Smarter than you

Adam Waldron-Blain is a famous artist in Edmonton. More »

Music:

Why is pop music the only art form that still inspires such arrantly stupid discussion? The debates that surround authenticity have no relationship to popular music as it’s been practiced for more than a century. Artists write material, alone or with assistance, revise it, and then present a final work created with the help of professionals who are trained for specific and relevant production tasks. This makes popular music similar to film, television, visual art, books, dance, and related areas like food and fashion. And yet no movie review begins, “Meryl Streep, despite not being a Prime Minister, is reasonably convincing in ‘The Iron Lady.’

Lana Del Rey’s Image on “Born to Die” : The New Yorker

Sasha Frere-Jones gets the January 2012 award for accuracy!

A commenter wrote in reply to this: “Agree with the sentiment, but actors act; musicians create music. We’re not implicitly invited to suspend disbelief with the latter.” This is just so wrong, because the role of the musician is not necessarily to create music so much as execute it. It feels absurd to have to point this out, but going back centuries, songwriters are not necessarily synonymous with performers. That is a fairly recent thing — Bob Dylan and the Beatles are largely responsible for the expectation that pop musicians write their own material. But regardless of that expectation, the majority of musicians do not specialize in performing their own material - even within bands who do focus on originals. And for that matter, it is exceptionally rare for actors to perform material that they have written. What matters is execution, and how a performer inhabits a role. Sasha’s point is that the overwhelming majority of creative endeavors are the product of collaboration with specialists, so it is absurd that music - a medium that all but requires people to come together to make anything happen – would be considered an exception. (via perpetua)

Yeah but no! There are many hollywood stars who we really do want to believe. That’s why the gossip press was obsessed with proving that Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson were doing it, and reviews of twilight did in fact talk about them in the way that they don’t about Meryl Streep: “Despite Pattinson and Stewart’s chemistry, the central relationship plays like a sad, destructive charade” and also we think that Pattinson isn’t actually a vampire (probably). What does the word “chemistry” mean except it could be real OMG. It’s why people love/d James Dean and Marilyn and Judy Garland and lots of other old hollywood stars. It’s what runs the gossip papers. And it’s still present in the way we talk about many many young stars: Lilo and Megan Fox and HELLO TUMBLR USE A MIRROR MUCH I KNOW YOU DON’T REALLY BELIEVE IT BUT YOU WISH YOU DO.

Post-script: It has come to my attention that I basically just post links about Lana Del Rey and fail to actually talk about her now. I just find it so interesting when people get so upset because other people are getting so upset because of something! But I will try to hold myself back in the future. Maybe in the mean time if you are bored and want to experience some constructed authenticity directly I can point you to my other blog.

(via heartdashbeats)

I Like:

The first time I wrote about Lana Del Rey, in a column, a few months back, I said I was pleased that when she invoked the name ‘Lolita’, she actually seemed to be talking about something like the character in the novel, and not whatever strange mincing porny thing people use that name to refer to today.

Now, having heard her song ‘Lolita’, I would like to apologize and mostly retract that. I wrote a review of her album for Vulture, findable here. I suppose the bullet points are as follows: It’s a so-so moody pop record that stumbles around a bit, and there are things about Del Rey’s attempt to pull off a persona that are campily interesting and/or poignant, and a lot of it reminds me of Showgirls. I have many more thoughts and feelings about related topic,* but I’m sure there’s more than enough to read about this artist at the moment, so I’ll save the bulk of them for another time.

Except for one thing. One novel I really adore is Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. It’s about two prisoners, in Argentina, sharing a cell: Molina’s there because he’s gay, and accused of corrupting a minor; Valentin’s there because he’s a leftist revolutionary. Through most of the novel, Molina is recounting to Valentin, from memory, the plots of films he loves. He has a keen memory for the sensual, glamorous, swooning side of them. One of the films he recounts is, essentially, a Nazi propaganda thriller, and he describes the things in it the way the film sees them — at some point, he’s describing all the beautiful, masculine German soldiers marching through Paris. This annoys Valentin, who challenges him on it. And Molina’s answer, as I remember it, is to just let the issue pass for a moment, and appreciate the type of beauty that this film, right or wrong, is trying to offer at that moment.

