I’ve been reading and passing on MJ eulogies all morning.

But I think Trend captured below what it was like to be a child of the 80s and to grow up with Michael Jackson. My Twitter comment this morning was “I remember a world without the Internet. I don’t remember a world without Michael Jackson.”

And yet I’m shocked by how gobsmacked I am by this. I expect to be horrifically sad when Madonna dies–I have grown up in the shadow and image of Madonna in a much more obvious way than Michael Jackson. I have grown up a girl who flaunts all her contradictions, who despises sexual hypocrisy and who still, after all these years, loves to dance.

Last night I had coffee and then dinner with a new friend who grew up in England, and I was trying to explain to him what it was like, being American, being born in 1980 and suddenly, unexpectedly hearing that Michael Jackson is gone. I can’t.

I can’t explain why I didn’t own any Michael Jackson music but this morning I hit iTunes for the songs that I love (”Wanna Be Startin’ Something” in my headphones as I type) and am genuinely saddened.

John Nichols wrote a lovely post about Jackson’s activism and cultural relevance, and Natalia Antonova wrote like Trend about the impact of Jackson’s music. But this piece by Richard Kim goes to a darker place–and made me think.

I’ve already noted the things that I can say I’ve drawn from Madonna–it’s a clearer image for me. Michael Jackson? Before today I would’ve said nothing. Yet it’s obvious now, as these words spill out of me, that there has been an impact on me, on all of us. It’s a complicated one. The face we are left with of Jackson is not a pretty one. It’s an intensely problematic one–all the worst aspects of our society reflected back in the face of a celebrity whipping boy.

I write a lot about monsters. Michael Jackson was, in one sense, a monster. He blurred boundaries between black and white, child and adult, masculine and feminine (as Patricia Williams wrote back in 2005), and yesterday, life and death, as the reports from tabloids hit first and many of us didn’t want to believe, held out hope that it was just a salacious rumor, until the LA Times confirmed it for us.

People either disavow Michael loudly as a “freak” or choose to remember the music–which is, of course, what I’m doing now, cherrypicking my favorite tunes to play back. But if we really want to remember Michael Jackson, we will look into the dark places that he went, and look at the side of ourselves that wanted to have him as our freak. That didn’t want to admit that he was still a lot like us.

And yet. A little while back we did a series of music posts, proclaiming the best rock albums, best country albums, etc. We never did get around to a best pop albums list, largely because I couldn’t step away from Madonna and Michael to think of anyone else. This morning, listening to these songs with a new poignancy to every high crack of that voice, I still have to salute the best pop songs any of us have ever heard. The music will live on whether we self-examine or not. And that’s perhaps as it should be.

Posted: June 26th, 2009 under Rock'n'roll.
Comments: 1

In keeping with the literary theme of my last post, I’m stealing this meme from Natalia because I love her. And because I love you, and we have good discussions about books on this here blog. So!

Instructions: Don’t take too long to think about it. List 15 books you’ve read that will always stick with you — the first 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Copy the instructions into your own note, and be sure to tag the person who tagged you. (In the interest of staying true to the exercise, I listed the books first and then went back and wrote descriptions)

1. Les Miserables. This book more than any other has been a huge part of me. I was a kid when my parents went to see the musical and brought home the soundtrack, and I became obsessed. My grandmother, the one who always wanted me to put down the books that I read obsessively at meals and in bed, bet me that I couldn’t read the book. I was 9. She brought me a huge hardcover unabridged copy–I’m not quite sure where that copy is now–and I read it in 3 days, at meals, in bed, in every spare second. Of course at age 9, 90% of it went over my head, but I go back to it over and over. I tattooed a quote from it on my back. I find something new and beautiful every time I read it. One day I’ll learn French and read it in French. I swear.

2. Ulysses. I guess I already blogged about it once, so I don’t know if I have to say much more than it pushed the boundaries of what fiction and language could do in my mind. That said, I too have not read Finnegans Wake.

3. The Thief’s Journal I came to Jean Genet because of a silly goth magazine’s photo spread with quotes from Funeral Rites. Funeral Rites is a seriously fucked-up book, and an amazingly beautiful one, but The Thief’s Journal has stuck with me longer. Genet makes the hideous and abject beautiful, and makes the beautiful abject. More people probably know his plays, but I love his fiction. Another reason I need to learn French.

