tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-44162182214711870172023-11-16T03:50:58.503-08:00Joy Press My Back PagesJoy Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14061462003517171574noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4416218221471187017.post-9749869113156688212015-07-30T08:21:00.001-07:002015-07-30T08:21:56.096-07:00The Exquisite Corpses of "Six Feet Under"<h4 style="line-height: 14.25pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 7.5pt; margin-right: 7.5pt; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-size: 11.5pt;">Feature on the visual poetry of "Six Feet Under" by Joy Press</span><span style="font-size: 11.5pt;">Village Voice</span></h4>
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<span style="font-size: 11.5pt;">If you'd asked me what I thought of<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Six Feet Under</span></i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>last year, I would have shrugged
noncommittally. Something about HBO's funeral-parlor series bugged me—the way
it seemed so damn proud of its eccentricity and broodiness, even while it
resuscitated cheesy gimmicks like talking ghosts, best left to melodramas like<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Providence</span></i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>and<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Sisters</span></i>, and compulsively unleashed soap opera plots
(psycho-killer brother, illegitimate baby, etc.). I never got attached enough
to these remote, pent-up characters, though I loved Brenda's exquisitely
nihilistic sex spree last season (culminating in her ménage à trois with a
couple of teenage surfer boys), and I was secretly thrilled by the gradual
cracking of Nate's saintly veneer and the prospect of his impending doom via
brain surgery.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.5pt;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: 11.5pt;">All my reservations vanished as I
watched the first half of the new season—<i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Six Feet Under</span></i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>has been transformed into TV's most
visually ravishing experience. (The first three episodes will be rebroadcast
together on March 22 if you missed them.) It has achieved a vibe redolent of
contemporary photographers like Gregory Crewdson and Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, who
create dramatic, magical tableaux out of humdrum, real-life moments. As if to
confirm this connection, producer Alan Ball hired Crewdson to shoot the
promotional photo for this season, an eerie image of the cast sitting around
the kitchen table, the floor engulfed by flowers. Ball told the<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">New York Post</span></i>,
"[Crewdson's] works seems to be about the sort of secret, surreal life
that exists just beneath the surface of mundane surroundings—and that's very
much what our show is about."</span><i><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-size: 11.5pt; padding: 0in;"><br /></span></i><br />
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<i><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-size: 11.5pt; padding: 0in;">Six Feet Under</span></i><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-size: 11.5pt;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: 11.5pt;">has been delivering its own startling
tableaux in regular doses: A highly strung Hollywood producer hides inside a
white cocoon she's made with her Fratesi sheets; frumpy family matriarch Ruth
(Frances Conroy) sits alone on a giant, oversized bench, her legs dangling down
like a toddler's; strapping ex-cop Keith (Mathew St. Patrick), now demoted to
security guard, fishes a dead dog out of a Hockney-esque swimming pool. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.5pt;">And of
course the whole season starts out with the ultimate existential montage. Nate
(Peter Krause) hallucinates alternate realities during his cranial surgery,
visions that include a serene moment with new-agey girlfriend Lisa (Lili
Taylor) and their baby Maya; a more boisterous vision of himself with his ex,
Brenda (Rachel Griffiths); and a glimpse of a world in which Nate never existed
at all. Although he emerges from the surgery without brain damage, he moves
through the series with the glazed look of a man wading through honey. </span><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt;">Everything in subsequent episodes seems
to radiate out from Nate's near-death experience; instances of déjà vu are
scattered all over the place. This lends the show a gentle, hazy pace—a marked
improvement on the forced edginess that sometimes afflicted it in seasons past. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.5pt;">Director of photography Alan Caso, who has shaped<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Six Feet Under</span></i>'s
visual sensibility from the beginning, says he deliberately avoids what he
calls "the kinetic, almost chaotic movement style of network TV—you know,
the<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">NYPD Blue</span></i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>thing. We don't move the camera a lot
unless there's a reason to move it, motivated by the emotional intent of the
scene. We do a lot of very formal shots where you let things play out on a
proscenium, treating the frame almost like it's a stage."</span><span style="font-size: 11.5pt;"><br /></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 11.5pt;">Caso admits that the show's look changed a lot this season—the
crew switched to a wide-screen format that evokes a more cinematic feel, and
he's made the lighting moodier. "I feel like we're always in a bat cave.
We're in their environment and the rest of the world is always trying to
invade, but never really gets into all the dark corners of the Fisher house.
Every character on the show is so messed up that the lighting really works with
them—there are so many dark areas in their psyches."</span><span style="font-size: 11.5pt;"><br /></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 11.5pt;">He says the main component of "the<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Six Feet Under<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span></i>look" is the wide
lens, which rarely gets used on television. "It gives us a much more
in-your-face style than traditional television. Have you ever talked to
somebody at a party and they stand a little too close? It's a very creepy,
uncomfortable feeling, and that's what we've been doing, putting the audience
in the shoes of someone who stands too close, so you feel you've invaded the
characters' space."</span><span style="font-size: 11.5pt;"><br /></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 11.5pt;">Although it's set in L.A., you won't see
many tan lines or tube tops. A lot of scenes take place inside the family's
cloistered kitchen, with its flocked wallpaper and cluttered cupboards, or in
the white-tiled embalming room. Yet the show is drenched in indirect light;
sunshine pounds so hard on the kitchen windows they ought to break, and it
slices through the vertical blinds of the shrink's office where David (Michael
C. Hall) and Keith are undergoing a humorous bout of couple's therapy. Now that
he's out of the closet, David is venting emotions like crazy. ("I feel
shamed," he announces when Keith snaps at him for adding too much pepper
to the bok choy.) In<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Six Feet Under</span></i>, Californian expressiveness doesn't
necessarily lead to happiness, though: Brenda's let-it-all-hang-out
psychiatrist parents thoroughly screwed her up, and Ruth's flirtation with a
cultish program called "the Plan" left her more estranged from the
world than ever.</span><span style="font-size: 11.5pt;"><br /></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 11.5pt;">Even if it didn't have anything else
going for it,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Six Feet Under</span></i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>has
the juiciest, most complex female roles on TV. And unlike<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Sex in the City</span></i>'s
femmes, these women don't have to swap outfits with every scene—Ruth wore
identical ankle socks for two years straight. This season, two of the female
characters come into spectacular relief—in both senses of the word. While Nate
and David appear faded and anxious, unable to find their bearings, redheaded
mother-daughter duo Ruth and Claire (Lauren Ambrose) spring to life. No longer
do they look like wax dummies left out in the heat too long; now both women
glow euphorically, each with the help of an accomplice. In Ruth's case, the
angel sent to mess with her coupon-clipping life is Bettina (Kathy Bates), a
friend who introduces her to the pleasures of massage and shoplifting. During
Ruth's first-ever massage, she makes gasping and squeaking noises as if
pleasure is being forced out of her body—one of the series' most grotesque and
affecting moments thus far.</span><span style="font-size: 11.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 11.5pt;">Meanwhile, Claire is having a parallel epiphany at art school,
as her creepy Eurotrash professor and a gorgeously geeky fellow student shower
her with adoration (whether for her talent or her body remains to be seen). You
can understand why: Her skin is absurdly luminous and her features in constant
motion, clashing thoughts skittering across them. Aside from giving her a
chance to blossom, Claire's enrollment in art school allows the writers to
weave the show's obsession with light and painterliness into the plot itself.</span><span style="font-size: 11.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 11.5pt;">Although the Fisher family continues to
deal with corpses in every episode, death has become the subtlest element of<i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Six Feet Under</span></i>—a constant, unremarked presence. The
real theme of the series might be that old Bob Dylan line, "He not busy
being born is busy dying."</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.5pt;">-- March 18, 2003</span><o:p> </o:p></div>
Joy Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14061462003517171574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4416218221471187017.post-33044023294143571442015-07-30T08:21:00.000-07:002015-07-30T08:21:01.357-07:00The Last Days of Loserville<h3>
Saying Goodbye to the old Bowery, street of lost and found souls, Village Voice cover</h3>
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by Joy Press</h3>
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It's just a construction site now, girders and planks strewn
on the floor. Instead of giant picture windows and balconies, there are
unfinished walls and a sheer drop. But use your imagination: In a few months,
this will be a glorious 16th-floor penthouse, complete with panoramic views,
Sub-Zero fridge, and Italian bathroom fixtures. For $4.4 million, you can hover
over all of downtown Manhattan like some kind of god, absorbing the sunlight
that once flowed west down Spring Street. </div>
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You can gaze down upon the crumbling
tenements far below you, the lamp stores, the scrawny men who shuffle in and
out of the flophouse next door. Your address is 195 Bowery and you are part of
the transformation of a street once synonymous with bleak failure into a new
millionaire's row.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Up and down the northern end of the Bowery, luxury apartment
buildings are shooting up over the low-rise thoroughfare like iron weeds,
framed by two nearly completed 16-story megaliths: 195 Bowery and Gwathmey
Siegel's "Sculpture for Living," a curvaceous glass tower rising
above Astor Place, where the asking prices range from almost $3 million to over
$12 million. In between is the controversial (and nearly completed) Avalon
Chrystie Place at Houston Street, with its giant Whole Foods and YMCA. If you
consider all the current and planned activity, there's likely to be at least
600 or 700 pricey new apartments on the street. To keep pace, developers may
have to bus in the rich—just as long as they call the buses jitneys. Sure, this
instant infusion of wealth sounds like a grotesquely accelerated version of
what's happened elsewhere in the city. Except this isn't elsewhere: </div>
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It's the
Bowery, a legendary slum.<o:p></o:p></div>
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You might wonder why anyone would mourn the passing of such
a hard-luck street. This isn't the loveliest place in New York, though it has a
frayed grandeur, a corroded quality that's always attracted artists and writers
like Mark Rothko, Nan Goldin, and William Burroughs. It has an assortment of
characterful old buildings, but the Bowery is more than just a physical place.
