Three poems from “Ararat” “Labor Day,” “Widows,” and “Lost Love,” make a compelling case that family intimacy is best understood through the time slowing effects of cold. In “Labor Day” the funeral of a father is contrasted with the anniversary of the ever present reality of his death. The funeral was a public affair punctuated by “How hot it was for September. How unseasonable.” The death of the father, happens “This year, it’s cold/ There’s just us now, the immediate family.” The father’s death is a perpetual event frozen in time continually experienced by his family. In “Widows,” the narrator remarks, “Each player has one pile to the left, five cards in the hand. It's good/to stay inside on days like this, to stay where it's cool./And this is better than other games, better than solitaire.” “Each player” is a widow playing the final cards they have been dealt. The “good” space they have created for themselves in these twilight years is “cool” which seems to allow themselves to be together rather than suffer this time alone. Finally, in “Lost Love,” the narrator says, “when my sister died/ my mother’s heart became/ very cold, very rigid, / like a pendant of iron// Then it seemed to me my sister’s body / was a magnet. I could feel it draw my mother’s heart into the earth, /so that it could grow.” The chilling effect of losing a child stops this mother from placing her heart anywhere other than “into the earth” the timeless mother whom embraces us all.
Aaron:
I was looking looking through “Poems 1962 - 2012” for a Glück quote to send and the marginalia suggest that I had to send that instead.
While Glück is absolutely a quotable poet, I encounter her genius most vividly in the pastoral tapestries that she weaves across poems and collections. If you're thinking about which collection you should start with my recommendation is to read her entire body work so that you are well equipped to quote the emotional vocabulary that Glück's poetry has created.
Insatiable, or rather the reviews of the show, exposes a leftist reactionary tendency toward a kind of representational censorship that erases reality in favor of a progressive vision of the future. To be clear, I'm as left leaning as then come. To paraphrase Sarah Palin, "I can see Brooklyn from my house." Which is why I think it's important to unpack these reviews and the reaction they have caused to understand where we on the left miss the mark when it comes to our tolerance for certain forms of representation.
It's been widely reported that the show was petitioned to be cancelled based solely on its trailer. Man, do we love petitions! We know that we can't stop Netflix from airing the show, but we can show that world that there are hundreds of thousands of us on the right side of history!
Indeed, the trailer, posted above, is full of representational triggers for many marginalized groups; plus-sized women, southerners, closeted people across the LGBTQIA spectrum, Asians, Christians - each group is represented in base stereotypical ways for what seems to be cheap laughs.
[Insatiable] just doesn’t have many discerning opinions about body image, confidence, and overcoming bullying. It tries so hard to push the envelope that it doesn’t really push anything at all, falling flat as a satire and as an intentionally over-the-top comedy.
The sentiment here seems to be two-fold. First, Insatiable fails because it's tone-deaf and secondly because it's poorly made. Which begs the question, why should we expect a poorly made show to have "discerning opinions?" Why are we holding a show that was ordered (and cancelled!) by The CW and released in the middle on August on Netflix to such a high standard?
Because, dear reader, your social conditioning (which isn't your fault) makes you think that the trailer is sexy and wildly appealing. Which means that you need to be made aware of the fact that it's NOT sexy and is, in fact, UNAPPEALLING.
Which feels, a bit, reactionary and, a touch, self-righteousness.
Perhaps I take these critiques personally because I spent a year of my life trying to make art that addresses privilege and intersectionality. Guess what, it's really really hard to do. The attempt, in and of itself, is admirable. But the very nature of this art practice is highlighting sites of micro(macro)aggression to elicit a reaction/reflection from/by the audience that is uncomfortable.
Cringing when you see Debby Ryan in a fat suit is the point. Why did you cringe? Is it due to that fact that throughout film history representations of womens' bodies are wrought with problematic stereotypes that have lead to widespread body dysmorpia and bullying? My Brooklyn readers are nodding furiously in agreement. Or, could it be because you've internalized the value proposition that certain body configurations are more valuable than others and seeing a fat body is repulsive? My honest readers are half-nodding in resignation.
