Saturday, November 06, 2010

"The girl must die," she tells us, so that the woman can live.


Erika Lopez could not have known she was releasing her raucous, racy and hilarious breakthrough novel Flaming Iguanas at the end of an era. It was 1998, and despite the 1990s being a decade of riot grrls and Manic Panic, a time when girls had rock goddesses like PJ Harvey, Sleater Kinney, Hole and Bikini Kill to emulate rather than rock gods to fawn over, it was all about to disappear.

Post-pubescent pop stars took over, the 'zine culture died off and Courtney Love became plastic surgery roadkill. Suddenly, Lopez — a performance artist and cartoonist as well as novelist — was out of fashion, her spunky, prickly, foul-mouthed writing style and tales of booze, men (and women) and motorcycles did not fit in with the current milieu of pre-packaged stardom and yoga spirituality.

"'Erika Lopez is an American original!.... Lopez won't have to worry about food stamps in the future!'" read one Flaming Iguanas review. Twelve years later, in her new The Girl Must Die: A Monster Girl Memoir, Lopez responds: "Well, not only do I have to worry about food stamps again, I just had to go and add welfare. Welfare."

29 comments:

  1. "Post-pubescent pop stars took over" everything, all by themselves.

    "She wants the culture that is currently in love with girlishness, Brazilians and Barbie blondes like Paris Hilton, to" buy her book.

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  2. Ah yes. Back in the good old days, when women were fetishized by grunge rockers for wearing plaid instead of pink.

    Them certainly was the Days.

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  3. the girl must die so the grrrrrrrrls can live again.

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  4. http://www.dickipedia.org/dick.php?title=Michele_Bachmann

    Chuckie, you can access the main Dickipedia page and find that Paris Hilton is not there, but Perez Hilton is. (This is an enlightened encyclopedia, and does not discriminate on race, creed, or supremacy praxis.) That's because Paris is a Barbie, and no woman was ever made more by men than Barbie. Otoh, you will find that Madonna is in the Dickipedia, and her page is hilarious.

    There should be plenty of room for Anodyne and Arpege in the Dickipedia, since that's what they've always wanted to be anyway....esp. with a membre virile....

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  5. Driven onto welfare by post-pubescent (a category which strictly speaking includes me) pop stars wearing pink and wielding vibrators. How degrading.

    But I want to know *the* culture is ... Latvian?

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  6. Looks like we can add Britney Spears to the list of women whose vaginas comprise a series of black holes that threaten to suck up every feminist accomplishment in human history, then.

    Glad we cleared that up, finally.

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  7. You know, I had to google up some of those grrl bands and then Britney just to confirm the chronology. Since I was already to old to have listened to any of the music of "either" sort. But, yes, she certainly must take the main share of the blame, mustn't she?

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  8. Slightly off topic, but I read an article today that reminded me of ODW.

    http://tinyurl.com/kkpv7x

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  9. in 2006 power blogged:

    Women can't be friends under capitalism. Any possible motivating cause for solidarity has been assimilated effortlessly into the perky slipstream of passive-aggressive aspiration and self-indulgent consumerism. It turns out women are really good at capitalism - 'you want it all - you can have it all!' It won't be pretty, but then you can cope. Besides, there's always chocolate, bubble baths, girly films, white wine-induced cirrhosis, your rampant rabbit, clothes-induced credit card debt and a new haircut to fill a life. You go, girl!

    You can either bitch about other women, or you can fuck each other (for better or worse), but there is no neutrality, no real affection. It's heart-breaking.

    It's a shame. It's structural. In practice it looks like this: a) the conspiratorial commitment/belief in some sort of 'other of the other'-type gaze. It's not the male gaze, exactly (whatever that is), but the necessarily confusing, 'male gaze that men don't have', i.e. the hyper-feminised (i.e. void) pure form of judgement that results (practically) in ... nothing - other than perpetual anxiety. It's a sort of big female other...There's nothing worse than 'the judgement of women'. And it'severywhere...what is she wearing? Look at her make-up! Stop talking to my boyfriend! Who does she think she is?

    Somewhere, a woman is enjoying herself, Good God...her suspicious laughter resonates round the hollow echo-chamber of female capitalist reason. And everyone feels bad.



    and also this blogpost


    Whilst I obviously think that free space travel should be a matter of brutal programmatic centrality for any government, the news that an Iranian businesswoman has paid to do it is vaguely cheery - even if they made her take the Iranian flag off her spacesuit. However:

    'Ansari said to ABC News that she didn't care what was on the menu on the International Space Station as long as there was one thing — chocolate.'

