March 2005 Archives
An accurate assessment of Closer, and its "ludicrous belief that displaying unremitting cruelty is somehow the same thing as telling the truth."
Katie's therapist said she thought Closer was "funny," after which Katie promptly fired her.
Perhaps it was my time as Portland town steward (or pariah, depending on who you ask) spanning the entirety of Bush II Chapter I, but now that I know my way around NY a little, and that the triangle in front of Trump tower actually has a name (which I now cannot remember), and also maybe because my seasonal affective whatever has subsided a bit (I can look into the sky without being pelted torturously in the face by this new thing called snow), I'm eyeballs-first into my obsession with being IN NEW YORK--really becoming a breathing cell of the city-organism. To be a part of its present, I'm reading to know its past... so far in my literary sojourns, nothing's better than Joan (of course) Didion's piece on the Central Park Jogger, about how the city's collective reaction was an exact script of race and class tensions glugging up the drain like a glob of hair untended.
As the case unfolded, she says, it reflected an abstruse spectrum of fear: wealthy/middle class New Yorkers' loss-fears (stock crashes, declining property values), their terror of this nebulous idea of "crime" (mask-fear for poverty), said to take shape in the form of scapegoated poor Black and Hispanic men, as embodied by The Accused. (Concurrently, she observes how poor Black and Hispanic women's fears, especially, took shape in the form of police officers, and defends complicated ol' Al Sharpton for the Tawanna Brawley incident. Didion maintains that whether it was fabricated is not the real issue; the real fright is that Brawley's tale of being raped by cops was a tangibly common enough scenario that she would concoct it to get out of trouble with her parents.)
It's 30 pages and it might be the best piece of personal/genius reporting I've ever read--a prime example of how Didion overturns rocks until she finds a root--although may I say that every time I read a Joan Didion essay.
Also, I haven't looked into Martha Gellhorn in a hot minute. Gave my Gellhorn anthology to Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu a million years ago; in return, he gave me this hella depressing book about a British photographer addicted to the sanguine energy of war and the gruesome high (?) of desensitization. When he wasn't taking photos in Bosnia, he was back in London shooting heroin. War was the only rush that kept him from the junk.
Jamie, he does not fake his funk.
The 3 train uptown, 6 pm, the smush of strangers. People, mostly besuited professionals hoofing it home from Times Square rush hour, are pissed. Crazylady in headphones sings loudly, off key, "Yeahhh You can go your own way--go your own wayyy-ayyy-ay." This lone section of chorus; her favorite part, I suppose, because she's crowing it on a loop. She crows, and crows, and crows, possessed by the 'fro'd and vested soul of late-'70s Lindsay Buckingham. A puffy-eyed woman nearby asks can you please stop with the singing and the answer is pretty much no:
You want fuckin quiet, go to the fuckin library! Go to the fuckin library if you want fuckin quiet growl, and growl, and growl
Tired lady looks her dead in the eye and says, In my next life I'll be born six-five and a man, and I will kick the ass of people like you
Crazylady stops singing, switches seats.
41st and Madison, 10 am. Four men relieving a truck of its boxes; they seem decidedly not-pissed. The door to the cab is open; rhythm tumbles out; horns flash wide cold smiles in the bite of the open morn. The moment is so fucking generous: it's Amerie unleashed. "Ding dong ding dong ding" is spring's doorbell and I am definitely answering. I feel less dead in 15 seconds than I have since like, 1964. Oh-woah!
Two totally unrelated people called me today saying, "Happy Purim, it's your fave Jew in the world!" For real.
Q: "I totes saw my husband AT THE DINER BY MY HOUSE AGAIN THIS MORNING. WE MADE EYE CONTACT AS I WAS GETTING MY COFFEE. I hope he lives in the neighborhood and we fall in love and get married."
A: "Dude, he stuck with Erykah for a year even though she would not have
sex with him. Does he still have that beard? He is stalking you."
You think you're seeing eye glasses, but I just see spectacles. Don't even think about stoking the fire without bringing your blazingest blaze.
HUBBA HUBBA
Artist Workshops: Click here for info on the Point Community Development Corporation's 2nd Annual Women in Hip-Hop Female Flavor Conference, this saturday, five bucks. In the Bronx. Includes an installation for Pebblee Poo! I have no idea what that entails, but omg!
