A New Year Poem from Sylvia Plath

New Year on Dartmoor

This is newness : every little tawdry
Obstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar,
Glinting and clinking in a saint's falsetto. Only you
Don't know what to make of the sudden slippiness,
The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant.
There's no getting up it by the words you know.
No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe.
We have only come to look. You are too new
To want the world in a glass hat.

Auld Lang Syne in shades of Pink and Blue

When Haverchuk showed me these toys from Pottery Barn kids, my first response was "that's cute." This is mostly because I would still rather use a tiny toy pink vacuum than the real thing, NOT because I think that ONLY little girls should be playing with a toy vacuum (which is undoubtedly the message encoded in the PB pink kitchen set).

That said, I'm all for the recent trend of making stuff for grown-ups look like toys. Unlike some of my fellow feminists, I do not consider the pinkification of otherwise ugly and utilitarian tools entirely offensive. I'll take my aesthetic pleasures wherever I can get them. I own several kitchen appliances made by Sanrio, and I nod in approval when Lorelei covers Rory's hammer with feathers on episode of the Gilmore Girls.

But this does not mean that I don't find the constant color-coding / gendering of children's toys troubling. I'm willing to admit that my attraction to things that are pink and fluffy likely has something to do with an early inoculation as a female consumer with a desire for all things pink. But the thing is, boys like pink too. And boys also like to vacuum and sweep and wash dishes. And girls like hammers. I like hammers. I still do.

A little boy I used to babysit had both a play kitchen and a play toolbench. Both were hand-me-downs, and the family kept the toys side by side in the basement. Interestingly, the toy kitchen and the toy bench seemed exactly the same; they developed the same types of motor skills and invited a similar type of play. And of course the kid mixed them up. Spoons hung from the workbench and there were hammers in the sink. The point is that both were fun to play with. Toys do not need to be gendered, they just need to be fun.

This is rather an obvious point, I suppose, and perhaps one not nearly exciting enough for new year's eve. That said, I hope you all have a very happy new year, and that your 2006 will be filled with lots of good, loving, non-gendered play.

What's your take on pink hammers and baby-blue mixers?

We All Aint Ready; K-Fed and Derek Bailey, RIP

SB here, completing a post from a few weeks ago. When I started this post, I was taking a break from the inane carnival of outward self-promotion and inward self-loathing that is Ph.D. applicationeering. Blech. The exigencies of that odious process kept me from finishing this post, so I am finishing it now at the folks' haus in Toronto. Apologies if this puppy runs long!

I will cut directly to the chase: I nominate Kevin Federline's "Y'all Aint Ready" as 2005's song of the year. Not just the best song of the year-- the only song of the year! Deal with it, haterz!

Recently we had bloglisted and in-n-outraged over for pizza and cocotinis (FF's powerful yet smooth signature cocktail), and conversation turned, as it always does, to the topic of K-Fed. Now, don't get me wrong--- we all hate K-Fed a lot. But when FF fired up the 0:43 second snippet of K-Fed's "Y'all Aint Ready" that had migrated a few months ago to the internets I had a surprising aesthetic reverie. All of a sudden I really, really liked "Y'all Aint Ready." Then I reflected on Britney's purported reaction to "Y'all Aint Ready" when Kev demoed it for her: "maybe a hundred people would want to buy this." Harsh tokes, indeed. But most of the music I like (and indeed, that which I create myself) falls into the "maybe a hundred people would want to buy this" category, and I can only imagine that Britney would take a dim view of it.

What is there to like about K-Fed's rap masterpiece? Well, to start with, K-Fed fulfills the promise inherent in the vanity musical projects of all wealthy dilletantes: that the lack of restrictions on creative output engendered by insane affluence and the company of sycophantic yes-men will lead to the kind of unfettered oddness that characterizes the "outsider" music of society's most marginalized. We would then have concrete evidence of a kind of "natural" utopian solidarity in "difference" rather than uniformity, eccentricity rather than conformity, Desire rather than the Law. To put it another way, it seems to me that hope for a better future lies in the propensity of humans to wander off in unpredictable directions oddly.

