I had enough. Every day I read or hear negative news about emos, these kids between 11 and 17, always crying, always sad, extreme posers and suicidal. Everyone agrees that they are completely ridiculous, dangerous for themselves and others and they need some good therapy.
Young girls accused of being emo deny it with a lot of anger. Same situation with the bands. At some point you wonder if there is such a thing as emo. But what is behind this entire mainstream story that I apparently cannot escape?
In Eastern Europe reactions to this subculture take a classical expression: another dangerous Western import that destroys our children. Jokes on emos’ expense got here in poor translations from English, other local jokes are adapted and all of them create a new category to make fun of. But in relation to them, another-dangerous-alienating-element-that-we-should-beware comes in discussion: internet and its destructions, how massively it influenced emo subculture.
Parents are affected also by this media interest in emos, they are scared that their child can become emo and kill themselves. Clinical discourse intervenes here: from the first signals that parents or teachers are dealing with an emo, they should send the sick person to a therapist.
In 2008 in Mexico reactions against emos started to get organized. Various anti-emo groups attacked teenagers in Mexico City, Querétaro, and Tijuana as an opened reaction to their queerness. This aspect is highly emphasized by their critics everywhere, they are directly accused of being queer or gay, in relation to their display of emotions and tenderness together with their fashion statement where differences between emo girls and boys are missing. Queerness is often associated with the theatricality of their display, a hysterical symptom of grabbing attention.
In Russia, a law is about to be voted by Duma to ban emo websites and emo fashion at schools or state buildings, based on the assumption that emo is a dangerous teen trend promoting anti-social behaviour and suicide.
In Romania, Timisoara Police created a collective to prevent events where emo kids are involved. They go in schools to talk to parents about emos. On the other hand, Romanian Orthodox Church reacted also on several times on the emo danger, considered framed by a bigger move away from traditional values and morality. Priests spoke freely about the involved manipulation, corruption and destruction of contemporary Western subject. Romanian newspapers signal that in every school there are at lest 2-3 kids that are emo, especially fifth and sixth grade and are complaining about lack of statistics regarding emo kids.
Emos are attacked on music and fashion grounds as lacking authenticity and being lame copies of Goths, punks or Japanese manga characters. Attention-grabbing effect, posing and histrionic behaviour are generating a whole subculture bashing. Journalists share a charming optimism: soon enough this fashion will die like all the others. Soon enough they hope. What can I say, things haven’t changed much: it was the same reaction towards women in the nineteenth century, as soon as they became visible, having a voice, hysteria came into place to put into mental institutions the most active ones. These teenagers have a voice now, quite a strong one, and with similar tactics are put down exactly like hysterical women a while ago. Besides the hysterical elements of emo culture that I mentioned here and are constantly under attack, there is one more “dangerous” in its subversiveness: their struggle against sexual difference. Many of the jokes are making fun of boys’ lack of masculinity and their queerness. I wonder how a 12 years old can act more masculine…but the main issue here is the heard voice of this generation that has clearly something to say. The response to teenagers’ demand for agency is a typical one: institutionalizing and silencing.
Showing posts with label mexico. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mexico. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Monday, November 12, 2007
Notes on Frida Kahlo's diary
- Frida is going to a concert: she arrives late and the sound of her sumptuous jewelry covers the orchestra and everyone is looking at her box, the concert doesn’t count anymore. An Aztec goddess, Coatlicue, a deity wrapped in her skirts of serpents, exhibiting her lacerated hands, like trophies. Or maybe Tlazolteotl, the vulture that has to devour filth to keep the universe clean. Earrings are as big as cartwheels; her rings transform her hands into claws.always hiding her tortured body, shriveled leg, broken foot, orthopedic corsets
- always hiding her tortured body, shriveled leg, broken foot, orthopedic corsets
- under the spectacular finery of the peasant Mexican woman, who kept jealously the ancient jewelry hidden away, protected from poverty, only to be shown at the great fiestas.
- Laces, ribbons, long skirts, rustling petticoats, braids, flowery peasant blouses, garnet-coloured shawls, moonlike headdresses[1] - form of humour, great disguise, theatrical, self-fascinated form of auto-eroticism, a call to imagine the suffering naked body underneath and discover its secrets[2]
- Her clothes were a manner of dressing for paradise, of preparing for death.
- “Kahlo, disguised in many clothes, a Saint Joan of the liberating culture of the Revolution”[3] : dressing and undressing, wearing her clothes were ceremonial acts, laborious, regal, ritualistic
- “I am not sick, I am broken.”
- Fooling death, fooling around with death, in her language, death was: La Mera Dientona [old buck teeth], La Tostada [The Toasted One], La Chingada [the Fucked One], La Catrina [The Belle of the Ball], La Pelona [The Hairless Bitch], La Tia de las Muchachas [The Girls’ Aunt]
- Nietzsche: Whoever has built a new heaven has found the strength for it only in his own hell[4]
- proud and defiant in her denim cloths and proletarian, urchin-like cloth caps, together with Las Cachuchas [The Caps]
- internal darkness under
- Defenderse de los Cabrones – lifetime slogan
- Broken spinal column, collarbone, ribs, pelvis, left shoulder forever out of joint, one feet crushed, handrail crashed into her back and came out through her vagina
- Naked and bloodied, covered with gold dust
- Pain destroys language, pain is indescribable (Virginia Woolf)
- Nietzche decided to call his pain Dog
- Frida as a speaker for pain[1]
- 32 operations
- from 1944 she wore eight corsets
- in 1953 – her leg is amputated
- her wounded back “smelling like a dead dog”
- loses her fetuses in pools of blood
- forever surrounded by clots, chloroform, bandages, needles, scalpels
- personal suffering transformed into art, an art that is shared, not impersonal
- a ribbon around a bombshell – Andre Breton about her art
- she loved Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges, Chaplin, the Marx Brothers
- beauty as truth and knowledge: Frida’s legacy to the marginal, invisible, faceless men and women, when only photogenic and shocking images merit a vision
- I am writing to you with my eyes
- sexual and political Mexican art- censored in US, in order to preserve their fake innocence, forget their dirty history: genocide of native Indians, rape and robbery of their land, Black slavery, wars against weaker nations, territorial annexations, robber barons, capitalist exploitation, urban violence – American culture is left without appropriate, lasting beautiful images of its own violence.
- The internal oneiric change is inseparable from external, political, material, liberating change: marriage of Freud and Marx. In Frida’s subversiveness that would be the marriage between Woody Allen and Groucho Marx.
- The more I loved her, the more I wanted to hurt her. (Diego Rivera)
- I cannot, I cannot! [F on socialist realism]
- Deep down, you understand me, you know I adore you. You are not only something that is mine, you are me myself. [love letter to Alejandro Gomez Arias]
- Her voice was deep, rebellious, punctuated by caracajades [belly laughs] and leperadas [four-letter words].
- Theatrical persona – practical and linguistic jokes
- Love for carpas and cantinas, joy in singing and enjoying Mexican music
- She could sing couplets like La Malaguena with a perfect falsetto.
- Friend with carpenters, bartenders, shoemakers, anarchists, servants
- She was using a lot of diminutives, charming the words – form of defense against arrogance and oppression, a form of anesthesia.
- F vocabulary: Chaparitta – small women, chulito – male friends, doctorcito, herself: Chiquita, chicuita, Friducha
- Like Diego, she was baffled by gringo faces and could not paint them, they looked like "half-baked rolls". On her American female imitators: they look like “cabbages”.
- Mr Ford, are you jewish? [F. to renowned anti-semite Henry Ford]
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