WHITNEY AND THE WORLD.

I’m really sad about the death of Whitney Houston. Why? I don’t know. I’ve never really been a fan. But I’m sad. I’m sad that an inspirational and insanely talented public figure spiraled out of control and in the end died. And I find myself relating to her in some weird sense.

In reading up on her death and tuning into such whatever online cesspools exist there is one thought that I feel like I see over and over again:

Whitney is not someone to mourn, hundreds of thousands of people die each day. The “real” heroes. They are the ones to care about.

And I don’t understand how one feels the right to tell other people what deaths are the “wrong” and the “right” deaths to mourn. And I don’t understand why anyone gets to be the authority on what atrocities are more deserving of being upset about. And I don’t understand how Whitney Houston somehow shouldn’t be mourned because of what she was born into and what she did with her life. Because she happened to be in a situation where what she could give the world was pop songs sung by a beautiful voice? Is she a bad person because she wasn’t fighting oppression on the street? She doesn’t deserve mourning?

I mean, I get it, there are so many people who are so deeply abused and die in such horrific ways who are forgotten and ignored. And the general public turns a deaf ear, but do you really think it’s because they don’t care? Yes, some people truly do not give a shit, but some people just have different lives and different priorities and are exposed to different things. It could be because they only pay attention to mass media, and surprise surprise, mass media gives more of shit about a fallen pop star then war crimes and general human suffering, and really, do you expect anything different? Even at the times when mass media does turn an eye to human rights abuses the stories are always twisted and turned to benefit specific parties, or to exploit and terrify... but again, really, do you expect something else? We all know mass media is bullshit. But again, are people bad for mourning things that others have decided don’t deserve mourning? I mean, it’s true, it is easier to mourn a pop star. It is easier to not think about the worlds atrocities. We (as in myself and the majority of people reading this) don’t really have to face the terrible abuses that people are capable of commiting. We can say what a shame but we will probably never have to face the horrors that occur daily for so many in the world. So we don’t always remember, we don’t always think about. Sometimes we do turn a blind eye. Because sometimes it is fucking exhausting. And maybe some people who get upset about famous people dying never mourn these other things. And maybe it’s because celebrity worship is what is jammed in our eyes every day and some don’t take the time to dig deeper. Maybe it’s easier to find catharsis from the horrors of everyday life through the death of a pop star. And maybe some people are more inspired to get up out of bed because they just listened to “The Greatest Love Of All”. And maybe some people get out of bed every day because they don’t want Rachel Corrie to die in vain. Or maybe they are trying to raise kids and work three jobs to make ends meet and singing along to “It’s Not Right, But it’s Ok” is a better escape from their daily existence than watching Al Jazeera. Or maybe someone is struggling with PTSD or dibilatating anxiety and they cannot handle paying attention to or thinking about these atrocities. It could be someone who is overwhelmed by the horrors of the world and it’s just easier to mourn a famous person for a second. Or it’s even possible that someone listens to “I’m Every Woman” to get inspiration before they go to a protest, and now the singer of that inspiration is gone.

But I’m upset. I’m upset that I am somehow deemed a bad person, or stupid, or a sheep or whatever because I’m mourning “the wrong thing”. There are a myriad of problems with this, one of them is that it implies that I can only give a shit about one thing at a time. But really, as people we do have a lot of compassion, we can care about or be upset about more than one thing at any given time. And there is enough compassion in me to talk about all these things, to mourn all these things, to be upset about all these things. Because I’m sad that Don Cornelius died because he was a person and his creation that is Soul Train revolutionized television and brought black music to the forefront of pop culture. And I’m sad that so many in Tahrir Square have been routinely beaten to death, because as people they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, and no one should be killed or hurt for demanding what everyone should have a right to. And I’m sad Mike Kelley died because I really like Sir Drone and he made a lot of really mind-blowing art. And I’m sad that women are brutally murdered in so-called honor killings because being raped and beaten should not render a person dirty and expendable.

I cried when I read about women getting brutally raped and then having to endure “virginity tests” and I cried watching a Whitney Houston video on the day she died. Was one of those cries shitty or inappropriate? Was one of them more deserving of my time and sympathy? Which one?

And a death is a death is a death.

And you know what else? I relate to Whitney Houston in a way. I’m not famous, I can’t sing, but I have been in fucked up relationships, I do battle mental illness, and though I’ve never quite been addicted to anything I am deeply familiar with self-medicating. And I’m sure most of my peers, my roommates, my friends, my comrades at protests have dealt with at least one of these things if not all. So when you say her death isn’t worthy of mourning, you are denying the fact that abusive relationships can and do destroy lives, you deny the daily battle that is living with mental illness, and you deny the terrible disease that is addiction. And when we deny these things we act like they don’t exist, we act like they aren’t important and that they aren’t real problems. And since they aren’t real problems we don’t need shelters for survivors of domestic abuse, we don’t need free accessible healthcare, we don’t need welfare.

