“Things are beautiful if you love them.”
—Jean Anouilh
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don’t know the source, but the correction is perfect
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"We as Black people have to tell our own stories. We have to document our history. When we allow someone else to document our history the history becomes twisted and we get written out. We get our noses blown off."Erykah Badu, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (via beautiful-ambition)
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"I would never re-write you. You are by far my most complete and greatest novel. You and your splendor; lingering in my brain across a timelessly barefoot reality."Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Vita Sackville-West dated 23 November 1926. (via fuckyeahvirginiawoolf)
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"The language forged by Black people in this country, on this continent … got us from one place to another. We described the auction block. We described what it meant to be there. We survived what it meant to be torn from your mother, your father, your brother, your sister. We described it. We survived being described as mules, as having been put on earth only for the convenience of white people. We survived having nothing belonging to us, not your mother, not your father, not your daughter, not your son. And we created the only language in this country."James Baldwin | The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (via theeducatedfieldnegro)
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"Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be—a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they—and all of us—have to be able to think about a world that works differently."
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We are aware.
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» If You're Laughing at Kanye West, the Joke's on You
The media is freaking out about an interview with Kanye West that theNew York Times ran yesterday. West always gives good copy, and predictably enough, he obliged the NYT by saying lots of suitably “outrageous” things, all of which have been circulating like crazy around the Internet over the last 24 hours. The inevitable quote roundups have already started rolling in, and their tone is all too predictable — Vulture, for instance, gives us “The Most Ridiculous Things Kanye Said In His New York Times Interview,” while The Daily Beast goes with “The Craziest Quotes,” and… well, you get the idea. Look at the crazy guy! Listen to the crazy things he says! The thing is, if you really think West isn’t doing this on purpose, well, the joke’s on you.
The way Kanye West is portrayed in the media is an ongoing study in the conflict between perception and reality. As the reaction to this interview (and, indeed, the interview itself) demonstrate, he’s frequently depicted as a cartoonish figure, a caricature of the egocentric modern celebrity. In fairness, he hasn’t always helped himself defy that stereotype, but then, perhaps he hasn’t wanted to do so, because the persona West projects is all about making the media work for him, and he knows exactly what he’s doing.
The way in which savvy musicians are dictating their own mythology is something I’ve looked at before, but whereas in the case of many artists, this is a process of resisting the way they’re portrayed and trying to dictate an alternate narrative, West seems to have decided early on in his career to embrace many of the stereotypes thrown at hip-hop artists (although, curiously, not all of them; he’s never for a moment embraced gangsta clichés) and turn them up to 11.
West is many things — brilliant, idiosyncratic, egotistical, contradictory — but one thing he’s definitely not is stupid: “I get it, everybody knows I’m a motherfuckin’ monster,” he raps during the chorus to “Monster,” and he’s only too happy to play up to this popular perception of himself. People criticize him for his ego, so he appears on the cover of Rolling Stone as Jesus, or proclaims himself “the Steve [Jobs] of Internet, downtown, fashion, culture.” People criticize him for being materialistic, so he raps, “They made us hate ourselves/ And love their wealth”… and then, a decade later, tweets a photo of himself with his private plane.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that there’s more than a whiff of racism in making a spectacle of “crazy Kanye West,” in the same way that there’s something sexist about the way that Fiona Apple is always depicted as the madwoman in the attic — take, for example, the rather distasteful way that Vulture’s quote roundup describes West as “Kim Kardashian’s future baby daddy.”
Again, West seems only too aware of this; on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, he snaps that “the same people that tried to blackball me forgot about two things: my black balls,” and years earlier, he noted, “We shine because they hate us, floss ’cause they degrade us/ We trying to buy back our 40 acres/ And for that paper, look how low we stoop/ Even if you in a Benz, you still a nigga in a coop.” By the sounds of it, Yeezus tracks like “New Slaves” and “Black Skinhead” address this subject even more explicitly.
The fact that the media has been only too happy to portray West as a caricature rather proves the validity of the entire exercise. His persona has worked as a fractured reflection of expectations, and if you look back over the way that this persona has evolved throughout his career, it’s almost performance art — compare and contrast the fresh-faced, Polo-shirt-wearing, backpack-toting preppy of The College Dropout to the moneyed hedonist of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and the latter-day firebrand of his new work. It’s like Middle America’s nightmare made flesh, an articulate and angry black man first trying to live the American dream, then transcending it, then rejecting it. Rarely has a career followed such a compelling and coherent narrative arc, and if you think the guy following it is just a cashed-up egomaniac, well, you’re putting an awful lot of faith in providence.
West’s attitude has defined his career, and without it, he might never have become one of the most famous rappers of all time. As he rapped in his guest verse on Rhymefest’s “Brand New,” “They say your attitude determines your latitude,” going on to describe himself as “still the motherfucker that you love to hate/ But [you] can’t because you love what I make.” This, perhaps, gets to the heart of West’s persona — you can love him or hate him, but he won’t be ignored. (It was fascinating to note his reaction to a reviewer giving one of his live shows a report card-style B+: “What’s a B+ mean? I’m an extremist, its either pass or fail! A+ or F-!”)