One of the truly stupidest things about New York's hell-machine of transaction/ascension is the idea that, in certain circles, cultural capital can render one more or less datable, i.e. "He's everything I've ever wanted, but he's only second-tier editorial!" Or the idea that some dudes would not date a woman that wouldn't garner them the collective thumbs-up from their man-friends--real-world locker-room ass-patting, like driving a Ferrari, or being told the Bose stereo is better than the Sony: buy that one; envy and admiration shall follow suit. We devalue even in our own eyes, whether we're models thinking that's all we're worth, or not-models getting the "nein" because some dude's A&R friends don't cosign our fat thighs.
This correlates loosely with the Hip-Hop & Feminism panel I attended tonight [update: Imani Dawson's story on the panel] two-and-a-half hours of unmitigated chaos--Remy Ma on the mic without a beat behind her was, tonight, truly a morbid experience--though I woulda coulda maybe thought she was cool and fun, were she not verbally destroying something I care about so deeply. Her tack: "No one is forced to be a girl in a video. There is no responsibility to be taken. He's not talking about me, specifically, when he says 'bitch' and 'ho,' so" failing to see herself, or the possibility of herself, in other people. Stanley Crouch and Johnnie Walker backed out at the last (reasons given: "the flu" and "surgery," respectively), so it consisted of Remy, Akiba Solomon (she-ra of Essence mag), Jean Grae, radio journalist Karen Hunter, and DJ Beverly Bond. Barely moderated by Thabiti Boone, a man who I admire for co-founding the Hip-Hop Political convention, but who, unfortunately, turned the discussion over to the audience after about five minutes, which resulted in aforementioned chaos. Despite certain panel problems, and Remy's, erm, monopolization of the discourse, I dug out a few basics from the mess, some of which we already knew:
1. The portrayal of women in hip-hop is a symptom of a larger problem, which includes a complex web of late-stage capitalism, media consolidation, and 600 years of American racism. [Karen Hunter: "You cant solve a problem unless you know where it starts."]
1b. Just because it is a symptom does not mean we are powerless, or that we are excused in our complicity.
2. Someone is seriously profiting off the thong-thonged and Nelly-with-a-leash videos, and it aint necessarily Superhead... nor is it necessarily Nelly. (see 1.)
3. We are, to paraphrase Krist Novoselic, a country in crisis.
4. Hip-hop feminism didn't quite hit critical mass tonight (it hardly even got to the feminism part tonight), but a lot of ladies have a lot to say about it. This is a positive first (second, third, fourth) step.
5. The portrayal of men in hip-hop isn't all cake and ice cream, either.
6. It is seriously fucked that the Grammys eliminated the "Best Female Rap Artist" this year. (Credit: Jean Grae)
7. It is also seriously fucked that Clear Channel has banned "I'm Black" by Styles P. (Credit: Akiba Solomon)
8. Can Jean Grae eat?
9. This nice lady recommends Dr. Eileen Southern's The Music of Black Americans: A History for context.
10. Hip-hop feminism, like most social justice movements in 2005, could really use a good point person. (or is point-person/sole-leader an archaic notion--is organizing about "The Hive"? tell me, o wise politicos) I totes nominate Akiba, or Elizabeth Mendez-Berry (perhaps as co-conspirators).
'Xcuse the cursory nature, but I'm saving the paragraphs for the print piece. Surely soon we'll hear more from Jay and Hashim, both in attendance.
live in Portland, OR or Vancouver, WA, and have an open room, my dear friend Nate is looking for you. And you are definitely looking for him: he is clean, stays hydrated, rides bikes and plays bass in the only performative, drum-machined, party-black-metal band you'll ever want in your basement. email nate@groadies.com! he is O.G. Dance Club! you will love him!
Popcorn and fake lasers.: date night at the Court Street Stadium 9000 and we've been planning this for months. We ride the escalator up 40 floors, past concessions and spilt skittles, up another floor, another, up like Jacob's Ladder, there is no movie, only time. Fourteen-year-olds are cutting it close to curfew, clutching their boyfriends' hands and charged, lips glossy, half-shirts tied up after they left the house. God willing, some of them will kiss in the theater and miss the plot. Ring 2 is bad, but in a surprise-scare moment I jump, flick my wrist and my m&ms scatter across the aisle.
