Trickle-up aesthetics

Boy, today's New York Times Magazine is quite the feast of putative conundrums. First and foremost there's the cover story on musician M.I.A., who's so thoroughly full of it that even Lynn Hirschberg can call her on it; and man, that's saying something. (The whole package, which includes a "portfolio" by bad-boy photog Ryan McGinley, is so rote in its posturing that one starts to feel thoroughly trapped within a culture whose only function is to perpetuate its self-parody.) It's true that as full-of-it types go, M.I.A. (whose records I largely like very much, by the way) is a more interesting case than most. Complacently perpetuating the Bronfman lineage while making pronouncements along the lines of "Give war a chance;" well, that sort of thing takes some stones, if not a head full of rocks. Late in the profile Hirschberg chides the Romain-Gary-Gavras-directed video for M.I.A.'s song "Born Free" as being "at best, politically naive;" more predictably, she fails to note, likely because she failed to glean, that it's a limp (expanded gore notwithstanding) homage to Peter Watkins' 1970 film Punishment Park, which I wrote about here. Which brings up the question: if you make a homage and nobody notices, is it still a homage, or is it just a rip-off?

"But you noticed, Glenn," I can hear some of my kinder readers saying, and I thank you for that, but let's face facts: I don't count. In another piece in the same issue, Virginia Heffernan holds forth on "web music videos" that "find pleasure in prohibition" and rhapsodizes over the Beyoncé video for "Why Don't You Love Me?" and its internet propagation: "...lest anyone think video commenters are all just semi-literate masturbators, consider how scholarly things get: 'This is a homage to Bettie Page,' one commenter declared, pointing readers to a vintage Page video..."   Oh, sigh. It brought me back to a time not so long ago when the fact of even having heard of Bettie Page would have made someone like Ms. Heffernan consider you to be, well, a semi-literate masturbator. Pointing out that the model for the character of Bettie in Dave Stevens' terrific The Rocketeer comic book and its subsequent not-so-terrific movie adaptations, in which Jennifer Connelly portrayed the character, earned one the designation "drooler" rather than "scholar." I understand for a fact that the late, great Mr. Stevens (who died of leukemia in 2008) was oft-subjected to some dubiously raised eyebrows on account of his Page enthusiasms. Page-knowledge still has some occult appeal: "For enlightenment about the video, I e-mailed its director, Melina Matsoukas. Beyoncé, she explained, wanted to create a video inspired by Bettie Page movies 'without telling anyone—not her label, not her management, not anyone.' They chose the right medium. Online video always seems as if it's going behind the backs of managers and labels; the story of a video's creation complements its scrappy aesthetic."

Yeah, sure thing. (I bet Beyoncé told her stylist she was making this video.) I rather gape at the notion that in this day and age adapting the style of a Bettie Page loop is somehow seen as a legitimately subversive act. But I'm more irritated that the mainstream dismisses the people who do the actual cultural heavy lifting as lepers and the ones who appropriate the results of their research as visionaries. Like this is a new thing. Maybe I should just get over it. 

In any event, this sort of thing doesn't always fill me with resentment; sometimes it opens me up a bit. A few years back, in one of its "fashion issues," Premiere ran a short chat with the shoe designer Manolo Blahnik about his inspirations, particularly his cinematic ones, and he cited Luis Buñuel. Big deal, you may think, pretty much anybody who's taken a film appreciation course or seen the first half of Belle de Jour knows the director had a foot fetish that makes Tarantino look like a hobbyist. And you'd be right. But Blahnik cited what was then a pretty obscure Buñuel film—his 1964 version of Diary of a Chambermaid, still at the time a few years from its Criterion DVD release. And he cited a specific scene, the one in which the haute-bourgeois paterfamilias has Jeanne Moreau's character try on a particular pair of small boots. Right on. And somehow the through-line from Buñuel to Blahnik to Carrie Bradshaw was something I found ironically pleasing, as if someone was getting away with something. Or other. 

Comments

[Stephen Bowie]

Not that I really come here for the beating-up-on of other writers, deserving though they usually are, but ... oh, man, okay, I'll bite: that Lynn Hirschberg NYT profile of Megan Fox (which opens with the sentence: "Megan Fox is a fox.") has the least favorable ratio of words vs. amount of things to say of anything I've ever read, I think. At least Hirschberg is carving out a niche in her subject matter: women who are undeniably hot but still manage to be completely uninteresting, even to a shallow sleaze like myself.

[Fulton Oursler]

Dear Glenn:

Romain Gary is sad to say, dead. He won the Prix Goncourt twice, one time under a pseudonym. Perhaps he is directing the MIA video under the name of Costa Gavras Fils...?

[Glenn Kenny]

@ Fulton Oursler: Alas, poor Romain. Sorry about the mishap, a classic mnemonic brain-fart typo. The director is in fact Romain Gavras and apparently not even a tenth of the filmmaker his father is even at his least inspired. Oy.

@ Stephen Bowie: It's funny, I didn't even think of this as a "beating-up-on of other writers" piece when I was composing it; I thought I was doing an "a certain tendency" mini-essay. Perhaps this lack of awareness is part of the problem. Hmmm.