When Kevin Federline raps, he ignores every rule of metric regularity and rhythmic consistency. Like the glorious Shaggs, every new phrase intoned by K-Fed begins a new rhythmic unit, even if the last one wan't quite finished. Like the serpentine lines of music found in the medieval Chantilly Codex, K-Fed's rapping bends the brain over, under and sideways. Like hobo mystic Harry Partch's 'US Highball," K-Fed's lines start when they start and end when they end, and the sheer power of the delivery convinces us that this is how music must necessarily be.

For those readers who didn't spend any semesters in music school, here is a way to think about this idiosyncratic rule-breaking: imagine a metronome ticking, and a musician tapping his or her foot along with it. Most pop music will have a strong downbeat (an extra-firm stomp on the floor) on the first and third beats, but just about any emphasis can work, as long as it is consistently repeated. Within this pattern, melodies are usually constructed so the notes land on a down or up beat, or some sub-division of the beat. Tension can be created by dragging or rushing this note or that phrase, or superimposing an odd pattern, like a group of 3 beats, over an even one, like a group of 4 (this is the secret at the core of "funky" musics like funk and hip-hop and Scottish pibroch and many many others).

It is hard not to sometimes see this framework as a cage, and the expectations of audiences that good music will have a "good beat and you can dance to it" as a limiting kind of ideological dogma. Some see this aforementioned rhythmic regularity as "natural," and therefore regard its hegemonic status as justified, but that is a hard point of view to support. Every non-Western musical culture has a sense of "time" that is dramatically at odds with the ticking metronomes of the conservatory practice room, the "click track" of the modern recording studio, and the baton of the conductor. Lydia Goehr's groundbreaking work on the rise of notation-based, conductor-driven music helps us understand how recent a phenomenon this really is. In Bach's time, a performance of notated music was a wild, noisy, and sloppy mess... and I am sure it was unbelievably awesome, especially compared to the icky bourgeois seriousness of the symphony hall.

I learned to appreciate the power of resistance to ossified, codified, and calcified habits of making and listening to music from a British guitar player named Derek Bailey. In the early 1960s, Bailey, a gifted jazz guitarist from Sheffield, England, quit playing with dance bands and orchestras. Already in his 30s, he was pulled to challenge himself to create a non-idiomatic style of music, one that could be played without notation, without rules, and without leaders and followers. In this endeavor, he was part of a general community of composers and musicians questioning every vestige of authoritarianism in musical culture-- folks like John Cage, Christian Wolff, Cornelius Cardew, and the composers of the Scratch Orchestra.

Even though Bailey was technically capable of producing the kind of crowd-pleasing acrobatics of a Jimi Hendrix or Eddie Van Halen, he never indulged in the easy gimmickry of virtuosity. Following the lead of Anton Webern, Bailey mapped out pockets of atonal and dissonant notes on his guitar (an intrument that is made to make pleasant music) so that his improvisation would not be compromised by the subliminal suggestions of the instrument itself. Bailey pursued every possible permutation of collaborative improvisation, from solo concerts to working with huge ensembles, from groups that stayed together for many years with the same membership, to the Company Week festivals that brought together musicians from all over the globe to stimulate new parterships. I have a cherished bootleg of a concert from 1980 in Toronto, where he starts to pitch the records available for sale in the lobby in his appealingly unassuming Sheffield accent while banging out his signature frail and spiky clusters and squeaking harmonics.

I was assigned Bailey's book on improvisation in my first formal class in improvisation at school, and I guess it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say that it changed my life. For the past 10 years I have made music in the style pioneered by Derek Bailey, and have had to put up with the comment, for some reason a slur in much of the experimental music world, that my playing sounds too much like that of Derek Bailey. It's not true, but if it was, there would be no greater compliment.