And though I use Whitney Houston as my main example here these thoughts are applied universally.

There are so many terrible things in the world, sitting around and trying to rank them, trying to decide which ones are more worthy of our attention or our sadness is fucking ridiculous and a waste of time.

SUPERBOWL SUNDAY.

Ok, listen kids. Two major big whoops about the halftime show that everyone seems to be shitting their proverbial pants over: MIA flipping the bird and the whole performance being a satanic ritual. To both things I would like to just say OH. FUCK. YEAH.

Ok, first things first. MIA gives the people of the US of A the finger. My first reaction was "that is so fucking cool!!!" and of course since I have the mentality of a toddler sometimes I assumed that everyone was on the same page.

oh, how wrong I was.

Pretty much everyone has deemed it an immature move. Pitchfork said it was a cheap shot, the FCC is fining all parties involved, both the NFL and NBC are scrambling, and even MIA apologized. What's even more fascinating is the amount of news sources that are referring to it as a "malfunction", hearkening back to the infamous Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction in which hopefully everyone remembers Jackson was entirely blamed for. In this repetition of semantics it is made clear that both of these women are not only blamed for offending america but at the same time treated as if they have zero control over their own bodies. Nice fucking double speak y'all.

Beyond that, some are taking the finger as a career move, as if we didn't know her name already. She was nominated for a godamn grammy people! Do you remember? That movie that was the underdog mainstream movie? Paper Planes? Ok? Alright? She is a household name. Not to mention, it's not like you could even look at this as a controversial move to only garner attention. MIA has been saying fuck you to the world forever. While the likes of Britney Spears and Lady Gaga are being touted as the next Madonna MIA is actually the closest thing to it. No really, look at it: rising up from an underground art scene, constantly pushing mainstream artistic boundaries, constantly pushing fashion boundaries, being smarter and more interesting then most interviewers they encounter, calling people on their shit, making videos that are banned by major media outlets... yeah, I think so.

What I'm trying to really say is that it kind of seems like MIA doesn't give a fuck about career moves and she doesn't give a fuck who she pisses off. Whatever.

I digress.

Second thing: apparently there was a 1,001 ways it was at least alluding to satanic rituals. Some explanation.

Oh, and then this?

FEMALE FURY

The latest sensation on the Russian underground music scene talks
about its songs.

By Sergey Chernov
The St. Petersburg Times
Published: February 1, 2012 (Issue # 1693)



Pussy Riot, a feminist punk collective from Moscow whose members hide
their faces behind colored balaclavas, creates waves of protest
through its dissident songs and unsanctioned performances — which
culminated late last month in a brief unauthorized concert on Moscow’s
strictly guarded Red Square.

The group, which performed a freshly penned anti-Kremlin song called
“Putin Got Scared” (Putin Zassal) — complete with colored smoke bombs
and a purple feminist flag — was arrested and, after being held for
about five hours in a police precinct, two members were fined 500
rubles (around $17) each. The members were charged with holding an
unauthorized rally.

“Red Square is symbolically the main place of the country; we believe
that it is the place that should be occupied to achieve a real
political change, it’s the equivalent of Tahrir for Russia,” Pussy
Riot said in an email interview this week.

In an email, a member who calls herself Garadzha Matveyeva said that
the group answered the questions collectively — just as it writes its
songs.

For the Red Square performance, the group chose as its stage Lobnoye
Mesto — a 13-meter-long stone platform previously used for announcing
the tsar’s ukases — as a reference to the historic demonstration of
seven Soviet dissidents who came to the site with the slogan “For our
freedom and yours” to protest against the Soviet invasion of
Czechoslovakia on August 25, 1968. The dissidents subsequently spent
years in prisons, psychiatric asylums and in exile.

“We believe that the Soviet Union’s aggressive imperial politics are
similar in many ways to Putin’s course,” Pussy Riot said.

“The way the state treats its citizens hasn’t changed much since the
times of the U.S.S.R.; there is still paternalist supervision and
police control over people. Secondly, we always try to choose elevated
platforms — similar to a concert stage — so Lobnoye Mesto met our
needs in this sense.”

“Putin Got Scared” was inspired by the spontaneous, unsanctioned
protests against the rigged State Duma elections in December.

“The song was written in the aftermath of the Dec. 5 events and is
permeated with the radical mood of protest of that day, when after a
10,000-strong rally on Chistiye Prudy a number of protesters managed
to break through the OMON police cordons and around 1,000 marched
almost to the Kremlin itself,” the group said.

“The police were at a loss, they didn’t know what to do; they were
waiting for orders in astonishment and didn’t dare touch the
protesters. The orders to detain the demonstrators didn’t come until
the people had already reached the Kremlin, half an hour after the
march had begun. The authorities were frightened.

