Before I started this blog I put together a series of themed mixes for an Internet radio show a friend of mine was running. Most of these never got broadcast, and the ones that did had a fairly small audience. Since I haven't put together any of these proper in more than a year, I'm happy enough to declare that project concluded and start typing out the tracklists for you.
Show #1: friends (compiled 2018-04-26)
The Beach Boys - Friends
Don Everly - My Friend
Red Crayola - Keep All Your Friends
Pantherman - You Are My Friend
The Millennium - I Just Want To Be Your Friend
Tradition - Frenzied Friends and Friends
Wire - A Mutual Friend
Morita Doji - Letter For My Friend
YDI - Friends
Mad River with Richard Brautigan - Love's Not The Way To Treat A Friend
Black Tambourine - We Can't Be Friends
They Might Be Giants - I Found A New Friend
Jodie Abacus - I'll Be That Friend
Uncle Wiggly - Sitting With Our Friends
Arthur Russell - They and Their Friends
Leon Lowman - Friends
The Left Banke - My Friend Today
Robert Wyatt - Was A Friend
Big Star - Thank You Friends
Show #2: hiphop (compiled 2018-04-27)
Divine Styler - Grey Matter
Orko the Sycotik Alien - Tape Hiss (feat. Millennium)
Sensational - Craving Satisfaction
Edan - The Science of the Two (feat. Insight)
MF DOOM - No Snakes Alive (Feat. Jet Jaguar, King Ghidra, & Rodan)
Unique - Pure Dynamite
Hip City Swingers - I'm the Man
Nonchalant - Lazy Afternoon
Organized Konfusion - The Extinction Agenda
The Juggaknots - Trouble Man
Zion I - Revolution (B-Boy Anthem) (feat. Vin Roc)
Nickelus F - Da Reaper
Leak Bros - See Thru
Gangrene - Livers For Sale
Eyedea & Abilities - By the Throat
Show #3: 1981 (compiled 2018-04-27)
Neon - Remote Control
Secret Mammals - Cost Too Much
Colored Music - Colored Music
The Warlord - Black Knight
Marlin Wallace - Mark of the Beast
Fuzz - Satan's Fans
These Eyes - Soca Hustle
Mission of Burma - Max Ernst
DV8 - Guns on the Right
The Slits - Earthbeat/Daichi no Oto
39 Lyon Street - Kites
Martin Briley - I Don't Feel Better
Luther Vandross - Never Too Much
DEVO - Race of Doom
Todd Rundgren - Compassion
Chakra - Free
Show #4: 2018 (compiled 2018-04-30)
Iceage - The Day the Music Dies
awakebutstillinbed - Fathers
Tram Cops - Coming Up
Elysia Crampton - Nativity
Gwenno - Aremorika
Anna & Elizabeth - Mother in the Graveyard
Panopticon - A Ridge Where the Tall Pines Once Stood
Palm - Color Code
Simmy - Ubala (feat. Sun-El Musician)
Optiganally Yours - How Do You Feel?
The Armed - Role Models
U.S. Girls - Rosebud
Sudan Archives - Nont For Sale
Lolina - The River
Cheer-Accident - Last But Not Lost
Oneida - All In Due Time
Forth Wanderers - Company
Janelle Monae - Take a Byte
I got 58 of these. I'm gonna stop here for now. More later, maybe!
Monday, 22 June 2020
Sunday, 21 June 2020
Slash and the Id Vortex
Sometimes history is a battleground. One such battle I've seen played out, see played out, is the argument over slash.
There are a lot of spaces, a lot of people who will dismiss slash writing. I am probably not the right person to summarize the argument made by people who are opposed to slash, but I am at least going to make an attempt, because I think the argument deserves to be fairly represented, without being muddled up by all of the virulent personal attacks and hatred that have, historically and in the present, been directed at slash writers.
As far as I can tell, the primary argument against slash is one of _standing_. Many, if not most, writers of slash are women. Many, if not most, writers of slash are some variety of heterosexual. For these women to write homosexual male fantasies is a violation of appropriate fictional boundaries, is tokenizing, is destructive to the relationship between these two characters _intended_ by their professional writers. Fundamentally it is not their place to tell these stories.
And since I am not interested in direct arguments, I am not interested in battlegrounds, my response to that argument would be of a different sort. What place do women have, then, in the Star Trek universe? Where do they belong? I am particularly interested in this question with reference to the original Star Trek series, because it was this series, more than anything, that engendered the slash phenomenon.
I am not overly familiar with the original series. I've seen some scattered episodes, and a couple of the movies, but I'm ignoring those because they seem like a different beast entirely. The ones I know that I've seen, that I remember the titles and plots of to some extent, are Amok Time and The City On The Edge Of Forever, which I gather are some of the most acclaimed episodes of the show.
My impression of those episodes is that women have no continuing place in ST:TOS's narrative. I note that "The City on the Edge of Forever" directly contradicts the stereotype of Kirk as a rough, rugged lothario who alternately kisses and punches alien women, because in this episode, Kirk falls in love. Falls in love, in fact, with a woman who has a strong, distinct personality, played by a good actress.
Aaaaand at the end of the episode she's dead. Now, this interests me. You know, I just watched a whole documentary about the history of trans representation in cinema. One of the ways trans women are marginalized in cinema, one of the very important ways, is that we are portrayed as tragic, unfortunate victims.
The character of Edith Keeler maps very, very well onto that stock character. I think it's safe to say that Edith Keeler doesn't offer much of a viable space for women in the Star Trek mythos.
Amok Time, on the other hand, I recall as hinging on the relationship between Kirk and Spock. This, it seems to me, is the central and best-developed character relationship in the show. In it, Spock, who is normally a sensible, hyper-rational character, reveals a dark secret of his. Vulcans, it turns out, are cyclothymic. It is a long cycle, but on a recurring basis they go through some strange changes in their personality. They cease to be rational. This is portrayed as, well, somewhat horrifying and traumatic, particularly to Kirk, who sees a good friend who he cares about behaving in disturbing and inexplicable ways.
