“Mary Woronov burned herself into my brain when, as a college student in 1966, I first saw her smouldering, imperious performance in Andy Warhol’s epic film Chelsea Girls. She was one of the most original, stylish and articulate sexual personae of the royal House of Warhol. I never forgot her, and I followed her subsequent movie career with great fascination … Warholism, which is my philosophy as a critic, merged the visual and performing arts and closed the gap between high and popular culture. Thirty years later, it can be clearly seen that the Warhol Factory, with all its riveting decadent excesses, was as seminal an avant-garde circle as that of the Dadaists and Surrealists after World War I in Paris.”
/ Camille Paglia's back cover blurb on Mary Woronov’s 1995 autobiography Swimming Underground: My Years in the Warhol Factory /
Born on this day (8 December 1943): insolent Warhol Superstar turned queen of cult movies, actress, writer, visual artist and recovered amphetamine enthusiast … Mary Woronov! I love the strikingly angular Woronov’s deadpan performances, resting bitch face and witheringly contemptuous voice in Chelsea Girls (1966), Silent Night, Bloody Night (1972) (recommended Christmas viewing), Death Race 2000 (1975), Rock’n’Roll High School (1979), Eating Raoul (1982), Hellhole (1985) (even in a cast including Edy Williams (Beyond the Valley of the Dolls) and Dyanne Thorne (Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS), Woronov totally dominates as – what else? – the sadistic villainess) and Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills (1989). But hell, Woronov is even great value doing guest spots on episodes of Charlie’s Angels (1976) and Murder, She Wrote (1985). One of the best things she ever did was play the mother in punk band Suicidal Tendencies' 1983 video “Institutionalized” (“All I wanted was a Pepsi, just one Pepsi, and she wouldn't give it to me!”).
Hi! there are not much videos interview of him, most of the interview he gave are on audio(radio), magazines and music blogs.VideoVK [On stage with Gesaffelstein]This video tooMusic BlogsPitchFork (February 4, 2014)MixMag (october 21 ,2013)Noisey-Music by Vice (January 29, 2014)Inthemix (october 22,2013)TheMusic (December 20, 2013) PlanetNotion (April 14, 2011)Hypetrack (January 7, 2014)Stoney Roads (December 8, 2013)
Radio InterviewFrance Inter [Laura Leishman Proyect](French audio) (October 24,2013)BBC Radio 1 [Annie Nightingale] (October 5, 2013)ABC [Triple J] (November 5, 2013)BBC Radio (October 3, 2013)I know there are more, so you can Ask meremeduse and vintagechiquevinylfreak for more information :). -and sorry for date mess-.
I have zero interest in watching Heated Rivalry but a lot of fandom discourse is leaking into my own timeline which has made me notice something.
The Heated Rivalry fandom seems to be filled with kpop stans, specifically the shipper type. Mainstreaming of fandom culture especially kpop fandom culture has been a terrible thing across the board. They brought their most toxic traits to other fandoms and have started to ruin the discourse the way they did in kpop spaces.
I primarily blame BTS because they were the one who mainstreamed the genre (not their fault) and because they actively cultivated a weirdly identitarian and liberal, deeply attached, boymom sort of fandom whose behavior stands out in the current online zeitgeist. Since their military service they have lost relevance and so no one really talks about them but their impact on the fandom culture and online discourse is vivid.
These boymoms ship two men in a romantic pairing but are also deeply homophobic. These boymoms send hate towards the only openly bi actor for ruining their ship and defend the other guy solely based on his identity as an asian man, because they fetishize him. They stalk their partners, harass them. Kpop fan playbook 101.
Ofcourse people can say this is not just a BTS or kpop thing and this was prominent in 1D or Supernatural days but the thing is those people were seen as freaks in the fringe. The people I am talking about now are mainstream and driving the narrative on fauxmoi. I think that's not a good thing.
Hi! I was reading some of your political and literary analysis posts and found them really enlightening and interesting to chew on, I noticed you have a lot of criticisms of Spivak - I was wondering if you mind elaborating on that? It's not my major but I took a class where we read some of her work last semester and since I'm rather new to the field/don't have much background knowledge I found it pretty compelling and I would love to have a deeper understanding of the issues with it if you ever have time! Thank you!
oooh thank you for such a fun question! yes i know the post i where i talked about disliking spivak, and i think i kept the actual critique to a paragraph because iirc the question there was about something else related to a fic…
i’ve tried to explain here my main issues with her but also the way she’s taught in crit theory/lit crit classes but just wanted to point out i went to and grad-taught at universities in the UK (for the most part) so that’s where the “how spivak is taught” stuff comes from…i am not sure how she’s covered elsewhere.
