Sabrina Carpenter has an actress's talent at performing the attitude and winking at the attitude at the same time. she seems both to be having a great time and to be able to pull off the leveled-up fame that opening this tour has afforded her. as a 45-year-old cishet guy i understand that her whole deal is not for or about me but i like to think i can spot The Goods when i see it.
I know this is technically an unrelated comment but I RAN to your newsletter because I am reading the 76 page Tavi Gevinson zine on Taylor Swift and so far I feel like it’s in conversation with a lot of your writings on Taylor and also I am 👀. Will report back.
Lana has the Marilyn thing to me....or like what people often see in Marilyn I see in Lana. Or maybe Judy Garland. Whereas Taylor is Barbara Stanwyck. Idk what I'm trying to say as a matter of fact but I do feel like Lana is actually from a different era in some ways, from her glowup under a new sexy name and persona to the vulnerability she brings both to her music and to her negotiation of her public role.
I consider Taylor to be like me. Or a version of Taylor that is actually bad at everything she's good at. But we both are good at keeping on keeping on after it when all the dust has settled, is the thing, I feel.
ever since i played the game "count how many artists you know off the coachella poster" and graphed my results over the years, i realized (1) i am now old, (2) the cheat sheet is literally in front of me. i'm still working through my 2023 list though lol
Is it really bad for Lana? Perceived / performed brittleness, and the ability to project the veneer of precarity over what is, by any objective measure, true privilege, are both integral to the "trad-conservative high femme" persona that she trades in -- your comparison to a mob wife might be more apt than you intend it to be. In that respect, this is only good for her, the way her previous dismal showings were.
Like the whole thing that makes a society wife figure into the object of camp worship is that she is imperious in her contempt, resentful and fearful of the desire she's subject to while glorifying in what it gets her, surgically precise in what she sees from within her gilded cage, all this while also being always already miserable. Fucking up in public only endears her further to her admirers -- what makes an Elaine Stritch performance is when her alcoholic self-medication slips just of alignment and she lists toward nervous breakdown.
To paraphrase Robert Gluck, the heart of camp is abjection. In other words, it's important to be pitiful. Precarity is ultimately safe and incorporated into the performance of femininity -- public embarrassment is expected of a silly little bird, and it's temporary. It doesn't mean or reflect any real change in her stature, even if it's *not* a knowing exaggeration. The flailing's a put on, knowingly or not. Lana is camp. Chan Marshall is not camp.
Anyway it'd be cute if Lana hadn't so naturally indulged in slut-shaming misogynoir, re: famous femme rappers. Especially given that she'd earlier teased sexual-racial taboo with male rappers. Sometimes a mob wife is just another white woman
Sabrina Carpenter has an actress's talent at performing the attitude and winking at the attitude at the same time. she seems both to be having a great time and to be able to pull off the leveled-up fame that opening this tour has afforded her. as a 45-year-old cishet guy i understand that her whole deal is not for or about me but i like to think i can spot The Goods when i see it.
I know this is technically an unrelated comment but I RAN to your newsletter because I am reading the 76 page Tavi Gevinson zine on Taylor Swift and so far I feel like it’s in conversation with a lot of your writings on Taylor and also I am 👀. Will report back.
Lana has the Marilyn thing to me....or like what people often see in Marilyn I see in Lana. Or maybe Judy Garland. Whereas Taylor is Barbara Stanwyck. Idk what I'm trying to say as a matter of fact but I do feel like Lana is actually from a different era in some ways, from her glowup under a new sexy name and persona to the vulnerability she brings both to her music and to her negotiation of her public role.
I consider Taylor to be like me. Or a version of Taylor that is actually bad at everything she's good at. But we both are good at keeping on keeping on after it when all the dust has settled, is the thing, I feel.
ever since i played the game "count how many artists you know off the coachella poster" and graphed my results over the years, i realized (1) i am now old, (2) the cheat sheet is literally in front of me. i'm still working through my 2023 list though lol
Is it really bad for Lana? Perceived / performed brittleness, and the ability to project the veneer of precarity over what is, by any objective measure, true privilege, are both integral to the "trad-conservative high femme" persona that she trades in -- your comparison to a mob wife might be more apt than you intend it to be. In that respect, this is only good for her, the way her previous dismal showings were.
Like the whole thing that makes a society wife figure into the object of camp worship is that she is imperious in her contempt, resentful and fearful of the desire she's subject to while glorifying in what it gets her, surgically precise in what she sees from within her gilded cage, all this while also being always already miserable. Fucking up in public only endears her further to her admirers -- what makes an Elaine Stritch performance is when her alcoholic self-medication slips just of alignment and she lists toward nervous breakdown.
To paraphrase Robert Gluck, the heart of camp is abjection. In other words, it's important to be pitiful. Precarity is ultimately safe and incorporated into the performance of femininity -- public embarrassment is expected of a silly little bird, and it's temporary. It doesn't mean or reflect any real change in her stature, even if it's *not* a knowing exaggeration. The flailing's a put on, knowingly or not. Lana is camp. Chan Marshall is not camp.
Anyway it'd be cute if Lana hadn't so naturally indulged in slut-shaming misogynoir, re: famous femme rappers. Especially given that she'd earlier teased sexual-racial taboo with male rappers. Sometimes a mob wife is just another white woman