Sometimes there’s a typical cultural mindset centered on how hard something you desire to do is and how you should never even have the audacity to do it because of that difficulty. Sometimes you push through to do those things anyway& it raises hackles in many others whose naysaying and warnings were ignored.
There’s another mindset centered on wanting to do something or be seen as a doer of something solely keyed to what someone thinks others might think of them upon finding out they do that thing.
One of the things that all this Ai does that really registers as love to me is it helps both of those camps doing it for those reasons(or not doing it for those reasons) to do these things. It’s the great equalizer between those heists.
Even though I believe that insecurities are driving them away from their true artistic selves by going down either of those paths, I also believe the circle eventually closes, usually by fire.
The wanting to say “yeah, I am writing a book too” is a awkward one for me when I hear it come out of someone “Just so you know~” style. Even my congratulations for doing it have tended to be weirdly received coming up, and it took the longest time to understand why. No amount of interest IN their book was ever enough, and often not even the allowed topic of discussion. & that became the separation of the wheat and the chaff for me…so I just learned to avoid those discussions.
I write…because the stories that a logline sets off in me are delicious. and I have to get them out of me so that I can run my eyes over them gluttonously whenever I feel like tasting that vibration. It is both supremely selfless because you offer your babies up to the world for whomever those babies charged out of you to meet out in the world…and erotically egoic, obscenely gratuitous to be on the far side of having nailed the tale you had on you to tell for the characters tickling you.
If you are quietly centered on whomever you felt inferior to ( from your own pov, usually) who had written books prior to you finding the tools, help & balls to just write, the accolades you get from doing it will ring hollow and never wash the true taste of insincerity out of your mouth that was the inner impetus.
When you hear of writers wandering around in their hair shirts, flagellating themselves after some modicum of success, it’s usually keyed to this headscape of the impetus beginning outside of them & theirhigher self taking them to task over that leaning, as far as I have seen.
Otherwise you’ll get to the end of that process hollow, having done all that work for nothing, trying to prove something.
You were never able to access what lit up whoever got your nose out of joint being a writer in flow when you saw them in the throes of it because you’re at the river for the wrong assed reasons.
That is still going to have to be inwardly addressed if you want to not look at yourself as a sham.
It is the Same with any creative endeavor.
umm…okay… but Where is all this coming from?
Jennifer (fucking) Lopez.
I waited…until the stupid reactive zeitgeist towards it mellowed a bit because I wanted what I truly have been called to say on this to be heard Martin Luther style, nailed to the Catholic Church of creativity with all its “indulgences ” up for sale…so I never have to address it again. I can just point querulous cows mooing to this, as my answer to any desires to meander down this primrose path, across the arts.
I’ve been quietly watching all this J-Lo stuff with such absent curiosity because genX wise she could be the poster child for the experience described above. I’ve always thought that going after all those brass rings that mean so much to outside eyes before figuring out if you give a fuck for those aspects has to be exhausting, but it was the way forward offered for an entire generation of folks just now stumbling into their 40s and 50s.
But that “exhaustion” is kind of up for debate. One man’s exhaustion is another’s below average coasting. & knowing which camp of those two you’re in as you’re grappling, helps. But what is not open for debate is the carnage chasing that trail willy-nilly brings to your actual creative life. Because to go after all those worldly important accolades you HAVE to disrespect your true gifting in that diffusion. & from then on out you are faced with your inner fraudulence in the midst of being doused with those accolades you now know are empty, no matter how you twist and bend.
For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world [wealth, fame, success], but forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?
Matthew 16:26
This isn’t even me being all bible-thumpy.
This is me…deciding to explain to some of y’all on variations of the same path you may be mocking Jlo for waking up and finding herself on… to help clarify this shit, 35+ years into this shit.
The presentation of the documentaries and the film are inextricably linked to the unveiling of all of her “don’t look at me!”meanness publicly expressed across this entire journey.
