In the car this evening, Nina Simone was singing, "I told Jesus it would be alright if he changed my name." Her performance was stop-everything-and-just-listen perfection. I'd never heard this song before and wondered if I were mishearing her, the words were so mysterious, like a koan. What does it mean to have Jesus change your name? Online Christian sites say it's about the totality of the conversion experience. Makes sense, but even that's odd. There are all these Westerners walking around with Hindi or Buddhist or Muslim new-names, but I'm not familiar with Christians doing this. I was raised fundamentalist, and being "saved" was a big deal. I still remember the words: "Do you accept Jesus Christ as your one and only lord and savior?" I'm taking mainstream Bible-thumpers, not Martha Marcy May Marlene-type cults. I don't want a rational explanation for "If He Changed My Name." Simone's vocalizations and the enigmatic narrative create a visceral response that analysis adds nothing to, dilutes even.
Here's some pictures from Kevin's birthday party. This is my favorite, which I post guiltily, as people don't look particularly good in it. Note the green-sweatered person on the far left, who's bending backwards or levitating. That's Margaret Tedesco, I believe. She looks like she's pretending to be full-body baptized in a huge pool of water, like the Baptists in my town did.
David Brazil looking wonderfully perverse, with his hand on Sara Larsen's ass.
I deleted what I wrote about Marie Calloway, not because I don't like what I wrote, but because I don't want to be part of that conversation.
1 comments:
This is the one and only post I've seen on the Calloway piece that at all painted what I saw in it. There's all this talk in the feminist blogosphere of "Adrien Brody" exploiting her, and I'm certainly not one to defend a 40-year-old man having sex with someone almost half his age as having no exploitative elements, but Calloway herself points out how he has zero interest in getting into the age difference and power dynamics. He should have said no (not only because of his girlfriend, but because of the age difference and the fact that he's semi-established in the industry and she wasn't--the irony now being that she's probably more established than he is) but its a far cry to say he exploited her.
But that's beside the point. I like what you have to say about how her lack of exploration of her own sexuality is a glaring point here--she touches on it, but truly I don't know if she's attracted to him, if she wants to have sex with him/desires him or if she's just saying that she appreciates him and doesn't know how to express that other than sex. She may think she's saying the latter but it doesn't show up in the piece, not enough, I don't think.
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