One of the best things about Lukas Moodysson’s directorial debut Show Me Love (Swedish title: Fucking Åmål, 1998), is that even though I grew up with it, it has continued to grow along with me. Until I saw it again last night, I just thought that meant that it had stayed in my memory all these years, but there’s something deeper at display here. The spirited and earnest teen drama was simple and empathetic enough to work as a tale about self-acceptance and self-doubt when I was a searching 13 year old taking part in the public mass hysteria that the movie’s popularity caused in Scandinavia in early 1999. No matter what I thought about my sexual orientation, it was comforting to watch a movie so universal in its appeal and approach to teen romance that it made peers of mine declare, with their very straight faces, that the movie made them want to be lesbians. Show Me Love didn’t glorify or exoticize,it just made it seem natural. So natural, in fact, that it took until now, eleven years hence and far remove from the mass hysteria of its release, to fully appreciate it as a gay movie. (more…)
Me Against The Music?
13 AprAbout a month ago, Pink Floyd won a lawsuit against the record company EMI, deciding that the group’s songs could no longer be sold as individual tracks; from now on, they shall not be sold separate from the albums they appear on. The case seem clear enough, since the group actually had a clause in their record contract detailing exactly that. And as someone who owns a handful of Pink Floyd albums and have listened to them off and on since I was 12, I can certainly appreciate that some of them – most notably The Wall, but also Wish You Were Here and Dark Side of the Moon – are albums with their own narrative structure and internal logic. They were never intended to being consumed in any other form or order. It would simply diminish them as albums. (more…)
The Sexiest Males Alive List, Twenty Over Thirty Edition
9 AprA couple of days ago, the excellent Jessie Carty – whose blog on writing and poetry should be appointment reading for any culture-interested reader – left a comment on the February edition of the SMA, noting how it to go along with the sexualization of teens. I addressed that issue as best I could, but apart from that, her comment inspired me to do something a little different for the April edition. This month’s list should stay perfectly clear of the morally dubious, as I decided to abide by a self-imposed rule: What would the list look like if I kept it to people 30 years or older? (more…)
Hanson’s Really ‘Somethin’
5 AprI had just sat down to think about what I wanted to say in my upcoming second essay on the Hanson discography (the first, on Middle of Nowhere, is here), when Hanson decided to steal all my points by previewing a new single, Thinking ‘Bout Somethin’, that incorporates most of them. (more…)
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