I leave Austin for Madison on Sunday. This is both a sad and exciting time. Fortunately, this last week includes birthday celebrations, friend times, a farewell party, and the Girls Rock Camp Austin showcase, which is a helluva way to go out. In that spirit, here’s an interview I did with Spoken City about being a blogger and an Austinite. Two subjects very close to my heart.
Archive for July, 2011
24
Jul
11
On the naming of artists
The other night, I met up with Carla DeSantis Black, creator of ROCKRGRL Magazine, who moved to Austin late last year. We share some mutual friends and some obvious interests, so it was a natural meeting. I talked about the blog, school, and other things I’m working on. She talked about some projects she’s getting off the ground. We talked about facilitating workshops for Girls Rock Camp and the current state of women in music.
One thing that she brought up that I found especially interesting was the recent crop of female artists using pseudonyms instead of their given names. I hadn’t really thought about it much, but indeed it’s a phenomenon–Glasser, tUnE-yArDs, Bat for Lashes, St. Vincent, Noveller, Circuit des Yeux. Many of these women either started out or continue to write, record, and tour as solo artists. Black is encouraging female artists who record under aliases and do much/all of their act’s writing, recording, and performing to use their given names in order to claim ownership of their work.
Circuit des Yeux, aka Haley Fohr; image courtesy of imposemagazine.com
Of course, adopting a nom de plume is standard practice in popular music. Freddie Mercury was born Farrokh Bulsara. Erica Wright renamed herself Erykah Badu to honor her African roots. In the grand tradition of drag artists, Christeene Vale was born Paul Soileau. The Donnas and the Ramones created a group identity by sticking to one name. David Bowie was born David Jones, but didn’t want to be confused with the Monkees’ front man. Given hip hop’s inclination toward nicknames, Kanye West’s decision to record under his given name is damn near revolutionary and certainly political. My presence is a present, kiss my ass.
The process of renaming is as old as the entertainment industry. A-list aspirants continue to lop “ethnic” surnames, use middle names, or invent stage names. Reinvention is intrinsic to constructing a persona. Often, a performer’s decision to adopt a stage name says a great deal about racial and ethnic identity and the politics of assimilation. In music, which is tied to fantasy and the imagination, it may also say something about artistic creativity, the desire for metamorphosis, and a need for creative release shared between performer and fan. Actors often use stage names to seem more relateable to an audience. Musicians often use them to trouble relatability, if not transcend human existence entirely.
But what does it mean when female musicians use a moniker instead of their given names, especially white women associated with indie music? Is it a defense against being reduced to a chick musician or singer-songwriter? Do aliases subvert expectations and provide artists more space for play? Is it particular to female artists already prone to musical abstraction who eschew traditional instrumentation, or are we seeing it elsewhere? Can we apply these concerns to female MCs, deejays, and electronic artists, who usually go by nicknames and aliases as well? Does it obscure their individual efforts? Is it political? Is it anti-feminist? What do you think?
22
Jul
11
For Hannah Fury
Today is my last day at the LBJ Library.
I’ve been a digitization specialist in Text Archives a week shy of three years. Essentially I played with Adobe, cleaning up metadata and background text. I made the President’s Daily Diary Web-ready and built digital versions of his VP and Senate diaries, as well as Lady Bird’s diaries. I worked on oral history collections for a year and a half, helping process Joe Califano and Lady Bird’s oral histories, as well as tidy up the background text for the Miller Center collection. I served and refiled a bunch of boxes, did a rotation in AV Archives, and burned CDs of the telephone conversations for researchers. I gave tours for Education in Action and helped judge the Central Texas History Fair. I got to chase LBJ’s ghost through the stacks, poke through Lady Bird’s closet, experience Luci Baines Johnson Turpin speak in public, take a staff photo with Sandra Day O’Connor, show my mom Che Guevara’s diary, and count watching documentaries and going on guided museum tours as work. It was fun, especially since the job afforded me a lot of headphone time.