4. The Savage Detectives. I read this last summer after hearing an NPR segment on Roberto Bolano. I came away from the book staggered, like I hadn’t been by an author in years. His fierce devotion to his artistic and political ideals reminded me that art is as revolutionary as politics, and writing fiction is a worthwhile occupation.

5. Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail. Hunter S. Thompson is like Jesus, in that the man is pretty awesome, but I can’t stand most of his followers. No, seriously, I hate people who start immediately talking about the drug references in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, because they miss out on the real reason Thompson was so fucking great: the man could WRITE, and he could see through hypocrisy no matter how out of his mind he was on whatever substances he could smoke, drink, or snort. The best political journalist America’s ever seen?

6. Lolita. Is also a cliche, but I don’t care. No one should’ve ever tried to make a movie out of it: Lolita is the consummate novel, from a man who spent plenty of time messing around with the idea of a novel, stretching it to its limits and beyond (Pale Fire). The story in Lolita can’t be told properly in any other medium but the written word.

7. The Sound of Waves. I also came to Mishima from that same silly goth magazine–so my goth years were good for something. The first book of his I read was Forbidden Colors, probably his best book, but the one that hits me like a ton of bricks is this one, a deceptively simple first-love story.

8. Written on the Body. Jeannette Winterson is a whole lot of awesome as far as I’m concerned, but Written on the Body is a standout for many reasons, chief among them that it’s a love story in which you never know the gender of the main character. You know that the lover is a woman, but the “I” who speaks is so perfectly concealed that it becomes a game within the book, trying to find a clue. And yet it doesn’t compromise the story a bit.

9. Namedropper. Emma Forrest’s first novel, written when she was maybe 19; I read it when I was in college and it was the first time that I really saw myself in a character. Normally, I read books to get out of my own life, but this one was so much like me.

10. The Sound and the Fury. So Faulkner might be another cliche. So what? I still love him, and always will. I love the way this whole book revolves around Caddy and yet she is only a ghost; that everyone thinks they know her and yet it’s so immediately clear that no one does.

11. Shanghai Baby. Wei Hui’s first novel, I think, I bought because it was “banned in China.” It’s not very shocking at all, but it was the first book that I read where I thought, “I could do this.”

12. Jazz. I did not properly appreciate Toni Morrison in school, despite going through several of her books, a few of them repeatedly. It wasn’t until I took an audiobook of Jazz from my local (tiny) library for a road trip that I realized why people love her. What most of my favorite books have in common is a love for and experiment with language, and this one is no exception. It reads like music.

13. Blonde. Joyce Carol Oates does Marilyn Monroe, and I melt and want to cry just thinking about how heartwrenching this book is. Another one that someone unfortunately tried to adapt to the screen, and another one that should only be read.

14. The Sandman. Because I am me, I have comics on this list. I only have comics that were written by one person for their span, and the Sandman counts. I cannot make a list of books I love without including Neil Gaiman, and I cannot be honest and say that I like any of his prose novels more than Sandman. The Sandman comics are about stories and storytelling, about the nature of fiction and characters and myths and of course dreams, and they will change your life.

15. Local. Another comic, and my favorite since Sandman, I think. It’s a collection of short stories about one girl, and when put together (in a gorgeous hardcover that I still don’t have) it’s a story of a life told in the moments that define it. It is also the perfect comic for people who don’t read comics. Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly are wonderful.

(OK, it took me a lot more than 15 minutes to write blurbs about all of these, but I did come up with the list in less than 15. Your turn, now…)

Posted: June 20th, 2009 under Love, Reading.
Comments: none

In the midst of lots of other important news, why am I taking time out to celebrate James Joyce?

Well, aside from the fact that I just like to point out that I’m a member of the august group of people who’ve not only read Ulysses, but read it more than once and ENJOYED IT. Loved it, really. I love Joyce’s willingness to play with language, to toy with its history and its future and the way it can be changed and manipulated and made to say several things at once.

