good morning midnight

IN DEFENSE OF THE HOT MESS / A CALL FOR LADY ANTIHEROES

Lately I’ve been really into weird concepts of something like failed, desperate, self-conscious deliberate performative femininity? Part of this is evidenced by the fact that I’ve been doing my hair in big curls with my kinda-crappy-blonde-dye-job and wearing a ridiculous faux-leopard coat with ripped tights and messy eyeliner, and part of it comes together more in at least 47 different e-mail conversations about books and movies with “unrepentantly fucked up” lady characters that I’ve been having with at least 5 different people of late.  Some of these ideas have been written very eloquently by other folks already, and some of it is obvious and some of it is still vague, and all of it is definitely not “complete,” so, like, go at it in the comments, y’all, I wanna know what you’re thinking.

It begins, I think, with my ongoing frustration that when we are presented with male characters (or personas, or even real persons) who are basically bad people with one redeeming quality (still sleeps with a teddy bear, is a brilliant filmmaker) we let that one redeeming quality, you know, redeem them, and are collectively charmed by their fucked-up-ness.  But I have a really hard time coming up with similar female examples: all of the ones I can think of we have opted to either lambast or concern-troll instead.  And we always need to redeem them. They always need to learn something or be rescued, which we all know is basically the opposite of how the world really works.  Kids, I am a hot mess, and almost all of the women I admire and love and am fascinated by are also hot fucking messes, and I so rarely see that represented in a real, nuanced, and fascinating way.  To simplify: I am eternally tearing my hair out over the fact that I desperately want more female antiheroes. In books, film, pop culture personas, whatever.  And I’ve been seeing this idea come up again and again lately.

As a brief list of some of what I’m referencing: There’s this Lana Del Rey album review, which is kind of the most astute thing I’ve read on her yet, and which hit the nail on the head of my bizarre, obsessive preoccupation with her and her aesthetic — though it condemned her where I obviously am fascinated instead.  There was that Marie Calloway brouhaha, and the fantastic response to it all from Kate Zambreno, which also lead to The Rejectionist’s interview with her here.  There were a bunch of folks over at Emily Books who managed to somehow misread a lot of lesbian moralism into Eileen Myles’ Inferno, when I thought it was just a book about, like, someone very funny and intelligent and unapologetic, who also lived a life that reminds me an awful lot of my life now. There was Charlize Theron in Young Adult, who would have been way fascinating if not for Diablo Cody’s frustrating insistence on de-nuancing her characters in favor of twee trope-tastic banter.  There’s Cat Marnell at XOJane and the no-nonsense-it’s-okay-to-be-human writing at Rookie.   Sarah’s and my Rayanne Project (which sort of fizzled out probably partially because I am a little bit too much of a whacked-out womanchild to coordinate and motivate folks to write me things like that, but the stuff that’s up there is still amazeballs!)  The Amy-Winehouse-inspired couture collection that Gaultier showed yesterday.  Courtney Love, like, in general.

I am really into this, you guys.

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A BETTER VERSION OF ME: AN ESSAY ON TEN YEARS OF LISTENING TO RAINER MARIA

            Every time I get into one of those All Time Desert Island Top Five conversations, I hesitate.  I usually go for the safe,  the safe and obvious — Radiohead, The Pixies, New Order, Gang of Four, maybe like Sleater Kinney or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs? But I’m always lying.  Because the thing I always hesitate to admit is this: one of my favorite bands, and the band I have seen live more than any other, ever, is actually Rainer Maria.

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KREAYSHAWN, LANA DEL REY, AND HIGH SCHOOL STYLE LADYHATE ONLINE

Okay, kids.  I’ve been putting it off and re-editing and drafting and queueing and un-queueing a post about this for weeks now, but I need to stop waffling about it, since we need to talk about Lana Del Rey and Kreayshawn, and how I don’t hate them, and how I think the intensity and specificity of everyone else’s disdain for them is sort of shitty, and how self-righteous and unquestioning we’ve all been about that hatred.  We’ve talked about both of these ladies to death, but it seems that very few people (in my admittedly over-stocked Googlereader, at least) have even so much as glanced at the intensity of the public reaction to both of them and really questioned why they irritate us so much.

There’s one disclaimer to be made here, first — it’s true that there are a lot of conversations to be had about Kreayshawn and race (and to some extent about Del Rey and nostalgia and class.)   I want to make it clear that I’m not in any way refuting these, as a lot of those conversations are totally valid and necessary and you should read them or write them too and I think they are super important and want you to tell me about them too.  This conversation, if it’s possible to do this, is slightly outside of those dialogues, a concurrent frame through which I think these two singers can be viewed.  This is about ladyhate and the curious extent to which of these pretty lady pop singer internet sensations have become our most reviled cultural icons this year, our favorite objects of hate and disgust. 

This isn’t criticizing thought-provoking conversation about potential social issues in pop culture, or any of the nuanced dialogues about femininity and race and queerness and class that they may have provoked — plenty of those have been super rad, and super necessary.  This is about the personal attacks and the particular brand of lady-directed-snark we’ve been seeing all over with regards to both of these girls, lots of which are lacking in deeper analysis. This is about how despite the fact that Kreayshawn and Lana Del Rey have little in common other than having a YouTube account, we the feminist music-snob internet have reacted to them with the same variety of sneers and upturned noses.

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ON RIOTS AND YACHTS

“But what do people do on boats?” I asked.  ”I just don’t get it. How long do you stay on the boat and am I going to get sick and do people bring food or am I going to have to help make the boat work or do you just like float around and am I going to get wet and what do I talk about with the kind of people who own boats? Who owns boats anyway? How much does a boat cost?” 

A coworker had invited my girlfriend to go sailing on their yacht after work, an invitation which had been extended somewhat tersely to “partners” — a word which, coming from people who are old and straight and rich and conservative but at heart still genuinely “nice people,” has always sounded uncomfortable to me, a politically correct and sanitized way to acknowledge nonheterosexual relationships without the embarrassment of explicit reference to gender.  A self-consciously magnanimous attempt at generous inclusion of that other kind of people, a well-intentioned but tight-lipped tolerance without wholehearted acceptance — something nice, something I give people credit for, but that always leaves a sour taste in my mouth.  Would it be un-partner-ly of me not to go, or would I ruin their boat party simply by merit of being that, a partner? But more importantly, what was this even going to entail?

My friends assured me that it would be nice — calm down, they said! It’s just a boat! They invited you, you crazy person!  It’ll be nice!  ”But what do I do?” I asked them frantically. “What do people do on boats? Do I compliment them on their boat? Do I need to bring champagne? I can’t afford champagne until I get paid Friday. Can I wear Converse? I don’t have boat shoes. I’ve never been on a yacht, what are yachts even like?”

“Take a Xanax and don’t talk about politics,” my friend advised. “Maybe wear a floppy hat. There will be booze.”

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