Of course, there are myriad other reason one might cringe but it's the cringing that's interesting, not the representation in and of itself but it's representation that's under attack. Take Vulture's Jen Chaney's following comment for an example,
Insatiable is impressive in its capacity [to] offend a vast array of ideologies, including the notion that TV in 2018 should really be a hell of a lot smarter and more nuanced than this.
The implication here is that there is a base "smartness" and "nuancedness" that a show must have in order for it to be aired in 2018. I'm not sure what 2018 the reviewer is referring to, but the one I live in has a reality show star as President of the United States of America.
There is an argument to be made that art should (re)present a world that has moved past body-shamming, racism, sexism, abilism, classism, and homophobia and that we are all living in Woketopia (a neighborhood in Brooklyn, I presume) so that we can one day make it there. But there is another argument that art should re-present the world we are living in through a place like Masonville, Georgia where all of these societal ills still exist despite a mountain of evidence that they should not so that we can start to change our minds.
In fact, in a world were arguments about isolationism and nationalism are winning at the polls around the world, an artistic attempt to grapple with these topics in a milieu were the hegemonic forces of the community tacitly condone marginalization is probably a more relevant exercise.
Blast Insatiable for not having enough Nonnie or for having too many puns but be careful when calling out the show for not representing the toughest issues of our day in a way that makes sure that every marginalized group is represented in their best possible future as opposed to their broken and complicated present.
In the penultimate paragraph of Masha Gessen's "Why Autocrats Fear LGBT Rights," she writes, "Looking at a person who embodies choice—the possibility of being or becoming different—can be like staring into the abyss of uncertainty." "Person," here, means a member of the LGBT community and represents what Gessen calls, "a convenient stand-in for an entire era of liberalization," that has ushered in a wave of authoritarian regimes across the world. This is a rather tidy reading of the motions that have lead countries as disparate as Turkey and the United States to come to the same conclusion and elect the same type of leaders. What seems more likely is that the rhetoric of difference is used by the left and right to elicit a emotional response to protect one's own at all costs. This article is an entry from the left and it must be tossed in the same waste bin as similar arguments from the right.
Members of the LGBT community are normal and any attempt to suggest that their existence is something outside of society, beacon of hope or coming of the apocalypse, is to accept the idea that difference inexorably separates us when, in fact, difference could be the thing that unites us. If this article is to be believed, a queer society is, by rule, a freer society. If only that were the case. Our work would be so easy. Sadly, our problems are much deeper.
For example, the Dyke March exclusion of a lesbian expressing her Jewishness makes sense in the context the West's casual antisemitism. The organizers fell into traditional authoritarian roles because that's what normally happens when people gain power and they are as normal as anyone else. Queerness, as such, does not cause societies to be one thing or the other. Societies are what they are because of the laws (natural and artificial) that govern them.
The ways in which the West deals with queer people, and difference in general, is problematic, but the problem is in the problematization of that or any other difference.
Take this article and replace the premise that suppression of queer rights is "the frontier in the global turn toward autocracy," and replace it with the premise that suppression of Morman rights is "the frontier in the global turn toward autocracy" and have it published in the summer of 2016 as an attack on the advances of LGBT rights under the authoritarian regime of Barack Obama and one starts to understand how difference is weaponize by left and right to separate people.
We need a different "difference" argument. One that goes something like -- we are all different and that's what makes us the same. Difference is not a threat, it's our path to building a more inclusive society.
We can only achieve radical change if we are all feed up with being manipulated by our emotions and are organized to create a society worthy of the idea that each one of us is created equal and has curtain inalienable rights that must be defended by the rule of law.
A Moon shimmered at dusk over California
Skies and I wanted to capture it for myself,
Own it, but as I reached out to take it in hand,
Nox whispered in my ear, "This Moon has captured you.
