Haters Back Off! I Love Miranda Sings

What's not to love about the brilliant comic character and internet sensation created, performed, and marketed with genius, by Colleen Ballinger? Miranda Sings is the perfect postmodern clown; the ugly-beautiful face of all that's bad - but, paradoxically, all that's good - about contemporary popular culture. 

In fact, the Miranda Sings YouTube channel is social media satire at its finest and funniest and fully deserving of its 300 million views and 3 million subscribers (or, as Miranda would call them, her Mirfandas). 

Her guest starring role on a recent episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee in full Miranda mode alongside a bemused and amused Jerry Seinfeld - followed by an appearance on The Tonight Show playing Pictionary - confirms that Ballinger has the respect and admiration of those in her profession who know great comic acting when they see it. 

Miranda's unique (and uniquely irritating) voice and her madly inventive use (and misuse) of language have to be heard to be believed. Likewise, her insane facial expressions, awkward body postures, and idiosyncratic twerking style just have to be seen (though the latter might still not be believed even after being seen).

Singer, model, actress, dancer - and magician! - again, I can only ask: what's not to love and recommend all readers check out her videos, or, if you get the chance, go see Ballinger performing as Miranda live in concert. 

Links: 

You can find Miranda by going to her website: mirandasings.com ... Or you can watch any of the hundreds of videos posted on her YouTube channel: youtube.com/user/mirandasings08 

To watch Miranda with Jerry Seinfeld on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee click: here  ... Or to see Miranda on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, click here.

It is your age - A Poem by Isabel del Rio

It is your age that pulls away the veil

From eyes expecting so much more than seen.

And what you did or who you were prevailed

just briefly, what you are is just has-been.

Dreams are no more and even love is dreamt,

No longer hope of saving skin or soul

From surest damnation, all feelings spent

On make-believe things until they run cold.

Don't say it's sad, unfair or undeserved,

this is the only journey you will take,

at least you're here for now, a sentence served

with no purpose but solely for its sake,

to prove or disprove nothing, even less

an answer to the question: what's this mess?

Isabel del Rio is a writer and linguist, born in Madrid and living in London. She writes in both English and Spanish, and has published fiction and poetry. Her bilingual book, Zero Negative / Cero Negativo appeared in 2013 (Araña Editorial). She works for an international organization as head of terminology, and is currently writing a memoir. 

Ms. del Rio appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm and I am very grateful for her kind submission of a sonnet written last year and, indeed, for the photograph.  

A Nietzschean Message for the New Year: Amor Fati

For me, the greatest and most touching of new year blessings and resolutions remains the one with which Nietzsche opens Book IV of The Gay Science (written January, 1882):

"Today, everybody permits themselves the expression of their dearest wish. Hence, I too shall say what it is that I most desire - what was the first thought to enter my heart this year and what shall be for me the reason, guarantee, and sweetness of my life henceforth: I want increasingly to learn to see as beautiful what is necessary in things, so that I may become one of those who makes things beautiful.  

Amor fati - let that be my love from now on! 

I do not want to wage war against that which is ugly; I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to judge those who judge. Looking away shall be my sole negation. For some day I wish to be one who says Yes to life as a total economy of the whole."

This is what the phrase torpedo the ark means to me: love fate; find pleasure in things as they are; don't judge; look away from that which offends one's taste, but nonetheless affirm everything (even the cockroach that obscenely scuttles across the floor, or lies on its back kicking its legs in the air).

Happy New Year to torpedophiles everywhere ...      

Note: The above text by Nietzsche is a modified version of Walter Kaufmann's translation in The Gay Science, (Vintage Books, 1974), IV. 276.

The Prince and the Pauper

Look at this photo taken recently of Prince George; one of a series of shots released as a Christmas gift to the world's media by the Duke and Duchess of Kent:

Now look at this photo taken over the festive season of my nephew's little boy; one of a series of snaps circulated to friends and family by his proud parents:

Spot the difference? Obviously, George is several months older than baby Joshua, but that's not really what I'm getting at. Rather, what we see here is not age difference, but startling evidence for the violent and institutionalized inequality of expectation and opportunity that still exists in the UK. This may be a green and pleasant land, but so too is it one of outrageously uneven playing fields.

And so, in the first picture, we find a prince looking smug and self-satisfied as well he might. He wears cleverly coordinated and well-made clothes like a little royal dandy; no comedy costumes or infantalized outfits for him. He will get to know whilst still very young what it is to wear shirts that button and need ironing, as well as shoes that lace and need polishing.

On his jumper is a picture of one of his great-grandmother's soldiers, sworn to serve and protect him. Like his father and uncle Harry, he'll doubtless spend time in the military, learning what it is to be an officer and to give command. I don't know what steps he's sitting on - doubtless they are those of some palace or other - but they symbolize power and hierarchy; he might be at the bottom now, but one day he'll quite literally be king of the castle.

In the second picture, we find a subject of the Crown looking the happy idiot in his elf suit and already being trained to smile when he hears the words heigh-ho; to aspire to a position in Santa's toy factory, or some other dead-end job.

His clothes are manufactured for comfort, for convenience and for comic effect; t-shirts with slogans and sports shoes with rubber souls; no need for him to dress to impress or dress to kill. Rather, he can dress to chill and never have to worry about tying a Windsor knot or fastening a pair of cufflinks.    

People say it's wrong to envy the wealthy and privileged - and I don't envy them; it's loathing and contempt that speaks here. One can, I think, be legitimately angry and protest power differentials without falling into slave morality or ressentiment.

And so my new year message remains pretty much the same as it has always been; a call for regicide, revolution, and what might be termed cannibalistic class war - Eat the Rich!

