed, we all ended up in the bedroom together because we were too afraid to separate. We dragged the couch cushions in so someone could sleep on the floor next to the bed... except none of us could do that either. Looking under the bed, it felt threatening, angry, DARK. And we were 17 and 18 years old, well past an age of being afraid of the dark or a monster under the bed. That night we all slept on the bed, piled on top of each other, with the bedroom door locked and the nightstand lamp on. Mercifully, we only had to stay the one night. 

And oh my god I almost forgot- the auditorium at my high school was hella haunted. And yeah, I know theaters always seem a little haunted, but I swear to god this one IS. We get light orbs (unconnected with any stage lighting), we get moving shadows where there are no people, we had disembodied voices, doors rattling on their hinges so violently you’d think someone was kicking it from the other side, objects moving on their own the moment you turned your back, we had posters and frames thrown forcefully off the walls while people watched, circular saws inexplicably powering on when the scene shop was empty, the list goes on and on. And somehow we all just learned to live with it? Anybody who was a guest in the theatre was so weirded out- the choir kids who did seasonal concerts, the kids who only did the spring musicals, any and all incoming freshmen. But if you were one of the ones who stuck with the drama department (heaven help you) you grew accustomed to it. It phased you less and less, you learned to announce your presence if you were alone or in a group of less than 4, sometimes you made polite conversation with the darkened space around you, you said “thank you” when you left, you explained how things went to the freshmen every year, and so forth. And it felt like the theatre grew accustomed to you, too. Whether that was just age and experience, or desensitization, or actually the entity backing off, it felt much more peaceful and less threatening to be in there alone as a junior or senior. We always joked about holding a seance or planning a Halloween haunted house in there, and I really still think someone should! 

[heartschoicegames]

Heart’s Choice Author Interview: David Monster & Jim Dattilo, “All World Pro Wrestling”

You’re a trainee in the male Erotic Professional Wrestling Federation... and you’re reader to take on all comers. Training includes sparring, matches in the ring against the other trainees, tag team competitions, a battle royal, antics in the showers and locker room, and even ringside seats at the Championship Match.

All World Pro Wrestling is a 310,000-word interactive erotic gay novel by David Monster and Jim Dattilo, one of the first set of games releasing with the launch of Heart’s Choice. I sat down with the authors to talk about writing interactive romance. Heart’s Choice games release December 2nd.

All World Pro Wrestling is part of the first launch of Heart's Choice games and it's the first gender and sexuality locked game we're releasing for gay men. Jim you've written non-genderlocked games as well. Can you talk a little about the difference?

JIM: Writing a gender and sexuality locked game certainly has some advantages. The most obvious first advantage is that we don’t have to code gender pronouns, which saves time in coding and editing.

The next major advantage is in creating the characters. As a writer of choice games you want to give players lots of options. As a writer of fiction you want to give the reader highly specific characters. So in a game like Zombie Exodus, I need to have a huge variety of characters which are all open to various sexualities. Hopefully every player can find someone they are interested in or identify with. It is a phenomenal amount of work. However in All World Pro Wrestling, we can focus on a smaller set of characters, making them highly detailed.

Wrestling is also having a little cultural moment right now, it seems. What informed your decision to write wrestling fetish interactive fiction?

DAVID: There’s currently a great climate in independent pro wrestling. They seem to be embracing diversity, especially LGBT, in a way that major federations are not. The independents are a lot more entertaining because they have a great sense of humor, especially guys like Joey Ryan, RJ Skinner, Brian Cage, The Golden Lovers, and Jervis Cottonbelly. It’s a lot more appealing to me, because through the humor, they are acknowledging the homoerotic aspect of the sport in a way that’s exciting, amusing, and not derogatory.

After I published my first book, Service, people contacted me to tell me they loved it but wanted more sex and erotica. So, I wrote a gay erotic pro wrestling novel. It’s such a natural, because beyond being a sport, pro wrestling is really a fetish, and along with the homoeroticism, there’s a brotherhood that naturally lends itself to man-on-man romance.

JIM: I have a lot of gay male fans through my other writing and they provide some of the best feedback on romance. There are so few choice games or forms of interactive fiction focused on LGBT characters that players are more willing to voice their support and criticism. As game designers we need both forms of feedback.

When David and I decided to collaborate, we thought to convert his gay male erotica novel into a choice driven story. His novel already had a rich setting, plot, and set of characters. This is why we wanted to pitch it.

Are you fans of regular wrestling?

DAVID: Yes, I watch all different kinds of wrestling, mainly on YouTube. I like vintage pro wrestling, like AWA and GWF from the 50s to the 80s. When it comes to current wrestling, I’m a big fan of the independents. They’ve evolved as much more entertaining than WWE, currently the largest federation. I can’t watch WWE anymore. I’ll tune in every ten years or so, and it’s always the same storylines, same choreography. The guys are great-looking, but I need more than that.

I’m also a fan of Collegiate Wrestling. I wish I would have trained in amateur wrestling and grappling. All the great MMA fighters say it’s a necessary foundation for their sport.

JIM: As a kid I was a big fan of wrestling, back in the early days of Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage. I stopped watching at the time the WWF became the WWE, because as David said, the storylines became recycled. I don’t fault anyone for enjoying it now. Sometimes I’ll see a commercial for a large event and it will pique my interest.

This game is full of different romanceable characters. Tell me about some of them and which ones you enjoyed writing most.

DAVID: To tell you the truth, I love them all. They all have different attributes that make them special. Rory is an extremely cute blond boy. He’s sweet and kind, but he has the heart of a fighter. He always wants to win but wants all his friends to win, too. Bravon’s a real man, the best athlete in the facility, and a good friend to have. He’s a handsome muscle stud with the most extreme abs. Mandrew’s a cute jock boy and the class clown. He’s funny and always a good time, although he’s straight (or at least he says he is). Marcos is a big, hairy bear, and a total pushover. If you’re a power top, he’s your guy. He’s truly up for almost anything.

Finally there’s Stan. He’s a short little mountain of muscles, and, by far, the toughest guy in the training facility. He’s built is solidly as a wall of concrete which also represents the walls he built around himself to hide his vulnerabilities. He’s a loyal warrior, who is devoted to training but always searching for love.

Beyond these characters, you can have flings with lots of other characters.

Could you talk a little about your collaborative writing process?

DAVID: It was a learning process for me. I’ve never written a multiple choice game before, and Jim had already done three. He was my teacher and mentor, and taught me things about making a game you can’t learn from a tutorial. Jim’s guidance made me a much better writer.

JIM: David was the primary writer while I was the developer and coder. After writing a very extensive outline based on his book, we went through several rounds of drafts and edits until we came up with the shell of the game. David would write a chapter in a form of pseudocode, and I would take that document and convert it to ChoiceScript. Along the way we would talk about adding new content and deleting certain parts that weren’t working. David was always willing to do rewrites or punch up some text if needed. Since this was really his subject matter, I had to lean on him for the majority of the content. And he never made me feel like I was working for him. We were always collaborative and equal.

And what's next for you guys?

DAVID: I released the book this game is based on, called Rowdy Armstrong 2 – Pro Wrestling Rookie. It’s available on Amazon, and you can check out the website for pics of all the characters in the book: RowdyArmstrong.com    

I hope Jim and I can work on the sequel to this game, very soon. He’s so busy with Zombie Exodus. His fans are constantly demanding more of that story, because he has created a really cool world there.

I have another game, with accompanying book, I hope Choice of Games or Heart’s Choice will host. It’s a non-genderlocked fantasy story that will not involve wrestling.

I have a podcast, called Unimaginary Friendcast, and will continue to talk about this game on it. We have interviewed Jim twice, so search for that. It’s worth a listen, for sure.

Here’s my webpage, if you want to know more: DavidMonster.com

JIM: I’m continuing to work on Zombie Exodus: Safe Haven, Part 3 primarily. I’m also currently working on a new title for Choice of Games. It’s a secret project, and I hope to share some details on this game early next year.