I’m also the last of a quartet of awesome women who quit this summer. One was hired by another Presidential library. Like me, the other two moved away to chart a new course. While I’ve enjoyed my work here, the pay isn’t great, professional advancement from within is nigh impossible, and there’s little managerial interest in paying entry level folks a competitive wage or grooming them for a career in archives. This is universal, regardless of whether we hold master’s degrees or, in one friend’s case, ostensibly run an entire department without credit or compensation. And they don’t seem to actually care about retention. The solution posed by our director to systemic problems in one meeting was breakfast tacos. I can’t be bought off with a damn breakfast taco, any more than I can abide top brass decisions to remove explicit mention of the Great Society in a forthcoming permanent exhibit on LBJ’s legacy. I got into the PhD program of my dreams. It’s time to go.
I know I’m lucky to be an American with a job, even if I only got one raise and one cost of living increase despite consistently glowing performance reviews from my supervisor. Unemployment, job creation, and retention are real problems. We seem closer every day to a class war. China might foreclose on us. It’s a bad time, and I hope I get a job after all this schooling. But I have faith, and I’m not bitter. I don’t regret my time at LBJ. I had lunch almost every day with one of my best friends. I liked many of my co-workers and my boss. Also, I wrote a lot of blog entries while I was on the clock.
Hannah Fury
This post is a tribute. It’s a tribute to a remaining work friend who’s zealously followed this blog since he knew it existed and I hope lands a job at Beinecke when he’s done with school. But it’s also a tribute to singer-songwriter Hannah Fury. I don’t know her personally, but she worked here before I did. I guess she weirded some people out and endeared others. Based on her goth cabaret act, I bet I would have liked her. I respect the hell out of her for making music while she was employed at LBJ. I admire folks who keep a job to support the projects they’re actually passionate about. That’s basically every creatively inclined friend I have, and most of the bloggers I know on- and off-line. But I especially relate to someone who pressed on while working at a place that I know personally can be both rewarding and emotionally draining. If we worked together, I would’ve interviewed her in the copy room and posted the piece while everyone else attended a social media Webinar.
I also wonder if Fury vibed on the double life she led, or considered it as such. Some colleagues know I run this blog and freelance, but most don’t. Many of those who do had to discover my writing. That’s by design. I’m proud of my work, but suspicious of dogged self-promotion. There’s a difference between talented people and folks who are good at something and constantly need other people to validate that. I strive to be the former. Maybe Fury did too. I hope to meet her someday, so she stops seeming like a ghost. I salute you, Hannah Fury, as a person, artist, and kindred spirit.
19
Jul
11
Julee Cruise, Miss Twin Peaks
Last night, I finished Twin Peaks, a show that is the textbook definition of a cult classic. The Sopranos shouldn’t get sole credit for its challenge toward TV audience expectations and use of talismans as a storytelling device or shorthand for character development, nor should Lost get singled out for its complex narratives, limitless paratexts (open Laura Palmer’s diary to page 3), spirited online discourse, and fervent aca-fandom. It’s clear that televisual generic experimentation the and conceptualization of creator/showrunner as auteur gained ground with this show. Twin Peaks sharply divided audiences while also providing intrigue for late adopters–something I’ll keep in mind when I get around to watching The Killing (I’ll also reread Kristen Warner and Lisa Schmidt’s great rebuttal toward the backlash against the season finale and Veena Sud). I’m not a TV historian, so I hope I’m not overlooking other shows that accomplished what Twin Peaks did. But it seems obvious that Twin Peaks changed what could air on American television and how audiences related to it.
Julee Cruise, conjuring
But how do I feel about Twin Peaks as two seasons of television? To borrow from the schlemiels on Stella, Twin Peaks ”is, like, whatever dude.” There are indelible moments that I can’t and wouldn’t want to unsee–a surprising amount of them from the lesser-regarded second season, even if James Hurley is given entirely too much screen time. I certainly understand why it’s become such a cultural touchstone. Yet I was often bored and unmoved, though never when Frank Silva was on screen. YIKES.
