The conversation of aggressive art

This is the first of a series of articles opening up the dialogue I want to have with this website. Forever, I've been interested in fringe theatre, transgressive fiction, professional wrestling, pornographic academia (the dialogue in and around porn by smart people with degrees on their walls, just to clarify) illegal art, underground politics, etc. It's all incredibly fascinating stuff. When I look at my bookshelf, my mp3 player, my movie collection, it reflects this. I'm not interested in mainstream consumer culture. I'm interested in counter-culture consumer culture. I get the ironies and difficulties of that. I'm sure a lot of you are. And I'm sure a lot of you would like to dig deeper.

I do like that this sort of art (from here on, music, movies, etc, will just be referred to as art. As thorny as that reduction is, it's just much easier to type) is capable of cutting into preconceptions, changing behavior, and offending parts of us we had never considered important. If the mainstream product is pabulum, counter-culture product is adrenaline: energizing, natural, and dangerous.

From . Taboos meant (and sometimes marketed) for secret and guilty enjoyment change over time as well. So in any period of time, you have a mix of what is appropriate, what isn't, and what is so long as you feel a little guilty about it, and these things are constantly shifting.

I'm going to blog about what fits into those three bins in this era of course, but also what happened in the past, and what might happen in the future. The conversation will move from commerce to appreciation and back, I'm sure. And I'll likely offend some, but you should kind of know what you're going to get by the marquee. I'll also work on getting better at concluding paragraphs.