Thanks to the efforts of folks like John Zorn and Jim O'Rourke, the 1990s saw a series of wonderful CD reissues of Bailey's classic recordings and a slew of exciting new releases. I met him once and he was sweet and generous and funny and even sent me some kind words about a CD of my own music I had sent him.

Derek Bailey died this week. If you ever have a chance, reserve an hour and listen to "Aida" or "Domestic and Public Pieces" or "Takes Fakes and Dead She Dances" or any of the hundreds of other beautiful records of glorious utopian radical music that Derek Bailey gave to the world. It will make you happy.


















image source

Fluff Sells

We're in the land of the SB where there's snow, maple syrup, and latkes aplenty. Oh, Canada! You are so cozy. You make us want to cuddle up and think about... bunnies!

Meet my new favorite ad campaign: the telus mobility bunnies. These little spokesfluffs are all over Toronto, tucked in all it's gray corners, crouched above benches at the bus stops, and splashed across billboards. When I am in a city, I usually do not notice ads; they are so ubiquitous that they seem to be an integral aspect of the modern urban landscape. If I do notice them, it is usually because I am nonplussed or nauseated. But I like these bunnies. And so does a certain almost two year old, which only validates my own opinion that these bunnies are good.

They are fluffy and cute. They have nothing to do with the product. They're simply delightful. If you're going to plaster a city's surfaces with ads, then do us a favor and at least include something fluffy.

And I just found out that one of their television ads includes a Le Tigre song (hot topic). Fluffy bunnies AND feminist pop??? Are these people reading my mind???

Now, I do not want to pretend that I don't find aspects of this campaign troubling. I basically find all advertising troubling. And I know there are people out there who have very strong opinions about the use of certain songs in ad campaigns (these posts relate to the use of M.I.A.'s "Galang" in a Honda Civic commercial). But there is no denying that I enjoy watching herds of bunnies hop across a music scale to Le Tigre. It's better than watching "bimbos" bop to Bruce Springsteen, which is what we usually see in tv commercials. So I say, bring the fluff!

The Beast of 2005: Sick to Our Stomachs

Weight loss has long been one of America's pastimes, and it's bullseye on the female body -- the way it's gaze works to problematize every bulge, bump, and curve -- grows only more wide and fierce in the context of contemporary capitalism.

And although thinness is repeatedly rewarded in even the most unrelated context (I want to spit nails every time I read a book review or interview that comments on the subject's weight), our culture is quick to call someone "too thin," and calls those who become excessively thin "sick." It's a toxic contradiction.

I can't give you a firm number or a percentage, but I can guarantee that I read thousands of headlines while waiting in line at the grocery store about how thin some female celebrity had become. Of all the magazines prominently displayed in the checkout aisle, almost 100% of them feature some reference to weight loss or thinness. The dissonance in the classic before and after shots are echoed in their headlines: i.e. "Scary skinny" vs. "holiday weight loss secrets." Gross.

Although this trend isn't new, I'm naming it my "Beast of 2005" because it seems to have reached some sort of fever pitch. The constant scrutiny of particularly bodies -- the nicole richies and mary kates -- is especially troubling. They are at once spectacles of self-destruction and objects of "thinspiration." Other celebs, particularly those who experience rapid or drastic weight-loss, are treated as gurus -- those who can offer us insight into the occult practices and technologies of weight-loss. And the emergence of the term "manorexia" and before and after shots of folks like Jack Osborne and Carson Daly suggests that thinness for men has come a long way since Al Roker was painted as a pioneer of the gastric bypass. Meanwhile, weight loss narratives (The Biggest Loser, Celebrity Fit Club) effectively conflate weight-loss and virtue. It's sickening, and I'm hoping this trend will end with 2005.

Boo to skellywood.

Exhibit A:
The Skinny Website (be sure to check out the ads - yikes)

"Skellywood Shrine" image courtesy Gallery of the Absurd

Almost

...the new year. Stay tuned for the SB's take on K-Fed (for song of the year????) and my diagnosis re 2005's "Beast of the Year." Y'all aint ready.