There’s a dissertation in me somewhere on Joyce and Yeats and the feminization of the Irish people by their colonizers and how it impacted their writing, referencing all sorts of theorists on colonialism and feminist theorists who talked about writing. Maybe if I don’t get a job I’ll go get an MA and then a PhD in literature just to be a nerd.

But even if I never get the degree, I’ll keep writing about that last chapter in Ulysses for a long time, because among many, many other things it’s a lush celebration of female desire.

why cant you kiss a man without going and marrying him first you sometimes love to wildly when you feel that way so nice all over you you cant help yourself I wish some man or other would take me sometime when hes there and kiss me in his arms theres nothing like a kiss long and hot down to your soul almost paralyses you

Molly Bloom is just a figure in the background for most of the novel, but here we dive straight into her mind and her thoughts, of course, are of sex. The building, heightening repetition of the word “Yes” is dirtier, hotter than any of the more lurid descriptions in the chapter, and I wonder if those who would have banned Ulysses were more put off by Joyce’s pleasure in prurient description or in the triumphant declaration of Molly Bloom at the end?

I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

And so today, June 16, is the day that Leopold Bloom took his famous walk around Dublin, and book nerds the world over celebrate. I certainly don’t have a Bloomsday party to go to, but I’m blogging it, in the midst of revolt in Iran and war supplementals here, because books have power. If they didn’t, no one would try to ban them.

Posted: June 17th, 2009 under Art, Love, Reading.
Comments: none

Those of you who read the first Phonogram trade and missed those thoroughly despicable yet compelling characters in the series’ second incarnation will be thrilled to know that “We Share Our Mother’s Health” is indeed the story of Emily Aster. A story of Emily Aster, really, because Emily strikes me as a woman with many, many stories. It’s part of her charm, if charm was something that she could be bothered to have.

I relate to her, though she’s nasty and frightened and working as hard as she can to keep up with something shallow and silly to leave behind the person she was, the person who hurt. I want to know just how Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie got into the head of a woman stuck trying to stay as pretty as the pretty young things around her, clinging to a rock’n'roll youth that she’s losing fast because she cannot relate to the adult world she’s supposed to be part of.

(Read on.)

Read more »

Posted: June 14th, 2009 under comics.
Comments: 1

I’ve been following the story on Twitter all day, as U.S. news outlets are really not covering it at all. People livetweeting from Iran as the country explodes at the election results, information being passed on as it is received and people attempt to verify it in real time…

Nico Pitney at the Huffington Post has been liveblogging and collecting info as it happens, but watching the story come in over Twitter is really exciting–and frightening. We place a certain amount of trust in news that comes to us from mainstream outlets, while here we just assume that people are who they say the are and that they are where they say they are. Or we desperately try to verify, a task that would be much easier if news outlets had nearly the amount of reporters on the ground that they should have.

Video, however, is worth a thousand words.

Live video shot by amateurs and uploaded to YouTube has an even more visceral effect than the glossy photos taken by professionals. It feels real, immediate, frightening, and exhilarating. No doubt the repression is coming, but these people are willing to face it.

Posted: June 14th, 2009 under Hope, Politics.
Comments: none

At the New York Times, the headline reads: “Weekend Opinionator: Is Racist Hate Republican or Democratic?”

Easy Answer to Stupid Question: It’s neither, assholes. There are racists in both parties, and I could readily provide examples from my own personal experience and from your own newspaper in the past year. Or has everyone else forgotten the primary campaign and then the general election?

There are also racist communists, and racist anarchists, and obviously racist fascists and racist Libertarians and racists in the Temperance Party and the Green Party.

As for the partisan blame-fest, I already said this, and unlike this guy who got paid far more than I did, I actually wrote my own thoughts down instead of cutting and pasting other people’s comments.

Posted: June 14th, 2009 under Bullshit, Media, Politics.
Comments: none

Hi, darlings. I’m getting settled in Brooklyn and at my summer gig, which, if I haven’t already mentioned (and by mentioned I mean bragged) is as the web intern at The Nation. So if you don’t already read EVERYTHING ON THE SITE, you should start, stat.

Seriously, though, I’m going to be pretty busy so I don’t know how often I’ll be around, though I’ll be required to be even more obsessively informed on the issues of the day, so I’ll probably have some rants here and there.