[Stephen Bowie]

While we're at, this is pretty hilarious:

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/05/who_else_has_lynn_hirschberg_t.html

Every writer has these tics (once I sent around an e-mail linking to TWELVE different pieces in which Jonathan Gold used the word "sluice" as a verb) but the fries, I think, are a legitimate symptom of a certain failure of imagination.

[Hauser Tann]

On that note (and only looking at occurrences on this blog...): http://tinyurl.com/2fpn8rk

[Glenn Kenny]

Hey, what can I tell ya? Just as Merv Griffin "love[d] to kill" in "The Man With Two Brains," I love the word "putative." For whatever reason, it works for me a lot better than "ostensible." It isn't my fault that it's so apropos—blame modern culture and its ineffectual simulacrums for the Real! Or is the suggestion here that I'm not aware of the fact that I use it maybe too much? Because, you know, I am aware. Painfully. Last time I looked it wasn't costing Hauser Tann anything, so I don't know exactly what he wants.

On a note related to Mr. Bowie's link, Richard Linklater once complained, rather insistently, to my then-boss Peter Herbst about a profile of him by Anne Thompson in which Linklater was portrayed eating a burger and, I think fries. Linklater's objection was two-fold: that he was a vegetarian, and that he thus wouldn't be caught in any condition eating a burger; and that, as the director of "Fast Food Nation," which he was showing at Cannes (where the confrontation took place), he wouldn't be caught in any condition eating a burger. His complaint may well have been legitimate, but he was really unpleasant to Peter, way out of proportion (I thought) to what the occasion warranted, especially as Peter would have made every good faith effort to try to rectify the error if it indeed turned out to have been one. My and My Lovely Wife's way of "getting back" at Linklater has been to deny the DVDs of his films space on our home's "Auteurs" shelves, despite the fact that he pretty completely fits the definition of an auteur. And that'll teach him.

[Hauser Tann]

Woops: I thought I had come up with a search query that would also catch the adverbial form, but apparently I suck at teh Google. Fuller picture: http://tinyurl.com/252cd2k

[lipranzer]

While I enjoyed Glenn being snarky, I have to admit the only thing I have of substance to talk about is this point:

"that the model for the character of Bettie in Dave Stevens' terrific The Rocketeer comic book and its subsequent not-so-terrific movie adaptations"

Admittedly, I never read the comic book, but I happened to like the movie version of THE ROCKETEER. Sure, it's a lightweight version of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, but it's quite enjoyable, and I especially liked Connelly (then again, I usually do).

[Stephen Bowie]

Another good reason to deny Linklater space on one's auteur shelves is that too many of his films suck.

I read on one of the LA Times' gossip blogs that M.I.A. also hated the Lynn Hirschberg piece, although probably not for the same reasons that Glenn hated it.

[Tom Russell]

M.I.A. hated the piece so much that she gave out Hirschberg's cell phone number to her fans via twitter. What a dick.

[Glenn Kenny]

Wow. I wonder if she can be deported for that. Putatively.

[Tom Russell]

The "public-sharing-of-phone-number-by-a-person-of-influence/celebrity" thing seems to be increasingly common these days-- something you can blame on the twitter. I believe Kristie Alley did the same thing-- IIRC, it was in retaliation to some kind of tabloid news story about her health. And there are a few others that I can't recall at the moment.

Say, does anyone know-- did anyone cause any kind of ruckus when Siskel gave out Betsy Palmer's mailing address on television and told people to send her hate mail for doing Friday the 13th?

[Stephen Bowie]

Yeah, remind me not to give out my cel number to any sources who understand teh twitter.

"Hey, Lynn, wanna meet up for a plate of fries? Hello? Hello...?"

[John M]

Honestly, Lynn Hirschberg's writing makes her (Hirschberg) sound like a snotty jerk whose cutting-edge trick is to sub in mockery for illumination. MIA giving her number out to a bunch of freaks on Twitter seems like a fair trade-off for the truffle fries line alone.

(If MIA's bugged excerpt of the interview is to be believed, Hirschberg's subjects all chomp on fries because Hirschberg orders the fries. She just really digs fries--I think she should push it, order corny dogs or sloppy joes. A more compromising type of snackfood.)

[Stephen Bowie]

Was it really "bugged"? Because I've had more than a few interview subjects either openly make their own recordings or insist on a copy of mine as a condition of doing the interview, and one can hardly refuse, as long as approval of the content of the piece is not implicit.

Anyway, Robert Sietsema has the last word on the fries:

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/archives/2010/05/mia_and_lynn_hi.php

[EOTW]

Look, I read the article. i've heard of this chick but have not heard he music and have no desire to. She comes off as incredibly bright ad naive at the same time. But, in the end, her success and money have overshadowed her artistic cred. Money can do that. Tough to keep it real when you're living the life in Brentwood.

[joel_gordon]

Not the last word, Stephen. I went to the article, and someone in the comments section found the BH Hotel menu: actual black truffles on those fries, not just truffle oil. I would think that truffle salt would be a better choice than oil, anyway. Would Jonathan Gold have written the above while incorporating the word "sluice"?