On the Malign/ed Art of Faking It (Part III) - A Guest Post by Thomas Tritchler

Cover of the 2010 Penguin edition of 
Wilde's 1891 essay 'The Decay of Lying'

The Romantics understood that all poetic mendacity begins in childhood, which is why children should be extravagantly rewarded for their relentless pleasure in confabulations of all kinds; from invisible friends to self-incriminating fibs. 

But adult pretension matters too, for, as Dan Fox has succinctly argued in a valuable piece for 'Frieze Magazine', pretension is a form of pretending - and pretending can be extremely productive.

Thus, in contrast to the cynic's inability to see beyond affectation, charlatanism, and self-aggrandizement in such matters, the idealist perceives an innocent, adventurous and sometimes tragicomic excess of ambition over attainment - something Fox suggestively correlates to Susan Sontag's depiction of camp as a 'sensibility of failed seriousness'. 

The melted wings of Icarus depict the tragic potentiality of the soul's imaginative flights, not a mythological excuse never to test one's creative limits. If we remember that the Greek word for actor was hypokrites, then it becomes apparent how the thirst for such performative slippages between who we are and would like to be, is woven into the West's cultural DNA.

What is needed - I am suggesting - is the pursuit of a strategic (if not satanic) reversal of the hypothetical value of our key terms. Like Brian Eno, we should turn the word 'pretentious' into a compliment and move beyond the mistaken assumption that there are authentic individuals and others who simply pretend to be something they're not. As a matter of fact, to fake it, is probably the most creative - and important - thing we might do. For it's the way in which we learn about art and experiment with becoming-other     

Further, if the accusation of pretentiousness essentially rests on the idea of people getting above themselves, it is also not hard to follow Fox into regarding the politics of pretence as implying a kind of informal class surveillance. He is right, I think, to highlight the corrosive snobbery embedded in both historical and contemporary England, with its craven obsessions with rank, accent, and the cynical coalition between sex and social exploitation. 

At the same time, even in toxically class-conscious Britain, we should not make the mistake of confining the codices of class to a socio-economic integer rather than an ontological domain. From whatever walks of life, there is a self-selecting unnatural order of romantics, outlaws, aliens and poseurs - let us call them the constituency of the counterfeit - who refuse the rat-race of reality, whose experimental aesthetics configure the vectors of artistic escape and who understand, in a much over-used phrase, that all style is risk. 

In conclusion, we might do well to remember Wilde's words in 'The Decay of Lying', spoken by the decadent aesthete, Vivian, sworn enemy of the old, the conventional, and the well-informed: 

"Many a young man starts life with a natural gift for exaggeration which, if nurtured in congenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by the imitation of the best models, might grow into something really great and wonderful." 

Thomas Tritchler is a poet and critical theorist based in Calw, Germany. He has written and researched extensively on a wide range of authors, including Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Ted Hughes and Jean Baudrillard, and on topics including Romanticism, the Holocaust, and the politics of evil. He has recently worked with the Berlin-based art cooperative Testklang.   

Thomas Tritchler appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm and I am very grateful for his kind submission of a lengthy text written especially for this blog, edited into three separate posts for the sake of convenience.

 

On the Malign/ed Art of Faking It (Part II) - A Guest Post by Thomas Tritchler

A rare but recent photo of Thomas Tritchler

taken in Salzburg, Austria

The dreary utilitarianism of the English intellectual tradition is of course a historical given. But recently this Orwellian weakness for plain speaking has been reasserted by Elliot Murphy in his otherwise valuable study of anarchism and British literature.

In Unmaking Merlin (Zero Books, 2014), Murphy devotes an embarrassingly reactionary chapter to mocking obscurantist French poststructuralism - the decadent representatives of which he is clearly far too real and rational to care to understand. Against those sceptical writers who value irony and regard critical thinking as an indispensable inheritance of that hermeneutic tradition inaugurated by the great masters of suspicion (Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud), Murphy oddly joins hands with pantomime moralist Roger Scruton, for whom Foucault's The Order of Things  is to be dismissed as: 

"An artful book, composed with a satanic mendacity ... [whose] goal is subversion, not truth [that perpetrates] the old nominalist sleight of hand that was surely invented by the Father of Lies - that 'truth' requires inverted comas, that it changes from epoch to epoch, and is tied to the form of consciousness, the episteme, imposed by the class which profits from its propagation ..."

 

Since I would gladly affirm Scruton's scornful review as a ringing endorsement, we at least both know where we stand; he in his Anglican pulpit haranguing the heretics and frauds of aesthetic thought; I, presumably, whispering to demons with a forked tongue in a Parisian graveyard. At any rate, it feels good to know that as well as wearing Prada and having all the best tunes, the Devil is also a chic-y postmodernist!

In an instructive essay on British anti-intellectualism, Ed Rooksby has traced such inverted snobbery to the father of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, who, in his repudiation of the romantic idealism of the French Revolution, subsumed the horror of free thinking beneath the twin lenses of natural prejudice and common sense. The inductive methodologies of Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton would now underpin an ontological realism whose homespun incarnation assumed an irremediably naive strain.

Not for nothing did Oscar Wilde lament England as the 'home of lost ideas'. At the very least, in a culturally and financially bankrupt nation in which Stephen Fry offers the closest approximation of a public intellectual, it can be safely assumed one is unlikely to be breathing the rarefied air of grand thoughts.

    

Thomas Tritchler is a poet and critical theorist based in Calw, Germany. He has written and researched extensively on a wide range of authors, including Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Ted Hughes and Jean Baudrillard, and on topics including Romanticism, the Holocaust, and the politics of evil. He has recently worked with the Berlin-based art cooperative Testklang.   

Thomas Tritchler appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm and I am very grateful for his kind submission of a lengthy text written especially for this blog, edited into three separate posts for the sake of convenience.