I should admit that I’m not a big David Lynch fan. Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, and Mulholland Drive all have great, unsettling moments. I may take for granted the sociohistorical context in which his best-regarded work was originally received, but Lynch’s curdled nostalgia and deliberate weirdness seem too obvious to me. Lynch is a deft surrealist. He certainly can set and shoot a scene, and is smart enough to get Angelo Badalamenti to score it. But his gender politics undercut his work’s transgressive potential. I don’t want to dismiss the predominantly white women of Twin Peaks as sweetie pie damsels and she-devils. Actually, my favorite characters on the show are women: Audrey Horne, the Log Lady, Super-Nadine, Donna Hayward when she isn’t written and played as a sultry bad girl.
I might include Lucy Moran, if only because I’m surprised that future Fox News enthusiast Victoria Jackson didn’t play her in an inevitable SNL parody because Kimmy Robertson could be her sister. I’d include Catherine Martell because who doesn’t love Piper Laurie, but any business with the mill bored me. Also she hoodwinks Ben Horne by posing as a Japanese businessman, so ugh. I can’t include Shelly Johnson because, while at first her abusive marriage to Leo elicits terror and sympathy, she and her lover Bobby Briggs made so many stupid decisions that I stopped caring about their arc. Then there are plenty of women I don’t have a read on–Josie Packard, Norma Jennings, Annie Blackburn, sudden junkie Blackie O’Reilly . . . Laura Palmer isn’t Twin Peaks‘ only mirror onto which men reflect themselves.
But there’s one lady I wish I saw and heard more: Julee Cruise. I wish the theme song wasn’t the instrumental version of “Falling” because I treasure what Cruise brings to it. Actually, I pretend all of the show’s musical flourishes include Cruise breathily cooing about love’s rainbow or something. All of the opaque, murky, strange humanity I’m supposed to get from the show I hear in Cruise’s voice. I’m sure plenty of people want to cast Cruise as Lynch and Badalamenti’s ingenue, the M.I.A. to their Tarantino. They’d probably point to their songwriter and producer credits as evidence. They might also dismiss Cruise as a cheaper substitute for Elizabeth Fraser, since they worked with Cruise on Blue Velvet after they couldn’t get This Mortal Coil’s cover of “Song to the Siren.”
But Lynch and Badalamenti clearly needed Cruise’s voice to guarantee the emotional responses they sought to engender in their audience, and they weave magic together. We never actually meet Laura Palmer, the show’s dead catalyst. She’s intercepted and interpreted by friends, townsfolk, law enforcement, and her damaged parents. Thus I think Cruise comes the closest to embodying Palmer as a fragile dreamer wrecked by evil circumstances who willed herself to survive for as long as she could.
Cruise performs in my favorite episode, the Lynch-directed “Lonely Souls.” She demonstrates Palmer’s charm in “Rocking Back Inside My Heart” and stops time with “The World Spins.” Paired with the horrifying scene that reveals Palmer’s murderer, Cruise’s performance of “The World Spins” is part of the best sequence in the series’ run. I cry right along with Donna, both for who was lost and what could have been.
Let her have the damn chair; image courtesy of hitfix.com
I’ll always feel for Britney Spears. I am thrilled that Beyoncé raced past the quartet of blonde girls to be the enduring pop star of her generation–outsinging Christina Aguilera even at triple pianissimo, channelling Tina Turner’s stage presence, putting forth something of a (racially problematic, materialistic) feminist rhetoric, and, taking a cue from Janet Jackson, insisting on having a personal life. Beyoncé clearly has a support system who quake when a shy Houston girl transforms into a diva while rehearsing backstage. Does Britney? At least she had her assistant Felicia.
Remember 2007, aka Britneywatch, no doubt the worst year of her life? She was soon to turn 27. I’m not a superstitious person, but I knew many past pop icons bit the big one at that age. I worried we’d lose her, either to an overdose or a car accident or by her own hand. I was hardly alone. South Park 86ed the laffs in “Britney’s New Look” to comment on the horror show her life had become and our collective involvement in its creation (one of my contributions: I felt really good about myself when she admitted to not ”getting” Sundance selections because, you see, I watched Spirited Away). David Samuels wrote on Spears and tabloid journalism for The Atlantic. Tom Ewing compared her to Laura Palmer. Tobi Vail wanted to send her some Bikini Kill records after she shaved her head, a moment Beth Ditto noted as a potentially radical stance against a public she didn’t want touching her anymore.
