Filed under: copouts, music, personal | Tags: freda payne, kari ferrell, magazines, print, stupidity, the internet
I spent most of the last two days re-reading everything I’ve ever written, more or less, and decided that I’m getting dumber. This will be important in a minute.
Joe from Joe.My.God just updated his Facebook status and mentioned that Freda Payne was on American Idol tonight. I had no idea, and don’t really know why she was there since this was disco week and Payne’s last hit was in 1971. However, she is awesome. I haven’t mentioned my love of Freda Payne much–though her excellent Easiest Way To Fall was on one of the mixtapes sixteen months ago–but she’s really fabulous. Reviews of her performance tonight aren’t so good, though I refuse to acknowledge the opinion of anyone who starts off an article in the misinformed style of whoever wrote this thing. (It was the first story when I did a Google news search.) Not that I’m pursuing journalism jobs or anything, but how is this nonsense acceptable in an era with so many unemployed writers? (His getting the song title wrong bugs me, too, because I just spent an hour thinking I had missed Payne singing Since U Been Gone, which was sort of blowing my mind.)
Payne’s appearance is sort of funny to me because this morning I reread the one other post here where I mentioned her, the one where I used Band of Gold as an example of why pop is just as valuable, if not more so, than the Rolling Stone-endorsed canon of rock is. (It was a pre-emptive defense of why I thought that Mary J Blige’s Real Love, and not Smells Like Teen Spirit, is the best single of the nineties. Which it is, by the way.)
Anyway. As I was saying before, I’m getting dumber. These days I rarely write anything longer than two pages, I don’t read books criticially, and I can’t remember the last time I actually tried to argue a point in any kind of meaningful way. I mean, I’m also not in college anymore, and that’s obviously a huge part of it. But rereading older stuff I’ve written, a lot of it’s really pretty okay and not nearly as pretentious as I would have expected.
Filed under: this very blog
Lots of hits from Twitter today, but no one I know linked here lately… Interesting… Anybody know who did?
There was an anti-trafficking rally held at the Rhode Island State House yesterday, which worries me. Once again, people seem completely oblivious to the fact that consensual sex where money is exchanged is not the same thing as human trafficking.
It keeps happening here. People try to criminalize prostituion on the grounds that the women are victims, they propose laws that would send the prostitutes/victims to jail, and then they don’t understand why people think that’s a bad idea. There are currently multiple bills in the state legislature to ban indoor prostitution, and all of them seek mainly to put the prostitutes in jail.
That this rally took place just days after an escort was tied up and robbed at gunpoint is also very inappropriate. Was the message of the rallyers that she was the one who should have been arrested? That it was wrong of this woman to have called the cops? That she should go to jail for possibly finding a murderer?
It’s true that Rhode Island is full of brothels thinly disguised as massage parlors. But the argument of the anti-trafficking people seems to be that, except for the sex act itself, these places are fully untouchable by the law right now. Do we know that? Are all workers properly documented? And over the age of 18? Are any of these women living in the massage parlors? Are the businesses filing fully legit taxes every year? Are the buildings even up to fire code, or OSHA standards? My guess is no, and probably a visit from the Health Department could solve lots of the state’s problems. Also, I don’t think making prostitution illegal is going to make anything better for anyone, particularly for the trafficked women, who will have even fewer rights than they do now.
[Photo via the Mount Hope Neighborhood Association]
