My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-6-6) →
- Casiotone for the Painfully Alone (41)
- M.I.A. (34)
- Joanna Newsom (2)
- The Flaming Lips (2)
- Chicago Public Radio (1)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
“The oddity of using a garment linked to mercenaries to convey a very different message seemed to elude Maya” was the key sentence of Lynn Hirschberg’s controversial M.I.A. profile, I thought.
Hirschberg spends all this time constructing the idea of M.I.A. as, essentially, an insanely ambitious, lucky, clever, double-talking nonartist whose one real talent is figuring out what combination of things will pique the interests of the right people while enraging the wrong ones — and then repeatedly implies that M.I.A. doesn’t understand exactly what she’s doing. It comes across as sloppy, like Hirschberg’s desire to write an anti-fluff piece got the better of her ability to figure out who this person actually is, which is — I guess? — the point of this kind of profile.
I don’t care at all what M.I.A.’s politics actually are; I’m sorry, I know I should, but I just totally don’t. I don’t care what her motivation was for performing at the Grammys 9 months pregnant; whyever she did it, it was an awesome and truly empowering spectacle to witness in an entertainmentverse that’s chockablock with fake “empowerment” for women. I don’t care that she sang about pulling up the people, pulling up the poor then moved to a mansion in Brentwood with a rich dude and ordered truffle fries. I guess anyone with radical politics who makes any money should give away all that money and live in a hut, like Lynn Hirschberg undoubtedly does. But even if I wasn’t already, in a vague noncommital way, a fan of M.I.A.’s aesthetic and schtick (and NAILS, my god), I still would have been skeeved by this profile.
“It’s weird to me that M.I.A. knew to focus on the “truffle fries” line. The profile portrays her as oblivious, but it seems to me that an oblivious person wouldn’t know that eating truffle fries is wrong. I’ve written lots of pieces that included lines like that, where the point is ‘look at this clueless, hypocritical monster,’ and invariably the monster’s too clueless to know,” Leon wrote earlier.
The whole queasy business of knowing when to deploy that damning detail has been discussed at great length over the years by people with far more expertise than I’ve got. I guess my general feeling now is that it barely fazes me anymore to see something like this done by a 24 year old journalist-come-lately who has various excuses, but when someone experienced does it I’m still shocked. It’s cool that I can still be shocked, I guess. Yay.
Maya was so clearly baited and set up by Lynn Hirschberg. The fact that the reporter herself is the one who ordered the fucking french fries is enough to discredit everything else in the article as a copy-and-paste job to make the artist look as bad as possible. And the whole thing has this undercurrent of — what is it, even? Seething jealousy? — that makes it seem like Hirschberg has a very personal axe to grind. Like she’s Mr. M from Election.
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-5-30) →
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
On Turning 25.
A warm band of sunlight against my back, along with the smell of freshly cut grass and the distant, husky guffaw of the source of its truncation worked together to inveigle me to consciousness on the morning of my 25th birthday. I rolled over, initiating the ritual of stretching and flexing from top to toe while gliding my hands along my naked skin to assess whether or not I’d injured myself the night before, satisfied that the only damage seemed to be tenderness in the meaty part of my right palm and a sudden awareness that the inside of my mouth tasted like a campfire. I had chain-smoked cloves bummed from a guy in a Dick Tracy t-shirt while romping around the packed patio of the Ottawa Tavern, clad in acid yellow Ray Ban Wayfarers at 1 o’ clock in the morning, where I am sure I did not exude the apathetic sex appeal of a louche trustafarian in a Brett Easton Ellis novel, and I am also sure that I’m now too old to get away with trying.
I slid out of bed, pulling on underwear and American Apparel lounge shorts that are not much more substantial than underwear, smiling to myself because I know they make my housemate uncomfortable (“They should call them boner shorts.”) as I made a pre-destined Donnie Darko path to my fancy American refrigerator that dispenses ice and water at the touch of a button. As I did this, I did not think about how fortunate I was to not be a part of the Haitian diaspora, or how I could help make refreshing filtered beverages as easy for them to come by; nor did I think about the hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil currently spewing into the Gulf of Mexico and the widespread irreparable damage it’s caused to several ecosystems. Mostly, I just thought about how I didn’t want to get wrinkles, or get fat, if I absolutely had to continue the sad imitation of life that is my life.