In October 2003 Steven and I saw The Ring at the Park Slope Pavilion on one of my CMJ visits, before I moved here, so tonight was our anniversary of sorts, a commemorative eve. The movie itself, no--the screaming kids in the theater, yes. It was Friday night license for untethering one's lips and lungs. You can scream in the library on Friday night.
Two other things from that CMJ visit: 1. the infamous MOP "fuck a brick" roundtable at Bubbe's (which also included Chris Ryan and Rjyan Kidwell), wherein I admitted my affinity for sides C and D of LL Cool J's Greatest Hits on vinyl: the slow jams. Even "Hey Lover." ("I love LL Cool J's Greatest Hits sides C and D: the slow jams!" I was bleating, and Sasha joked, "Do you need love?" Wah, wah.)
2. I longed for Ezra, who was on some crazy Mexican expedition with his adventuresome chef-dad, visiting the cactus farms which produce the world's finest tequila, and are guarded by men lugging the world's heaviest artillery. We were still honeymooning, I was carrying a Polaroid around in my notebook, and Steve told me after The Ring 1 that while he appreciated that Ezra was the sweetest, smartest, funniest, cutest boy in the entire universe (still is. ladies, don't sleep), he would like it if we could maybe discuss something else.
So I was all, "Securities trading: you have a future in those."
Now Wut? has footage of the Jam Master Jay/Adidas party SANS Public Enemy performance, and a pretty redondo clip of Cam boyishly drunk, the watching of which is silently voyeuristic and personal, and makes me feel for the dude, even though (or perhaps because) he is showing off his $105,000 watch.
Apparently everyone mocks him for his Playskool styles.
Honestly, give me one good reason why I should ever get "real" cable.
Did I neglect to tell you I think Sleater-Kinney's The Woods is the greatest rock album I've heard in something like two years, and their best album since Dig Me Out? All that annexation of Led Zep, the sharp political commentary--smart and not the least bit cynical--the seething operatic vocal runs and fluid sensuality in lyrics / intent. Fucking awesome. Were I not writing more for not-blogs, I'd elaborate. I will say this: seeing them at the Mercury Lounge a couple weeks ago with about 250ish others was so much like the first time, in 1997ish, the Middle East in Cambridge Mass; they were opening for Helium just after the release of Magic City* and Dig Me Out, and I was, as now, choking on my ill-functioning brain-sauce. But every time I spend a little time with the ladies I'm like, oh sure, there's hope. They are crafting light, and they always seem to be around when I really need them.
Steven, my oldest and dearest friend, who joined me in that lovely tour of duty that was high school in nuclear Wyoming, came home drunk the other night, posted up on our ugly blue-grey couch (which looks like a half-consumed blueberry jawbreaker), and freestyled. Topic: me, who I was at 16, 17, pissed, aggressive and terrorizing the young, pristine pioneer-heirs around us. "People were always scared of you; you were a completely open torrent. You were Courtney Love of our school.* People were like, 'What the fuck is happening and why is she doing this to my world?' You gave us a shield to be more who we were, because they were distracted by how extreme you were being. You were a kid, and you were fighting a war you knew needed to be fought, without knowing how to fight it."
Sooo... Is Steven trying to rectify the fact that studmall.com ("no fake studio bullshit 100% real") has mysteriously entered the "favorites" section of my web browser?
*this is totally going to help my EMP paper
I unlocked the giftbox and a glut of Pitbull freestyles were inside, including "Miami Clap," and "Miami" on the beat to "New York." So like, why was his crunk-aeton album not-so-blazing? Other than the singles "Culo" and "Toma," M.I.A.M.I. was kinda like buffalo winging it. AND YET! This man in my iTunes has a sense of humor, a crunky-satiny flow, and a love of the best beats: "Knuck if You Buck," his distinctly Cuban take on Semtex' "Forward Riddim," even my lady Teedra's "you'll never find a better woman" song, with a verse that is nicer and more dateable than the original Jada verse. He breezes through "Overnight Celebrity" as smoothly and as rapidfire as Twista. His next album: possibly lighting a small fire.