    Eh?!

    You've paid twenty million dollars to go into space, and all you can think about ischocolate?! Get out! You don't deserve the cosmos! All humanity's technological and mathematical capacities stretched to breaking-point in the name of the abstract, pointless beauty of extra-terrestrial exploration...and yet a Flake in front of the telly might have done? Pfft.

    I'm thinking of starting a boycott of chocolate - it's making an idiot out of everyone, but particularly women. That acceptable non-food (non)extravagence that all-too-neatly encapsulates just the right kind of perky passivity that feminised capitalism just loves to reward....er, with a bubble bath and some crumbly cocoa solids. It sticks in the mouth a bit.
    // Posted by InfiniteTh0ught @ 04:09 pm

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  10. the latter becomes this passage in the "book" she claims she "wrote" because she was so frustrated with feminism:

    But a hip young feminist must have her indulgences. Just as pink has become the color that somehow symbolizes both freedom and sexual availability, like a curious form of hygienic nakedness (think of High Hefner’s claim that ‘the Playboy girl has no lace, no underwear, she is naked, well-washed with soap and water, and she is happy’), chocolate has come to indicate that its female devourer is a little bit, well, ‘naughty’.

    Take for example the Iranian [sic] business woman, Anousheh Ansari, who paid to go into space:

    "Ansari said to ABC news that she didn’t care what was on the menu on the International Space Station as long as there was one thing – chocolate."


    You’ve paid twenty million dollars to go into space, and all you can think about is chocolate? All humanity’s technological and mathematical capacities stretched to the breaking-point in the name of the abstract, pointless beauty of extrea-terrestrial exploration and yet a Flake in front of the tell might have done?

    Chocolate represents that acceptable everyday extravagance that all-too-neatly encapsulates just the right kind of perky passivity that feminized capitalism just loves to reward with a bubble bath and some crumbly coca solids. It sticks in the mouth a bit.


    one question is what is explicitly Marxist about this? And of what exactly is it an "analysis" "Marxist" and "structural" or otherwise?

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  11. arpege, I think it truly is time to go to a new shrink. Dr. Zizzney is not working wonders on your worldview.

    Thank you.

    I understand that you love Rosa Luxembourg, but your fixation on Zizek is truly diseased at this point, and it means you have decided there is no joy to be cherished in le tout paris at all, so you just sit around and think about how you are Zizek's Victime... it's just sooooo Roman Polanski with Deneuve in 'Repulsion'.

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  12. quoting self from comment elsewhere...

    what fascinates me is the zizekian formula at work and then this explosion of moralising puritanical fury -

    first up (and pink explicitly used for raciist purposes here) the contrast of the proper "clean" woman, who, Power insists must be pink/white because clean, with the American businesswoman identified ethno-tribally as "Iranian", who is not clean and not white, but naughty and eats chocolate.

    then there is the contrast between the noble masculine ruling class of John Galts, those whose splendid achievements are harnessed, and this animal brown woman, bodily vile thing, creature of appetite, who "doesn't deserve the cosmos".

    then there is Power herself staging herself as a simpleton who reads gossipy tabloidy media as if it is the transparent presentation of historical truth - it says on ABC website that Ansari like three women astronauts asked for chocolate! This is not a media produced infotainment product for the bottle blonde Power but pure and revealing data, the transparent exposure of the horrible truth of these vile beings' base lusts.

    then there is the pillory and shaming...

    behold this slut, this wicked wench! Her words thrashing the naughty girl like a switch.

    Take for example the Iranian [sic] business woman, Anousheh Ansari, who paid to go into space....

    You’ve paid twenty million dollars to go into space, and all you can think about is _chocolate_?


    Does Iranian Ansari have any idea of the value and glory and nobility of that which she has insulted with her vile self-indulgent snacking on sweets? Her loathesome bodiliness? Whup. Whip.

    All humanity’s technological and mathematical capacities stretched to the breaking-point in the name of the abstract, pointless beauty of extrea-terrestrial exploration and yet a Flake in front of the telly might have done?

    ... the cheezy Ayn Randian rapture, the sentimental cheap transcendance, the Buzz Lightyear uplift TO INFINITT AND BEYOND! - not for you Iranian woman devourer, base being, satisfied with a flake in front of the telly, vulgar animal.