Devote yourself to Her; change as She changes; glow
Just as brightly on the faces in the darkness;
Feed Her with loyalty and cloth Her with honor;
Make a home with Her wherever Her travels lead
And always remember that you are Her bright Sun;
Make Her your guide through My bewildering nighttime
Jungle; Listen to the many Moons that She echoes;
Join with Her forever and ever and ever…"
I spend a decent amount of my free time watching the great minds of our time give lectures to small auditoriums of academics. It's not entertainment, per se, and I would not typically review these videos in the pages of Entertainment Matters, but the current moment demands that we gather and share the best information we have in the fight against the devaluation of black lives in America.
In the clip above, Judith Butler, discusses our ability to, at once, fully ignore or, in fact, glorify the violence that States enact on people during war, while at the same time abhor violence that non-state actors enact against people. At around 36:55 Butler says, and I quote selectively (the lecture is actually a snippet of an essay entitled, "Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect" published in a collection called "Frames of War," Verso 2009)
The critique of violence must begin with the question of the
representability of life itself: what allows a life to become visible in its
precariousness and its need for shelter, and what is it that keeps us from
seeing or understanding certain lives in this way? The problem concerns the
media, at the most general level, since a life can be accorded a value only on
the condition that it is perceivable as a life, but it is only on the condition
of certain embedded evaluative structures that a life becomes perceivable at
all.
…An
ethical attitude does not spontaneously arrive as soon as the usual
interpretive frameworks are destroyed, and no pure moral conscience emerges
once the shackles of everyday interpretation have been thrown off. On the
contrary, it is only by challenging the dominant media that certain
kinds of lives may become visible or knowable in their precariousness. It is
not only or exclusively the visual apprehension of a life that forms a
necessary precondition for an understanding of the precariousness of life.
Another life is taken in through all the senses, if it is taken in at all. The
tacit interpretive scheme that divides worthy from unworthy lives works
fundamentally through the senses, differentiating the cries we can hear from
those we cannot, the sights we can see from those we cannot…
When I heard this, all I could think was, "This is why "Black Lives Matter" is such a relevant rallying cry." My next thoughts was, "Wait, why aren't Judith Butler quotes dominating my Facebook feed right now?"
Then I come to find out, that on January 12, 2015 (18 months ago), Butler was interviewed by the New York Times for a piece entitled, "What's Wrong with 'All Lives Matter?" where, among countless clearly articulated statements she says,
Perhaps
we can think about the phrase “black lives matter.” What is implied by this
statement, a statement that should be obviously true, but apparently is not? If
black lives do not matter, then they are not really regarded as lives, since a
life is supposed to matter. So what we see is that some lives matter more than
others, that some lives matter so much that they need to be protected at all
costs, and that other lives matter less, or not at all. And when that becomes
the situation, then the lives that do not matter so much, or do not matter at
all, can be killed or lost, can be exposed to conditions of destitution, and
there is no concern, or even worse, that is regarded as the way it is supposed
to be.
Followed quickly by,
So it is not just that black lives matter, though that must
be said again and again. It is also that stand-your-ground and racist killings
are becoming increasingly normalized, which is why intelligent forms of
collective outrage have become obligatory.
I could go on quoting Butler and that's my point here. If you are struggling to articulate why the term "All Lives Matter" makes no sense in the context of the current moment, stop struggling and quote someone who thinks for a living.
And spend your time participating in "intelligent forms of collective outrage" so that one day black lives can become lives.
For two weeks in
April, Washington, DC partakes in an annual ritual called the Cherry Blossom Festival. The epicenter of the
festivities is the Tidal Basin where 1,800 Somei-Yoshino trees burst into pink
and white bloom. The landscape is typically garrisoned with a phalanx of
amateur photographers armed with digital cameras trying to capture the
effervescent blossoms that seem to start falling the day they bloom. Having been one of those camera-armed soldiers, I can tell you that there is a sense
of urgency that compels one to take as many pictures as one can before the sun
goes down or before it rains or before our short spring morphs into our long
summer. Rarely have I simply gone to the Tidal Basin and just sat underneath
one of these blooming trees and just listened to what they were saying.
