This space is almost dead, it’s so little trafficked by me or others. Just that one’s very best might not be the world’s idea of the very best. I’m not saying that one should strive for something less than one’s best. That not everyone needs to be “ a voice of their generation.” That this particular (read: American) breed of exceptionalism can be kind of damaging and fucked up. I’ve had MONTHS to ponder this shit.īut most compellingly for me, Hannah’s viewpoint fails to account for the self-awareness needed to project one’s possible place in the scope of the culture and be OK with off-Broadway, or off-off Broadway, regional theatre, or community theatre, for that matter in other words, the belief that the art is enough of a north star that the person can sustain it in a vacuum. I also think this fails to account for the possibility that inspiration might peter out in the life of a creative dilettante (though maybe not…Montaigne didn’t have a dearth of things to say).Ĭlearly I’m extrapolating quite a bit here, but cut me some slack. I think this worldview is tied to weird financial hang-ups people have about art and success, like living paycheck to paycheck grants one the moral high ground of, say, not working for The Man. Or that non-creative or quasi-creative work could be meaningful (if it was, for example, virtually anything other than writing GQ advertorial). She can’t see room for the possibility that a creative life might also involve some kind of non-creative, or quasi-creative work. I both admire that and think that it speaks to the character’s youth. Which is of course what she ends up doing. Hannah views them as having given up and deferred their dreams: that to be real artists, they need to cast off their corporate shackles and pursue their real work with single-minded dedication. This season was a return to form over last year, but most compelling for me was Hannah’s foray into the working world as an advertorial copywriter for GQ, in which position she not only encountered the moonlighting Jenna Lyon, but a set of colleagues who were Writers turned writers.Īs someone who works full-time in a creative field, I am basically one of her colleagues. I never got around to talking about Girls here. It’s not as if those newer items aren’t worthy/worthier topics of discussion, but wtf. We only talk about new/newsy things, such as the Norwegian guy’s struggle and the passing of Nadine Gordimer. I don’t think ANYONE is talking about it right now, because no one talks about anything that is months old anymore. Months ago, the third season of Girls ended. There may be some degree of artifice to Courtney Love’s hijinks, but they always looks pretty fucking real. She has unfortunately disappeared so far up her own ass that it’s possible to tell if there’s anything real there. Seth suggested that although different stylistically, perhaps Lady GaGa had the potential to be a force similar to Courtney Love. I’m more into Digital Witness than I have been her previous three, and I thought her SNL performance was the best kind of weird and electric. While I find her music jarring at times, St. The culture has moved in a different direction, and there are a great many women whose musicianship represents a bigger project than breakup songs and Auto-tune (see: Swift, Taylor). I’m not using my status as An Old to wax nostalgic. Probably there are women who feel that way about Courtney Love. Patti Smith was the blueprint, but I was too young for her. Are they there? The ones I think of are of her generation, e.g. I just can’t think of any Courtney Love corollaries for the current generation. That was an important album to me, not only that it was more viscerally raw and angry than the Tori Amoses of my rotation and more accessible to me than, say, Bikini Kill, but also that it was good, as good or better, than a lot of the Sub Pop catalog that the culture was holding aloft. I’m so grateful that I came of age when Live Through This came out. I watched the Miss World video embedded in the article and it still feels really fresh to me (contrast it with Beyonce’s (Sia’s) thematically similar Pretty Hurts and tell me which one is more raw – I don’t question that the material resonates with Beyonce, but she is too much the Pygmalion of her own image to go all the way with it). The woman’s work speaks for itself, and she is magnetic – a woman who is not afraid to look bad to subvert expectations, a woman who advertises her anger, a woman who could probably kick your ass. For sure, she’s a little crazy (or finds it useful to appear to be a little crazy), but that’s a red herring. Several weeks ago, I read an interview with Courtney Love.