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Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars, and Aesthetics, by Wayne Koestenbaum
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"Cleavage is very 1960s: it shows off the new permissiveness. (Look! we can reveal most of Elizabeth Taylor's breasts!) Cleavage is not nudity. Cleavage is a promise: not sight, but on the verge of sight." [p. 138]
In this brilliantly shrewd, hilarious collection of essays, cultural critic and acclaimed writer Wayne Koestenbaum exposes all that provokes, intimidates, heartens, and arouses us in matters of style, celebrity, obscenity, and art.
Armed with a bold curiosity, a stinging wit, and a subversive sense of wordplay, Koestenbaum reflects on a dazzling array of subjects. Here are the outsized emotions inflamed by Sophia Loren, Robert Mapplethorpe, and locker-room nudity . . . vivid dreams of flirting with Bill Clinton and resurrecting Bette Davis from the dead . . . the intangible joys of thrifting . . . the true meaning of masculinity . . . and the indelible sensation that two scoops of vanilla flesh, heaving incongruously in a 70-millimeter musical, made on a young boy of impressionable age.
From the rigors of a day spent with Melanie Griffith ("Melanie Time") to the healing powers of a gray Prada suit ("Diary of a Suit") to moving meditations on the importance of reading ("Why I Read"), this volume is an irresistible exploration of culture and identity in America. If celebrity is--as Koestenbaum suggests--an earthquake, then Cleavage is the aftershock.
- Sales Rank: #1978537 in Books
- Published on: 2000-02-29
- Released on: 2000-02-29
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.28" h x .77" w x 5.53" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 352 pages
From Publishers Weekly
According to Koestenbaum, culture is all around us: in movie magazines, paparazzi, Robert Mapplethorpe's photos, Princess Di's dresses and, of course, Liz Taylor. After deconstructing gay men and opera (The Queen's Throat) and prominent first ladies (Jackie Under My Skin), the ever-observant Koestenbaum has assembled in these 49 reprinted essays an idiosyncratic overview of the state of U.S. popular culture as well as his own mind. His charm and power as a writer reside in his ability to wed his own obsessions with the most serious and the most frivolous of cultural manifestations. For him, a meditation on Oscar Wilde's trial prompts the statement, "I... believe that desire is extreme and anti-social." An essay on Elizabeth Taylor moves easily from her looks to his own gender identity: "After watching Elizabeth Taylor movies I feel eerily masculine. Her beauty shoves me out of maleness and compresses me back into it." In a less astute or self-aware writer, such leaps might read as simple narcissism or miscalculated post-modern posturing, but Koestenbaum is able to combine personal writing and cultural analysis in a way that advances both with poise and intelligence. While some of the pieces are less substantial--such as his quirky short essays on envy and masochism--Koestenbaum delivers when he writes most personally. "The Aryan Boy," an introspective essay on masculinity, homosexuality and Jewish identity, shows the author at his best: moving, insightful and fueled by his ability to shock, provoke and challenge.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Sex and aesthetics are all well and good, but its stars who claim pride of place in this miscellany by academic gadfly Koestenbaum (English/CUNY; Jackie Under My Skin, 1995, etc.). Though its divided into six parts on topics ranging from Dress and Undress to Reading, this collection of occasional pieces, whose original provenance ranges from Parnassus to Allure, breaks down into two larger units: unabashed celebrations of popular culture and cultish figures like Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and more gnomic, cryptic analyses, or replications, of the tensions of contemporary culture. In these latter piecesespecially in the 12 prose poems of The Locomotive EmpressKoestenbaum is often opaque, banal, or portentously playful, but he is never staid. His unapologetic delectation in himself, the dreams he constantly retails, and his reactions to cultural marginalia (I consider sexual liberation to be a subset of fashion liberation, he remarks at one point, and later confesses: I am afraid of my underwear) gives his profiles of stars from Liz Taylor to Dawn Upshaw a canny infatuation compounded equally of postmodern irony and Rex Reed. He revealingly tells Alec Baldwin: I feel a burning need to meet stars, and its easy to see why: His worship of icons from Melanie Griffith to Gertrude Stein, like his graphic fantasy of himself as Bill Clintons lover, validates the star-struck persona he delights in discovering in the most unlikely contexts (I am a woman of Dada. . . . I am exhibiting a hectic, touristy relation to my own passions). Koestenbaum even manages to find himself in the mandarin Stein, whose austere demands on readers couldnt differ more from his own eagerness to please himself and everybody else. Logorrhea is the hallmark of contemporary discourse, rules Koestenbaum. Readers who arent frightened by that prospect will enjoy passing the odd hour with this latest collection from the Donald Barthelme of the nonfiction aisle. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
From the Inside Flap
"Cleavage is very 1960s: it shows off the new permissiveness. (Look! we can reveal most of Elizabeth Taylor's breasts!) Cleavage is not nudity. Cleavage is a promise: not sight, but on the verge of sight." [p. 138]
In this brilliantly shrewd, hilarious collection of essays, cultural critic and acclaimed writer Wayne Koestenbaum exposes all that provokes, intimidates, heartens, and arouses us in matters of style, celebrity, obscenity, and art.