If you’ve missed me dearly, I’ve had two pieces up at Global Comment this week in between the unpacking. “No Common Sense, No Pleasure: From Dr. Tiller to The Pill Kills” is pretty much what it sounds like–it’s a beginning of some thoughts on how we deal with women’s sexuality. (I wish I came up with the title, but Natalia is better at that than I am.)

It’s 2009, and yet we’re stuck on the old terms when it comes to discussion of women’s sexuality. We’re inured now to sex scandals among male political figures, but women are still subject to lectures about their duty to children and families, and even the debate over a new Supreme Court justice hinges on whether or not she is pro-choice. Discussions of birth control and abortion too often leave out the point that sexuality is normal and healthy, and women should be able to enjoy it without being forced to bear children.

We yield to discussions on mournful abortions, or else feel required to admit to absolutely no guilt or second thoughts, lest we unwittingly give the Right some talking-point ammo. We are left with no avenue to talk about the pleasures and pitfalls of adult and adolescent sexuality.

Then yesterday I wrote a quick response to the early reaction to the shooting at the Holocaust Museum. There are so many ways I could’ve gone with that story, but I got quite annoyed at the bickering on Twitter about whose fault it was that an antisemite got a gun.

Arguing over whose side the killer was on is as simplistic, reductive, and plain stupid as arguing about whether the Columbine shooters were victims of bullies or crazed Marilyn Manson fans (they were neither). It misses the point entirely.

We have a culture, especially in the Obama years, in which a radical fringe feels newly disempowered, and acts of terrorism like this are perpetrated by people who feel threatened. They take up arms in some attempt to go after the ones they blame for their situation. They may believe their actions will change things, or just be angry or disturbed enough to want to go out in a hail of gunfire.

Hope that will tide over anyone who cared. Be back soon.

Posted: June 11th, 2009 under Feminism, Politics, Sex, Shameless self-promotion.
Comments: none

Is up at Global Comment.

I really enjoyed this conversation–there was much more we could’ve talked about, but we discussed the problems with environmentalism for its own sake, local economies, politics, how to save journalism, Karl Marx, corporate libertarianism, and centralized currency. His book Life, Inc. covers a lot more ground, and I’m not exaggerating when I say I think it should be required reading. It comes out June 2, and in honor of Rushkoff’s premise, you should get it from your local bookstore.

Here’s an excerpt from the interview, and the video preview for the book. Check it out.

S: A lot of the things that you mention as solutions, like buying local, are being tossed around now because they’re environmentally friendly, but you talk about them as good in themselves, because they connect you to the place where you live and the people that you know.

DR: Right. Which would I rather do? Hang out with these pretty girls on an organic farm, get some really bright gorgeous chard, or go into the fluorescent-lit A&P and push a cart around with a bunch of bored people? It becomes an easy choice when you think about it from a sensual level, rather than just an intellectual level. I’m trying to show people that I’m not asking them to live an ascetic life of renunciation and denial, but actually a much more abundant life of fun and pleasure.

When people are doing stuff out of guilt, which is what people get from the sort of Al Gore/”Inconvenient Truth” method of environmentalism or the Noam Chomsky approach to politics and economics, you get the feeling that you have to hole up somewhere and not consume anything. There’s this false dichotomy set up between doing it for the world OR having fun.

S: You talk about the connection to work, whether it’s on a farm or whatever you do—when I say it that way it almost sounds like the classic Marxist argument, that people are alienated from their work.

DR: Marx really did get a lot of it. It got used in some really silly ways and was a terrible basis for a movement. That’s why in the book I speak out against movements in general—you join this whole big thing and then the movement itself becomes a distraction from whatever’s really going on.

Posted: May 25th, 2009 under Economy, Media, Politics, Shameless self-promotion.
Comments: none

I put my car up for sale on Craigslist today. I’m moving to New York City and it’s just not practical. Yet it’s probably the hardest part of this whole move for me.

I love driving. I mean LOVE. When gas was cheap I used to just drive (stop looking at me like that, environmentalists!) for hours. When I wrote music reviews every week, my favorite place to absorb an album that I needed to review was in the car.