Lisa Hiton does
pause to listen and offers us, "In Response to
Trees," a vivid, contemplation of the language of nature. The poem, published in
Issue 12 of The Adroit Journal, starts off with an acknowledgement of T.S.
Eliot's cruel spring, "In winter I knew them all / as one dead
thing," but seems to sluff off the despair in the next line, "but now
I love to watch them blossom." For Hiton, it seems, the past is not
something to be memorialized, it is merely the last guidepost on the uncharted
path towards new discoveries.
The guide on this
particular path, a Japanese tree, like so many soothsayers, seems to speak in
riddles. While it "translates / beauty into sunlike white and pink,"
it leaves enough mystery that our narrator states, "I lie under them / deciphering
/ their shapes. …" There is a juxtaposition here between the primary
language of nature that we can tap into with our senses, "sunlike white
and pink," and the secondary (tertiary, etc.) language of thought, that
attempts to reconfigure natural occurrences, like the blossoms of a tree, into
something geometric like "shapes." This movement leads to the general
problem of thought, eloquently stated in the poem, "…How to a give a name / to something you know so well…"
In the turn of a
word, Hiton takes us back to our first real encounter with nature,
"…:Mother," in what seems like an attempt to discover something we've
always known. But as we've learned in
the first lines of the poem, what we claim to know is often loss and death.
"I know you are
afraid
of my love when I watch the
little round discs fall
suicidality towards
me. …"
Here, the fear of
love is wrapped in the loss of love which is inextricably linked to the
possession of love. And while we all know this natural occurrence, all too well,
are we not in the same boat as the narrator who states:
"…I am afraid
of what I might call
them while they are in
the air…"?
Here there seems to
be a fear of naming the gravitational body that pulls us away from our first
love "Mother" because that body takes the unfortuitous position of
becoming a new "Mother" who will fear our love and who we will one
day fall away from. And, again, we know this but what we know, as Hiton shows, is not as lovely as what we can dream:
"tiny petals
like eyelids dropping down. The
first time I dreamt
of falling it was peaceful like
this:--
nameless world,
filled with green light…"
Nature takes us out
of the tongue-tied world of our conscious mind into the sensory-guided world
of the unconscious. Here, the act
"of falling" from love to love is free of named loves lost or loves
to be lost. It is simply a force of nature as natural as light itself.
Hiton leaves us with
a coda that echoes the narrator's first question, "by what name, Japanese
tree, / by what name, Mother?" And for me, that is the beauty of this
poem. It reminds us that the answers to the biggest riddles of our lives lie in
a return to nature and the language of light, vibration and touch.
Next year, I'm going
to leave the digital camera at home as I walk through the cherry blossom trees.
Instead, I'm going to have my dear friend Lisa's poetry in my heart as I ask
the trees the big questions.
One of my semi-weekly rituals is to roam around the Barnes & Nobel at the corner of E St. and 12 St. NW. Typically, I'll head right to the newsstand and grab the latest issue of Monocle before heading upstairs to peruse best sellers, hit business books and the extensive games section. Recently, I find myself lingering in front of the shelves that make up the "Poetry" section of the bookstore. About six weeks ago The Best American Poetry 2013catches my eye and I purchase it on a whim. I thoroughly enjoy the process of reading these poems and when I find myself standing in front of that same "Poetry" shelf last week, I'm delighted to see that the 2014 edition of the anthology is already out.
I'm further delighted to see that this year's edition is guest edited by MacArthur Fellow Terrance Hayes. I first encounter Mr. Hayes at the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series where he joins a host of accomplished poets to commemorate the 125th anniversary of Poet Lore. He reads How To Be Drawn To Troubleand it's obvious to see to why he's a genius grant recipient.
Mr. Hayes' introduction to The Best American Poetry 2014 is unlike any introduction to the "Best American" anything I've ever read. The set up for the introduction is that Mr. Hayes sends a draft of the introduction to Dr. Charles Kinbote who is stunned to receive a 182-page treatise. In lieu of publishing the unwieldy introduction, Dr. Kinbote suggests that Mr. Hayes include the transcript of a wine soaked interview the two of them have.
