Sophie lives in BK, works, writes, plays music, puts on shows and uses twitter.
A few blogs I run or help run:
flavorpill.tumblr.com
thepermanentwave.tumblr.com
sadjams.tumblr.com
spiralringnotebook.tumblr.com
pseudoprofoundelectronicartists.tumblr.com
silentdraperunners.tumblr.com
Quote reblogged from Judy Berman with 213 notes
One issue that surfaces when teaching the skills of radical cultural critique to students is a sense of conflict between pleasure and analysis. Initially they often assume that if you are critiqueing a subject it must mean that you do not like it. Since I have written critical essays on two Spike Lee films, students will often say “Hey, you’re really down on Spike.” Or even before they “get on my case,” if I express a positive interest in Lee’s work, they are surpised because they assume that critical essays are an attack. In any liberatory pedagogy, students should learn how to distinguish between hostile critique that is about “trashing” and critique that’s about illuminating and enriching our understanding.
bell hooks, Yearning, 7 (via teacherandapreacher)
The Internet ain’t no liberatory pedagogy.
(via nickminichino)
This quote is basically my theme song.
(via judyxberman)
Source: teacherandapreacher
Photo reblogged from flavorpill with 52 notes
But then Lemberger gets to her real problem: “Downton Abbey was appointment TV for my husband and me, two people whose tastes rarely coincide. He watches sports. I watch upholstery. But as the season has progressed, the groans from his end of the couch have gotten louder.” So, that’s it — the heart of what detractors are really complaining about. In its second season, the show has begun to strike some viewers as openly — nay, brazenly! — female oriented. While it used to be required viewing for everyone who’s ever donated enough to own a PBS tote bag, Julian Fellowes has tipped his hand, and it’s all queens. And, perhaps because everything women like more than men is ripe for popular scorn (think “chick flicks” vs. action blockbusters), the author is embarrassed enough by its girlie elements that she now seems to believe her beloved costume drama has devolved into World War I Gossip Girl.
Yes, ‘Dowton Abbey’ Is a Soap Opera. So What?
Judy is secretly the Dowager Countess.
Source: flavorpill
Post with 21 notes
It’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you.
In the last 24 hours I got pretty angry about two things. First, the ongoing Lana Del Rey fiasco, which was probably my own fault for reading her lyrics for about an hour last night, but which was reinforced by walking to into my office and hearing her album on the speakers this morning. It sounded nice - I’m pretty sure it’s going to get some decent reviews. But the memory of what I’d read made me sad and angry all over again.
The other inciting incident from was the Chuck Klosterman essay in which he strangely and unsuccessful posits that tUnE-yArDs is a flavor-of-the-week indie artist who, along with her gender ambiguity, will fade into the buzzy ether soon enough. This bothered me on a pretty personal level. Merril is an inspiration and hero to me, as someone who is also a woman, musician, ukulele player, singer and believes in questioning gender norms, and her records and live performances have had a huge impact on me over the last few years.
Talking to a friend about our growing desperation in the face of the unending success of the LDR meme, I thought of a piece another friend wrote about her - one of the few that stuck out from the onslaught over the past few months:
What I didn’t understand was why [she] bothered me. But then I watched the videos and realized that for me, the problem was that I simply am not the intended audience.
…in Del Rey’s thus-far oeuvre, the intended audience is a lover who constantly needs to be re-engaged, re-compelled with forever fulfillment, reassured: “You can be the boss, daddy.” The lover/observer, not the artist, is creating the rules, but both are watching so very very closely. To love these songs, I think, requires an exhausting level of interest.
Though these observations were directed towards LDR, I think they can be applied to the Klosterman “controversy” as well. He simply isn’t tUnE-yArDs intended audience. Instead of recognizing that, coming to terms with it, or trying to understand what makes that so (hint: being a professionally grumpy white straight dude might have something to do with it), he assumes that because one minute piece of culture is not all for him, the artist in question must have a limited relevance, and the people who care about her must be suffering from some sort of temporary delusion.
We all make this mistake on occasion, assuming that because we don’t fit in an artists audience their music is bad or of little consequence (and sometimes it’s true, too). What bothers me is that in both of these cases, the parties involved (Chuck Klosterman and LDR’s audience) represent a demographic that is CONSTANTLY pandered to. For the concerns of those outside that group to be treated as silly or delusional (a stereotypical accusation), is all the more proof that sexism is alive and well, and even a distanced nostalgia for a time when it was socially acceptable (which LDR’s music displays) is worse than reversing what marginalized people have been working towards since the days of Ellen Willis, it’s spinning car around and flooring it in the opposite direction.