For centuries, it has also been an imaginary zone onto which the world
projected its most lurid fantasies and anxieties. This was capitalism's
wasteland, a refuge for failures and fuckups. And the Bowery bum was a living,
breathing cautionary tale for the burgeoning American middle class: Look what
happens when you stumble in the rat race.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Some urban preservationists are worried that all evidence of
this street's remarkable history will be trampled, its oldest buildings
demolished within a few years to make way for mini-skyscrapers. "If the
scale and architecture remain, you can use your imagination to understand what
was here before," says Andrew Dolkart, a professor of historic
preservation at Columbia. "But as it gets replaced so quickly, you're
losing that feel that this was a place where history happened. You might as
well change its name if it doesn't mean anything anymore." </div>
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At the same
time, it's hard to argue for preserving a place that has been the staging
ground for so much misery, home to such an ever changing population. As
Chinatown historian Peter Kwong says, "This is a city that's very
pragmatic. A new group comes and wipes out the old. That's always been the case
in New York—but of course it's not always a good thing."<o:p></o:p></div>
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Shamble down the street with eyes peeled and you can still find traces of the
Bowery emblazoned on our national consciousness by a hundred novels, songs, and
movies. Mottled old buildings huddle next to each other like a mouthful of
rotten teeth that have somehow remained intact from the 18th, 19th, and 20th
centuries; houses that survived all manner of despair and abuse stand here
today, testament to a city's tender neglect and a thousand happy (or more
likely, unhappy) accidents.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Farmland, theater district, battlefield for the gangs of New
York, immigrant haven, viceland, street of lost and found souls, cradle of
minstrelsy and punk: The Bowery has careened through at least nine lives. In
the 1700s, it was just a lane on the outskirts of New Amsterdam used by cattle
drovers; at the end of the Revolutionary War, the last of the redcoats marched
down the street on their humiliating retreat back to Mother England. By the
early 19th century, fashionable entertainment spots like the Bowery Theater had
popped up, as well as "pleasure resorts" such as Vauxhall Gardens
(located on the block the Voice now occupies on Cooper Square), where
locals could eat, drink, and take in music and fireworks.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Even back then, there was a tug-of-war over territory:
Wealthy New Yorkers bought into this up-and-coming neighborhood, pushing
property prices way up. Jacob Astor actually chopped Vauxhall Gardens in half
to create the exclusive enclave of Lafayette Place. And then the fickle rich
deserted the area, leaving it to a growing immigrant population and the working
poor, some of whom styled themselves as Bowery Boys and Gals.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="page-2"></a>"The Republic of the Bowery was a
powder keg of pre-political class rage that required only a slim excuse to go
off," Luc Sante writes in his cultural history, Low Life. Dressed
like a dandy, the Bowery Boy (whose legend calcified over the ages into
Hollywood's Dead End Kids/Bowery Boys movies) roamed the neighborhood with his
gang, looking for pleasure and trouble, occasionally erupting in bloody riots
and battles with rival gangs. The Bowery Boys and Gals introduced plenty of
raw-knuckled slang into the American vocabulary (bender, blowout, chum, kick
the bucket), and patronized emerging popular-entertainment forms like
melodrama, vaudeville, and freak shows.<o:p></o:p></div>
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As a shady interzone, the Bowery allowed certain freedoms to
flourish. "Fairy resorts" allowed men to cross-dress and use back
rooms for sexual liaisons. Slumming parties of respectable uptown folk often
trooped down to the street seeking cheap thrills, and locals quickly learned
how to exploit the sleaze tourists. One rough bar near the corner of Houston
and Bowery became so notorious for the regular suicides that took place there
(prostitutes threw themselves out of an upper window, possibly to protest working
conditions) that its owner rechristened the place McGurk's Suicide Hall. And a
local entrepreneur named Chuck Connors led wide-eyed customers through
Chinatown; he showed them ersatz opium dens and bordellos, reinforcing seedy
clichés about the exotic new immigrants on the block.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Sensationalist books and magazine articles popularized the
Bowery as a den of sin. It slid so far down-market that in 1845, residents
between what is now Cooper Square and Union Square successfully petitioned to
have the street's name changed from Bowery to Fourth Avenue to separate
themselves from its shabby aura. Things only got worse when the city erected an
elevated railway that shrouded the thoroughfare in shadows. At the turn of the
20th century, the street became a kind of underclass ecosystem in which, as
Sante writes, men "rotated among the missions, the flophouses, the greasy
spoons, the barber colleges." Living there meant that you had somehow
fallen off the treadmill of the moneymaking world, beyond striving—you'd hit
the literal embodiment of the phrase rock bottom. With the pressure of
cultural expectations gone, men found a kind of relief in "reaching the
finality," as Benedict Giamo wrote in the 1970s, "being there in that
place you have feared all of your life."<o:p></o:p></div>
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The bustle of flophouses, nightclubs, and rummy bars had
dwindled by the 1940s and the street settled into an industrial twilight.
Chinatown businesses gradually started edging uptown. In the '60s and '70s,
artists, writers, and musicians moved into ramshackle lofts—figures like
Burroughs and Rothko, Kate Millet and Roy Lichtenstein, Nan Goldin and Debbie
Harry—attracted by the street's abundant sunlight and dirt-cheap rent, but
probably also by its aura of outsiderness and decay. It was no longer just the
last resort for those ejected from society, but a refuge for those who rejected
it.<o:p></o:p></div>
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CBGB founder Hilly Kristal saw an art colony taking shape in
the neighborhood, and in 1969, he rented a dive bar underneath a flophouse
called the Palace Hotel. While he was rebuilding the inside of the old bar that
would five years later become ground zero for American punk rock, Kristal
remembers how the guys from the hotel upstairs—remnants of another era—would
line up outside his door "at eight in the morning for the first eye-opener
of the day. If they could reach the bar and put down 35 cents, they got a
little glass of wine to keep them going."<o:p></o:p></div>
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Now the residents of the Palace Hotel are all but forgotten,
and CBGB's status as a cultural landmark has been cemented by the renaming of
2nd Street at Bowery as Joey Ramone Place. Yet Kristal says his landlord has
threatened to double his rent, leaving the future of CBGB on the Bowery in
question, along with all those joints selling cash registers and chandeliers.<br />
<br />
Kristal sounds philosophical about the changes. "The whole Lower East Side
is changing," he says. "That new building across the street from
me—people say it's so ugly but I think it's a nice modern place. A lot of this
neighborhood could be nicer and cleaner. So things are gone, places are gone.