His first line over the beat from L. Jon's "I don’t give a fuck":
"I'm back / it's that Cuban from track 18 on the Kings of Crunk." Hee!
Mais oui. The Mixtape Awards last week were a montage of bananas and binoculars (a word further immortalized in SPIN this month by Matos, who's easy with the hollers. Thank you, Matos.).
I went straight to the awards from thurrrapy; normally I like to roast in my own pathos with a movie post-head-shrinkage, but tonight it felt right to make a public appearance. Because I was already amped from the cheese sandwich they proffered at the listening sesh. Because Sasha was blowing-up-binoculars as we tromped through Times Square, with all its vegasy pulsation, spitting cold-breathed excitement from the thump of hearing one of Pharrell's hottest beats ever. (6/28, amigos.) Because I felt like we were teenagers at the movie theater on a Friday night, free and giddy and twittering about Ludacris: unsupervised and wanderlusting for the city, cast in immediacy, bubble pop electric.
I got to BB King's just in time to sweat and catch the end of Stat Quo. That corny new Rap City host was at the helm; when it was clear the actual Awards Ceremony was slowgoing and tres boring, Sasha beckoned me to the retiring room, with its paradise of rappers and DJs and the usual array of industry people. "I just spent an hour talking to Chamillionaire and Buckshot," Sasha gushed, more breathless than if HE HIMSELF had been handed a prize by Just Blaze and Saigon ("New Yorker Critic Most Likely to Cover the Mixtape Awards," probably).
In the secret room, DJs and rappers were hugging and pounding each other willy nilly, an unexpected love-in that got butterflies in me stomach. (I conveyed this to kris later, he said "It was probably the ecstasy they were handing out at the door." Cynic.) I also contracted gawker's ADD, proving I am both dorky and 14 at heart. (You can't really blame me; Common is FINE, okay?) Met Chamillionaire (mouth full'o'platinum underscoring the sweetest smile in the South), talked to Pitbull, an articulate, whipsmart sweet potato who loves dancing (did I place a personal ad? Culo!), and to DJ Vlad, who insists he makes no $$ off his "Promotional Use Only" CDs. Vlad explained most of his mixtapes being sold in New York and online are in fact bootlegs of the bootlegs, dividing and multiplying like germy germs and depositing nothing resembling hard cash into his PayPal account. He just does it for his reputation, he said. It's cool, though; dude is clearly making pesos off something--his custom red patent leather Nike AF1s were not birthed by the stork. (FYI, mixtape DJs are playing high-stakes Texas Hold'm of the shoe game.)
That's about when Sean Combs walked in with an entourage of 29,028 people, wearing the biggest diamond earrings I have ever seen and drinking Cristal straight from the bottle. He is his own cliche.
Talked to Cuban Link, and Sasha photographed his large collection of ice du Jacob. (He's also got a decent-sized Big Pun tattoo on his left forearm, which is the muscular equivalent of Mt. Vesuvius.) We learnt Link has just finished shooting a video with Mya for "Sugar Daddy" (a song, and I quote, "for the ladies"), has started his own record label (Men of Business), and does not think fondly of Pitbull. (He didn't explain, told us to google it.) A man in fake-fur carrying a giant trophy belt arrived; we assumed he won something mixtape-y, and rushed him. But his award was from like, two years ago, and likely received for most vile pornographer, with grossest penchant for "Nasty H*** and Asses," complete with two women who 1. exposed a breast and 2. chirped, coy and contrived, that they were girlfriends. Women as chattel in real life. I felt sick.
Talked to Remy Ma, who I love, and who's very sweet and much shorter than she looks on the billboards. Was distracted from conversation with Remy Ma when The Game reached over us to give her a pound. (All I could think about was last summer, when he asked her out over the radio. So bizarre.) This very beleaguered, short white-lady reporter muscled in to grill Game on the just-squashed 50/Game beef, asking if they'd struck a deal, to which he replied, "I don't make deals; the devil makes deals. I'm just trying to feed my son," and walked off like some crazy ass Clint Eastwood, all seven-and-a-half-feet of him. She followed; Game's shorter-than-he bodyguard tried to peel her off like a barnacle; she screamed unpleasantly upwards, "But DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?! I NEED TO GET MY QUOTE!!!"