    Chocolate represents that acceptable everyday extravagance that all-too-neatly encapsulates just the right kind of perky passivity that feminized capitalism just moves to reward with a bubble bath and some crumbly coca solids.

    And there is Power in infancy, babbling without sense, words in imitation of adult language but without meaning, but arranged to display this term "feminized capitalism". Having been a good girl, she gets a bath, and there is the chocolate and chocolate, the chocolate that is rewarded with chocolate, the chocolate that is and isn't chocolate, and sticks in the mouth a bit.

    Incredible how she just dumps her whole subconscious out like that for show on page after page. Next up, having given Ansari the devourer her spanking, she turns the channel to see what the other wicked sluts are up to. Pornification! Watching in dismay, she discovers that her breasts are "yapping dogs" she can't stop petting...No, no, you misunderstood what is meant by "contemporary breasts"...not mine! other women's breasts. Malevolent women. They are yapping dogs that need petting, not hers, other women's, lesbians, Americans, bad women, Iranian chocolate devourers before the telly.

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  13. your fixation on Zizek is truly diseased at this point,

    oh don't be so grim patty poo. it's a hobby, and I only pursue it when i can bear to put down the toblerone and vibrator.

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  14. besides, it will be finished soon. I've really been just throwing these things out for the hacker - we have one, and s/he only likes zizz themed posts - like breadcrumbs for the pigeons.

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  15. anyway - so aerospace industry and high tech are "abstract" now - no production, no exploitation. on the other hand, chocolate production requires no "technological" or "mathematical" capacities, its made by the elves alone without the Galts that manage the elves in the production of rockets and space stations etc..

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  16. "on the other hand, chocolate production requires no "technological" or "mathematical" capacities, its made by the elves alone without the Galts that manage the elves in the production of rockets and space stations etc.."

    Funny you should mention this. I was just learning in microbiology that no one has yet figured out exactly which species of bacteria are used to ferment the cocoa beans that are made into chocolate. They have to be fermented on site in South America to have the "chocolate" flavor people love. So, in a manner of speaking, the science of chocolate is even *more* mysterious and unknown than rocket science.

    But, you know, white people didn't think it up so it's not advanced and lofty. It's all bodily and appetite-driven and presumably sinful.

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  17. "before the telly"

    You can't help but wonder if some of the talk about how "women" and "feminists" behave now isn't autobiography. Power certainly watches enough TV herself, and apparently quite a few commercials. Maybe she has a chocolate addiction or something. Maybe she thinks it's too capitalistical to eat chocolate, but she secretly craves it and has naughty dreams about eating chocolate in a bubble bath. So obviously ALL women do, because ALL women are beholden to the "void"-like "feminine" Big Other. Which just fills us with anxiety and neuroses.

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  18. "Women can't be friends under capitalism. Any possible motivating cause for solidarity has been assimilated effortlessly into the perky slipstream of passive-aggressive aspiration and self-indulgent consumerism."

    Again- projection? Maybe it has never occurred to her that calling 99% of all women consumerist sluts who are mindless automatons perpetrating "gynocapitalism" on humanity isn't going to win friends and influence people. Just a thought...

    "Whilst I obviously think that free space travel should be a matter of brutal programmatic centrality for any government"

    Snicker. Riiiight. I mean, I want socialism too, but it ain't going to mean free rides up into space for the people. Given that it only takes, oh, two or three years to get one trip into space engineered by a team of thousands, the queue might get a wee bit long. The sheer pointlessness of making a statement like this reminds me of somebody who's just saying something to be heard saying it. It's like "see, I'm so hardline I even want free space travel for das Volk!"

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  19. Again- projection?

    Seriously. And this is the subtext of everything she writes and why men love it. Her little girl girly act hides a really vicious, unscrupulous and manipulative person. But not very well.

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  20. The sheer pointlessness of making a statement like this reminds me of somebody who's just saying something to be heard saying it.

    yes she's all this - just self-dramatising, no content except illustrating herself. like out of Bernice Bobs Her Hair. or really usually she sounds like a miss american contestant: "i think feminism should be for all women and concerned about the planet and we all should remember that it's inner beauty that counts."

    here on the summer reading recommends :

    Being a fairly curmudgeonly type, I don’t really like the idea of summer reading, implying as it does some kind of listless sangria-addled page-flicking on a beach. Having said that, there is a way in which at least some trips put you in a reflective mood, which is often fairly good for getting to grips with serious issues or difficult concepts (going on holiday with me sounds fun, no?). To that end, I would recommend trying to read Vol 1 of Marx’s Capital, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit or Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Only joking. I usually try to read some left-wing, or at least strange, account of whichever place it is I’m visiting. Reading Regis Debray’s vicious anti-travelogue, Against Venice, near St Mark’s Square whilst overhearing Antonio Negri talk about how he hand-makes pasta a couple of years ago was particularly amusing.