You want old stuff? Go to Europe. This is New York."<o:p></o:p></div>
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Maybe the new buildings going up will make us look at the
place anew, lifting our eyes from the dingy storefronts. And maybe the
juxtaposition between the dilapidated tenements and the angular, avant-garde
building soon to be constructed for the New Museum can infuse the whole area
with new resonance.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="page-3"></a>This long unraveled seam of a street
marks the border for many neighborhoods but belongs to none—one reason that
development has proceeded without serious planning or foresight. Several
groups, including the Municipal Arts Society and Rebuild Chinatown, have
initiated studies of the area, but no grand plan has been hatched, and
historians worry that this current development frenzy will destroy not just the
many important old buildings but the whole spirit of the place. "The
Bowery isn't long for this world unless somebody pays attention to it,"
says Municipal Arts Society president Kent Barwick, who's lived around the
corner from the Bowery for many years. He believes it's been largely ignored
"because it's been a place of degradation and despair—you still see a body
bag coming out of a Bowery hotel once in a while—and because it hasn't had a
middle-class constituency looking out for it."<o:p></o:p></div>
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Urban landmarking usually focuses on quaintness or
greatness. So how do you preserve lowlife? Art projects are one way to
acknowledge the past, and in the last few years, the Bowery has been the
subject of a few. The New Museum's "Counter Culture" show featured
installations that involved local residents and businesses. Brooklyn artists
Dave Mandl and Christina Ray (oneblockradius. org) are currently creating a
psychogeographic portrait of a single Bowery block, while a group called Place
Matters is working on an interactive map of the Bowery.<o:p></o:p></div>
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These art projects aren't really a solution, according to
Place Matters director Marci Reaven, but a stopgap measure to instill a sense
of what we're losing. "Preserving the memories and stories is
important," she says, "but the actual physicality of buildings and
streetscape is important too. People use buildings to place themselves in
time." Reaven suggests landmarking key sites as well as preserving certain
uses—for instance, revivifying the flophouse, a form of shelter that's
vanishing despite the city's need for more low-income housing. Barwick of
Municipal Arts Society hopes to maintain the hodgepodge of residents, which he
insists is the essence of urban-ness: "Old Asian men, young people
drinking in bars, businessmen coming to buy dented restaurant supplies—this mix
is important. It's also very hard to prescribe." But what disturbs Barwick
most is the sudden profusion of 12- and 16-story buildings. "If I were
God," he says puckishly, "I wouldn't let them alter the scale of the
buildings the way they are."<o:p></o:p></div>
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Not everyone agrees that preservation is the way to go.
Kwong is rightly suspicious of this sepia-tinged, bourgeois nostalgia: "If
you say you want to preserve culture, you have to ask, what culture, whose
culture, and for what purpose? Working-class Chinese people still live here right
now ; they have a living culture." And yet even Chinatown businesses
and residents face being priced out of the area. "If you say you want to
maintain culture when people can't afford to live here," Kwong argues,
"then you're basically talking about this being a museum or a tourist
shop."<o:p></o:p></div>
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New and old coexist elsewhere in New York, but the
transformation taking place on the Bowery right now is truly extreme, from the
pits to the penthouse. Experts say that it would take a huge, concerted effort
to get the city to intervene. The best-case scenario would be the preservation
of some old buildings as well as the construction of more low- and
middle-income housing. But in today's market, the latter belongs in the realm
of pure fantasy, considering that years of community negotiation on the Avalon
Chrystie Place project resulted in just 25 percent low-income apartments and no
middle-income allotment. Perhaps the least one can hope for is that the
anti-paradise that was the Bowery not be paved over all at once—that some of
the sore patches and disheveled dwellings be allowed to remain as monuments to
the not-so-distant struggles and furies that once coalesced here.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Erase all traces of the old Bowery and you lose a crucial
facet of Manhattan, which always found room for the poor and desolate, not to
mention the eccentric and debauched. Once upon a time, this wasn't just a city
of winners: The Bowery is proof that New York had a place for life's losers
too. [Additional reporting by Halley Bondy]<o:p></o:p></div>
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--February 22, 2005<o:p></o:p></div>
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Joy Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14061462003517171574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4416218221471187017.post-26542428592702030672015-07-30T08:20:00.000-07:002017-10-05T12:05:56.876-07:00"Game of Thrones": An epic with a different ring<h3>
<i>
Game of Thrones</i> premiere feature, Sunday Calendar cover of Los Angeles Times<br />by Joy Press</h3>
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Gargantuan dire wolves, frozen tundras, corrupt royals,
brutal deflowerings, gullets slit wide open — oh, and don’t forget the
debauched dwarf. The chilling slogan “Winter Is Coming” only hints at the epic
scope and brooding cinematic feel of the much-anticipated series “<span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Game of Thrones</span>,” which
premieres April 17.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Based on George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and
Fire” novels, the 10-episode saga is a high-stakes move for HBO — an expensive
leap into spectacular fantasy for a network whose reputation was built on
nuanced, character-driven dramas geared toward adults. The show’s stars merge
actorly skill with genre-movie magnetism: Sean Bean is best known as Boromir in
Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, Lena Headey starred
as Queen Gorgo in “300,” and indie movie veteran Peter Dinklage played Trumpkin in
“Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Thrones” has been in development since 2006. That’s when
friends David Benioff and Dan Weissdecided they wanted to bring
to life Martin’s magnum opus about bloody power struggles, dark mystical
forces, and children grappling with the sins of their forefathers, all set in a
gritty yet vaguely medieval fictional kingdom.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Benioff and Weiss have known each other for decades, and
their meet-cute story is pretty unusual for hot Hollywood show runners: The
Americans befriended each other while getting master’s degrees in Irish
literature at Dublin’s <span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Trinity College</span>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Dan was studying <span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Joyce</span>, and I was studying <span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Beckett</span>,” Benioff says with a slight grin. The
pair are sitting in a Pasadena hotel, both looking rakishly groomed, with 5
o’clock shadows in force midday.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Having studied two of 20th century modernism’s towering
geniuses and later published literary fiction themselves (Benioff wrote several
novels, including “The 25th Hour” and “City of Thieves,” while Weiss penned “Lucky
Wander Boy”), it might seem strange that they were drawn to Tolkien-esque
fantasy.<o:p></o:p></div>
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But for all their education and high-end novels, Weiss and
Benioff quickly point out that they’re not just literary geeks: They are also <a href="http://www.wizards.com/dnd/" target="_blank" title="Dungeons and Dragons"><span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Dungeons
& Dragons</span></a> geeks. “We were both dungeon masters,” says
Weiss, whose novel “Lucky Wander Boy” is steeped in video game culture. In
fact, the huge popularity of Martin-style fiction seems to go hand in hand with
the immersive, drawn-out and escapist entertainment of video gaming.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The duo’s earliest attempt at collaboration — a horror
script called “The Headmaster” — went nowhere. But Benioff got a boost in 2000,
when Tobey Maguire took a liking to “The 25th Hour” and enabled
Benioff to write a screenplay for the Spike Lee movie of his novel.
This launched his career as an in-demand writer on movies like “Troy,” “The
Kite Runner” and “X-Men Origins: Wolverine.”<br />
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In the meantime, Benioff married
actress Amanda Peet, completing the aura of Hollywood fairy tale. And then “Game of Thrones” landed on Benioff’s doorstep.
Literally. Martin’s agent sent him a hefty package of the books, several of
which run more than 1,000 pages. Initially the cheesy fantasy covers repelled
Benioff, but after he started reading, he was hooked. “At some point I e-mailed
Dan and said, maybe I’ve lost my mind, but this is more fun than
anything I’ve read in years and years.”<br />
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Dan felt similarly exhilarated. “You almost literally
disappear into those worlds, and I hadn’t done that since I was 12 or 13 years
old. It’s the kind of experience that’s very hard to have as an adult reader. …
A crack-like propulsion to get to the next chapter.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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The duo decided that cramming Martin’s complex saga into a
two-hour, PG-13 film would be “an act of mutilation” and wondered if Martin
might turn down the payday of a “LOTR”-style movie franchise in favor of a
cable TV series.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Martin recalls meeting them at a West Hollywood restaurant
for lunch: “They were very enthused, they said all the right things. They
didn’t even ask, ‘Does it have to medieval, can it be contemporary?’ ”<o:p></o:p></div>
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The 62-year-old Martin — who, with his hulking frame and his
long white locks and beard, could be a character in his own saga — had spent a
decade working in TV (“Twilight Zone,” Ron Koslow’s live-action “Beauty
and the Beast”) and was fed up with scaling down his vision for the screen.
