So it takes a lot longer to get over anything. And I'm home sick. Being kicked from the inside. Can't really concentrate on anything productive. Let me tell you what's on my mind. Here,
I've been obsessed with pickles lately. Also juice. But yesterday I also ate some ice cream just to see if it would feel good on my sore throat. So yes, I literally ate pickles and ice cream. FML.
The other day - okay, this was a while ago now - Pandora played me "Jumpin', Jumpin' ", and for the longest time I kept thinking about it - partly because I couldn't really figure out what they were saying in the chorus, which sounded like "the club is full of ballers and their cock is full grown", but it actually is "the club is full of ballers and they pockets full grown." Which I couldn't decide whether Destiny's Child were trying to express that the ballers were rich, or had erections. Mr. E wisely pointed out that they were probably implying both, and in fact the easy mishearing was probably deliberate and intentional, and the lyric is awesomely evocative and concise. It's true. That's a great line.
But my major issue with the song is that it exhorts the ladies to leave yo man at home and go to the club, and the fellas to leave yo girl with her friends and go to the club, because the club is jumpin', jumpin'. Okay now 30 seconds of forethought is going to let you know that if everybody does this, there is going to be a massive encounter of embarrassment and rage at 11:30 when the fellas and the ladies all converge at the club and discover that we've all been ditched and our ladies/fellas are there looking for other brothers/chicas, who are probably going to be too busy for hookups on account of being stuck in angry arguments with their own previously ditched ladies/fellas. It just doesn't work. DC can't possibly be speaking to everybody. Unless of course the song is actually describing some kind of carnival like dancing the Moon in Always Coming Home, where normal rules and ordinary monogamy are suspended and you know that your fella is at the same club that you are and he's going to be with other chicas and it's totally fine because he knows that you are there finding other brothers and it's a night of license and that's okay because that night because the joint is jumpin', jumpin'. That would be awesome.
But is that really the way it is? My suspicion is that in fact DC are only talking to some ladies, certain fellas. Maybe the ones who are dating jerks, jerks who deserve to be ditched? Except if you don't break up with your jerk in a straightforward manner and instead just go out for the night to find a baller with his pockets full grown, you are also a jerk. And if you're both jerks, you'll probably end up at the same club, and we're back to the beginning of the problem. If you ever wondered why I will never amount to anything? This is why. While Mr. E spends his time thinking about, like, space exploration, and 3D printing, and math, I'm overanalyzing Destiny's Child lyrics. I want to be somebody else.
(I mean, ideally, somebody who's not a limp, achy snot faucet.)
Also the next night I literally dreamed that Christina Aguilera's "Genie in a Bottle" was actually a harshly realistic political song in metaphor about the price in civilian deaths that America is willing to pay in return for a policy of relatively unrestricted access to guns ("If you wanna be with me/ Baby there's a price to pay".) Not even joking. Pregnancy dreams, they are weird.
Speaking of music, do you know about Tylan Greenstein's solo album? I've loved Ty's work with Girlyman for like ten years, but now Girlyman is taking a break; Doris, Nate and JJ have gone off to make a terrible album for children, and Ty has gone off to make a great album for adults. I honestly don't fucking know how you can buy this album. It's supposedly "available for preorder" on her website, but I know the album exists because I bought a copy at her concert. So go to her concerts! She's touring the Midwest now. You can hear the first single off the album here, featuring Amy Ray, but honestly that shouldn't have been the first single, because it's far from the best song on the album. Actually it's unintentionally sort of hilarious, it's one of those songs where listening to it, I can't help hearing a sort of ghostly counterpoint, which is the song from the other person's point of view. The chorus: "I wasn't the one who saved your life/ I gave you my best prolonged midnight/ I gave you the kiss that saved my whole life.../ you were already fine." Tell me you can't imagine what it might have been like to be the other person in that relationship.
Anyway, when I saw her perform, she started with "Over the Rhine", which is really powerful and made me cry and the rest of the show was amazing from there. So seriously, if you get a chance, go see her.
And then the other thing was the Amanda Palmer poem. Which, if you had not heard about it, Amanda Palmer wrote "A Poem for Dzhokhar", apparently in about 9 minutes, and posted it to her blog, leading the internet at large to just massively lose their shit about how apparently Ms. Fucking Palmer was "making the tragedy all about her".
Which is total, total bullshit of the kind that Seanan McGuire recently pointed out. Who the fuck didn't have something to say about the Boston bombings? Who the fuck, who had a blog or a Twitter or a Facebook or anything, didn't take ten minutes at some point or another to write down whatever was on their minds? We were talking to each other. It's what people do, and these days we do it on the internet. But Amanda Palmer does it and gets a ton of "So what's the over/under that @amandapalmer ends up being the inmate marrying type?" and "If @amandapalmer was in a Boston hospital, looking at bloody stumps where her legs used to be, she'd have penned the same poem, right?"
