Sabina versus World.
Actually, I think where Subdee and I were broadly aligned is that the girl G-Dragon is the superhero. Like G-Dragon’s Sasha Fierce is a girl, that is part of the transformation. Whether that makes her good or bad, and which is the “true” self, are secondary questions, though key.
(Bom’s Sasha Fierce is actually Beyoncé.)
G-DRAGON - MICHIGO
[6.56]
Disappointed the translation isn’t ruder here.Cecily Nowell-Smith: It’s hard to feel totally okay with the K-pop industry’s studio system. In among the punishing work schedule and hyped-up fan possessiveness the agency-entertainer relationship starts to look less like a management contract and more like debt peonage. Still, there’s enough give in the system to throw up sports like G-Dragon’s solo sideline in manic swagger hip-pop, curious and lavish as any little princeling’s vanity project. Pop as magpie as you can get it, assured of success, and yet it doesn’t feel cynical, for all the lyrical content has been dialed down for a touchier market. The whole exercise seems so… fanboyish. It’s like it’s inviting the listener to play the game of “guess which records G-Dragon and his producers were most into when they made this” (Rihanna’s “Phresh out the Runway”, Big Sean and Nicki Minaj’s “A$$”, etc etc). He’s stealing cos he loves, so it’s all cool, right? Except this particular celebration’s always primed to slide into murky territory, and the video’s the demonstration of that. Adapt the beats, adapt the intonation, adapt the clothes, adapt the look, and it’s one artist’s admiration of the styles and ideas of the artists he loves. Take up a few afro wigs among your wacky costumes, and your audience might be reminded of that time you got up in blackface to express your admiration for Andre 3000. I’m a sap. I don’t doubt the sincerity of the dude’s love and respect for the artists he pastiches. But there’s an important part of love that’s about consideration of the sensitivities and history of the people you’re supposed to feel so much for — and that’s still lacking. Isolated within the K-pop system, rapid prototyping a post-everything pop where any genre is fair game, it probably doesn’t even occur to GD and his attendant lords. But it does out here, and, well, it’s hard to feel totally okay with it.
[7]Edward Okulicz: Remember Bomfunk MCs? Sure you do. Imagine they’re Korean. And have worked out how to synthesize the sleaziest in pop and sell it on their own shores. They’re better, dirtier, fartier, cheekier — “shut up!.” “Michigo” has so much swagger and grind I feel like I should be watching my backside. I don’t care, I can hear “ass” in there, and if I were drunk, “I wanna hump you” would be in there too, and if you’re not in drunk the club this is still great to strut too, as long as nobody’s looking.
[8]Anthony Easton: The siren at the end of this, whistling like a bomb, clearing out most of the noise for a bit, letting the pitbull (not Pitbull) vocals dominate, is ace.
[8]Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: The laugh is important. That high-pitched and crackled laugh you hear in the chorus, is borrowed from Chris Brown. It isn’t the first ad-lib loaned out by G-Dragon: on Big Bang’s “Fantastic Baby,” he perfected Kanye’s indignant grunt (“HEAGHNN”), turning it into percussive tick; elsewhere, he absorbed - and censored - Lil B’s “pretty bitch” adlib, calling himself a “bad girl” in live performances; a previous take on CB’s ad-lib was subtly dispersed into the background of last year’s “One of a Kind.” However, it’s front and centre on “Michigo” and presented as another instance of G-D’s cheeky American appropriation. The lift makes for an awkward moment where the artist over-thinks their hip-hop friendly brand-building and sacrifices what makes them fun. “Michigo” is that moment extended to four minutes, an overcooked traipse through G-D’s skewed pop prism. It packs in enough entertainment to stop you from writing it off totally: the gaming arcade dubstep of the beat, the continued gender trickery in his “mother/father/who are you” refrain, etc. Nevertheless, G-D’s style-collage approach has begun to show signs of derivativeness. The laugh is important – it may serve as an omen.
