Spring Breaker-zzzzz: review
If anyone else says “Spring Break forever” I’m going to lose my shit
Spring Breakers, in which I review a film I feel largely indifferent about
**CONTAINS SPOILERS**
I felt excited about Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers after watching the exhilarating trailer and hearing all that hype about it.
I wondered if I’d feel shocked or offended or have some kind of feminist breakdown over it, or if Korine would manage to do something different and surprising with his Girls Gone Wild pretext.
I just didn’t expect to be so bored. I’m still not sure how such a level of violence and sexual antics could end up being so dull, but I imagine it had something to do with Korine’s attempt to create a dreamy drug-like experience instead of a traditionally structured screenplay – a laudable aim but one that was only partly successful.
Repetition can be a powerful device used skilfully, but not when the same self-involved, whiny characters repeat the same, badly scripted lines over. And over. AND OVER. I really didn’t want to watch one more shot of the characters standing around in their bikinis stroking each other’s hair like a group of snivelling primates, but Korine showed me one more. And then another. And then a lot of boys squirted a lot of beer and liqueur over a lot of girls’ tits, which was a right royal waste. And you thought we were in a recession, ladzzz?
There were some interesting takes on the relationship between hedonistic sex and greedy capitalism, in one of the film’s two very funny scenes involving James Franco’s character Alien throwing money, guns, clothes and a bottle of Calvin Klein’s Escape around and screaming Look at all my shit!!”. But it wasn’t enough next to so much average material.
And after a while the jiggling arse and tits ‘n’ beer shots took their toll. Like all things raunch culture, things become very unsexy very quickly, and very, very boring. Korine isn’t exactly satirising this culture because if you read anything about him you know that Harmony loves trash, and he wasn’t exactly celebrating it, because some Really Bad Things happen to the characters and a lot of the time they feel Really Bad, which accounts for all the standing-around and hair-stroking. But I found it rather depressing to watch, and queasy afterwards at exposure to these idiots, like I’d walked in on someone I hate having sex and hung around to crunch some popcorn in the corner.
Srsly I’m so fricking bored right now those guns are the most boring guns I’ve ever seen
I read some women’s reactions online who felt refreshed by the agency of the female characters, and their excessive comfort with their bodies, but I couldn’t get excited about a version of womanhood that so closely resembled a high-school jock’s Friday night wankfest. I don’t have any problem with naughty girls (I know plenty of naughty girls), but it’s such a one-note version of sexuality – aesthetically synced to MTV Base; and brassy and public, the big show-offs; and bordering on mandatory, in terms of the expectation that young people (especially women) should be frequently sexual and sexually available. It’s depressing, when I think of all the mighty girls I know, and all the things about them – their sense of humour and their jobs and their compassion and their children and their PHds etc – that this is another version of naked girls who just loooooove to fuck. Plus it’s a mean-spirited sexuality: it’s only for thin girls, and you can bet they don’t want you in their gang. I like shy people; I can’t warm to exhibitionists because it’s always all about them, and these girls made me want to give them a cardigan and a lesson in good manners and make them watch Antiques Roadshow on a 10 year loop. ❤❤ Antiques Rooooadshoooow foreva bitches ❤ ❤
And of course a lot of guys watched it and “craned their necks in delight every time a new pair of boobs bounced across the screen, and said things like “aaw yeah,” “work it,” and “dammnn gurl”” instead of seeing it as a piece of art.
But we can’t expect every film to be a feminist fist pump, and I guess we had our Bridesmaids moment, didn’t we Girls? Last time I get sucked in by this kind of trailer-trickery:
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Tags: raunch, Spring Breakers
Kathryn Ferguson’s Four Tell
From what I remember of feminist research methods from my uni days, the idea is to remove the masculine model of objective interviewer and subjective interviewee, the idea that there’s a tangible reality that an unattached scientific observer can uncover. Instead there is a collaborative spirit, a sense that the researcher and the researched can learn from each other and produce something new only by both parties giving something to the process.
It’s a technique that has had more influence than you might imagine, even if the words “feminist research methods” don’t exactly get you all hot under the collar. Interviews with musicians, artists, writers and so on frequently take on this two-way approach, but they work best, of course, if both parties have something fascinating and relevant to say.