— her formulation stops at the impossibility of speech for the doubly marginalised/‘subaltern’ figure and doesn’t seek or even really discuss the multiple ‘subaltern’ authored sites of speech that do exist… a generous reading might say she acknowledges them at the very least, but if you’ve been in academia for *checks notes* 50+ years like she has and continues to be, i’d say there’s been more than enough time to offer more than the initial, dated provocation
— this leads to a kind of paralysing academic pessimism where the ‘subaltern’ is always-already unknowable and beyond representation. and i’m not coming at this in a “oh this means Academia™️has stagnated, o my beloved field 🥺” sense, i’m more saying that this indefinite deferral becomes a very convenient opt-out clause for the south asian academic hegemony. “yes, of course we sharmas and chatterjees and mukherjees need to write about dalits and muslims because the latter two cannot speak without being spoken over, and this is still not that bad because at least we aren’t white men like foucault.”
— “speaking over” someone isn’t a passive act. while the way spivak poses the theoretical gesture is compelling and engages a wider range of global scholars, it also obscures the concrete & extant ways in which ‘subaltern’ communities (in the indian contexts she speaks about: dalit, adivasi and muslim communities) do speak, theorise and organise. and “obscuring” is as active an act as “speaking over”.
— i always find it very interesting when contemporary progressive scholars who are adherents of spivak talk about how her work (positively) impacted their perception of caste in india, because in spivak’s writings, caste is absolutely marginal (at its best) and outright casteist (at its worst). caste is always seen as a secondary or tertiary axis rather than a central one. even in her later writings where she reflects on her own positionality, caste is only acknowledged as an extant system, not interrogated with regards to herself as an active participant in said axis of oppression.
— and imo any south asian postcolonial critique that foregrounds the colonial archive, even as a negative, whilst sidelining caste as a structuring principle of indian life (and scholarship) is just a reproduction of that elite secular narrative that critiques the long shadow of empire but is soft on the persistent centrality of brahminism, and centres white epistemic violence while underplaying or just-acknowledging vernacular forms of domination
— i’m not saying that spivak is the only person responsible for this, far from it. but postcolonial studies as a field, in which spivak is a key architect, has historically globalised that specific soft secular indian perspective whilst relegating discourses of caste, language domination (hindi) and structural islamophobia to a separate, specialist “domestic” register, which isn’t seen as “compulsory” to know in a way spivak et al are.
— similar to her engagement with caste, her engagement with the specificities of muslim life and political suppression in india has been minimal, where she’s commented vaguely upon it or discussed it in a west-vs-muslim world sense, it’s imo very detached and apathetic considering the country she writes about has, in general but especially post-2014, openly mobilised hindu majoritarianism against its muslim citizens. the criminalisation of protest, the national sanctioning of mob violence, and the weaponising of legal tools like the CAA… and scholarship in the face of that kind of barefaced structural violence means resisting the secular-liberal frameworks within which the indian muslim subject is either misread or made-silent.
— so i definitely get that spivak’s notion of “strategic essentialism” was initially phrased as a tactical move, whereby marginalised groups might adopt essentialised identities for the purposes of political mobilisation, without thereby endorsing essentialism per se. however both in and out of the academy, “strategic essentialism” has often been decontextualised, instrumentalised, and misapplied, even used to justify majoritarian forms of nationalism. hell, spivak herself has distanced herself from the term as it is used in the contemporary moment.
— but imo, and again going back to india/south asia because at the end of the day that is the subject she writes of, i think the concept itself was always fraught. communal identities aren’t just discursive but material, ie used to justify discrimination, incarceration, lynching, and structural exclusion. “strategic” deployment of identity is not always an option as available to the marginalised as she posits. and this is exactly why her sidelining of caste and religion as oppressive structures in themselves detracts from her very argument: the strategic deployment of caste and religious identity for politically expedient purposes isn’t a particularly realistic option in a structurally ethnonationalist country: it’s difficult to “deploy” indian muslim subjectivity when no matter what positionality you adopt, the nation-state will 100% view you as muslim, and use that as an excuse to beat you to death and then charge you for beef possession. ie, when identity is surveilled and punished by the state and dominant civil society, it is not something that can be donned and disguised at will.
my issue isn’t that spivak is taught at university, far from it: people have to read spivak to critique spivak. my issue is that whilst foucault and marx and derrida and other theorists (and said too!) taught at crit theory 101 level are often, within 101 level and beyond, engaged with through their contemporaries and opinions disagreeing with them as well, yet when it comes to subalternity, the buck so often stops with spivak. as in, there’s very little exposure, in anglo academia at least, to dissenting scholarship from within the subcontinent, which then leads to spivak being taken as prescriptive. either that, or it centres spivak as a “global” voice, and dissent/criticism from india being a “domestic” response, which i think is quite rich considering spivak is directly writing about india.
also i feel like this interaction she had last year kind of illustrates the points i try to make much better than i ever could 🥲
Everything within thought that repeats a position without reflecting upon it, like those who from the very beginning share an author’s opinion, is bad. In this attitude thought is brought to a standstill, degraded into the mere recital of what is accepted, and becomes untrue. For the thought expresses something it has not permeated yet as though it had reached its own conclusion. There is no thought in which the remnants of opinion do not inhere. They are at once both necessary and extrinsic to it. It is the nature of thought to remain loyal to itself by negating itself in these moments. That is the critical form of thought. Critical thought alone, not thought’s complacent agreement with itself, may help bring about change.