[5]Patrick St. Michel: Another example of YG Entertainment’s ability to identify musical trends - whether they be big in South Korea or abroad - and morph them into something that sounds unlike anything happening anywhere. “Michigo” brings to mind brostep and trap, but smashed into something even more maximalist. Despite the very, very busy sounds, G-Dragon still finds a way to shuffle through all the clutter and let his personality shine through.
[7]Alfred Soto: The level of synthesis impresses: bits from Nicki Minaj, A$AP Rocky, and goodness knows how many Asian toothpaste commercials. It goes someplace but not far enough.
[5]Brad Shoup: “He did NOTsay Dirty Mad Fiesta,” says Toria. “He said ‘dirty nasty a$$ f*ck’. That’s what the boy said. I know… I speak english.” Well… my third language is Common Sense, and I’m not hearing it. Maybe the pitchshifted voice is saying “nasty as fuck.” Maybe. Anyway, if you wanted to know what brostep would do for Travis Porter’s “Wobble”: yay! More stickiness could have been pulled from this combo, but GD’s making too much face.
[6]Katherine St Asaph: 2012 in urban and EDM, made ten times more bracing with distance and curation. What’ll it be like when the K-pop machine gets to Mike WiLL?
[7]Iain Mew: The synth blurts and G-Dragon going “brum brum”, “dudum dudum” and so on are consistently entertaining, but this would probably be better off if it gave itself up more completely to the Lemmings beat.
[6]
I wanted this to be the song where I finally write the piece on G-Dragon’s performative genderfuckery (genderqueerness?), but had no time this week, and I’m not sure I’ve arrived at a conclusion yet. It’s polite to write long meta posts only when you have something to say. XD
In January, over email with Subdee, I argued what was essentially an agnostic position: I only have a sense of G-Dragon as an artist, not as a person — even the mediatised “sense of a person” you get from reality shows and interviews and such, since I don’t watch them — so I am literally not sure what he’s doing when he dresses as a girl. Taking on a female alter ego? Performing ideal girl-ness? Performing bad girl-ness? (G-Dragon swaps clothes with 2NE1.) Integrating femininity into the G-Dragon persona and thereby divorcing it from popstar masculinity? Androgyny as metaphor for popstar trickery (including the trickery of other forms of wholesale appropriation, as Cis and others point out)? Popstar trickery as metaphor for queering? Does the fact that Big Bang falls on the relatively masculine side of the K-boyband mystique scale factor into this in any way? (G-Dragon dresses his bandmates.) …Also, part of why I don’t feel like I can read G-Dragon properly is because for some reason, I also have no firm sense of what it meant to all the other male rock stars who dressed in female clothes over the years. I assume different people had many different reasons, and furthermore audiences read it in different ways over the years, and some of those readings were intended/unintended. I mean, I feel like I know why Peter Doherty wears dresses and wigs and makeup sometimes, because I have a working model of Peter Doherty’s psychology. I don’t actually have a working model of eg. David Bowie’s psychology.
Whatever it is, though, it’s clearly driving G-Dragon’s car right now, and increasingly so. The girl stuff is the salient point of interest — I find the single extremely catchy, but it’s not an artistic advance in any way.
[…]
So in a sense FFVII is totally about drag. (In a thousand more relevant senses FFVII is about anything but. I know this. Bear with me.) The game presents Cloud as this sort of self-complete icon of masculine potential (via violence) that’s unfortunately common…
Timocratic continues re: the date sequence, and also thematic foreshadowing or whatever.
I always feel impelled to remind ppl that the ending of Scott Pilgrim pays major homage to all this, but I don’t think anyone my age really needs the reminder.
WHY DID IT TAKE SO LONG FOR TUMBLR TO GET JOHN CLEESE TARDIS ART CRITIC ON MY DASH?
… I guess I should watch the Fourth Doctor then probably.
There are worse places to start DW than with this story.
