Lindsay Zoladz

A couple of years ago, I watched the Pixies documentary loudQUIETloud with someone who didn’t...

Wed, 15 May 2013 12:50:01 -0400

A couple of years ago, I watched the Pixies documentary loudQUIETloud with someone who didn’t get Kim Deal. “Why are all of these people freaking out over her?” he asked, intoning the last word like Michael Bluth. How do you explain to somebody why Kim Deal is cool? That cool means going to a punk show dressed like a secretary because you came right from work and didn’t have time to change? That cool means showing up for a magazine cover photo shoot with visibly unwashed hair? (Kim Deal in Spin, 1995: “Of course I know how my photos look. I know I come off lookin’ like a fuckin’ haggy housewife compared to all these other women in rock, and that’s fine with me, man. So I don’t wanna wash my hair, fuck you, this is how I look.”) It’s like Kim Deal has D-G-A-F tattooed across her knuckles, except in invisible ink, because it’s so ingrained in her that she doesn’t even feel the need to broadcast it. If you don’t get why that’s cool, I don’t even know how to talk to you.

I like this thing Carrie Brownstein said in the Pixies oral history, Fool the World: “Kim Deal was the first female enigma in indie rock.” Last Splash came out in 1993, the year riot grrrl really started getting mainstream media attention. But in the opening line of her liner notes in Last Splash’s reissue, Deal specifies, “We weren’t riot grrrl and we weren’t grunge.” In 1993 riot grrrl was proving the revolutionary potential of standing for something and having an easily communicable message, but Kim Deal was about something else, the power of being an enigma— which is also a particular kind of power when you’re a woman. People are going to look at women whether or not they want to be looked at and they are going to impose a meaning on them based on how they look. So, in the public’s gaze, women who get famous (and, let’s be real, even women who don’t) are either sexualized or totally neutered, and there is very little in between. But Kim Deal found the loophole, somehow. People adore her on her own terms. She is a punk and a jock. She is a chain-smoking cheerleader. She seems tough and also kind. And the cool that she beamed out into the world had something to do with owning your contradictions rather than stooping to explain them to the people who don’t get it, because whatever, man.

I wrote a review of the Breeders’ 20th anniversary reissue of Last Splash, which went up at Pitchfork today, and until like a day before I filed it the opening paragraph was going to be full of quotes from the comments of Breeders songs on Songmeanings.net, until I tried to explain this idea to someone on Saturday and midway through explaining realized with absolute certainty and horror that it was a terrible idea that I could in no way pull off. But the point was going to be that everybody thinks every song Kim Deal ever wrote is about sex. One commenter had an elaborate theory about why “Invisible Man” was about masturbation, someone said “Divine Hammer” was about (and I quote) “a divine fuck”, and there was a whole discussion about whether “Cannonball” was anti-Marquis de Sade, pro-Marquis de Sade, or using the Marquis de Sade as a metaphor for Frank Black. Maybe all of these things are true, probably none of these things are true, maybe “Gigantic” is actually about whatever you think it’s about too. But I doubt you’ll ever hear it from Kim Deal. Amidst all the chatter, you can almost hear the hazy, singsongy chime of her voice as she smiles that smile that is at once the most guileless and opaque thing in the whole world: I’ll never tellllllll.

“All of the songs on [my album] are about love, except for...

Wed, 01 May 2013 16:08:51 -0400

“All of the songs on [my album] are about love, except for one, which is about taking ecstasy, but everything else is about love.”

"The narrator of my non-fiction pieces is not the same person I am— she is a lot more..."

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 12:04:55 -0400

“The narrator of my non-fiction pieces is not the same person I am— she is a lot more articulate and thinks of much cleverer things to say than I usually do. I can imagine her coming across as a little insufferable sometimes. But she, too, is out of my hands— I may have invented her, but she is the person who insists on speaking for me.”

- Janet Malcolm

Someone one asked me what my writing process is like.

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 12:14:09 -0400

Someone one asked me what my writing process is like.

Photo

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 10:40:02 -0400

"Part of my own affection for Kim Gordon, I realize, is her association with an era when even boys..."

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:02:06 -0400

“Part of my own affection for Kim Gordon, I realize, is her association with an era when even boys thought it was cool to call themselves feminists. I’m not sure when exactly that changed, but I know that by the time I was aware of experiencing sexism firsthand I’d already gotten the message that to identify myself as a feminist would limit me. I envy and admire the way Gordon—and the pop-cultural heroes she helped shape, like Hanna and Coppola and Courtney Love—seemed unafraid of that word. But I am even more envious and admiring of the way the men in Gordon’s orbit—from the Beastie Boys, who played with Sonic Youth over the years, to Moore to Cobain, who was very close to Gordon—seem to have taken cues from her about how to be good men.”