Which is two different kinds of criticism. The first kind is the annoying sexual kind. In Ms. Palmer's particular case it also leads to a lot of "I can't believe Neil married her" and similar crap. I cannot help thinking it must put something of a strain on a public figure's relationship to know that you're always painted as The Evil Witch and your husband is painted as The Genius by a shockingly large amount of the world that knows about you. (Though it probably helps that Mr. Gaiman tends to respond publicly with things like "also a long time since I've seen incoherent obscene tweets telling me how evil my slut wife is. It makes me feel young again.")
And then the second kind is basically about how there is an Approved Emotional Response to terrible acts like the Boston bombings, and that is the only okay way to respond, and if you don't respond that way, you probably deserve to be killed. Certainly you should never say any other kind of response in public. And let me make it explicit that yes, identity politics comes into this as into everything; Amanda Palmer as a white woman got sexualized and dismissive verbal attacks for speaking in public, but Amanda Palmer as a white woman got verbal attacks for speaking in public, not physical attacks for just being out in public while not embodying the Approved Emotional Response; which is, to be honest, Fuck Muslims, I Love Americans And Hate Muslims, which is pretty fucking hard to to embody when you are an American Muslim or even just look like you might be. Which is one of the major problems with the Approved Emotional Response - probably the most important one - but it's not the only one. It's death on poetry, for example. Okay, I know that sounds trivial in comparison, but people have seriously died for the right to write what they want and not have to write the Official Party Line. Because it's important. Look, it's a damn shame that the poem isn't better. It's not a good poem. It's got some really good bits in it. I think a really good poem that wanted to talk about the humanity of the bomber would have to talk about the humanity of a person who did what he did; would have to make you think about what he did. Ms. Palmer's poem doesn't. I don't know who could write that poem. Auden? Sassoon? Rich? I don't know enough about poetry. I don't think this poem is it. But you can't say that it's only okay to violate the Approved Emotional Response if your poem is good. You can't write good poetry that way. It has to be okay to write dreck. And, I mean, people should point out that it's dreck, absolutely. But the response needs to be criticism, not threats.
(Also there's the issue of how many people are listening. Have you ever read Leigh Alexander's FAQ?
What’s it like being a woman in the game industry?It's not just the gaming industry, of course. Mia McKenzie had the nerve to write about how years of racism have made her not give that much of a shit about the Boston bombings. I am impressed with her courage. I hope she doesn't get beat down into silence as she gets better known.)
Like playing Metal Gear Solid 3. You feel a sense of pleasure and mastery so long as you don’t generate noise or movement above a certain acceptable baseline. Call enough attention to yourself and suddenly you’re fighting an unpleasant combat game in which you experience crushing anxiety and virtual pain. I’d like to see that change for us.
Okay, ending on an up note. Here's an awesome bit from The Hairpin about how kids are not a magical whole new level of love and maybe you shouldn't bother - your dad might tell you seriously, don't bother - but you know what, if you want to, they're kind of awesome.
Secondly, that having babies can be really fun, if you have a ton of free time and a lot of money and maybe a partner and definitely a person to come and cook and clean and do laundry for you for a month (thanks, Mom!), and probably under other circumstances as well. Thirdly, that you can have a wonderful life and experience all the possible human emotions just as well with a border collie pup and some kind of Game Meats of the Month Club subscription.
(Crossposted to http://metaphortunate.dreamwidth.org/46
For my kids -- I don't need a collie.
Also: wow, that's a fabulous FAQ.
I do feel that a Game Meats of the Month subscription could give you some of the excited highs and repulsed lows of parenthood, though.
It needs to be OK to write dreck, yes. But dreck doesn't deserve a blue ribbon and widespread "go you, thanks for trying!" approval. People who do not like your dreck are not "haters," and AFP was definitely not the victim of the Boston bombing.
The unicellular spat made me laugh.
I have been trying to think of my white cells all nervous like that because it stops me wanting to beat everything in my throat and sinuses to death with a hammer. It would be counterproductive. I think.
And while the sexualized and sexist crap about Amands Palmer is bad, she does seem to be awfully self-important and clueless about a lot of stuff.
I mean, my problem isn't with Amanda Palmer's sentiments, it's with the way that she presents them, and the massive cry for attention it represents. The poem would have bothered me less if it was written as "hey, here are my feelings." It wasn't. IT was written like, "Hey, here are my profound insights into the experience and character of a real person of whom I actually know nothing." I don't have a problem with empathy (I have some in this situation, too), but there's a difference between empathizing with or trying to comprehend someone, and assuming you can/should speak from the point of view of another person in a situation that you can't know. It's the same as, say, a white American writing a poem claiming to speak for a Burmese child soldier. You might have good intentions, but it's not your story to tell, and chances are you're going to make it about your feelings and not their experience.
TLDR I also hate the sexist critique of Amanda Palmer, but that doesn't make her any less awful.
And we are definitely agreed on the critique of her as a person being sexist and gross, even though personally I could do without any of her art.