Anyway, what I like about this scene is that it’s not even bullshit art criticism, it’s perfectly cogent art criticism. XD
(via thoughtsnotunveiled)
(Source: iamabadcitizen, via thoughtsnotunveiled)
‘Tous Les Arbres Sont En Fleurs (live 1969)’ by Nana Mouskouri & Le Groupe Les Athéniens
“Honey” (English or French) cycles obsessively, never resolves; Nana M. gives it a linear dramatic reading.
Janelle Monáe for Saint Laurent
Okay, so I’m being a bit facetious, but in the wake of watching this amazing video, I got to thinking about three of Spring’s biggest narratives: the reinvented sharpness and graphicism of the 1960s (seen at Vuitton, among others), the slew of monochromatic pieces that we saw back in September and Hedi Slimane’s continued antagonism and ire for the fashion industry at Saint Laurent.There’s been way too much ink devoted to Hedi, and to continue to harp on it before the Pre-Fall collections come out is a bit moot at this point. That being said, Hedi’s obsession with all things punk, grunge and surf has reinforced the ethos of the rich white girl appropriating symbols of marginalized classes for her own benefit, to the detriment of visible minorities (in the watered down ethnic by-products distributed by Urban Outfitters) and the economically disadvantaged. Yes, those girls have inspired much of American culture and we’re eternally grateful for characters like Marianne Faithful and Courtney Love for inspiring the aesthetic of counter-culture. That being said, Hedi’s work, commercially and aesthetically viable as it is, embodies all of the worst qualities of fashion. Selling $1400 oversized flannel shirts to girls that previously bought them for $10 in Los Angeles thrift shops is a slap in the face to those who have been living that lifestyle for years, and don’t need some waify little shit telling them that their look is “in”. It’s even more of a slap to the face for the YSL-faithful (and no, I won’t play into that Saint Laurent garbage, because it’s a thin guise for Hedi’s appropriation of an entire house), in that it denies them the YSL characteristics that we’ve come to treasure: the austerity, the quiet rebellious streak, the sensual/sexual undercurrents.
What does any of this have to do with Janelle Monae? I’m well aware that it’s a bit of a stretch, but entertain me for a moment: what if Janelle Monae (and Erykah Badu / Badoula Oblongata) an empowered woman of colour with a clear sense of control over her massively disbursed subjectivity), was the face of YSL? She fits the YSL’s aesthetic: internationally influenced, but rooted in her own ideas of style. She fits Hedi’s aesthetic: skinny, monochrome, and not afraid to push the aesthetic limits of her own culture (or in Hedi’s case, the sacred annals of French fashion, which he’s so keen on disrupting). What if for a moment, Hedi stopped denying the power of the images that he appropriates and gives license to a young, fresh face like Janelle to give Saint Laurent a political impetus? Wouldn’t acknowledging Eurocentric oppression of visible minorities, especially in fashion, be a more effective way of dismantling the hegemonic institutions that continue to exert power over the cultural psyche and by extension, the way we dress and view other groups?
It’s about time those in fashion give credit where credit is due, and moreso, give visible minorities the visibility that they’ve been entitled to for so long. Are we not at a point where we can recognize that the subtle suppression of visibility is itself, a violent form of racism? Get your act together Hedi, and give fashon something to really cry foul over.
I know absolutely nothing about fashion, but my boyfriend does and sometimes he writes long impassioned rants about it, and this is also vaguely about Janelle Monáe, so reblogging it doesn’t feel entirely like off-topic nepotism.
Consider this reblog penance for not having posted anything of substance lately - I’m packing and moving my life into storage for the summer, but I’ll be back writing regularly by Monday at the latest.
This is really interesting; a different perspective. I’m inclined to co-sign the ethical argument, though I don’t think it encompasses my actual reservations vis the past couple of seasons at YSL, which are more of an aesthetic problem. …I’ve been sitting here rewriting the paragraph, trying to define what I think Hedi is doing wrong (though gawd knows a lot of ppl have yelled a lot of things XD). Ultimately I think it’s that the Dior Homme stuff at the time felt new, or more precisely newly syncretic, whereas the current Saint Laurent stuff iterates on ideas that have worked their way through every marketplace echelon already. I mean, if he’d come out with those maxi skirts just ahead of the 2010 Hemline Index** drop… which is saying nothing since dude was not designing then. But this is a good example of my nagging feeling that he’s “clearing out backlogged ideas.”