“With my first drafts, they’d always say, ‘It’s great, but it’s too long,
it’s got too many characters…. Ultimately I’d come up with a shootable
script, but I always liked my first drafts with the huge, juicy stuff in it.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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These books were his attempt to escape Hollywood’s
constraints and, as Weiss puts it, “write something that you could never, ever
make into a television show or movie. And sure enough, we are now making this
unmake-able world into a television show.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Benioff tries to keep his vision for the series — and Martin
fans’ expectations — in perspective.<o:p></o:p></div>
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“There are certain things we are never going to be able to
do the way Peter Jackson could with ‘Lord of the Rings,’” he says. “On the
other hand, we have a lot more time to spend with our characters. And at this
point in my life as a 40-year-old man, I am much more excited by George’s
stories than I am by ‘Lord of the Rings.’”<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Because Frodo never gets to go to a brothel,”
Weiss pipes up impishly, as Peter Dinklage’sfabulously saucy character, Tyrion,
so often does.<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Game of Thrones” is much more raw and graphic than most
fantasy of “The Lord of the Rings”-”Harry Potter” kind. It offers beheadings
and bare breasts, as befits the show’s home on HBO. “The [movie] studio conception of fantasy — and the more you
edge toward high fantasy the more this becomes true — is that who would be
interested in what is limited to 13- to 15-year-old boys?” Weiss says. “But
frankly, a 13-year-old probably should not be reading Martin’s books.”<br />
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Having a pre-existing narrative to work from is naturally a
huge advantage to the show runners. Unlike the creators of a TV show like “Lost,”
they don’t have to make up plots as they go along. “Somebody very, very smart
has been thinking about [‘Thrones’] 24 hours a day for the past 20 years,”
Weiss says. “It gives you such a head start in terms of structure.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Thrones” arrives
amid a boom in historical and pseudo-historical cable dramas, including Starz’s
“Camelot” and “Spartacus” and Showtime’s forthcoming “The Borgias” and recently
concluded “Tudors.” Although Martin has done much historical research,
“Thrones” is not shackled to any specific reality. According to Benioff, “It’s
built on a vaguely Western medieval skeleton, but he’s pulling from the
Mongols, native Americans, India, all these elements get woven together into
this new tapestry that feels very organic and real but also feels fresh.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Because it is a work of pure imagination, they can throw in
a dragon here, a sword-wielding heroine there; they can even invent a new
language. And so they did — hiring linguist <span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">David J. Peterson</span> to <span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">create a Dothraki dialect</span> spoken by
the barbarian tribe that beautiful would-be heir-to-throne Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia
Clarke) marries into.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It’s a full-on geek move that should stand them in excellent
stead at <span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Comic-Con International</span>, though neither has learned Dothraki
yet. Weiss quips, “It’s on my to-do list. I’ve been told Klingon was hard to
learn, so we asked that it be easier to learn than Klingon.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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This lapse could be forgiven, considering that the duo spent
most of last year on location. (Weiss’ wife gave birth while he was shooting in
Northern Ireland, while the Benioffs had their second child during
postproduction.) Over the last half decade, they have juggled other projects,
like the “Halo” movie that Weiss was attached to for a while and the Kurt
Cobain film that Benioff is scripting. Of the latter, Benioff says he’s
handed in what he hopes is the final draft of the movie, to be directed by Oren
Moverman (“The Messenger”).<o:p></o:p></div>
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But Benioff and Weiss are committed to riding “Thrones” as
far as they can, and neither foresee having time to return to writing fiction
soon. Did their years as Irish literature scholars go to waste?<o:p></o:p></div>
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Benioff pauses, his mop of curls shaking slightly. “One of
the experiences we were studying in Ireland was really close reading,” he says.
“Paying so much attention to the text and trying to extract meanings from it.
Obviously George’s books are very different from Beckett’s. But he is creating
these worlds that are entirely unlike anything I had read before … and we want
to do it justice.”<o:p></o:p><br />
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Joy Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14061462003517171574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4416218221471187017.post-9297845944588594802015-07-29T22:20:00.000-07:002015-07-30T08:19:21.394-07:00Notes on Girl Power<h3>
Riot Grrrl, Jane Magazine and the Mainstreaming of Girl Power </h3>
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Village Voice</h3>
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by Joy Press</h3>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt;">From the moment do-me feminism was
coined (by a male <i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Esquire</span></i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>writer)
in 1994, it was inevitable that a magazine like<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Jane</span></i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>would
be born. Although the term was reviled by the women it supposedly definedattractive,
prosex feminists of the Naomi Wolf genusit did expose a growing trend among
young women: a backlash against the perceived puritanism of traditional
feminism, and a move toward the politics of pleasure.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div style="box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 14.25pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 7.5pt; margin-right: 7.5pt; margin-top: 0in; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt;">But
do-me feminism also described an emerging niche in the marketplace: young,
free, and single 18- to 34-year-old women. Targeting this demographic,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Jane</span></i>the monthly that made its debut last weekis the
grown-up sister of<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Sassy</span></i>, Jane Pratt's
legendary teen magazine of the late '80s.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Sassy</span></i>had a serious
agenda: to break through the sickly sweet fodder of<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Seventeen</span></i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>and
its ilk, and put teenage girls in touch with the pleasure principle. Says
Debbie Stoller, coeditor of the zine Bust and one of many then-twentysomething
women who guiltily enjoyed reading<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Sassy</span></i>, "The
other teen magazines were about 'just say no' to everything, whether it was
french fries or dick.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Sassy</span></i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>was all about yesthe older you get,
there's more and more things you can say yes to, and isn't that cool."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Jane</span></i><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt;"> </span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt;">arrives with little of this heady
idealism. With more than $5 million of Fairchild money riding on it, Pratt's
not likely to make many daring moves. At an idle glance, it looks a lot like
your standard women's magazine: beauty and fashion advice, and endless ads
featuring models so skinny it's hard to see where their internal organs might
fit. Yet, within the narrow confines of the genreone pretty much defined by
its ability to stoke female anxieties and insecuritiesJane makes some subtle
inroads. It avoids old chestnuts like "How to lose 15 pounds in 10
days," or "How to trap a man," instead continuing Sassy's
emphasis on fun and independence with first-person accounts of a nudist
retreat, kickboxing, and the hazardous life of a female pirate-radio DJ. The
tone is feisty and the attitude is encapsulated in the subscription card:
"Ever notice how most magazines are either for teenyboppers or baby
boomersfilled with lame stuff about how to get a life? Hey, you've got a life!
You're in your prime."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt;">In her debut letter from the editor,
Pratt, the perpetual teenager, admits that her first choice for a magazine name
was</span><span class="apple-converted-space" style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt;"> </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt; outline: 0px;"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Girlie</span></i><span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt;">. The appeal of that word is no fluke. Girl power
has come to represent a whole new school of softcore feminism for thousands of
(mostly) white, hip, middle-class young women. Girl reserves the right to think
about clothes and makeup, but she still expects to be taken seriously. Girl
isn't afraid to be obnoxious or snarly for fear she'll be seen as unfeminine.
Girl wants a boyfriend but values her female friendships more. Girl knows she's
as good as a guy, but she's proud to be girlie and to wield her girl power.
Independent but not adult, pursuing a career but not exactly a "career woman,"
fierce but feminine, girl is a mess of contradictions and conflicts, sure. But
when you get right down to it, she expects a lot from the world. As the online
girlzine</span><span class="apple-converted-space" style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt;"> </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt; outline: 0px;"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Minx</span></i><span class="apple-converted-space" style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt;"> </span><span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt;">puts
it: "Can we please be smart AND want to get laid? We propose: Yes. We demand
satisfaction. Meaning: Don't waste our time. Stay true to your word. Equal pay
for equal work. And make us come."</span></div>
<div style="box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 14.25pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 7.5pt; margin-right: 7.5pt; margin-top: 0in; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<br /></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt;">At 34, Pratt herself is pushing the
upper limits of girldom, heading toward arrested development. Yet she cannily
understands that girl power is more than just a passing trend; it represents a
new life stage. "It used to be that you would go from your family's home
to your husband's home and that family," Pratt told the<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Voice</span></i>. "Now there's this whole time in your
twenties that gets ignored. The things you're interested in as a teenager don't
necessarily drop off when you hit your twenties. Women in their twenties are
not all dying to settle down and get married." In fact, in<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Jane'</span></i>s premiere issue a survey of women 18 to 34
conducted by Yankelovich reveals that "82 per cent believe a woman does
not need to marry and have kids to have a full and rewarding life." Even
more remarkably, "One in five say they don't know when they will feel like
a grown-up."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Jane</span></i><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt;"> </span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt;">is a pioneer in the impending gold rush
for the girl-power dollar. Waking from a great sleep, marketers, trendspotters,
and product developers are discovering that the single-female 18-to-34
demographic is dripping with disposable income. (The average 25- to-35-year-old
woman makes $25,000 a year, and spends about $1000 more than her male
counterpart.) Several new young women's magazines are now in production hoping
to capture this market (one of which,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Siren</span></i>, hit the
newsstands this summer with the tagline FOR WOMEN WHO GET IT).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhalZcXMLaN4WpwMbWG_b3KDD8XzC0xZuYMDJFjblbr0nKjsIHJQM5NPnFZGcOJp8EWF_EJxFZFGefixWqcjmTU0rzXupPCV6sYG2WVXKeHtj4t1p7KtmWvh15RpkgkegNN-8Fa-itjTDg/s1600/daria.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="120" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhalZcXMLaN4WpwMbWG_b3KDD8XzC0xZuYMDJFjblbr0nKjsIHJQM5NPnFZGcOJp8EWF_EJxFZFGefixWqcjmTU0rzXupPCV6sYG2WVXKeHtj4t1p7KtmWvh15RpkgkegNN-8Fa-itjTDg/s320/daria.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<div style="line-height: 14.25pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 7.5pt; margin-right: 7.5pt; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt;">In the wake of Daria, the<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Beavis and Butthead</span></i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>spin-off
about a supercilious teengirl, MTV is developing more female-centered programs,
including a video show hosted by a Tank Girllike animated character called
Cyber Cindy, and a program created by the editorial team behind<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Bust</span></i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="line-height: 14.25pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 7.5pt; margin-right: 7.5pt; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt;">Lifetime, the cable channel for women,
has been working on a block of programming for twentysomething women called<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">The Place</span></i>, which they hope to spin off into a separate
channel someday. Videogame creators, once fixated on the testosterone target,
are struggling to create girl-friendly products such as Sega's new<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Enemy Zero</span></i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>game,
which stars Jill Cunniff of the band Luscious Jackson. As for consumer goods,
according to Nick Bennett of the brand-design agency nickandpaul, "It'll
take about a year, and you'll start to see loads of products that reflect this
new idea of femaleness. That's what everyone's salivating to tap into."</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 14.25pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 7.5pt; margin-right: 7.5pt; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 14.25pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 7.5pt; margin-right: 7.5pt; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt;">Originally, of course, girl power was never meant to be consumer
friendly; it was supposed to stick in the mainstream's craw. When Riot Grrrls
rehabilitated the word girl in the early '90s, they were looking back to the
wild, unsocialized tomboys of prepubescence for inspirationchiming with
sociologist Carol Gilligan's idea that adolescence is a calamity for female
confidence and self-esteem. Riot Grrrls had seen firsthand, through their
mothers, that being a grown woman involves making awful choices and sacrifices.