“The orders to bring armed troops to Moscow came immediately. Special
detachments were put on alert. It was clear that Putin had got
scared.”

Although the two authorized anti-fraud rallies that followed in
December drew more than 100,000 each, Pussy Riot believes that they
did not have as much of an effect as the unsanctioned protests.

“All the troops were taken out of Moscow on Dec. 10; when it became
clear that the opposition had made large concessions, Putin calmed
down, unfortunately,” the group said.

“As far as we can see, Putin is scared only of unsanctioned rallies.
That’s why we promote holding unauthorized protests in our songs. We
are not happy about what happens in the sphere of civic protests,
which have now turned into sanctioned rallies.

“The authorities will not get scared and make concessions because they
are rallies that they sanctioned themselves. On the contrary, such
rallies show that the authorities are allegedly tolerant toward
people, that they are ready to listen to them and provide them with
public platforms. But in reality, the authorities turn a deaf ear to
all the protesters’ demands and none of the claims set up at the
rallies have been fulfilled.”

Pussy Riot believes that more unsanctioned rallies will follow in view
of the upcoming presidential elections.

“It’s very likely that most radically-minded people will be isolated
(arrested, put in prison) — such as the Natsbols [members of the
oppositional Other Russia party] or [left-wing activist] Sergei
Udaltsov,” the group said.

“What happens after the elections depends on those tens of thousands
of people who come to sanctioned rallies and marches now; we hope that
the violations, fraud and falsifications that follow will force people
to take action not sanctioned by the authorities.”

According to the group, the song “Putin Got Scared” celebrates the
feminist capture of the Kremlin.

“It was cold on that day, it was a real Russian winter, and we and our
equipment got really cold,” Pussy Riot said.

“But this angered us even more, so the girls screamed so furiously
that the policemen were scared to come up to us at first.”

The video of the performance became an instant YouTube hit, while the
blog entry containing photos and links to the videos, lyrics and the
group’s commentary received more than 1,100 comments.

“As we saw from the responses to our video, many Russian citizens want
Putin to get scared once again and for a long time,” Pussy Riot said.

“The grassroots protest force is more radically-minded than official
rally organizers imagine. We believe that a large number of people are
ready to demonstrate without a sanction. People were happy to share
the quotes from our songs: ‘The time for a subversive clash has come,’
‘Live on Red Square / Show the freedom of civil anger.’”

The group — which features from three to eight performers — sees
itself as being “on the border between punk rock and contemporary
art.”

“Contemporary culture is characterized by diffusivity, mutual
influence and the interaction of different directions, the
intersection that leads to transgression,” Pussy Riot says.

“It’s possible to find features of 1990s Actionism in our
performances, while the motif of the closed face of the performer —
which has been used by many music bands such as Slipknot, Daft Punk or
Asian Women on the Telephone, for instance, is borrowed from
conceptual art where the tradition of not showing one’s face is
present.”

Pussy Riot officially formed in autumn 2011 when it played its first
gig in Otradnoye metro, performing the song “Clear Up the Pavement”
(Osvobodi Bruschatku). Complete with footage from performances at
other metro stations as well as on bus roofs and trolleybuses, the
video was released on Nov. 7, the anniversary of the 1917 Russian
Revolution.

According to the group, one of the events that led them to form Pussy
Riot was Putin and Medvedev’s announcement made to the United Russia
party congress on Sept. 25 that they would change posts in the
upcoming presidential elections due on March 4. The move has been
compared to castling in chess, when a rook and a king swap places. “We
don’t like this kind of chess,” Pussy Riot said.

Since then, Pussy Riot has held unsanctioned performances in boutiques
and at a fashion show as well as on the roof of a garage next to the
detention center where the imprisoned participants of anti-fraud
rallies were held. They unveiled a banner, lit flares and performed a
song called “Death to Prison, Freedom to Protest” and escaped without
being arrested.

The group cites American punk rock band Bikini Kill and its Riot Grrrl
movement as an inspiration, but says there are plenty of differences
between them and Bikini Kill.

“What we have in common is impudence, politically loaded lyrics, the
importance of feminist discourse, non-standard female image,” Pussy
Riot said.

“The difference is that Bikini Kill performed at specific music
venues, while we hold unsanctioned concerts. On the whole, Riot Grrrl
was closely linked to Western cultural institutions, whose equivalents
don’t exist in Russia.

Pussy Riot’s unsanctioned concerts are reminiscent of The Sex Pistols’
infamous boat concert, when the band rented a boat to premiere “God
Save the Queen” to spoof the Queen’s Silver Jubiliee in 1977, by
playing live on the Thames, passing Westminster Pier and the Houses of
Parliament.