But Kirk wants to help his friend, so they go to his home planet together. This is where my memory gets fuzzy. I'm trying to reconstruct it with the help of plot summaries, but I'll be honest with you, this shit just doesn't seem to make sense. Apparently some shit goes wrong and Kirk and Spock wind up having to fight to the death, and they play some dramatic music and oh lord here comes the meme machine. This is the really memorable bit, right? Kirk and Spock fighting to the death. So much so that I don't remember so good what happens thereafter.
So apparently Spock seemingly kills Kirk? Except it turns out that Kirk was just pretending to be dead? And somehow him not killing Kirk resolved his Pon Farr which means he doesn't have to fuck anybody after all, which Kirk and Spock are both a-OK with? That just doesn't make any fucking sense. I've seen episodes of "Radar Men From the Moon" with more plausible resolutions.
Like, maybe I'm telling it wrong. The overall impression I get though is that this is a terrifying period in Spock's life to Kirk and Spock both, that the idea of Spock having to MATE with a WOMAN is portrayed as a fate worse than death, and that the way he gets out of that is by sublimating his urges into an intensely homoerotic solo combat with his, uh, "best friend".
So what I get from these two episodes is that, at the show's best, Kirk and Spock were interesting and compelling characters. While they were both portrayed pretty unambiguously as heterosexual, they nonetheless had a homosocial relationship that was more interesting and compelling than any of their individual relationships with women, which were mostly portrayed as being tragic and unfortunate. I also got the impression from these episodes that Star Trek did not have any strong or compellingly drawn ongoing female characters. A large part of being a "fan" for me is, honestly, to understand myself better through the thing I'm a fan of, to find a place for myself in that narrative.
For women, apparently, this was a lot of work, and it seems like different women tried different approaches. For instance, apparently one woman attempted to create a strong female character who could hold her own with Kirk on the Enterprise. Unfortunately strong characters are, it turns out, really difficult to create, and she wound up with a wish fulfillment character that was so derided and ridiculed that her character's very name - Mary Sue - became shorthand for a certain type of terrible fan writing.
The approach taken by the slash writers, while controversial, seems to have at least gone slightly better than that. The slash writers mapped themselves, their deepest desires, onto the show's most compelling characters, who happened to be male, onto the show's most narratively compelling relationship, which happened to be homosocial.
I find these women to be, quite frankly, heroes of mine. When I read the history of early slash, as told by the women who wrote it, I see women fighting their way into a boys' club that had no place for yucky girls, who refused to conform to the stereotypes the show's canon and, particularly, the show's male fandom placed on them. I see women with the bravery to speak their deepest truths in the face of overwhelming hostility, abuse, and disgust from that gatekeeping male fandom. I see women talking about ideas and experiences that resonate with me very, very deeply in my own (non-fanfic) erotic writing.
So I find the fanlore.org website to be an absolute treasure, and not just from a historical perpsective. It is absolutely liberating to me as a queer woman to be doing the sort of research I'm prone to doing and come across this concept:
https://fanlore.org/wiki/Id_Vortex
With some trepidation I will speak a bit here about my own experience writing erotic fiction. I have a number of friends who do this, and - I'm not doing my own research here because nobody can contradict me - my memory is that sometime in 2015, I finally started writing some of my own. I was working part-time. I'd cut back my hours so I could attend school full-time, but school was not as time-consuming or taxing as I'd anticipated, so I had some spare time and the ability to keep odd hours.
I wrote a story, a self-contained story, and then I wrote another one. But the second story, I just kept writing. The words poured out of me. Managing the sheer flow of information, not getting so consumed in it that I forgot to live the rest of my ordinary life, was a challenge, but it was a challenge that, for a time, I was more or less up to.
It quickly became apparent to me that my writing went deeper than simple erotic fantasy. I recognized and understood early on that I was, in fact, writing about myself, about experiences that were too difficult, too powerful, for me to allow myself to address directly.
At the time I characterized this writing as "not _really_ being about sex". I do not agree with this characterization today. Being honest with oneself is a process and takes time and effort. It was enough for me to admit, at the time, that my writing deeply resonated with my experience of mental illness, that it offered powerful catharsis and understanding and was fundamentally worth doing.
It was still something I struggled with, though. I was not sure whether I really had the right to say the things I was saying. A lot of the things I put my characters through (and they were, at least nominally, original characters) was extremely dark, was intensely traumatic, and I had throughout the process the worry that what I was doing was wrong. The entire time I was writing involved negotiating with that feeling, with that voice.
Ultimately I concluded that what I was writing was, in fact, wrong, and stopped. I still have the writings somewhere. Multiple copies, I believe. I may perhaps have sent an early draft to Sedric? I don't know.
Part of my negotiation with my shame, with the inner voice that told me what I was doing was wrong, was telling myself, over and over and over again, "I am not my characters." In retrospect it was an obvious mind trick, one that is thankfully less necessary for me today. The process of writing those characters, characters I thought of as strong, psychologically complex female characters, was an essential part of making me who I am today.
Perhaps one day I will write down my story directly, with no narrative distancing tricks. Until then, well, I'm doing well enough for myself.
There are a lot of spaces, a lot of people who will dismiss slash writing. I am probably not the right person to summarize the argument made by people who are opposed to slash, but I am at least going to make an attempt, because I think the argument deserves to be fairly represented, without being muddled up by all of the virulent personal attacks and hatred that have, historically and in the present, been directed at slash writers.
As far as I can tell, the primary argument against slash is one of _standing_. Many, if not most, writers of slash are women. Many, if not most, writers of slash are some variety of heterosexual. For these women to write homosexual male fantasies is a violation of appropriate fictional boundaries, is tokenizing, is destructive to the relationship between these two characters _intended_ by their professional writers. Fundamentally it is not their place to tell these stories.
And since I am not interested in direct arguments, I am not interested in battlegrounds, my response to that argument would be of a different sort. What place do women have, then, in the Star Trek universe? Where do they belong? I am particularly interested in this question with reference to the original Star Trek series, because it was this series, more than anything, that engendered the slash phenomenon.
I am not overly familiar with the original series. I've seen some scattered episodes, and a couple of the movies, but I'm ignoring those because they seem like a different beast entirely. The ones I know that I've seen, that I remember the titles and plots of to some extent, are Amok Time and The City On The Edge Of Forever, which I gather are some of the most acclaimed episodes of the show.