The interview is great but after reading it I'm itching to get my hands of the full introduction. I scour the internet but I can't find any trace of the document. Finally, having no other option, I reach out directly to Mr. Hayes.
Here's what I write:
Will the 182 page version of the introduction ever be made available to the reading public?
And here's Mr. Hayes' incredible response:
Thanks for the inquiry, Aaron. The BAP 2014 Intro interview is really just me and a character from Vladimir Nabokov's novel, Pale Fire. There's no other introduction. I was imagining how long an intro would need to be to cover all I had to say about contemporary poetry. About as long as the anthology, I figure.
Best
Terrance
Note to self, before sending a note to a genius, do your homework. And a note to everyone else, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of The Best American Poetry 2014.
For many years the following quote has been pinned above my desk:
Let us remember…that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both. - Christian Wiman, Editor, Poetry
Recently, I've picked up to the tools of poetry to build my own houses in places I want to more fully inhabit. Typically these poems are written for an audience of one, usually the muse who inspired the song. I will offer them here in the pages of Entertainment Matters and I hope you find a resting place within each verse.
When pressed to answer the OK Cupid question, "What is your favorite band?" I usually say Stars, the indie-ish rock-ish band out of Toronto and other points Canadian. I first encountered Stars in December 2006 at the 9:30 Club. They opened up for Death Cab for Cutie and I was immediately stuck by how free they seemed on stage. They carried an air of grown-up playfulness that made them an absolute thrill to watch. When co-lead Torquil Campbell pulled out a trumpet and started wailing on it, I was hooked.
Two years later, the band headlined 9:30 while touring their anti-war opus "In Our Bedroom After the War." This was just a few weeks before the 2008 presidential election and the feeling in the room was electric. Anticipation reverberated through the room and the band radiated flower power (and actual flowers which the they threw out into the audience) and the corresponding hopefulness. At one point during the show I was so overwhelmed that tears began streaming down my face. To this day, it was one of the most powerful shows I've ever been to.
On a fairly consistant candence, the band drops a new record and their latest come out on Tuesday. In classic Stars fashion, "No One is Lost," the title track, is an anthem for depressed extroverted outcasts who, no doubt, gleefully complie with the song's stark refrain: "Put your hands up, 'cause everybody dies/ put your hands up 'casue everybody dies (No on is lost)." Far from nihilistly hopeless, this refrain is driven home with a dance groove that permits this listener to revel in the glorious now.
Craigslist.org has replaced the newspaper classifieds as the go to place to seek and find private transactions but The New York Review of Books (NYRB) still provides their readers a forum to connect with their fellow readers. Here's a sample of what you'll find if you stumble upon the NYRB personals:
VERY PRETTY, smart and accomplished and much more too: gracious, warm and slender with lots of heart, quick laugh and easygoing adventurous streak. E-Commerce CEO reinvented as public speaker, mentor to young entrepreneurs. Passion for travel (Paris/Provence, Italy, NY theatre, hiking Yosemite), music, learning, art, Giants especially when they’re winning, Pilates. Healthy dash of irreverence, considered very easy on the eyes. Featured in HBS case studies but never takes herself too seriously. As likely to be flying to London for meetings as stumbling through tango class here in San Francisco or walking along the Bay. Seeks accomplished, nice-looking, kind and thoughtful man 56-70—curious mind, enthusiastic about life. (415) 819-4324.Camille7711@yahoo.com. (Note: This particular ad is no longer on the live classifieds page)
Right off the bat you'll notice a few things that you'll rarely find on Craigslist, i.e,, loads and loads of personally identifiable information. Not only is there a phone number and personal email address, there are details that any decent googler could use to find out exactly who this person is, what she looks like and where she lives. How many e-commerce CEOs turned public-speakers are there that are featured in the Harvard Business Review, spell theater with an "re," are VERY PRETTY and live in San Francisco? Maybe three (extra points to the reader who finds out)? The point here is that this woman has an extremely high-level of confidence (robust personal security detail?) that she will not be trolled by low-lifes.