Whereas girls still had all options open to themnone of life's roads were blocked
off yet.</span></div>
<div style="box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 14.25pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 7.5pt; margin-right: 7.5pt; margin-top: 0in; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 14.25pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 7.5pt; margin-right: 7.5pt; margin-top: 0in; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt;">In
place of sugar 'n' spice 'n' all things nice, the new grrrl was bratty, angry,
and as nasty as she wanted to be (something Courtney Love made visual by
wearing frilly, sexy little-girls' dresses that she called her
"kinder-whore" look), while brandishing protofeminist slogans like
"Grrrl Power" and "Revolution Grrrl Style." These attitudes
circulated over the years through bands like Bikini Kill and fanzines with
names like<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Girl Germs</span></i>,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Hungry Girl</span></i>,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Bust</span></i>, and<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Bitch</span></i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>and their more recent webzine
successors like<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Maxi</span></i>,<i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Wench</span></i>, and<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">gURL</span></i>. All share a cynical, sarcastic toneimagine
Heathers meets Valerie Solanas with a smidgen of Parker Posey thrown inthat
Bust's Stoller calls "shebonics."</span></div>
<div style="box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 14.25pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 7.5pt; margin-right: 7.5pt; margin-top: 0in; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 14.25pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 7.5pt; margin-right: 7.5pt; margin-top: 0in; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt;">Gradually, the shebonic voice and the
nasty grrrl attitude hit the mainstream, first through Love, and then, in much
diluted form, with the multiplatinum-selling Alanis Morissette. Faint echoes of
girl-power edginess persist in such crass post-Alanis pop product as Meredith
Brooks's "Bitch," and the Spice Girls' anthem "Wannabe."
The Spice Girls' official book,</span><span class="apple-converted-space" style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt;"> </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt; outline: 0px;"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Girl Power</span></i><span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt;">!, is
plastered with slogans like "Girl power is when...you believe in yourself
and control your own life."</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 14.25pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 7.5pt; margin-right: 7.5pt; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 14.25pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 7.5pt; margin-right: 7.5pt; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt;">Pushing sisterhood ("You stick with
your mates and they stick with you") and equal rights ("I expect an
equal relationship where he does as much washing up as I do"), the Spice
Girls have done the seemingly impossible: they have made feminism, with all its
implied threat, cuddly, sexy, safe, and most importantly, sellable. As Paul
Bennett admits, "All our clients are like, Find us the next Spice
Girls!"</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 14.25pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 7.5pt; margin-right: 7.5pt; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 14.25pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 7.5pt; margin-right: 7.5pt; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt;">With their boisterously physical, unladylike antics in videos
and a kung fu kicking member whose nickname is Sporty Spice, the Spice Girls
have tapped into what looks like the next stage of girl power: a weird mix of
tomboyish athleticism and coquettish seduction. Call it "rad femme":
rad as in surfer and skate-punk slang for cool, femme for the traditionally
feminine trappings like lipstick and barrettes.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 14.25pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 7.5pt; margin-right: 7.5pt; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 14.25pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 7.5pt; margin-right: 7.5pt; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt;">Gwen
Stefani of No Doubt could be the poster girl for rad femme. In concert, she
cuts a striking if somewhat unnerving figure: her buff body stomps boisterously
around the stage, sweat dripping from her quarterback shoulders and washboard
abs as she lunges and leaps, while that squeaky, Betty Boop voice emerges from
her heavily made-up, almost doll-like face, complete with lacquered '40s bob.
Stefani simultaneously revels in her femininity ("I'm a girlie girl type
and I like to...get all made up and do all that stuff," she told the
online zine Foxy) while mocking, in the hit song "Just a Girl," those
who would rein her in or belittle her.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 14.25pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 7.5pt; margin-right: 7.5pt; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 14.25pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 7.5pt; margin-right: 7.5pt; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt;">Marketers
seem to be betting their money on the rad femme: Both Lady Footlocker and
Mountain Dew have recently run commercials that showcase feisty but feminine
girls. Lady Footlocker's ad features a menacing grunge remake of Helen Reddy's
saccharine pseudofeminist anthem of the '70s, "I Am Woman," while
Mountain Dew's ad relies on a punked-up version of an old standardthe
condescending Maurice Chevalier ditty "Thank Heaven for Little Girls"sung
by Ruby (a/k/a Lesley Rankine, formerly the aggressive front woman of
Silverfish, for whom she coined the protoRiot Grrrl slogan "Hips, Tits,
Lips, Power"). Crooning the patronizing lyric "Little eyes so
helpless and appealing," Rankine tilts her shaved head sardonically and
sneers, "then they flash and send you crashing through the ceiling."
All this is intercut with shots of lanky, raucous girls, and footage of
wildwomenyoung ski champion Picabo Street, a skydiver, a rollerblader attached
to helicoptercareening off dangerous precipices. As they take the plunge, they
each let loose a savage girl-hollerthe kind of roar you might hear in a Hole
or Bikini Kill song, but stripped of anger and transformed into purely joyous
exuberance.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 14.25pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 7.5pt; margin-right: 7.5pt; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 14.25pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 7.5pt; margin-right: 7.5pt; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt;">It's thrilling to see such female fierceness portrayed on TV, something
unthinkable even a few years ago. Yet below the surface lies a very traditional
kernel. The commercial ends with a bunch of dopey, awestruck skate dudes who
gaze dizzily back at the gang of tough girls; one of the boys bleats, "I
think I'm in love." A crucial coda, these boys have been tacked on to
reassure the target market of young women that you can be ferocious and
girl-powered but also desired.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 14.25pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 7.5pt; margin-right: 7.5pt; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 14.25pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 7.5pt; margin-right: 7.5pt; margin-top: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt;">The
rad femme's composite of tomboy and hyperfemininity raises the question: Is
this new Mountain Dew-approved version of girl power merely feel-good feminism,
with all the struggle and critique removed; a defanged politics that's about
being active instead of activist? Probably. But it could be argued that, in
this mediagenic age, being stylized and diluted is a fair price for being
disseminated throughout the wider culture. Sure, these commercials leech on
girl power, but in a weird way they also act as advertisements for softcore
feminism as much as for a soft drink. You might even say that the Spice Girls,
those sex kittens in rebel's clothing, have given many prepubescent girls their
first taste of feminism, however compromised. As</span><span class="apple-converted-space" style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt;"> </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt; outline: 0px;"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Bust</span></i><span class="apple-converted-space" style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt;"> </span><span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt;">editor
Marcelle Karp says, "Let [the Spice Girls] get up on MTV or in the movies
and remarket feminism and call it girl power. Put that out there, let the girls
soak it up and think about what girl power really means."</span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 14.25pt;">Girl
power may turn out to be fleeting, edged out by the culture's perpetual hunger
for ever more risky pursuits, but chances are that in the process, it will
expand society's ideas about what is acceptable and what's possible for young
women. So perhaps, in the end, it's worth the price. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
-- September 23, 1997<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
Joy Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14061462003517171574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4416218221471187017.post-73820583191320095092015-07-29T22:04:00.001-07:002021-12-08T17:07:46.005-08:00Yoko Ono profile<h3>
YOKO ONO PROFILE, cover of <a href="https://www.thewire.co.uk/issues/146">The Wire issue 146</a><br />by Joy Press</h3>
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<i>"I never will forget the dawn in the Abbey Road Studio
when John and I hugged each other after completing the Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono
Band record. When I was a little girl, I read of Monsieur and Madame Curie
discovering radium, with, naturally, the Madame sitting in the driver's seat.
