#agata pyzik

[thenewobjective]

Next Festival review

if you are making a music festival, radio or any cultural program and not inviting Ukrainians or vicitims (sic) of the Russian violence, dunno, what you are doing [eastbloc af sound alliance pinned tweet] Music festivals in 2022 have not been able to bypass the issue of Ukraine. And considering there is currently no end in sight to the war, the same will apply for the year ahead, unless war…

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[newspeak-wb10]

"Thinkpiece" must be among the most loathed terms by me ever. I wonder what the person inventing it was, erm, "thinking".

Agata Pyzik

[rogueish]

In Praise of Vulgar Feminism

Faced with a choice between the bassist of Sonic Youth and the nihilist nymphet Lana Del Rey and her army of Twitter defenders, the highbrow music fan knows whose side she’s on. And it’s not as if Gordon is wrong about Del Rey, whose embrace of American rock and roll myths, shot through with a cartoonish sense of female desire, really is infantile. The appeal of Kim Gordon is completely different. She came from the New York art world of the early ’80s, co-founded one of the most admired bands of all time with her boyfriend and eventual husband Thurston Moore, and has now written an honest memoir about the whole thing. She’s one of the most respected personalities in rock music, who somehow obtained a license in the world of male-dominated culture to combine the impossible—to be both sexy and smart, mature and attractive, a mother and an artist, confrontational and political and also eternally “cool.” How many women are able to do this in music or pop culture, or at all? Not many.

Which makes me think: Isn’t Del Rey, precisely through her disturbing, masochistic fantasies of rape, mental abuse, and violent sex, and on top of that her adolescent rejection of feminism (“feminism doesn’t interest me as an idea,” she’s told interviewers on several occasions), a better icon for our time? Don’t her words and lyrics say more about the contemporary position of women than the mature, self-confident, and in the end somewhat commonplace pronouncements of Kim Gordon?

[tecknofobe-blog]

She’s one of the most respected personalities in rock music, who somehow obtained a license in the world of male-dominated culture to combine the impossible—to be both sexy and smart, mature and attractive, a mother and an artist, confrontational and political and also eternally “cool.” How many women are able to do this in music or pop culture, or at all? Not many.

Agata Pyzik on Kim Gordon, here. 

[thearticleoftheweek]

High Minds on Low Culture

That title could probably apply to any post that shows up on this blog. We here at TAotW love nothing if it's not thinking for internet-only lack-of-word-limit lengths of time about pieces of pop culture that might not at first glance seem like they need even a sentence of deconstruction. But this week, we're zero-ing in not just on the big ideas behind mass entertainment, but on the big ideas that require a special kind of "bad for you" lack of pretentiousness to be said. So, buckle yourself into your technobabble-powered rocket ship, lower your brow down to the floor, and prepare for some cultural nutrients that come from anything but vegetables.

This Week's Pick:

"In Praise of Vulgar Feminism" by Agata Pyzik, April 28, 2015, n+1

I hate the term "underrated." There's lots of great stuff out there, and sometimes we need to realize that just because we like something more than anyone else does, doesn't mean we're smarter than them. But goddammit, Hole is an underrated rock band. Courtney Love is one of the few pop culture icons towards whom irrational hate seems almost politically correct. She's a woman that people seem totally comfortable blaming for the suicide of her husband whom they’ve never met, and someone that has never lost a reputation for being crazy and desperate for attention. Pyzik compares her tumultuous persona with Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, an in-the-flesh model of a cool girl that can make Gillian Flynn's hypothetical seem lame. She examines what it means to be feminist and what it means to rebel, and how sometimes you might need to stop being so damn cool to actually have any of that mean something. Listen to Live Through This and Sister if you haven't recently, read this, and think about how you should maybe scream a little more.

Runners-up:

Three big picture attempts at understanding the biggest picture in the world:

"Masters of the Universe: Marvel's Unprecedented Storytelling Gamble" by Kevin Lincoln, May 5, 2015, Grantland

"Age of Robots: How Marvel is Killing the Popcorn Movie" by Sady Doyle, May 10, 2015, Medium

"The Marvel-Industrial Complex" by James Rocchi, May 5, 2012, Movie Mezzanine

It's impossible to miss it, so I assume you haven't.  Avengers: Age of Ultron has taken over the world, and pummeled the box office, and made lots of money, and yet somehow managed to do all that in a way that still feels disappointing, to both industry executives and critics. So what is a thinking movie-lover supposed to do when there's a behemoth of this brutish power obliterating the rest of the movieplex, and Marvel is everywhere with no possibility of stopping. Three writers go deep trying to dissect their popcorn. Rocchi examines how the demands of Marvel's ever-expanding plot threaten to engulf the entirety of the movie business; Doyle examines how the demands of Marvel's ever-expanding business threaten to engulf the entirety of the movie's plot; Lincoln embarks on the audacious task of trying to figure out what that all-engulfing plot is about anyway. All three pieces manage to be neither entirely positive or negative about the Marvel empire, but all deal with the effects on movie-making now that the rules have changed and are governed solely by Kevin Feige.

[rhianejones]

As a child of the nineteen-eighties, way before online discussions on how to be a fan of problematic things, I remember being starry-eyed about the Soviet Union. I grew up in impeccably Old Labour territory, in which the anti-Stalinist tenets of Neither Washington Nor Moscow But International Socialism had not diminished a certain instinctive admiration for the achievements of 1917. Any yearning for the USSR, though, had less to do with the reality of its final days and more to do with its symbolic opposition to a Conservative regime which was then laying siege to the industry, economy and community of my part of the country. I looked East in the way one might look to the stars in the hope of arbitrary rescue by occupants of interplanetary craft, with expectations about as realistic. My attitude was based on abstract ideals, not on the real lives of those living under conditions I could not fathom and struggling to change them. Nevertheless, in those days the existence of what seemed like an alternative to capitalism meant something which, given the current glaring absence of alternatives, is hard to recover, much less explain.

http://thequietus.com/articles/16244-agata-pyzik-poor-but-sexy-culture-socialism-ostalgie

[melancholyflower]

The Quietus - 27 mai 2017 : Bord saignant : Nicky Wire à propos des futurs, du futurisme et de Futurology

The Quietus – 27 mai 2017 : Bord saignant : Nicky Wire à propos des futurs, du futurisme et de Futurology

Avec le nouvel album des Manic Street Preachers, Futurology, qui sort en juillet, Robert Barry parle à Nicky Wire d’art européen, d’architecture européenne et de vie européenne.

(more…)

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[tisa-ne]

In a recent interview, Russian Marxist dissident Boris Kagarlitsky recounts an anecdote about a meeting with some young Swedish revolutionaries. During the intellectual dispute it was pretty boring, but after the lecture the youth wanted to drink bottled beer in the park. Yet there was no bottle opener. Suddenly there was fright in the eyes of the students: how are we going to open the bottles? Kagarlitsky then opened the bottles using the table and then explained there's at least half a dozen other ways. "This is the difference between the Russian intellectual and the Swedish revolutionary. They know that a bottle is opened with a special tool, a bottle opener." The East of Europe, culturally a part of the West, was pushed into a parallel reality for 45 years and some of its countries are still paying the price for it today, especially compared to the affluent West. But maybe we still can come up with ways to open things that you don't and didn't have to know about.

Agata Pyzik "Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West"