Today is a grand day for it is release day for Furious 7. Fingers crossed that finally, a film in this franchise wins an Oscar for Best Picture. Here, I am on the Sideshow podcast, talking about this amazing set of films. Yes, I sure did link to that. I did.
Six winters ago, I took a break from college to live in Rock Creek, West Virginia, in a house an acquaintance had rented for a couple hundred dollars. The house was poorly insulated, and so, during the coldest months, we slept in the living room around a woodstove that piped most of its smoke, though not all of it, through a flue cut crudely into the ceiling. I did not last long in this house. In the spring, a trio of young vagabonds arrived by coal train and set up camp in the rhododendrons. They strung tarps from the branches and laid their bedrolls on the dirt. They had dogs and drank heavily, and though I wished they would leave, I admired their resourcefulness. Once, having neither firewood nor briquettes, they hauled an old couch into the yard, lit it on fire, and when it had burned to almost nothing, grilled chicken on the coals.
This past weekend I went back to my home state of Indiana to watch two of the best people I know get married. It was a bit of a miracle that I made it, and I loathed to return for a few different reasons. One of the big ones was that the Governor of Indiana, Mike Pence, had just signed a bill called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. You may have heard of it. It’s the bill that many say would give businesses a license to discriminate against LGBT people.
I am not normally one for April Fool’s Day pranks but Rihanna pulled a pretty amazing prank on Jimmy Kimmel because she is excellent.
Speaking of Rihanna, does she offer us a prosperity gospel?
Money is unclean. Cash flows; as it slips constantly out of debtor’s hands into creditor’s, fingerprints, stains, emotional and moral significations muck up the paper—over time, cash even builds up its own scent. That musk rarely transfers onto polite women anymore, who rarely touch dollar bills in the age of Venmo and sugar baby feminism. Rihanna still wants it in cash. Bad Gal, unmoored and uninspired by American dichotomies of cleanliness and defilement as she is, prefers her payment liquid and solid to the touch.
Last day of freshman year, mirror screwed crookedly into the back of my locked door. I see us, or rather you. Wetting my lips with your tongue. Pale back sprouted with curly, black hairs. My flowered sheets, stuffed animals, talismans of childhood; a homesickness I thought I’d outgrown. We were too young for blueprints. Then my hands slinking up, grasping, pulling you into me. A ritual. From the window, voices soaked in spring, a Frisbee tossed outside the dorm. Limbs, dreams, futures flailed about. A few wondered where I was. Then you. Maybe one or two wondered if we were together. Truth is, we’d been doing this for most of the year. Late at night, your roommate gone, or mine. For some reason, you wanted no one to know. To be secret is to be chosen, and to be chosen is to be loved. A week earlier, you’d taken another girl to your fraternity dance. I pretended not to care. And so laid out the path we would follow.
I was born in 1989 at the end of hip-hop’s infancy. By the time I dropped into being, hip-hop had a Grammy and platinum records. Reagan had already wreaked his brand of havoc on the American underclasses and crack was well integrated into our communities. By the time I came of age, much of the cultural context for hip-hop was already in motion — drug war, mass incarceration, neoliberalism, post-Civil Rights respectability politics, urban divestment and subsequent repatriating gentrification, zero tolerance schooling and policing. I don’t have a particular moment when I “discovered” hip-hop or saw it take over the world. For folks of my age bracket (born in the late eighties to early nineties) hip-hop was a central part of the zeitgeist; the rapper was just as viable a musical star as the singer. I was a child when hip-hop surpassed country as America’s biggest selling music genre. The centrality of hip-hop to cultural identity isn’t an argument to me so much as it’s the up that is sky.
Hennessy has a Tumblr. This makes me giggle so so much.
Outlander returns to Starz this weekend. I am just making sure you know because Outlander is awesome. I will be recapping the show for The Butter. Yes! I will!