My impression of those episodes is that women have no continuing place in ST:TOS's narrative. I note that "The City on the Edge of Forever" directly contradicts the stereotype of Kirk as a rough, rugged lothario who alternately kisses and punches alien women, because in this episode, Kirk falls in love. Falls in love, in fact, with a woman who has a strong, distinct personality, played by a good actress.
Aaaaand at the end of the episode she's dead. Now, this interests me. You know, I just watched a whole documentary about the history of trans representation in cinema. One of the ways trans women are marginalized in cinema, one of the very important ways, is that we are portrayed as tragic, unfortunate victims.
The character of Edith Keeler maps very, very well onto that stock character. I think it's safe to say that Edith Keeler doesn't offer much of a viable space for women in the Star Trek mythos.
Amok Time, on the other hand, I recall as hinging on the relationship between Kirk and Spock. This, it seems to me, is the central and best-developed character relationship in the show. In it, Spock, who is normally a sensible, hyper-rational character, reveals a dark secret of his. Vulcans, it turns out, are cyclothymic. It is a long cycle, but on a recurring basis they go through some strange changes in their personality. They cease to be rational. This is portrayed as, well, somewhat horrifying and traumatic, particularly to Kirk, who sees a good friend who he cares about behaving in disturbing and inexplicable ways.
But Kirk wants to help his friend, so they go to his home planet together. This is where my memory gets fuzzy. I'm trying to reconstruct it with the help of plot summaries, but I'll be honest with you, this shit just doesn't seem to make sense. Apparently some shit goes wrong and Kirk and Spock wind up having to fight to the death, and they play some dramatic music and oh lord here comes the meme machine. This is the really memorable bit, right? Kirk and Spock fighting to the death. So much so that I don't remember so good what happens thereafter.
So apparently Spock seemingly kills Kirk? Except it turns out that Kirk was just pretending to be dead? And somehow him not killing Kirk resolved his Pon Farr which means he doesn't have to fuck anybody after all, which Kirk and Spock are both a-OK with? That just doesn't make any fucking sense. I've seen episodes of "Radar Men From the Moon" with more plausible resolutions.
Like, maybe I'm telling it wrong. The overall impression I get though is that this is a terrifying period in Spock's life to Kirk and Spock both, that the idea of Spock having to MATE with a WOMAN is portrayed as a fate worse than death, and that the way he gets out of that is by sublimating his urges into an intensely homoerotic solo combat with his, uh, "best friend".
So what I get from these two episodes is that, at the show's best, Kirk and Spock were interesting and compelling characters. While they were both portrayed pretty unambiguously as heterosexual, they nonetheless had a homosocial relationship that was more interesting and compelling than any of their individual relationships with women, which were mostly portrayed as being tragic and unfortunate. I also got the impression from these episodes that Star Trek did not have any strong or compellingly drawn ongoing female characters. A large part of being a "fan" for me is, honestly, to understand myself better through the thing I'm a fan of, to find a place for myself in that narrative.
For women, apparently, this was a lot of work, and it seems like different women tried different approaches. For instance, apparently one woman attempted to create a strong female character who could hold her own with Kirk on the Enterprise. Unfortunately strong characters are, it turns out, really difficult to create, and she wound up with a wish fulfillment character that was so derided and ridiculed that her character's very name - Mary Sue - became shorthand for a certain type of terrible fan writing.
The approach taken by the slash writers, while controversial, seems to have at least gone slightly better than that. The slash writers mapped themselves, their deepest desires, onto the show's most compelling characters, who happened to be male, onto the show's most narratively compelling relationship, which happened to be homosocial.
I find these women to be, quite frankly, heroes of mine. When I read the history of early slash, as told by the women who wrote it, I see women fighting their way into a boys' club that had no place for yucky girls, who refused to conform to the stereotypes the show's canon and, particularly, the show's male fandom placed on them. I see women with the bravery to speak their deepest truths in the face of overwhelming hostility, abuse, and disgust from that gatekeeping male fandom. I see women talking about ideas and experiences that resonate with me very, very deeply in my own (non-fanfic) erotic writing.
So I find the fanlore.org website to be an absolute treasure, and not just from a historical perpsective. It is absolutely liberating to me as a queer woman to be doing the sort of research I'm prone to doing and come across this concept:
https://fanlore.org/wiki/Id_Vortex
With some trepidation I will speak a bit here about my own experience writing erotic fiction. I have a number of friends who do this, and - I'm not doing my own research here because nobody can contradict me - my memory is that sometime in 2015, I finally started writing some of my own. I was working part-time. I'd cut back my hours so I could attend school full-time, but school was not as time-consuming or taxing as I'd anticipated, so I had some spare time and the ability to keep odd hours.
I wrote a story, a self-contained story, and then I wrote another one. But the second story, I just kept writing. The words poured out of me. Managing the sheer flow of information, not getting so consumed in it that I forgot to live the rest of my ordinary life, was a challenge, but it was a challenge that, for a time, I was more or less up to.
It quickly became apparent to me that my writing went deeper than simple erotic fantasy. I recognized and understood early on that I was, in fact, writing about myself, about experiences that were too difficult, too powerful, for me to allow myself to address directly.
At the time I characterized this writing as "not _really_ being about sex". I do not agree with this characterization today. Being honest with oneself is a process and takes time and effort. It was enough for me to admit, at the time, that my writing deeply resonated with my experience of mental illness, that it offered powerful catharsis and understanding and was fundamentally worth doing.
It was still something I struggled with, though. I was not sure whether I really had the right to say the things I was saying. A lot of the things I put my characters through (and they were, at least nominally, original characters) was extremely dark, was intensely traumatic, and I had throughout the process the worry that what I was doing was wrong. The entire time I was writing involved negotiating with that feeling, with that voice.
Ultimately I concluded that what I was writing was, in fact, wrong, and stopped. I still have the writings somewhere. Multiple copies, I believe. I may perhaps have sent an early draft to Sedric? I don't know.
Part of my negotiation with my shame, with the inner voice that told me what I was doing was wrong, was telling myself, over and over and over again, "I am not my characters." In retrospect it was an obvious mind trick, one that is thankfully less necessary for me today. The process of writing those characters, characters I thought of as strong, psychologically complex female characters, was an essential part of making me who I am today.
