tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70237854220914144962024-03-14T09:02:47.495-07:00All the Rest Is CommentaryEmmahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09956562001797104096noreply@blogger.comBlogger235125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7023785422091414496.post-43143178692718836742016-03-29T12:03:00.003-07:002016-04-07T05:21:28.921-07:00On Downton and Happy Endings<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/12/25/23/2F9C01BA00000578-3374289-Family_of_three_Anna_and_Mr_Bates_welcomed_a_baby_in_the_drama_p-a-21_1451086947230.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/12/25/23/2F9C01BA00000578-3374289-Family_of_three_Anna_and_Mr_Bates_welcomed_a_baby_in_the_drama_p-a-21_1451086947230.jpg" height="200" width="133" /></span></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">IF YOU'VE still not seen the series finale of Downton Abbey, I'll ruin it by saying everything turns out splendid. I counted at least seven actual or hinted-at couplings. A new business is formed. A wildly 'advantageous' marriage is made. Everyone stays alive.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">By any standards this is an audaciously cheerful outcome, but it is particularly so for a show that often wallowed determinedly in gloom. Through six seasons we suffered world war, unjust imprisonment, shocking deaths, familial feuding.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The final season cleverly foreboded all the things that could go horribly wrong. The earl of Grantham bursts an ulcer, splattering blood on the dinner china; Barrow slits his wrists in the bathtub; Henry is terribly near a fatal race car crash—but all survive. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In the final episode Anna makes everyone nervous, bopping about with maidly efficiency when she's eight and a half months pregnant and feeling unwell. Her water breaks and she says, <i>This doesn't seem right</i>, giving us all flashbacks to Sybil. But the final moments of the series find her abed, glowing, holding the bairn alongside proud Bates. The couple who voiced reasonable doubts about whether lasting good could ever come to their lives get to be ridiculously happy.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">HAPPY ENDINGS are often considered cheap. Tragedy is more artistically respectable. But as any Jane Austen fan knows, a well-woven happy ending is heftily satisfying and a great narrative feat. Such brightness creates an especially lovely contrast among the English, whose dourness the Dowager Countess of Grantham, in the final episode, explains by saying, <i>I blame the weather.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It may well be easier to strike characters with tragedy to buy easy narrative gravitas, rather than go to the effort of creating a plausible happy ending. But the thing is, sometimes life does actually go absurdly well. Rarely, perhaps, but it happens. Why not end there?</span>Emmahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09956562001797104096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7023785422091414496.post-72308855733804477762016-01-27T15:54:00.001-08:002016-01-27T16:08:54.258-08:00The Disappointing Femaleness of Hillary Clinton<span style="clear: left; color: black; float: left; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsZmP9TSg-CvsjxT4e6PKyXYr0ow11zuagoUj64xmW_9GTVOhBrKOSqDzK9XMK-1QSKyWck6L_8LT-CoqMCJNhNox-0pi5hnGMXJOUkVm6uaXWGkOIQvCM5koORCfSR8Sou_zOOiqtU94/s640/blogger-image--1135906515.jpg" /></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">THE BEST reason to vote for Hillary Clinton is, apparently, that she is a woman. Who is wowed by her platform, record, leadership? And yet, much as I would love to see a woman become president, it would crush my soul for Hillary Clinton to be that woman. (It would also crush my soul to have a terrible president for 4-8 years, and as that is a likely alternative I'm braced for heartbreak in any case.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It would crush my soul because Hillary Clinton does not own her femaleness. She dons and doffs it in that shape-shifting manner aptly called Clintonesque. When she hopes to prove her capability she sheds femininity, wearing her dour Serious Face, and when she hopes to demonstrate kindly relatability she puts on a softened, grandmotherly smile. Neither feels genuine. She wears her pantsuits not in a badbitch-butch Ellen DeGeneres way, but as if aiming for the least-offensive common denominator.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Where is the pride in electing a woman as president if her demeanor conveys the message that being powerful must mean acting like a man?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It dismays me, too, that we call her by her first name, since her last name is, well, kinda already taken. I find this symbolically fraught, an uncomfortably unfeminist reminder that she is ever in the shadow of that other one. She occasions much use of "in her own right," a meekly complimentary phrase whose accidental patronizing grates on my ears.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">HILLARY EMITS a vibe of obligatory sisterhood. She nudges, like, <i>Don't forget: I'm female! It would be historic!</i> This seems in rather poor taste. Is it not more honorable, more feminist to want to be measured on the merits?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Barack Obama got no easy pass with African American voters in 2008. On the contrary, they were pointedly skeptical of any assumption that Obama repped them by default. He had to earn that support, in part by demonstrating that he truly had grappled with and got what it means to be a black American. Clinton should be held to the same standard. Has she truly grappled with what it means to be a woman in an often anti-feminine society? If not, why should she presume she represents me, or any woman?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Hillary came up in an era when it was extremely rare and difficult to be a woman in power, and seems never to have transcended the contradictory weirdness and defensive posturing inherent to that struggle. She never found her individually-crafted path to female power as did other trailblazers of her generation, like Gloria Steinem, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Ann Richards, Nancy Pelosi.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This is not whatsoever to say all female people ought to be girly. (If Rachel Maddow ran for president I'd steal identities and vote ten times.) It's about being one's authentically gendered self. Hillary Clinton's authentic self is notoriously elusive. And nothing about her sends the message, <i>You can be whatever kind of woman you want to be, and be powerful.</i> Michelle Obama telegraphs that every time she opens her mouth, or bares her elegantly muscled arms.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Hillary Clinton is not, to borrow Maya Angelou's lovely phrase, 'a woman <i>phenomenally</i>.' She is a woman hesitantly, awkwardly, convolutedly, focus-groupedly. There are rich, beautiful possibilities in female leadership. Hillary, alas, does not embody them.</span></div>
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Emmahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09956562001797104096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7023785422091414496.post-1788395542730298462015-11-23T12:55:00.002-08:002015-11-23T12:55:18.845-08:00Harvesting Honey<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qH9WW90rjmY?feature=oembed" style="box-sizing: border-box; height: 384px;" width="100%"></iframe></span> Emmahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09956562001797104096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7023785422091414496.post-56751262133507467752015-11-02T14:19:00.001-08:002015-11-02T14:21:53.690-08:00The Good, the Bad, the Throwback<div style="box-sizing: border-box;">
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This honeymoon could not last. I knew it was over when Q 102 played “It Was a Good Day” and my car companion changed the station, saying, “I’m sick of that song.”</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Sick of it? That song? The disarmingly melodious strains of Cube’s classic, emerging serendipitously from the radio, have long been my harbinger of a good day to come. This magic began twenty years ago, when my clock radio nudged me from slumber with <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Just waking up in the mornin, gotta thank God. </em>I had a bangin hair day, got an A on a geometry test and smiled reciprocally at a cute boy.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Imagine my despair upon realizing that, actually, I too was sick of it.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">EVEN THE best music is ruined by excessive play–in fact the best music is likeliest to suffer that fate. There were thousands upon thousands of hip hop tracks made between, say, 1985 and 2005 (the approximate “throwback” timeframe), but inevitably radio, in its maddening, consumer-tested, none-shall-change-the-station way, hones in on a tiny number and plays them to death. At least with current radio the limited selection is constantly updating. You hear “Wet Dreamz” until it’s spent and then “Hotline Bling” rotates in. Not so with oldies. They get canonized. Some stat geek determines that practically everybody loves “Hypnotize” and “Gin and Juice” and those tracks go in the Play At All Times pile. A formula is set. And we all start to hate the songs we love most.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Throwback radio is the emerging beast of the airwaves nationwide. It’s a nifty way to target us crotchety thirty-somethings (with our presumable money to blow), who hobble about, muttering, “Who is this Fetty Wap feller anyway? Play another Dre track!” Like bubblegum oldies and classic rock, throwback is a deft repackaging of old music, tapping into nostalgia with a precision both infuriating and irresistible.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I DON’T resist. I have many moments of throwback bliss. They usually come when non-robot Scotty Fox is in the mix, during high listenership hours. On a recent <span class="aBn" data-term="goog_938677299" style="box-sizing: border-box;" tabindex="0">Saturday</span> afternoon I vibed my way to the gym on “Next Episode” mixed into “Go” mixed into “Just Kickin It” and life was good. But I’m wary now. I hear Pac’s voice and quickly change the station, lest his soul rebellion lose its power. Some things must remain sacred.</span></div>
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Emmahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09956562001797104096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7023785422091414496.post-79725915641432301732015-08-31T16:36:00.000-07:002015-09-01T16:50:35.404-07:00Dark Tunes from The Weeknd and Lana Del Rey<div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: #040404; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">Lana Del Rey sounds wet-eyed in her new single, singing, <i>I lost myself/When I lost you</i>. </span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: #040404; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">It's a far cry from the usual kiss-off playlists, whose standard message is embodied in </span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: #040404; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">Beyonce's classic "Irreplaceable": <i>I could have another you in a </i></span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: #040404; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;"><i>minute. </i></span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: #040404; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">The snarling kiss-off is meant to be empowering, but that equates power </span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: #040404; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">with bitchy invulnerability and blame-dumping, with a little man-hating thrown in for spice.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Lana does not do bitchy invulnerability. "Terrence Loves You" is equal parts sadness and acceptance (<i>Youuuuuuuuu aaaaaaaaaare/What you are</i>) and no parts righteous indignation. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Undoubtedly her critics will deride the notion of losing oneself in a relationship's end as disgustingly weak and self-misogynizing. But we do find ourselves through love. And when love ends we must find new selves, yet again. <i>I still got jazz</i>, she sings, a hint of triumph.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Lana lets her heart break. That's real power.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://open.spotify.com/track/2HNcNd5RPZ7DSRNbIl6JsP" target="_blank">"The Hills"</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Weeknd sings about love and tenderness, but he's not really about all that. His voice vibrates most in sinful subject matter; like some evil fungi he thrives in dark places. He really digs into those swamps and excavates, using an unlikely combination of erudition, falsetto and meanness.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">He plays a self-aware asshole on "The Hills," which is far more resonant than his other radio hit, "Earned It," on which he plays nice. The "Hills" beat is as bombastic as any Dirty South banger and drops into the hook like it's falling off a cliff: <i>I only call you when it's half past five/The only time that I'll be by your side.</i> Dude is badly using half-past-five chick and he knows it. The drugs are "feelin like it's decaf" and the hazy lyrics might be regretful, unrepentant or just amoral. But they do cop to bad behavior, which is pretty original among the heaps of lyrics in which women are badly used and it's too unremarkable to merit thought.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The only love in this song flutters in at the end with a female voice singing sweet nothings in Amharic. The Weeknd seems to be winning World's Most Famous Habeshah, and he is catching up to Drake in the category of Depressive Realness with Infectious Beats.</span></div>