[many-gay-magpies]

i think i ran out of popcorn around the point of vampire homoeroticism but MAN did i enjoy the ride ! no wait bc that thing abt pregnant mothers makes so much sense to me and HOLD ON HOLD ON. WHAT IF. OKAY IM JUST MAKING SHIT UP BUT IT MAKES SENSE TO ME. WHAT IF THE TARGET OF THE EXPERIMENTS ON THE MOTHERS WAS TO PRODUCE SUPERPOWERED CHILDREN. LIKE THE SUPERPOWER GENE WAS WHAT THEY WERE TRYING TO GET. AND THE ONLY BABIES THAT SURVIVED TO TERM WERE THE BOYS AND SOOHA. THEY COULD HAVE THAT BACKSTORY OF PLAYING TOGETHER AS A PRINCESS AND KNIGHTS (which is Adorable btw i love it), BUT THEN WHEN THE ORGANIZATION COMES TO KIDNAP THE CHILDREN SOOHA'S MOM WAS ABLE TO PROTECT HER. in the orphanage, they're trying to observe the effects of these powers on human bodies— let's say that most humans cant survive with those powers for long, and they want a way to make the gene last in the boys' bodies for as long as possible. so they give them the pills shown in given-taken to make them vampires, immortally superpowered and therefore eternal test subjects. i really like the idea of them having to consume vampire blood to be turned— that is actually a requirement in some vampire stories. i feel like those scenes of them taking pills, getting sick/convulsing/checking their mouths with flashlights imply that they weren't Like That before. this is new, and they dont know what's going on. and once the boys realize that they've been turned into LITERAL MONSTERS by the orphanage that claimed to "protect them," the freak the FUCK OUT and decide. this place is going Down. they may be new vampires but jino's been pyrokinetic his whole damn life and he will Use it. okay i will address the rest of your response in a separate ask because my brain RAN with this

-vrvr anon

im glad you enjoyed it! i dont have any more new or unsaid ideas to tell you about so i doubt ill get THAT long again (but its me so you never know), but it was very fun to dump all of that out!!

:O DUDE YEAH THAT MAKES SO MUCH SENSE-- the pregnant mothers were experimented on, then they were set LOOSE to go have their babies in "peace", or at least the organization claimed... but they were always watching from afar... and then when the kids got to be old enough, the organization came to collect them, telling the mothers that they'd discovered the experiments had harmful effects and they needed to continue their research. and maybe sooha's mom protected her by pretending that the powers had ALREADY KILLED her daughter, getting sooha and the other boys to play along with it—maybe she pretends to be all mad at the organization because "your stupid experiments KILLED MY BABY i want nothing to do with you" when in reality she could sense the orphanage coming and sent sooha to hide out a few towns over with her sister or something.

AND THEN THE ORGANIZATION MAKING THE BOYS VAMPIRES SO THAT THEIR BODIES COULD NEVER BE KILLED BY THE POWERS I. OMG YES. HOLY SHIT. and god now im just thinking about the effects the superpowered genes might have on NORMAL bodies... the superstrength, even though it's the most MINOR power, tearing up a user's bones and muscles and making their bodies age and get weak so faster... the pyrpokinesis liTERALLY BURNING THEM FROM THE INSIDE OUT... anti-gravity messing with their balance and brain functions and the way they perceive the world... superspeed just scrambling ALL sorts of shit... telepathy screwing with brain function/causing brain damage/mental health issues... the organization's experiments worked, the superpower gene was a success, but the human body was never made to contain such unimaginable power. the solution? make them inhuman. and OH SHIT maybe whatever solon's power is was so goddamn powerful and harmful to his body that they had to double it and turn him into a werewolf too—but in the process they also accidentally locked away or repressed whatever that power WAS.

(with that in mind though, how would sooha go her whole life with the power and be perfectly fine? maybe she falls ill a lot, or maybe the side-effects set in much later, or maybe girls are just built different and the organization experimented on mostly male fetuses because sexism. kind of like how landscaping companies only plant male trees and end up causing a shitton of allergies because of their stupid fucking tree sexism. idk, ill work on that one.)

and now im also thinking about how the whole amnesia storyline would go... the boys don't remember anything from before they came to the orphanage, right? well maybe, to avoid past attachments interfering with their work, the organization wiped their memories of anything pre-orphanage—names, families, EVERYTHING. they pick new names to replace the ones they never knew they had. as far as the boys know, theyre just a bunch of orphans taken in by the kind-hearted orphanage. and, well, maybe, the superpowered genes have OTHER physical side-effects too that set in slowly as they age... like bright, colorful hair and unnaturally colored eyes... and those side effects hadn't appeared yet or were only just beginning to manifest before the orphanage took them. not to mention, sooha was so YOUNG when they got taken away, her memories of them would be muddied and unclear anyway—throw different names and perfectly normal hair and eye colors into the mix and its easy to believe she wouldnt have a clue who they are when she meets them again.

no that would make so much sense tho—the boys have had these powers all their lives, they're used to them, even if they dont REMEMBER having them before the orphanage necessarily their bodies still have the muscle memory. so when they figure out that the orphanage turned them into LITERAL BLOOD-SUCKING VAMPIRES just to have eternal test subjects/superpowered soldiers... they go "nah fuck this im out" and burn that fucker down. i realize i sort of just parroted your entire last point back to you in your own words but i want to emphasize that i strongly agree

[horrible-monstrosity]

Also for no reason I've continued to put thought into how to "fix" Kappadrum or whatever the fuck it was called Sarah Dishes I literally can't give enough fucks to remember

First and most obvious, actually escalate the "reveals" that come with the stock footage sequence. Ikuhara had this exact same problem in Penguindrum too, he blows his load way too quickly and then has to keep asspulling up more bullshit to keep things going or else there would be nothing left to happen. A very obvious application of this is: Yellow's first ass-secret is something revealing but still minor, so he breathes a sigh of relief, but then at the end of *that* episode he sneaks the kiss on Pink. Now the audience knows what he's relieved didn't get out and we have a setup for the fallout from the later reveal. In Blue's case, he gives up some minor secret, but is deeply traumatised by even just that and refuses to head any asspull brigades, until he absolutely has to and then he's even more traumatised, then eventually he's been given enough power of friendship that he doesn't even fear dumping his whole backstory. Thus escalation actually helps the character arc. If you need an excuse, it's that doing the brigade progressively loosens up their spiritual anuses, so it gets looser over time and bigger things slip out.

Another is to make the secrets desire-themed, as to go with the whole theme of the show, and to actually line up systematically with the stuff coming out of the asses of the guys you're fighting being made of their secret desires. Though there should be some wiggle room of course to keep it from being to restricted and thus either repetitive or forced. obviously. Just tilt the things being revealed a certain way rather than making it a diarrhea stream of unrelated bullshit written for max drama and nothing else. This helps with actually developing a reason for carrying assball to cause secrets to come out- like, it's big and keeps the kappa asshole open so stuff escapes, or it takes up too much room in the asshole so it pushes shit out. great shit huh?

Next, each boy could have a different "thing" to their secrets. Yellow I haven't pinned down, Blue as discussed above would evolve from someone "anal-retentive" basically to someone who trusts the others enough to open up. So consider this for Pink: every one of his secret reveals relates to his crossdressing. Just this idea opens up a lot of... ideas. The repeated revealing still fills him with shame and fear even though the guys already know, cuz that's not going to just immediately go away once the plot button has been pressed once; have it turn out he's secretly kept crossdressing once he doesn't need to for lil bro anymore because he secretly enjoys it, which is even more humiliating to be forced to show off than doing it because lil bro... the idea that he's a pure/normal/wholesome boi compared to the other two who have darker/weirder secrets, so his reveals keep going back to the same thing. Maybe you'd make an exception for the adoption/lil bro reveals, but that would actually increase its impact when both Pink and the audience are expecting the same shit as usual then suddenly you get hit by this shit.

Fourthly, introduce a fourth boi. Let's call him Green, or he can be Purple or Orange or Red or whatever you want him to be. He's a third wheel friend to Pink and Yellow, providing an outsider/normie perspective to some of the shit they end up in, bla bla bla His main purpose is ensuring none of the main three boys end up shipless. Yes, that's a very important thing, don't question me. But also, if the "hidden" core of the story is Blue being healed and redeemed, there could be a nice subplot where he becomes friends with Green on his own volition- him being forced to ally with Yellow/Pink forced him to become friends with them, so this shows that kind of friendship healed him a little bit, enough to go friendship on his own and reintegrate into normal highschool boi society (or however the fuck old they were idgaf)

Finally, you might be wondering how you can fit all this shit into a measly 11 episodes, and here's the answer: multiple ass-bass-pulling, kappa-becoming sequences per episode. Yes, really. You can actually play around a lot with the use of the stock footage sequence- depending on how much you use per instance and which parts you use, you can give a different feel. Like, showing only the last bits gives an in-media-res feeling, good for the first in an episode; showing the first bits then skipping ahead to the fight is like let's-get-to-the-point, etc. I wouldn't really put more than 2 per episode unless there's specifically an episode where they churn though a bunch of them and have problems because of that. Eventually, using the full sequence gives an ominous feeling, like "what could this be building up to??", which would of course be used for a significant fight or two. This sort of progression means they'll gather all 5 silver dishes in like 3-4 episodes, so they'll spend that wish on something that partly fails due to infighting, then next time start pulling bronze dishes that you need like 12 of them to get a wishing dish, which increases tensions even further. Then once the cop guys do their thing (after an actual character arc and actual development for that to be an actual payoff, of course), their pure matured love produces a diamond/platinum/whatever plate that gives the boys one superwish (after the bronze wish is wasted somehow) And when I say failed/wasted wish I don't mean the comedic giant cucumber roll in the first episode (which is just fine as-is since it sort of introduces the wonder of being able to wish for anything... sort of), I mean something like an immediate crisis forcing one boy or another to spend the wish on it rather than on their heart's desire. Like Yellow getting shot, actually, so I guess you could even keep tht plot point; have the bronze plates spent on that and the superdish spent on, wait for it... the boys wishing to stay together or some shit because they've learned they can work towards their dreams together, so such a wish benefits them all evenly, without leaving two boys in the dust while one gets everything he ever wanted. See, we don't need wishes to just magically get everything we want, we can do it ourselves! friendship(And maybe a little homoeroticism)!! and basically this means blue gets out of getting arrested without getting hiS FUCKING HAIR SHAVED THE FUCK OFF AAAAAAAAAGRRGRDGDXXGDRVRDFDVRJ

[abeautifulblog]

you are honestly my favorite fanfiction author of all time, and it feels sort of back-handed in a weird inexplicable way to have "fanfiction" preface that... in my very humble opinion, if was to list my favorite (no preface) authors of all time, you'd definitely be in my top three; beaten only by Mitch Albom and Scott F. Fitzgerald for me, and youre steadfast one of the main authors I re/read for inspiration when i write... who are the authors that inspire you most??