Anyway. The other thing is that I’m not up on which musical acts are involved with Saint Laurent. For a while I thought Janelle Monáe was. As noted, she fits the YSL ideal really well (in fact Pilati used her IIRC, which may be a strike against her now :P). But this aspect seems just as thematically unfocussed — if you have Daft Punk and Courtney Love, what do you have? Other than, I guess, “famous musical acts”? The music of the shows themselves is still excellent, though.
** Per the current research, a three-year lag on the Dow, like clockwork.
In February 2012, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek decided to go public with a strange and, he worried, somewhat embarrassing idea. Impossible as it seemed, Wilczek had developed an apparent proof of “time crystals” — physical structures that move in a repeating pattern, like minute hands rounding clocks, without expending energy or ever winding down. Unlike clocks or any other known objects, time crystals derive their movement not from stored energy but from a break in the symmetry of time, enabling a special form of perpetual motion.
[…]Now, a technological advance has made it possible for physicists to test the idea. They plan to build a time crystal, not in the hope that this perpetuum mobile will generate an endless supply of energy (as inventors have striven in vain to do for more than a thousand years) but that it will yield a better theory of time itself.
A Crazy Concept
The idea came to Wilczek while he was preparing a class lecture in 2010. “I was thinking about the classification of crystals, and then it just occurred to me that it’s natural to think about space and time together,” he said. “So if you think about crystals in space, it’s very natural also to think about the classification of crystalline behavior in time.”
When matter crystallizes, its atoms spontaneously organize themselves into the rows, columns and stacks of a three-dimensional lattice. An atom occupies each “lattice point,” but the balance of forces between the atoms prevents them from inhabiting the space between. Because the atoms suddenly have a discrete, rather than continuous, set of choices for where to exist, crystals are said to break the spatial symmetry of nature — the usual rule that all places in space are equivalent. But what about the temporal symmetry of nature — the rule that stable objects stay the same throughout time?
Reality: always trippier than SFF. CRYSTALS OF TIME, GUYS.
Has Doctor Who (or, hell, Ballard) not already written the fanfic? … … … not that my statement was a request.
It’s always nice to hear words like “physicists plan to build a time crystal,” I hope they tell us when they mean to switch the apparatus on so we can set a date for our just-in-case-something-goes-wrong-and-a-Rift-swallows-NoCal parties. XD
Also, the hipster-ass commenter who’s like, “Oh please, Hestenes worked out that electrons exist in an eternal trembling helix before perpetual motion went mainstream.”
In all seriousness, though, this feels like the Platonic ideal of science: someone proposes a groundbreaking hypothesis, others are skeptical, an experiment is designed and planned — all within a couple of years.
Julien Malland (aka Seth), photo by Jérôme Coton
Before demolishing Les Bains-Douches on April 30, owner Jean-Pierre Marois decided to give the building one last hoorah with an ephemeral art exhibition curated by galleristMagda Danysz that will soon be destroyed along with the legendary structure. Les Bains was originally built as a bath house in the 19th-century Paris and was later re-opened as a night club frequented by celebrities and famous creatives like Mick Jagger, Kate Moss and Andy Warhol. The establishment was declared a safety hazard and closed in 2010. Before demolishing the building in order to build anew, owner Jean-Pierre Morois invited Magda Danysz to curate an artist residency featuring 50 international artists including the likes of Vhils, Sten Lex, Space Invader, Seth, Futura and more. Les Bains is not open to the public, however — a catalogue of the ephemeral exhibition will instead be published through Magda Danysz Gallery. Take a look at some photos of the works at Les Bains-Douches below. (via)
Another one of those legendary spaces…
(via coloredink)