Even his occasional “missteps” have been remarkably successful in terms of refining his mythology. Take his notorious “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” moment, for instance — apart from the fact that he was probably completely correct, it occurred in the same week that he released Late Registration. I’m not sure that West is cynical enough to have treated his appearance solely as a publicity stunt — the speech in which the quote came seemed pretty emotional and heartfelt — but equally, he clearly realized that this was an opportunity to do… something. He pauses for a moment before making his proclamation, like he’s weighing its impact, and then jumps in with both feet. And look, here we are, nearly a decade later, still talking about it.
The NYT interview comes with the provocative headline “Behind Kanye’s Mask,” but really, it’s not anything of the sort — it’s another manifestation of the persona he’s been refining for years, and what truly lies “behind the mask” is something that very few people get to see. Intriguingly, those who know him best describe him as somewhat shy, which makes sense when you think about it — it’s often those who are least secure who tend to overcompensate by being aggressively extroverted. Whoever the real Kanye West is, one thing’s for sure: if you’re giggling about how “crazy” Kanye is, you’re doing exactly what he wants you to do.
Although I rarely read critical writing on hip hop, this piece actually goes in. -Sebas’
Also I’m beginning to think that Kanye is a musical/media genius.
Also, he gave life in that interview.
All a dis.
Idk man, a private jet aint fucking satire.
Totally obsessed with shit like this
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"I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me."Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (1973)
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So I was on the train today and these two black guys were having a conversation not even that loud and said “nigga” like once when this white lady turns around and says “How do you think MLK Jr. would feel about you using that kind of language” and one of the guys snaps back and said “Idk maybe if your people didn’t shoot him I would know”
OOP
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God we fuck up teenagers’ heads. We tell them that biological conditions are moral punishments and then we get all shocked when they don’t practice rational risk management of biological conditions. We teach them “sex is super desirable and all the cool kids do it, and it’s hideously shameful and will destroy your life” and we wonder why they act an eensy bit neurotic about it. If you tried to design a system for making sexually active kids confused and unsafe, you couldn’t do much better than the American media and school system.
And for once, the answer is relatively simple. Just talk about sex like it’s a part of life. Some people have sex and some people don’t, because people are different. STIs aren’t bad because they’re Dirty Crotch Rot; they’re bad because they’re contagious illnesses like strep throat or whooping cough, and you can ask a doctor to check for and treat them just like you would with strep throat. Unwanted pregnancy isn’t a scarlet A; it’s a mostly-preventable accident that sometimes occurs when people are going about their normal business of having sex. You can ask the school counselor about a variety of topics, including career planning, problems at home, questions about sex, or conflicts with teachers.
If we could just get the goddamn stick out of our collective ass and accept that sex is a human activity and teenagers are humans, maybe there wouldn’t be quite so many plaintive “I don’t understand my body and I’m confused and scared and I don’t know anyone I can ask in person” messages flying out into the world.
"The Pervocracy - “Teenage Panic.” (via klonazepam) -
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I want to stress this again: In many, many parts of the country right now, if you want to go to see a movie in the theater and see a current movie about a woman — any story about any woman that isn’t a documentary or a cartoon — you can’t. You cannot. There are not any. You cannot take yourself to one, take your friend to one, take your daughter to one.
There are not any.
By far your best shot, numbers-wise, at finding one that’s at least even-handedly featuring a man and a woman is Before Midnight (on 891 screens) so I hope you like it. Because it’s pretty much that or a solid, impenetrable wall of movies about dudes.
Dudes in capes, dudes in cars, dudes in space, dudes drinking, dudes smoking, dudes doing magic tricks, dudes being funny, dudes being dramatic, dudes flying through the air, dudes blowing up, dudes getting killed, dudes saving and kissing women and children, and dudes glowering at each other.
Somebody asked me this morning what “the women” are going to do about this. I don’t know. I honestly am at the point where I have no idea what to do about it. Stop going to the movies? Boycott everything?
They put up Bridesmaids, we went. They put up Pitch Perfect, we went. They put up The Devil Wears Prada, which was in two-thousand-meryl-streeping-oh-six, and we went (and by “we,” I do not just mean women; I mean we, the humans), and all of it has led right here, right to this place. Right to the land of zippedy-doo-dah. You can apparently make an endless collection of high-priced action flops and everybody says “win some, lose some” and nobody decides that They Are Poison, but it feels like every “surprise success” about women is an anomaly and every failure is an abject lesson about how we really ought to just leave it all to The Rock.
"At The Movies, The Women Are Gone : Monkey See : NPR
The whole article is fantastic, as is pretty much everything Linda Holmes writes.
(via kdhart)
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setfabulazerstomaximumcaptain:
Tyler Perry Movies In A Nutshell
What episode is this from?
Lmao! “I am dark skinned and bald, so I hate you and I hate jesus!”
That was a REAAAD!!! I died when i first saw this.
“Get out, I’m gonna marry this white hussy, because you are too virtuous and strong, and might make me a better man”
LORDHAVE
MERCY
“Oh lord thank you Jesus, I never thought I’d ever be with a man so loving and light-skinned”
DEAD AND FUCKING GONE GOOD FUCKING GOOOOD
‘I LOVE ME SOME JESUS, AND I LOVE ME SOME YOU!!!’
“I WILL ALWAYS BE LIGHT SKINNDED FOR YOU!!!’