O wow! That is – some high praise indeed, I am deeply honored. :) It’s gratifying to hear that this fic is resonating with you, because it is the most personal piece of fiction I’ve ever written. (Honestly, I’d be happy not to write anything this personal ever again.)

As for the authors who have influenced me (strap in)…

One of the most influential writers when I was a teenager was Anne Rice and her vampire series, though I think it was less about the vampire thing and more about the raging homoeroticism (I joke that Anne Rice made me gay) and the intense, almost claustrophobic emotional intensity of those books. I’ve actually written about her influence on my writing here. (I don’t update that blog anymore, I don’t even know how to approve/respond to comments anymore, but it’s got a pretty extensive archive for people who like hearing me talk about media.)

It’s interesting because just recently (like, last week) I reread a few of her earlier books – Queen of the Damned, The Vampire Lestat, and I’m about halfway through Tale of the Body Thief – and was reminded that yes, she was in fact really good before she went off the rails. (After Tale of the Body Thief, the rest of the series is nigh-unreadable.) She writes lonely people really well – the struggle of endlessly trying to achieve intimacy and failing. When I’m on my game and writing powerful emotional content, I feel like my style owes a lot to the way she does descriptions, which is… kind of hard to describe, but it’s like… emotive language in unexpected combinations? Pairing descriptions of the landscape with adjectives that tie in to the character’s emotional state, or abstract nouns with adjectives that describe a physical sensation. I don’t know, I don’t have any specific examples I can give, but I’ll catch myself writing sometimes and go “ooh that’s good” followed by “haha, you’re pulling an Anne Rice.”

Besides Anne Rice, most of what I read is sci-fi/fantasy; I tend to have very little use for realistic/literary fiction. (Which is why it’s kind of funny that I’m 70k and counting into a suburban love story.) I like SFF, and I like it gay, and for many years it was my quest to find and read every book in the intersection of that particular Venn diagram – the fruits of my quest are here, The Gay Fiction Booklist That Doesn’t Suck. Anything with a throbbing “top pick” icon next to it is, well, exactly that, but I’m not sure whether I’d call them an influence, because I was already in my twenties by the time I read them, so my literary style was kind of settled by then.

(Although when I need to read something to ~get me in the mood~ for writing, Karin Lowachee, Jacqueline Carey, and Sarah Monette are excellent choices for top-notch prose and top-notch emotional engagement.)

Someone who’s not on that list is a relatively obscure manga writer named Miyamoto Kano, who I really wish I could rec to a wider audience, but her work is mostly inaccessible if you don’t read Japanese. Her stories have been a very strong influence on the way I write romance, namely that in the real world, sex doesn’t actually resolve anything (except sexual tension, I guess), and it is not where you should be investing your narrative tension. I’m much more a fan of letting characters jump into bed with each other before they’ve finished working out their shit, and not making the resolution of the drama hinge on them having sex.

(…Which, again, funny – because we’re 70k into A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and they still haven’t shagged, which means I’m writing exactly what I say I don’t write.)

I’m also a huge fan of Miyamoto’s brand of off-beat realism, that you’ll get these moments of comic absurdity popping up even at the most dire moments because that’s what life is. The universe has no respect for your personal crisis, and you get weird/funny/distracting shit popping up when you’re just trying to have a good cry, or a good solid screaming match. To reiterate my favorite George Bernard Shaw quote: “Life doesn’t cease to be funny when people die, any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.” Miyamoto gets that, so beautifully.

And I’m probably forgetting something, but those are the strongest fiction influences I can think of. I read a lot of nonfiction too in order to understand people better on both an individual and a societal level – my top picks would be Influence (Cialdini), Whipping Girl (Serrano), Made to Stick (Heath), On Killing (Grossman), Stigma (Goffman), Collapse (Diamond). (With a much longer list of specialty books for specific subjects.)

For learning how to write emotional involvement, I am a serious nerd for narratology and I recommend Dorrit Cohn’s Transparent Minds. It’s not a book on how to write, it’s one that documents the different methods for conveying a character’s consciousness to a reader. I read it for my thesis, but it wound up being an epiphany, because it explained exactly why some books achieve so much more emotional engagement than others.

And lastly, because it would be ungenerous not to give a shout-out to the very excellent fanfics that are no doubt feeding into my own writing in some way, here’s a sampling of some lesser-known favorites:

Ain’t No Grave (Can Keep My Body Down) - Steve/Bucky, with a very different take on Bucky than what you usually see. I guess maybe this one isn’t so unknown anymore, but I FOUND IT BEFORE IT WAS POPULAR.

Odi et Amo - Eagle of the Ninth, aka, that movie set in Roman Britain where Channing Tatum and Jamie Bell were being hella gay at each other. This fic is a Dead Poets Society fusion, beautifully atmospheric, makes you wish you knew more about poetry.

Love Is All You Need To Destroy Your Enemies - Dresden Files/Welcome to Night Vale crossover. So good that I don’t even begrudge it having dethroned my own Dresden fic from being top-in-fandom.

World Ain’t Ready - Les Miz high school AU. You don’t need to know anything about Les Miz to enjoy this; I didn’t! :D

In His Image - Supernatural, Dean/Castiel. There are a number of fics that are reworkings of season 5, but this one is brilliant. Like when you’re all of a page into the first chapter of a fic and you can feel a smile starting to spread across your face because, oh, oh, this writer is GONNA BE GOOD.

If You Liked The Book, You’ll Hate The Movie - X-Men: First Class, another high school AU because why not. I have a weakness for weird, dysfunctional people being weird and dysfunctional.

…And that does not even scratch the surface of the fics I’ve read and enjoyed, but yeah.

I should stop now. Thank you for reading this far.

[how2to18]

JONATHAN FLATLEY’S Like Andy Warhol presents a compelling alternative to the preconceived conception of Warhol as a cold, crass materialist making affirmative icons to bolster transcendent, glamorous, consumer identification. Flatley instead shows Warhol thinking through ways to approach and share in the feelings of loss, failure, and disidentification that the United States’s glossy consumerist iconography generates. Paradoxically, Warhol opened up affective pathways through liking rather than hating, dismissing, or ironizing. Flatley integrates Warhol into a radical approach to homo-eros that suggests how the desire for sameness in homoeroticism permits a multifarious openness to others and to difference, recalling like-minded theories proposed by Samuel Delany, Michel Foucault, and Leo Bersani. Flatley’s Warhol joyously attaches to the world and others through chains of alikeness: experiences of non-identical, shared similitude that bind subjects in and through difference and similarity. Refusing to overcome abjection through masculine heroism, the Warhol revealed in Flatley’s study is unselfconsciously focused on debased objects, in spite of the possible injury or insult that often attend them. In this way, he created an open invitation for viewers to be “embarrassed and stigmatized” together.

For Flatley, Warhol’s famous screen tests don’t deliver exacting portraits of stable, iconic identities but rather they dramatize “the singular way each sitter fails to hold onto an identity, the way each person comes together and falls apart.” Warhol’s flamboyant, transgressive encounter with the notion of universal masculine interiority posed by both abstract expressionism and the straight-acting industry of late modernist critique uniquely outline the contours of his work against the fixity of modern art and masculinity. Where Warhol imitated the mechanics of industry, industry has subsequently imitated him, in a turn from comedy to tragedy. While Hal Foster famously called Warhol’s dystopian mimicry “traumatic realism,” Flatley points out that rather than shutting affect down, Warhol opens receptivity up by allowing for “a relaxation of the mimetic shock-defense dynamic, enabling transferences of affect from everyday life into the space of the art work.”