Perhaps one day I will write down my story directly, with no narrative distancing tricks. Until then, well, I'm doing well enough for myself.
Disclosure (2020)
Just a brief heads up about the new documentary Disclosure. I guess the idea is that it's sort of a trans-focused counterpart to "The Celluloid Closet".
It's nearly all there, as far as I can tell. Only nearly. Ed Wood isn't, for instance. That fucking Felicity Huffman film, Transamerica, that wasn't there either. But a lot of shit I don't know about, wouldn't know about, I had a chance to learn, and that was important.
I rewatched "The Celluloid Closet" just a couple months ago and it was super disappointing. There was a lot of smug self-congratulation, this sort of "WE FIXED IT" vibe, which centered around, of all things, fucking "Philadelphia". At least here the ending acknowledges that there isn't an ending. I appreciated the person who voiced overt advocacy for space communism in this Amazon Prime production at the end. Everyone whose voice is heard in the film is trans or GNC, and I appreciated that as well.
But for the most part the film is an atrocity exhibition. I wish I didn't need to watch it, but I did, and I am completely wrecked.
It's nearly all there, as far as I can tell. Only nearly. Ed Wood isn't, for instance. That fucking Felicity Huffman film, Transamerica, that wasn't there either. But a lot of shit I don't know about, wouldn't know about, I had a chance to learn, and that was important.
I rewatched "The Celluloid Closet" just a couple months ago and it was super disappointing. There was a lot of smug self-congratulation, this sort of "WE FIXED IT" vibe, which centered around, of all things, fucking "Philadelphia". At least here the ending acknowledges that there isn't an ending. I appreciated the person who voiced overt advocacy for space communism in this Amazon Prime production at the end. Everyone whose voice is heard in the film is trans or GNC, and I appreciated that as well.
But for the most part the film is an atrocity exhibition. I wish I didn't need to watch it, but I did, and I am completely wrecked.
The Death of the Author, The Word of God, and the Gay Agenda
When I'm trying to put something off, I suddenly find all kinds of other important things I need to do. Today I'm putting off, err, getting my nails done, which means that my head is full of fascinating Opinions that I might express.
I have ongoing arguments with friends about Baudrillard. Yes, I'm one of _those_ sorts of people. Frankly, I'm not quite sure I can get behind the whole "death of the author" thing. Not, at least, in such strong terms, at least. (To be fair, I haven't actually _read_ Baudrillard, in French or in English. Yes, I'm one of _those_ sorts of people.)
My feeling is that what John Cleese has to say about the meaning of the Argument Sketch should probably carry more weight than what I have to say.
On the other hand, I do feel like what I have to say about the meaning of the Argument Sketch should carry more weight than what Graham Chapman has to say. This is because Graham Chapman is dead. In fact, I would argue that the longer it has been since Graham Chapman died, the less weight any opinions he expressed while he is alive should matter. I would argue that all texts are palimpsests, constantly being written over every time they are read or performed in a different world than the one in which they were created.
Which in turn means that John Cleese's word is not, as TV Tropes might put it, "the word of God". Certainly I would weight his word, as the author of the sketch, higher the beliefs of some queer American lady who wasn't even born when the sketch was written. The thing is, that weight applies most specifically to what he meant when writing that sketch, in 1972. Even if we assume that he can correctly and coherently express that, uh, "original intent", the importance and meaning of that intent is far, _far_ less important than, say, William Rehnquist might have believed.
I don't often read the Onion, but last year I read a very funny Onion article. Like many Onion articles, most of the humor is in the headline.
https://entertainment.theonion.com/frozen-2-creators-confirm-that-elsa-gay-but-also-tran-1839981134
"‘Frozen 2’ Creators Confirm That Elsa Gay But Also Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist"
That's a pretty sharp critique and one that bears unpacking, I think.
The obvious target here is people who want Elsa to be canonically queer. This is an argument I see pretty commonly expressed, that sexuality has no place in children's entertainment.
With all due respect, I find this argument to be bullshit.
One of the things that struck me watching Graham Chapman's rant the other day is how much of are norms are defined, explicitly or implicitly, in opposition to "the gay agenda". It was OK to be gay as long as you were a consenting adult (the age of which, at the time, varied in England depending on whether you were consenting to a homosexual or heterosexual encounter), but the children! My God, won't somebody think of the children?
Well, heteronormative, cisnormative society surely does spend a lot of time thinking of the children. I'm not so sure I'm impressed with _what_, precisely, they think of the children.
You know what, I'm gonna redirect here, that's a rant for another time, I think. Trust me, I _am_ going to get back to that one. Let's just say that there is, today, a lot of explicitly queer-affirming, GNC-affirming children's entertainment, and from what I can tell, it seems to be doing a lot more good than harm.
On consideration, I think the people who want Elsa to be canon gay, they are right to want that. They are right to want to be acknowledged, to be seen, to have everyone, yes, _and children_, told explicitly, rather than through subtext and coded messages, that being gay is normal.
So the humor in this, for me, is to imagine the creators giving with one hand and taking away with the other. Having created an obviously gay character, they choose to simultaneously openly affirm and celebrate what they've done _and_ make that character hateful and awful.
Yes, of course. Yes, I am thinking of "beloved" children's entertainer J.K. Rowling. J.K. Rowling, for whom homosexuality is so meaningless and insignificant, so remote from her experience, that she feels comfortable unilaterally declaring a major character in the novels to be queer after the fact. Now, Dumbledore, look, this isn't an Elsa thing. It's not like there was a huge fandom petitioning Rowling to please, for the love of God, make Dumbledore canon gay. There's more slash involving the Sorting Hat than there is involving Dumbledore. To the extent that there is a queer Harry Potter fandom, Dumbledore certainly doesn't seem to be the focus of it.
I'm sure Rowling doesn't understand any of this. Doesn't understand why so many queer people were upset when she just said "oh by the way Dumbledore's gay", doesn't understand how she was appropriating and tokenizing queer experience.