I don’t know the exact nature of her mental anguish. Maybe it was being raised to be a pop star and treated like a commodity for so long without developing a better sense of self. Diet pills and an intense gym regimen certainly didn’t help. I don’t believe Courtney Love’s accusation that Spears was sexually abused by her father, but I would believe Spears if she made that charge, for the same reason I’d believe you or Mackenzie Phillips. But I’m glad she’s still with us. Like Jody Rosen, I enjoyed Femme Fatale. And I hope Britney is happy and has people looking out for her. I don’t know what Britney Spears did to “get better.” Frankly, I’m not convinced she did. Her comeback registered as hasty defense to me, but I’m willing to assume the best. So it makes me sad when I see comparisons between her early and current concert performances. A friend directed me to a clip and noted that the light from her eyes was gone. My concern is the restricted movement. One thing that gets overlooked in the outlining of Britney’s downward spiral is the knee injury she sustained from the video shoot to “Outrageous.” As a dancer and maybe as a person, she never recovered.
Blowing out her knee may have been even more depressing than the swarms of paparazzi she fought off or her marriage to Kevin Federline. Like Jackson, people dismissed Spears as “just” a dancer. These folks tend to overlook that while both artists have limited vocal ranges, they brought personality to their voices (see also: Rihanna, Madonna, Diana Ross). Jackson beguiled audiences as much with her whispered soprano as with her authority over any complicated dance routine. Likewise, Spears “sang” like a southern robot working through a head cold. It worked with her frayed-wire cyborg stage persona and anticipated that she’d be cast as a femmebot. Also, have you tried to do either of these women’s dance routines? One of my favorite high school moments was watching two cheerleaders in the middle of a Britney-off at a Sadie Hawkins dance. For one, it was hilarious because those girls were so serious about it. For another, it was impressive. High kicks, shimmies, lunges, punches, intricate foot work. Doing the routine to “Oops! . . . I Did It Again” is work. I don’t remember which girl won the battle, but both were probably sore in the morning.
The considerable amount of technological intervention that goes into pop vocals may isolate the star from the voice and the voice from the listener, which may explain why many producers seem to be channeling video game music these days. The chorus to the Dr. Luke/Max Martin/Billboard-produced ”Till the World Ends” charges like DDR set on expert. This is no doubt why producers Stargate and Sandy Vee made the verses to “Only Girl (In the World)” sound like the music to Mortal Combat. Instant embodiment. Power up!
But to understand Spears is to engage with her changing body and how it can and cannot execute certain activities anymore. Thus it’s weird that there’s relatively little discussion about athleticism and issues around ability when talking about Spears, as these are essential components to understanding her as a performer. Then again, female dancers’ athleticism is often minimized, if not outright ignored, especially when they’re playing hurt or risking a sustained injury. Spears always lip synced, so her understanding of a song may have resided in using her body to act out its emotional register. I hope she’s not just going through the motions now. She’s not just an avatar. She’s Britney.
Happy 4th of July, friends. May we celebrate this day by eating a lot of starches and encased meats (fake or otherwise) and drinking brewdogs. If Governor Perry allows Texans to light sparklers, I’ll raise one for you, me, my friend Ricky, and America. Maybe we’ll celebrate today by reading Frederick Douglass, questioning whether the term “patriot” is chauvinistic, or watching Robert Altman’s Nashville. I hope you do all of this while soaking in a kiddie pool on someone’s front lawn.
Also, I made a mix for Homoground and it’s up today. I had a blast doing it. All the songs are from Texas artists who are either queer or queer-friendly. Artists include Chainbow, Meat Joy, No Mas Bodas, Girl in a Coma, the Tuna Helpers, and Christeene, who is hosting a BBQ at Chain Drive tonight. The photo was taken from last month’s QueerBomb parade (my left arm and blue short sleeve are visible about three people deep on the lower left-hand corner; also, my friend Curran looks very fetching in his plaid shirt and white suspenders). A lifelong Texan, I move to Madison at the end of the month. I can think of no better tribute. Play it loud.
Thanks to Curran Nault for helping with this mix.