Flatley does not tiptoe around the dystopian aspect of the “liking” culture explored by Warhol, especially as it currently manifests in a standardized part of the social media landscape. Rather, he demonstrates that Warhol’s wish to “like” everything was more of a unique cog in the late capitalist machine than the seamless, banal tool for monetizing aesthetic experience that powers social media. This refreshing take on Warhol reveals the artist’s work as predicated in part by fostering the comingling of queer outsiders, rather than just a homo-normative conception of consumer-oriented camp, offering a chance to rethink the often-caricatured artist ahead of a forthcoming retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

I talked with Flatley over email about Warhol’s prophetic relation to social media and branding and about the ways that homophobia continues to inflect canonical interpretations of his work.

¤

FELIX BERNSTEIN: Your opening quote, from a 1963 interview Warhol did with Gene Swenson, is particularly interesting with regard to how it destabilizes the interview: “Someone said that Brecht wanted everybody to think alike. I want everybody to think alike.” Thinking of Warhol’s evasive yet pungent responses as aesthetic decisions, what effect does this have on the retrospective interpreter of Warhol’s statements?

JONATHAN FLATLEY: Great question! In that interview, I really like the way that what Warhol wants (“I want everybody to think alike”) arises in relation to a report (“someone said”) about what somebody else (Brecht) wants. His “own” ideas and intentions and feelings arise here in a chain of imitations. In later interviews, Warhol literalizes this mimetic impulse by saying to the interviewer things like, “You should just tell me the words and I can just repeat them.” Or, at other times, he will just say, “What?” or, “Uh, yes,” or, “Uh, no,” in response to long, involved questions. (Indeed, the filmed interviews give a vivid sense of Warhol as a talented comic performer.) In such situations it becomes impossible to avoid thinking about the productive presence of the interviewer, the degree to which the “interview” is an ensemble performance. On the whole, I think that Warhol’s insistence on being alike thwarts what Foucault called “the will to know,” destabilizing the protocols of the interview, especially if one approaches the interview as a technique for producing truths about the self. (See also Nicholas de Villiers in Opacity and the Closet on Warhol’s refusal to participate in the interview’s will to knowledge.)

I think Warhol’s interview style is destabilizing, especially if you — as interviewer or “retrospective interpreter” — are looking to find some nugget of personal truth or moment of self-disclosure in the interviews. (Is he really smart or is he stupid? What is he “really saying” about Marilyn Monroe or Campbell’s soup? What is his real sexual identity? Is he “for” or “against” consumer culture?) Throughout the book, I mainly see in the interviews Warhol’s ongoing efforts to be open to the people around him, his tendency toward attraction, his indiscriminate approval, and his interest in finding ways to be alike. Together, these might be said to create an openness to the environment.

There is a lot of documentation and disclosure surrounding Warhol, including his own cassette recordings, but there is also a lot of mystery and misinformation. How does the history of homophobia and censorship impact the picture we have of Warhol?

At least in this interview with Swenson, he was openly queer, but all the queer content was edited out, probably (at least in part) by the editor of ARTnews. Jennifer Sichel’s amazing recent discovery of the cassette tapes with recordings of Swenson’s original interview with Warhol reminds us of the very significant role of homophobic editing in the publication of Warhol’s interviews. [1] So, the interview does not begin with the statement about Brecht. Instead, remarkably, it begins with this exchange:

Swenson: Now we have to start talking again. What do you say about homosexuals? Warhol: Oh, you have to ask me a leading question? Swenson: Do you know a lot of closet queens who are homosexuals who are [laughing] Abstract Expressionists? Warhol: Yes. [Laughing] Uh…

This is then followed by gossip about “these girls” (the Abstract Expressionist closet queens), Swenson’s critique of the Abstract Expressionists for being “moralists,” and Warhol’s insistence that the whole interview “should just be on homosexuality.” And then, we get the following:

Warhol: Well, I think everybody should like everybody. Swenson: You mean you should like both men and women? Warhol: Yeah. Swenson: Yeah? Sexually and in every other way? Warhol: Yeah. Swenson: And that’s what Pop art’s about? Warhol: Yeah, it’s liking things. Swenson: And liking things is being like a machine? Warhol: Yeah. Well, because you do the same thing every time. You do the same thing over and over again. And you do the same … Swenson: You mean sex? Warhol: Yeah, and everything you do.  

As Sichel points out, in the printed interview

the removal of every word surrounding Warhol’s statements “everybody should be a machine” and “everybody should like everybody” transforms them into wilfully ambiguous, blank statements about consumerism and serial production. But that is not what they were. These statements form the core of Warhol’s specific response to Swenson’s pointed question: “What do you say about homosexuals?”

That is, Warhol’s liking and his imitation of the machine are here explicitly presented as queer sexual practices.

Clearly, this should alter our sense of Warhol’s apparent reticence about sexuality. The editing of the interview is an example of Warhol being “de-gayed” by the institution of art right from the start (to borrow the language Jennifer Doyle, José Esteban Muñoz, and I used years ago in Pop Out: Queer Warhol). In fact, a large part of the interview is taken up with Warhol’s repeated insistence that Swenson should also have conversations with other Pop Artists — James Rosenquist, Bob Indiana, Claes Oldenburg, and Jim Dine are suggested — “on homosexuality.” At one point Swenson says, “Do you think Pop Art’s queer? [Laughing] I’ll ask Rosenquist that.” Warhol responds very enthusiastically: “Yessss! That would be fantastic!” In other words, Warhol is clear, open, and even ebullient about the possibility of Pop — precisely as queer — making a place for an open discussion about homosexuality in the art world.

The closet, the homophobia of the Abstract Expressionists, the queerness of Pop are all here fully, directly, extensively considered. Had this material been published, it would also have been a kind of ambient destabilization!

It is interesting to juxtapose that affective openness with the very monolithic way that Warhol is often characterized. In the book, you note that he enjoyed seeing people react to him acting swish and “fey.” Yet, Warhol is also portrayed (especially in movies) as having a flat affect — being sinister, cold, flippant, ironic; if not villainous. What is the relationship between Warhol’s perceived flatness and the flamboyance?

Honestly, I think that the critical focus on Warhol’s flatness or his repudiation of feeling may just be a homophobic misreading, an unwillingness or inability to recognize or acknowledge his queerness. It is as if because people could not (or would not) recognize Warhol’s queer feelings, they acted as if he had no feelings at all. If you watch his various interviews or listen to tape recordings or read through his diaries what comes through is a shy, sometimes awkward but recognizably queer, campy, faggy, swishy, or effeminate mode of being in the world. I mean, Warhol did sometimes play up a kind of distanced affect, especially in order to ward off hostile interlocutors. But, even if people did not see him as nice, his friends and colleagues — people who knew him well — did not characterize him as cold or nonaffective, even if they did sometimes describe him as shy and as not liking to be touched. I think Warhol did sometimes wish that he had no emotions, mainly because of his repeated experiences of romantic disappointment, but he also acknowledged that this was impossible. So instead he tried to like everything and like everybody.

How does Warhol’s capacity to like everything stand in congruence and/or dissidence with the monopolized marketization of culture we see in the “liking” regime of market-driven social media?

As we all know, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and so on all instrumentalize their users’ liking in order to “harvest” information about its users’ tastes, turn-ons, anxieties, and emotional ties (our “data”) that is then valuable to advertisers, marketing departments, political campaigns, and everyone else interested in shaping consumer behavior. Moreover, Facebook knows how to use this attention and the information it gathers about our emotional lives to change, quite directly, how we feel.

One response to this situation — a reasonable self-protective one, I think — is to withdraw from social media. But, if we see liking as the most basic form of affective openness to the world, essential to any engagement with the world, then I think it is worth thinking about how we might expand our abilities to like rather than withdraw and delimit them. Here is where Warhol’s effort to like everything and like everybody is interesting. Instead of a withdrawing from liking, Warhol aims to de-instrumentalize liking. His is an expanded, maximalized (I want to say Whitmanian) liking: “I think everybody should like everybody.” In doing this, he looked for places where liking is already present — in consumption, fandom, pornography, collecting practices, the use of technologies like cameras, video, or tape recorders — and looked for ways to affirm and expand that liking.

How can we decouple this homoerotic maximized liking from social media, and recover different modes of affirmation?

To affirm liking does not require that one also affirm its instrumentalization. In fact, the profit model for mass culture and social media depends on users liking some things and not liking others. Unselective liking, such as Warhol’s, is not valuable, is not instrumentalizable, in the same way. Liking everybody and everything — especially if everybody did it — would not only disrupt Facebook’s financial model, it would challenge the basic model for mass culture more generally, where the audience attention that is sold to advertisers is valuable only to the extent that it is selectively exercised, indicating preferences that could be directed toward a purchase.

Even if liking everybody and liking everything is an impossible task (which I think it is), in a world such as ours where disillusionment, anxiety, depressive ambivalence, and alienation are as present as ever, where remaining interested and open to the world presents itself as an ongoing challenge, I am inspired by the unexpected connections and anticipatory hope opened up by Warhol’s de-instrumentalized liking. Such a liking is not just a passive acceptance of the world as it is. Inasmuch as such liking is itself imitative, it brings likenesses into being; it changes the liked and the liker in ways it can be hard to predict in advance. Thus, in the present moment, I keep returning to the question: what resources do we have for de-instrumentalizing our liking?