It boys

Wiki's take on "it" boys:

Male actors are usually referred to as "it boy" less often than a female actor will be referred to as an "it girl", as male actors often begin their careers at an older age. The reign of an "It boy" usually lasts around a year, where they will either become a full-fledged celebrity or their popularity will fade.

New York Magazine's article on "it" girls and an accompanying article on "it" boys

To Market, To Market

You Must Read This

Gendergeek has a great post -- basically a list/ compendium of statistics -- about women and global economics. Here's a bit:

Merry Christmas World!

Women work two-thirds of the world's working hours, produce half of the world's food, and yet earn only 10% of the world's income and own less than 1% of the world's property.

World Development Indicators, Womankind Worldwide

Millions of women in developing countries live in poverty. The feminization of poverty is a growing phenomenon. Women are still the poorest of the world's poor, representing 70 percent of the 1.3 billion people who live in absolute poverty. When nearly 900 million women have incomes of less than $1 a day, the association between gender inequality and poverty remains a harrowing reality.

UNIFEM, Strengthening Women's Economic Capacity

And in case you are wondering, yes, I feel dumb for bitching about the skirt thing now.

A Good Skirt is Hard to Find

Some of you may remember that I recently acquired a pair of incredibly gorgeous boots. And all I want to do is wear them all day every day. And they look best with skirts. Jean skirts to be exact. Not cheesy micro-skirts, not ruffly frilly skirts, and certainly not a pair of cuffed...shorts?

What is going on? What they hell happened to all the skirts? I've been in all the stores. All of them. And I can't find a straight or slightly a-line button-fly skirt ANYWHERE. All I can find are these jersey-knit culotte-type gaucho garments and shorts that look like cuffed trousers. The thing is, I've yet to see any of these cuffed trouser type garments on anybody. And I thought the cropped-pant / capri trend of the summer was bad. I mean, c'mon people, it's WINTER. These garments don't even look that cute, and they certainly don't look comfortable. At least the Juicy sweatsuit of 2003 was comfy (not that I EVER wore a juicy sweatsuit. hell no.)

Anyway, I'm not sure what to make of this trend. I blame Laguna Beach for all the horrifying fashion of 2005. It occurs to me that I could be getting old, and that's why the tweedy winter shorts and tuxedo culottes don't appeal to me. But I know that isn't it. No, I think these fugly skorts are a good example of the useless, ugly stuff that is the spawn of capitalism. Boo.

The Carnival of Feminists

is up over at scribblingwoman. Go check it.

Barbie Are You Grieving?

from Feministing:

Barbie-torture is a rite of passage

New research says that many seven to 11 year-old girls maim and destroy their Barbie dolls. Duh.

Many girls thought it "cool" to mutilate Barbie because she was just a "plastic" doll, according to the Bath University study of 100 youngsters.

Dr Agnus Nairn said: "It's as though disavowing Barbie is a rite of passage."

I certainly have memories of cutting of my Barbie dolls’ hair into buzz cuts and twisting their heads and bodies into unnatural positions. I believe I even gave one a black eye with some nail polish. I never fucked with any of my other toys or dolls--just Barbie. Curious.

Any other Barbie-maimers out there?

I actually have a scene sort of like this in my teen novel. I don't want to reveal too much here, but let's just say that it produces some serious psychological dissonance for my protagonist.

Barbie shows up quite a bit in poetry too. David Lehman says:

Postmodernism and feminism seem to have converged in the figure of the Barbie doll. Barbie is the subject of a book by M. G. Lord (Forever Barbie, 1994) and of a virtual mini-genre of poems, including "Barbie's Ferrari" by Lynne McMahon and an entire sequence entitled It's My Body by Denise Duhamel.

And read about the pictured "suicide bomber Barbie" here.

What's your take on Barbie?

