Although I didn't watch the game or the halftime show on Sunday, I saw the 'controversial' video of the bird flipping Sri Lankan singer M.I.A. performing "Give Me All Your Luvin." I wasn't shocked or offended: it was part of the show, the spectacle of a Madonna TV appearance. I think the NFL is woofing when it calls M.I.A.'s gesture "obscene", and I certainly don't believe the NBC presser that calls it a "spontaneous gesture."
I watched the YouTube video of the performance a couple of times to see how spontaneous the gesture seemed, and it was much as a part of the show as the lyric "I don't give a sh--," which was bleeped at the game and is part of the original song (it appears in the official video). I wouldn't be surprised if the NFL told NBC before Sunday that it was going to be included in the show so have the pixelation ready. The fact that they missed it was just poor timing.
For me the only really surprising thing about the bird here is that it came from M.I.A. and not Madonna.
It's the same old thing from her, the same as the 'shocking' kiss at the Grammys, the same as the fellated Evian bottle in her 1991 'documentary' Truth or Dare. And let's be completely honest, Madonna was the focus of the broadcast, not Cee-Lo, not M.I.A., not Nicki Minaj, and certainly not LMFAO, who I initially mistook for clownish looking extras until they began using microphones. (I had to look them up because I didn't know who they were).
For the purpose of full disclosure, I am a fan of M.I.A., which is to say that I own a couple of her albums and enjoy them if they pop up on my Shuffle. She's the daughter of a Tamil Tiger rebel and an ex-pat Sri Lankan. Her political background is completely centered on the Tamil's revolutionary struggle for equality in her native country. She's certainly not as sophisticated, nor as cognizant of FCC regulations, as Madonna, which is why I believe her flipping the bird wasn't anymore spontaneous than Howard Stern's appearing as Fartman at the MTV awards in 1992.
I think Madonna put M.I.A. up to it because the younger singer didn't know that the gesture isn't kosher on TV in the United States. Afterall, she grew up in England where people use the word the gesture represents without the shock that accompanies it here.
Now I'm sure the FCC will have a much dimmer view of it than I do, which will of course prompt lots of talk show appearances for Madonna, lots of mention of the song, lots of replaying of the video of the game day performance (with pixelation in place, of course). Her album will be as hot as a two-dollar pistol on a Saturday night in the city, and she'll be laughing all the way to the bank.
So spare me the outrage, people, it's just another case of the Madonna tail wagging the dog.
Monday, February 06, 2012
Wednesday, February 01, 2012
Why I won't put fiction here
I've been getting a lot of rejections lately for my fiction work, which, according to some writers' resources, means I'm one step closer to getting my next piece published.
Since most of my writing experience comes from journalism, the urge to revisit pieces, to edit, to make changes, to improve, passes quickly once I finish the story. Journalism doesn't lend itself to lingering or self-reflection: You tell the story in the most compelling way, and you move along. Visit almost any news room in the world, and you'll be hard pressed to find a writer who worries about a piece more than a couple of days after it ran in print.
Not so with fiction writers.
The apocryphal tales of fiction writers' obsessions about their work are as profuse as the number of writers. The French realist, Guy de Maupassant, died in an institution supposedly driven to madness by trying to create the perfect story. Franz Kafka left deathbed instructions to his friend, Max Brod, to destroy all of his writing. American author, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote two complete drafts of his most famous work, The Great Gatsby (first titled Trimalchio) and rewrote the novel Tender is the Night so frequently that his editor felt compelled to publish one of the later drafts twenty years after the original was published. Before he shot himself with the same gun that his father used to commit suicide, Hemingway was said to lament that his best writing was a six word short story. Notorious recluse J.D. Salinger allegedly wrote 15 unpublished novels because he felt publishing them would be a nuisance. There is a conceit within each of these legends, and quite possibly more than a modicum of truth as well.
That conceit is likely present in all writers, whether producing fact or fiction or a blending of both, but as a former journalist, I feel a great deal of pressure to publish whatever I write. There's one theory on this need to publish that suggests that writing is a relationship, a conversation between writer and reader, and without the latter half of this binary, nothing remains. I've ignored this blog for a couple of years now, too busy scratching out my fiction to dedicate time to this endeavor, but recently I had the thought that I could just as easily publish my fiction here and hope to develop a following for it. But the problem is that in the arcana of fiction publishing, anything I include here is unlikely to be accepted elsewhere because few publications accept previously published work.
And so while I'd love to use this space for the latest short story to be rejected, I fear that if i ever succeed in publishing something, I won't be able to reuse any work that you'd see here.
So as much as I'd like to entertain my blog's one visitor per year, I'll refrain from it, and instead use this space as I have in the past, for commentary and essay and some amalgam of both.
Since most of my writing experience comes from journalism, the urge to revisit pieces, to edit, to make changes, to improve, passes quickly once I finish the story. Journalism doesn't lend itself to lingering or self-reflection: You tell the story in the most compelling way, and you move along. Visit almost any news room in the world, and you'll be hard pressed to find a writer who worries about a piece more than a couple of days after it ran in print.
Not so with fiction writers.
The apocryphal tales of fiction writers' obsessions about their work are as profuse as the number of writers. The French realist, Guy de Maupassant, died in an institution supposedly driven to madness by trying to create the perfect story. Franz Kafka left deathbed instructions to his friend, Max Brod, to destroy all of his writing. American author, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote two complete drafts of his most famous work, The Great Gatsby (first titled Trimalchio) and rewrote the novel Tender is the Night so frequently that his editor felt compelled to publish one of the later drafts twenty years after the original was published. Before he shot himself with the same gun that his father used to commit suicide, Hemingway was said to lament that his best writing was a six word short story. Notorious recluse J.D. Salinger allegedly wrote 15 unpublished novels because he felt publishing them would be a nuisance. There is a conceit within each of these legends, and quite possibly more than a modicum of truth as well.
That conceit is likely present in all writers, whether producing fact or fiction or a blending of both, but as a former journalist, I feel a great deal of pressure to publish whatever I write. There's one theory on this need to publish that suggests that writing is a relationship, a conversation between writer and reader, and without the latter half of this binary, nothing remains. I've ignored this blog for a couple of years now, too busy scratching out my fiction to dedicate time to this endeavor, but recently I had the thought that I could just as easily publish my fiction here and hope to develop a following for it. But the problem is that in the arcana of fiction publishing, anything I include here is unlikely to be accepted elsewhere because few publications accept previously published work.
And so while I'd love to use this space for the latest short story to be rejected, I fear that if i ever succeed in publishing something, I won't be able to reuse any work that you'd see here.
So as much as I'd like to entertain my blog's one visitor per year, I'll refrain from it, and instead use this space as I have in the past, for commentary and essay and some amalgam of both.
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