The archive you draw on to discuss Warhol is vast and his collection is immeasurable and celebrated. The Warhol Museum archives both his collection and his art. However, museums don’t typically attribute authorship to items in an artist’s collection that have not been purposely curated as art by the artist. Jean-Michel Rabate, in The Pathos of Distance, has recently pointed to how, after modernism, the author’s signature remained a dominant framing device for art that questioned originality. But with Warhol, there is not just the indexical signature but a post-mortem brand that authorizes official merchandise sold at most museum stores in New York. Does his transmutation of “liking” itself into art change the way that we should consider his authorship?

This is an interesting and difficult set of questions, in part because “authorship” is a concept with so many valences and meanings. I think you are right that Warhol’s collecting carries with it its own odd sense of authorship. Does the collected object count as a “work” authored by Warhol? If we see Warhol’s artistic practices as a kind of archive of his liking, how does this change what we see as a Warhol “work of art”? Is the very act of “liking” a kind of artistic creation? In a way, I take Warhol’s challenge to authorship for granted in the book, as I see him participating in a “non-compositional” tradition going back to Duchamp. Of course, when he became a well-known painter in the early 1960s, it was not his collecting that disrupted received ideas about artistic creativity and authorship, but his appropriation of already recognizable images of stars and consumer objects, and his mechanically reproduced repetitions on the canvas. The negation of the then-dominant Abstract Expressionism could hardly be more acute.

Yet, collecting is at an interesting liminal space between authorship and non-authorship. If it does not fit into usual conceptions of art-making, it is still the case that any given collection does seem to suggest a subjectivity behind it, an “I” liking things and putting them together into a group of things that “belong together.” Isn’t that a form of authorship? In the book, I sidestep the question of the authored work by focusing on collecting as a practice. I see Warhol’s career as being shaped by the effort to like things by assembling groups of likenesses, by producing and proliferating similarities, seeing and making similarity in as many ways as he could. Relating to the world as a collector was a way to ask of each object of perception: What collection do you belong to? What are you similar to?

Warhol tried to have a collector’s relationship with as many objects of perception that he could. His collections — whether we are talking about his perfumes, his celebrity photographs, his drawings of male genitalia, his art deco furniture, his watches, his rugs, the screen tests of people who came through the Factory, his hundreds of hours of tape recordings of his conversations, the series of images of similar-but-not-identical images of Marilyn Monroe or an abstract shadow in a painting, or the cardboard boxes he filled mainly with mail, photographs, newspaper clippings, poems, invitations, magazines, along with drawings, clothes, toys, the occasional food item, and just about anything else he did not want to throw out or did not have another collection for and called “Time Capsules” — are the record and map of the way of relating to the world that his collecting establishes. Some of his collections, however, were not for others to experience, but were there and valuable inasmuch as they allowed him to keep relating to the world as a collector, to help him maintain his state of ongoing liking. But even here, after his death, with his watches or perfumes, it is not hard to see or imagine the person who has “liked” the things in the collection, and thus to assimilate these collections into an expanded notion of authorship.

Films like Empire are notoriously hard to watch completely (Anthology Film Archives gives a reward to those who can sit through it) and yet Warhol’s difficulty in the avant-garde film context can translate to ambient easy watching in a gallery context (Sleep, for instance, played on loop in a Guggenheim show on Zen art). How does context and attention economy morph the reception of Warhol’s work? How does he foster an affective attentiveness in the viewer, as you argue occurs in the watching of his durational films?

I think those durational films retain their power, at least in the setting of the film theater. I saw Sleep a couple years ago in Frankfurt with my friend Marc Siegel, and it was really fantastic as an aesthetic experience. I mean, setting aside that much time to sit and look at something — whatever it is — already means that something is going to happen. But the film so dramatically disappoints one’s usual spectatorial habits that one has to be in the mood, ready to relax, and let the rhythm of the film structure your perception. Once that happens, one’s sense of time and of perception more generally shifts into a kind of hallucinatory mode where the body of John Giorno in Sleep loses its identity, or shifts its identity over and over again. The squiggles and blips of the grain of the film come in and out of the center of one’s attention. Patterns of light and shadow start to look like other things, like when you are staring at clouds and see “ice cream castles” and “feather canyons” (to borrow from Joni Mitchell). This all sounds fairly straightforward, but as a mode of experience, as a mood, a way of being in the world and of experiencing time, it feels like quite a departure from everyday life, even a negation of it, and in this sense it seems modernist. It draws you to other people, too, to ask them if they noticed those weird shapes in the corner or wonder with them if that was Giorno’s underarm, or what was it? Or, is that his crotch right there, and if so, where is his knee? Are we looking up at the body of Giorno from the point of view of someone giving him a blowjob?

Warhol’s serialism accumulates difference over time but also breaks apart the same-difference binary. From his drawings of various penises to his multiple iterations of Marilyn, his serialism is never monotonous. As you put it, “[A]ffects and attractions never occur for the first time.” But can we pick out an original aptitude or event? Is it just a hall of transferential relations?

For Warhol, I think it is all imitations all the way. There is no original. We all come into being as subjects through imitation. What we imitate is also an imitation. But all these imitations fail in the sense that we never become what we imitate. In any imitation, there are mistakes, mistakes of contingency, or mistakes introduced by the medium. Whatever the medium is, whether it is paint on canvas or film or tape recorder or the human body itself, it always distorts and changes the model according to its own systems and logics and static. Warhol’s practice seems designed to highlight these deviations or distortions and to value them. He seems to be especially interested in the way that mass culture creates a situation in which many people will be imitating the same celebrity models (“think of all the James Deans and what it means”), thereby also becoming like each other. By way of Warhol, we can see how it is the intense imitation-encouraging liking of the fan that constitutes the glamour and “ideal” status of the star. The star’s glamour is the effect rather than the origin of mass fan idealization and imitation. Mass liking makes the star.

When you have lots of people imitating the same star in their own ways, as, for instance, at the Beyoncé concert I attended last spring, it can create a glorious, joyous sense of singularities fitting and misfitting together. Such a plural imitative spectatorial liking was one source of Warhol’s interest in drag queens as “ambulatory archives of ideal movie-star womanhood.” In their very comportment, drag queens make an archive, performing a scholarly service, in the ways that they have incorporated the gestures, looks, gaits, postures, and styles of stars. Warhol admired the mimetic talents required for the reshaping of one’s body in this way, as well as the affective intensity behind it. But Warhol was also drawn to the mode of conviviality or togetherness that shared imitation produced, a togetherness Warhol represents in his Ladies and Gentlemen series of paintings and prints of Black and Latinx drag queens. Among his sitters was the great Marsha P. Johnson, who remarked that “[u]sually most transvestites are friendly towards one another because they’re just alike.” This friendliness, Johnson knew, could also be the basis of a politically active collectivity, which Johnson helped to form and create as a participant in the Stonewall Riot and co-founder with Sylvia Rivera of the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, or STAR. This actualized the political potential of this particular way of being in a group formed by likeness.

You talk about how Warhol was very alert to competition — for instance, altering his style when he saw Lichtenstein doing something too similar with comics. How did he respond to rivalries and falling-outs? What about to those whom he had such shared affinity but difficulty collaborating with, like Jack Smith? How important was the regularity of Warhol’s finding himself hated, judged, and disliked to his practice of “liking”?

It is tough to say what motivated his liking, but it does seem like it mitigated, at least partially, his sense of rivalry, jealousy, and his experience of being disliked. He seemed to be unhappy with those falling-outs, though not as unhappy as he was with romantic breakups. I don’t know if Smith was a rival in Warhol’s view, although Warhol certainly loved his films, and took ideas and stars from him. José Esteban Muñoz told me that John Giorno (Warhol’s boyfriend for a while and the star of Sleep) said that he and Warhol saw Flaming Creatures every night for like two weeks or something like that. He took the idea of the “superstar” from Smith, who coined the term. But they had a hard time getting along and collaborating — this is dramatized in Warhol’s film Camp.

He was always jealous of Lichtenstein, noting, for instance, in his Diaries, how much Lichtenstein’s paintings sold for at auction in comparison to his. Lichtenstein’s always sold for more. He talks openly about his general tendency toward jealousy — which was a feeling he did not like having. His liking may have been an effort to compensate or redirect his feelings about those he felt similar to. The more envious he felt of those who were similar to him, the more he tried to like them.

You deftly show how Warhol’s cultural miming was not an attempt to neatly blend in but rather about standing out, oddly, and at odds; what Warhol called being atypical. You highlight how the singularity of the Screen Tests is paradoxically plural in its openness to a multitude of subject positions that are never resolved by a catchall identity. How was he able to give the viewer a sense of enigmatic, if not auratic, originality?