Being queer means something to me. I can't tell my story without that story being informed by my queerness, can't even talk about something as simple as the Modern Lovers album without that being informed by my queerness. It's pride, it's doubt, it's regret, it's decades of struggle, of fighting for the right to exist, in the face of people who want to make us invisible, want to make us silent, who sometimes explicitly deny our very existence.
People like, you know, J.K. Rowling.
J.K. Rowling's word is not the Word of God. Please do not treat it as such.
I have ongoing arguments with friends about Baudrillard. Yes, I'm one of _those_ sorts of people. Frankly, I'm not quite sure I can get behind the whole "death of the author" thing. Not, at least, in such strong terms, at least. (To be fair, I haven't actually _read_ Baudrillard, in French or in English. Yes, I'm one of _those_ sorts of people.)
My feeling is that what John Cleese has to say about the meaning of the Argument Sketch should probably carry more weight than what I have to say.
On the other hand, I do feel like what I have to say about the meaning of the Argument Sketch should carry more weight than what Graham Chapman has to say. This is because Graham Chapman is dead. In fact, I would argue that the longer it has been since Graham Chapman died, the less weight any opinions he expressed while he is alive should matter. I would argue that all texts are palimpsests, constantly being written over every time they are read or performed in a different world than the one in which they were created.
Which in turn means that John Cleese's word is not, as TV Tropes might put it, "the word of God". Certainly I would weight his word, as the author of the sketch, higher the beliefs of some queer American lady who wasn't even born when the sketch was written. The thing is, that weight applies most specifically to what he meant when writing that sketch, in 1972. Even if we assume that he can correctly and coherently express that, uh, "original intent", the importance and meaning of that intent is far, _far_ less important than, say, William Rehnquist might have believed.
I don't often read the Onion, but last year I read a very funny Onion article. Like many Onion articles, most of the humor is in the headline.
https://entertainment.theonion.com/frozen-2-creators-confirm-that-elsa-gay-but-also-tran-1839981134
"‘Frozen 2’ Creators Confirm That Elsa Gay But Also Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist"
That's a pretty sharp critique and one that bears unpacking, I think.
The obvious target here is people who want Elsa to be canonically queer. This is an argument I see pretty commonly expressed, that sexuality has no place in children's entertainment.
With all due respect, I find this argument to be bullshit.
One of the things that struck me watching Graham Chapman's rant the other day is how much of are norms are defined, explicitly or implicitly, in opposition to "the gay agenda". It was OK to be gay as long as you were a consenting adult (the age of which, at the time, varied in England depending on whether you were consenting to a homosexual or heterosexual encounter), but the children! My God, won't somebody think of the children?
Well, heteronormative, cisnormative society surely does spend a lot of time thinking of the children. I'm not so sure I'm impressed with _what_, precisely, they think of the children.
You know what, I'm gonna redirect here, that's a rant for another time, I think. Trust me, I _am_ going to get back to that one. Let's just say that there is, today, a lot of explicitly queer-affirming, GNC-affirming children's entertainment, and from what I can tell, it seems to be doing a lot more good than harm.
On consideration, I think the people who want Elsa to be canon gay, they are right to want that. They are right to want to be acknowledged, to be seen, to have everyone, yes, _and children_, told explicitly, rather than through subtext and coded messages, that being gay is normal.
So the humor in this, for me, is to imagine the creators giving with one hand and taking away with the other. Having created an obviously gay character, they choose to simultaneously openly affirm and celebrate what they've done _and_ make that character hateful and awful.
Yes, of course. Yes, I am thinking of "beloved" children's entertainer J.K. Rowling. J.K. Rowling, for whom homosexuality is so meaningless and insignificant, so remote from her experience, that she feels comfortable unilaterally declaring a major character in the novels to be queer after the fact. Now, Dumbledore, look, this isn't an Elsa thing. It's not like there was a huge fandom petitioning Rowling to please, for the love of God, make Dumbledore canon gay. There's more slash involving the Sorting Hat than there is involving Dumbledore. To the extent that there is a queer Harry Potter fandom, Dumbledore certainly doesn't seem to be the focus of it.
I'm sure Rowling doesn't understand any of this. Doesn't understand why so many queer people were upset when she just said "oh by the way Dumbledore's gay", doesn't understand how she was appropriating and tokenizing queer experience.
Being queer means something to me. I can't tell my story without that story being informed by my queerness, can't even talk about something as simple as the Modern Lovers album without that being informed by my queerness. It's pride, it's doubt, it's regret, it's decades of struggle, of fighting for the right to exist, in the face of people who want to make us invisible, want to make us silent, who sometimes explicitly deny our very existence.
People like, you know, J.K. Rowling.
J.K. Rowling's word is not the Word of God. Please do not treat it as such.
The Modern Lovers
CW: Self-Harm
At the present time, I own two rock band T-shirts. One is a T-shirt for the early '90s grunge band Temple of the Dog, ordered for me from Eastern Europe as a gift by my brother. I have never heard the band Temple of the Dog, not even "Hunger Strike". My brother is kind of a troll. That said, I wear the T-shirt all the time. The T-shirt is soft and comfortable, and I love my brother dearly.
The other T-shirt is one I ordered for myself, and is for the early '70s rock band the Modern Lovers. There is a dog window decal one sees in cars around here that kept reminding me of the Modern Lovers logo, you see, and eventually I just went off and ordered a T-shirt from Jonathan Richman's website.
It is the sort of T-shirt where, before my transition, I would receive compliments from random strangers when I would go out wearing it. I liked this. See, for some reason, men are socialized to interpret compliments on one's appearance pretty much exclusively as expressions of sexual desire. Men are taught that "cute" is a synonym for "I would like to stick my erect penis in that". Given this, I guess it's not terribly surprising that so many men put so little effort into their appearance.
T-shirts are one of the rare exceptions. If you compliment a person's T-shirt, you see, you're not complimenting someone's appearance, but you're complimenting the idea the T-shirt expresses. Telling someone in a Modern Lovers T-shirt "cool T-shirt" does not necessarily communicate the idea "I would like to engage in coitus with you". It may also communicate the idea "I, too, have heard of these 'Modern Lovers' of which your clothing speaks, and I stand in solidarity with your tacit endorsement of this long-defunct rock band." This certainly may be done with the ulterior motive of getting into someone's pants, but it's not an absolute _requirement_, which sets it apart.