Kathryn Ferguson’s short film, released on International Women’s Day, is a beautiful bit of feminist film-making. Featuring Caryn Franklin, Bella Freud, Zaha Hadid and Wah Nails’ Sharmadean Reid, the screen regularly splits into two, three, four, including all four women’s experience as equally valid and showing the breadth and variety of influences and opinions. The women also ask each other questions, becoming producers of an inspiring story.
(As an aside it’s sponsored by Selfridges, which makes all-time fucking legend Caryn Franklin’s comment all the more poignant: “I appreciate creativity more than ever … I see the beauty that people make, but I also see the corporatization of creativity and the driving force of money over everything.”)
Showing a multitude of views and individuals is a worthy thing to do. Surely the biggest and best thing we can do for young people – and all of us – is show them a variety of paths. Want to wear a dress, even though you’re a bloke? Want to be an architect, a nurse, a nail technician, a dad, a welder; want to listen to the Smiths or the Roots or Lady Gaga? Fine. If kids spent all day watching inspiring people speak – education a la Ted talks – the world would be singularly amazing.
International gender reinforcement day
I’m sometimes wary of the whole “celebration of women” idea (as I would be of celebrating men – what, all of them?) as it can so easily lead to that idea of some innate quality in either sex – as if traits of nurturing, empathising, competitiveness, creativity or strength can be aligned with one sex. But of course, we missed out on quite a lot of celebrating of women over the entire course of human history, aside from that whole mother/whore/precious flower worship, which makes it all the more important to tell and retell the stories made by women.
Which is why photos like this, of some girls about to make the world better, really rather cheering and jolly.
Happy International Women’s Day, everyone.
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I’m no expert on folk music (or even females), but there’s a few artists who’ve been my consistent accompaniment to the last year or so.
Here are three amazing women artists to get you through the winter. Get that camomile tea brewing, lie back and dream of spring.
Josephine Foster 
I saw Josephine at Cafe Oto in November after my boyfriend Adam saw the first night of her residency and told me to “go, go if you don’t go to any other gigs this year.”
I was happy to go on my own (though I was pleased to see my friend Geoff there), and we stood and listened to her astonishing voice in the reverent silence people don’t break at Oto. She trained as an opera singer and can do that stunning vibrato effect, so that her voice sounds like a cross between playing glass and glass breaking and breaking hearts.
Below is Child of God from her latest album Blood Rushing, but her material in Spanish with the Victor Herero band is not to be missed – she sounds so sweet and pure on such traditional sounding tracks.
Julie Doiron
I’ve listened to Doiron’s The Longest Winter EP countless times over the past few years, always in the cold weather, so much so that I know exactly which song will follow and which chord will strike next. Recorded with the band Wooden Stars, it’s a beautiful take on loss and the feeling that the winter will never end, in a similar vein to Bon Iver’s Emma, Forever Ago.
Lately I’ve been listening to it in the mornings on the cold walk to yoga in the morning, at 7am when it’s still dark, when there’s just the cold and her warm, perfect voice while London wakes up.
The Last Time in particular is heartbreaking, and would have to be in my top five – or definitely ten – breakup songs with its minimalism:
this will be the last time
this will be the last time
this will be the last time
this will be the last time
anyone is pretty when she smiles
I mean that she’s smiling like she’s laughing
anyone is pretty when she smiles
me, I’m only pretty when I’m crying
maybe that’s how it works for me
maybe that’s how it works for me
Her Consolation Prize is differently paced but a brilliant take on unrequested opinions, post-relationship: People insisted on telling you what a great couple you had been/They insisted on telling you/Over and over again.
Karen Dalton 
Firstly, look how cool Karen looks on her 1966 album cover. She had a creaky beautiful voice and never recorded any of her own material, but made a name in Greenwich Village and beyond for her performances – and when you hear her sing you understand why.
This Pitchfork review of the album tells you all you need to know about her:
“Dalton has a Mona Lisa voice: it gestures toward a whole universe of unknowable things, and the way it makes notes curl up at the corners seems to suggest– no matter how sad the song– that its keeper is slyly smiling to herself about something you’ll never quite comprehend … 1966 finds Dalton in a setting even more intimate: her own cabin in Colorado, rehearsing with her estranged husband, fellow Village ex-pat Richard Tucker … the occasional snippets of dialogue from the couple (who split shortly after) straddle the line between poignancy and black comedy. “Wow, what an ending, we just did it perfect,” Tucker sighs at the end of a rendition of Hardin’s “Shiloh Town”. “No, we didn’t,” Dalton mutters. “I didn’t know what you were doing.”"
