Links for October 7, 2015
Eyes Wide Open – Oh my god, it’s Corin Tucker interviewing Lauren Mayberry.
MAYBERRY: We’ve had a few things at shows, but nothing as extreme and as aggressive as we’ve had online. I think the anonymity factor really wraps it up.... For us, the Internet has been really amazing, and I think it’s a place of great passion, creativity, and knowledge. Seeing people communicate about the band online has been amazing, but I think a lot of people spend a lot of time talking about what they hate rather than what they love. I don’t want to get trapped in that.
TUCKER: You guys have such an amazing following from people who have heard you online. I feel like in some ways that’s the new generation of how people experience music. When I started playing music, it was all face-to-face. It wasn’t any less confrontational. It was charged with sexist problems. A lot of our early shows, there were some really angry confrontations, but there were some really beautiful moments too. Hopefully the beautiful moments outweigh the confrontations and the problems that we all have work out.
Ryan Adams’s 1989 and the mansplaining of Taylor Swift
Serious analysts of pop culture have often, and fairly, criticised Swift’s public persona, whether for the troubling casting of people of colour in her videos or her basic understanding of feminism. But you don’t have to like her brand to understand that she is an extremely talented songwriter. You shouldn’t have to listen to a middle-aged man repeating her words through a distorted microphone to understand that either.
It's the Only Woman We Got: Margaret Dumont in Duck Soup (1933)
Margaret Dumont, frequent co-star in the Marx Bros. films, was the perfect foil. She was usually a wealthy widow, a society matron during the years of the Depression, an archetype disliked, or at least distrusted, by Hollywood audiences. But she traversed the vague space between the struggling masses and the unjust upper class, because she always wanted to help people and was never greedy for power. In Duck Soup, Mrs. Teasdale was a good sport, open minded and playful and obviously fond of Groucho.
Doing the Worm: A Brief History of Muni's Graphic Art
Project Apollo Archive – Whole rolls of photos from the Apollo missions.