The Modern Lovers are, as far as I can tell, chiefly known for two songs: Road Runner and Pablo Picasso. Road Runner is an up-tempo rock number about the joys of driving. Pablo Picasso is a humorous, vaguely Dylan-adjacent song about how "Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole". They're both fairly widely covered songs. I first heard Pablo Picasso on the soundtrack to the cult 1980s film "Repo Man". It was first performed by John Cale, who heard it while producing some demo recordings for the band.
The myth is that everyone who saw the Velvet Underground went out to form their own band. It's not really true. Hell, not even everybody who _bootlegged_ the Velvet Underground went out to start their own band - most of them did, but famed Boston Velvets taper "The Professor", to the best of my knowledge, never recorded in a rock band.
The thing about the Velvets is that later in their career particularly they were sort of a super-local band. They didn't have a national reputation. Instead, they had several very passionate local fanbases. One of the homes of that fanbase was Boston, Massachusetts. This is germane because the Modern Lovers were, fundamentally, a local Boston, Massachusetts band. "Road Runner" is a song in praise of driving cars, but it's also a song explicitly in praise of Boston, Massachusetts, and unlike "Dirty Water" wasn't recorded by an LA band.
It's a good song but I'm not a Bostonian. The songs that strike me by the Modern Lovers are other songs.
He's hard to pick apart, Jonathan Richman. He's not like me. A lot of the people I listened to, back in those days - they weren't very much like me at all. I may have more to say about that in another post.
So for instance Jonathan Richman has a song called "I'm Straight". Readers, I am _so_ not straight. Except, well, in the sense that Jonathan Richman means it, which is to say that he doesn't do drugs.
This was a big thing for me when I was young, the sort of "so straight I'm a weirdo" thing Rick Wakeman (who is not, in fact, a weirdo) was talking about. It seems to me now that I avoided drugs less out of moral principle and more because I was fucked up in ways that predisposed me to _not_ become addicted to drugs. (I did eventually develop and kick a drug addiction, but that's a story for another time.)
Successful people who didn't do drugs were role models for me. Not all of them were good role models, but Richman, well, I still think he was decent enough as a role model, at least as opposed to Frank Zappa. Frank Zappa didn't do drugs because they were stupid. People who did drugs were stupid, just like people who had feelings and expressed them were stupid.
Richman danced a finer line than this. Richman loved the modern world, loved technology, loved America and wanted to fight for his vision of it. Richman wanted to be dignified and old some day. Honestly a lot of the ideas he advocates in his songs, I don't agree with them. One day I will be old, but I will never be dignified.
Richman was also lonely and was extraordinarily open and self-revelatory about his feelings. Many of the Modern Lovers' songs reveal a man who is extremely familiar with mental illness. If there's one message that keeps coming through in the Modern Lovers' songs, it's this: Please don't die. For God's sake, don't die, I know life is hard, but if we both make it through, things will get better. Jonathan Richman is singing to someone else in "Dignified and Old", he's not just saying that _he_ will be dignified and old, he's saying that some day we'll be dignified and old together.
And he turns out to have been wrong about the dignified part. He wasn't lying, he was just wrong. What he was right about was the importance of staying alive, how important it is for us to care for each other even when we're broken and sad. Please, I know things are hard, but when they let you out of the (mental) hospital, please talk to me. I miss you.
That stuff is hard for anyone to say. You say that and you'll look like a weirdo. Jonathan Richman looked like a weirdo. For someone like me, for whom "not being a weirdo" wasn't an option, who could only ever pretend to be straight (poorly and at great personal cost) - for someone like me the only question was what sort of weirdo I was going to be. Songs like "Hospital" helped me a lot in answering that question.
At the present time, I own two rock band T-shirts. One is a T-shirt for the early '90s grunge band Temple of the Dog, ordered for me from Eastern Europe as a gift by my brother. I have never heard the band Temple of the Dog, not even "Hunger Strike". My brother is kind of a troll. That said, I wear the T-shirt all the time. The T-shirt is soft and comfortable, and I love my brother dearly.
The other T-shirt is one I ordered for myself, and is for the early '70s rock band the Modern Lovers. There is a dog window decal one sees in cars around here that kept reminding me of the Modern Lovers logo, you see, and eventually I just went off and ordered a T-shirt from Jonathan Richman's website.
It is the sort of T-shirt where, before my transition, I would receive compliments from random strangers when I would go out wearing it. I liked this. See, for some reason, men are socialized to interpret compliments on one's appearance pretty much exclusively as expressions of sexual desire. Men are taught that "cute" is a synonym for "I would like to stick my erect penis in that". Given this, I guess it's not terribly surprising that so many men put so little effort into their appearance.
T-shirts are one of the rare exceptions. If you compliment a person's T-shirt, you see, you're not complimenting someone's appearance, but you're complimenting the idea the T-shirt expresses. Telling someone in a Modern Lovers T-shirt "cool T-shirt" does not necessarily communicate the idea "I would like to engage in coitus with you". It may also communicate the idea "I, too, have heard of these 'Modern Lovers' of which your clothing speaks, and I stand in solidarity with your tacit endorsement of this long-defunct rock band." This certainly may be done with the ulterior motive of getting into someone's pants, but it's not an absolute _requirement_, which sets it apart.
The Modern Lovers are, as far as I can tell, chiefly known for two songs: Road Runner and Pablo Picasso. Road Runner is an up-tempo rock number about the joys of driving. Pablo Picasso is a humorous, vaguely Dylan-adjacent song about how "Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole". They're both fairly widely covered songs. I first heard Pablo Picasso on the soundtrack to the cult 1980s film "Repo Man". It was first performed by John Cale, who heard it while producing some demo recordings for the band.
The myth is that everyone who saw the Velvet Underground went out to form their own band. It's not really true. Hell, not even everybody who _bootlegged_ the Velvet Underground went out to start their own band - most of them did, but famed Boston Velvets taper "The Professor", to the best of my knowledge, never recorded in a rock band.
