The Life, Death and Work of Amy Winehouse
“Well-behaved women seldom make history.” - Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
When I was a child I would hear the deaths of famous people announced on the radio but I never knew who any of them were. Around the age of eight I realized that the reason I did not know them was because I was too young and that as I got older the deaths being announced would start becoming people I did know who had had an effect on my life. It was one of those early sobering existential moments. For most people around my age our grief for dead musicians tends to be retrospective. They died before we were born or before we were old enough to appreciate them. It is not an active grief, it is more of an occasional moment of melancholy that someone who seemed to understand to our predicament is dead.
Lady Gaga’s Born This Way
“I am- as a blonde woman with tits and ass- very proud of my accomplishments as a musician. And I say that with lots of strength. People call it arrogance. But I do believe that women in pop music have a very bad rap and I think people have learned to expect very little from all of us and it’s very unfair; it’s very prejudiced. So, me and my tits and my ass and my brain are very proud to be here today.” - Lady Gaga
If you had told me on the twentieth birthday in January 2009 that Kanye West’s next album would be better than Radiohead’s next, that blink-182 would reunite, that a Korean pop girl group would be my most played artist on last.fm and that an Italian American girl from New York City with a big nose who wears lobsters on her head would be the biggest pop star in the world my reaction probably would have been hysterical laughter. It’s amazing how things change. I can barely read my older writing without cringing. In January 2009, I was one of those music fans. You know what I am talking about. If you don’t I suggest you take a look around a Radiohead message board for topics on popular music. For instance a topic on one about Adele titled “Fat Ugly 21 year old beating Radiohead in the album charts, sign of the times?”. You can practically hear them snickering as you read it.
Alien: Resurrection
“Was it everything you hoped for?”; “I’ve been finding a lot of things funny lately, but I don’t think they are.” - Ellen Ripley, Alien: Resurrection
My mother hated Lost in Translation when she first saw it and did not watch the entire thing. When I showed it to her last year her reaction was, “it is so bea-u-ti-ful”. I have this policy of never not completing a film because I am a pedantic completionist and I always have this nagging feeling that if I don’t complete a film I might be missing something. I push myself to complete virtually everything except my writing. I used to have to watch the entire film in one sitting but I have stopped doing that. They put a pause button on my media player for a reason. Some films really test my patience, however. It took at least half a dozen attempts to get through the first fifteen minutes of Alien: Resurrection to the point I considered abandoning my policy altogether. I wrote on my Twitter: “When I watch it I feel a combination of boredom and anger which is pretty much the worst thing a film can do”. That was before I watched the entire thing and realized it is bea-u-ti-ful.