[Brian]

I also think it's worth pointing out that Dave Stevens was not only a fan of Page's, but befriended her late in her life, helped her with her finances, and became a point person for helping to arrange for her to be financially compensated for use of her image. Which makes him less a "drooler" (which I know Glenn was using as a description of others' perceptions, not his own) than a real mensch.

I also think the movie's fun, if only to see a fun Timothy Dalton performance, and several actors (Billy Campbell, Terry O'Quinn, and the aforementioned Connelly) before they became more famous.

[Dan Coyle]

Stevens was also a good friend of Thomas Jane, who wrote the intro to the recent Definitive collection of the Rocketeer and is trying to get a new film project going in Stevens' memory.

Every time I read Hirschberg at length I get a horrible nosebleed, start weeping, and usually black out and wake up naked 50 miles from my home covered in pig's blood.

[bill]

So what if Hirschberg eats a lot of french fries with her interview subjects? The damning part of that excerpt isn't the fries, but rather "I kind of want to be an outsider." That's the part that makes MIA sound like a jack-ass. Reading the french fries bit just made me want to eat some truffle-flavored french fries.

[Jeff McMahon]

I'm just glad that I'm not the only one to see through MIA's posturing. Good musician, obnoxious person.

[John M]

"'I kind of want to be an outsider,' she said, eating a truffle-flavored french fry."

The whole sentence is a set-up rooted in some vague notion of authenticity. Ha ha! You've eaten the truffle-flavored fries I ordered, while saying you're an outsider! I caught you! No outsider would eat something flavored with truffles, and so I shall juxtapose these things in a sentence that will surely be quoted in the blogosphere! It's childish and classist. (And unoriginal...how many writers could poop out a profile like this?)

And judging by the reactions to this story, and to her in general, MIA still does register like an outsider. She married rich and has a house in Brentwood, but her concerns, her taste, her politics, and her music are certainly still outside the mainstream. One can be rich and an outsider. Ask undead Howard Hughes. (All this, and yeah, I agree that MIA often sounds like an undereducated jackass...walking contradiction.)

I guess, most importantly, for which am I more appreciative? MIA's music or Lynn Hirschberg's celebrity profiles? I'll take the music.

EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP would be a good companion film to this discussion.

[HandH]

oh man, i couldn't agree more. i just don't see how a "blockbuster" mega video that was prob shot on film, took several weeks to make and had the budget of a short feature film comes anywhere close to being subversive in it's mode of production...among other things...

[bill]

But, John M, if you're an outsider, you're an outsider -- you don't "kind of want" to be one. That seems to me to imply a certain level of premeditation, with one eye on "street cred", doesn't it?

Although, I'll tell you what really does make her seem like an outsider: she thinks that Facebook is a tool of the CIA. Also, Google.

http://www.nylonmag.com/?section=article&parid=4668

[John M]

I guess I'm just looking at this all with a giant heap of relativism, and with the constant modifier that, yes, I agree, she does sound like a spunky 15-year-old. After the truffle fry, she continues, “I don’t want to make the same music, sing about the same stuff, talk about the same things. If that makes me a terrorist, then I’m a terrorist.”

First off, anyone accusing MIA of being a terrorist--and I'm sure someone out there is--is being every bit the straw-man-waffling goofball that she is. Her existence relies on taking that bait.

The fact that she feels completely comfortable coughing up so much bizarre, muddled political bon mots--like the Facebook thing (which is, by the way, kind of a hip-hop filtering of how actually evil and big-brothery Facebook sometimes is/seems)--makes her even more unusual in the pop world, which is the world she chose. A cultivated outsider is as close as the pop world will get to a real outsider. The bullshit is the message.

Ultimately? I wish the Times had put someone better on this beat. (Or just given the profile over to the New Yorker or Atlantic.)

[JG]

You left out the best thing about the never-not-odious Virginia Heffernan piece. Virginia talking about her friend. Virginia's musings are always, first and foremost, about her precious clique. http://firetomfriedman.blogspot.com/2010/05/virginia-heffernan-falls-off-wagon.html

[PaulJBis]

The whole "Facebook=CIA" thing circulated around the net a couple of years ago (so she didn't make it up). Apparently, the real-life basis of it was that one of the corporations that invested in Facebook had on its board people who had been linked to the CIA, or something like that.

Me? I think it would explain *a lot*.

[bill]

Just because she didn't make it up doesn't mean she's not an idiot for believing it.

[Glenn Kenny]

And there's also the fact that Google and Facebook are, when you come right down to it, toys for relatively comfortable people. Put another way, they're bourgeois. To imply that they're tools of oppression controlled by the ruling hegemony is to display a rather sick-making ignorance of what actual oppression is. It's also an ideological inversion of the same self-flattery that argues "'Sex and the City' is the reason the Taliban exists."

Talk about a broad who needs to read some Zizek...

[bill]

@John M -

"First off, anyone accusing MIA of being a terrorist--and I'm sure someone out there is--is being every bit the straw-man-waffling goofball that she is."

Come on, man. You can't say that somebody is probably doing something, and then say that IF THEY ARE...etc. That's just setting up your own straw-something-or-other.