Hype: The Next in Line reviewed

Jason Schneiderman reviews The Next in Line for Coldfrontmag.com.

Highlights:

“The vision of the erotic that Schmidt offers is surprisingly friendly and refreshingly playful.”

“Schmidt’s touch is so light, it feels like he’s rediscovered the harpsichord in a time of Thelonius Monk imitators.”

“Schmidt’s debut collection is a remarkable accomplishment—clever, smart, and emotionally satisfying.”


Click here to read the review.

Thanks, Jason!

Posted on June 12, 2009
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Something’s comin’


View My move in a larger map

Posted on June 12, 2009
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Rag-picking


Fashion critics are heaping praise on Alexander McQueen’s Fall/Winter 2009/10 collection, but for all the wrong reasons. McQueen’s clothes are impeccably tailored and gloriously styled (if a touch specific — on a few dresses, a houndstooth pattern morphs into birds, as if McQueen had hired M.C. Escher as his fabric maker). But what is really getting the critics excited is the recycling theme that McQueen used for his runway presentation. At the center of the runway stage was an enormous dump of discards — the remainders of McQueen’s previous runway shows, painted black. The models wore hats made from trash-can liners and other remnants.

But McQueen’s “rebellion” against fashion’s culture of obsolescence would have a lot more bite if he had first swallowed his own medicine. As a commentary on what fashion does (recycle its past), his detritus theme is clever enough. But as a critique of the fashion business–per the New York Times’ Eric Wilson and McQueen’s own PR–it’s toothless. McQueen could have used recycled fabrics,* or avoided the conspicuous waste of the runway show, or in some way thrown a cog into the gears of the fashion system. Instead, he sent out dresses that looked as if they were made out of Hefty bags. Although many of the silhouettes here are “classic” and in a sense timeless, they are so distinctive and so formal, it is hard to imagine them being worn more than once. Versatile, rewearable clothes these are not.

McQueen may be making a statement, but it’s a calculated one which in no way threatens his position in the system that feeds him. Business as usual: reclame sells.

* Recall Miguel Adrover’s recycled Burberry trenches and the coat he made from the late Quentin Crisp’s mattress ticking:

Posted on March 12, 2009
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Second-hand Rose / She’s wearing second-hand clothes

bebe.jpg
Bebe Sahara Benet, a contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race

Some of us here at The Next in Line, wrestling with dissertation deadlines and mid-winter blues, have found relief in an unlikely source: the Logo show RuPaul’s Drag Race. Some people have described it as a parody of the typical reality-TV show competition. But there’s actually little parodic about it, except for the drag competition at its center. These queens are dead serious about their craft. If anything, the dissonance between drag parody and the cutthroat competition is what makes the show so fascinating.

There are really too many highlights to list, not least the surprising grace of RuPaul herself, who is witty, composed, and evangelically supportive. In drag, RuPaul is a fabulous ringmaster and emcee. As man, wearing slightly ill-fitting suits, Ru is a surprisingly sensitive teacher to his drag students.

But the point I’m compelled to make is that the show’s timing couldn’t be better. Drag might seem tired, pre-political, “over.” And probably it would have seemed egregiously so even six or seven months ago. But in our new economic climate, drag is suddenly relevant and necessary, and not just because we need a little Busby Berkeley glamour to pull us out of this depression. Rather, drag is on point because it is fundamentally an art of recycling. This is true in a practical sense; queens must be resourceful and innovative, often in the face of greater challenges (size 13 feet, bigger noses, extra appendages) and smaller paychecks. Case in point: in the first challenge on RuPaul’s Drag Race, the contestants raid costume department cast-offs and bins from a 99-cent store to create their first runway looks. It’s a typical reality-TV challenge (almost every season of Project Runway begins similarly). But here it is especially telling because the impulse to drag is itself a kind of recycling: a recycling of a lost femininity, of a “drag mother,” of an original moment when the queen was first stung by the glamour bug.

In an interview on the Logo site, the contestant named Shannel is asked what music videos have influenced her, and she says that she doesn’t watch a lot of videos, because the stars that inspire her are from “bygone days.” What makes drag a compelling form may be less its gender disruption than its its unstable marriage of retrospection and innovation, of conservation and progression. The drag queen recombines elements of past glamour to make new entertainments—a judicious economy after these years of unreflective consumption and waste.

Posted on March 3, 2009
Filed Under Uncategorized, fashion, media, pop music, the spectacle, the spectacle, visual studies | 1 Comment

Interdisciplinary Transcription journal

Andy Fitch and Jon Cotner have assembled a stellar cast of poets, critics, and artists for a special issue of Intervalles on “Interdisciplinary Transcription.” I’m honored to be included. Most contributors have submitted creative work, but mine is a critical essay about Andy Warhol and his transcription practice, adapted from my dissertation. (It’s in PDF form.)