- The Top 50 Gifs of Me Dancing At Coachella, Being Like, “Fuck Yes Kim Gordon (And Lizzy Goodman)”

Kind of funny that the best song ever written about Gen X is...

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 22:10:33 -0400

Kind of funny that the best song ever written about Gen X is also the best song ever written about Millennials. Maybe it is just the best song ever written about being young.

“Man, what if somebody made a human-sized replica of the...

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 20:24:34 -0400

“Man, what if somebody made a human-sized replica of the milk carton dude from Blur’s ‘Coffee & TV’ video?” Does someone at the Museum of the Moving Image have a direct line to ALL OF MY HOPES AND DREAMS?

Photo

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 20:38:00 -0400

And there was nothing/But there was everything

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 10:34:00 -0400

And there was nothing/But there was everything

"Q: On “A Tooth for an Eye”, you sing, “I’m telling you stories, trust me.” So while you’re..."

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 18:01:12 -0400

“

Q: On “A Tooth for an Eye”, you sing, “I’m telling you stories, trust me.” So while you’re pointing out how so much of our history comes from a very white, male viewpoint, you’re also acknowledging that this album is coming from a specific perspective as well.

Karin Dreijer Andersson: It’s important to question my story and my way of telling it, too. It’s good to ask questions instead of serving answers.

”

- The interviews The Knife are giving for Shaking the Habitual are next-level.

Trash Humping

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 22:29:00 -0400

I saw a Harmony Korine movie at an AMC multiplex. I did! The one on 34th St. across from Penn Station. On a Saturday night, and with a sizable opening weekend crowd that was mostly teenagers, though I’d estimate about eight of them walked out during the film. They played some ads for Coca-Cola and a preview for the new Michael Bay movie about weight lifting and then they screened the new film by the guy who made Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy and Trash Humpers, which is called Spring Breakers.

Daniel Yacavone once called Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey “the most remarkable smuggling of the abstract/experimental into the cinematic mainstream,” although the way people are talking about Spring Breakers you feel like he’d have to amend that superlative. The Monday morning quarterbacking I saw today among Korine diehards today could pretty much be summed up as, “LOL at all these kids who thought they were going to see a vapid teen party flick and instead they found themselves enmeshed in” —gasp, oh look away! look away!— “A NON-LINEAR NARRATIVE.”

I was excited to see Spring Breakers. Radical art being smuggled into the mainstream— that is, like, my thing. That is so up my critical alley it’s not even fair. I believe in the radical possibility of film (I do! I do! I do!) to change the way we perceive the world, to invite us to identify with viewpoints that might seem foreign to us in daily life, to challenge everything safe and unquestioned that we hold dear. So I will admit that as I sat in that theater a big part of me was just smug about the seemingly subversive fact that I am seeing a Harmony Korine movie at an AMC multiplex. Dude’s really found a way to stick it to the man, eh?

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Spring Breakers is a bad film. I once had this professor who’d say the only films that he thought were truly bad are the ones you can’t think to say a word about afterwards. The remake of Planet of the Apes, by his measure, was a bad film. I can’t call Spring Breakers a bad film because since I walked out of that theater two days ago I have been talking and reading about it incessantly.

But what I would like to challenge is this critical narrative that we’ve successfully ground up the antibiotics and snuck them into the dog’s peanut butter, that we’ve Trojan Horsed some piece of radical, subversive, ~*illuminating*~ art into the mainstream and that the only choice is either to shake our heads disappointedly at the ones who “didn’t get it” or feel triumphant about the ones whose sad, artless lives went from black-and-white to color and who vowed to minor in Cinema Studies the second they saw the Titties-and-Skrillex montage (“truly the Odessa Steps of the new millennium” —someone, probably) and thus we have won (ARTSY PEOPLE: 1; PHILISTINES: ZERO). I want to challenge all of that because I really don’t think the ideas at work in Spring Breakers are much more enlightening or interesting (not even to say radical) than that new Michael Bay movie about weightlifting. Or even, like, that Coke commercial.

“You see a woman and she’s really curvy and you’re attracted to that, and some guys see a woman and she’s like a straight line, and they’re attracted to that. I’m just attracted to what’s in Spring Breakers.”