The last time I lived without a car was my freshman year in college. I had a car when I was in high school–mostly because my parents were working full time and if I had a car it was less work for them. When I was 17, it turned up–a 1992 Acura Integra, flame-red. We called it the Bitchmobile.

I moved out of the dorms sophomore year and brought my car to New Orleans with me. At that point, I was driving a maroon 1990 Ford Probe, nicknamed “Betty” (I am so witty, Betty Ford, eh?). When a guy ran a stop light and totaled that car, I replaced it with a Toyota Corolla named Norma Jeane. I drove that car from 2001 until last year, when it too was wrecked, this time when parked.

The car I have now is called Lulu. She’s a Volkswagen Golf, and I love her. She’s a 2000, not the prettiest thing on the road, but she’s a great little car with good gas mileage and she’s tiny and easy to park. Writing the Craigslist ad was hard.

In addition to my tendency to get emotionally attached to inanimate objects (the shoes I will not throw out, the dresses that I will never wear again), I’ve seen my car for so long as freedom. I could get in at any time and escape whatever was bothering me. I’ve driven pretty much all the way across the country–moving from New Orleans to Denver, driving to California from Denver (to LA then San Jose and then back down) and used road trips as a way to clear my head, to get over breakups or to decide to break up with someone.

I’ll save a bunch of money without a car, and yes, I’ll be greener or something. I don’t need a car in NYC, and I actually look forward to spending more time on foot and coming into contact with people. Cars isolate us to some degree, and living alone I’m already pretty isolated. Still, sometimes I need that space and time to myself.

I’ve already gotten one email about the car–haven’t even given her a bath and cleaned out the inside yet. I’m sad about leaving my apartment and my sister and my friends and professors and students and even my low-paying but often excellent job. But the car? That really hurts.

Posted: May 7th, 2009 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 1

I read this article this morning in the Mail & Guardian about Vladimir Putin and it made me giggle. At first, I thought that it was just worth a drive-by snarking on Twitter, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I should go back and write about it.

At first, of course, you get the usual masculinity-fetish. The title of the article is “That Shrinking Feeling,” which is just too obvious. Further down, a sentence reads, “Not that Putin is a spent force.”

Sexual metaphors and obsession with Putin’s bare chest are hardly rare–comic artist Becky Cloonan has a whole range of Putin-fantasy webcomics that are totally hilarious. I admit to a bit of a Putin obsession myself–he’s such a caricature.

As was Bush, of course. A caricature of a certain type of American masculinity (just like Reagan before him) the same way Putin is a caricature of a certain type of Russian masculinity. He has judo videos! He shoots tigers! He’s so BUFF!

Only a few months ago, we were scared of Putin “rearing his head,” (oh, Palin, will you ever get old?) but now we hear little to nothing about him. And this article, masculinity fetish aside, makes a decent point about why, even if it buries it beneath layers of alternately fawning and poking at him.

Analysts add that United States President Barack Obama’s emollient approach on Nato enlargement and missile defence is not helping.

As Russian president, Putin was a natural when it came to attacking former president George Bush, for example over Iraq.

But fast-forward one year and he looked far less comfortable, barely speaking above a whisper, as he made a conciliatory speech praising the new Iraqi order in front of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki at a recent Moscow meeting.

As the public questions whether everything is really the United States’ fault, a change of tone is needed that Putin may struggle with, says political commentator Arkady Dubnov of the newspaper Vremya Novostei.

(OK, they did say “enlargement.”)

Does Obama’s conciliatory approach to foreign policy make the former bluff and bluster between Bush and Putin look…well…juvenile? Does Obama’s refusal to give leaders like Putin (and Chavez, and and and) a target effectively work where threats and yes, swagger didn’t?

Of course it’s far too early to tell. But during the campaign, especially the primaries, I wrote about Obama’s demeanor and tone about foreign policy contrasted with his rivals, and how Hillary Clinton and Obama seemed to have switched gender stereotypes.

I’m disappointed with many of Obama’s moves so far, but I wonder if just the tonal shift in public diplomacy is having an effect worldwide. It’s definitely not calming the Right inside the U.S., but they sure do look silly. So there’s that.

Posted: May 7th, 2009 under Feminism, Politics, Sex.
Comments: none