Hi friends,
A quick personal update first: Our home renovations continue towards their conclusion, yet the last bit seems to take forever as the pieces must align: plumbers, counters, electricians. We’re so close to having a new space to cook and host and celebrate in — I can feel it!
It is these visions of welcoming back community, of celebrating and hosting — eventually — that I hold onto while sitting here on the couch with the shades down and the window cracked open for fresh air, as I hack and cough a rather disgusting wet cough that I try to aim away from any other human being because yes, after a good couple-year run of avoiding it, I now have Covid-19. Thanks to whatever combination of vaccines, general fitness, and luck, my case isn’t so bad. It’s more like a combination of a bad cold and a gnarly flu, but mostly without fevers. I’m not going to the hospital any time soon, I’m just grumpy, achey, and irritable, cooped up in my house trying not to get my germs on anyone. My energetic little one seems fine and is testing negative. I am wearing a mask around her. We’ll make it to the other side. But right now…yikes!
Send some healing vibes,
IKM
I swear on my bus pass, Josie and the Pussycats deserves a rewatch.
I saw a movie this weekend that I had been avoiding since it came out in 2001: Josie and the Pussycats. I agreed to watch this thing for my monthly movie club and I waited til the last possible night because I had no desire to see it — that is how thoroughly put off I had been by the complete disdain with which it had been received by the critic class and moviegoing public at the time.
This movie is a fucking delight. If you haven’t seen it, I beg of you to rent it, especially if you are any kind of millennial or millennial-adjacent. (Discoveries like this are why I love my movie club, despite the clunkers I’ve also had to watch like Speed Racer, with which this film was paired.)
This movie was marketed as a cute, poppy story about a teenage girl group’s rise to fame, and that rote storyline coupled with the very Blink-182-style music (just not my cup of tea, I prefer symphonic metal to bubblegum pop-punk) earned my utter indifference. I thought it was aimed at 12 year old girls and I was above it. But the trailer gives no indication of what the film really is: an absurd, cartoony wacky satire of the desperate churn of capitalism and mindless consumption, with Alan Cumming and Parker Posey turning in hysterical, weird performances as the sort of evil but mostly just wildly insecure puppeteers of a pop culture trend machine designed to brainwash the powerful teenage consumer bloc into constantly buying more stuff.
Make no mistake: this movie is for adults. More specifically, I’d say it’s mostly for adult women.
Watching Josie in 2022 is a special trip for me because it’s an impeccable time capsule, bottled at precisely the correct moment. 2002 was arguably the zenith of the recording industry’s power to dictate popular taste and consumption. After that came the internet, mp3 sharing, streaming — the swift, decisive fall off a cliff, pushed along by ubiquitous high-speed internet. This film calls out for mockery a system that seemed, at the time, to be all-powerful, exposing it as a fragile and pathetic house of cards, just shortly before that house of cards began to tumble for real.
Making even more explicit the commentary on consumerism, brands are plastered all over nearly every scene, a good many of them no longer relevant today: AOL, Sega, Kodak, Revlon. (There’s also plenty of McDonald’s, Starbucks, Puma, Tide, Evian, and others that are still doing just fine.) I looked this up to learn that none of these brands paid to be featured. Peter Travers from Rolling Stone accused the film of hypocritically plugging products, showing just how far over his head the critique went, and he wasn’t the only supposed professional critic who made this mistake.
Back to the time capsule aspect…let’s just take a moment to appreciate the fashion. Oh my god the fashion. The bright candy-colored outfits. The choppy bright red hair on Josie — once the absolute height of cool, now impossibly dated. The aggressively frosted eyeshadow and lipsticks on everyone. The low-rise jeans, plastic platform shoes, and sexy power suits as daywear and partywear. The spot-on perfection of the boy band DuJour, a perfect parody of the Backstreet Boys in sound and look. The tribal tattoos and shiny pants.
While critics at the time heaped on the condescension (Ebert gave the film a half star and called it “dumb”), it’s quite a bit smarter than plenty of other, more commercially successful films. As a Gen X/Millennial cusp female viewer, I loved seeing a story about a group of ambitious women whose first loyalty was to each other (not boyfriends, not family, or anything else) and their collective success. Their ambition is to become world famous, successful rock stars — for the joy of it, for the affirmation of their talent — and they aren’t punished for that. So often in stories about ambitious women, we’re forced to watch some kind of elaborate degradation as the supposed “price” for fame or success, but not here. 20 years on and we still don’t have much more in the way of pop culture examples of ambitious women who enjoy success, fame, or power. America is still so unrelentingly uncomfortable with powerful, ambitious women that it gave us 4 years of the most laughably corrupt, despicable human being ever to set foot in the White House rather than award the Presidency to the much more qualified Hillary Clinton.
Another male establishment critic, Travers again, called the film a “girlie trifle.” One wonders if those words are synonymous in his lexicon. Girlie it may be, but a trifle?
Maybe if you believe that art must be masculine to be taken seriously or to engage with serious ideas. The magic trick Josie accomplishes is that it keeps you bopping your head and laughing in spite of yourself at all the absurdity while painting a very dark all-too-realistic picture of our inescapable capitalist hell world — all while managing to serve up a more genuine dose of creativity and “girl power” than Spice World could dream of.
Side quests
Josie and the Pussycats was far ahead of its time. 10 more great and classic movies about consumerism. One of the greatest Y2K fashion movies. Larger Than Life asks: did a boy band change your life too? Serious question: Where are all the girl groups? Boy band style has evolved. Girl power 2.0 - What is Ariana Grande’s music really about? Maybe the modern world still isn’t ready for successful women.
Creative juice
City, Michael Heizer’s sprawling installation of manmade forms in the dusty Nevada desert, spans over a mile long and can only be explored on foot. I am 100% going there when I get an opportunity. It’s been described as the largest contemporary artwork on Earth. In progress since 1970, it opens to the public this year, though only to a limited number of visitors, with advance registration required.
Via the Art Newspaper:
Heizer envisions City as a project that will endure well beyond the lifespans of even the most treasured and tough contemporary art. “My good friend Richard Serra is building out of military-grade steel,” he said in a 2016 New Yorker profile about the project. “That stuff will all get melted down. Why do I think that? Incans, Olmecs, Aztecs—their finest works of art were all pillaged, razed, broken apart and their gold was melted down. When they come out here to fuck my City sculpture up, they’ll realize it takes more energy to wreck it than it’s worth.”