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Emmahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09956562001797104096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7023785422091414496.post-13547348708552643312015-07-28T17:26:00.002-07:002020-12-11T12:54:30.540-08:00Beautiful Agriculture—and Fiber Rabbits<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I GOT rabbits. And thus have I graduated from average urban farmgirl to full maniac. These are farmstead animals, employed members of my backyard system. I'm not going to eat them. They're fiber rabbits.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Fiber rabbits! A few years ago I didn't know there was such a thing. Fiber rabbits belong to a special category of utilitarian farm animals that are adorable and don't have to die. That would be along with milkers, egg layers, bees, guardian animals and non-rabbit fiber animals like sheep. As a sensitive wuss vegetarian and farmstead enthusiast I really appreciate this category.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Even with the egg layers and dairy animals some loss of life must take place. Boy goats and roosters don't make eggs and milk, but eggs and milk cannot be produced without their existing at some point (as breeders or offspring) creating a conundrum most readily solved by someone--not a sensitive wuss vegetarian--eating them. Fiber animals of both sexes give humans something nice without anyone having to die. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">THERE ARE those who believe using other animals for any selfish human purpose is wrong. <i>Animals exist for their own reasons</i>, they say, suggesting we leave them to it. And I fear these presumable vegans are right, though I selfishly hope they are not entirely right. The thorny fact is that laying hens and milk cows and fluffball sheep would not exist without our having bred them into existence. So I think maybe technically, for better or worse, they exist for reasons inextricably bound to us. Same goes for dogs, cats, roses and most things we eat. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">All this human selection is a tremendous responsibility. There is a legitimate argument to be made that it is cruel to breed sheep and rabbits so heavily furred that they depend on us to regularly relieve them of their coats, or poultry who cannot survive the wild. I don't know yet whether I can adequately justify taking advantage of such breeding, but nor am I convinced of its inherent wrongness. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Animal rights sorts aren't the only skeptics of agriculture, of course. It is rather hip in certain circles to pine for hunter gatherer days--paleo eating and squatting to defecate and all that. Some people find it more honest to hunt or trap a wild animal than befriend, cohabit with and take advantage of a domestic one. I respect that way of thinking, but take a different view. And not just because I love cheese and bread and tomatoes and wool and a bunch of other things agriculture makes possible.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I THINK agriculture is beautiful. Done right. Joel Salatin is fond of saying that good agriculture should be 'aesthetically and aromatically, sensually romantic.' Good agriculture can give its participants bliss. I recently grew a buckwheat cover crop on one of my raised beds and watched my hens tear it up. In that moment was bliss--theirs and mine. They clucked self-actualization as they turned the soil for my fall crops.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Agriculture is a millenia-long collaboration among humans and other species. It's bold, messy and morally complex. It has the capacity to be epically destructive: to the land and to the lives of all who work for or eat from it. So even when you have a postage stamp city homestead, producing piddling quantities of anything, there is much to consider.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And consider I do! The ethics, the economics. I fret myself silly until I decide to go ahead and see if I can, say, keep a pair of Angora rabbits happy and healthy in my yard, and make clothes from their spare fur without ever hurting them, and actually come out ahead when I crunch the numbers. I weigh the costs of housing, organic pellets, grains for sprouting fodder against the benefits of making myself and everyone I know dope luxury scarves and hand warmers of absurd softness. From my own freaking bunnies! I think the numbers look good. We shall see.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">My buns are two months old now, learning the ropes along with me: when to hop about the yard and when to rest and digest in the safe hutch, how to relax into my grooming attentions, why collaborating with my wishes is worthwhile (treats!). I was at their conception. I met them hours after their birth.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Luckily I have had about six months to practice on my neighbors' English Angoras, one of whom birthed my own bunny bairns. They have taught me rabbit ways, rabbit treat preferences, how not to offend. (I did not realize this, but rabbits are easily offended.) They shed, I brush them, I accumulate luscious heaps of Angora wool. I watch Netflix, I spin the wool on a drop spindle, I knit the yarn into items of clothing, I wear the clothing. Every part of the process is meditative and gratifying.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">THERE ARE other perks. I take very seriously my role as a curator of cuteness in this world. And goodlord: it's almost unbearable how plush these wooly bunny bodies are. The creatures themselves are wonderful much like Angora scarves are. Fluff comfort. The purest kind of soft.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The rabbits eat things neither the chickens nor I particularly care for, like kale stems. And they love to chill in shady nooks neither the chickens nor I can squeeze into. They produce tidy, round fertilizer nuggets that can be applied directly. I am starting to see their niche in the backyard ecosystem.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As I look upon my yard these days--hens laying, bees foraging, bunnies furring, corn looming, beans working the pole--I am amazed at all the creation. Maybe humans love agriculture because it makes us feel like God. But I'm not sovereign over my yard. I'm just semi-competent designer slash manager. I'm in awe of what is going on back there, the crazy way all of us creatures are making something together.</span></div>
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Emmahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09956562001797104096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7023785422091414496.post-33979982090378217572015-06-29T17:21:00.001-07:002015-06-30T17:02:08.363-07:00The Good Old Thug Love Duet<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">REMEMBER the video for "I'm Real"? JLo in hoops, bun, pink velour jumpsuit, smiling over how real she is. Ja Rule in a white do-rag, growling Ja Rule-isms. It epitomizes a classic rap sub-genre: the thug love duet.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Turn-of-the-millennium thug love duets have a bubblegum quality that predates the darkly complex sex-love relations of the Drake era. Think of Cam'Ron's bouncy "Hey Ma" or Jay and Bey's "'03 Bonnie & Clyde," from before she was Ms. Carter.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">IT'S A WORLD where men rap hard and ladies sing nice. The guys are wild and profane, but the women are endlessly sweet, holding them down with smiling hooks. <i>Down to ride to the very end. </i>Thug love duets are about badboys and the good girls who love them; only the earnest heart of the good girl can melt a thug. <i>All I need in this life of sin.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Undisputed princess of the genre is almond-eyed Ashanti. She mighta been singing "Foolish" over these fools later, but she made an ideal thug lover, her innocent smile the perfect foil for rapper grimaces.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The ladies aren't just relegated to hook duty these days; they rap hard as the dudes when they feel like. Thug love bangers may be naughtily retrograde, but they are so delicious. It's that polarity of masculine and feminine, hard contrasted against soft, plus a notion of love that's wonderfully simple: opposites attract.</span><br />
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<a href="http://open.spotify.com/user/122475388/playlist/6nywp3lLw3eIWzdA8pDsKc" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Listen to my Thug Love Duets playlist</span></a></div>
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Emmahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09956562001797104096noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7023785422091414496.post-52272972236240542382015-04-30T17:43:00.000-07:002016-01-27T23:04:30.784-08:00Homesteady<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I SOMETIMES feel strange for loving homesteady things like I do. I chill in my backyard recliner for hours, watching preening hens and homebound bees, scheming how to grow cucumbers on the coop roof. And my love does not always express in sweet, reasonable ways; it frequently veers into obsessive fiend territory. Storey guidebooks and goat kid YouTubes are my bedtime porn.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I might be crazy. But maybe my fixation is rooted in wholesome earnestness. I think this stuff touches depths in my soul.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Nothing satisfies me quite like producing something in collaboration with soil and plants and fellow creatures. With enough health and space I think I'd enjoy producing a significant portion of my own food. In such case I would treat my homestead chores as a job, one I love, one that has clear meaning and is as basic and necessary as work can be: the work of providing for oneself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The usual model in our time is to pay various someones to provide all or most of our vital needs. We specialize in some niche, earning money to fund our food, clothing and shelter. This model is effective, of course, but it's so ingrained that providing for your own basic needs can seem like a cute lark, while the Serious Business of Life is assumed to be designing apps or distributing parking tickets or whatever one's specialty happens to be. Apps and parking tickets are important, but still.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">On the spectrum's other end are the Preppers, whose doomsday expectations seem both paranoid and reasonable. They seek self-sufficiency in preparation for imminent system collapse, when we'll run out of oil or be hit by a mega-earthquake and only those milking their own cows shall survive. They do have a point about the fragility of the systems we take for granted. But I suspect their world-bout-to-collapse alibi partly serves to justify to themselves and others why homesteadiness is urgently valuable, when some Preppers simply feel compelled toward that way of life for less articulable reasons. I bet they're kinda in love with it, like I am.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">HOMESTEADY THINGS may seem like a lot of unnecessary bother. I've often felt like I should think of it that way, open my eyes and realize I can just buy honey at the store and save myself the bee suit hassle. </span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But my homestead chores don't hassle me. They ground me, and tie me to the non-human world. Sure, they're a pain in the ass sometimes, but I love the steady discipline they require and the calm routines they create. Plus I dislike the notion of household duties as drudgery to be avoided. I think you can take pride in mucking a chicken coop. That's how you know you're doing the damn thing. If I'm not cleaning up after chickens (or scrubbing a toilet, or washing dishes) someone somewhere is doing it for me. I think that's worth remembering.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Far be it from me to preach, like, <i>Everybody should grow their own food! Just try to do one small thing! Grow potted herbs on your patio! </i>I don't like to presume that what is good for me would be good for anybody else. If you work long office hours and eat only takeout, hey: do you. There are plenty things I prefer to have other people do for me (like, say, plumbing). This is not a "you should" diatribe. I just don't want to feel like a weirdo for prioritizing this stuff so much. I don't want anybody to laugh when I start churning my own butter.</span><br>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Self-sufficiency seems old-fashioned--why do such things when we don't need to anymore? Maybe we don't, practically speaking, need to provide for ourselves, as in we won't otherwise starve. But homesteadiness satisfies the soul. It grants a deep sense of accomplishment. Providing my sustenance is the realest feeling I know.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">WHEN YOU provide any portion of your own foodstuffs you also realize how uncertain a game that is. Disaster abounds. <i>Man plans and God laughs</i>, as we pessimistic Yids say. Weather is cruel, pests merciless; your own body betrays your intentions. Coworkers of other species are no more reliable than human ones. And sometimes you just screw up. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This winter I had two disasters. My original bee colony succumbed to some combination of ailments, ant invaders and my own mistakes. Then Mrs. Darcy, my big, bitchy, beautiful Wyandotte, fell incurably ill. Two friends with an axe ended her miseries. To the extent such failures are my own (and it is impossib</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">le to quite know the extent) they make me feel almost unbearably guilty. I question whether any living thing should be entrusted to my care. But I always dust it off and try again. I still trust myself to take better care than a great many food producers would.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Most of us are far enough from the rural life that we imagine it as fundamentally peaceful, but it so is not. I don't ever plan to be a farmer, not least because it's </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">hard</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">. But then hard is real. Sometimes hens quit laying and lettuce gets coated in aphids; any insistence that it be otherwise leads down a road most of us dislike, paved with chemicals and animal abuse. Managing the constantly churning series of backyard catastrophes teaches me a lot.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Peace comes in those glimmery moments when the whole thing is mostly working. When the systems I have painstakingly devised actually allow plants to grow heartily and creatures to live a cushy lifestyle, all harmonizing to give me sustenance and earthly beauty, it seems like a goddamn miracle. But peace comes too in mid-disaster, when I'm burying a hen or taking swarming bees from a high branch, thinking, <i>This is the business of life</i>.</span></div>
