The joy of visual transgression

I'm sitting here, drinking a delicious hot chocolate. This Starbucks Café is quite cosy. The employees even know me by now. There's something, though, which kinda irritates me. This café is full of nothing but technocrats and all sorts of right-wingers. I mean, there's lots of them. The usual gay couple comes and goes, but the crowd is mainly preppy, speaks with the disdainfully assertive accent of the Mexican Uper White (class?) and comes here to sort out businesses and stuff. At times I make as if I were just going about my business, but in reality, I'm listening to their conversations about... excellence! money-making! the stock-exchange! sinergy! the habits of the very efficient people! neurosomething programming! the dirty working classes! I find it so difficult to understand them, really, I guess they're like every other folk, they want to be happy, have their security, and stuff, it's just their brutal approach what sets them apart. Anyway, I also ask myself why being a technocrat right-winger also comes with having a very narrow mind on social issues. I mean, I've learnt that when it comes to morals or capitalism, the elites usually choose the latter, for if there's a moral principle constraining profit-making, it is usually removed from at least mainstream values. But this is Mexico, the right-wing also distinguishes itself from the masses through their superior "values". Postcolonialism to the fullest.

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Anyway, in honour of one of my favourite values, transgression, in this very right-wing environment, I embed in this blog some of my fave pop transgressors!!! Yay!!!

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I'mmmm crucifiiiied!!! The Army of Lovers. Swedish kitch. Gay, very gay. A dance cult hit, there's even PhD dissertations about this act and the song. 1992, before the conservative takeover of it all. I can't imagine anything like this coming out of mighty conservative Anglo_Saxonia and succeed like the Lovers did. For everyone's delight: Crucified.

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Ex communists have come a looong way in Bulgaria. Now, to our very eyes, the King, no, I mean, the Queen of Bulgarian Folkpop, Turbo Folk or Chalga, Azis!!! One of the most admired pop folk singers in Mexican history is Juan Gabriel, who's admitted to being a homosexual, although always sorta sticking to a semi-manly image. Azis is out and about, I mean some people come out, others just explode onto the scene, just like he does. I can't think of any kind of singer like him hitting it big in Western Europe or Mexico, this may be just too much for Protestant or hypocrat Mexican values to bear.

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Last, but not least, the very last Baroque masterpiece, Marilyn Manson's Long Hard Road Out of Hell. The director studied well pictures of XVIIIth-century Hispanic baroque, full of blood, and crossed messages about sensuality, faith, devotion and theatrics. Manson provokes us with his androgynous depiction of himself, takes us down to the hell and allows us to dwell in it. No one's updated or recycled, then destibilised a whole artistic period like Manson in this amazingly brilliant video. Visually stunning. Theatrical. Provoking. Coldly calculated, like any embellishment in any Spanish or Latin American church in the XVIIIth century.

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