Quote with 18 notes
What it comes down to for me — as a Velvets fan, a lover of rock-and-roll, a New Yorker, an aesthete, a punk, a sinner, a sometime seeker of enlightenment (and love) (and sex) — is this: I believe that we are all, openly or secretly, struggling against one or another kind of nihilism. I believe that body and spirit are not really seperate, though it often seems this way. I believe that redemption is never impossible and always equivocal. But I guess that I just don’t know.
It’s funny, though: Most music lovers carry around some shred of a very powerful myth that says the opposite, that pleasant music can never really be where the meaningful ideas are. Nobody says that outright, of course, but we’ve all been just a little bit indoctrinated on the point that “nice” music is old news. It is, allegedly, the sound of complacency, boredom, and undeserved comfort. Niceness is for wimps and sell-outs, a bland little house in a repressed little suburb; everyone knows the real power of music is built from aggression and loud noises in dirty basements, transgression and energy and screams.
Quote with 2 notes
Why? Because it matters! It’s not entertainment. This is art goddamn it!” he says.
“It’s life. It saved my life, it saved a lot of people’s lives,” he said. “To do anything that devalues it, I think it’s sad. And I think the writers at Pitchfork love it in the same way all the critics have. I think the people who run it, don’t.
Quote reblogged from katherine st asaph with 7 notes
The main point here is that the Black Eye’d Peas are merely puppets of the music industry + corporate america. THEY DO NOT PLAY MUSIC… THEY ARE SINGER/DANCERS. If they truly cared more about music they would hire musicians or play instruments, however, they are SO VEIN that they must strip all the authenticity of their sound in exchange for costumes and larger profits. Second, their lyrics are SHALLOW, SUPERFICIAL, and promote the mentality that corporate america relies on for creating shallow, superficial consumers. THEY ARE THE AIDS/HIV OF MUSIC AND PHILOSOPHY.
the comments on Ann Powers’ piece
a) Fuck you, musical theater and opera performers, as well as lead vocalists everywhere! YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT MUSIC. SINGING IS NOT MUSICIANSHIP!
b) “so vein”
c) that last sentence I don’t even
(via katherinestasaph)
I kind of love this.
Source: katherinestasaph
Quote with 5 notes
And this was within the confines of a queer/punk/DIY community. The straight music-journalist dudes disapprove and want us to be more political, just like the queer punks disapprove and want us to be more political. Is it your duty as a female in the punk community to have a specific political agenda when making art? I sure wish I was a dude, then—I could make party songs and not have to worry about all the people I was letting down.
Quote with 9 notes
Sure, I know it’s my personal and subjective problem that I find Joanna Newsom’s Ys the best album of the century and it’s my personal and subjective problem that I get miffed when the most important music journalism publication rates any album more highly than it. But I started to research the highest numbered Pitchfork ratings of all time and I was very dismayed with the results. Not a single album made primarily by a female artist has even received a 10.0 rating from Pitchfork. Only two albums have been named album of year which has a significant female creator—Fever to Tell by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs for 2003 (if we go by the end of the decade lists), with Karen O as the primary lyricist and songwriter and Silent Shout by the Knife for 2006 with Karin Dreijer Andersson as the primary lyricist and songwriter…
Only 7/40 top albums of the year from 1970-2010 have had women as songwriters and only 2/40 with women as the primary songwriters and lyricists (and let’s remember that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Knife have men in them, so I am a bit hesitant to even count them)
All The Birds on the Bon Iver BNM today.
Interesting points.
Quote reblogged from Mark Richardson with 21 notes
Sincerity is the opposite of pretentiousness, and while it is certainly possible to be puzzled or annoyed by Mr. Malick’s philosophical tendencies or unmoved by the images he composes or the story he tells, I don’t think there is any pretending involved.
A.O. Scott (via seanfennessey)
Interesting exchange and worth a read.
(via markrichardson)
I feel like this article is addressing the politics of a culture of movie writers that I am totally unfamiliar with (though I read the article it was in response to). Honestly, I don’t think it really said anything as interesting first article said. A.O. Scott just seems kinda pissed off at everyone. Movies are definitely not the only art form that is expected to be “fun” and accessible and not serious… see: television, comic books, pop music.
Source: The New York Times
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