That was how I felt...I was a composer who was stretching her ears to the edge
of the boundless universe."</i><o:p></o:p></div>
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- Yoko Ono, liner notes to the London Jam CD, from Onobox<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Standing in the vestibule of the Dakota building in Manhattan,
I tell the guard: "I'm here to see Yoko Ono." It seems like a stupid,
surreal thing to say - like announcing, "I've got a pizza delivery for the
Pope" - but he lets me in anyway.<br />
<br />
Upstairs, Yoko is sitting in her kitchen, a vast room as big as my entire
apartment, with sofas and a television at one end, and a mosaic-topped kitchen
table at the other. Dressed in a plain black shirt and stonewashed jeans, she
chainsmokes slim cigarettes and speaks in skewed English. Contrary to myth, she
turns out to be funny, self-effacing and surprisingly mumsy; when her son Sean
shows up, she fusses and frets that he'll be late for his voice lesson.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Every so often I have to remind myself: this is one of the
most famous women in the world; a woman who was also, once, a key member of the
Fluxus movement, a leading performance artist and 'High Priestess of the
Happening', and collaborator with John Cage, David Tudor, LaMonte Young and
Ornette Coleman. Her music in the 60s and early 70s was groundbreaking; on such
albums as <i>Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band</i> and <i>Fly</i> she merged rock 'n' roll and New
York downtown avant gardism. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Years before Patti Smith, Siouxsie Sioux or Diamanda Galas,
Yoko invented 'the scream': a spectacular eruption of shamanic female energy,
dervish-whirling through soundscapes as hybrid and chaotically miscegenated as
her own East-meets-West upbringing. She was an ardent feminist whose
performance art, films and music aggressively addressed women's oppression. Yet
her own achievements were eclipsed when she threw in her lot with John Lennon.
Suddenly the arc of Yoko Ono's career nosedived; she went from diva of the
avant garde to dragonlady.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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In 1992, as the world began to re-evaluate some of the
liminal figures haunting that edifice known as 'women in rock', Yoko was asked
to compile her life's work for a five CD set called <i>Onobox</i>. It got rave reviews
and avid attention from young musicians who had only ever known her as a
cultural pariah - the woman who broke up The Beatles. Courtney Love, Yoko's
modern-day shadow, promptly claimed Ono as her patron saint, and even named a
song after her: "Twenty Years At The Dakota".<o:p></o:p></div>
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Now, four years after <i>Onobox</i> Yoko has made a return to her
avant garde roots with <i>Rising</i>, her most uncompromising album since Fly. She is
accompanied by IMA, a group of ace teenage musicians spearheaded by son Sean
Ono Lennon. And later this year, her record company will release remixes and
cover versions of songs from <i>Rising</i>, recorded by young Ono fans like Thurston
Moore, The Beastie Boys, Tricky, Ween and female Japanese-American art-popsters
Cibo Matto.<br />
<br />
"I didn't know there were so many brothers and sisters out there thinking
in the same direction as me," Yoko tells me. She sounds genuinely
astonished.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b>Remember the holes in your mind</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Yoko Ono is descended from emperors and samurai. Her father
was a concert pianist turned Tokyo banker who, legend has it, often
measured his daughter's hands to see whether they were big enough for her to be
a first-rate pianist. (They weren't - she's a tiny woman.) Yoko spent most of
her childhood in Japan, including some very hard years during World War
Two. When she was 20 the family moved to upstate New York, where she went
to Sarah Lawrence College. There she discovered Schoenberg and
spent much of her time trying to find the right outlet for her fierce creative
impulses.<br />
<br />
"I felt that I was a misfit in every medium," she has said. "I
thought that there might be some people who needed something more than
painting, poetry and music, something I called an 'additional act'."<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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John Cage changed the course of Yoko's life, pointing the
way towards an interdisciplinary art. In 1958 Yoko and her first husband Toshi
Ichiyanagi, a young Japanese musician, attended Cage's experimental music
composition class at the New School in new York City. The
class attracted a panoply of young avant garde painters, writers and musicians
-including Jim Dine, Richard Maxfield, larry Poons and Allan Kaprow - who
embraced Cage's notions of incorporating indeterminacy and chance into art. By
offering her gigantic Chambers Street loft as a performance space, a
la Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire, Yoko helped foster this burgeoning experimental
scene. Her friend LaMonte Young, newly arrived from Berkeley, performed there,
as did Henry Flynt (who coined the term 'concept art'), electronic composer
Richard Maxfield and Yoko herself.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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At the time, Yoko was working on conceptual art that she
called 'Instruction Pieces' (Painting To Be Stepped On consisted of the
instruction: "Leave a piece of canvas or finished painting on the floor or
in the street"), and doing performance art happenings. One of her earliest
happenings, A Grapefruit In The World Of Park, was a multimedia work in which
the performers wore contact microphones to capture the sound of perspiration
and other "sounds you hear in silence" - her words echoing Cage's
statement that "My favourite piece is the one we hear all the time if we
are quiet". George Maciunas, soon to be ringleader of the Fluxus movement,
was smitten by Yoko's stuff and asked her to exhibit in his gallery. With its
Zen humour and interactive/confrontational qualities, Yoko's work fit the
Fluxus vision of 'total art' perfectly: action, sound, movement, poetry and
visuals brought together in a multimedia soup that melted the membrane between
everyday life and art.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Throughout her career Yoko tweaked taboos by flaunting the
female body in her work, from the infamous performance Cut Piece to the film
<i>Fly</i>, in which a camera follows a fly crawling over the landscape of a woman's
nude form. Even today, the concept of Cut Piece resonates; Yoko knelt onstage with
a pair of sharp scissors and asked the audience to cut the clothes off her body
until she was naked and exposed. Exploring notions of voyeurism, violence, and
victimisation, it's one of her earliest and most powerful feminist statements.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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In retrospect Cut Piece seems dangerous, even foolhardy.
Yoko admits that she can't imagine doing it now. But back then, she recalls,
"There was the feeling that I wouldn't respect myself if I didn't have
that courage. There was always that notion in me that art should come first to
a dedicated artist, and life comes second." Luckily Cut Piece had a
built-in obsolescence point, since Yoko always wore her best suit for each
performance. "My wardrobe went down very rapidly, until there were maybe
two clothes left," she chuckles. "But the feeling was to use my best
clothes - for art's sake."<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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From the early 60s onward, Yoko's voice became her
trademark; a visceral wail, Roland Barthes's "language lined with
flesh". Her vocal techniques emerged gradually, she says, out of a desire
to find new sounds - interior or imaginary sounds. After experimenting with
ambient noises and musique concrete, she started reciting poetry in
performances, "accentuating syllables in a strange, almost dissonant
musical way".<br />
<br />
While preparing for a show at the Carnegie Recital Hall in 1961, Yoko had a
flashback to her childhood in Japan which further inspired her.
"I still hadn't gone through the experience of childbirth then, but I
remembered that when I was a very little girl, I overheard these servants
talking about how painful it is to bring a child into the world." The
servants' yowling re-enactment of labour stuck in Yoko's mind.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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"I remember it even now, exactly how it sounded,"
she explains, panting and moaning for me. "Around that time in 1961, I had
a miscarriage... or an abortion," she mutters under her breath. "And
that reminded me of those stories. So I thought, I'm going to try to recreate
that sound of a woman giving birth." She recorded the groans, but when she
went to play it back, she accidentally hit the reverse button. The result was
so spooky and weird that "I rehearsed it to simulate the backwards sounds.
That's how it all started."<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Aside from singing 'backwards', Yoko also absorbed a style
of Japanese kabuki called hetai "which requires you to strain your voice a
bit". The child of a Buddhist mother and a Christian father, Yoko was
perfectly placed to syncretize East and West. Much of her early work was
meditative and owed its spiritual force to Buddhism. She said at the time,
"I think of my music more as a [Zen] practice [gyo] than as music."