Honestly, at this point the argument I find more annoying is the idea that "gaze" can only refer to oppressor groups - like that there's no "female gaze" and the idea of the term is to suggest that women ogling men are the same as the reverse or something. Some people do use it that way, so I get being salty about it if you've only ever seen it from the "misandry is real" crowd or from dumb pop feminism articles. But if you get into academic media theory that talks about gaze, there is in fact a utility in being able to talk about the specific way that one can frame stories from the perspective of subaltern groups and the specific way that they look at things as going beyond just not-the-oppressor-group's-way. When I learned in my graduate post-colonial film theory seminar (in one of the nation's top 10 film studies departments) about the "colonial gaze" we also learned about the "anti-colonial gaze," so this is both an established academic thing and not just something that is done with gender. There's something to be said that only viewing gazing as an activity of the oppressor group is itself oppressive, and encourages stuff that tries to eschew that perspective to just undo it and be "for everybody" (which usually ends up being from the oppressor's perspective in a more subtle, roundabout way) rather than actively asking "what does a woman's perspective on this look like? what does it look like if we frame this film about an anti-colonial revolution from the perspective of the colonized people rather than the colonizers? what does a movie about slavery from a specifically black perspective look like? how do movies FOR gay or bi or trans people look different from movies ABOUT them for a presumed 'neutral' (which in practice means straight/cis) audience? how do marginalized groups tell their own stories and how is that reflected in the cinematic language of camera angles, lighting, blocking, sound design, music, and so on?"
Today's society is no longer Foucault's disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society [Leistungsgesellschaft]. Also, its inhabitants are no longer "obedience-subjects" but "achievement-subjects." They are entrepreneurs of themselves. The walls of disciplinary institutions, which separate the normal from the abnormal, have come to seem archaic. Foucault's analysis of power cannot account for the psychic and topological changes that occurred as disciplinary society transformed into achievement society. Nor does the commonly employed concept of "control society" do justice to this change. It still contains too much negativity.
i feel like DE is a really good example of hauntological aesthetics and ideas making their way into mainstream art. it’s such a nebulous concept that people use to mean anything from “the actual narrow way it was first used by derrida” to “just about any film with ghosts in it” but i’ve never seen something that fits as many of its attributes as this game does. hopes of lost futures fading. a literal fog of depression and forgetting slowly consuming the world. communism that was suppressed, liberalism that doesn’t work, a shabby grimy sad post-soviet french city, anachronistic technology, timelessness, music as a carrier of the past, etc etc etc . Shivers is basically psychogeography
and yes i am aware that this post is extremely 2021core but that’s why i’m making it on the only website where that fact won’t get judged
“In both Derrida’s and Fisher’s conceptions of hauntology, the crucial element is that of time. For Derrida, the return and repetition of the past in the present is manifested through the figure of the revenant, that which returns each time as if it were the first, unchanging and insistent, demanding a reckoning for a message that went unheard or was ignored. For Fisher, as we shall see, there are two opposing temporal currents intrinsic to hauntology: the no longer and the not yet. The former haunts the present from the past, an event, idea or entity whose moment is past but which continues to make its presence felt. The latter haunts the present from the future, through the unfulfilled promise of that which never came to pass but which may yet do so.
In both instances, their impact is felt now, in the present, either through repetition or anticipation. The very idea of the ghost as that which comes from the past to manifest itself in the present and yet which belongs to neither, simultaneously both absent and present, challenges our belief in the unbroken progression of linear time. Hauntology foregrounds such temporal disjuncture or 'dyschronia', questioning whether we truly experience time in so straightforward a manner as the linear model suggests. Instead, both Derrida and Fisher see history as one charac-terised by repetition and disruption, as the past recurrently irrupts into the present, forcing us to reconsider events and ideas we might have regarded as safely consigned to the past. Fisher goes further, arguing that since the closing decades of the twentieth century, cultural time has faltered, dragged to a standstill by the ever-growing weight of our recorded past; not so much the end of history as an excess of history, beneath which we struggle to move forward."