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Emmahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09956562001797104096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7023785422091414496.post-19300593735245379532015-03-31T12:33:00.001-07:002015-03-31T12:44:22.256-07:00A Brief Poetic Analysis of Weezy's “Truffle Butter" Verse<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">THE FINAL lines of Lil Wayne's verse on </span><a href="http://youtu.be/EvlQOjK0MPk" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;" target="_blank">"Truffle Butter"</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> are magic. Not the words, of course; they're just a grab bag of oft-perverse rapperly braggadocio (e.g., paraphrasing, </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Beware my</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">city is so hard people die over sneakers</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">). But the SOUNDS. What use of language for mellifluous effect!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Goes like this:</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I'm so heartless, thoughtless, lawless and flawless</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Smallest, regardless, largest in charge and</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Born in New Orleans</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Get kilt for Jordans</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Skateboard I'm gnarly</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Drake, Tunechi and Barbie</span></i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Why is this so delightful? My poetry terms are rusty, but I think the delight results from a complexly intertwining rhyme scheme with assonance (which, as you may recall from a bygone English class, means repetition of vowel sounds.) </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">He opens with two internally-rhyming lines (heartless-thoughtless-lawless-flawless/smallest-regardless-largest), and simultaneously begins an assonant pile-on of 'ah's that carries through the end of the verse (thought-law-flaw-small-regard-large-charge-Orleans-Jordans-gnarly-Barbie). Course you gotta say 'Orleans' and 'Jordans' the proper Tunechi way for it to work.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">At line three the structure changes utterly, in mid-sentence (<a href="http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enjambment" target="_blank">enjambment</a>!), without any break in flow. The phrases shorten, the lines start to end-rhyme, the meter shifts. The first two lines are roughly trochaic tetrameter, so four sets of stressed/unstressed syllable pairs; the assonant 'ah's are stressed and the rhyming 'ess' endings are unstressed. Lines three through five are dactyl-trochee pairings: <i>SKATEboard I'm</i> is a dactyl (stressed-unstressed-unstressed) and <i>GNARly</i> is a trochee (stressed-unstressed).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In the final line he lets Drizzy and Nicki be the stressed syllables, leaving his own moniker humbly unstressed. Perhaps an acknowledgement of his semi-emeritus, godfatherly role in today's rap world?</span><br />
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Emmahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09956562001797104096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7023785422091414496.post-55699428710835944362015-01-29T15:17:00.002-08:002015-02-21T21:06:35.756-08:00On Pain<span style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0980392); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.701961); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; text-decoration: -webkit-letterpress;">III. Appreciation</span><br />
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<span style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0980392); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.701961); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; text-decoration: -webkit-letterpress;">I love to complain about how Pain fucks with my life. (And lately it sure has done so.) But in rare, shining moments, I appreciate certain things about it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I resent the Pain 96% of the time. It makes me dull, tired & stupefied. It makes my dreams seem beyond reach, because you can't reach for shit when you're lying on the floor. And Pain is self-centered, demanding you forget Wellness.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">That 4% though. Moments when I appreciate the teachings of Pain make me feel calm and wise. If I can imagine that Pain gives me something worthwhile my perception of the Pain experience changes. Hardship can enrich your soul if you look at it right.</span><br />
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7023785422091414496" name="more"></a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In those 4% moments I don't feel desperate to escape difficulty. And that's a useful kind of peace, because, hey, life is hard. Sometimes it's nice to stop resisting and just sink into the sucking. Suffering well is an art, one I'd like to learn. Seems a smarter bet than trying to sneak through life without letting suffering find me.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Pain slows me down. The pace of life changes when you can't do many things and can only do others with difficulty. When Pain really hits there can be no flitting from one activity to the next, no scurrying to fulfill obligations. I move deliberately. On a bad day I fix my hot cereal, then rest, shower, then rest, stretch, fix a sandwich, then rest, take a little walk, then rest. (Which might make a lovely day if it weren't for the disc-nerve vortex, and my nagging awareness of obligations unfulfilled.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Being forced to a slower pace during Paintimes has taught me the value of slow-moving in any times. I hate zooming through days. Rush erodes my awareness of the world around me, other people, my own body, own soul. In slower motion I see kinglets in the fig tree, and how long my nails have gotten, and the troubles in the eyes of someone I love. And Pain necessitates awareness. I have to notice when I am about to overdo activity, or which muscles need stretching or what mistakes I made leading up to a setback.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">When you go slow, you have to deliberate and choose. You can't just pack it all in. You have to decide what is worth the use of limited energies. The choosing reminds me what matters and makes me rejoice in small delights. A pool of butter in my oat bran makes me happy. A short walk on a creek path is magical. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Pain taught me to avoid overlords. The only way to win against so cunning an enemy as Pain is to be fully in charge of my own life. Controlling friends, family, employers, doctors cannot be tolerated. This is great, since overlords suck regardless.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Pain makes me spend a whole lot of time with myself. I can watch dwarf goat videos and read Wendell Berry and re-watch <i>Wire</i> episodes by the dozen, but distraction must sometimes cease. And there I am, just me, motionless on the floor. It's excruciating to have to face my raw self, but valuable too. If I can face my neuroses, my limitations, everything about myself that irritates me, well then I feel like I am okay. I can befriend myself, however annoying a friend I may be. Pain shows me how much I can endure. Every now and then someone says,<i> I don't know how you stand it,</i> and I feel like a badass.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And sometimes, maybe only 1% of the time, I appreciate the state of just being, and the many ways I am healthy--the fact that my heart is beating and my brain can make my limbs move and I am alive. And when I can drive to the store and get my own groceries, damn, I sure appreciate that.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0980392); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.701961); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This is the third essay in the series <i>On Pain</i>. The first two are </span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><a href="http://www.alltherestiscommentary.com/2014/02/on-pain.html" style="color: black;">here</a><span id="goog_815825056"></span> and <a href="http://www.alltherestiscommentary.com/2014/03/on-pain.html" style="color: black;">here</a><span style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.7019607843137254);"><span style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0980392);">.</span></span></span></span></div>
Emmahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09956562001797104096noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7023785422091414496.post-17588937530943636092014-11-28T14:40:00.000-08:002014-11-28T14:48:27.754-08:00Day of the Consumption<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">AH, BLACK FRIDAY, the holiday of American consumerism, when demon-eyed shoppers fight for discount flat-screens across this great nation. It's not the sort of holiday you can wish somebody a happy one of. It's more like gloomy Yom Kippur, when you wish people 'an easy fast.'</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I am not strictly opposed to consumerism; surely we can all enjoy a bit of exuberant retail now and then without harm. But the consumerism of Black </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Friday has a maniacal, desperate tone. It is not billed as a fun day out shopping, but as a sort of mall armageddon. Getting gifts becomes, in this model, a massive, </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">panic-stricken mission rather than a cool opportunity to think up a few things loved ones might enjoy.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Talk of 'door-busters' and 4am store openings, frantic ads </span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">during Thanksgiving football, whip buyers into a retail feeding frenzy</span>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Black Friday ads are designed to create a perception of urgent need and brief abundance, to be followed by dire scarcity. </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">These deals won't last,</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> they grimly warn. </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Get yours NOW, before they're ALL GONE</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">. Women in commercials compare their bag takes, implicitly competing for some 21st century homemaking prize. The shoppers at big box stores look like looters, grabbing what they can while the getting is good. Walmart challenges customers to 'win the day.'</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The very name has the ring of doomsday. Black <i>Tuesday</i> was when the 1929 <i>stock market crashed</i>, for godsakes, ushering in the Great Depression. This is how we kick off the Most Wonderful Time of the Year©?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The purpose of the madness is for everybody to get what they want on Christmas, without it costing a fortune. That sounds like an okay idea. It is amazing how many shiny gadgets, lovely clothes and complicated toys can be had today on a reasonable budget, and, hey, I'm all for bargain shopping and not immune to shiny gadgetry. And yet it sounds awfully nice for retailers not to manipulate us so crassly, for kids not to expect Playstations, and for moms not to feel obliged to camp out at Walmart to buy them.</span></div>
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Emmahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09956562001797104096noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7023785422091414496.post-91152507443622847542014-10-31T13:09:00.001-07:002014-10-31T13:45:11.044-07:00Dawn of the Booty Supremacists<div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">ONCE UPON a time, women longed to have flat butts. 'Big tits, tiny ass' is how my mother described the body ideal of her youth. How times have changed. I have a forty-two inch posterior and no complaints.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Well, one complaint. Now that we the callipygian have risen to power, I don't want us lording it over the assless. In the pop culture vanguard, the lording has already begun.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">At the zany close of "Anaconda," when, in the video, Nicki is giving Drake a quite skillful lapdance, she ad-libs, as only Nicki can, </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This one is for.../ My bitches with a fat ass in the fuckin club/ I said where my fat ass big bitches in the club/ Fuck them skinny bitches! fuck them skinny bitches in the club!/ I wanna see all the fat ass bitches in the motherfuckin club fuck you if you skinny bitches what! kyuh!</i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I hate to gripe; Nicki should say whatever she wants. And I could definitely see myself in the club shouting along, <i>Fuck them skinny bitches! Fuck them skinny bitches in the club!</i>--because that sounds fun to shout. It's hilarious and mean. But still. I see we are veering in a troublesome direction.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">'Skinny bitches' are also referenced in Meghan Trainor's curve empowerment anthem "All About That Bass." The song is cute, harmless, direly catchy, but I find it odd for a song whose theme is plainly meant to be 'You are BEAUTIFUL!' to mock those poor skinnies. In the video a representative Size 2 girl looks on, befuddled, banished to the fringe while the curvy girls dance and frolic. Trainor sings, <i>Every inch of you is perfect</i>, but this seems to apply to curve-acceptance rather than everything-acceptance.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">IN THIS Kardashi-era, it is hardly reasonable to claim, as Trainor does, to be 'bringing booty back.' Pop and rap radio currently serve up about a hundred butt exaltations per hour, staggeringly outpacing references to any other body part. So don't let's pretend we are uplifting the downtrodden here.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Booty supremacy uses the same faulty logic as Barbie-body supremacy, presuming that there can be but one ideal type of beauty. We can get away with it by acting like we are empowering an underrepresented minority (curves still being rare in certain kinds of beauty imagery). But it's not right. We risk becoming <a href="http://rap.genius.com/Sir-mix-a-lot-baby-got-back-lyrics">the "oh my god Becky" girls</a>, those judgmental meanies who find women with bodies unlike theirs bizarre and gross.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Am I pleased to have my culture come around to idealizing my own body type within my lifespan? You better believe. But we ought not hate upon vanquished 'skinny bitches,' many of whom end up skinny not by any eating-disordered design, but simply by genetic fate. (Shoot: some of them are getting fake butts.) We in the thick community should celebrate our thin sistren. Beauty runs in all sizes, even 2.</span></div>
Emmahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09956562001797104096noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7023785422091414496.post-89816206374075159932014-08-31T18:55:00.000-07:002015-02-21T21:07:09.605-08:00Food Religion<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">WHICH IS healthier? Soy or beef? Your answer will depend upon the food religion to which you subscribe.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I know, I know. It's obnoxious of me to refer to it thusly. I've annoyed everyone I've talked to about this subject, probably because no one wants to think of herself as believing in a 'food religion.' People say, <i>Religion is based on belief. My nutritional choices are based on facts.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Ah, but. Most people make at least some effort to eat healthfully, and we all think our healthy eating choices are based on nutritional fact. And yet each of us chooses, often quite adamantly, to eat different things. One person says beef is artery-clogging, hormone-riddled and murderous, while soy is packed with wholesome plant protein. The other says soy is naught but an allergenic, GMO phytoestrogen, while land meat is the hearty fuel of our ancestors. Old reliable Science does not unequivocally discredit either point of view.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Healthy eating is not strictly about facts. It is also about preference and beliefs. There are beliefs about meat-eating and whether food should be cooked; beliefs about the merits and demerits of fat, sugar, gluten, protein; sects led by online gurus with trim waists and dewy skin. And there is the agnostic default, what health bloggers pityingly refer to as the Standard American Diet or SAD. Those who care about nutrition tend to be willful about their particular beliefs and the pious are often eager to share the good news. (See, for example, my breathless commendation of whole milk, which failed to convert my mom away from skinny lattes.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">FOOD BELIEFS are ever-shifting, subject to new research, fresh trends and the vagaries of life experience. Canola was the "it" oil of the aughts, but among bleeding-edge nutrition hipsters, it is being shunned in favor of the kinds of old-fashioned, solid-at-room-temp fats that used to get teased for being so saturated. Lard is back. Vegetarianism was once considered near-obnoxiously moral and healthy, but there is now a burgeoning cohort of born-again carnivores, taunting us poor veggies with thinly-veiled proselytisms about how vigorous they feel eating flesh.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Much food religious belief nowadays fixates on avoidance of certain foods. The aisles of Whole Foods cry out with claims of freedom from one baddie or another. I bought this veggie burger whose package proudly declared it corn-free, gluten-free, yeast-free, dairy-free, egg-free, soy-free and nut-free. (Plus, you know: meat-free.) Remarkably, there was some food in there. And it was actually most tasty.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But wholesale demonization of basic foods can lead to paranoid worries about what the hell is actually good to eat. I read a hilarious <a href="http://thelovevitamin.com/3906/10-ways-intuitive-eating-could-make-you-happier-and-healthier/#.U-QDvGK9KK0">rant on this subject</a> that went like this:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Grains are hard to digest because of their leptins and phytates and their gluten (it’s guaranteed to punch holes right through your gut wall!), and because humans haven’t adapted in ten thousand years to eating them, and we didn’t have them in the stone age...Dairy products – dude, cow’s milk is for cows, not people. That’s gross. Think of all the hormone in there to make baby cows grow so big!! That’s not for humans!!...Think that juicy apple is good for you? THINK AGAIN, SIR! That stuff is WAY too high in fructose – that’s a sugar and all sugar is bad for you! It feeds candida, it spikes your blood sugar, you are on your way to certain diabetes!!!… chard, spinach, and kale? OXALIC ACID!! That stuff binds to calcium and minerals and actually depletes you! and what are you doing?? are you steaming your vegetables!! ARE YOU CRAZY??? They’re toxic that way, along with all cooked food, didn’t you know that??!</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">If you believed the negative claims against every food, there would never be anything for dinner ever again. Remember that corn-soy-nut-egg-gluten-dairy-meat-free burger? Yeah, that's <i>processed</i>. And if there's one thing almost every nutrition zealot agrees upon, it's that processed foods are bad.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">WISE TYPES say you should 'follow your body's intuition' when it comes to eating, which sounds lovely, but who among us feels confidently knowledgeable enough to do so without at least some guidance? We know food is a primary reason why one person is fit and another obese, or why one lives long and another dies of disease. That's way too much pressure. It's tempting to turn those presumably life-or-death decisions over to some nutritional authority.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But then...which authority to trust? Because there are gazillions, and ain't like they all agree. Almost all food religions sound sensible to me sometimes and flat batshit other times. The batshit stuff often comes in the dread comments sections that follow every nutrition article. A paleo type says, "Scientists have done studies saying that vegetarians would die off due to lack of protein leading to a smaller brain." A vegan type says, "Humans shouldn’t be drinking breast milk from a different species...Especially giving it to kids still developing their bodies. Should be child abuse."*</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">*Both quotes are from comments on health blogs, though the writers' food religious affiliations were not explicitly identified.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But it's not just the quacks on the either end who utterly disagree. The dewy-skinned gurus do too. I go to all these wonderful holistic healer types and want to trust them all, but one touts milk for protein while another considers it too hormoney. Makes a person want to give up and eat the SAD.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The zealotry of food religion in this country at this moment probably has something to do with the, dare I say, dysfunctionality of American food culture. We are but half a century out from the "Better Living Through Chemistry"-era cuisine of margarine, Wonder Bread and Spam, foods designed to be modern and convenient more than healthy and wholesome. Microwaveable frozen dinners and dubious diet shakes boasting their few calories were the 'health foods' of our recent past. Course correction could take awhile.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As a nation of immigrants, lacking a unified food culture, with seemingly infinite choices, a history of junk food abuse and notorious obesity rates, we are highly confused. And to confuse us yet further, there is a new group of techie food engineers who eschew the predominant local/organic/fresh/whole foods religion in favor of neo-Spams like <a href="http://www.soylent.me/">Soylent</a>, a meal replacement drink taglined <i>What if you never had to worry about food again? </i>Soylent purports to contain all the nutrients humans need and is marketed as healthy.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">CONVERTS OF all stripes are united in avoiding the SAD, with its corn syrupy sodas and GMO taters fried in hydrogenated soybean oil. So hey: at least we're trying. And we probably oughtn't worry. People from many cultures thrive eating wildly different diets. There is no one right way to eat. We each have to find our right ways, and that's a winding trial-and-error process. New scientific findings, and the trends they engender, are bound to come along and complicate matters, so we also have to strike a balance between heeding those and trusting our guts.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I remain pretty confused myself. I've stopped buying presumalby inflammatory vegetable oils, but I don't trip off eating them in prepared foods and restaurant meals. I've come to Jesus where dairy fats are concerned. They may not be as healthy as some claim, but if I can eat butter and fatted yogurt and not grow plump and feel ill, I <i>will</i>. Because that shit is <i>delicious</i>. Tastes so right, can't be wrong. I'm not giving up on wheat, lest it should make a lard-style comeback after I've suffered years of glutenlessness. (And my twenty-seven year vegetarian phase is not about to end, so kindly refrain from hints about seeing the meat light.) Other than that, who knows.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">When I do settle upon a food belief system that suits me, I'll try to remember that it suits me alone. Gluten and dairy make many people sick. Meat makes many people happy. So: do you. As long as we're putting some care into it and eating what seems to nourish us, we'll probably all be okay.</span><br />
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Emmahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09956562001797104096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7023785422091414496.post-13389971177250039272014-06-27T11:44:00.002-07:002015-09-01T16:53:57.461-07:00Lana Del Rey and the Forbidden Feminine<div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTvUpQkuDj0b0Z7BsdjomdEPraW2iVxC-uvgu4aA0_R4OfQWnKMKxjLym7OxAKEdUWIXEy8PdKksw23Y2rzvpYkLMmoxWsdD4t3h3Z9YVC6ps7NW_fK2xAVIrV0cWJ8dv5EPJD8OBZ2eY/s1600/Lana-Del-Rey.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTvUpQkuDj0b0Z7BsdjomdEPraW2iVxC-uvgu4aA0_R4OfQWnKMKxjLym7OxAKEdUWIXEy8PdKksw23Y2rzvpYkLMmoxWsdD4t3h3Z9YVC6ps7NW_fK2xAVIrV0cWJ8dv5EPJD8OBZ2eY/s1600/Lana-Del-Rey.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">LANA DEL REY evokes a world of red lips, intoxicants, deceptively innocent dresses, punky badboys and slick-haired sugar daddies who take you on fast drives down the coast at night. Her songs sound so lushly beautiful that you almost wish to be in them--until you remember how miserable that would be, since they are made of gilded angst, as dark-skied as pop can be. Lana has a <i>Mad Men</i>-esque knack for slathering glamor on turmoil until it's gorgeous. Her new album <i>Ultraviolence</i> is darker even than previous releases and edges into a hazily adulterous, abusive space. Even when she's cooing <i><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKxuiw3iMBE">Ooh baby ooh baby/I'm in love</a> </i>it sounds like a scary place to be.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Her fascinations with quicksand sexuality, meekness and a badgirl variety of transactional romance are irksome and anti-feminist to some. "If we as a society accept the disempowered form of femininity that Del Rey embodies, young women are truly in trouble," read a <a href="http://msmagazine.com/blog/2014/06/12/lana-del-rey-not-a-feminist/">recent denunciation in<i> Ms</i></a>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I think such irking is important. Feminist thought tends to wish away some common, deep-rooted habits of the female mind, like yearning for male attention, fearing aloneness, being enticed by wealth, and that ancient craving for the protection of muscles. (</span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">He holds me in his big arms/Drunk and I am seeing stars/This is all I think of</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">, Lana disempoweredly sang on "</span><a href="http://youtu.be/cE6wxDqdOV0" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Video Games</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">.") Even if we choose to sensibly repress such brain habits, lifting the rules to see what may lie beneath serves a real-keeping purpose.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Lana keeps it thusly real. Her sisterly defenders point to every woman's (feminist!) right to be screwed up, and I do not disagree. Lana's music contains disturbing scenarios, which should be heard as earnest art, dark subject matter handled with nuance and skill, rather than judged as bad role modeling. But her words are rarely as shocking as <i><a href="http://rock.rapgenius.com/Lana-del-rey-ultraviolence-lyrics">He hit me and it felt like a kiss</a></i>; she is mostly criticized for the submissive fragility and phallocentric romanticism of her lyrics. The singer Lorde <a href="http://www.thefader.com/2013/08/08/interview-lorde/#ixzz35afUSg1D">said of Del Rey</a>, "It's so unhealthy for young girls to be listening to, you know: 'I’m nothing without you.' This sort of shirt-tugging, desperate, don’t leave me stuff."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But surely many a woman has had not-proud moments of "don't leave me" shirt-tugging, if only in her own head. Weakness, fear, neediness--and the use of seduction to paper them over--are authentic parts of female experience, and it is valuable to hear a voice that admits to loving foolishly. Lana, singing <i>Need you, baby, like I breathe you, baby</i>, takes us to vulnerable corners of the female psyche that feel forbidden. Her unfeminist vices let us question the unflappable power pose of contemporary womanhood.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">WITH HER bombshell image and helpless romanticism, Lana sings sex and love in unusual ways. She doesn't care about uprightness, suitability. She sings desire, desperation, unseemly devotion. She sings the kind of sex that makes you feel unpowerful in a good way (<i><a href="http://youtu.be/zTgCn4qmRvU?t=1m30s">In the land of gods and monsters I was an angel/Looking to get fucked hard</a></i>) and the kind that makes you feel powerful in a wrong way (<i><a href="http://youtu.be/z0Q9xJ5JuNo?t=33s">Fucked my way up to the top/This is my show</a></i>.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">She has sufficiently intact romantic sensibilities to remake the deliciously treacly Disney classic "<a href="http://youtu.be/8waJ7W3QcJc">Once Upon A Dream</a>," darkening it almost beyond recognition but still honoring the love dream of the original. The punky badboys and sugar daddies are her antagonists, but also her romantic heroes. This is an artist captivated by love, in all its soaring and crashing. The Lana of her songs is exquisitely, sometimes tragically, vulnerable in love, but savvy enough to know that vulnerability carries its own form of honest power.</span></div>
Emmahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09956562001797104096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7023785422091414496.post-38118116317107746202014-06-11T11:36:00.000-07:002015-02-21T21:07:50.924-08:00Farm Dreams (Are Made of Bees)<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">MY YARD is full of dreams come true. The yard itself, sunny and alive, I dreamed up during a cold, hard Brooklyn winter. I saw the Craiglist ad for a cottage in Oakland with fruit trees and I cried; it looked so much like my dream, and I figured that meant I couldn't have it. (But I got it. That still amazes me.) I dreamed up the foot-high cedar raised beds with tidy rows of carrots and leeks. I dreamed the flock of hens chilling in the shade of the fig tree, and, later, I dreamed the banty subflock, roosting in a barn-red mini coop perched preciously on stilts.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Dreams are messy, of course, in the coming true. I've lived in '1 BR Cottage with Fruit Trees' for ten years now. I had to cut down the loquat and the old lemon. The decrepit peach succumbed to disease, and the figs, which aren't very tasty, besmirch the patio. I've had hens murdered by predators and my vegetable beds infected with equally deadly Verticillium wilt.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But none of those disappointments ruin the dream. Such woes are the price of realness; they cannot outweigh the satisfaction of imagining something wonderful and bringing it to fruition. The lemon and orange I planted the year I moved in are big, productive trees now. I open a high window and grab some bout-to-be-juice.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Problems also shape the course of new dreams. The dread Verticillium has made tomatoes and squashes (and hella other things) hard to grow, which depresses me. Last year, as I watched my cucumbers wither and my strawberry leaves turn crisp brown, I started thinking of ways to produce food from my yard that would not involve soil. I began to dream about bees.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A BEEHIVE was one of those supercool things I thought I'd maybe have someday, perhaps when living with some brave individual willing to have bees all up in his business. I thought that way about chickens too, circa 2005. I figured I'd maybe get chickens at some suitable juncture, when I was fifty or whatever. But I got chickens circa 2006.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Once I dream something up wheels turn and I can't help but make the thing happen. At least that's how it works for farm dreams. Farm dreams have a fairly straightforward arc: think it up => read obsessively about how to do it => plan meticulously and excitedly => shop! => plunge in fearfully. And there I am dumping ten thousand bees into a box painted to match the coop. (Would that I could work this magic system for non-farm dreams.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">When any farm dream is in the coming-true process, I freak out daily. I suppose the notion that my vision is really happening is too hard to believe, so I expect doom around every corner. I worried that the swarm I purchased would abscond (which means the bees all fly away in a fuck-you cloud), that my colony was queenless (which means reproductive doom), that I had so-called 'zombees' (which means workers get parasitized by an evil fly). But as the spaces between worries get longer, I am loving the bees. My ultra-miniature new livestock are wondrous to behold. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">At any given moment of daylight there is serious traffic at the hive entrance, bees zooming out purposefully, ready to fly miles for nectar, while others return with fresh supplies, stomachs full, legs laden with pollen. Their earnest dedication has me feeling guilty about the part where I'll 'harvest' honey. I say harvest-in-quotes because that word connotes reaping the rewards of one's work, and taking frames of honey seems way less honorable than that. How many bees are flying and dying for those honey stores? And here I'm gonna barge in like some asshole bear and just gank it? I should make a big show of doing some helpful things for these bees so I can feel justified. I did give them a cozy hive, easily defensible from thieves other than me. That's a start.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Some time next winter I'll be having scrambled eggs and orange juice and mint tea with honey and it will all be from my yard. That's gonna taste so good.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">WHENEVER I feel discouraged by life, thinking this or that cannot possibly happen because it would be way too awesome if it did, I should remember my younger self in cold Brooklyn, gazing at '1BR Cottage with Fruit Trees,' disbelieving I could ever have what I have now.</span></div>
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Emmahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09956562001797104096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7023785422091414496.post-40166977349773564042014-05-06T14:22:00.001-07:002014-05-06T14:24:29.129-07:00Happy<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I THINK I might be happy. Feels strange. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There have been long, cold times in my recent life. Sustained happiness is a feeling I had kinda forgotten--perhaps even wished to forget, so as not to suffer unpleasant comparisons. I have been (mostly) glad for good happenings in the lives of other people, but tried to keep such concepts at a safe remove from myself. Better not to dwell upon that which is not quite an option.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But I'm pretty sure I recognize this warmth on me, feeling like <i>For lo the winter is past</i>. Looks like happiness.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I DON'T know about this happiness business. Really though. It's disturbing. Unhappiness has a cool certainty and deflated expectations. Happiness is such a wild risk. It's bound to crumble at some point. What if I get accustomed and can't bear the crumbling?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And if this whole happy thing keeps up...will I become obnoxious? Will I become the sort of person with an endless parade of charmed-life Facebook status updates, tormenting those less fortunate? What if I start <i>expecting</i> my life to be good, rather than being grateful for goodness? Will I turn into a total brat when little shit goes wrong? Will I avoid the sorrows of others, lest they tarnish the sheen of my bliss? I suppose I make the depressing, psuedo-Buddhist assumption that misery makes you empathic and happiness makes you arrogant. But I know some humble, happy people. Wonder how they do it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Perhaps the best way to avoid these troubling questions is by dampening my emergent happiness with worries about the nature of happiness itself. Phew. I feel better already.</span></div>
Emmahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09956562001797104096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7023785422091414496.post-54152818429326020462014-04-03T13:56:00.001-07:002015-02-21T21:08:52.164-08:00Why Negative Rap Is So Damn Good<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">WHENEVER I listen to the Talib Kweli classic "<a href="http://youtu.be/87docz4cvGk?t=7s">Get By</a>," I am transported to a land of rainbows and sunshine. In such a state of bliss, it is easy to think, 'Man, why can't rap always be about love and uplift and the beautiful struggle?' Indeed, many an earnest hip hop fan has, at one time or another, wished rap could quit being so <i>wrong </i>so much of the time, and just be more <i>positive</i>. Such laments are often accompanied by forlorn remembrances of the good old days, when rap was pure.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But such thinking is based on illusion. Rap has never been pure, and never should be.</span></div>
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In fact, negative rap is just as worthy as the positive kind. If you doubt this, try the following experiment: Next time you are in a shit mood, prescribe yourself "Shook Ones" on repeat. Bathe in the anger. Witness its healing power. When the world treats you bad, aggression in your headphones is cathartic. The less rational and sensibly-directed the aggression, the better the catharsis. This is but one of the great things about negative rap.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">AGGRESSION is inherent to hip hop; few would argue with that. But some might argue that the aggression should be, like, productive rather than senseless. The work of Public Enemy, say, or The Coup, is sure not soft. It has an edge, but it's a positive edge, cutting against social injustice. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">While I respect political rap, its sensible aggression does not work as "Shook Ones" medicine for me. If all angry rappers turned to socialism it'd be a dull world indeed. Hip hop can't be *good* all the time. There's something in it that yearns to be bad, and that badness is part of its allure.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A commonly-cited justification for rapper negativity is what I like to call The Documentary Argument. Once popular among the great studio gangsters of the West, it basically goes, 'Yeah I rap about drive-bys and dope slanging. This is how it is in the hood. I am a mere vessel for the truth.' It's not a bad argument, but it's a sneaky one, with omissions. It innocently pretends not to enjoy bragging about thug triumphs, when, in fact, that is half the point. (And, needless to say, the boasts can be plenty fictionalized.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Tales of lawless violence, well-told, are fascinating, and vicarious delight in outlaw coolness is a big part of their appeal. So I can't pretend I listen to <i>The Chronic</i> just for accurate documentation of the Compton streets. <i><a href="http://youtu.be/6uZxhtavYyw?t=46s">Protected by n***** with big dicks, AKs and 187 skills</a></i> is a stylized glorification of violence. Backed by synthesizey Dre sounds, it has the same visceral appeal as Ray Liotta's '<a href="http://youtu.be/GW71aILZEXo?t=10s">As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster<span id="goog_2117482435"></span></a>.' This is art, where aggression requires no reasonableness and negativity needs no justification.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">THERE MAY well be a purpose in rappers rapping their violent impulses or misogyny or homophobia, though it is slippery to pin down. At any rate, scolding misses the point. If an artist really is that fucked up, or willing to act that fucked up, I find it more interesting to ask why than to get all impotently offended. Many rappers <i>don't </i>respect women. It's not on me to correct them. I just take note. And if a rapper is talking about guns or hoes just out of uncreative laziness, this too is telling.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The job of an artist is to be truthful, not to be positive. Truth in art is not a matter of accurately recounting life, either; it's more wildly alchemical than that. So if Kanye really is a raging narcissist, and if Tyler (or his persona) really is a hard-core depressive, well, they're doing fine jobs expressing what lies in their beautiful, dark, twisted souls.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Positivity is critical. In hard times, a positive outlook can save a person. And some days you really do wake up feeling brand new, and jump up, and put on Kweli, and it sounds just right. But positive can't be mandatory or we'd all explode. Sometimes when life gives you lemons you'd rather throw them at pedestrians.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Besides, negativity is no less the truth. We have to be honest with ourselves about just how hard shit can suck. All rap may well be about struggle, but struggle inspires many responses: work and uplift, yes, but also escapism and rage. The rage can land anywhere (and often lands on some weaker-looking being, like, for example, a woman). The darkest hip hop gives us a depressive realist view of the world that is just as valuable as uplift. Crazy dirty club bangers give us another kind of uplift, objectionable and irresistible at the same damn time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It is in rap's fundamental nature to need to scandalize. It does so in different ways, in different moods. It fights the power, pimps big, runs the streets, beefs with itself. We fans--especially the gentler souls among us--may think we want to tame it, but really we don't. Hip hop on permanent good behavior would cease to be hip hop.</span></div>
Emmahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09956562001797104096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7023785422091414496.post-60951851695915979972014-03-03T14:29:00.001-08:002015-02-21T21:08:31.909-08:00On Pain<div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I WAS FROZEN for a couple years. On the upside I don't seem older than I did pre-freeze: my face hasn't seen much sun and life hasn't had much chance to wear me out. On the downside years have gone by and things have happened and I had no role in them. I couldn't. I was on ice.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I was frozen in my house, supine on an ice pack, for six months or so, then occasionally upright for the next year, thawing ever so slowly. Then refreezing, then thawing, again and again, up to the present pleasant thaw, three years later.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One of the funny things about being frozen is that you stop minding, or stop noticing. The glacial pace of my life became normal to me. I'd forget it was weird until I encountered some healthy person who seemed to be zipping around at dangerous speeds.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">WHILE I WAS stuck in frozen tundra things did not really happen. I did not become more of a Writer. I did not meet handsome suitors. I did not go anywhere on a plane. (It is terrible to whine about such things; meeting handsome suitors and going on planes are privileges, not rights.) I used what wherewithal I had to fix some food and tidy my little frozen cave and then returned to the safety of motionlessness.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I may be the same age as my peers, but I feel like I've had about five fewer years being alive. (I was on ice some years in my twenties too, hence the five year total.) The years still happened. I just didn't make much of them. Maybe that's because I trepidate. Maybe it's also because I was on ice. And maybe I move slowly because I am too used to ice.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I get excited about living a defrosted life of motion, but the thaw also reminds me just how long I've spent on ice. I am haunted by opportunity cost. I fear I have missed some chances once and for all. But maybe some good things became of me while I was in solid form--things that will serve me now that I'm liquid.</span></div>
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Emmahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09956562001797104096noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7023785422091414496.post-32982688350674107272014-01-31T17:03:00.000-08:002015-02-21T21:09:09.927-08:00On Pain<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I. The Weird World of Variable Disability</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I DON'T SPEND my days lying on the floor now. I do things, which is lovely. It is a great pleasure to blast the radio on the way to the grocery store, or walk from a parking spot near the lake to the gym, where I yoga and sauna.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It is difficult, then, to explain how Pain infects my life. So many of my dreams and ambitions feel stunted by Pain. One might suppose the operation of Pain on my life would be logical, a static set of limits, within which I function freely. The truth is more chaotic. Pain can overwhelm, even when it's not at its worst. Everything becomes hard. Thinking becomes hard. At some point Pain becomes a sickness. It's not just discomfort felt in one place; the whole body becomes incapable, lethargic, like when you can't run or speak in a dream.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There are things one must do in a day, in order to maintain a life: hu$tlework and dishes and errands and the rest. When Pain is bad--shit, even when Pain is only kinda bad--small tasks become stressful burdens. When Pain is bad I expend much mental energy on task triage: which things absolutely must be done today and which can be safely neglected? Many of those neglected tasks are things things I really wanted to do. Seeds I wanted to plant. Outings I wanted to take.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Variable disability is confusing. It's damnably confusing to me, and I assume it is confusing for those who know me. There are many cycles of reinjury and repair, running over decades, years, weeks, hours, overlapping and conflicting. What is possible one week offers only conjectural clues about what will be possible the next week, never mind many weeks hence. If a friend sees me out and about one week, will she be offended when I say I'm unable to visit her the next?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">EACH TIME I drive or walk or dance or sit I withdraw from a modest account. Because I <i>can</i> do any of the above activities I am sometimes tempted to just do them, and skip the usual neurotic calculation of what I can 'afford.' Then come the overdrafts and the penalty fees. I have to go back to doing nothing. My house becomes a mess and my friends have to bring me groceries.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Most people have a natural tendency to urge me toward activity. Usually, I think, they have no idea they are doing so. It's just that activity is the normal mode of many people; inactivity makes them twitchy. I tend to feel embarrassed pointing out that I <i>can't</i>, so I fake ability pretty often, especially with people I don't know well. I'll sit up for a while and pay later, when they're gone. Alone, or with those who know me well, I am safe. No pressure.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I can pass for able-bodied, very easily. So if you are wondering why I don't acknowledge more freely to those around me what my limits are, well: I'd rather be mistaken for fully able. It's nicer than being worried over, pitied or treated like a child. It's nicer than watching someone speculate why I have not managed to fix myself. I never consciously decide to pretend to be something I'm not. It's just pretty fucking tempting to let my able-looking body speak for itself. Do I really want <i>I have a shitty spine</i> to be one of the first things a person learns about me?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I probably ought to flaunt myself, Chronic Pain Barbie-style, and say, <i>Take me as I am, world</i>! But I suppose I'm often too lazy or cowardly for that. Pain itself is tiresome enough.</span></div>
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Emmahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09956562001797104096noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7023785422091414496.post-52544844805284862962013-10-29T13:31:00.000-07:002013-10-31T15:22:47.749-07:00The Drizzy-Jhene Duet of Smooth Ambivalence<div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"> "From Time"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">YOU DON'T really hear straight up love songs nowadays. Artists are too cool for </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">You're mine </i><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">baby I love </i><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">you</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> old-timey stuff. Everything has to be complicated, flippant, vengeful, sexual, ambivalent.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Drake is undisputed king of complicated, flippant, vengeful, sexual, ambivalent sorta-love songs. He excels (so Jewishly) at hyperanalytic relationship talk. He seems to spend ungodly amounts of time ruminating on woulda-couldas and past flames, which I find endearing and relatable. "From Time" is easily his best riff on this theme, with his neurotics calmed by some understated piano and the placid voice of Jhene Aiko.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In classic Drizzy form, he begins by worrying:<i> I needed to hear that shit/I hate when you're submissive/Passive aggressive/ When we're textin I feel the distance</i>. He packs two verses with reflections on money, music, his parents, his doubters, his internal strife and, of course, the ladies. The ladies missed out. As he assonantly puts it: <i>What qualities was I lookin for before/Who you settlin for/Who better for you than the boy (hah)?</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Aiko matches his sophistication, but pares her words down to offset the Drizzy verbosity. She etches her hook like a cursive engraving, singing simply,<i> I love me,</i> and then,<i> I love me enough for the both of us</i>. She slips in among Drake's bursts of words with soothing assurance. He can be all over the place; it's cool. She'll be right here, steady loving herself. It's not quite a love song, but it does sound good.</span></div>
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Emmahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09956562001797104096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7023785422091414496.post-92134473560505355702013-09-29T12:50:00.000-07:002013-10-30T21:53:46.893-07:00Love, Loss and Cheek Feathers Vol. II: Hard Knock Life<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">By Ximena the Hen, guest plogger</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifVb-xe7tn9gTTRJwytDjkqj3CjI6FWvcHeBuF7c9iKn3CUk1dIqC4Rw3IK6fFRHRLKZu41lOcY3AxNIk7A-na6TENwHpEqVBT109vXQmQZFrQss04EPXAVAMsBmnkZ80_Vs1QMnxcCWw/s1600/author+photo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifVb-xe7tn9gTTRJwytDjkqj3CjI6FWvcHeBuF7c9iKn3CUk1dIqC4Rw3IK6fFRHRLKZu41lOcY3AxNIk7A-na6TENwHpEqVBT109vXQmQZFrQss04EPXAVAMsBmnkZ80_Vs1QMnxcCWw/s1600/author+photo.jpg" /></a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I BEGAN laying later than most. The other pullets were stepping out of the nest box clucking, tweeting egg pics, preening smugly like they knew they were real hens now, while I just waited. I waited for that feeling you are supposed to get, the deep soul urge that sends you looking for a bit of straw in which to leave your indent. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Finally, after fall had turned to winter, the urge came. I needed the quiet of the nest box and the undulations of my oviduct as I needed feed and water. There is no greater satisfaction than laying an egg. In my early laying days I would set proudly atop my creation for a good hour after it emerged, enjoying the round certitude under my breast feathers. Sometimes I clucked. Mostly my celebrations were quiet, private.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Now I am five years old, an age of which factory farm birds can scarcely dream. I still lay four eggs a week, in season. Many humans say hens stop laying after a year or two. Let them say so. My work speaks for itself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In my chickhood I fretted about why I had cheek feathers while other birds had none. But once I was a grown hen I knew that what set me apart made me beautiful, and I embraced the tufts in my peripheral field. I wondered if there were other chickens out in the vast world who had also cheek feathers, and whether they might be kin to me.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLpSTnUvTdXidwAX7RvrXTIjWYKEPCAVx6sP9-jLLlAnP8LHNFr-ZH97Yqsm2kkyE5uyD06o0Ae3-EcKKsRGLLoh2C8EO4-ErUxPsmnPObVI3FfvnATjWseEXrv481zLTT5NDWLCLefCc/s1600/IMG_4275.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLpSTnUvTdXidwAX7RvrXTIjWYKEPCAVx6sP9-jLLlAnP8LHNFr-ZH97Yqsm2kkyE5uyD06o0Ae3-EcKKsRGLLoh2C8EO4-ErUxPsmnPObVI3FfvnATjWseEXrv481zLTT5NDWLCLefCc/s200/IMG_4275.jpg" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; text-align: center;" width="200" /></a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">My flockmates back when were Betsy, a sensible White Rock, and Marianne, a charming but unreliable Cuckoo Maran. I was content in the middle of the pecking order, between them. For three years we lived and laid contentedly. Treats were plentiful and sun sliced into the run. Evenings we wandered the backyard and found clever ways to peck the juicy kale leaves not meant for us. Comes Bearing Treats loved us even when we made stalk skeletons of the kale. I knew I was her favorite.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As the days lengthened toward spring, I did not know that my life was about to change. Then one fateful night shattered my peace.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">IT IS difficult for me to recall or recount the events of that night. It is still too painful to tell in detail, but I will say what I can. A possum muscled its way through a rusted hole in the coop wire and made to kill us all. I screeched and fought while the monster tore a gash in my side. Feathers flew and my flockmates were stunned by terror, but I kept squawking the alarm. CBT came flying out into the dark yard to answer my cries. She fought off the beast and I was spared. Betsy and Marianne were not so lucky. Both lay dead.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What followed was a dark and lonely time. I was wounded. CBT was too. I had no flock and no home--the coop was too dangerous. I lived those first few days in a box next to CBT's roost. (Humans roost by lying flat on what looks like a funny pile of straw.) I could not squawk nor cluck nor lay.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I learned a lot in that time. It is hard to be a hen without a flock, but I managed. I wandered the yard, haunted by memories, and occupied my troubled mind finding sneaky hidden nest spots. I learned meditation from the feline Buddhist nun, and I learned my own fortitude.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The days grew long and my wound healed. I began to lay again. One day in May I heard peeping from the human coop. I knew what it meant. I had little urge to hassle these new birds. I pecked them, but it was mere formality. They were to be my flock. I understood. When I was young, I attacked and rejected, but all that seemed pulletish now.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSBlbT3_UR7hg_dDLEMmCNR2pbgMYsudK2_LFa0ivxo_ecAIwUNzDw8Kf6nbQ_A6DCYmZTUXdXBm1E4AoQUwka6Hc2nJZkkhrlk0tb3ix1SCXeeECmut9Ju0-1p-Op661828jF-Kecw6k/s1600/blogger-image-1662963207.