Film & Music & Reviews
Guest PostsGIANT Guest-post: Kati Nolfi on The Runaways
I’ve been living life as a Runaway. I saw the movie three times, I read the books Neon Angel and Joan Jett, watched Foxes, and cut my hair. This narrative has a pull over me, a grown lady who should be done with slouching and greasy hair. The Runaways, the books, and the interviews, especially of Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning, are texts that clarify and complicate the meaning of child actors and musicians growing into adulthood.
Kristen Stewart is amazing. In interviews she’s not coy and cute, she’s weird and rude and awkward, defying the script of normal behavior. Her Internet lovers and haters seem obsessed with her nervousness and stuttering. Nothing seems to be a pose and that seems to piss people off, as if she should posture, stand straight and smile. The truth is in the YouTube commentariat, mean, gracious, and otherwise. One detractor says, “Kristen looks more like a hobo than a star.” That’s a good thing! Girl, meet me in the desert and we can be friends.
26 Comments
May 10th, 2010 / 9:47 am
May 10th, 2010 / 9:47 am
Representation Without Taxation
I find myself obsessed with two things this morning, the first being the viral video of Lin Yu Chun singing a flawless rendition of Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You”:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RgXC303Q5A&feature=related
The second artist Alexa Meade, who paints human flesh so that the subject appears to be a painting rather than a living person; the backgrounds, too, are painted to look like a painting, thereby making a photo look painted:
What is the literary equivalent to Lin Yu Chun’s uncannily flawless performance? How do we complete these analogies; what are the X’s in
“Lin Yu Chun : Whitney Houston” as “Writing : X” ? Or the more direct, “Photograph : Painting that looks like a photograph” as “Writing : X” ?
Fans Revolt on Grateful Dead Comment Thread!
Title like that and ya’ll probably think this is going to be a joke-post, but people who know me know that I am an extreme Grateful Dead-partisan, so dispense with the notion that I am writing in anything but earnest, and turn your attention now to a website you probably haven’t visited lately, Dead.net, where the once-venerable and now Rhino Records-controlled GDP (that’s Grateful Dead Productions) is offering their latest in (what we can only hope is) an endless supply of live-releases from the legendary VAULT.
To give credit where it’s due, most of the vault releases over the past couple years have been fantastic. A lot of people despaired of the fate of vault-stewardship after the death of Dick Latvala (the band’s tape archivist whose eponymous Dick’s Picks series eventually ran 35 multi-disc volumes), but the Road Trips series has won over more than a few skeptics (yours truly included) who at first balked at the decision to move from Dick’s focus on individual shows to a model that sought to provide, over two or three discs, the “highlights” of a run or an entire tour. But nothing really comes close, imho, to the three big–as in nine discs apiece–box sets: Fillmore West 1969, Winterland 1973 and Winterland 1977. So why are the notoriously genial Deadheads so pissed off about Philly ’89?
Playing connect-the-dots with two dots just gets you a straight line
(1)
Most of the work in this world completely sucks balls and the only reward most people get for their work is just barely enough money to survive, if that. The 95% of people out there who spend all day long shoveling the dogshit of life for subsistence wages are basically keeping things running just well enough so that David Brooks, me and the rest of that lucky 5% of mostly college-educated yuppies can live embarrassingly rewarding and interesting lives in which society throws gobs of money at us for pushing ideas around on paper (frequently, not even good ideas) and taking mutual-admiration-society business lunches in London and Paris and Las Vegas with our overpaid peers.
(2)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-agl0pOQfs