in the comments section of the entry directly prior to this one, the nicest person i've ever met jason maier and i both professed a guilty passion enjoyment of the films of michael bay. now, i rarely feel guilty when it comes to any intake of art, but sometimes that which is in question is so diabolical(like michael bay) that one has no choice but to feel a little pang of shame alongside the otherwise flawless enjoyment of the piece. take pearl harbour, the michael bay film, not the actual event. i mean if i were to distill a narrative theme from this film(a tricky proposition no doubt) i would have to say fire. michael bay is the ultimate purveyor of fire, and in particular people running from it, in the entire history of cinema. seeing how i like to see things on fire (like cuba gooding's performance in pearl harbour) i easily succumb to the rampant gunshots and bombs(the island) that help to create bay's grand symphony of flames. obscenely stupid with cinematic flair is still cinematic flair. betcha you thought i was gonna say stupid, but i can't because i kinda dig michael bay and i am not ashamed to admit it.
at least not as ashamed as i am to admit that i love taylor swift. even though she kinda looks like she is perpetually caught in that half state in the middle of transformation between human and werewolf, her songs still make me smile everytime i hear them in the car. at first i thought that tim mcgraw was just a bubblegum country novelty song by an underfed teenage hillbilly as if its catchiness was some sort of fluke. but then i heard teardrops on my guitar and it felt like my soul wanted to well up and i wanted to immediately be transported back to the first girl i ever had a huge crush on(anne butler) just so we could listen to taylor swift and awkwardly slow dance in the gym/cafeteria at our 7th grade prom. yeah, i love it that much...and it made me love the tim mcgraw song that much too. taylor swift, like the film the virgin suicides, takes the tenderest feelings and best bits of dreamy, teenage, girly poetry and packages them in a way that distills its very essence while creating a safe world which it and its appreciators can inhabit. today, when i heard our song on the radio, i smiled big and started to love taylor swift as something more than this silly guilty pleasure.
my ultimate hope is that by admitting my love for radio disney's newest pop-country pre-teen princess, that i can summon the courage to go out and buy the album that has as of now eluded me in part to the silent judgement i am sure to recieve from behind the register of k-mart or wherever the hell i buy it from. maybe i will buy it along with bad boys, as i want to show...
that i love michael bay and taylor swift.
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3 comments:
I also have no problem with Taylor Swift. I almost always listen to Teardrops on My Guitar whenever I hear it on the radio. She reminds me of Michelle Branch. Anytime I have seen or read an interview with her, she seems like a genuinely good person. Which is odd for her age and profession. Your post on Michael Bay and Taylor Swift is actually right on topic with something I have been thinking about lately; the idea of the guilty pleasure and who comes up with things that are ok to like and things that are not ok to like. When I tell people I have more interest in Space Chimps than I do in Hellboy 2 or have more interest in the new Miley Cyrus than the new Beck, people look at me like something is growing out of the top of my head. Of course, the problem with my age group is that it is understood that you can only like something ironically that they deem to be beneath them. It's like the essay that Chuck Klosterman wrote about the difference between Crazy and Crazy Bitch. He writes:
"As such, the difference between "Crazy" and "Crazy Bitch" creates an ideal litmus test for how you experience popular music (and how that experience is shaped by media). Download both songs. Play them three times each. If you find yourself preferring "Crazy Bitch," you have been sonically and culturally emancipated: You will never have to read another album review for the rest of your life. You don't need criticism, because the things you like don't require explanation. You're free. You're crazy, but you like the way it fucks you."
I personally do prefer the Gnarls Barkley. But I guess my point is there are way too many people out there that are so concerned with what is either a) cool or b) liking something because it is deemed high culture vs. low culture. How many people do we know that were crazy about The Strokes in 2001 that would make fun of somebody liking The Strokes in 2008. Its OK to prefer Last Year at Marienbad to Iron Man. I think it's also OK to prefer The Fast and the Furious to Seven Samurai or Freddy Got Fingered to Crash (either the Cronenberg or the Haggis). Of course this just takes us full circle back to the discussion between which is more essential the work of Agnes Varda or Steven Segal. The answer is whichever you prefer, but I would like to think that there's room for both. People (probably even myself included) spend way too much time making fun of other people's taste.
i too probably spend way too much time making fun of other people's taste but i find that as i grow older i do it more because it is fun than because i feel as if i am some arbitor of cultural allowability. i wrote this entry(and most entries for that matter) in a way so that it would be discussed/possibly made fun of because i genuinely do not care.
i feel like i have done a nice job of "culturally emancipating" myself, but from time to time i still feel like showing off and the sad part is in this landscape the only thing one can do is to champion those that seem almost beyond championing.
i write blogs about people i love who i feel are somewhat respected in the art community(miranda july, hhh andy samberg?) and nobody ever responds with anything. i write a blog about michael bay and taylor swift, people i assume aren't as well respected, and it kicks off an awesome discussion like this.
possibly, the zeitgeist is fucked...or possibly taylor swift and miranda july aren't as far removed from each other in the real world as i percieve them to be in my mind. either way, i love them both and feel that they both love me back. equally...cause beer cannes is all about equality. except for brett ratner, he's a piece of shit.
Of course it's fun to make fun of other people's tastes, that's why we do it.
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