Secondly, this women paid between $4.60 to $5.85 per word (an email address is two words) or between $510.30 and $649.35 to run this ad. To put that in perspective, Match.com is $203.88 a year and eHarmony Premium is about $500 a year. So there must be a perception that one ad in NYRB is far more effective than being matched in 23 personality dimensions.
Finally, she's rather cliched about the sort of man she's looking for, except for the age range. There is no doubt that this sort of message, delivered in a print publication as erudite as NYRB, should mostly reach men who are squarely in this demographic. The question is, do these men still flip to the back pages of newspapers to find love or are they swiping right on Tinder?
C O M M A N D - Watermouth, Unique Bias Records
Download Now - "I Wonder"
I usually post this sort of thing on my Tumblr, My Family Album, because it pertains to the work of one my talented family members, in this case, my ultra cool younger brother, Joesph Mosby. But not every Entertainment Matters' reader has been introduced to that site and that's no reason to deprive you of this heart-breaking work of staggering genius.
You may remember Joesph as Jacobi Red or as a founding member of the Electives. Through these personae Joesph has transformed from a precocious teenager to a self-assured young man who's tasted the bitter pill of heartbreak and the tedious grid of higher education. In his new skin, C O M M A N D, he displays -- just that-- on every level in his debut album, Watermouth. From the bold scintillating album art to the genre-bending undulations of each track, one can detect a mastery that is shocking given the fact that he's only 22. In "I Wonder," the orchestration is a hyppnotic mix of live instruments and electonica elements that creates a sort of dreamscape that maps perfectly to lyrical exploration a relationship that can't survive a geographical separation. C O M M A N D infuses elements of rap, dream pop, electronica, classic R & B in songs of love, loss and remembrance that will leave you salivating for more.
"This is no ordinary lamp," our narrator exclaims, "It once changed the course of a young man's life. A young man, who, like this lamp, was more than what he seemed. A diamond in the rough."
This opening suggests that this is a story about Aladdin. There are many great arguments for that particular reading of the film. After all, we meet Aladdin, we follow him through his trials, tribulations, reconciliations and we revel in his joy and wish fulfillment. But there are parts of the Aladdin character that are not fully formed. The crux of his character arc is that he starts off as a thief with a heart of gold. Then, through magic, he becomes a prince. During the second act of the film, he struggles with reconciling his new found royalty with his humble past. While this is somewhat compelling, Aladdin's realization that he should just be the great guy that he's always been, is a somewhat hollow epiphany.
What makes Aladdin such a great film is the Jafar story. Jafar is always the smartest guy in the room. He's ambitious and cunning. He is much more than your average cartoon villain painted merely to accentuate the purity of the hero.
The Sultanate of Agrabah is in shambles. Orphans go hungry and often resort to crime in order to live, yet the Sultan spends his days playing with toys. The future of the kingdom rests in the hands of the man who can win the heart of a spoiled princess who feels trapped in her palace fantasy land and doesn't like princes who've come calling. In context, Jafar's choice to take the throne, by means suited to his understanding of the dark arts, seems somewhat rational. He is a man of great intellect and motivation. He defiantly has the stuff of an effective leader. And as the clip above shows, he is wittier and more ruthless than his foes.
We can quibble over the cruelty Jafar inflicts on the Sultan and Jasmain, but suffice to say, and the end of the movie proves, given a similar option, the "good guys" treat him the same way (as Queen Cersei Lannister would say, "In the game of thrones, you either win or you die."). Where Jafar does fail, is in his pride that he, alone, should weld ultimate power. Blind to any danger in gaining more, he is goaded by Aladdin to wish to become a genie. He ascends to that zenith of power but fails to realize a simple and universal truth said rather eloquently by Jesus in the gospel of Mark, "If any man desire to be first, the same shall be last of all, and servant of all."