“In this story with the Sex Pistols we find it odd that the boat was
rented by the band itself,” Pussy Riot said.

“It’s difficult to find an element of protest when you perform on a
boat that you have paid for; on the contrary, it’s a type of
commercial performance. There’s no connection to Pussy Riot in this,
because we didn’t rent and are not going to rent anything; we come and
take over platforms that don’t belong to us and use them for free.”

Although Pussy Riot conceals its faces and identities, the group
revealed that the members’ average age is 25 and they have a
background in music, theater, art — and mountain climbing. One member
works in the electronics industry.

“We are united by feminism, opposition to Putin’s regime and his
vertical of power, antiauthoritarianism and leftist ideas,” Pussy Riot
said.

“Some of us are anarchists, some have leftist liberal positions. We
would like horizontal political activity, self-organization and the
capability to be aware of oneself as an equal participant in civil
politics, to understand one’s rights and fight for them to develop.
Russian society lacks tolerance and lenience.

“We are concerned about the centralization of political life and all
the problems that stem from it. It’s obvious that a single center
can’t take the specifics of every region into consideration, that’s
why it’s important to develop regional self-governance.

“We are concerned about the educational reform that would make even
high school education a partly paid service, and health reform that
promotes such dubious things as an anti-abortion law. We don’t like
the lack of cultural institutions, and the fact that no conditions for
their development have been created. We are concerned about widespread
sexist thinking, which reduces the diversity of people’s lives to
sexual roles.”

According to the group, it would like to influence the cultural
situation that forms public consciousness.

“We alter the approach to specific particular subjects such as LGBT,
feminism and civic protest activity,” Pussy Riot said.

“Our motivation is ethical; we see that entire strata of population
find themselves under unjustified discriminatory pressure. For
instance, conservativeness dictates a definite role for a woman, which
is guaranteed by social mechanisms of encouragement and punishment.
This role doesn’t allow her to fulfill herself in another, alternative
way that doesn’t correspond to the ideals of classic femininity.”

Although Pussy Riot’s performances have been classified by the police
as “unsanctioned rallies,” the group said it was the counter-extremism
Center E, described as “Putin’s political police” that harasses it
most.

“Ordinary policemen are not as annoying and bothersome as Center E,”
the group said.

“Center E taps our telephones, breaks into our email and tries its
best to prevent our concerts.”

POP SECRET: PREGNANCE´

I know this is a little after the fact, but whatever. Beyoncé already had her baby. There was a huge kerfuffle about the fact that an entire floor of a hospital was monopolized for this event and the five-day-old has already been featured in a Jay-Z song that has topped the charts. But lets take a moment to roll back to the actual pregnancy.

For the entire time (and even in the weeks after) Beyoncé was pregnant there were rampant conspiracy theories that in actuality she was not pregnant and really just using a surrogate. Proof ranged from footage of a “collapsing stomach” to theories that the reason they rented out the entire floor was to hide the fact that it wasn’t actually Beyoncé giving birth to claims that because there were bottles of champagne brought to the delivery room that obviously there was no way she could be pregnant.



Now, lets direct our attention to other famous ladies. Other famous ladies such as Jennifer Anniston, Jessica Simpson, Angelina Jolie, etc. who have a never ending stream of pregnancy rumors swirling around them. Where a baggy sweater could mean 5 months in and eating a large meal means three. Where not drinking at a fundraising gala means pregnant. Where gossip rags will claim a stars “boobs look pregnant”.

While tabloids obsessing over famous womens bodies is nothing new, the dispute as to whether a pregnancy is “real” or not is a pretty unusual one. Wanting to cover up a surrogate seems like a bizarre move, seeing as Hollywood types have been public about using a surrogate and have caught little flack for it. But beyond reasons behind using a surrogate/not using a surrogate/covering up a surrogate is a terrible new development. On top of the on-going battle of too fat/too thin we know have another concern troll war ranging of covering up a pregnancy or faking a pregnancy. And walking hand in hand with the court of public opinion of whether or not you are faking a pregnancy is the battle over reproductive rights. Not only can this be seen as another step deeper into the complete okness of commenting on every womens body but also a step deeper into the okness of everyone having a say on what you do reproductive-wise.

What this all comes down to is ye olde violation of privacy. Again, this is nothing new to the stars, talking about the contents of the uteruses you don't know is par for the course, but with this we have a new key into the reproductive choices of women we don't know. While the public might feel lied to in reality Beyoncé has no responsibility to tell us the truth because it's her body. And really, we don't have any right to know what's going on with her body. When the general public acts like we have an unalienable right to know the contents of someone elses uterus we are adding another support to the structure that strips women not only of their privacy but of control over their own bodies. With this development we have a whole new way to not only scrutinize other womens bodies but also a whole new way to invade other womens privacy.