I think Warhol’s work shows us how singularity appears in fields of similarity. This is easiest to see in his collections, which are themselves techniques for the production of such fields. If one sees a teapot on a table one thinks, “Oh, there’s a teapot.” But if one sees one teapot among other teapots, features such as its oddly shaped spout with a little chip in the porcelain at the tip, the commonness of its color, the elegance of its handle, the particularity of its size all become apparent. It does not tend, when next to other teapots, to be perceived in its identity as a teapot so readily. Seeing them all together one might think: “Oh, I had not appreciated how many different ways there were of being a teapot!” I think that Warhol was attracted to collecting (and to collecting the flawed rather than the perfect object) in part because it allowed him to relate to the world in terms of similarity and singularity.

Warhol’s 472 Screen Tests (filmed between 1964 and 1966) also form a group of similars. These portrait films are all like each other in their basic format, but the singularity of each sitter emerges in the particular way that each one fails — as they all do — to remain still. Even Ann Buchanan, who rather miraculously manages to not blink, cannot prevent her eyes from tearing up in a physiological response to the failure of her eyelids to re-lubricate her eyes. Which is to say that each sitter is brought together into a field of similarity — made alike — not only by the formal principles of the Tests, but also by her or his failure to fulfill an (impossible) request. The Tests set up everyone to succeed in failing. I see here an allegory for an idealized queer collectivity, one in which its members “misfit together” (in Warhol’s phrase, also elaborated brilliantly by Douglas Crimp in his book on Warhol’s films) inasmuch as its members fail (each in their own way) to meet the demand to fit into the given “stock roles.”

Warhol was obviously attracted to groups brought together by voluntary practices of becoming-alike that create a way to belong and be with others without depending on one’s capacity to be an identity or fit a role. Take, for instance, Warhol’s interest in the “A-men” or “mole people” who hung around the Factory, a group brought together by their shared devotion to taking amphetamines. Because amphetamines predictably alter sensation and feeling in similar ways, taking them was a way to become like the others also taking the drug creates a kind of magic circle of lived similarity. One might see his whole career as an ongoing exploration of the creation of such magic circles and the modes of becoming they permitted and promised.

I was just rereading Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, where she takes note of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s call to “pluralize and specify” as one way to think about how “people are different” and to make room for that difference. I know that it is counterintuitive to think that orienting toward likeness could be a way to appreciate singularity and specificity. But it has the advantage of sidestepping the opposition between the same and the different, as well as the reifying effects of “identity.” And it’s not like one’s likenesses are fixed; they don’t attach to you the way identities do. One can “be like” lots of different things across many kinds of differences in ways that don’t erase those differences so much as help us to apprehend them more precisely. We can enter into different magic circles of similarity, but then we can also move out of them. So I don’t mean to propose that orienting one’s feeling and perception toward likeness is the only way to apprehend and appreciate and experience singularities. But it is one way, and it is one that Warhol seemed endlessly interested in, not least because it seemed to enable him to imagine the existence — and even participate in — groups of non-miserable, even joyous, plural queer singularities.

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Felix Bernstein is the author of Burn Book (Nightboat, 2017).

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[1] “‘What is Pop Art?’ A Revised Transcript of Gene Swenson’s 1963 Interview with Andy Warhol.” Transcribed and edited by Jennifer Sichel, Oxford Art Journal, 41.1 2018 85–100; and Jennifer Sichel “‘Do you think Pop Art’s queer?’ Gene Swenson and Andy Warhol,” Oxford Art Journal, 41.1 2018, 1-25.  

The post Liking Andy Warhol: An Interview with Jonathan Flatley appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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JONATHAN FLATLEY’S Like Andy Warhol presents a compelling alternative to the preconceived conception of Warhol as a cold, crass materialist making affirmative icons to bolster transcendent, glamorous, consumer identification. Flatley instead shows Warhol thinking through ways to approach and share in the feelings of loss, failure, and disidentification that the United States’s glossy consumerist iconography generates. Paradoxically, Warhol opened up affective pathways through liking rather than hating, dismissing, or ironizing. Flatley integrates Warhol into a radical approach to homo-eros that suggests how the desire for sameness in homoeroticism permits a multifarious openness to others and to difference, recalling like-minded theories proposed by Samuel Delany, Michel Foucault, and Leo Bersani. Flatley’s Warhol joyously attaches to the world and others through chains of alikeness: experiences of non-identical, shared similitude that bind subjects in and through difference and similarity. Refusing to overcome abjection through masculine heroism, the Warhol revealed in Flatley’s study is unselfconsciously focused on debased objects, in spite of the possible injury or insult that often attend them. In this way, he created an open invitation for viewers to be “embarrassed and stigmatized” together.

For Flatley, Warhol’s famous screen tests don’t deliver exacting portraits of stable, iconic identities but rather they dramatize “the singular way each sitter fails to hold onto an identity, the way each person comes together and falls apart.” Warhol’s flamboyant, transgressive encounter with the notion of universal masculine interiority posed by both abstract expressionism and the straight-acting industry of late modernist critique uniquely outline the contours of his work against the fixity of modern art and masculinity. Where Warhol imitated the mechanics of industry, industry has subsequently imitated him, in a turn from comedy to tragedy. While Hal Foster famously called Warhol’s dystopian mimicry “traumatic realism,” Flatley points out that rather than shutting affect down, Warhol opens receptivity up by allowing for “a relaxation of the mimetic shock-defense dynamic, enabling transferences of affect from everyday life into the space of the art work.”

Flatley does not tiptoe around the dystopian aspect of the “liking” culture explored by Warhol, especially as it currently manifests in a standardized part of the social media landscape. Rather, he demonstrates that Warhol’s wish to “like” everything was more of a unique cog in the late capitalist machine than the seamless, banal tool for monetizing aesthetic experience that powers social media. This refreshing take on Warhol reveals the artist’s work as predicated in part by fostering the comingling of queer outsiders, rather than just a homo-normative conception of consumer-oriented camp, offering a chance to rethink the often-caricatured artist ahead of a forthcoming retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

I talked with Flatley over email about Warhol’s prophetic relation to social media and branding and about the ways that homophobia continues to inflect canonical interpretations of his work.

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FELIX BERNSTEIN: Your opening quote, from a 1963 interview Warhol did with Gene Swenson, is particularly interesting with regard to how it destabilizes the interview: “Someone said that Brecht wanted everybody to think alike. I want everybody to think alike.” Thinking of Warhol’s evasive yet pungent responses as aesthetic decisions, what effect does this have on the retrospective interpreter of Warhol’s statements?

JONATHAN FLATLEY: Great question! In that interview, I really like the way that what Warhol wants (“I want everybody to think alike”) arises in relation to a report (“someone said”) about what somebody else (Brecht) wants. His “own” ideas and intentions and feelings arise here in a chain of imitations. In later interviews, Warhol literalizes this mimetic impulse by saying to the interviewer things like, “You should just tell me the words and I can just repeat them.” Or, at other times, he will just say, “What?” or, “Uh, yes,” or, “Uh, no,” in response to long, involved questions. (Indeed, the filmed interviews give a vivid sense of Warhol as a talented comic performer.) In such situations it becomes impossible to avoid thinking about the productive presence of the interviewer, the degree to which the “interview” is an ensemble performance. On the whole, I think that Warhol’s insistence on being alike thwarts what Foucault called “the will to know,” destabilizing the protocols of the interview, especially if one approaches the interview as a technique for producing truths about the self. (See also Nicholas de Villiers in Opacity and the Closet on Warhol’s refusal to participate in the interview’s will to knowledge.)

I think Warhol’s interview style is destabilizing, especially if you — as interviewer or “retrospective interpreter” — are looking to find some nugget of personal truth or moment of self-disclosure in the interviews. (Is he really smart or is he stupid? What is he “really saying” about Marilyn Monroe or Campbell’s soup? What is his real sexual identity? Is he “for” or “against” consumer culture?) Throughout the book, I mainly see in the interviews Warhol’s ongoing efforts to be open to the people around him, his tendency toward attraction, his indiscriminate approval, and his interest in finding ways to be alike. Together, these might be said to create an openness to the environment.

There is a lot of documentation and disclosure surrounding Warhol, including his own cassette recordings, but there is also a lot of mystery and misinformation. How does the history of homophobia and censorship impact the picture we have of Warhol?

At least in this interview with Swenson, he was openly queer, but all the queer content was edited out, probably (at least in part) by the editor of ARTnews. Jennifer Sichel’s amazing recent discovery of the cassette tapes with recordings of Swenson’s original interview with Warhol reminds us of the very significant role of homophobic editing in the publication of Warhol’s interviews. [1] So, the interview does not begin with the statement about Brecht. Instead, remarkably, it begins with this exchange:

Swenson: Now we have to start talking again. What do you say about homosexuals? Warhol: Oh, you have to ask me a leading question? Swenson: Do you know a lot of closet queens who are homosexuals who are [laughing] Abstract Expressionists? Warhol: Yes. [Laughing] Uh…

This is then followed by gossip about “these girls” (the Abstract Expressionist closet queens), Swenson’s critique of the Abstract Expressionists for being “moralists,” and Warhol’s insistence that the whole interview “should just be on homosexuality.” And then, we get the following:

Warhol: Well, I think everybody should like everybody. Swenson: You mean you should like both men and women? Warhol: Yeah. Swenson: Yeah? Sexually and in every other way? Warhol: Yeah. Swenson: And that’s what Pop art’s about? Warhol: Yeah, it’s liking things. Swenson: And liking things is being like a machine? Warhol: Yeah. Well, because you do the same thing every time. You do the same thing over and over again. And you do the same … Swenson: You mean sex? Warhol: Yeah, and everything you do.  