And her performance art often drew upon the natural world, as in 1962's Wind
Piece, in which she invited the punters to move their chairs aside to make an
aisle for the wind to pass through.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Who was in those early audiences? Was it mostly other
artists? "The avant garde scene innew York was very large, and a lot
of people would show up," she explains. "I had a mailing list of
about 200 people. In those days, because I was very work-oriented, I would do a
concert or an exhibition once a month almost. I thought that was 'success', you
know, not knowing there was another world where a million people buy your
records."<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Yoko admits that she was hurt by sexism, as rife in the
macho avant garde art world as anywhere else. When male artists go out on a
limb they are considered brilliant and daring, but when women do the same, they
are crazy. "Crazy or downright annoying!" she agrees. "Many
times I was not invited to a group show or to perform, so I had to do a concert
on my own. In hindsight, maybe that helped me."<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Yoko still bumps into some of her old Fluxus colleagues on
occasion; thanks to a resurgence of public interest in the movement and various
retrospective exhibits, former Fluxus artists sometimes find themselves
corralled in a room for group photos. Today, former pals like LaMonte Young and
Terry Riley are practically demi-gods to a certain circle of younger musicians,
but Yoko seems wary of discussing them.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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"I admit LaMonte Young's talent," she says
stiffly, "but there should be equal respect, you know?" He doesn't
respect you? "Ah, I don't want to go into it...There is always an ego
problem amongst artists. I suppose with the kind of work that he's doing, it is
very important that he have an incredible pride to carry him along. We were all
like that."<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Choose your cliche: Yoko the cold, calculating bitch who
leeched on Lennon's fame and fortune, or Yoko the martyred wife who sacrificed
her brilliant career for her husband. The reality, as usual, wavers between
these two extremes. But in terms of the public perception of Yoko Ono, there's
no getting around the fact that racism and sexism played a big role in her
demonisation.<br />
<br />
Think of <i>The Rutles</i>, Eric Idle's Beatles satire, in which Yoko's equivalent was
transposed into a leather-clad, goose-stepping Nazi. And <i>Esquire</i> magazine once
ran the headline: "John Rennon's Excrusive Gloupie". Of the blatant,
unremitting prejudice, Yoko says quietly, "That was a situation that all
of us Japanese-Americans went through at the time. But then I was singled out
to be personally attacked. What was that about? At the time I was thinking,
why, why, why me? But something good might have come out of it, in the sense of
making me stronger."<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Yoko met John Lennon in 1966. At the time she had showings
at two hip London galleries; after years of critical neglect she was
finally hitting her stride as an art star. Which is why critics have suggested
that, in terms of her career, meeting Lennon was the worst thing that could
have happened to her.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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"I don't agree with that at all," she insists.
"I was stuck in the avant garde thing. Where do you go from there? If I
had insisted on staying there, I could've been known as the person who never
budged from her belief, and been canonized by now..." Like LaMonte Young?
"Yeah. But the fact that I rolled around in the mud, so to speak, was very
good for me. By going off with John into a totally different world I got so
much inspiration. Yes, on a career level maybe I lost credence totally. Maybe
not totally...well, almost totally..."<br />
<br />
She takes a deep breath and lets out a nervous giggle. "I always had this
innate confidence that my artistic activity will not be killed. Even if I had
to stay put for a whole year to get pregnant, that was fine - I thought, one
day I'll use that experience to make something out of it."<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Surprisingly, Yoko insists that she was an outcast in the
avant garde community even before she took up with a pop star. She made a film
called <i>Bottoms/Film#4</i>: two hours of bare bums which Yoko called "an
aimless petition signed by people with their anuses".</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
After the film's release, she says, "All my avant garde friends dropped me
because I got a tremendous amount of attention and reviews. This nice avant
garde artist couple had a dinner party, and the wife told me, 'My husband feels
like you sold out and we're not inviting you for dinner...' I was stuck in a
strange place, up in the air. I was not in the avant garde world but I was not
as big as the [mainstream] world that John was in. 1967 was a very lonely
passage, it was like I was in nowhereland. That's when John noticed my work.
And he picked me up!"<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Not only did Lennon rescue Yoko from her limbo, he also
introduced her to whole new kind of music: rock 'n' roll. Ono's radical vocals
and mystical mindset combined with Lennon's raw rock sensibilities in a way
that was sheer sorcery. Their first joint experiments with looped tapes and
sound collages, <i>Unfinished Music No 1: Two Virgins</i> (recorded about the same
time as "Revolution No 9", Lennon's Stockhausen-influenced noise
collage on 1968's The Beatles) were out-and-out avant garde. But with <i>Yoko
Ono/Plastic Ono Band</i> (1970) and <i>Fly</i> (1971), the couple combined experimental
production, freeform jazz spontaneity and rock 'n' roll primitivism.</div>
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<br />
On the riotous "Why", Ono's voice seems to transcend the limits of
her body, searing and soaring over the Bo Diddley-esque beat and Lennon's
sulphurous guitar; on its sequel, "Why Not", Ono gargles strangled
syllables over a bluesy groove, sounding like a child that's been skinned alive.
Consider the John Cale-LaMonte Young-Yoko Ono nexus, and you realise that <i>Yoko
Ono/Plastic Ono Band</i> and <i>Fly</i> - in their exploration of noise and the mantric
powers of repetition - are an unacknowledged parallel to The Velvet
Underground's <i>White Light/White Heat.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<br /></div>
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"When John and I got together I was not thinking pop
music so much as rock," Yoko explains, dragging on her sixth cigarette.
"I was interested in that strong, heavy beat, which I equated with the
heartbeat. I thought avant garde music is mainly for the head - most male avant
garde composers avoided the voice because it was too animalistic. They were
into very cool instrumental kind of things. Cool was in, and by using my voice
I was a little uncool in their eyes. Strange, isn't it? The sound of my voice
was too human and emotional. Because of that, I kind of rebelled against that
avant garde tendency and I went more animalistic. When I heard the rock beat, I
thought, oh this is what I was looking for! And I never looked back."<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Although those records met with a mostly hostile reception
from critics and public alike, Yoko says, "We felt, John and I, that we
created a whole new sound, a new world. Even though most people were busy
throwing our records in the trashcan! We didn't expect that -we thought the
whole world would recognize that this is a new sound." So the couple
believed they had created a 'New Music' that was a "fusion of avant garde
jazz rock and East and West". For <i>Fly</i>, Yoko recruited her old Fluxus pal
Joe Jones to create one-of-a-kind sculpture-instruments "which played
themselves without any musicians" (as she explained in the <i>Onobox</i> notes).
And she utilized various items of exotic percussion like tablas and Cuban
claves.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At roughly the same time, the likes of miles Davis, Can
and Tim Buckley were on a similar genre-crunching trip. The lock-groove
freak-outs "Touch Me" and "Mind Train" (which a strangely
humble Yoko edited from 17 minutes down to four for <i>Onobox</i>, to 'spare' the
listener) are remarkably similar to the punk-funk jazz fission of Miles's <i>On The
Corner</i>. Similarly, "Don't Count The Waves" and "The Path"
are proto-dub explorations of echo and studio space that reverberate with
cosmic dust and radiowaves. They sound weirdly like parallels to Can tracks
such as "Augmn" from <i>Tago Mago</i>.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Was Yoko aware of what these other artists were doing?
"No, I didn't connect that at all," she says icily, and perhaps a
little disingenuously. "Okay. So I thought Miles Davis was probably doing
something great, but I thought it was just instrumental stuff. And it probably
was. The vocal thing I thought of as separate." It seems hard to believe
that Ono was unaware of Davis's work on <i>Bitches Brew</i>, a big hit with
counterculture 'heads'. But perhaps this brings us back to her earlier point
about artists' egos - it was only her unswerving belief that she was out on her
own, creating a new musical universe, that propelled her through all the
barriers that the art world threw in her path.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
These two early albums elicited some of the best playing of
their careers out of Lennon, Ringo Starr, and even Eric Clapton How did she do
it? "I think it was a lot to do with John," she says. "It was
always in the context of doing his [recording] sessions: it was like, you're
here anyway, who not do Yoko's song? It's not like we made phone calls and
said, 'We're going to do Yoko Ono's stuff now, let's get into the studio.' It
wasn't like that at all! 'Midsummer New York', for instance, I think it
was two in the morning and all that time we were doing John's stuff. Everbody's
tired and John says, 'Let's do this one song Yoko showed me this morning.' And
it's like, okay..."<br />
<br />
She rolls her eyes in a superb imitation of bored, patronizing musicians.