Annoying Boy of the Year: "Papa Joe" Simpson

Above: Joe Simpson with daughter Ashlee (aka "Assley").
On daughter Jessica:

Jessica never tries to be sexy. She just is sexy. If you put her in a T-shirt or you put her in a bustier, she's sexy in both. She's got double D's! You can't cover those suckers up!

Yikes.

What tragic figures the Simpson sisters have become, and it seems they have only their dad to thank.

Daddy pimped out Jessica as soon as she hit puberty, made creepy comments to the public about the size of her breasts, and advised her to turn her humorously naive marriage into a business op (Newlyweds, a show that includes scenes of ol' Papa talking about how Jessica gave Nick her "gift" and ogling her booty-shaking pussy-cat doll performance for Nick's birthday). Most recently, he vehemently denied rumors that Nick and Jessica were on the rocks, and reportedly urged them to stay in their ramshackle marriage until the release of the final season of Newlyweds so as to not hurt sales. Wow. What a sweetie. Don't you wish he was your Daddy?

He followed suit with second-daughter Ashlee, who is both untalented and incredibly unlikable: two facts that have become painfully obvious to everyone thanks to Papa Joe's "managment." After making Asslee play sidekick to Jess by being her back-up dancer, he got Ash her own reality program when she decided to leave the.worst.show.ever -- 7th Heaven -- to pursue her own music career (The Ashlee Simpson show includes a scene in which Ashlee giggles that her father "would be proud" when she's told that she gave one of the camera men on the set of her "la la" video a hard on). Papa Joe has also "managed" many of Ashlee's love interests (including her current boyfriend, who's actually a member of her band), causing many to speculate that he might actually pay these people to "play" her boyfriend. Ew.

Of course such sleezy behavior isn't limited to his relationships with his daughters; the story of his early courtship with wife Tina is equally disturbing. On the E! True Hollywood story for Jessica, Ashlee, and the Simpson Family, Papa Joe reveals that Tina was originally -- and this is his word -- one of his "youths." That is to say, Tina was in the youth group Joe ministered. So before he was her boyfriend he was her youth minister. And he certainly seems to like being the kingpin of his daughters' cabal, which naturally includes a number of Jessica and Asslee's young female friends and assistants. I don't even want to think about the sort of relationship Cacee Cobb might have with Papa Joe...

But let's address that minister thing. People are always talking about how Papa Joe was some youth minister as though that was a vocation equivalent in prestige and virtue to being an actual minister or priest or a rabbi or some other religious leader. I'm not sure, but I don't think you have to go through a whole lot of extensive training to be a youth minister in some crappy Texas town. I'm pretty sure you just have to like (or pretend to like) reading the bible with young people. And I don't mean to sound cynical, but it's not as though some creep hasn't ever used religion as a pretense to get closer to vulnerable young people before. I'm just sayin'.

Without a doubt, "Papa Joe" Simpson has done more than enough to earn the title of "Annoying Boy of the Year." These days Jessica Simpson is getting divorced and sister Asslee is in the hospital (for, what else -- "exhaustion"). And, as if that wasn't enough, we also have him to thank for exposing us to all things related to Ryan Cabrera, the horror that was Fabian Basabe et al in the hideously insipid Filthy Rich Cattle Drive, AND the recent signing of none other than Laguna Beach's King Dunce Talan Torriero to Papa Joe records.

What an EVIL.PIECE.OF.SHIT. Boo.

Related:

Joe Simpson sells daughters
Joe Simpson manages his daughter's lovers
With in-laws like these
Joe Simpson teaches the A-list
Joe Simpson = Don Johnson
Joe Simpson a la "nobody puts Baby in a corner"
*new* Ashlee Simpson: red-headed step child

image source

We Are Living in a Material World

No drinking game this week. Just the gingerbread shack of the sad billionaire.














I made a house too. That's it in the background. Note the fluffy dog with a moustache. He's made of marshmallow.

thanks to Jenny for thinking up the whole scheme.

