Links & Bits for 11/12/10

The Political and the Personal: Thoughts on Freedom (Shitty First Drafts)

"In other words, even while I felt the sting of some of Franzen’s satire, I have ultimately come to the realization that this novel is not really about me. For one thing, I’m a woman, and Franzen appears to be woefully inadequate when it comes to realistically documenting the lives of women who aren’t slavishly committed to a man. For another thing, I don’t have access to the ideas and resources for activism that are so richly available to these characters. But I am not the only person for whom this novel does not speak. Indeed, this novel seems to have little to say about non-white people (except for one brown secondary character who is barely a person), about queer people, about trans people, even about disabled people, and it is especially condescending toward lower or lower-middle class people."

Glee S2E6: Never Been Kissed (Tom & Lorenzo)
"Gay kids get none of that. Not one bit of it. The fact of the matter is, bullying is the natural result of all that socializing that reinforces heterosexuality as the norm and everything else as... well, so under-represented that it might as well still be a taboo. Teenagers see thousands of murders depicted onscreen by the time they reach 18 but most of them never see a boy kiss another boy or sing him a sweet love song. You want to prevent gay kids from killing themselves? Push for more scenes like the above. Giving a young gay boy the dream that someday Prince Charming will come and sing a love song to him? You cannot imagine. You simply cannot imagine how revolutionary such a thing is."

Why Courtney Love Matters (Jezebel)
"Courtney Love is unwilling to become boring — I don't think carrying a Birkin and telling André Leon Talley about how high she was on Letterman counts — and for that alone, it seems some must condemn her."

Kayne West: Romanticism, Media and Race, MJ and Bush (PostBourgie)
Video in link

Lucinda Williams, "Drunken Angel" (American Songwriter)
"'Drunken Angel,' which appears on the album Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, recounts the story of Blaze Foley, an Austin songwriter and general roustabout who was shot to death in 1989 while allegedly trying to defend a friend from said friend’s violent son."