"I was always an afterthought. But it worked out well. On 'Yoko
Ono/Plastic Ono Band', you hear John saying 'Did you get that?' I kept it in
because most of the time when we did my stuff, all the engineers picked that
time to go to the bathroom. They couldn't stand it probably! A lot of things
were not taped, and a lot of things were lost in my life." <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Although many of her early instruction pieces were published
in the book <i>Grapefruit</i>, Yoko says that much of her work has vanished over the
years. "If I were a guy that wouldn't happen. I heard that Allen
Ginsberg's mother kept everything that he wrote since he was three. It must be
a big file. But in my life, a lot of things happened to me, and the
war..." she says, alluding to her childhood experiences in war-torn Japan.
"I'm lucky I kept a few things. Woman's career is not taken seriously, so
no one's keeping an archive for you."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>There's no way back so just keep walking</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
After the extremism of those two shattering records,
anything less untethered was bound to sound tame in comparison. Yoko's post-<i>Fly
</i>work in the 1970s was fervently feminist, but sonically sedate and
session-musicianly. She was palling around with Yippies Abbie Hoffman and Jerry
Rubin (her Fluxus-honed instinct for the spectacle melded perfectly with their
pranksterish sensibilities), and attending to numerous cool causes.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Her collaborative album with Lennon, <i>Sometime In New York City</i>, and her solo
records, <i>Approximately Infinite Universe</i> (backed by the hippy group Elephant's
Memory) and <i>Feeling The Space</i>, featured such forthright songs as "What A
Bastard The World Is" ("All of us live under the mercy of male
society/thinking that their want is our need") and "Potbelly
Rocker", a loose, jazzy slip of a song dedicated "to wives of rockers
who are nameless, who live in the shadow of groupies and who get a weekend
loving once every month...between the tours spiced with crabs and
gonorrhoea".<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Stray moments of intense strangeness found their way onto these records, such
as the eerie "YangYang", and "Woman Power", one of the few mid-period
songs which really succeeded in fusing powerful politics to equally powerful
rock. A stomping Amazonian tirade recorded in 1973, "Woman Power"
anticipated the marriage of Metal riffs and rap bombast more than a decade
before Run DMC sampled Aerosmith for "Walk This Way".<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Despite such strident pro-women rhetoric, Yoko wasn't a big
hit with the radical feminists because she stood by her man at a time when
separatism was in vogue. To women who felt overshadowed by men, Yoko was living
proof.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
"You're right - feminists didn't like me either. I was just a rich man's
wife to them. That was the initial stage when feminists were totally down on
wives and prostitutes!" she says gleefully. Ironically, the late 70s saw
Lennon and Ono grow into the ultimate roles-reversed couple: he was
house-husband, baking bread and looking after the infant Sean, while she
managed a business empire that some estimate at £100 million.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br />
At the dawn of the 80s Yoko turned to electronic technology. "Walking On
Thin Ice", the last track she created with Lennon, is one of her best,
most disturbing pop songs: over a motorik disco pulse, Yoko croons softly while
sonic debris careens and crashes around her. Much of <i>Double Fantasy,</i> <i>Season Of
Glass </i>(co-produced by Phil Spector) and <i>It's Alright</i> are peppered with
synthesizers and lush, multi-tracked vocals (she used 81 tracks on the epic
"Never Say Goodbye", a herculean task in the days before mixing desks
were computerised). <br />
<br />
"In the 80s, after John's passing, I really fell into music in a way that
was like a security blanket," she explains. "I needed to hold onto
something. Doing something elaborate, like elaborate harmonies or
instrumentals, was a way of getting into a more complex place, which was
therapeutic. It made me feel there was a whole new world I was delving
into." She chose to use actual gunshots in the staccato, atonal epic
"No, No, No," and later wrote that she had finally learned what
musique concrete really meant.<o:p></o:p></div>
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When asked for specifics about her interaction with
technology, Yoko grows a little vague, saying only that she's always been
involved in twiddling knobs in the studio. A statement that seems overly
modest, considering that she has produced or co-produced every one of her
albums. "Sometimes I get into that kind of thing," she says,
"and sometimes I think about the fact that in the computer age we get more
and more removed from ourselves, and I want to go back to the simple animal in
us. I hate it when things get too academic. If I play with technique, I want to
play with it towards an end. Otherwise it can stunt you...In Classical music,
people were doing very complex things, for the same of being complex. I leaned
that rock, with two simple chords, can bring an incredible communication of the
spirit."</div>
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The way Yoko tells it, <i>Rising</i> closes a circle that began
with <i>Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band</i>, in more ways than one. Firstly, it is a return
to uncompromising art rock. The album opens with the roiling Speed Metal
pummelling and vocal convulsions of "Warzone". Then there's the
requiem "Kurushi" (a Japanese word which vaguely translates into
'tortured' or 'suffocating'), the wonderfully flaky "Ask The Dragon",
and "Rising" itself, a lovely song in which plaintive chants dissolve,
over 14 minutes, into naked grief and cathartic chaos. <o:p></o:p></div>
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On a personal level, Rising is also, says Yoko, "a
reminder of when John and I did <i>Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band</i>. It was that kind of
feeling. I felt that Sean was very supportive of me, just like John. So there
were no silly questions - you know: 'Why are you screaming Yoko?'"<o:p></o:p></div>
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When Sean was a small boy, his voice often appeared on
Yoko's records. I suggest that he probably absorbed her aesthetic sensibility
from the womb onwards. But Yoko insists that she was taken aback by his
interest in her music and his desire to play (alongside Sam Koppleman and Timo
Ellis) on <i>Rising</i>. "I naturally assumed that when he grew up he would
respect his father's work a lot. I never thought he would even listen to mine.
I never pushed it or even explained it to him, but then I'm seeing him playing
my old records and...I was surprised."<o:p></o:p></div>
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This seems rather self-deprecating to me, and not a little
sad. Why wouldn't a son be interested in his mother's work? "My work is
the work of an outsider, and his dad is very mainstream..." She pauses.
"Well, he created the mainstream! So it's natural for Sean to go to that.
But the fact that I was an underdog probably appealed to him. And it's worked
out very well for the mother and son relationship!" <o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><i>
Rising</i> came into being after playwright Ron Destro
approached Yoko to write some songs for his play <i>Hiroshima</i>, timed for the
50th anniversary of the bombing of the city. The first song she wrote was
"Hiroshima Sky Is Always Blue," recorded with Paul McCartney last
year but not included on the album. Scenes in the play's script sparked painful
memories: the bombing of Tokyo, hiding in an air raid shelter, moving to
the countryside and nearly starving, then returning to the ravaged city where
she was surrounded by the walking dead. "I had been wondering why this
experience I and all of us New Yorkers are going through now felt familiar -
this feeling of tension and insecurity and fear. I was thinking, I remember
this feeling, when was the last time I experienced this? And I realised that
there was a parallel in my life." <o:p></o:p></div>
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Yoko's first live performance with IMA was at a memorial
event held in an ancient shrine near Hiroshima. The songs on <i>Rising</i> were
rewritten for Japanese drum, Chinese gong, didgeridoo and tablas, and IMA wore
kimonos. Although she's mindful of the 'One World' idea of melding East and
West, she explains that there were practical reasons for the Asian instruments.
"It was a thousand year old shrine, a national treasure, and they weren't
used to people getting on the stage wearing shoes even. We wanted to respect
that - to the point that I think we surprised them. If we used electric guitars
we'd have to have heavy speakers and amplifiers, so I made it all acoustic -
acoustic and interesting."<o:p></o:p></div>
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Over the years people have despised Yoko One for being too
cool, too cocky, too 'inscrutable'. Back in the 60s and 70s, with her hot-pants
and black beret, her anger and pronouncements about changing the world, she was
as threatening to the pop status quo as any angry young woman could be.<br />
<br />
Now aged 63 and a widow, she may find the public more sympathetic. Her rage is
still intact, but tempered by a lifetime of humiliations and misfortunes, she
seems more like a sage than a virago. The keynote to <i>Rising</i> might be found in
the title track: "Have courage/Have rage/We're rising". The message
is there ("We're all victims of the immaturity of the human race, and we
can all stand up together and do something about it," as she paraphrases
it for me), but filtered through some of Yoko's most virulently virtuoso
singing.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I ask whether she prepared or rehearsed her vocals in
advance. "[For] a song like "I'm Dying", the band started
playing and the first words that came to my mind were "I'm dying".
And I thought, 'Am I gonna say that?' There was a little resistance, because I
didn't want the whole world to think...'Oh, she's dying!' But I thought I
should say it - daring to not censor yourself. It is a bit frightening, but
that's how it is. My feeling is that it's a matter of attitude - if you think
that when you feel now is an accumulation of 60-something years, then anything
that comes out now is okay. Then you don't have to prepare. Just let it
come."<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
The Wire ISSUE 146, April 1996</div>
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Joy Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14061462003517171574noreply@blogger.com0