—Harmony Korine, “pop poet”

I think some people want to read Spring Breakers as a critique of racial and gender politics in 21st century America, but trust me on this one, joke’s on you if you’re reading that into the film, because that is not the film Harmony Korine made. Korine’s movies are not critiques of anything; they’re gloriously, unapologetically lurid celebrations of the surface of things. My former internet colleague Calum Marsh (seriously are you reading his stuff at Film.com, he has been tearing it up over there recently) totally gets it: Spring Breakers is not as ironic as you think.

So it’s a fool’s errand to read it as some sort of biting critique of contemporary society, but to accept what’s on the surface is to accept a film that alienates, objectifies and commodifies women and people of color for the flimsy sake of “art, man.” The world it celebrates is, just like the real, non-cinematic world, depressingly racist and sexist, but that because it is not critiquing or saying anything halfway intelligent about those facts, there is no catharsis. No place for the anger and disgust that these images prompt in those who can’t just brush them aside. And when critics ignore those factors and blithely throw their hands up and say, “Well, maybe I don’t get it, but I like it!” (I SEE U, TRAVERS), they’re continuing to propagate the myth that “art film” is this elitist clubhouse closed to any spoilsport who dares articulate the larger cultural forces that prevent them from blithely enjoying a movie like this. Trust me, we don’t hate fun. We believe in the American Dream. WE WANT SHORTS IN ALL THE COLORS TOO.

So let’s not laugh at the kids who don’t get it, Who-Is-Paul-McCartney-Dot-Tumblr-Dot-Com style. Let’s not be naive enough to believe that they’ll all grow up, take that Film Studies 101 Class Where You Watch Breathless and then will suddenly think, “OH, I AM FINALLY EDUCATED ENOUGH TO UNDERSTAND SPRING BREAKERS. WHAT I WAS SEEING THERE WAS A NON-LINEAR NARRATIVE.” (For one thing, this assumption greatly underestimates the average American teenagers’ likelihood to have already seen Memento?) Or maybe they will take that class and it will give them the critical license to say with confidence that they were right the first time, that the movie’s point of view was pretty boring and repetitive and trite, and then they will add, “Plus anything that is allegedly formally innovative about this movie is something Malick was doing way better and more poetically in the 70s.”

I think that Korine is a talented filmmaker in the way he conjures atmosphere. I think Benoit Debie is one of the most exciting working cinematographers. I am not trying to say that I found nothing here to think about, to be entertained by, even in some ways, to enjoy (I am not going to act like the Britney Spears montage was not grotesque/sublime/something I will Youtube in the future). But I do want to question what people find so subversive or rebellious or “intellectual” about this reductive ogglefest in arthouse’s clothes. I want to ask you to think about what you think radical art looks like to you in 2013, and how (or if!) it is at all different from what mainstream “pop” art looks like to you. Which is a really long-winded way of saying: Meet the art boss. Same as the old boss with the combover and the (“ironic”) Penthouse subscription and the self-satisfied air that everything he’s doing is New and Edgy and Never Been Done Before, ‘cept he knows Werner Herzog so I guess he’s cool.

New installment of my column Ordinary Machines is up today at Pitchfork! It’s about the...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 17:01:00 -0400

New installment of my column Ordinary Machines is up today at Pitchfork! It’s about the influence of mislabeled mp3s on filesharing sites. A few footnotes:

1. I am loving the conversation it’s generating and it’s fun to learn about people’s own personal “Innocent Civilian”s. Katherine St. Asaph’s story is great. And the thought of Tom Ewing thinking for one moment that an ABBA cover of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” existed is legitimately breaking my heart.

2. Something I did not really get a chance to tease out: “shameful” as some of these memories and misunderstandings can feel now (THOUGH), for a lot of people this was a legitimate source of musical discovery, and often the kind that pointed you in the direction of an artist you might not have found otherwise.

3. There have been a lot of really interesting— and, ultimately futile— attempts undo the damage of P2P mislabels. I came across this blog called Mislabeled P2P, which “is basically a source to help prevent the mislabeling of song titles and artists on peer to peer file sharing networks, namely the ever-popular Limewire,” as its anonymous vigilante author stated in an introductory post in 2009. They wrote a few blurbs with the noble aim of, say, educating the public to the fact that “Sex and Candy” was not a Nirvana song. (“Marcy [Playground]’s John Wozniak has a much deeper, [more] monotonous voice than Kurt Cobain’s.” A-HA!) But like so many well-intentioned blogs and coveted Wordpress usernames, its author abandoned Mislabeled P2P after 5 posts. It’s quiet the way a dead mall is quiet. Something about its silence says something about the impossible scope and ultimate futility of the task.

