Cock Culture

WARNING: THIS POST COULD BE CONSTRUED AS PORNOGRAPHIC BY THOSE WHO ARE OFFENDED BY THE SIGHT OF MALE GENITALIA. I DO THIS TO INJECT SOME HUMOR AND TO GET THE READER TO THINKING ABOUT HIS OR HER REACTIONS TO THE SIGHT OF A PENIS. IF YOU ARE OFFENDED BY PENISES I SUGGEST YOU CLICK OFF OF THIS POST AND FIND SOMETHING MORE TO YOUR TASTE.

The penis has played such an important role in American history it should be given it’s own stamp.

The penis is a much disparaged organ. It is blamed for the appalling state of our popular culture. If only men were dickless then perhaps things would be better. I think that kind of thinking is wrong. I feel sexuality should be celebrated, while recognizing how it’s misuse leads to sickening abuse and worse. I love my own penis, other guy’s jolly organ I tolerate. I can certainly understand why women (and men) would consider the penis to be quite ugly. It is just a tube after all. It serves it’s function and that is pretty much it. It isn’t even particularly good design. Urination and procreation performed by the same tube? Bad idea. But I already posted my thoughts about the penis. Here I want to write about Cock Culture. I don’t even like the word ‘Cock’. I don’t like ‘Cunt’ either. That ‘k’ sound is so unpleasant, not sexy at all. I prefer penis because it is a silly name, at least the name is unoffensive even if the organ isn’t. Actually it is the person attached to the penis that is offensive, don’t you think?

This testosterone driven culture that we inherited from the British enabled us to almost conquer a continent. We raped and pillaged our way across virgin territory, driving out the native Americans. Because we could. That is the ethos of Cock Culture. If you can’t eat it, then fuck it. Spreading our seed without regard for the feelings of the fucked was our manifest destiny. We felt we could always manage to achieve an erection and push ourselves onto the rest of the world. We shoved our cock into the mouths of Vietnam, and today we are attempting to do the same in Afghanistan and it isn’t working so well. Of course it failed miserably in Vietnam. Many still reason that we lost that war because we just didn’t keep on thrusting until we achieved orgasm. We committed the cardinal sin of Cock Culture. We pulled out. We continue to force the rest of the world to take notice of us. We shove our cocks into the unwilling faces of the rest of the world, with little regard for the indigenous culture. We have to have the largest and longest cock, the greatest nation in the world!! This is our sickness. Our politicians jerk us off every four years with their patriotic talk of America’s greatness. As you undoubtedly know (provided you are a man), your judgement is impaired when you are caught up in a lustful frenzy. Ooops! I just assumed she wanted it. Of course she did, look at how she is dressed. She is begging for it. And of course the penis, being a mere tube, has no scruples.

Come on and ride the Penis Train! It will be a long hard ride, but when you get to your destination you will be so satisfied!

But make no mistake, Cock Culture built America. When we built the railroads and sent these phallic engines charging across the landscape asserting our economic will, this was one of our grandest erections. Many men today look back fondly on that spectacular orgasm. Back in those days men stroked their cocks with pride. They were doing the lord’s work! Of course it wasn’t until Sigmund Freud explained it to us that we recognized how important a role the penis played in all aspects of civilization by the sword. It is all about sex, Freud said, and he made a good point. But that proved to be the beginning of the end for Cock Culture. It used to be, and still is to a large extent, that the penis was forbidden. You didn’t talk about it, think about it, you never played with it, and you certainly never presented it for perusal in mixed company, or any company for that matter. It is perfectly ok to display the vagina for this helps to dispel the mysterious hold this enclosure has over our male psyche. But displaying the penis is sick. Why? Because it amounts to the same thing as pulling back the curtain to reveal the little old wrinkled man pulling the levers, pretending to be this magnificent monster, the Cock!! It helps to dispel the myth of the penis, the myth of forbidden sexuality. I view with considerable trepidation my posting photos of the penis. WordPress may punish me dearly for this transgression. What if children saw this? I doubt any children check out my blog anyway, but if they did, it might just (oh my God!!) lead to questions. Why is the penis bad, daddy? Ask your mother. Why is the penis bad, mommy? Ask your dad. And on it goes, until finally they get something along the lines that it is nasty and private. Such ideas really make for a lousy time of it when these children attempt to come to terms with their own penises or vaginas. I say that is nonsense, people are nasty, penises are not. I would like to print t-shirts with a penis on them saying “Chill out! It’s just a tube!”