Sadly Dalton never recovered from her struggle with drugs. She died in 1993 at the age of 55.
Here’s her cover of Tim Hardin’s Reason To Believe.
Like the sound of these artists? Also check out Laura Gibson, Diane Cluck and – obviously – Joanna Newsom.
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“The world seems to contain many individual objects, both physical, like apples, and abstract such as love and the number 3.”
(Wikipedia entry on metaphysics)
My boyfriend isn’t bothered by anniversaries; he’d say that they’re arbitrary measures of time, are dates exploited by cynical marketers to force meaning on the unimaginative. 365 days is resonant because we’ve made it so. Aren’t we basic not to be able to shake it off, to be outside of proscribed time. Think of the possibilities of that! He’d say that. Or something. I’d smile and say “hmmm” and protest about the resonance of anniversaries, how it is no bad thing to look around you at the scenery, to look back and forward as well as at this moment you’re in right now.
Our friend Sam wrote a song called 4 YRS, an anniversary song, about how time enters you and the things around you:
“These four years are in our bones/are in our home/are in our phones and in our photos /are in ourselves / are on our shelves/are in our cells.”
It’s four years for us too (us – you start to own certain time together, even while you must hold other time separate for you alone). An anniversary: 48 months ago I was aflutter. I lay awake all night. I wrote terrible poem after terrible poem. Metaphors of varying quality, mostly low, were bursting all over me. Spring was springing. I had been woken up. I felt drunk. Pieces of fruit took on profound meaning. So did leaves. I laughed at myself, embarrassed.
Wendy Cope’s poem On Waterloo Bridge, wind whipping tears into her eyes:
“I wipe them away with a black woolly glove
And try not to notice I’d fallen in love.”
I tried not to notice in case noticing it made it not true.
It doesn’t feel like 4 years. Time is elastic. And marking it in the way we do is what we have. Crossing off the days makes this unknowable thing more knowable. 
February is the anniversary of last February, of all Februarys. At their best, these versions – past, present, future – all have their own potential to enliven us; at worst, to own us.
People hate January, but I don’t. I am partial to all this time that’s hanging around, to the buds are poking up from the earth in my window box, to the films there are to watch.
Here we are at home. Here are our shelves and our cells and our photos and all our love, with its private history (every love story is a secret). No one ever knows what happens after this episode. But here it is, nonetheless.
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I forgot to blog about this when it got published, but my short story Unordered Lists was published by The View From Here.
It was a thrill to see it online. Next up: my story Losing Eden is being published by Cinnamon Press in the spring. Can’t wait to feel its papery reality in my hands.
Stories courtesy of the best writing desk in-the-world-ever, co. Cork, Ireland. More currently being (slowly) eked out after work and at the weekend. Watch this space.
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Tags: Writing
Three things that made me smile this week:
Tavi being wise beyond her (and most people’s) years on TED:
“Women are complicated and multi-faceted, not because women are crazy but because people are crazy, and women happen to be people.”
Tina Fey on rape. Not rape rape. Rape.
“If I have to listen to one more grey-faced man with a two dollar haircut tell me what rape is, I’m going to lose my mind.“
And lastly, this campaign to get bare boobs off the Sun’s Page 3. I’m not a fan of banning papers from doing things (unless they’re illegal, News International! Hi-yo!), which is why I like this campaign, which asks nicely and respectfully – an approach somewhat different to tabloids’ treatment of women in general.
“George Alagiah doesn’t say, ‘And now let’s look at Courtney, 21, from Warrington’s bare breasts,’ in the middle of the 6 O’ Clock News, does he, Dominic?
Consider this a long overdue outcry.
Dominic, stop showing topless pictures of young women in Britain’s most widely read newspaper, stop conditioning your readers to view women as sex objects.
Enough is enough.
Thank you.”
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“It all started because I was thinking about Antigone, the girl from Sophocles Theban plays … what I think I remember is her saying something like: being alive is nothing, it’s trivial, compared to all the not-being-alive we did before we were born and the not-being-alive we’ll do after we’re dead.”