Poetry is the new Kabbalah

This gives me Sylvia flashbacks:


















According to Bookslut, Sienna Miller likes to read poetry:

She revealed: "It sounds so pretentious but it's one of my favourite things. I've got this group of friends who are quite Bohemian and we get drunk, get the poetry books out and read."

Wow, Sienna. That's deep. Bet you think you're so much better than Victoria Beckham.

(Given her situation with cheater maximus Jude Law, I'd think she'd need some serious feminist poetry about now. Audre Lorde perhaps?)

Funny Face

Gallery of the Absurd (artist 14) makes me laugh
more faces

forgive me for subjecting you to TWO images of Paris in as many days. FORGIVE ME.

Pooffy Pom Pom

You want more? go here?

Thanks, Porkmuffin!

Beasts of 2005, the micro edition*

Signs of the Times: nipply Paris and weird military video games






Not "best," but "beast."

11 Beasts of 2005 in no particular order:

MySpace.com
George Bush, et al
the term "nip slip"
Tom Cruise
Paris Hilton, et al
Military themed Video Games
Jeremy Piven
Miss Seventeen
Michael Brown
gynoplasty
Bratz babies

Bonus! the rash that won't go away: weight-loss narratives (i.e. the biggest loser and celebrity fit club)

*this list is by no means comprehensive. Feel free to add your suggestions in the comments.

Yuck

Not one, not two, but three posts about attacks on a woman's right to choose over at feministing today.

"George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People" : My Pick for 2005's Record of the Year

K-OTIX are keepin' it real

When Kanye West looked into the cameras and declared "George Bush doesn't care about black people," he created what will likely be remembered as one of 2005's most compelling and chilling moments. He said what many people were feeling re: the president's response to Hurricane Katrina, and Houston rap-duo K-OTIX decided to re-outfit Kanye's vaguely sexist "Goldigger" (replacing "I'm not sayin' she's a golddigger" with "George Bush don't like black people") as a way to underline the validity of this sentiment. Here are some of the lyrics:

Hurricane came through, fucked us up round here
Government actin like it's bad luck down here
All I know is that you better bring some trucks round here
Wonder why I got my middle finger up round here
People lives on the line, you declinin to help
Since you takin so much time we survivin ourself
Just me and my pets and my kids and my spouse
Trapped in my own house lookin for a way out
Five days in this muthafuckin attic
Can't use the cell phone, I keep gettin static
Dyin cause they lyin instead of tellin us the truth
Other day the helicopters got my neighbors off the roof?
Screwed cause they said they comin back for us too
That was three days ago, I don't see no rescue
See, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do
Since God made the path, then I'm tryin to walk through
Well, swam to the store tryin to look for food
Corner store's kinda flooded so I broke my way through
I got what I could but before I got through
The news said police shot a black man tryin to loot?

My favorite part is when they replace "18 years" with:

Five damn days, five long days
And at the end of the fifth you walkin in like, "Hey!"
Chillin on his vacation sittin patiently
Them black folks gotta hope, gotta wait and see
If FEMA really comes through in an emergency
But nobody seems to have a sense of urgency
Now the mayor's been reduced to cryin
I guess Bush said niggaz been used to dyin
He said, "I know it looks bad, just have to wait"
Forgettin folks who too broke to evacuate
Niggaz starvin and they dyin of thirst
I bet he had to go and check on them refineries first
Makin a killin off the price of gas
He woulda been up in Connecticut twice as fast
After all that we been through, nothing's changed
You can call Red Cross but the fact remains that . . .

I only wish this song had been played 1/3 as much as "Golddigger," which is up for a record of the year Grammy. Let's hope K-OTIX continue to get mad props, and let's hope that we get even more potent, political music on the airwaves in 2006.

visit the K-OTIX website here
listen to "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People" here
and wactch a clip on K-OTIX from BET's Beats Rhymes and Life here