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSBlbT3_UR7hg_dDLEMmCNR2pbgMYsudK2_LFa0ivxo_ecAIwUNzDw8Kf6nbQ_A6DCYmZTUXdXBm1E4AoQUwka6Hc2nJZkkhrlk0tb3ix1SCXeeECmut9Ju0-1p-Op661828jF-Kecw6k/s640/blogger-image-1662963207.jpg" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;" /></a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">My new flockmates were a sweetheart Rhode Island Red named Hennessy, a well-built and hard-working Barred Rock named Lucretia, and a surly Wyandotte named Mrs. Darcy. They respected me, and in due time I earned top of the pecking order by my soft power. They looked to me to learn where the best dusting spots were, in patches of sunshine.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Life once again took on the comfortable rhythms of laying and pecking, scratching and molting. CBT brought us soft, wormlike spaghetti, tortilla chips soaked in warm water, chard leaves stenciled by delicious leaf miners, and countless other delicacies. Aptly did we name her, for she does come bearing treats.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">LATER THAT year another bird joined us, or tried. Bettina was a bantam White Leghorn, a refugee from a flock that had persecuted her. She was tiny, innocent. Given a chance, my flockmates would peck her murderously. They were four times her size and could have killed her, so she had to live apart. Hennessy, who ranked lowest, and had her own bottom pecked bare by the others, was meanest to Bettina. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNptFhWFUKuDlvdrb3oCRSWxxLC8Mm-c079-P2fMVkQKISWVzhP1VHIe6OFELv19rC-c0rnTS4AY6YbN3jsGEv5nPMtFTjAS93YaeMY5s6B5IOsuuR899lRAQKX9zRiP1Nzdj-dKV0sN8/s640/blogger-image--1098412596.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNptFhWFUKuDlvdrb3oCRSWxxLC8Mm-c079-P2fMVkQKISWVzhP1VHIe6OFELv19rC-c0rnTS4AY6YbN3jsGEv5nPMtFTjAS93YaeMY5s6B5IOsuuR899lRAQKX9zRiP1Nzdj-dKV0sN8/s1600/blogger-image--1098412596.jpg" /></a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">She was a bantam and an optimist, and Bettina made the most of wandering the yard while we stayed in our run. She preened when we preened, clucked w</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">hen we clucked, but she was always on the other side of the wire. I alone could be trusted with Bettina. I sat peaceably beside her amid the calla lilies and her gratitude was palpable. I sometimes wonder if those who can be cruel have never suffered earnestly themselves; else how could they so blithely inflict suffering on others? Age has softened me, I suppose. The feline Buddhist nun taught me, <i>Don't have expectations for others. Just be kind.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Despite the rather hard conditions of her life, we all envied Bettina, because Ceebee loved her so. On rainy days Bettina got drenched trying to stay near to us, so CBT let her dry her feathers and preen in the human coop. I did not let jealousy overtake me at such moments. I knew Bettina had a hard lot in life. She looked at least as old as me, but was skittish like a pullet. Her anxious habits made me know she had never quite lived in ease: a hen's soul cannot be content without her own true flock. Ceebee wanted to change that. She told me her plans for two new coops, one for us big hens and another for Bettina and two future banty companions. We dreamed and planned.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjz5GQSKMpDfKP9SZZR0ZFcbFfswzN8QiWjQQ0oQlN8_uKyLSQ-eXunwI5vZ6HXUhDKXbRBDIICflb4-f1O4oxSVq4nOXU4Kd9S3skjwpyD-DaHtgsfVFNMTQX7NwAhZjHQ3up8HOTufRM/s1600/blogger-image-6122198.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjz5GQSKMpDfKP9SZZR0ZFcbFfswzN8QiWjQQ0oQlN8_uKyLSQ-eXunwI5vZ6HXUhDKXbRBDIICflb4-f1O4oxSVq4nOXU4Kd9S3skjwpyD-DaHtgsfVFNMTQX7NwAhZjHQ3up8HOTufRM/s640/blogger-image-6122198.jpg" /></a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">THIS YEAR another spring came--they always do--and brought with it a new home beside the fig tree, and fresh sounds of peeping. I adore my new nest box. It's marvelously spacious. I do sometimes miss the funky old coop, but the new one is snug and secure. And the peeping sounds brought me joy: they promised Bettina would have her own flock.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As a wise old hen I can tell you that sometimes you plan to make life better, but it gets worse instead. You may dig your darnedest to find a worm, only to have Lucretia snatch it from your beak. As the tiny banty chicks grew stronger, sweet Bettina grew weaker. She laid shelless eggs and sat listless by the calla lilies. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkjpQxeyHUJB2xJdwg50_E6A-05_A2rv-RouGsQp-pBuZsgO-3ksUOjkdX09bNFKPvUBgORLQOHLhWwwZ6rVkk3kLJ_Ts3-HoA10FCegvRi93NUFlECfQpwZDl_mJAjqDK9v0Gil0BHl4/s1600/Image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkjpQxeyHUJB2xJdwg50_E6A-05_A2rv-RouGsQp-pBuZsgO-3ksUOjkdX09bNFKPvUBgORLQOHLhWwwZ6rVkk3kLJ_Ts3-HoA10FCegvRi93NUFlECfQpwZDl_mJAjqDK9v0Gil0BHl4/s200/Image.jpg" width="200" /></a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">CBT did not know how to help her. Before the new birds were old enough to meet her, Bettina quietly died, alone in her new red coop. I watched Ceebee bury Bettina. I sensed her heavy heart, heard her quavery Kaddish, and knew I would be mourned so myself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">THERE WERE new babies to raise, so I reminded Ceebee of what she has often told me: <i>Birds may die, but the flock carries on</i>. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The young banties are plucky, but gentle. I stare in amusement at Mrs. Patmore, the blue Silkie, who is hardly a chicken, more just a ball of plush feathers. Her flockmate Daisy has something of the spirit of Bettina, and looks a bit like her, with a tiny frame and part white feathers. But she's feistier than that innocent banty Leghorn ever was. I wish Bettina could have lived happily among them. Some good things are not meant to be, I suppose.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There's something about Daisy. I can't put a claw on it. I relate to her somehow. Once, when Daisy was still a chick, Ceebee held us both together. She held the baby bird against my breast feathers, the tiny beak pointed at mine. I pretended to take no notice, which, in chicken body language, is a gesture of great kindness. Daisy gazed up at me and I felt my hen heart stir.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But I'm a foolish old bird. How could I not have seen it? I know what it is about Daisy. She's got feathers on her cheeks.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="text-align: center;">Read </span><a href="http://www.clebilicious.com/2008/11/ximena-love-loss-and-cheek-feathers.html">Vol. I of Love, Loss & Cheek Feathers.</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><img src="webkit-fake-url://C30E2802-5442-4014-BC78-2E40931CE0F3/imagejpeg" /></span>Emmahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09956562001797104096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7023785422091414496.post-41175766558036259752013-08-08T16:40:00.000-07:002015-08-29T16:03:57.421-07:00On Gender<span style="line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Gender is</span> not a crime.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 1.15; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Feels a tad controversial to say so, as many nowadays consider gender roles oppressive, and condemn 'g</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">ender essentialism' in favor of some sort of neuter ideal. We humans do have a sordid record of forcing each other into restricted roles based upon gender, skin color and so on; I suppose our skittishness on the matter is understandable.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 1.15; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">No one should be pressured to adhere to any rules of gender. We ought to all be free to express ourselves, gender-wise and otherwise, as we like. This seems an obvious platitude. And yet, we might </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">remind ourselves how widely it applies, scolding not just icky misogynists with retro notions of femininity, but also Women's Studies majors who would denounce my tight jeans. Both, after all, </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">implicitly impose their own gender ideas on others. My ass is mine to objectify as I please.</span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-2cecbaf1-5fd0-1aeb-61ca-a87c56595670"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-size: large;">I love</span> subversion of gender roles. I also love gender roles. If genderedness is taboo, we lose appreciation of both masculinity and femininity. Both of these value systems have good things to offer: masculinity contains lessons about strength, honor and stoic endurance; femininity contains lessons about compassion, nurturance and (controversially) beauty. Can't we all incorporate each into ourselves at whatever mixing rate feels natural? And be willing </span><span style="line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">to call some traits masculine and others feminine?</span></span></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 13px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Are both shoes allowed?</span></td></tr>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-2cecbaf1-5fd0-1aeb-61ca-a87c56595670"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To insist that gender divergences are strictly born of culture is nuts. Culture does much to determine gender norms, but I reject the idea that two varieties of people whose bodies have different designs and whose hormone stews use different recipes are--apart from the titties and whatnot--basically the same.*</span></span></span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-2cecbaf1-5fd0-1aeb-61ca-a87c56595670"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">People of either gender can take pride in masculine or feminine qualities they possess. I like to compliment Tolstoy, for example, on his feminine novelistic eye. Most male novelists can't do the thing where you go inside a character's head and excavate like ten layers of conflicting motivation, but Tolstoy nailed those femininely astute psychological observations.</span></span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-2cecbaf1-5fd0-1aeb-61ca-a87c56595670"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="line-height: 1.15;">And there is a woman I see about Town--perhaps transitioning, but still using the ladies locker room at the gym--with a </span></span><span style="line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">badass goatee and tattoos and rough, sagged jeans and a wallet chain and hella masculine swagger. She is so cool. Subversion of gender is its own bold expression of gender.</span><span style="line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">*<a href="http://youtu.be/p5LRdW8xw70">Fascinating research</a> on the nature/nurture gender question has been done by Simon Baron-Cohen, who, as you might have hoped, is in fact the cousin of Sacha Baron Cohen.</span></span></div>
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<span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-size: large;">Our noble </span>drive to eradicate sexism in recent decades has sometimes pressured women to be masculine. Maybe at the dawn of the feminist era women had to act a bit masculine in order to be taken seriously. (Else why would Hillary Clinton ever have donned those dreadful suits?) But if women must act mannish, or adopt masculine values--power, aggression, productivity--sexism is clearly still at work. What's passing for gender neutral equality is actually masculinormative.*</span></div>
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<span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">*I thought I was inventing this word. Turns out: it exists!</span></span></div>
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<span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Isn't it funny how "emasculate" and "effeminate" are both terms for loss of masculinity, both with negative connotations, both used mostly to describe men? What is the equivalent word for loss of femininity? 'Butch' means tough and undainty, but it is not an adjectival equivalent of 'emasculate'. It does not imply a feeling of thwartation in expressing one's natural female qualities.</span></div>
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<span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I've had that feeling. For me it had much to do with the expectations of a male parent, one who (calling himself a feminist) forbade makeup and earrings, and wanted me to excel at sports and science when I was naturally drawn to dance and pretty words. </span></div>
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<span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think many swaths of American society, alas particularly progressive enclaves like the one I now inhabit, tend to devalue femininity. A certain kind </span><span style="line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">of earth-goddessy female quality, in flowy skirts, can be okay, but excess domesticity or sexiness are highly suspect. And hard though it is to believe, women who have quit 'real' jobs to do the exalted work of raising new humans are still, in our liberated age, likely to dread the "so what do you do?" question.</span></div>
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<span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-size: large;">Or maybe</span> it's gender as a whole being devalued, because, come to think of it, I sniff devaluation of masculinity in the Bay air as well. Heterosexual women of my ilk often feel obliged to select for (feminine) qualities like sensitivity and communication skill in men, rather than, say, strength (which comes in many forms). Obviously sensitivity and communicativeness are wonderful, but they don't really moisten the nether regions. Strength might work there, and hardness (which also comes in many forms). </span></div>
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<span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Strength and hardness, by the way, are not inferior to sensitivity and communicativeness. They're really pretty awesome, especially when your spine doesn't work too well and a strapping man comes along for whom a 50-pound feed bag is but a feather. The hard, tough man is often condemned as a 'badboy,' delicious but wrong. Bang him if you must, we tell each other, but then steer clear. </span></div>