Posted on January 23, 2009
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The Next in Line published

The Next in Line by Christopher Schmidt My first book of poems, The Next in Line, is now available for purchase at SPD (small press distribution) and Amazon.

Posted on January 6, 2009
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Jack Spicer

My review of Jack Spicer’s My Vocabulary Did This To Me, from Time Out New York:

Spicer
Jack Spicer’s poetic talent was both a burden and a kind of magic. Like Blake and Yeats before him, this Bay Area figurehead believed that his poems were dictations from the “spooks” and “martians” of the spirit world. When Spicer died of alcoholism at the age of 40 in 1965, his final words expressed the fallout of his beliefs: “My vocabulary did this to me.” This statement of defeat now serves as the title to a vital new collection, bringing together late masterpieces long out of print and a raft of previously unpublished lyrics.

After he began writing “serial poems” in 1957—book-length sequences with titles like After Lorca and “A Fake Novel About the Life of Arthur Rimbaud”—Spicer declared his earlier lyrics to be as “meaningless as sex in a Turkish bath.” Such erotic pessimism runs deep in Spicer’s work. An unattractive gay man foiled by love, Spicer was by many accounts a spiky and hostile personality, intent on rejecting the world before it rejected him. (Spicer’s refusal to publish beyond the San Francisco area was another aspect of his self-abnegation, insuring the poet cult status.)

While the untidy difficulty of Spicer’s work will repel some readers—“The style of a poem is the armor we wear,” he writes—his wild forms break through the confines of traditional lyric, revealing new, discomfiting vistas. Treat this book as you would a bottle of contraband absinthe, to be decanted in small doses. His vision of the poet’s career is mad, restless and inspiring—more seductive for the likelihood that it will end in failure.

Posted on January 6, 2009
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Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell

My review of their correspondence, for Time Out New York:

“Do / you still hang your words in air, ten years / unfinished.…” Those lines are Robert Lowell’s, from a poem honoring Elizabeth Bishop’s exemplary forbearance. As a title to this lovely, if exhausting, collection of the poets’ 30-year correspondence, Words in Air takes on new meaning, evoking the perilous airmail journey of the authors’ letters over the great distance separating them: Bishop lived in Brazilian self-exile, while Lowell, in New York, enthralled the Partisan Review set with his Boston Brahmin charisma.

Lowell was Bishop’s American lifeline, and his letters are larded with gossip and literary intrigue. Bishop, while she struggled to complete poems, emerges here as a prolific letter writer; her vibrant, witty missives traffic effortlessly between the high-flown and the ordinary. She dwells seriously on writing and Lowell’s marital dramas, but also recounts making raspberry jam from a recipe found in Anna Karenina. The most striking exchanges occur, fittingly, over the misuse of letters. In his 1973 book The Dolphin, Lowell incorporated and rewrote correspondence from his estranged wife, Elizabeth Hardwick—occasioning a fierce rebuke from Bishop (“infinite mischief,” she writes).

Words in Air clarifies the psychological magnetism that kept these two poets in careful orbit of each other. Lowell once nearly asked Bishop to marry him—“the might have been for me,” he calls the aborted proposal. Bishop’s mere presence could unhinge the poet, and many letters find her subtly dissuading him from visiting her. But Lowell’s mental instability was also an attraction to Bishop, who reveals concern for her fellow writer’s breakdowns—at least from a distance. As much as these letters speak to the poets’ sustaining friendship, they also make evident a poignant fear of making too direct a connection.

Posted on January 6, 2009
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Author function

ashbery.jpg

Posted on November 7, 2008
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America

Enjoyed the baseball game.
Whatever you could do to help my sister.
If you came tomorrow.
In order to find a job you liked.

Whatever you say will be OK with Mary.
Whatever you say will be OK with Mary, won’t it?
Will whatever you say be OK with Mary?

I believe that education makes a difference.
They somehow got me to believe that education makes a difference.
It wasn’t me who got me believing.

For Tommy to pass now won’t be easy.
They somehow got the passing to be easy.
It wasn’t me who did the easing.

Didn’t he enjoy the baseball game on Saturday?
Enjoyed the baseball game on Saturday, didn’t he?
You enjoyed the baseball game on Saturday, didn’t you?

The cost of spending will be raised now.
They somehow got the cost of spending to be raised now.
It wasn’t me who did the spending.

They refused to believe the idea that the wind howling through the trees last night.
They refused to believe the idea that in order to find a job he liked.
They refused to believe the idea that the company, which employed many workers and made many different kinds of products.

The hailing took out all the looting.
They somehow got the hailing to take out all the looting.
It wasn’t me who did the looting.

The baseball game will be enjoyed now every night.
They somehow got it so the baseball game will be enjoyed now every night.
It wasn’t me who did the enjoying.

Whatever you say will be OK with Mary.
Whatever you say will be OK with Mary, won’t it?
Will whatever you say be OK with Mary?

Posted on September 14, 2008
Filed Under American Idol, Sarah Palin, The Election, found poetry | Leave a Comment

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