The thing about the Velvets is that later in their career particularly they were sort of a super-local band. They didn't have a national reputation. Instead, they had several very passionate local fanbases. One of the homes of that fanbase was Boston, Massachusetts. This is germane because the Modern Lovers were, fundamentally, a local Boston, Massachusetts band. "Road Runner" is a song in praise of driving cars, but it's also a song explicitly in praise of Boston, Massachusetts, and unlike "Dirty Water" wasn't recorded by an LA band.
It's a good song but I'm not a Bostonian. The songs that strike me by the Modern Lovers are other songs.
He's hard to pick apart, Jonathan Richman. He's not like me. A lot of the people I listened to, back in those days - they weren't very much like me at all. I may have more to say about that in another post.
So for instance Jonathan Richman has a song called "I'm Straight". Readers, I am _so_ not straight. Except, well, in the sense that Jonathan Richman means it, which is to say that he doesn't do drugs.
This was a big thing for me when I was young, the sort of "so straight I'm a weirdo" thing Rick Wakeman (who is not, in fact, a weirdo) was talking about. It seems to me now that I avoided drugs less out of moral principle and more because I was fucked up in ways that predisposed me to _not_ become addicted to drugs. (I did eventually develop and kick a drug addiction, but that's a story for another time.)
Successful people who didn't do drugs were role models for me. Not all of them were good role models, but Richman, well, I still think he was decent enough as a role model, at least as opposed to Frank Zappa. Frank Zappa didn't do drugs because they were stupid. People who did drugs were stupid, just like people who had feelings and expressed them were stupid.
Richman danced a finer line than this. Richman loved the modern world, loved technology, loved America and wanted to fight for his vision of it. Richman wanted to be dignified and old some day. Honestly a lot of the ideas he advocates in his songs, I don't agree with them. One day I will be old, but I will never be dignified.
Richman was also lonely and was extraordinarily open and self-revelatory about his feelings. Many of the Modern Lovers' songs reveal a man who is extremely familiar with mental illness. If there's one message that keeps coming through in the Modern Lovers' songs, it's this: Please don't die. For God's sake, don't die, I know life is hard, but if we both make it through, things will get better. Jonathan Richman is singing to someone else in "Dignified and Old", he's not just saying that _he_ will be dignified and old, he's saying that some day we'll be dignified and old together.
And he turns out to have been wrong about the dignified part. He wasn't lying, he was just wrong. What he was right about was the importance of staying alive, how important it is for us to care for each other even when we're broken and sad. Please, I know things are hard, but when they let you out of the (mental) hospital, please talk to me. I miss you.
That stuff is hard for anyone to say. You say that and you'll look like a weirdo. Jonathan Richman looked like a weirdo. For someone like me, for whom "not being a weirdo" wasn't an option, who could only ever pretend to be straight (poorly and at great personal cost) - for someone like me the only question was what sort of weirdo I was going to be. Songs like "Hospital" helped me a lot in answering that question.
Saturday, 20 June 2020
Getting Crap Under The Radar
Slowly starting to recover a little. Getting all kinds of ideas for posts I could write and maybe I might write some of them. Thoughts about the early history of Star Trek slash, which to me is the story of women fighting for their place in a fandom which systematically excluded them. I was going to do another one on Evil Twins in Doctor Who, I thought that might be a fun thing to write about. The problem is I keep getting sidetracked, I'm trying to balance Delve Mode with Create Mode and Delve Mode keeps winning. At the same time I'm writing I'm furiously opening tabs trying to find old videos of the Raincoats so I can make a joke about Sedric's personal interests, and then I run across the video I'm talking to you about today
So this is one of the places where several of my shared interests meet in the same place, which happens more often than I expect it to. I've made posts about old sesame street videos, and I make posts about old post-punk bands, and well, here is an animation made for Sesame Street by a lady named Merrill Aldighieri. Merrill promotes herself as "the first VJ". The claim is disputed - other people credit Rick Moranis(!) as the first VJ, but nitpicking the claim, I think, does a disservice to Merrill's work. First, second, third, who cares? She worked at a New York night club called Hurrah and made video installations. She filmed a lot of the bands who came through. Missio of Burma, Colin Newman, The Bush Tetras, Young Marble Giants, Bound & Gagged, a bunch of bands I don't know. In 1990 she filmed a conversation between Douglas Adams and physicist Michio Kaku.
And she made a computer-animated cartoon for Sesame Street.
https://youtu.be/2Fw_kKs6SCs
This is great because it's one of those things where there are multiple points of intersection. I start looking up things so I can contribute to a discussion about raincoat fetish porn, burn through a dozen or so increasingly interesting post-punk videos, and finally find my way to a video which, in typical Youtube fashion, has exponentially more views than the creator's other videos. (This phenomenon is weird to me; I'm always surprised at how little _effort_ people put into their media consumption. For all the talk of "influencer culture", it's really only an incredibly minute fraction of viewers of any particular video who will take the time to look at what else they're sharing. I guess it's healthy as that's what's kept me in delve mode all day, but my God, I've found so much amazing stuff this way!) And the video opens up with a shot of a person in a raincoat with an umbrella.
Or, for those of you who have dirty minds, a penis.
Don't try to tell me it's just me. I've seen penises before. That's what they look like. I mean it's a Simpsons-colored penis, admittedly, but it's pretty hard to mistake that curve. Merrill, you're a brilliant, groundbreaking, fascinating woman, and you totally put a cartoon that opens with an animation of a penis on the popular children's program Sesame Street.
So this is one of the places where several of my shared interests meet in the same place, which happens more often than I expect it to. I've made posts about old sesame street videos, and I make posts about old post-punk bands, and well, here is an animation made for Sesame Street by a lady named Merrill Aldighieri. Merrill promotes herself as "the first VJ". The claim is disputed - other people credit Rick Moranis(!) as the first VJ, but nitpicking the claim, I think, does a disservice to Merrill's work. First, second, third, who cares? She worked at a New York night club called Hurrah and made video installations. She filmed a lot of the bands who came through. Missio of Burma, Colin Newman, The Bush Tetras, Young Marble Giants, Bound & Gagged, a bunch of bands I don't know. In 1990 she filmed a conversation between Douglas Adams and physicist Michio Kaku.