This was in great contrast to Sasha, who effused, "I love hip-hop more than anything right now! I love it more than I've ever loved it ever!! In my whole life!!" I answered, "This is more exciting than a B2K concert! Seriously!!"
The Diane Arbus retrospective at the Met is enveloping--six or seven rooms of devastating portrature and tablets, scribbled notepads, letters, resumes, pleas to the Guggenheim. On the long guest list for one of her openings, she'd typed names and demarked each with short descriptors in green pen: Mr. And Mrs. Leonard Bernstein are tagged as "famous," another man is a "playboy," another is "a giant I hope to photograph." (She apologizes for the length of the list, signing: "I'm not being greedy. I just want it to be a good party. D") Arbus was as eloquent a writer as she was a photographer. In a letter to Marvin Israel, she writes that she sees herself in mirrors, all the time, and earlier that week she'd "peered across my stomach and smiled rather inappropriately at my gynocologist"--like she'd cast herself in one of her own photographs.
I take issue with the prevailing Sontag-borne notion of Arbus as exploiter and nihilist, even Arbus as cruel empath, seer of the unseen, bridger of worlds between "freaks" and normalcy. What's obvious is that she is compelled by these people because she IS these people, or more importantly, who she imagines them to be: lonely peers in her quest for emotional camraderie, or reinforcement. A complicated collision of bleakness and beauty, as ever. Sontag beefs that the isolation in the photos is apolitical, but I think isolation can be a politicizing force; she also says that Arbus' photos desensitize us to difference and impart a false sense of reality, which is mostly true of Arbus followers/misconstruers who get all up in the Vice mag, but I think it underestimates her incredible compassion and personal investment.
I guess that's calling Arbus a kind of solipsist, but then, what suicide casualty isn't?
Arbus killed herself at 48, in 1971--a grave act at any age, but at 48, one which seems much more determinate--and it was of course forecast by her final, most complex work: severely mentally disabled women wearing masks, captured in implied innocence, vulnerability and as follows, freedom. That's not insincere, thats a blinding state of being. It's still her self-portrait that's most haunting to me, the famous one of her a year before her suicide, surrounded by pin-ups of her own photographs and newspaper cut-outs (one of which is an AP photo of a woman fugitive crying near her husband, who's just been fatally wounded by cops), her hair cropped and staring, empty and exhausted, into the camera. She shares the same weary, distant expression as many of her subjects, a moment of complete alienation and total humanity, and it's clear that for all her giants, midgets, hoods and trannies, Diane Arbus was only ever photographing herself.
Soon I will tell you about my bananas evening avec one plainclothes reporterman, and my assortment of new boyfriends. But you will have to wait for a minute. Just a minute.
My assessment of the weekend, perhaps a bit overblown but certainly genuine, is that if I were fully immersed in the inchoate culture of grimeland 2005 right now, I would be heading up Rock Steady Crew UK and, ahermmm, innovating the third element on the dancefloor. This conclusion was built on empirical evidence. This is not my ego expanding; this is my physical reaction to the transatlantic echoes of a living font.
I spent hours (too many to recount here) fixated on Brooklyn Cable Access Television (BCAT) and its offerings of Madonna's "Lucky Star" and Janet Jackson's "Control" on a video program called Flashbacks. Before hip-hop ate the world, Madonna was dictating cool through modern jazz, a precocious sequence of now-too-slow hops and fan kicks and pas de bourres. She winks off-camera seven times in the video. Janet's moves have fared a little better with time; apart from copious The Snakes, she drops the prototype for the Missy bounce, the shoulder-snap that would become the house move for Timbaland disciples.
How can we take this video shit to the next level, so to speak, after Missy's throwback b-girl videos and DeVyne's post-b-boy butter smooths? Dave Elsewhere, that sideshow of a triple-jointed popper, is being cast in commercials after making You Got Served*; can The Neptunes please hire 33 Fainting Spells or, better, Donna Uchizono for their next cinematic opuses?
So I made up a dance in my living room to the Lady Sovereign song "Random (Menta Original Mix)," and let me just say, it puts me on some crazy moves I've never done before.
*Of which there will be a SEQUEL, so sayeth Omarion!! !!!!!! !!!!!!!! !!
