Culture, Digested: Spring Showers Links
Courtney Love, Harvard's Taylor Studies, Paying for your Passport
On deadline, so here are some random thoughts!
Kate Bush was only just inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year. And this year, the honor goes to the Dave Matthews Band.
Look, I don’t know what to say, music seems to be in a bad place right now. I’ve been listening to Courtney Love’s Women, and I am beginning to think we should just put her in charge of everything. Her and Azealia Banks. Let them run music journalism, criticism, radio, the labels, all of it. Let them put Lana del Rey into forced lockdown, they can rescue Kanye, they can actually act as arbiters of taste.
I find the groveling at the feet of Taylor Swift that the New York Times and Harvard are doing really undignified. I know we live in an attention economy, which means that you have to meet people where they are to get them to look over at you, so the whole apparatus just reinforces this pyramid where billionaire pop stars get all the money, press, adoration, etc, and everyone else gets scraps. But you’re the New York Times! You’re Harvard! You don’t have to do this and it’s weird that you want to!
So in the name of paying attention to other things:
the new Cindy Lee album is very good
Yussef Dayes’s Black Classical Music is stunning
Aquarium Drunkard, one of my favorite review sites, is moving toward a subscription model. Their mixtape series is one of my favorite things when I’m traveling, on trains and airplanes, stuck in layovers and weird hotel rooms. They introduced me to the music of Anna Ahnlund and I’m very grateful.
For a couple days, every time I went on social media I was shown the videos (from multiple angles even) of a guy setting himself on fire in front of Trump’s trial. Then it morphed into people arguing the videos have to be fake because of this or that detail. I do not care for this world.
It’s almost time for the Cannes film festival, which means it’s almost time for the annual tradition of the film critic humblebrag. Oh my god, Cannes? So irrelevant when you think about it, and I’m really suffering here being forced to see eight movies a day and sleep on the floor of an airbnb shared with six other critics, really my passion for films is such a burden. That whole thing. Which then turns into spiteful envy at the “influencers” and youtubers who get red carpet treatment and invited to better parties. Can’t wait. If only there were a way to re-experience the teary-eyed solemnity everyone at Cannes last year had for Killers of the Flower Moon, what a masterpiece, what a special film, I only wish it could be longer somehow, make it five, six hours, bathe me in its eternal glory. Then it came out and it was like huh, that was okay I guess.
European cities are figuring out it maybe wasn’t such a great idea to give a passport to anyone who paid them a lot of money. It turns out that inviting in money launderers, oligarchs, and American retirees with big bank accounts doesn’t do much to help the lower income citizens of your own country. (The fact that there isn’t a hit novel or prestige TV series about American retirees in Portugal and their clashes with the locals doesn’t say good things about our culture.)
And similarly, Kansas City’s rejection of the stadium tax for the Royals and Chiefs is a success story of grassroots organizing for KC Tenants. The campaign in support of the stadium tax spent around $6 million in the run up to the vote, and they still lost. Kriston Capps (friend of the pub) has written before on the bad math of city-funded sports complexes that promise revitalization but deliver disparity.
Also: what St. Louis’s vacant downtown district is doing to the city.
And finally, I wanted to like this essay on the missing financial information from contemporary literature but……… why are all the examples novels about the creative class? Because all novels are about the creative class now, I guess. But when someone says something like “we need more 19th century social realism-style literature” I think sure, okay, and then they say something like “about writer-expats in Barcelona” and then I tune out. Like, the financial information in novels about writers written by people who went to MFA programs is implied. And also, our literary culture is run on envy and spite, so you know if one of these novels came clean about the financial situation of its author stand-in protagonist, the whole thing would dissolve itself in the furious tears of writers who grew up in a slightly less nice neighborhood and are still mad they had to go to Brown instead of Yale. But also I get it because yesterday I opened a novel I was assigned to review and it’s about a woman frustrated by the state of her kitchen renovations. Help.
And in case you missed it, Sara Marzullo wrote about the recent blockbuster Mark Rothko show in Paris, and the perils of decontextualizing work in pursuit of a “pure” encounter with the art.