Good morning!
Welcome to Issue 69.1 of Digestable, your thrice-weekly mouthful of real things happening in the world, minus alarmist pandemic news.
Today’s news, fermented:
It’s Monday, and it seems that in fact, the world is ending, and corporate pledges and far-out targets that will never get met won’t save us. News also recently broke that the Kavanaugh hearings back in 2018 succeeded because of a sham FBI investigation. Really awe-inspiring stuff.
Per Friday’s issue, Digestable will be going on hiatus for the month of August. So, this will be our last full week; we’ll be back on September 1st.
(via)
The Second Look
Half-baked cultural criticism from Gabriel Coleman.
I’ve mentioned Róisín Murphy’s iconic lockdown-living-room performances for her recent Róisín Machine release a couple of times - but I want to take the opportunity to dive a little deeper into the meaning I pull from them.
See Mx. Murphy was doing live-from-home before COVID made it fashion. If you look back through the music videos she’s produced throughout her career, there’s a thruline of interrogating domestic interior spaces as an effort to reconcile her experiences of fame, performance, and womanhood.
This starts with her album Overpowered whose promotional material and music videos see Róisín as a “street diva” wearing ostentatious campy clothing in everyday settings. In the video for Let Me Know she dances and sings around a diner while the patrons go about their eating as if she’s not there. The video for You Know Me Better shows her as a series of women-on-the-edge, lying on bathroom tile and dropping bags of groceries but clad in over the top ruffles and flowers like a campier version of The Hours. The video for the title track begins with Róisín on stage at the end of a show and then follows her home as she grabs the bus, orders shawarma, brushes her teeth on the toilet, and tucks herself into bed - all in her ostentatious black and white stage costume. The three music videos seem to be different attempts to answer the same questions - What does it mean to be a woman in space? What characters do we play on stage, at home, on the street? And how does our interior life (both the life we live at home and our emotional life) play out in public?
Her next project, Hairless Toys ratcheted things up a level with a series of videos where she plays characters playing characters in a series of trailers and montages for a film that doesn’t exist. The video for Exploitation consists of a series of sparsely blocked theater rehearsals with interior space reduced to set furniture. Unputdownable’s video is a series of disjointed takes, behind the scenes footage, and critical accolades (in Italian with German subtitles of course) for a film set in a gorgeous marble clad bar, and Evil Eyes is selections of th
e fully realized film - set in a lush colourful home that literally out Guardianos Guardiano. The character Róisín plays in these videos is another version of this woman-on-the-edge, an actress - but possibly an actress in a play about a play about a play whose emotional breakdowns and moments of intensity are never quite settled between reality and artifice. It’s like if Meryl Streep was in a Charlie Kaufman film directed by Luca Guardiano. If Overpowered interrogates the characters we play in public and at home - Hairless Toys conceives the whole world as a stage, every home and restaurant as a series of sets where we act out our parts.
So in this context, Róisín Murphy’s live-at-home sets are much more than just a lockdown necessity - they’re a continuation of her larger artistic process, interrogating what it means to be at home, who we perform in public, and what the architecture we build around us says about us as actors and writers in our own little plays. I see her flower festooned webcam performances, use of zoom background technology, and DIY single shot drone videos as another way of turning the camera back on herself and asking who we as the audience think she is deep down, at home, and behind the mask - and more importantly who she thinks she is in these places. In her own words “it's a lot about architecture, it's about building and the future coming, its about here!” In this way there’s no one better than Mx. Murphy to interpret this strange introspective interior year and a half and I’m glad we have her.
*Hot Goss*
Brought to you by the superb Latifah Azlan.
A little thought experiment to kick off this week's ~*Hot Goss*~: If you were dating someone for "their personality," and that someone was a choice between Elon Musk or Ben Affleck, who would you pick? It's a serious question and I feel like both men are comparable to each other when controlling for wealth, fame, and achievements. And it's a pertinent question to ask given that Grimes, Elon's partner, recently revealed that she isn't with him for the money and that Jennifer Lopez, Ben's current babe, went Instagram-official with the actor on her birthday over the weekend.
Let's break it down, man by man. Elon is a billionaire yet isn't supporting his partner financially and spends his day on Twitter, jerking off into the digital ether. Personality-wise, he's your stereotypical tech bro who thinks he's deeper and more intellectual than he is but is only really good at coming up with techspeak for things that already exist and that people have used for decades like, oh, i don't know, buses. I suspect he'd be a total snooze to talk to because of that and if you're not gonna hand me free rein of your credit cards, then what am i here, making babies named after Xfinity wifi passwords with a billionaire for?!
Ben, on the other hand, is broody and volatile. I think he'd be more even in terms of showing equal interest in his partner but the baggage that comes with being Ben Affleck is a lot for one person to shoulder. This man (or at least his PR team) clearly reads the comments. The frequent paparazzi strolls and public displays of love-never-seen-before-ever must be exhausting to keep up with. This weekend, Ben and J.Lo decided to recreate the infamous yacht shot that happened during their first go-around as a couple. It would have grabbed my attention had it not been for the fact that Ben looked mildly interested in the fact that the palm of his Dunkins-greased hand was resting on the most famous, sought-after, envied derrieres in the entire world. That betrayed the very obvious stunt for publicity for which this picture was posed. And I just can't fathom dating somebody who needs to be on all the time that way!
So where do we stand on this issue, folks? Personally, I think I'd rather die dry than try to make it through a date with either one of these men. But if I really had to choose, I suppose Ben Affleck would at least take me on yachts and expensive dinners to make the work worth my time as opposed to dating Elon.