Lana Del Ray, Born to Die, Interscope Records, 2012 Download Now: Video Games
Lana Del Ray's debut album, "Born to Die," reminds a jaded, pessimistic generation, acutely aware of its civilizations's harbingers of doom, to relax. The album, at it's core, is a Rorschach test that measures the listener's ability to "stop worrying and love the bomb."
Del Ray has created an album that accepts that the end is nigh but refuses to accept hopelessness. It's true that the laconic orchestration that buttresses each track is more "Requiem" than "He is Risen." An ominous church bell rings out in the opening measures of "Video Games," as a few lonely chords drone out of the piano, but then, like a joke in a eulogy, a few strums from the harp subtlety alter the mood.
The lyrics weave the story of a fantasy women who says things like,
"...this is my idea of fun/ Playing video games/It's you, It's you it's all for you / Everything I do. I tell you all the time/Heaven is a place on earth with you/ Tell me all the things you wanna do..."
When I first heard these lyrics I frantically sent the song to a friend and said, "Finally, a love song for the men of our generation." But Del Ray's vocals suggest that my enthusiasm should have been somewhat tempered. While there are moments of loving lilts in her vocalization the artificial echo effect added to her voice creates a sense of distance and her husky nasal tone sounds more resigned than passionate (for more blatant cues see the video above). When the lyrics are examined under this light they seem to suggest that loving a man who loves video games is more best-available-option than first choice, and a militaristic snare drum rift toward the end of the track signifies that she will march on content in this reality.
But Del Ray is not merely interested in putting a happy face on a less than desirable situation, she is interested in why we buy into the facade. The violin arrangement at the top of "National Anthem," is reminiscent of The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony," a song that laments, "You're a slave to money then you die." Del Ray reframes the sentiment with the lyric, "Money is the reason we exist / Everybody knows this, kiss, kiss." While the tone echoes The Verve's nihilism, there is an undertone of cheekiness that suggests that although we are all hopelessly consumed by masking our problems with money and things, deep down we all know this does not work. In a track entitled "Carmen" the heroine "...doesn't have a problem/ Lying to herself because her liquor's top-shelf," and neither do we.
"Born to Die" is the soundtrack for Millennials who never expected to receive a Social Security check or find more happiness than unboxing a new iThing. We have a keen sense that our money is going to run out and the comfort afforded to us by our stuff will not last. Del Ray reminds us that, while all of that is true, we can always have our "Pabst Blue Ribbon on ice," and laugh in the face of despair.
Heather Traska is the one-woman a cappella Girl Talk of Disney songs. A star is born.
Predictions: 1) She will get her wish of being on Ellen (Tweet Ellen!); 2) She will be on an episode of Glee and 3) She will be the voice of the next Disney princess (this is obviously the boldness prophecy). My favorite part starts at 2:50 and goes to 4:35 (Let's Get Down to Business, Mulan melting into the greatest Disney song of all time, Reprise to One Jump Ahead, Aladdin). I would have ended the video here, but she's from a younger Disney-movie-watching generation who saw movies like Hercules and Tangled (a movie that brought tears to my 16 year-old brother's eyes because, he said, "Some parts [of Tangled] are just so deep") so she had to pack in more songs.
So, take a trip down memory lane and listen to Heather Traska sing Disney songs like you've never heard them before.
I just popped in the shiny 10th Anniversary Blu Ray of 10 Things I Hate About You. This is the hands down the best Julie-Stiles-plays-90s-teenager-version-of-a-Shakespearian-heroine movie ever made.
Couple of great things about the 10th Anniversary edition.
Heath Ledger gets a lot of love on the back cover for being the Joker, which is fair because he got the Oscar and he died a glamorous death of a young famous mega star on the top
Inflation is a bitch. Two movie tickets cost $15 (with popcorn, $53).Verona does all of his dirt for less than $500.00, the cost of an iPad.
There are so many songs in this movie that I don't remember at all - from the movie, from the radio, from anywhere.