And that issue, the thing that’s contested between them at that moment, has more to do with ‘camp’ than laughing at things because you think they’re bad — to me, camp is always about seeing some overblown proposition of what beauty is, and knowing that the fundamentals behind it, the belief system it grew out of, is defunct or rotten or collapsed. It’s like a touchingly grand expression of a belief that has no worthwhile purchase on the world.

Nitsuh Abebe – Important Retraction / Note on Camp

This is relevant to everything.

(via towerofsleep)

…and happy new year.

More sad songs for the new week

http://nothingbutthehits.tumblr.com

Every weekday

nothingbutthehits:

Wild is the Wind

I started a new band blog. All heartbreak all the time. http://nothingbutthehits.tumblr.com.

Fairport Convention· Tam Lin

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

This one’s a good one.

Upcoming performances in Woodlands

My performance regimen for the month began this weekend. Friday I put in about two hours in a small grassy enclosure housing some kind of utility substation before being defeated by hail and rain. Today I performed for a more respectable three hours in a rubbish-filled alleyway. It was very beautiful, yet unrepeatable. I felt the power of the sublime.

This week I’ll be performing in the afternoon on Tuesday 17 May and Thursday 19 May, starting about 1:00 pm. I’ll be somewhere in a similar space in Woodlands. On Wednesday we meet for Manhunt at 9:30, details on the site.

Recorded music and the recorded performance in objects of contemporary art, and an aside about the roles of documentation in performative practices

When I started this project it was from one point: I am not a musician. It was an easy assumption at the time; I hadn’t been playing seriously for a couple of years with only occasional moments where I would pick up the violin. I played the piano for fun, but here I was in Glasgow without one. I wanted to play the violin again but I was not going to be a musician.

Its gotten more complicated since then. Of course I’ve complained in the past about artists taking up music or other forms without believing themselves musicians, and without considering that part of their work in itself, alone. So I was committed to doing a good job of it, of performing with an idea of rigour, if a twisted one. I didn’t want to make something bad, because it would reduce the project to a joke.

So I had to practice, and it’s easy to become a musician by accident when you do that too much. I was poor, so I started busking too. But I’m still trying to keep these things somewhat separate.

Why am I not a musician?

Music is boring. There is so much. And, worse than art, everyone thinks they like it. Many people actually do not. But although they don’t know art but they know what they don’t like. There are a few places in music where that is also true—that is where I want to be.

This is a long one →

Mystery has always surrounded the Skye bridge

Tomorrow we are driving to Skye. I made this mixtape for the trip. It has some good ones.

Plz download it at your leisure.

j. bieber embodies an alternative vision of masculinity which is threatening to the dominant culture; this is why it is so often the case that young men and boys deride him with homophobic slurs and accusations of femininity. this is why there is such a loud, vitriolic, and disproportionate hatred toward the young male pop star. this is why on imdb ‘never say never’ is, on average, rated a 1.1 out of 10 by male voters. this is why 85.7% of all voters on the film are indeed male, 83% of which are between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine. this is by far the most predominate voting category, as well as the most negative. this should not be a surprise. of course, this is the demographic which is most at risk to lose privilege, power, identity, etc. to a social shift in the dominant masculine vision. the images of massive crowds of fourteen-year-old girls finding an icon in the androgyny of j. bieber is too much for manliness to handle. truly, i believe j. bieber to be a tremendously positive figure in our popular culture. and, i believe that what our society needs is more love for j. bieber; if only we could all be more like fourteen-year-old girls, i think we might be doing better for ourselves. instead, we have masculinity in crisis and i was like baby, baby, baby no!
nosex via Critical Culture