(Ali Smith, Artful)
I had a bad dream about the earth being filled up with all the bodies of everyone that had ever lived and died.
You know how, in a dream, you sometimes feel like you crack a code or solve some earthly mystery? (once, I was sure I’d sorted time travel.) In my dream, I had come face to face with the idea of the sheer number of people who had lived and died on earth, and it was so awesome and huge that I felt like I had genuinely discovered something new. Of course, they took up too much room: more room than there was in the whole world.
And then I woke up.
Dreams can be bad for you.
I think I had the dream partly because I’m reading Albert Cohen’s Belle du Seigneur, and he (and/or his protagonist) seems to have a fixation with the inevitability of death. He satirises us “walking corpses” with our arrogance and self-importance, despite our doomed fate.
When I came across some Virginia Frances Sterrett illustrations, I thought of the dream again. She had lived and died (young, at the age of 31, in 1931, of tuberculosis): she was one of the many dead, but here is her work, pulsing with life and real magic, full of the energy of the dying: got to finish got to got to finish before …
I couldn’t work out why the pictures tugged so much at something inside me. Then I read that Sterrett had illustrated a book called Tanglewood Tales, a familiar name to me, and I remembered that my granny had given us a book that she had when she was little of the same name. 
I think it had a date in the front of it of 1914, or thereabouts. It was as big as a telephone directory but delicate like a museum piece, with tissue paper sewn in to protect the pictures and thick parchment paper. It was a book of magic. The pictures are outside of time and yet tied to it. They are transformational, ethereal, full of longing.
The captions are so beautiful. Rosalie saw before her eyes a tree of marvelous beauty. Henry sprang upon the wolf’s back. Blondine sees the castle of Bonne-Biche and Beau-Minon.
Around the time of this dream, I was very tired and had some kind of faux (waking) epiphany about how I could somehow connect disparate phenomena to write a particular story.
One of those oh-my-god-everything-is-connected-together moments (I don’t know that it is). I sort of enjoyed these strange attempts at linkage, set off by fatigue. In a way, lots of story writing is about drawing together different phenomena to represent each other or connect in some way to another. It is also not that far away from madness, but then, aren’t we all.
Tanglewood Tales is a book of Greek mythology for children. In the summer, before I remembered the existence of the book, I said to Adam that I wanted to know more about Greek mythology and that maybe I should get a children’s book. I wonder if the book was right on the edge of mmemory.
The woman in the illustration at the top is also very like something I drew last year and put on my noticeboard (I cannot draw, but this view of a woman with her hair down her back sort of worked). I do not believe in fate, so I am not suggesting that any of these things were ‘meant’ to happen. But I like the neatness of it. I like the idea that our aesthetic senses form continuous chains over time, that Tanglewood Tales was there waiting for me, even that if it cannot – else it would truly be the stuff of myth – possibly be true.
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Go Long by Joanna Newsom
What a woman does is open doors
And it is not a question of locking or unlocking
Getting older is backing yourself into corners with music you are already in love with, instead of bothering to listen to anything new.
@eljbrown told me that Go Long is based on the Bluebeard myth, and I came across this article comparing Newsom’s take on Bluebeard with Angela Carter’s version (The Bloody Chamber). She compares their strange use of language, the degrees of menace in their representations of Bluebeard, the way the solitude and violence of men is shown as grandeur versus the forced curiosity of women, left at home to wander the house and discover the “terrible room”.
With the loneliness of you mighty men
With your jaws, and fists, and guitars and pens
I love that, somewhere in America, a girl is writing an article on this topic.
(The article is from a Tumblr blog called All The Birds , a “feminist blog about songwriter Joanna Newsom and the music she creates.” )
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Tags: Joanna Newsom
Girl in a box, in Los Angeles
Bret Easton Ellis’s dead-eyed rich kids are close enough to smell. They smell like PCP and self-involvement.
I am standing in the lobby of the Standard Hotel in west Hollywood, Los Angeles, when a man dressed as Jack Sparrow walks past me. He has beads in his semi-dreadlocked hair, a triangular moustache and a billowy shirt. He isn’t dressed up though; just dressed. This is the Standard. This is hipster town. This is a ‘destination’ of sorts.