And she made a computer-animated cartoon for Sesame Street.
https://youtu.be/2Fw_kKs6SCs
This is great because it's one of those things where there are multiple points of intersection. I start looking up things so I can contribute to a discussion about raincoat fetish porn, burn through a dozen or so increasingly interesting post-punk videos, and finally find my way to a video which, in typical Youtube fashion, has exponentially more views than the creator's other videos. (This phenomenon is weird to me; I'm always surprised at how little _effort_ people put into their media consumption. For all the talk of "influencer culture", it's really only an incredibly minute fraction of viewers of any particular video who will take the time to look at what else they're sharing. I guess it's healthy as that's what's kept me in delve mode all day, but my God, I've found so much amazing stuff this way!) And the video opens up with a shot of a person in a raincoat with an umbrella.
Or, for those of you who have dirty minds, a penis.
Don't try to tell me it's just me. I've seen penises before. That's what they look like. I mean it's a Simpsons-colored penis, admittedly, but it's pretty hard to mistake that curve. Merrill, you're a brilliant, groundbreaking, fascinating woman, and you totally put a cartoon that opens with an animation of a penis on the popular children's program Sesame Street.
Argument Sketch (Rewrite)
CHARLES enters the professional office of ARMAND.
A: Charles?
C: Well, I'm not the queen of England.
A: I'm Armand. Why don't you have a seat?
C: And what if I don't want to?
A: Right then, stand, suit yourself. What brings you here today?
C: I've told you once already.
A: Yes, I have your paperwork, I'd just like to hear it in your words.
C: And the paperwork wasn't my words? What, do you think I was lying to you?
A: Charles, do you think you might have a problem?
C: A problem? What, do you think you're a fucking therapist or something?
A: It just seems extremely odd to me that you've come to all this trouble to see me and you won't tell me why you're here.
C: You're saying I'm sick. This is abuse.
A: No, actually, abuse is next door.
C: I don't have to take this sort of treatment.
A: No, you don't. You're free to leave at any time.
C: What? Is that it, then? You want rid of me, I go to all this effort and you won't even fucking talk to me?
A: I'm talking to you now, Charles.
C: You just told me to leave.
A: I said you were free to leave.
C: See, to me, that implies that you want me to leave.
A: If I wanted you to leave you wouldn't be here.
C: So why did you fucking tell me to leave then?
A: Honestly? Because I knew you wouldn't, Charles.
C: Oh, you're so fucking clever.
A: And you have a problem, Charles. You're _paying_ me to argue with you? Really?
C: I was hoping to get some sort of professional quality out of it. Obviously that was foolish of me.
A: See, that's not why most people come to me. Most people come to me because, Charles, they have problems.
C: Oh, here we go again with the "problems".
A: They don't know how to deal with other human beings except by fighting. They twist other people's words around to suit their own exaggerated sense of grievance. Eventually the people around them figure this out and learn to stop arguing with them. And when that happens, they get desperate.
C: Nonsense! Reasoned argumentation is the basis of all conflict resolution! They're cowards. Cowards who won't face me in a fair fight.
A: Conflict resolution? And what do you end up resolving with your arguments?
C: Well, nothing, because they're too fucking stupid to listen. Pig-headed oafs.
A: Nothing. Nothing gets resolved, and your only recourse is more of the same. You come to me - you pay me - because nobody else wants to talk to you, Charles. You don't think you have a problem?
C: The hell with this. I'm leaving.
A: Fine by me. You know you will still owe me for our full session, correct?
C: I don't care, I'm not going to put up with any more of this bullshit.
A: Have a great day, Charles.
A: Fuck you, Armand.
CHARLES stomps out of the office and slams the door. He opens the office next door, clearly labelled "Abuse", gets behind the desk, and sits down, leaving the door open. After a few seconds, ARMAND walks into the office and sits down in the client's chair.
A: Charles?
C: Well, I'm not the queen of England.
A: I'm Armand. Why don't you have a seat?
C: And what if I don't want to?
A: Right then, stand, suit yourself. What brings you here today?
C: I've told you once already.
A: Yes, I have your paperwork, I'd just like to hear it in your words.
C: And the paperwork wasn't my words? What, do you think I was lying to you?
A: Charles, do you think you might have a problem?
C: A problem? What, do you think you're a fucking therapist or something?
A: It just seems extremely odd to me that you've come to all this trouble to see me and you won't tell me why you're here.
C: You're saying I'm sick. This is abuse.
A: No, actually, abuse is next door.
C: I don't have to take this sort of treatment.
A: No, you don't. You're free to leave at any time.
C: What? Is that it, then? You want rid of me, I go to all this effort and you won't even fucking talk to me?
A: I'm talking to you now, Charles.
C: You just told me to leave.
A: I said you were free to leave.
C: See, to me, that implies that you want me to leave.
A: If I wanted you to leave you wouldn't be here.
C: So why did you fucking tell me to leave then?
A: Honestly? Because I knew you wouldn't, Charles.
C: Oh, you're so fucking clever.
A: And you have a problem, Charles. You're _paying_ me to argue with you? Really?
C: I was hoping to get some sort of professional quality out of it. Obviously that was foolish of me.
A: See, that's not why most people come to me. Most people come to me because, Charles, they have problems.
C: Oh, here we go again with the "problems".
A: They don't know how to deal with other human beings except by fighting. They twist other people's words around to suit their own exaggerated sense of grievance. Eventually the people around them figure this out and learn to stop arguing with them. And when that happens, they get desperate.
C: Nonsense! Reasoned argumentation is the basis of all conflict resolution! They're cowards. Cowards who won't face me in a fair fight.
A: Conflict resolution? And what do you end up resolving with your arguments?
C: Well, nothing, because they're too fucking stupid to listen. Pig-headed oafs.
A: Nothing. Nothing gets resolved, and your only recourse is more of the same. You come to me - you pay me - because nobody else wants to talk to you, Charles. You don't think you have a problem?
C: The hell with this. I'm leaving.
A: Fine by me. You know you will still owe me for our full session, correct?
C: I don't care, I'm not going to put up with any more of this bullshit.
A: Have a great day, Charles.
A: Fuck you, Armand.
CHARLES stomps out of the office and slams the door. He opens the office next door, clearly labelled "Abuse", gets behind the desk, and sits down, leaving the door open. After a few seconds, ARMAND walks into the office and sits down in the client's chair.
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