As Sichel points out, in the printed interview

the removal of every word surrounding Warhol’s statements “everybody should be a machine” and “everybody should like everybody” transforms them into wilfully ambiguous, blank statements about consumerism and serial production. But that is not what they were. These statements form the core of Warhol’s specific response to Swenson’s pointed question: “What do you say about homosexuals?”

That is, Warhol’s liking and his imitation of the machine are here explicitly presented as queer sexual practices.

Clearly, this should alter our sense of Warhol’s apparent reticence about sexuality. The editing of the interview is an example of Warhol being “de-gayed” by the institution of art right from the start (to borrow the language Jennifer Doyle, José Esteban Muñoz, and I used years ago in Pop Out: Queer Warhol). In fact, a large part of the interview is taken up with Warhol’s repeated insistence that Swenson should also have conversations with other Pop Artists — James Rosenquist, Bob Indiana, Claes Oldenburg, and Jim Dine are suggested — “on homosexuality.” At one point Swenson says, “Do you think Pop Art’s queer? [Laughing] I’ll ask Rosenquist that.” Warhol responds very enthusiastically: “Yessss! That would be fantastic!” In other words, Warhol is clear, open, and even ebullient about the possibility of Pop — precisely as queer — making a place for an open discussion about homosexuality in the art world.

The closet, the homophobia of the Abstract Expressionists, the queerness of Pop are all here fully, directly, extensively considered. Had this material been published, it would also have been a kind of ambient destabilization!

It is interesting to juxtapose that affective openness with the very monolithic way that Warhol is often characterized. In the book, you note that he enjoyed seeing people react to him acting swish and “fey.” Yet, Warhol is also portrayed (especially in movies) as having a flat affect — being sinister, cold, flippant, ironic; if not villainous. What is the relationship between Warhol’s perceived flatness and the flamboyance?

Honestly, I think that the critical focus on Warhol’s flatness or his repudiation of feeling may just be a homophobic misreading, an unwillingness or inability to recognize or acknowledge his queerness. It is as if because people could not (or would not) recognize Warhol’s queer feelings, they acted as if he had no feelings at all. If you watch his various interviews or listen to tape recordings or read through his diaries what comes through is a shy, sometimes awkward but recognizably queer, campy, faggy, swishy, or effeminate mode of being in the world. I mean, Warhol did sometimes play up a kind of distanced affect, especially in order to ward off hostile interlocutors. But, even if people did not see him as nice, his friends and colleagues — people who knew him well — did not characterize him as cold or nonaffective, even if they did sometimes describe him as shy and as not liking to be touched. I think Warhol did sometimes wish that he had no emotions, mainly because of his repeated experiences of romantic disappointment, but he also acknowledged that this was impossible. So instead he tried to like everything and like everybody.

How does Warhol’s capacity to like everything stand in congruence and/or dissidence with the monopolized marketization of culture we see in the “liking” regime of market-driven social media?

As we all know, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and so on all instrumentalize their users’ liking in order to “harvest” information about its users’ tastes, turn-ons, anxieties, and emotional ties (our “data”) that is then valuable to advertisers, marketing departments, political campaigns, and everyone else interested in shaping consumer behavior. Moreover, Facebook knows how to use this attention and the information it gathers about our emotional lives to change, quite directly, how we feel.

One response to this situation — a reasonable self-protective one, I think — is to withdraw from social media. But, if we see liking as the most basic form of affective openness to the world, essential to any engagement with the world, then I think it is worth thinking about how we might expand our abilities to like rather than withdraw and delimit them. Here is where Warhol’s effort to like everything and like everybody is interesting. Instead of a withdrawing from liking, Warhol aims to de-instrumentalize liking. His is an expanded, maximalized (I want to say Whitmanian) liking: “I think everybody should like everybody.” In doing this, he looked for places where liking is already present — in consumption, fandom, pornography, collecting practices, the use of technologies like cameras, video, or tape recorders — and looked for ways to affirm and expand that liking.

How can we decouple this homoerotic maximized liking from social media, and recover different modes of affirmation?

To affirm liking does not require that one also affirm its instrumentalization. In fact, the profit model for mass culture and social media depends on users liking some things and not liking others. Unselective liking, such as Warhol’s, is not valuable, is not instrumentalizable, in the same way. Liking everybody and everything — especially if everybody did it — would not only disrupt Facebook’s financial model, it would challenge the basic model for mass culture more generally, where the audience attention that is sold to advertisers is valuable only to the extent that it is selectively exercised, indicating preferences that could be directed toward a purchase.

Even if liking everybody and liking everything is an impossible task (which I think it is), in a world such as ours where disillusionment, anxiety, depressive ambivalence, and alienation are as present as ever, where remaining interested and open to the world presents itself as an ongoing challenge, I am inspired by the unexpected connections and anticipatory hope opened up by Warhol’s de-instrumentalized liking. Such a liking is not just a passive acceptance of the world as it is. Inasmuch as such liking is itself imitative, it brings likenesses into being; it changes the liked and the liker in ways it can be hard to predict in advance. Thus, in the present moment, I keep returning to the question: what resources do we have for de-instrumentalizing our liking?

The archive you draw on to discuss Warhol is vast and his collection is immeasurable and celebrated. The Warhol Museum archives both his collection and his art. However, museums don’t typically attribute authorship to items in an artist’s collection that have not been purposely curated as art by the artist. Jean-Michel Rabate, in The Pathos of Distance, has recently pointed to how, after modernism, the author’s signature remained a dominant framing device for art that questioned originality. But with Warhol, there is not just the indexical signature but a post-mortem brand that authorizes official merchandise sold at most museum stores in New York. Does his transmutation of “liking” itself into art change the way that we should consider his authorship?

This is an interesting and difficult set of questions, in part because “authorship” is a concept with so many valences and meanings. I think you are right that Warhol’s collecting carries with it its own odd sense of authorship. Does the collected object count as a “work” authored by Warhol? If we see Warhol’s artistic practices as a kind of archive of his liking, how does this change what we see as a Warhol “work of art”? Is the very act of “liking” a kind of artistic creation? In a way, I take Warhol’s challenge to authorship for granted in the book, as I see him participating in a “non-compositional” tradition going back to Duchamp. Of course, when he became a well-known painter in the early 1960s, it was not his collecting that disrupted received ideas about artistic creativity and authorship, but his appropriation of already recognizable images of stars and consumer objects, and his mechanically reproduced repetitions on the canvas. The negation of the then-dominant Abstract Expressionism could hardly be more acute.

Yet, collecting is at an interesting liminal space between authorship and non-authorship. If it does not fit into usual conceptions of art-making, it is still the case that any given collection does seem to suggest a subjectivity behind it, an “I” liking things and putting them together into a group of things that “belong together.” Isn’t that a form of authorship? In the book, I sidestep the question of the authored work by focusing on collecting as a practice. I see Warhol’s career as being shaped by the effort to like things by assembling groups of likenesses, by producing and proliferating similarities, seeing and making similarity in as many ways as he could. Relating to the world as a collector was a way to ask of each object of perception: What collection do you belong to? What are you similar to?

Warhol tried to have a collector’s relationship with as many objects of perception that he could. His collections — whether we are talking about his perfumes, his celebrity photographs, his drawings of male genitalia, his art deco furniture, his watches, his rugs, the screen tests of people who came through the Factory, his hundreds of hours of tape recordings of his conversations, the series of images of similar-but-not-identical images of Marilyn Monroe or an abstract shadow in a painting, or the cardboard boxes he filled mainly with mail, photographs, newspaper clippings, poems, invitations, magazines, along with drawings, clothes, toys, the occasional food item, and just about anything else he did not want to throw out or did not have another collection for and called “Time Capsules” — are the record and map of the way of relating to the world that his collecting establishes. Some of his collections, however, were not for others to experience, but were there and valuable inasmuch as they allowed him to keep relating to the world as a collector, to help him maintain his state of ongoing liking. But even here, after his death, with his watches or perfumes, it is not hard to see or imagine the person who has “liked” the things in the collection, and thus to assimilate these collections into an expanded notion of authorship.

Films like Empire are notoriously hard to watch completely (Anthology Film Archives gives a reward to those who can sit through it) and yet Warhol’s difficulty in the avant-garde film context can translate to ambient easy watching in a gallery context (Sleep, for instance, played on loop in a Guggenheim show on Zen art). How does context and attention economy morph the reception of Warhol’s work? How does he foster an affective attentiveness in the viewer, as you argue occurs in the watching of his durational films?

