why are you not the president yet how does it feel to spend your days with a brain so big and ideas so good pLEASE WRITE THAT ESSAY I AM BEGGING
LOL i’m not the president because i want to topple the US government among other things but it is actually a curse!! so many good ideas! no manpower or time to bring them into fruition!
what that taemin x jose munoz essay would be is about munoz’s concept of queerness as horizon (something that is not yet here) and queer time as opposed to straight time. it's about going against queer pragmatics and instead engaging the political imagination. i think ngda is the closest thing there is right now to a mainstream portrayal of a queer korean futurism.
"The poem speaks of multiple temporalities and the affective mode known as ecstasy, which resonates alongside the work of Martin Heidegger. In Being and Time Heidegger reflects on the activity of timeliness and its relation to ekstatisch (ecstasy), signaling for Heidegger the ecstatic unity of temporality—Past, Present, and Future. The ecstasy the speaker feels and remembers in “A photograph” is not consigned to one moment. It steps out from the past and remarks on the unity of an expansive version of temporality; hence, future generations are invoked. To know ecstasy in the way in which the poem’s speaker does is to have a sense of timeliness’s motion, to understand a temporal unity that is important to what I attempt to describe as the time of queerness. Queerness’s time is a stepping out of the linearity of straight time. Straight time is a self-naturalizing temporality. Straight time’s “presentness” needs to be phenomenologically questioned, and this is the fundamental value of a queer utopian hermeneutics. Queerness’s ecstatic and horizonal temporality is a path and a movement to a greater openness to the world. (Munoz 25).
Munoz also describes queer ecstasy as "being marked by both self-consciousness and obliviousness, possesses a potentially transformative charge."
Things I could write a page about each:
Taemin's use of temporality, specifically queer temporal unity with a deliberate subversion of the linear:
1. the contrast of plato's theory of forms with a futuristic aesthetic is connected through a gay fashion designer's vision of an ecstatic catholic rave (Palomo F/W 2020). the motifs of the virgin mary, jesus, etc with the y2k futurist aesthetics.
2. and the form of the narrative is one of an epic poem, of orpheus descending into hell to save his wife or princess bari descending into the underworld to find the cure to save her parents.
Taemin and ecstasy:
1. As me and yaejin's post about the Palomo outfit says, "taemin said thotcrime jail is now GAY CATHOLIC RAVE". Taemin dismantles the panopticon! Taemin destroys heaven and hell to become one with nature!
2. How this ties into Korean communal musical practices for 5000 years, the practice of communal music spaces as places of untying han and instead creating generative catharsis and communal uplift
Taemin and possession:
1. I talked about this a bit already with my how is taemin korean ask but Taemin channels BoA, is momentarily possessed by BoA as a higher power when he lipsynchs her lines. But I wrote my senior thesis on how in Indigenous spiritual cosmologies, possession isn't a demonic thing of an act of owning and claiming the way it is in Western culture. It's about mutual responsibility to the spirit of the land/object in your care, stewardship and commitment and expectations of care. Through BoA's voice Taemin channels the "transformative charge" of queer temporality
NGDA is a uniquely korean, uniquely queer narrative of liberation that retools the imposition of western history onto the korean peninsula into a way to present a colonized queer korean reality.
https://emotionsblog.history.qmul.ac.uk/2015/05/david-byrne-on-music-ecstasy-and-catharsis/
This interview with David Byrne is also something I would use to contextualize the discussion of music, ecstasy, and catharsis and the globalization of pop music with its base in African diasporic music.
