Bukkhead Creative Writing

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====== SCUM Manifesto, by Valerie Solanas, a book review ======


I have not read SCUM Manifesto but I'm already mad. Based on what little I know. A woman self-publishes a tirade, then tries to shoot Andy Warhol. She goes to a cracker house, and years later, an erudite and connected academic pens an intro and they sell the shit on the internet.

"They" refers not to the broad who inked the screed, but to whatever publishing body publishes bodies like this. I don't know who's in charge of that press, but I assume it's non-female men, and that's where my anger comes from. Those imaginary men.

For all I know, Exploitation Inc. is helmed by a bunch of hairy-armpited lesbians who dine on chubby infants and drink the blood of young, hairless Mexican boys. But let's not get carried away. We live in a society where non-female men running things is the norm. Find an exception, and you find the rule. So even if I'm wrong, the idea that the platonic publishing crew is in my head oozing with Y chromosomes isn't unreasonable. 

Even if it's wrong. I don't want that shit in my head. I don't want to see that some dame with a screw loose wrote a reason for the murder of the over-rated cod-father of pop art and then missed her shot (Fuck you, Hamilton), only for my head to fill in the blanks by making the profiteers of her manifesto a bunch of cigar-chewing whore-choking their-own-daughters-body-shaming their-own-sons-rape-teaching whiskey-swilling walking-future-heart-attacks.

In an ideal world, would there be lesbians who write books and then shoot shitty artists and then go to the nut farm? Maybe? Are we not entertained? Can we not live in a world where a person is defined neither by their own genitalia nor the genitals of those they most like to mash genitals with? A world where a person can write a manifesto based purely on imagination and be read by someone else purely for the effervescence of their prose. No?

No, and that's why I'm angry. In an ideal world, I could experience anger, good, clean, juicy anger, without it being because of an injustice that is wholly the fruit of my imagination. I could read SCUM Manifesto and get good and angry without there actually existing gender, or sexuality, or mental illness, or ballistics, or derivative art, or cults of fucking personality.

Kind of the same thing: I just heard that Beyonce and Jay-Z have used a previously un-seen painting by Basquiat in a Tiffany's ad. Lots of people are mad about this. Myself, I rate Basquiat with Warhol, and I have never seen nor read //Breakfast at Tiffany's//, though I conflate the film/book with the actual business easily. I can tell you that reading the movie's plot synopsis on Wikipedia has made me angry all over again. I can tell you that I'm not seeing much of a difference between Holly Golightly and Valerie Solanas.

Must art contain misery is I guess what I'm asking. Beyonce is an artist, and Jay Z is an artist, to each their own misery and the art they make about it. But the exploitation of an exploited artist and the exploitation of racial identity by rich people getting rich selling riches to the rich, it makes me miserable. And so it's art. Damn it. All art is exploitation. God damn it.
Bukkhead Creative Writing

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