I think those durational films retain their power, at least in the setting of the film theater. I saw Sleep a couple years ago in Frankfurt with my friend Marc Siegel, and it was really fantastic as an aesthetic experience. I mean, setting aside that much time to sit and look at something — whatever it is — already means that something is going to happen. But the film so dramatically disappoints one’s usual spectatorial habits that one has to be in the mood, ready to relax, and let the rhythm of the film structure your perception. Once that happens, one’s sense of time and of perception more generally shifts into a kind of hallucinatory mode where the body of John Giorno in Sleep loses its identity, or shifts its identity over and over again. The squiggles and blips of the grain of the film come in and out of the center of one’s attention. Patterns of light and shadow start to look like other things, like when you are staring at clouds and see “ice cream castles” and “feather canyons” (to borrow from Joni Mitchell). This all sounds fairly straightforward, but as a mode of experience, as a mood, a way of being in the world and of experiencing time, it feels like quite a departure from everyday life, even a negation of it, and in this sense it seems modernist. It draws you to other people, too, to ask them if they noticed those weird shapes in the corner or wonder with them if that was Giorno’s underarm, or what was it? Or, is that his crotch right there, and if so, where is his knee? Are we looking up at the body of Giorno from the point of view of someone giving him a blowjob?

Warhol’s serialism accumulates difference over time but also breaks apart the same-difference binary. From his drawings of various penises to his multiple iterations of Marilyn, his serialism is never monotonous. As you put it, “[A]ffects and attractions never occur for the first time.” But can we pick out an original aptitude or event? Is it just a hall of transferential relations?

For Warhol, I think it is all imitations all the way. There is no original. We all come into being as subjects through imitation. What we imitate is also an imitation. But all these imitations fail in the sense that we never become what we imitate. In any imitation, there are mistakes, mistakes of contingency, or mistakes introduced by the medium. Whatever the medium is, whether it is paint on canvas or film or tape recorder or the human body itself, it always distorts and changes the model according to its own systems and logics and static. Warhol’s practice seems designed to highlight these deviations or distortions and to value them. He seems to be especially interested in the way that mass culture creates a situation in which many people will be imitating the same celebrity models (“think of all the James Deans and what it means”), thereby also becoming like each other. By way of Warhol, we can see how it is the intense imitation-encouraging liking of the fan that constitutes the glamour and “ideal” status of the star. The star’s glamour is the effect rather than the origin of mass fan idealization and imitation. Mass liking makes the star.

When you have lots of people imitating the same star in their own ways, as, for instance, at the Beyoncé concert I attended last spring, it can create a glorious, joyous sense of singularities fitting and misfitting together. Such a plural imitative spectatorial liking was one source of Warhol’s interest in drag queens as “ambulatory archives of ideal movie-star womanhood.” In their very comportment, drag queens make an archive, performing a scholarly service, in the ways that they have incorporated the gestures, looks, gaits, postures, and styles of stars. Warhol admired the mimetic talents required for the reshaping of one’s body in this way, as well as the affective intensity behind it. But Warhol was also drawn to the mode of conviviality or togetherness that shared imitation produced, a togetherness Warhol represents in his Ladies and Gentlemen series of paintings and prints of Black and Latinx drag queens. Among his sitters was the great Marsha P. Johnson, who remarked that “[u]sually most transvestites are friendly towards one another because they’re just alike.” This friendliness, Johnson knew, could also be the basis of a politically active collectivity, which Johnson helped to form and create as a participant in the Stonewall Riot and co-founder with Sylvia Rivera of the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, or STAR. This actualized the political potential of this particular way of being in a group formed by likeness.

You talk about how Warhol was very alert to competition — for instance, altering his style when he saw Lichtenstein doing something too similar with comics. How did he respond to rivalries and falling-outs? What about to those whom he had such shared affinity but difficulty collaborating with, like Jack Smith? How important was the regularity of Warhol’s finding himself hated, judged, and disliked to his practice of “liking”?

It is tough to say what motivated his liking, but it does seem like it mitigated, at least partially, his sense of rivalry, jealousy, and his experience of being disliked. He seemed to be unhappy with those falling-outs, though not as unhappy as he was with romantic breakups. I don’t know if Smith was a rival in Warhol’s view, although Warhol certainly loved his films, and took ideas and stars from him. José Esteban Muñoz told me that John Giorno (Warhol’s boyfriend for a while and the star of Sleep) said that he and Warhol saw Flaming Creatures every night for like two weeks or something like that. He took the idea of the “superstar” from Smith, who coined the term. But they had a hard time getting along and collaborating — this is dramatized in Warhol’s film Camp.

He was always jealous of Lichtenstein, noting, for instance, in his Diaries, how much Lichtenstein’s paintings sold for at auction in comparison to his. Lichtenstein’s always sold for more. He talks openly about his general tendency toward jealousy — which was a feeling he did not like having. His liking may have been an effort to compensate or redirect his feelings about those he felt similar to. The more envious he felt of those who were similar to him, the more he tried to like them.

You deftly show how Warhol’s cultural miming was not an attempt to neatly blend in but rather about standing out, oddly, and at odds; what Warhol called being atypical. You highlight how the singularity of the Screen Tests is paradoxically plural in its openness to a multitude of subject positions that are never resolved by a catchall identity. How was he able to give the viewer a sense of enigmatic, if not auratic, originality?

I think Warhol’s work shows us how singularity appears in fields of similarity. This is easiest to see in his collections, which are themselves techniques for the production of such fields. If one sees a teapot on a table one thinks, “Oh, there’s a teapot.” But if one sees one teapot among other teapots, features such as its oddly shaped spout with a little chip in the porcelain at the tip, the commonness of its color, the elegance of its handle, the particularity of its size all become apparent. It does not tend, when next to other teapots, to be perceived in its identity as a teapot so readily. Seeing them all together one might think: “Oh, I had not appreciated how many different ways there were of being a teapot!” I think that Warhol was attracted to collecting (and to collecting the flawed rather than the perfect object) in part because it allowed him to relate to the world in terms of similarity and singularity.

Warhol’s 472 Screen Tests (filmed between 1964 and 1966) also form a group of similars. These portrait films are all like each other in their basic format, but the singularity of each sitter emerges in the particular way that each one fails — as they all do — to remain still. Even Ann Buchanan, who rather miraculously manages to not blink, cannot prevent her eyes from tearing up in a physiological response to the failure of her eyelids to re-lubricate her eyes. Which is to say that each sitter is brought together into a field of similarity — made alike — not only by the formal principles of the Tests, but also by her or his failure to fulfill an (impossible) request. The Tests set up everyone to succeed in failing. I see here an allegory for an idealized queer collectivity, one in which its members “misfit together” (in Warhol’s phrase, also elaborated brilliantly by Douglas Crimp in his book on Warhol’s films) inasmuch as its members fail (each in their own way) to meet the demand to fit into the given “stock roles.”

Warhol was obviously attracted to groups brought together by voluntary practices of becoming-alike that create a way to belong and be with others without depending on one’s capacity to be an identity or fit a role. Take, for instance, Warhol’s interest in the “A-men” or “mole people” who hung around the Factory, a group brought together by their shared devotion to taking amphetamines. Because amphetamines predictably alter sensation and feeling in similar ways, taking them was a way to become like the others also taking the drug creates a kind of magic circle of lived similarity. One might see his whole career as an ongoing exploration of the creation of such magic circles and the modes of becoming they permitted and promised.

I was just rereading Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, where she takes note of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s call to “pluralize and specify” as one way to think about how “people are different” and to make room for that difference. I know that it is counterintuitive to think that orienting toward likeness could be a way to appreciate singularity and specificity. But it has the advantage of sidestepping the opposition between the same and the different, as well as the reifying effects of “identity.” And it’s not like one’s likenesses are fixed; they don’t attach to you the way identities do. One can “be like” lots of different things across many kinds of differences in ways that don’t erase those differences so much as help us to apprehend them more precisely. We can enter into different magic circles of similarity, but then we can also move out of them. So I don’t mean to propose that orienting one’s feeling and perception toward likeness is the only way to apprehend and appreciate and experience singularities. But it is one way, and it is one that Warhol seemed endlessly interested in, not least because it seemed to enable him to imagine the existence — and even participate in — groups of non-miserable, even joyous, plural queer singularities.

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Felix Bernstein is the author of Burn Book (Nightboat, 2017).

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[1] “‘What is Pop Art?’ A Revised Transcript of Gene Swenson’s 1963 Interview with Andy Warhol.” Transcribed and edited by Jennifer Sichel, Oxford Art Journal, 41.1 2018 85–100; and Jennifer Sichel “‘Do you think Pop Art’s queer?’ Gene Swenson and Andy Warhol,” Oxford Art Journal, 41.1 2018, 1-25.  

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