being beauteous

hmmmmm....

i am still meandering around the beauty posts. i think the only way i'm going to write anything at all is if i write notes and rambles for a never to be written post about beauty and its errors.

first - in catherine's post - who is making the error? is beauty itself some kind of error (which is how i read jared's response, that the non-beautiful is whatever is stagnant/rigid/stifling - the beauty is the surprising veering off)? or is an error in beauty valuing something too highly or not highly enough? (or having the wrong idea of what beauty is?)

tony and i just saw the not-super-great merchant of venice movie. but there's that scene where the suitors choose between three caskets to win portia's hand in marriage - and the right one is the lead one that bassanio picks, not the gold or silver the others pick...

so it's the all that glitters is not gold thing - but then bassanio is making an 'error in beauty' to show he understands what true beauty is so that he can marry a lady who is outwardly extremely beautiful, with a huge fortune. not sure where i'm going with this one except that i find it strange. he knows the right answer (conventional wisdom).

in his speech he says:

"Thus ornament is but the guiled shore
to a most dangerous sea..."

(mentioned bc 'guiled shore' is my current favorite phrase and i'm trying excessively every day to work it into flaming t.)
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i like the idea that there are errors made, but eventually one learns to fit them in to a larger framework - that the error in valuation/beauty is necessary to catapult you to a different order, where that error fits in as beauty. that is yet another idea ripped off from robert duncan. i was trying to allegorize this on the phone to jared in terms of the clothes i wore in high school....
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....but if you can flip perspective on an error so that it becomes beautiful in a new order - or as part of a whole which needs it - i guess the reverse could be true - that something that previously seemed beautiful becomes horrible in a new context. i guess i'm thinking more morally here though maybe there are aesthetic things too. or what about things that are so mixed up that they aren't readable/judge-able as beautiful or unbeautiful?
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the whole idea of beauty makes me think also of contemporary art. there's so much out-running beauty, in a way. (i.e. things are critiqued in terms of being 'too aestheticized' .) if you see beauty that way, it's the force of assimilation. it interests me that things that were anti-beautiful when they were made (like minimalist boxes) seem beautiful now. they jumped us over into another order of beauty. or they were gentrified. but how do you ever get out of that hole?
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or maybe they weren't meant to look un-beautiful - does a challenge to the art before you that gets on your nerves mean re-defining where beauty is? (i.e., beauty is not the stable, it's the contingent - or, beauty isn't making something that looks beautiful, it's making something the shock of whose ugliness/starkness will cause people to act in a more beautiful/ethical way?)

i'm complaining to tony that i can't write this post (he's working behind me at his desk) and he says "beauty is a trap." he means the concept beauty...he goes on to elaborate...."is it how something looks? is it how it's made? how it works? how it affects people? how it fits in to a system?" i like this so i'm transcribing it.
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continuing in the documentary mode, i guess because this strikes me as a tangled issue, the jay-z line "i'm che guevara with bling on, i'm complex" keeps running through my head over and over.

in other news, we watched dirty dancing last night (my first time seeing it) and went to go see guitar wolf. the music was good but it was so crowded and violent - an angry houston rockabilly crowd - i kept getting elbowed in the head and becoming older by the minute. a woman's very long and very blond and very scratchy hair was being shoved into my nose and mouth and eyes - i eventually started desperately pushing on her head as though it were inanimate to try to clear a little breathing room - not very beautiful behavior by me....

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