a beard of star's (glammy xmas to one and all)

 

(via Chris Roberts)

The Falseness of Teeth

Writing candidly about her own struggle with her teeth for The Irish Independent in 2016,  Victoria May Clarke admitted that it was actually late spouse Shane McGowan's teeth that attracted her to him in the first place. 

“A mouthful of rotting stumps and a gurning grin had become his trademark until this time last year, when he braved the dentists after having avoided it for 58 years.... 

"Having dodgy teeth and not caring about it was part of what attracted me to Shane. It was a sign of rebelliousness, of being a free spirit, a non-conformist. It was a sign of not being shallow, perhaps, of being willing to see beyond the superficial charm of a Hollywood smile. The Hollywood smile in America simply says that you had a good orthodontist, but in Europe it still carries a stigma of being ‘fake’ or vain.”

“What you do or don’t do with your teeth can be a style statement, a political statement, it can convey information about your values, in the same way that the kind of car you drive says something about you. Mine is held together with gaffer tape."

She further opined that once upon a time she didn't see flossing * as something that “cool” people would do.  

But now, after a course of expensive dentistry, Clarke's position on oral self-care is similar to  Pam Ayres's.

Far from being anti-image and anti-glam - a dissident refusal of pop's self-salesmanship - there was a perfect homology between Shane McG's gappy grin and the aesthetic of his songwriting.  

Principles outlined in this interview 

“People don’t understand what it takes to write a truthful song, a song that is trying to be pure and honest.”

And on the subject of his radical self-neglect and dissolution:

 “You call it chaos. I don’t regard it as chaos. I regard it as natural living.”

The anti-smile was in that sense a perfect billboard for the product - realness, refusal of showbiz, the embrace of unhappy endings and beautiful losers. 

Like Martin Amis, during his own struggles with extreme dentistry, looking in the mirror at his mouth - after having had all his carious remnants wrenched out - and seeing in the absence, the flappiness of loose lips around empty gums, a presentiment of his own death. 

It's an archetype

 

*  "Flossing" in the other, non-dental sense, too. Like sartorial slovenliness, rotted gnashers represents a valorous disregard for self-presentation,  a virtuous absence of  vanity... 

bow down

On the occasion of her documentary film about her tour about her album Renaissance Beyoncé has gotten some flak for not taking a stand on Gaza and for allowing the film to be screened in Israel

In an acerbic Vulture piece, Angelica Jade Bastién  says "there is no star of such magnitude who more cunningly positions themselves as apolitical than Beyoncé. Her performance as an icon is meant to connect with the broadest number of people possible. To do that, her refusal to stand for anything specific beyond the watered-down treatises on Black excellence must be maintained."

She examine how Beyoncé traffics, in this film and earlier ones, in "fake intimacy":  

"Every time you think you’ve seen behind the curtain, you realize there’s another curtain upon another stage. This isn’t new for her. Consider previous projects like the labored 2013 film Life Is But a Dream and the more successfully realized Homecoming in 2019. From this vantage point, fake intimacy is a currency she utilizes to give the appearance of revelation even if she actually remains as closed as a fist. Beyoncé positions herself not as a goddess bestowing a peek of humanity to her loyal subjects but as a relatable figure we can and should connect with. But if you have cameras on you all the time, even when you’re supposed to be “off,” when do you take down the performative mask? It isn’t even when she has knee surgery, a moment carefully documented on camera. For Beyoncé, a woman known to film her every move and house it in a temperature-controlled archive, everything is performance and each performance is merely a means of brand extension."

There are some jaw-dropping facts about the expense and labour (and carbon footprint) of the tour: 

"There were around 160 trucks used merely to transfer the stage from stadium to stadium, and the crowd sometimes numbered up to 70,000. These are not intimate shows but a demonstration of excessive spectacle"

Despite a dedicated moment of spotlighting of all the drones involved in making it happen - "stage hands and builders decked in shining chrome, backup singers and crucial musicians that share the live stage, seamstresses and designers, makeup artists and hair stylists, and dance captains like Amari Marshall" - Bastién says the doc is "still closer to an archival monument for the greatness of its performer, writer, and director.....   More than anything, Renaissance is a testament that Beyoncé is a brand that stands for absolutely nothing beyond its own greatness."

Bastién's casual use of phrases like "loyal subjects" and "aesthetic might" in her otherwise caustic piece reminded me of how baked into Beyoncé discourse are ideas of a/ regality and b/ entertainment as subjugation.  

