angel olsen (live at salon iksv) : a heavy presence

On May 3rd, I went to see the ethereal 50s-reminiscent indie queen of our generation, Angel Olsen. Dreamlike and luminescent as ever, Olsen's voice parallels the nostalgia of an eerie 50s radio broadcast, grainy, as if it'd been gracefully filtered through the sieve that is the legacy of an amalgamation of legendary artists, from Lauryn Hill to Brian Eno and David Bowie.

Standing in the humble crowd of 100 or so, the minute Olsen struck that first guitar string, the minute the first note gently emanated from the hefty amps behind her, the energy in the atmosphere metamorphosed rapidly. Striking a chord in everyone's hearts within a beat, Olsen emanates a indescribable quality in the air; she carries a heavy presence with her voice, her gaze; the mere thrill of her just standing there is enough to quieten the room. As always with Angel Olsen, I'm met with insuppressible waterworks and an unnerving trembling of my hands; my heart - open, my ears - open, I'm wholeheartedly entranced. 

Following Unfucktheworld, wherein Olsen gracefully reiterates: I am the only one now, I am the only one now, I am the only one now, she proceeds to counter that sentiment entirely in If It's Alive, It Will, entirely oxymoronic to the aforementioned: 

      I used to think I was the only one

      I used to think I was the only one

      I used to think I was the only one

      But I've learned quite a few things since then

      I've learned that no one ever really is the only one

Undiscerned by the majority of the crowd, Olsen pauses for a minute, chuckling at the paradoxical juxtaposition of Unfucktheworld consecutive to If It's Alive, It Will in terms of lyricism. Acknowledging the ups and downs pertaining to personal growth in her oeuvre presents a beautiful milestone - to have produced so much substance within her work that it showcases the turbulent journey of what it means to drench the art she externalises with emotional truths. It's the small things as such which remain most deeply ingrained in the memory - and surely, it takes quite a lot of poetic license to hold such a seemingly insignificant moment caught in time so near and dear to the heart. 
Meeting her after the gig was an experienced characterised by a muddle of surrealism, anxiety and heartfelt love; nothing I could ever vocally articulate would wholly encapsulate the imprint of her art - the emotional residue clogged up in me - although it was worth an attempt. 

a rushed little painting i'd made for angel

having burn your fire for no witness signed

There's nothing quite like experiencing the presence of Angel Olsen live - her angelic voice reverberates through my life as a tear-jerking hymn, a reminder of all things beautiful, all things which rip through the walls I've spent painstaking years building around my heart. 

bright-eyed and bushy browed : ramblings & reflections on sasha velour

RADICAL, MAGICAL, LIBERAL ART / GENDER IS A CONSTRUCT, TEAR IT APART

I know I'm incredibly late to have just jumped onto this bandwagon, but I've recently finished watching Season 9 of the fabulously flamboyant Rupaul's Drag Race. From the very first episode, a twinkle in my eye had been sparked by the glorious presence of Brooklyn-based funky art-theatre drag queen, Sasha Velour. Born Alexander Hedges Steinberg, Velour's identity has been constructed meticulously through intricately documented origins and personal anecdotes, 'Sasha', being a nickname for their original name Alexander, and velour, being their favourite fabric as a cheaper substitute for velvet, a feature they subtly parallel to the performative essence of drag.

Perhaps what remains most arresting to me regarding Velour's drag, alongside their constant practice of activism, is how it moves beyond practice of performing the conventions of femininity as someone assigned male at birth (which, in itself, is an gargantuanly endearing and defiant act) - Velour's drag, explicitly yet tastefully conflating various facets of the myriad subcultures within drag history, adopts an identity external to the enforced etiquette of hyperfemininity; it is unauthoritative, unhindered and always tastefully executed. There's been much commentary on the alleged "boundaries" of drag - an unnecessarily confining cage built around what qualifies as drag and what doesn't - and Velour isn't ashamed to call out the counter-productivity of hindering the fluidity of drag. And for fuck's sake, how could you not absolutely adore someone who, firstly, appears to have the sweetest smile to ever grace this earth, and secondly, mentions Judith Butler, a.k.a the world's reigning drag gender theory superstar, on Rupaul's Drag Race? 