Next to him, a man of Japanese descent wears a pair of dungarees with no shirt on underneath. He is with a fifteen year old with a mohican, carrying a guitar, with a man who is possibly the fifteen year old’s manager. Then a woman trips past in huge sunglasses and stacked wedges and a small t-shirt and an even smaller pair of pants. She is tanned and thin, thin as in never-being-able-to-eat-nice-things-thin. Feminism is dead here. It was stillborn when it was born here.
So too is self awareness, the version that involves humility, unlike the brand you get here: an awareness of the self as of primary importance in the order of things.
Everyone is 21. I feel frumpy. I tell myself that these people are not better than me, but I think that they think that they are.
Hats. There are lots of hats. Bowlers, flat caps, truckers, fultons. Tattoos. Big glasses.
Later on, as we walk past reception, a woman in a glass box lies on a bed and plays with her phone. She is the ‘famous’ ‘girl in a box’ at the Standard, ‘literally a girl in a box!’, though literally she is a woman in a box. This could be an interesting statement on something like seeing in an image-obsessed culture except that she is always a she, and she is always a model or dancer. She is allowed to do whatever she wants in the box. Some of them wear hats or fangs and growl like wolves at passersby. Others just lie there and zone out. They always wear a small vest and small shorts. People look in at the girl in the box as if she is a girl on a screen. We don’t. Neither of us can look for long: we find ourselves walking quickly away. I feel faintly sick.
The streets in LA are sunbaked. It is 35 degrees in the summer, relentless, day after day. This is brash for us English, with our clouds and long autumn shadows and delicate, seasonal shades of nature. Billboards scream and driving through the streets is frenetic: the signs say Taco Bell, In Out Burger, Dunkin’, Baskin, Flippin’, Chick’n.
In the hotel blurb in your room the manager tells you to enjoy being around some of the “most culturally relevant people in the world”. This makes me laugh a lot and then I feel sad inside. Aside from the farcically outlandish claim, this, I think, is people’s problem with “hipsters”. Hipster hate and baiting can be spiteful, but at various times I think: I get it. Watching those people makes you feel like you are going insane. Who are those awful people? Adam said, bewildered, back in the hotel room. Who are those awful people?
This is why I think we feel like this.
1. Exclusivity. Most subcultures are exclusive but they usually exist because the mainstream rejects them. These people, however – young, good-looking, affluent, free – are life’s winners. The tick list of characteristics required to be part of a hipster circle is a vapid criteria: looking the part, being young, having a ‘creative’ job or at least claiming ‘creativity’ in some area of your life, even if you’re an estate agent.
2. Self-absorption. You are not sitting there by coincidence. You are sitting there to be seen. You are sitting there because you think you’re relevant, because you think you are important. If you want to know about relevance go and talk to fucking Gandhi mate, or Aung San Suu Kyi, or even anyone who has made something that they think is true and real and beautiful and from their heart i.e. art.
3. Ageism. You cannot be older than 25 and be in this gang. You just cannot, unless maybe you were once famous, or you have a lot of money.
4. No politics. There’s no raging against the machine, no counterculture. There is a vacuum except when it’s filled by new clothes, getting seen and getting wasted.
5. Pro-commerce. Early hipster variations (think of Patti Smith running amok in the Chelsea Hotel with Robert Mapplethorpe and Iggy Pop and Nico and William Burroughs) actually made something. Now hipsterism is about what you wear and where you go i.e. products. X is checking into the Standard. You can bet your bottom dollar that most of these people work in PR or advertising. They are the bottom dollar. Their dollar is at the very bottom of the ladder.
6. We see a little of ourselves in them. Perhaps it’s the jeans and vague artistic leanings. But we have an ounce of self-awareness and when I put on the Sound of Music soundtrack, there is not a hint of irony in it.
There’s a bit in the Blur documentary No Distance Left to Run where Graham Coxon says he would mostly “rather talk to builders in the pub than people in the music industry”. It is one of the frequent moments where Graham comes across as a bit of a plonker, as it sounds like he’s saying “I am THAT edgy that I prefer to talk to the working classes – real people! – than actual relevant people”, but you can understand what he means. Hipsterland makes you crave a place where there are no pretences, where people realise that what matters is not how old you are or what you look like but all the things you are, that you think, that you’ve done.
It’s far away from here, in a foreign country somewhere.
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Tags: hipsters