The penis plays such a central role in San Francisco’s culture that the city should place the head of a penis atop Coit Tower, as a celebration of San Francisco’s perpetual hard-on.

So anyhow I push the limits of acceptable blogging once again and if this causes my blog to suffer, I will remove the offending posts and do my penance. Forgive me for my outrageousness. (have you ever noticed how when something really bad happens, especially if it is sexual, it is called ‘outrageous’. I always thought that being outrageous was a good thing. It is the root of artistic creation and innovation. The popular media has hijacked this word!!! and made it offensive. Is being bland and inoffensive a sign of mental health. I think not. If this offended you, I gave you fair warning and you looked at it anyway. Why is that??

OMG!! What will Russellpop do next????

My Virtual Living Room

My Virtual Living Room

Welcome to my virtual living room. This was a project for my Beginning Photoshop class in 2010. It captures my fascination with popular culture quite well, and it is certainly a lot more interesting than my real living room. This is the face of popular culture in the twentyfirst century. Everyone creates their own versions of the culture which surrounds them. Popular culture today is interactive, which leads to a lot of thorny issues I won’t go into here. Popular culture has always involved an interaction between the viewer, listener, or reader’s imagination and the work. This is where the magic occurs. When I was a kid I used carbon paper to trace images from my Batman comic books. I created my own stories for my own amusement. Much the same sort of thing happens today with the varied multimedia tools available to us all. We use the sounds, images, and words of popular culture to produce our own product. So long as we aren’t selling our product, we reason that we are not violating any laws. If we are creating projects for school we are generally protected under fair use laws. This is a difficult area for consumers and artists, because today  the consumer also becomes an artist.

This virtual living room also reveals a few of my obsessions within pop culture. I am fascinated by the weird and mysterious fringe areas of popular culture exemplified by Donnie Darko. The rabbit stands guard here, about ten times larger than the original figure. Batman of course, I have mentioned before, and he continues to resonate with me. Batman wasn’t always so cool, I was teased relentlessly for the Batman sticker on my bicycle. There weren’t any action figures when I was a kid, only models of Superman or Batman that you had to assemble. If I could afford it, I’d have a ton of action figures. So that is another obsession. They are especially fun because they are tangible, you can actually hold an action figure in your hand. In our virtual entertainment paradise we lose the tactile quality of toys. I think it is important to have an actual object to play with. I am not an advocate of keeping things in their boxes. I am not a collector. I want to play with my toys. Of course Andy Warhol’s Marilyn stares down from the wall. She is the queen of pop culture. Elvis is the king. Considering he is one more of my obsessions it is odd that he isn’t present. The devil girl bathed in red light is also a cute touch. I like kitsch, especially the underground comic sort of kitsch, which this sort of is. I liked how the San Francisco street outside appears like a watercolor. Nice unintended artifact.

I am fascinated by the interface between imagination and art, which is the essence of popular culture. To a child everything gets mixed together, they aren’t bothered by differences in scale, playing with a plastic dinosaur and a huge teddy bear at the same time. Things don’t have to make sense, the child gives it his or her own sense. That is the spirit of today’s popular cultural explosion. So this blog isn’t entirely about the passive consumer aspect of pop culture, it is also about the deconstruction of pop culture and the new art that emerges from that. So…anyway would you like an oreo?, they are right there on the coffee table. Help yourself.