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feldmanI have yet to finish watching Russian Doll, in favor of listening to Mythbusters and fiddling with story notes, but I keep thinking about the interview with Natasha Lyonne I read earlier in the week (I'm sure a link from my reading list here, so thank you whoever you are). I love that Lyonne pays homage to The Cramps musician Poison Ivy instead of doing a traditional couture shoot, taking control of her image as a creative, and shining a light on a formative influence. I discovered The Cramps last year, so, it's never too late to find the good shit.
There weren't a lot of older women in media when I was coming up, though the few that I can recall were definitely using and playing with their own image in a subversive way (Bea Arthur, Phyllis Diller...urm...yeah even if you gave me a week I could probably still count on one hand the number of women performers above forty I saw as a wee feldman). So it's a relief to get to this age and finally see that changing, to see women my own age and older creating, performing, producing, writing, being recognized and their work being discussed. Some fucking exciting shit happens to art when an artist has more life experience to fold into the mix, instead of being hustled off stage for the next young hot thing who's talent can be molded and exploited into pre-approved shapes because she's hungry.
Lyonne also talks about how she's been writing versions of this story for a decade, describing an iterative process of filling notebooks, making playlists, compiling image refs, and the work of digging down into the emotional truth of hard experiences and then telling a story about it.
That's a process that takes time, and courage. It's very heartening to me to peek behind a stunning piece of art and see, no, here, it's okay for a story to take time, for it to force you open like steaming a mussel, to haunt you like a fucking creaky house, to seep out of you in a bunch of different ways like fuel soaking out of a buried rusting tank.
You're not alone, stories sometimes just do that to a human.
There weren't a lot of older women in media when I was coming up, though the few that I can recall were definitely using and playing with their own image in a subversive way (Bea Arthur, Phyllis Diller...urm...yeah even if you gave me a week I could probably still count on one hand the number of women performers above forty I saw as a wee feldman). So it's a relief to get to this age and finally see that changing, to see women my own age and older creating, performing, producing, writing, being recognized and their work being discussed. Some fucking exciting shit happens to art when an artist has more life experience to fold into the mix, instead of being hustled off stage for the next young hot thing who's talent can be molded and exploited into pre-approved shapes because she's hungry.
Lyonne also talks about how she's been writing versions of this story for a decade, describing an iterative process of filling notebooks, making playlists, compiling image refs, and the work of digging down into the emotional truth of hard experiences and then telling a story about it.
That's a process that takes time, and courage. It's very heartening to me to peek behind a stunning piece of art and see, no, here, it's okay for a story to take time, for it to force you open like steaming a mussel, to haunt you like a fucking creaky house, to seep out of you in a bunch of different ways like fuel soaking out of a buried rusting tank.
You're not alone, stories sometimes just do that to a human.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-23 11:36 pm (UTC)I have got to watch this show!
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Date: 2019-02-23 11:51 pm (UTC)I was like this with The Love Witch, I bought it and then six months later watched half of it, then I circled back a month after that for the rest. I mainly listen to television, so anything that requires me to actually watch, where I'm not physically in a dark theater to do it, I'm so terrible at doing that.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-24 12:48 pm (UTC)