Pop culture treasure, high culture trash.

Sunday, August 27, 2006

Julie Ruin redux

Today's next wave riot grrrl bulletin, brought to you by Nicky Click:

IT SOUNDS LIKE YER SITTING IN YOUR BEDROOM ALONE AT NITE HAPPY TO BE THERE, BUT VERY AWARE THAT EVERY MOVE YOU MAKE IS MONUMENTAL AND MAGICAL! SOUNDS LIKE WALLS BEING BROKEN DOWN AND SILENCE INTERUPTED. FEELS LIKE YOU ARE WHOLE, COMFORTABLE IN YOUR BODY AND MIND, DANCING SOLO, JUMPING ON YOUR BED, SINGING IN THE MIRROR. YOU ARE YOUR NUMBER ONE FAN! SOUNDS LIKE NEEDLES SEWING YOUR HEART BACK TOGETHER. SOUNDS LIKE I LOVE YOU YER GREAT, AND YOU CAN DO ANYTHING YOU WANT, IT IS TRUE.

Nicky Click is part of the wave of girls making music alone in their bedrooms without shame of it being "lo-fi" or not super professsional sounding but doing it cos it is so empowering to conquer computer programs and write songs from yer inner feelings. when nicky click was in school only the boys did music and she never thought she could cos she was never offered resources or empowered.


Also on the RG's not dead tip, photographer Megan Holmes has taken pictures of all your favorite bands. Plus bell hooks. I would call her the Cynthia Connolly of 00's Portland but that would be lazy--she is herself and no other. Marvel here and here.

And in closing, a big wet kiss to Deep Fried Sexy Bexx for pointing the way toward Kelis' "Bossy" as queer femme autonomy reclaimed. Maybe this could work for the boys, too?

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

We have got to take cover, brother

Keep yr eyes on Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's twinsploitation flick Brothers of the Head--with any luck it'll have blown up by September. The film's original music sounds less 1975 (as it aims to) than it does like the Libertines reunion record Pete Doherty hasn't written yet, but that's all too appropriate for a fictional band whose blokesy Brit arrogance, sweaty bangs and sly homoeroticism seem ripped from the pages of this week's NME. Harry and Luke, Pete and Carl--mike sharing all around! We need more expeditions into the quasi-incestuous terrain where musical partnerships breed and decay. Bands made up of real family members always make a bid for redundancy; what are creative soulmates if not siblings whose private intuitive universe shuts out all intruders, sometimes to the point of self-delusion and implosion?

In Brothers of the Head, Fulton and Pepe literalize this kind of suffocating intimacy by making their struggling rock star subjects actual conjoined twins. The video for "Two Way Romeo" offers a preview of the sideshow-punk swelter they seem to have conjured up...if you can survive lyrics like "Two way Romeo/ giving me a boneo/ bang bang it's alright." Yikes!

Monday, August 21, 2006

I did it again

Over the weekend I moved to Ann Arbor to go to graduate school. I miss Minneapolis terribly but I will do my damnedest to keep pogoing outside the MSP. More content TK.

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Subcultural capital
















The Walker's sprawling Diane Arbus retrospective closes exactly one month from today. It's really worth seeing, and Thursdays are free. The show's strength, strangely enough, isn't its exploration of Arbus the photographer but of Arbus the writer. Curators have collected what seem like hundreds of pages from her journals, date books and note pads, whereon Arbus satisfied a Plath-like compulsion to sketch out the perilous topography of her subconscious. The Walker has transformed several smaller gallery spaces into mock-up darkrooms, where sepia-tinged lights flicker overhead and Arbus's handwriting covers the walls. The effect is seductive, spectral, and more than a little bit spooky. While the exhibit stops short of psychologizing Arbus, especially her motives for suicide, its juxtaposition of the visual and the verbal does an admirable job of letting the artist speak for herself.

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Yr Critique

My EMP Jem paper is in the new issue of Bitch (Fall '06, #33). The theme is Hot & Bothered but it's basically a sex issue, Bitch style, which makes it smarter and more nuanced than the average tri-yearly Mademoiselle "How to Give Great Blow Jobs!" yawner.