I thought about last night’s conversation with Jemma, the obligatory “get your shit together because I’m a go-getter who has successfully gone and gotten and I know what you should be doing right now and THIS IS NOT IT” and I try to think about what it must feel like to be successful, but I have no barometer with which to gauge it, because I’ve never attempted to do anything. I suppose that walking around with a sense of accomplishment is a grand feeling. When I am in the presence of creative people with cool jobs who cluster together, cocktails in hand, and talk shop, the jealousy hangs - and it weighs - and it dissolves any sense of self-worth that comes from possessing all of the qualities that could elevate me to the status of these people, but none of the resources and none of the ambition.
I often try to convince myself that I’m merely attracted to the spoils of success, the ability to buy things when you want them and to travel when you want to, and that - barring the absence of those things - I’m actually very happy with my life and who I am… but that isn’t exactly true, especially not the “happy” part, and the jury is still deliberating on the “who I am” part. At this point, I wouldn’t be satisfied with a middle ground so much as an alternate universe: A place where I did not have to have a job, and there was a person or handheld device who’s job it was to plan out and shepherd me through my daily life of working out and doing yoga for four or five hours, lounging around reading, and eating imaginative, nutritious meals.
As I typed that sentence, I realized that this alternative universe is called rehab. Or if you downgrade the quality of the food, prison.
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-5-23) →
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
On Revising History →
[Adapted from an email I sent my mom]:
What really bothers me is the utter irresponsibility of the people in charge, who see history as being so malleable that they can blatantly twist it to suit their own political ends. Sometimes I feel like Limbaugh/Beck/Palin are all in on the joke, that they’re just trying to make a quick buck (and doing very well at it), but clearly a lot of people out there really are that frightened and bigoted. The sources of information are less and less trustworthy. Sometimes I worry that I’m getting just as much misinformation and that my opinions are as ill-founded as those of the Tea Party. To so blatantly mold what should be an objective text is straight out of 1984- or any dystopic fiction, really. It would be absolutely comical if it weren’t true.
Speaking of which, I read a great article about the Tea Party’s activities- spitting on senators and charging Capitol Hill armed to the teeth- and how they would be perceived if the members were predominantly black. http://ephphatha-poetry.blogspot.com/2010/04/imagine-if-tea-party-was-black-tim-wise.html It’s a great explanation of the idea of privilege and how it colors one’s perception of fairness in the world. That’s something that should be taught in schools, when they teach Civil Rights. I know some teachers do address it- more power to them. Of course, they’re likely the ones who get the most complaints from parents to the principal.
This is the kind of thing that makes me want to move to France- for the education system, for the healthcare, and oh yes, for the cheese. Mmm. But Mom, I took to heart what you told me when I wanted to move to Canada when Bush ‘won’ in 2004. To live in this country and to have the awareness of the things that should be improved is to have responsibility to try to improve them. That is also what privilege is about. Not using the means I have to escape, but to use those means to make things better. I think about that a lot, along with that Ghandi quote, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” I don’t care how corny that is. Being corny and being earnest are the best weapons we’ve got.
Ísadóra Bjarkardóttir Barney sat with Marina Abramović for 3 minutes on May 15th.
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-5-16) →
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti — Round and Round.
Live @ Viva Radio (Impromptu on Naked Fridays).
An excerpt from Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, and a bonus short story. Both via firmuhment.
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-5-2) →
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
Locomotive Hootenanny: In Which I Really Stretch a Metaphor →
I’ve been thinking about those times in your life when you’re doing something important and your perspective kind of narrows to the point that you are the only thing in your vision. Then you get a glimpse of someone else carrying on with their day-to-day, wearing a placid expression and certainly…