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<span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We respect men who aren't threatened by strong women. What of the reverse? Are we purportedly strong, feminist women supposed to like soft, pliable, friable men? Yeah no thanks.</span></div>
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<span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(I'm also developing a theory that if we subtly punish men for being masculine they will hobble along for a while, baking bread in seeming contentment, and then, without warning, explode in fits of rage. Just a fledgling theory.)</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Apron crime</td></tr>
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<span style="line-height: 1.15;"><i>I have</i></span><span style="line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i> learned</i>, confides a guy friend, <i>that women want to have sex with a <b>man</b>.</i> He refers to his dichotomous streets/sheets personalities: steeped in the arts of sensitivity and communication (raised by lesbians, no less), this wise fellow puts all that aside to become a ravaging beast when it's business time. I can give you his number.</span></div>
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<span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There may be folk for whom any gender typing is a genuine turn-off. For the rest of us, though, whatever our sexuality, gender is tied to sexual desire. If it were not, concepts like homosexuality and heterosexuality could not even exist. Surely it is not only the genitalia but the whole masculine or feminine being that attracts us. </span><span style="line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">So take heed: gender erasure may lead to bad sex.</span></div>
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<span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />A woman has</span> the right to wear cargo pants, chop her hair, eschew daintiness, fight wars, build bridges, coach football, marry another woman. She equally has the right to eyeliner, heels, aprons, craft fairs, prioritization of motherhood, celebration of cuteness, love of masculinity. Neither path, nor any of the infinite variations thereupon, ought to raise eyebrows or invite quiet censure.</span></div>
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<span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Men and women can be equal, or achieve some precarious balance approaching equality, without being the same. Indeed it will be way more fun this way. Difference makes life interesting.</span></div>
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<br />Emmahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09956562001797104096noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7023785422091414496.post-79375465279391126272013-07-17T18:05:00.000-07:002013-07-16T22:54:24.827-07:00Letter to Game<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Game darling,</span></i><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Been too long since my last letter. I actually wrote this one ages ago and straight forgot to send it. Accept my apologies. </span></i><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Where have I been? You know: hustlin. </span></i><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I'm on that money grind, backyard grind, spine care grind. Every morning homie, it's the microwave heat pack and the yoga strap and I'm lying on tennis balls and hanging upside down and shit. But hey. I get to be out in this world, going places & doing things, so I am nothing but happy to spend an hour every day mollifying the left psoas and putting space between those lumbar discs. And since I know you'll ask, fuck yeah I'm working them muscles too. I dare any of those health care bishes implying I might need to "strengthen my core" to take a punch at these abs and break a damn hand.</span></i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>You're looking good yourself, I see. Yeah, don't worry, I noticed! You don't take it easy on us ladies, all those Instagram arm workouts goddamn.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>I have to say this. You've done me a lot of good turns over the years and I appreciate them all, but thank you thank you thank you for putting me on to Kendrick. You know you are always and forever first in my heart, but the kid is maaad! I mean, everything knuckleheads try to say about rap, he <b>confuses </b>it. The shit about over here we have "positive" rappers who use nice words to say soft things and over here we have gangsta rappers who use mean words to say hard things--he just upends all of that and I LOVE it. Not tryna go on about him here, though. I know why-I-like-other-rappers is a subject you'd rather skip in favor of why-I-love-The-Game ;)</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>You know what I loved? "Come Up." Hits hard and also has this fun carousel feel. And I like seeing you bring out the thug in mein klane Drizzele. "Greystone" was dope too. That's the kind of triumphal jam you hear in the morning then go on to have a glorious day. #CaliforniaRepublic #ThankYou</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>I hate to sound like every other whiny fan, but didn't you say Nicki was gonna be on</i> Jesus Piece<i>? Don't tease me like that, ya bish! </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/6ki21aILhoI" width="560"></iframe></i></span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Loved "Celebration." Nothing like a big sunny posse cut in a weed smoke haze. (I feel I should either find it sweet & adorable or wildly inappropriate that your Harlem was in the vid, but, oddly, I have no opinion.) I've been such a Tyga skeptic, but he did pull off the Bone Thugs-iness splendidly. Wiz did a fine (albeit brief) job too. But if Weezy says Trukfit one more time I swear I'm giving him a nougie. Thank you for "Ali Bomaye." I needed a new angry, determined push-ups jam.</span></i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Since you know there has to be a hard part, here goes: nothing on your last couple albums socked me in the gut and then handed me my heart on a platter. I am obliged to remind you that when the Instagrams and the reality shows dissolve in thin air, art remains. You know how to make it; don't forget.</i></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></i><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Oh by the way, studied the "I Remember" video with keen interest. HELL of gluteal talent in that one! And glad to affirm you're such a buffalo ;-) . </span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Those who hate shall never approach the absolute value of my love.</span></i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>West-sidedly yours,</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Cleb</i></span></div>
Emmahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09956562001797104096noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7023785422091414496.post-13960532292033697872013-07-06T12:10:00.000-07:002013-07-10T19:03:50.398-07:00La Crise Plogxistentielle (Deuxième Partie)<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Over the past</span> couple years I have many times feared my plog would die. It has not died. It has, however, limped along pitifully and huddled in the corner with drooping wings. And you know...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>I DON'T WANT IT TO BE LIKE THAT!</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I want to revive it--nay, reinvent it. I want it to finally be all that it can be. I've been tooling around with the layout, scribbling lots of notes for the posts in my head, rabidly consuming old and new favorite blogs, thinking about what I enjoy reading and staging my comeback. (Such is my way: I'm one part doing to nine parts plotting, fretting and research.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">From its inception, <i>Clebilicious</i> has been sort of lost and lonely. It has no natural niche, because it does not center on a single topic or theme. Oh the many times I've been told I should narrow my focus! I know it's what you're supposed to do! But if I couldn't write about strippers & rappers one month and hen lineages the next it would break my spirit and I wouldn't write anything at all.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I am trying to figure out how to make this plog successful and worthwhile (presumably deciding first how I'll define such terms) as a better-tended version of itself, rather than as some reasonable beast with, like, a single theme. So if you have been a reader and have encouragements or thoughts, or if you have read good blogs that are as hodgepodgey in subject matter as mine own, do let me know. Thanks for reading.</span>Emmahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09956562001797104096noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7023785422091414496.post-26339881068605960892013-06-21T17:00:00.000-07:002013-07-16T22:03:06.630-07:00The Clebilicious Review: Born Sinner<div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-JdLMz2lcmKxJNJnJsJFv3prcPZhH9EjJJ6EMkaWcLhl6hLVlM04NNwF7_ZFfN8zKuTrIz5cNQore80dgktxzQflG1cordSjmQxeKvMmNCEqAAU8SKgkMqwqJECWyGP5SXY0UgUu-mS8/s640/blogger-image--1684660124.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="color: black;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-JdLMz2lcmKxJNJnJsJFv3prcPZhH9EjJJ6EMkaWcLhl6hLVlM04NNwF7_ZFfN8zKuTrIz5cNQore80dgktxzQflG1cordSjmQxeKvMmNCEqAAU8SKgkMqwqJECWyGP5SXY0UgUu-mS8/s640/blogger-image--1684660124.jpg" /></span></a></div>
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<b> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> J. Cole</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> <i> Born Sinner</i></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">J. COLE HAS a soft power delivery. His touch is light, but when he gets his words right they make deep impact. <span style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">He doesn't wear an armor of swag and yet, in his understated way, he's extremely swaggish. (The author would totally do him. Take that haters.)</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Cole gets criticized for emulating other rappers and failing to do him. This is serious: derivative is a direly bad thing for an artist to be. <i>Born Sinner</i> makes clear that Cole is indeed a worshipful fan of his elders. He quotes other rappers lots on this album, even in its "Juicy"-derived title. (You know: <i>Born sinner, the opposite of a winner / Remember when I useta eat sardines for dinner.</i>) Worshipful fandom I think is wonderful. Worshipful fandom signals utmost respect. Still, it suggests Cole may not have finished his apprenticeship phase yet.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">That said, I quite like this album. I love "Forbidden Fruit," featuring Kendrick Lamar. Any rapper is brave to let Kendrick on a track, as the latter is prone to friendly-fire murders. Here the youngins team up to talk about temptation and the ephemeral nature of all things, and I couldn't have borne co-optation of the "Electric Relaxation" beat for any lesser purpose. (I could write a long post just about use of the word "bitch," in this song, but I'll save it.) This was nice:</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; text-align: center;"><i>Came a man by myself, only father was Time</i></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; text-align: center;">So she raised that nigga kids but she swallowing mine</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.296875); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">MUCH BUZZ HAS surrounded the unusually insiderish and confessional track "Let Nas Down."<i> </i>Long story short (which is a phrase Cole uses before telling an unabridged long story), Cole tried many moons in vain to come up with a single for his first album, <i>Cole World,</i> finally arriving at "Workout," a synthesizey, twerkable radio confection, but like...not really a good song.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.296875); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.296875); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I remember when "Workout" was released. I'd vaguely heard of this J. Cole character, but not heard him, and "Workout" told me he would be a slick but insipid, kinda boring rapper talking about the usual shit. Apparently Nas, a great hero to Cole and most other people, heard "Workout" and hated it. On "Let Nas Down" Cole admits this disapproval broke his heart. Rappers tend to hide behind their own mystique; hearing one step out and tell a story about professional travails and what it's really like to be a rapper is fascinating.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Knowing, then, his struggles for a <i>Cole World</i> single, we can only imagine Cole's joy upon birthing "Power Trip," an irresistible hit that is also irreproachably Good. It's Good in a very J. Cole way: raw and tender; unabashed but still cool--like "Marvin's Room," but more simple and earnest. <span style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.296875);">He sings and it works, rendering the Miguel hook superfluous</span><span style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">. (It's quite a feat to make Miguel, master of emoting through the mic, look like he's trying too hard.)</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">To rap emotion is not easy, because a rapper has ever a responsibility to eschew softness. Eschewal of softness is not optional; it's as inherent to the game, as, say, ballers' eschewal of slowness. Like Drake, Cole has a talent for walking the line between vulnerability and swagger. </span>I haven't heard a lovelier way to admit feelings whilst remaining hard than J. Cole's on "Power Trip": <i>Love is a drug, like the strongest stuff ever and / </i><i>Fuck it, I'm on one.</i> There's a significant pause after "and," like he still needed a sec to think about it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">COLE YEARNS for bangers--he speaks of his "Big Pimpin" envy--but chasing those may cause him to neglect his talent for crooked smile storytelling and Fayetteville charm. I admire Cole for staying humble and being a fan of the greats, but he may not yet have enough respect for his own particular gifts. "Big Pimpin" may move the crowd, but "Power Trip" pangs at the heart.</span></div>
Emmahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09956562001797104096noreply@blogger.com0