The regality might partially explain the apolitics - if she's anything like the British monarchy, her reign would be dependent on not taking a stand or speaking out, but being a queen for everybody - a figurehead transcending ideology.

Another recent piece about the Renaissance concert movie is also limned with tropes to do with regality and masochistic evocations of overwhelming entertainment. 

Spencer Kornhaber recalls watching her 2016 tour:  "Even from the nosebleeds, she seemed huge, and impossibly important. I felt like I was watching the Statue of Liberty come alive, declare herself empress of Earth, and twerk." 

By comparison the Renaissance tour felt more collective - about the audience as much as the performer -  and Kornhaber did not "leave the show with the classic Beyoncé feeling of having one’s skull crushed by a higher power."

The film has "plenty of moments" that" will make the viewer feel, to use the lingo of the ballroom subculture that inspired Renaissance, her latest album, gagged by opulence" but he argues that at this point  "Beyoncé... wants her brand to be less about … herself."

Yet, the text still feels the pull of hierarchic imagery: there's a description of her Coachella performance doc Homecoming, which "essentially created a human pyramid with one woman at the apex."

The final paragraphs note sagely that while "great pop stars always gesture to a communal ideal—fans as family, dancing as democracy.. At base, though, they sell dominance and submission: a fantasy of the world’s problems pacified by a noble tyrant." 

While Beyoncé makes these gestures towards sharing the limelight, ultimately the Queen is "hardly surrendering her claim to power and control. As the movie’s credits play, so does a tremendous new song in which she raps, with boxerly aggressiveness, about house—the musical style, the material achievement, the place to host guests and raise families. Implicitly, she’s inviting us all inside her walls. And yet, she very amusingly keeps shouting, “Get the fuck up out my house!” She knows we still want to be commanded—and that not everything she’s got can be shared."

House becomes a palace. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Here's my own Beyoncé take from S+ A

2013 February 

Beyoncé’s half-time performance at the Superbowl is the victory lap capping off her global superstardom. Planned for months, costing millions, involving 500 local volunteers to erect the stage in addition to Beyoncé’s own crew, the fifteen-minute mini-concert is a celebration of Queen Bey’s remorseless flawlessness. 

It starts with a taped speech of football manager Vince Lombardi gravely exhorting the pursuit of excellence “with all of one’s might”.  The glamour and clamour, Lombard intones, are just the exterior testament to what really matters: an implacable inner drive to dominate, “the spirit, the will to excel, the will to win.”  Beyoncé literally erupts onto the stage, to the sound of her hit “Run the World.”   For the next fourteen minutes she flexes her vocal training and rehearsed flair amid what seems like hundreds of lights blaring thousands of watts.  It’s a fiesta of feminine incandescence - jets of fire, guitars with roman candles ejaculating sparks from either end of the instrument - with special FX mirroring that “clones” a mini-army of Beyoncés.

Beyoncé at the Superbowl is like the Panopticon in reverse: surveillance turned inside out, “all eyes on me.”  110 million watch it in real-time; many more world-wide catch it later on the Internet.  “All minds on me” too: the performance generates 300 thousand tweets per minute. Critics prostrate themselves like obsequious courtiers. Rolling Stone’s reviewer gushes that the set’s supposed absence of crowd-pleasing favorites indicates that “she’s Beyoncé and Beyoncé can get away with doing whatever Beyoncé feels like doing”  -  less a critical assessment than a curtsey.

The Beyoncé spectacular is nominated in multiple technical categories at the Emmys. But it wins for just one:  “Outstanding Lighting Design/Lighting Direction.”   Deservedly: it’s the overkill climax of an illumination-escalation that has seen awards ceremonies and arena shows get more audience-stunning and retina-bruising with each year.  Light and power have always been linked historically, from the candle power that only lords and kings could afford, to the splendor of bright dyes and glittering gems that shone out in a world of murk and squalor.  Beyoncé at the ‘Bowl is where bling and blitz converge: a tour de force of shock and awe.  

antitheatricality round up (court room as stage)

David A. Graham at Atlantic on how impeachment-inquiry-happy Republicans are "playing House"

"Republicans are just playing House. The impeachment inquiry is a prominent example, but others include the spectacle of Kevin McCarthy’s removal; the process to replace him, which even Republicans described in terms unfit for a family magazine; and a failed gambit on reauthorizing intelligence laws this week. This isn’t governance. It’s ludic, and ludicrous..... 

