One of the most tremendous and extraordinary happenstances to come in the wake of the Man/son show last year, was my introduction to David Herrle, whose opus Sharon Tate and the Daughters of Joy, has just been released.
Expounding a similar trough, Davids prose is a fascinating rhythmic riff on an eternal arc of the goddess, femme fatal and eviscerated muse through history,and I was honored then to be asked to contribute my 2010 piece-the Valley-as the frontispiece. That aside, I make no bones when I say that I believe Herrles work is as profound as Ginsberg's "Howl" and every bit the master painter with epigrams, I'll leave you with a selection of his remarkable prose, and the hope that you will click the following link and fill someones stocking:
check out Sharon Tate and the daughters of Joy
UNTITLED, or UNTAINTED
Scatalogicians say “we’re born between urine and feces”
and evolutionists reduce human births to fishy non-events.
I rebut that we burst from Zeus’ head and correspond
to true love as the moon reflects the sun.
We are one part piss and shit, three parts magic.
There is a vast heaven between the hole and the hole.
REVERSE GALATEA
I stand against genetic egalitarians, insisting — and proving —
that there
are perfect tens among us, that the streets, malls,
schools, slums and cubicle lands teem with females that shame
Playmates, Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, Gibson Girls, Miss USAs.
Physical beauty and limbic dope can't make us righteous or
inspire peace (those darling pinups on bomber noses: all
femmes
fatales) so we must abstract delectable flesh into concept, Muse,
trickle-up aesthetics: unveil the Sublime, inform the world of Forms.
This is the Reverse Galatea, an unreification, a Cocochanelism.
Let's piss off gender-feminists and Left and Right ascetics.
My radical subversion compels me to saturate the social sphere
with post-Pre-Raphaelite cream women, hot ebon lovelies and
supermodels, conflate proto-Soviet Plato with
Marie Claire, shine
pop culture's flooziest swan-sired Helens into Nurse Ratcheds' eyes.
Offend puritan Hitlers, Marlene Dietrich! Toss your bra at social
realism, Dita Teese! Muffle Rembrandt noses, Courbet bushes!
The Aesthetes were right in praising scopophilic and olfactory
bondage: arresting style and images, powder, blush and perfume,
Prada over
Pravda, because curative visual frottage stimulates a
sugary ooze to gum up utilitarian machines and appall soul-police.
Mary Poppins is Julie Andrews (not the marm of the books), Gypsy Rose
Lee frees, Trudy Stein jails, Joplin's a jalopy, and Katy Perry's a Ferrari.
We need gorgeous gargoyles to repel drab demons, a return to pulp
magazines' dichotomous depictions: an aesthetic equivalent to war-
propaganda art that defends the pure genius of being good-looking.
Who's afraid of Naomi Wolf? Not us! Beauty is an ever-expanding box!
Pin-up artists Vargas and MacPherson are high-treasonous.The centerfold is a revolutionary act.