4. Seriously can we talk about this screenshot.

5. One of the artists most often mistagged on p2p sites was, true story, Weird Al. The best site I found in my research (and, to my knowledge, the best site in the history of the internet) is a fan-created page called Songs Not By Weird Al, which provides authoritative confirmation that Weird Al did NOT write such p2p hits as “Beer Polka,” “I Bit His Ear,” “Bohemian Rap City,” “Wrong Foot Amputated,” “I Hate Big Butts,” “I Like Big Butts” (“This song is by an individual named ‘Sir Mix-A-Lot’”), “What If God Smoked Cannibus,” “Oh Taliban,” and “Oops! I Farted Again.” I bet he wishes he did, though.

"Kael discovered that in writing about film she could write about everything."

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 23:28:48 -0400

“Kael discovered that in writing about film she could write about everything.”

- Craig Seligman on Pauline Kael. Relevant, aspirational, etc etc etc.

And I’ll fish for compliments And I’ll drink until I’m happy And...

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:14:00 -0500

And I’ll

fish for compliments

And I’ll

drink until I’m happy

And I’ll

wonder what you’re doing

But I won’t call

—Waxahatchee, “Grass Stain”

And I will grow out of all the empty bottles in my closet

And you’ll quit having dreams about a swan dive to the hot asphalt

And I will grow out of all the empty words I often speak

And you will be depleted but much better off without me

And we will find a way to be lonely any chance we get

And I’ll keep having dreams about loveless marriage and regret

—Waxahatchee, “Swan Dive”

When I was writing my review of Waxahatchee’s excellent new album Cerulean Salt, I kept thinking about this line that Mary Timony sings in the Helium song “Superball”: “Everything I say ends with ‘and.’” I take “Superball” to be this sly and surreal little poem about the elasticity of identity, and in particularly about a femininity that can house all sorts of contradictions. “I’m small, like a superball/Throw me at the wall/I’m fragile, like an eggshell/I’m mad as hell.” With each line she morphs into something different, with different physical properties, different strengths and different weaknesses; she is up on some serious Alex Mack shit. To be small and fragile and mad as hell. And…

A more precise description of a Waxahatchee song might be “Everything I say begins with ‘and,’” but still. I really like the rhythmic structure of Katie Crutchfield’s lyrics, she never goes for the easy or obvious end rhyme, there are a lot of interstitial words spilling over between lines, and the sense you get from that approach is that these words are pouring out of her almost faster than she can get them down. (Seriously, listen to her music with an ear for the soft-spoken, hidden “ands,” it’s like an egg hunt.) They all feel like run-on sentences, thumbing their noses at grammatical rules and containment, existing somewhere between stations, capturing both the anxiety and the joy of endless possibilities, the youthful feeling that there will always be more. I felt that way in my early twenties; a lot of people have felt that way in their early twenties. Small and fragile and invincible and huge. It’s as disorienting as it is empowering and if you’re lucky you never grow out of it. I saw a quote going around the internet yesterday, an interviewer asked Margaret Atwood what her favorite word was. “And,” she said. “It is so hopeful.”

somehillbilly: honeycomb.

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 13:59:54 -0500

somehillbilly:

honeycomb.

"These are the days of miracle and wonder This is the long-distance call The way the camera follows..."

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 00:58:01 -0500

“These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long-distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation that’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder and don’t cry, baby, don’t cry”

- I saw Waxahatchee last night. They played what is likely to be the best cover of “The Boy in the Bubble” I will ever hear and Katie dedicated it to “anyone who hasn’t checked the internet on their phone since they’ve been here.”

You know there’s nothing more than this.

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 23:00:16 -0500

You know there’s nothing more than this.

“And to Kathryn Bigelow, my director. You’ve said...

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 18:14:00 -0500

“And to Kathryn Bigelow, my director. You’ve said that filmmaking for you is not about breaking gender roles, but when you make a film that allows your character to disobey the conventions of Hollywood, you’ve done more for women in cinema than you take credit for.”

"It’s a little bit about how, if you can’t be psyched about your own thoughts, then how..."

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 12:17:00 -0500

“It’s a little bit about how, if you can’t be psyched about your own thoughts, then how are you supposed to have a meaningful interaction with anyone? It’s very important to enjoy time alone with yourself just existing, because existence is kind of cool.”

- Angel Olsen is the best and Laura Snapes got to talk with her about the cosmos and stuff.