Velour's constant commentary on the intersecting crosspaths of drag with queer + gender politics is incredibly significant, considering the ever-deepening divisions between groups which ultimately yearn for the same liberationist politics. Acutely aware of their privilege as an upwardly-mobile white individual, Velour is unhindered in their impassioned expression of how trans women of colour were the prime ringleaders of the queer movement alongside the Stonewall Riots: 

Trans women, trans men, AFAB—which is assigned female at birth—and non-binary performers, but especially trans women of color, have been doing drag for literal centuries and deserve to be equally represented and celebrated alongside cis men.

As of now, I've much more to research on drag history; although it intersects immensely with the queer movements of the '60s and '70s, drag history in itself, although not nearly as extensively documented as queer history, is incredibly rich and broad, and as Velour eloquently states, "is literally so ancient that it predates modern understandings of gender... drag predates the word drag itself."

Can I get an amen up in here? A-fucking-men.

the world’s wife: 'little red cap review' - grit, authority and all things unladylike

WORDS, WORDS WERE TRULY ALIVE ON THE TONGUE, IN THE HEAD

WARM, BEATING, FRANTIC, WINGED; MUSIC AND BLOOD

Carol Ann Duffy with Adrian Henri

Carol Ann Duffy’s 1999 anthology, The World’s Wife, marks a gripping departure from the earlier status quo of male-prescribed narratives and societal expectations in fairy tales, myths and historical events. Saturated with a tinge of British social realism, Duffy tactfully imposes her critical interventions in the hackneyed homogeneity of the literary world, though she extends far beyond the linguistics of gender discourse by unashamedly setting each poem in a contemporary idiom. From illuminating the disregarded status of Lazarus’ wife, to subverting Little Red Cap’s pitifully prescribed gullibility, Duffy’s radical reinterpretations place these women in the limelight for once.

Bet Mrs. Midas never turned to gold. Renowned British Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife amalgamates cultural paradoxes as she shines a light on the overshadowed women of history - women who are tender yet tenacious, lyrical yet humoristic, and above all, fall victim to prevailing patriarchal strictures yet conceive an inner tenacity to subvert it. Through archiving a personal history, Duffy eloquently - and rather cathartically - provides a ventriloquised voice to the women behind the scenes and subtly integrates memoirs of personal, yet collectively encountered experiences. Perhaps what remains the most arresting to readers in The World’s Wife is its all-too-familiar essence materialized from its lingering traces of social realism; the Lazaruses no longer exist in a biblical realm as we encounter the colloquial depiction of Mrs. Lazarus’s turbulent emotional ups-and-downs, and Little Red Cap’s folklore veneer disintegrates as we witness parts of ourselves manifest through her premature sexual awakening. These women - the girl next door, the streetwise lolita, the domestic alpha - aren’t your locally televised Jane Doe; they exist as archetypes in contemporary society, although Duffy does much more than to merely fuel these pigeonholed-identities by examining the intricacy of it all.

Exemplifying the personal and political significance of each narrative, Duffy’s Little Red Cap acts as both an intimate anecdote and an ideologically-loaded reinterpretation of the Brothers Grimm’s classic folktale from 1905. As a universally integral narrative in our childhoods, a politicized Little Red Cap (1905) substantiates the current patriarchal status-quo, riddled with man-made norms of femininity and a fueled image of hypermasculinity - because who better to depict girlhood than two old cisgender men seeking to avert their stereotypical narrative from being politicized? The reappropriation of this original folklore, being Duffy’s own mouthpiece, is imbued with a personal reminiscence of a dramatic yet nonchalant transition to womanhood - her first relationship at age 16, with Liverpudlian poet Adrien Henri, 23 years her senior. This begging to believed - girlhood - is implicitly validated through Duffy’s subversion of the prescribed roles for Little Red Cap and the wolf. Substantiating this is an underlying tone of tenacity prevalent throughout the entirety of the poem, as Duffy assumes an intentionally subordinate voice, ironically capitalising on this thetic norm of frail femininity in order to dismantle the norm itself. This acute awareness of the events to come is intricately conveyed through Duffy’s linguistic devices:

It was there that I first clapped my eyes on the wolf                  6

In line 6, Duffy implicitly reinforces the antipodal roles assigned to her and Henri; her assumption of concealed authority is linguistically exemplified through “clapped” - sonorous and plosive, the auditory element of the verb alludes to a physical acquisition of the wolf’s [Henri] attention. Not solely is Red Cap’s [Duffy] predatorial character self-prescribed, but the puppeteer of this ostensibly spontaneous series of events is Red Cap herself. Here, Duffy goes beyond exploring the intricate narratives of the “women behind the scenes” - she is the woman behind the scenes, the puppeteer whose delicate wordplay delivers a carefully curated show.

Red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big ears.                      9
He had! What big eyes he had! What teeth!                              10

Here, Duffy deliberately employs a tone reminiscent of our childhood bedtime stories - wide-eyed, guileless, repetitious. However, once placed into context, these unelaborated descriptions of the wolf are unanticipatedly rife with wit - perhaps even patronization. And of course it’s political - to recast the folklore in a way that engenders a shift in the power dynamic, especially to assign authority to Red Cap, given her ostensibly subordinate status, is to hum a tender tune to put the patriarchy to sleep.

But we should be reminded that this is not merely Duffy’s mouthpiece. The full-force immersion into a self-initiated departure from childhood holds a contemporary truth - the ritualistic tendencies of budding young girls, sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, to inhabit a invigorating vision of manmade sexual attractivity - because what little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf? Note ‘manmade’ - this wide-eyed desire is not an inherent trait, but more so a performative act constructed through ideological forces, lest we forget the coercive forces of heteronormativity and commodity domination in our age. Little Red Cap is a ventriloquised narrative for us all; perhaps not a rumination about “childhood’s end”, or a nostalgic longing for the relinquished naivete of girlhood, but a climactic engrossment into the whirlwind we hastily label ‘adolescence’:

Are the uttered thoughts of trees, that a greying wolf                  34
Howls the same song at the moon, year in, year out                      35
Season after season, same rhyme, same reason. I took an axe             36


To a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmon               37
To see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf                          38
As he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw                       39
The glistening, virgin white of my grandmother's bones                  40
I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up                   41
Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone            42

Beyond a mere narrative, Little Red Cap culminates in an implicit personal victory; however, this feminized “instinct” to possess a hypersexualised exterior is one that, contrary to Duffy’s account of a consequential ‘triumph’, does not always bear fruit.

Perhaps we should not label this a ‘triumph’, but an ostensibly celebratory wave-goodbye to the dewy-eyed fawn, the prey, that has now metamorphosed into a doe, the protector. Little Red Cap’s final stanzas (lines 36-37) emanate a quality of adultish complacency - not solely does a linguistic approach allude to the humdrum cyclicality of adulthood, but the ballad-like, full rhyming of this dramatic monologue pinpoints the solemn adieu to the initial stanzas’ unpremeditated, buoyant half-rhymes. The rambly demeanor is replaced with a desensitization to what we once saw as vivid stimuli; the yearning to truly feel is fruitless, as Red Cap’s futile axe-thrusts fail to harness any sense of vitality. Nonetheless, this futility is overturned by Duffy’s own axe-thrust - one that hits a little too close to home.

Perhaps what keeps us going are these fleeting moments whence this vitality unanticipatedly resurfaces. The axe spontaneously plunges into life and a rustle of leaves reveals the dewy-eyed fawn chastely emerging from behind the vast foliage once again.