Not so smart and nuanced? Deborah Solomon's interview with Andi Zeisler in the NYT. Solomon's line of questioning wavers from probing to antagonistic to hostile:

Solomon: You can’t say Chloe [of the TV series 24] is a feminist. She is more of a postfeminist who instinctively takes control in a world mismanaged by men.

AZ: I don’t believe in postfeminism. The media love to trot out the idea that feminism is dead, and every so often it will be the cover story in Time or somewhere else. But feminism is as alive as ever.

S: Is it really? It seems as if its original vision of social equality has been undermined by third-wave feminists like yourself, who limit your critiques to, say, Tori Spelling’s breasts. Doesn’t the obsession with pop culture risk trivializing feminism?

AZ: I think that could be a risk. But if you are going to be working in feminist activism, you have to look at pop culture, because that’s what everyone else is looking at. Young women today have more day-to-day contact with “Desperate Housewives” than with the radical feminist writings of Germaine Greer or Shulamith Firestone.


Thoughtfully criticizing the third wave is one thing, but is anyone else having flashbacks to that 1998 Talk of the Nation condescend-a-thon? The one that Le Tigre turned into "They Want To Make A Symphony Out of the Sound of Women Swallowing Their Own Tongues"? At least Andi doesn't swallow her own tongue here--she holds her ground and holds it well.

Saturday, August 05, 2006

What the Zizek?

Okay, so the coda of that last post? About not arguing with Zizek? Screw that.

Highsmith's Ripley is in a way disconnected from the reality of flesh, disgusted at the Real of life, of its cycle of generation and corruption. Marge, Dickie's girlfriend, provides an adequate characterization of Ripley: "...He isn't normal enough to have any kind of sex life." Insofar as such coldness characterizes a certain radical lesbian stance, one is tempted to claim that, rather than being a closet gay, the paradox of Ripley is that he is a male lesbian. This disengaged coldness that persists beneath all possible shifting identities gets somehow lost in the film. The true enigma of Ripley is why he persists in this shuddering coldness, retaining a psychotic disengagement from any passionate human attachment...

I do not appreciate or comprehend the proposed connection between "coldness" and radical lesbianism. Zizek doesn't equate (radical) lesbianism with abnormality, psychosis and self-delusion--but he comes close. How do you jump so fluidly from "not normal enough to have any kind of sex life" to "radical lesbian"? How could a word that denotes a preference for a certain kind of sexual partner ever describe someone who doesn't want any sexual partners? And could we have a little more problematization of Marge's "normal," please?

A primary criticism of lesbianism and lesbian feminism has been that it ignores the biological necessity and basis of heterosexuality--i.e., human reproduction. Historically, lesbian feminists have been attacked for perverting the "reality of flesh" and its "cycle of regeneration." Disengaged from the realities and comforts of straightness (and patriarchy), they are seen as unnatural, unaffectionate, irrational shrews, confused about their true womanly purpose. Zizek clearly did not intend to support this tradition of stereotyping, but his characterization of Ripley as a self-deluding, philophobic, asexual yet still somehow lesbian ice cube does more than a little to shore it up.

This logic reminds me of Jon Pareles reporting on S-K in the New York Times yesterday, suggesting that being an "openly gay" musician writing political lyrics makes you "tediously righteous" and didactic. Forgetting for a moment that he got some people's orientations mixed up, where's the necessary connection? He uses the word "gay" but it's in the context of women, and I wonder whether he would have made a similar comment while talking about gay male musicians. Lesbians get tagged as tediously righteous (cold, perhaps?) in a way that queer men rarely do, and gay men who openly politicize their sexualities can never match the perceived didacticism of queer women. This is because queer women as a group are assumed to imitate male heterosexuality, and queer men female heterosexuality. While a man "acting like" a woman can be cute, funny, and ultimately forgettable, he has no privilege to gain, no power to wrestle. When a woman "acts like" a man it's not funny, just threatening.

Maybe that's why they only let Keira Knightley stay kind of convincingly cross-dressed for about two minutes in PC2. After that it was nice, but awfully "don't worry, she's really a girl!" hair extension city.