Pop culture treasure, high culture trash.

Sunday, November 05, 2006

The thrill of discovery

Oh, the things you can find out while not interviewing software developers. An end-of-week roll call:

-All of CSS's videos contain segments where the film runs backwards. It's a comment on the fiercely nostalgic, pereptually backwards gaze of the pop subcultural zeitgeist, surely. Or something. Observe: 1) "Alala"; 2) "Let's Make Love etc."; 3) "Off the Hook". Y'all are getting an early Bjork vibe off of Lovefoxxx too, right? Right.

-You can Hollywoodize anybody, including maverick misfit genius photographers and the virgin mums of religious prophets.

-Popular mystery writer Anne Perry is the same person as Juliet Hulme, sometime convicted teenage co-murderess whose relationship with Pauline Parker was dramatized in Peter Jackson's gonzo-fantastic and bravely sympathetic film Heavenly Creatures.

-Using the word "dukes" as a synonym for fists originates in Cockney rhyming slang: Duke = Duke of York = fork = how you hold your hand when you hold a fork, i.e., in a fist. I grew up 5,000 miles away from the East End and yet, somehow, kids at my elementary school were able to run around the playground starting fights by shouting, "put up yr dukes!" I never knew what the hell it meant at the time. Blimey.

-Linda Perry is totes Pope Leo X:

"Like the Protestants of the Reformation, indie fans continue the rebellious narrative first put forth by the punks, the paradigmatic British music performers. They present a narrative of the deviation from true musical encounters through a hypertrophic growth of institutional machinery to benefit corporate executives who exploit the faithful and debase music itself...the notion that at the heart of indie lies what many feel to be a conservative and repressive religious ideology would be distasteful to those who embrace one of the fundamental and widespread folktales of youth culture, namely, that participating in a music scene constitutes a form of rebellion rather than a recapitulation of the dominant cultural ideology and narratives."

(Wendy Fonarow writing in Empire of Dirt: The Aesthetics and Rituals of British Indie Music)

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Dude! I purposely went to an Anne Perry book-signing the year Heavenly Creatures came out, just to ask her about it. She basically went pale & then refused to answer or make eye contact with me afterwards. But I got her to autograph a book for me anyway -- she wouldn't sign it Juliet like I asked.

Lizzie Pogo said...

Dude! That is so brave. I could never have done that. You are rad and a half.