    It's empty of content one expects (something about some books she's going to recommend) and all about illustrating herself. And her "joke" finds bizarre company for Capital. But having never read Capital she doesn't know it's not a dull pointless slog like the other two and that it's subject matter could not be more different than those famous speculative idealist tomes. These three books just mean something to her as props of her image.


    very interesting about chocolate - i saw something about workers in this industry once, have never tasted it, because it's too expensive, women work making it for decades and don't know what it tastes like.

    nasty greedy all devouring women of gyocapitalism "literally making nothing"

    I really really loathe her but of course its her male supporters who are doing all the damage because they are the ones who reward this subservience and this fraudulent anger and call it feminism - this is the true feminism, the one they can applaud, and as it says all the other women are only vile selfish sluts using the oppression of good girls like nina power as a cover for their selfish greed and evil, their consumer debt, their destruction of socialist movements, the animal appetites which debase and thwart male striving for transcendance...It's men who crucially centre this and legitimate this and make it pay, this performance of their own anger directed at women objects of desire and hatred, and who deride and mock and punish really angry women who challenge their domination and struggle against the status quo.

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  21. This is a well-written and popular social history of chocolate: Carol Off, Bitter Chocolate: The Dark Side of the World's Most Dangerous Sweet.

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  22. Also worth a look:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Next_Room_(or_The_Vibrator_Play)

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  23. Sounds good, Hollowentry and Pinkerton. I'm increasingly interested in South American roles in biopolitics, it's just one of those huuuge topics you could devote your life to. I watched a decent doc recently about Evo Morales and MAS called Cocaleros.

    If the Qlipoths know of any more like this, I'd love to take recs.

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  24. Btw, Chuckie- if you truly haven't heard of B. Spears, I envy you.

    "so aerospace industry and high tech are "abstract" now"

    Interesting how this word abstract functions as an unqualified good in all of this type of discourse. That's debatable, first of all, but it's also a misnomer in a lot of instances. You can appreciate space travel from an "abstract" perspective, but space travel itself is far from abstract- there's plenty of good old fashioned physical labor behind all that, it's not just immaterial labor.

    And here's the where strange ellision of reality and the slip into idealism happens for them. Over and over. It pivots around the abuse of the word "abstract" quite frequently.

    We're not just beaming people up like Scottie. And I can think of solid, materialist, slightly utilitarian-twinged arguments that would hold it as almost self-evident that space travel is a waste of precious resources, no matter what form of government's in place.

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  25. "heard of", yes. "heard", no.

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  26. Wish I could say the same. I still wake up, now and then, with "Oops, I did it again..." in my head. And that puts me in a special place in hell even poor Dante did not imagine.

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  27. "Carol Off, Bitter Chocolate: The Dark Side of the World's Most Dangerous Sweet."

    looks like a good pendant to Mintz on sugar...which is also in chocolate.

    as is shipping and advertising and finance, and therefore satellites, and therefore aerospace.

    what is the name for this goofy infantile way of thinking the ZizneyCorp practises and encourages? This treating of the world as allegory but in the most cheezy crap genres....then academic production consists of vague exhortations to see "the link" between these allegorical figures - "rethinking the link between chocolate and Women in a Marxist Feminist perspective requires pauying moren attention to the global context of changes in the nature of work."

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  28. 'then academic production consists of vague exhortations to see "the link" between these allegorical figures - "rethinking the link between chocolate and Women in a Marxist Feminist perspective requires pauying moren attention to the global context of changes in the nature of work."'

    Ha- this is exactly what I used to do when I was in grad school (social research) whenever I'd procrastinated something to the last minute, usually because I'd been partying too much or what have you.

    My research proposals would be all padded with unexplicated "links" between things. But I at least knew to be ashamed of myself for handing that kind of thing in...

    Take a a little of this author's work/social phenomenon, then a pinch of historical circumstances. Add a few gradiose-sounding but tenuous "links" between them, stir, halfbake- and voila!

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  29. One the best examples of this academic style was in some German discussion, so long I've forgotten exactly what, where the author comments on receiving a draft from agrad student, who had revised the phrase "some kind of connection" to "the dialectical connection."

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