Armed with a bold curiosity, a stinging wit, and a subversive sense of wordplay, Koestenbaum reflects on a dazzling array of subjects. Here are the outsized emotions inflamed by Sophia Loren, Robert Mapplethorpe, and locker-room nudity . . . vivid dreams of flirting with Bill Clinton and resurrecting Bette Davis from the dead . . . the intangible joys of thrifting . . . the true meaning of masculinity . . . and the indelible sensation that two scoops of vanilla flesh, heaving incongruously in a 70-millimeter musical, made on a young boy of impressionable age.
From the rigors of a day spent with Melanie Griffith ("Melanie Time") to the healing powers of a gray Prada suit ("Diary of a Suit") to moving meditations on the importance of reading ("Why I Read"), this volume is an irresistible exploration of culture and identity in America. If celebrity is--as Koestenbaum suggests--an earthquake, then Cleavage is the aftershock.
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Does It Smart? Well, Let Me Kiss It!
By J. McFarland
At his best Koestenbaum, wit, ardent fan, astute critic and antic camp, riffs on his idols and his passions to intoxicating effect. Bringing high and low perspectives to bear on his varied subjects here, he flaunts his knowledge (wide-ranging) and queerness (all-consuming) and dares to go out on to the high wire without a net (e.g. "I want to fail in the most beautiful way, to write something so like a parallelogram it baffles every critic and excites the raven-haired young androgynes.") Whether he is writing about his underwear (he starts out from home) or his favorite diva (he ends up at the theater), he lets his imagination run amok, trusting that his daunting intelligence will step in later to ground the musings in the everyday that we all will recognize (it does). Fans of his "Jackie under My Skin" and "The Queen's Throat" will adore this even zestier collection, although some others may feel that a shorter, more focused array of delicacies would have made this very good book a masterpiece of its genre. On a more pedestrian but essential note, Koestenbaum's "Cleavage" will also make you laugh like nobody's business.
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Here's what the NYTimes said....
By A Customer
An omnivorous culture vulture who feels as comfortable discussing Franz Schubert as Rambo -- in fact, both in the same breath -- Wayne Koestenbaum believes that ''it is our job, as observers, to wrest meaning from events and objects.'' Koestenbaum is a semiotician of the trivial and the effete and writes a rarefied designer prose. At their best, the essays collected in ''Cleavage'' can be as intense as poetry, and are, occasionally, elegant. At his worst, Koestenbaum, the author of ''Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon,'' produces overwrought, hysterical writing that keeps drawing attention to itself at the expense of the subject at hand. He is given to declarations like, ''I must collect my thoughts about underwear or I will have an epistemological breakdown''; he also describes himself as ''a blurted-out obscenity or nonsense syllable, a case of fashion Tourette's.'' Under such circumstances, perhaps the most telling essay is one on logorrhea; it is an unapologetic defense of what Koestenbaum describes as ''the affliction of those whose desires and whose sentences are old-fashioned, purple, tumescent, waiting to be evacuated.''
6 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
It's still the same old story....
By A Customer
This collection of previously published "essays" by the self-absorbed poet and celebrity-seeker about town demonstrates, if nothing else, Koestenbaum's remarkable talent for turning absolutely anything and everything around so that it's about HIM. Really scraping here is a NY Times mag piece about His dreams about movie queens, which reads as if it were dashed off while he was filing his nails or something. Plus other skin-crawling, mind-boggling mis-uses of prose about Melanie Griffith, Liz Taylor (she makes Him feel like a man -- imagine that -- but please, spare us the imagery), and other godawful ramblings. This guy should have taken a cue from Kate Hepburn and just called this book "Me." You'll want to take a very hot shower after reading this. But it's doubtful you'll be able to dispel the icky feeling it gives with just water....
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