The resolution passed yesterday doesn’t accuse Biden of any high crimes or misdemeanors. This is just playing around....  

When Republicans were simply fighting one another and cutting their own leaders off at the knees, it was an embarrassment to the party but also mildly entertaining. But now the chaos has started to affect the rest of the nation..... None of this is just fun and games.

"...  All that’s going on is a pantomime of governance"

 

Michael Cohen finds document that shows Trump recycles the same attacks…he simply changes the name of the attacked as needed. He stated that Trumps lawyers are not there to lawyer but to create theatrics…Trump thinks he will win the election by creating a circus…the bigger the circus the higher the poll numbers…it’s why the defense thinks they will need to take until Dec 15th to make their case when in fact they can do it in a week…they want to put on a show. Trump knows he lost but he knows he can get it all back by winning the WH and robbing America blind…his goal will be to turn every case into a circus.

[source unknown]

Another example showing how the Other Side has started using anti-theatrical tropes:

Lindsey Graham: Biden sending troops to the border is “ridiculous theater”.

Reporter: Did you feel the same about it being theater when Trump sent troops to the border in 2018?

David Frum at the Atlantic on a second Trump term

If Trump wins the presidency again, the whole world will become a theater for his politics of revenge and reward. Ukraine will be abandoned to Vladimir Putin; Saudi Arabia will collect its dividends for its investments in the Trump family.

Doreen St. Felix at The New Yorker on the Republican debates as an "Anti-Spectacle" and cos-play fantasy for a not-happening Trumpless future for the GOP

"A post-facto watch of nearly eight hours of political theatre creates a story that is, of course, counter to how a debate is meant to be consumed. The story being: how the G.O.P. was seeking to arrange its characters in a Trumpless environment, a future that could end up being a fantasy.

"... Roles were set on that first stage, in August, from which there have been insignificant deviations. Everyone knows to hit their marks. The former governor of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson, played the muted elder; Senator Tim Scott, the awkward patriot. Ron DeSantis, the wooden and sober ideologue, dodging specific questions to convey his general vision of a culture brought totally to heel, literacy corralled, genders controlled. Chris Christie, the pitied loser, trying to become the moralist phoenix rose from the ashes. Ramaswamy, the big-mouth contrarian. Nikki Haley, the woman among the men, conjuring the example of her brutal idol, Margaret Thatcher.,,,

"... As the industry of election spectacle coalesces once again, the regular ugliness of the right has utterly lost its shock value, making the tedium a kind of anti-spectacle. By the end of the second debate, it was clear that no sense of durable celebrity could be found amongst the viable candidates; Ramaswamy was the queasy star, but he was not a challenge to DeSantis or to Haley

".... The drama between the two candidates, which has grown nastier in the course of the four debates, is of the personal and intra-racial sort, and has been the through line that has stuck with me. Earlier in the season, Ramaswamy called Haley “Dick Cheney in three-inch heels,” and this week, he went harder, bringing a prop, a sheet of paper on which he had written in schoolyard print, “Nikki = Corrupt,” and needling her for several minutes on end for not being able to name three provinces in Eastern Ukraine. Haley initially made a calculation, responding in a calm and imperial manner that she wouldn’t dignify Ramaswamy’s pestering with a response. But she eventually produced three names, one of which was Crimea, which isn’t an Eastern Ukrainian province, feeding the beast of the show. That’s her gamble."

George Packer at the Atlantic on Trump and the media

The relationship between Donald Trump and the news media has always been a little disingenuous, like a pair of fighters trading insults and throwing air punches at a weigh-in. The hostility is real, but the performance benefits both sides.

Trump claims to despise the journalists who cover him, calling them “the enemy of the American people,” suing them, and threatening unspecified reprisals for their transgressions against him. But his narcissism craves their constant attention, and as president he gave reporters far more access than his successor has, taking their late-night phone calls, then framing their cover stories in gold. Media organizations, including this one, have warned for years that Trump is a danger to the democracy that makes journalism possible, and that a vigorous press is essential to a free society. At the same time, the media became dependent on his vile words and scandalous deeds for their financial health, squeezing droplets of news from his every tweet even if the public had nothing to learn. Leslie Moonves, the disgraced former TV-network chair, said of Trump’s first candidacy: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

"bored with the mundane"

 

"Boys Keep Swinging"-echoing provocations from Tricky Kid and Martina T-B