The “media” making a gross story out of everyone finally openly reviling her reads so differently to me. & I think they are doing it as loudly and fanning the flames of discontent in the surging masses to topple the golden calf they erected for those masses to focus on instead of what those masses could be doing to change the world…so those masses will get caught up in pulling that idol down…instead of pulling the curtains open to see those who put the fucking calf up in the first place and storming that castle.
This theory is buoyed and underscored by the actuality of the theme of this year’s Met Gala.
The twisted sci-fi/ Dark Fantasy short story that was the anchor of the “Sleeping Beauties” event was by J.G Ballard.
To give it to you who shot the dawg style… a 1% couple is hiding out in their castle, playing around with their accoutrements…as the the world that gave them the money for all the baroque shit they’re swaddled in burns on the horizon. The hubby has this “device”[ dare I say, literary~] that is able to slow the procession of those angry, looting mobs down as they rage towards the ritzy estate. Again and again dude is able to stave off the arrival of the filthy masses that said estate is built on the bones of in a sense for a wee bit longer. But eventually…the hordes arrive… to nothing but dust. The mofos in the castle have been dead.
In my casually chaotic send up of all this… Jennifer Lopez is cast as the literary device flicked into the fire to slow down the masses turning on the barons.
But that in itself complicates things. Because outside looking in, she is a representation OF that 1%. That documentary on the surface looks like her & Affleck, sitting in their castle fucking around with tchotzkies not saying anything empowering , encouraging or of import from that tower while the world that threw its coins at them to take its mind off the hell said world was becoming, burns.
Lopez is even one of the helmers of the Met Gala this year. How on earth am I casting her as being burnt in effigy in all of this? She IS one of them! right?
If You truly were a creative soul with a true gifting.. but you sold that guiding gift short to be seen as glamorous & famous & in the room due to half-assing in all these other areas… you were never in the room as anything but fodder to be used when necessary.
And once you understood that… every interaction going forward with that realm AND the world would be forever changed for you.
She’s exhibiting all the signs of the despair that’d come with it. The symptoms of living in that.
Doesn’t excuse the horrific behavior exhibited pointing downwards at all.
But it totally explains it when you consider the world she clawwed into with her bare hands.
It explains the psychological NEED of always reminding herself and everyone else…she is from the block. That’s her holding onto some semblance of sanity in a crazy-assed realm full of everything she’s wanted, but like sawdust on her tongue all the same.
Add to that the selfsame “Block” that she has been holding onto in her minds eyes like a fucking psychological life preserver in that golden realm rejected her from the get-go…which is part of WHY she ran away from it in the first place.
All the disgust and outrage and disrespect brayed now at her for her always mentioning “the block” to humanize herself… speaks to what her true interactive experience of that said block probably was. Her mom was a narc, her classmates hated her…and early on when she went back with some success in the late 90s/00s it was an obvious “fuck y’all, I Made it ” tour, even then lol. & it pissed a lot of folks off , even then.
BUT~ if that had been your experience…
Rejection in the realm you were born in, clawing your way in to supposed Heaven of access with all the shit that comes with that, and then recognizing that in that realm you were still looked at with low grade disdain beaming out of all eyes lain on you…
You very well would probably have as a pernicious, vicious norm…seeing disdain & disgust beaming out of every eye you felt on you on that mountain top. It’d probably be palpable. Unable to fully get away from. You’d feel it because everything is a mirror, whether what we see in those mirrors is unchecked or not. You’d feel rage & malice towards those eyeballs that could see what you are… and what you’d been through streaked across you…with no grace, differentiation or true comprehension, only revulsion…and could do Nothing about it. When in reality the inner outrage is over you facing how close all that shit you’d crawled through to be wherever you are is to the surface.
But one thing you Could maybe do… is pettily use…some of the topical power that came from all those accolades…to demand No one be allowed to look you in the eye.
You’d be the monster…but you wouldn’t have to see the monster beamed back out of any eyes around you.
Not really a win, more like a buffer.
Or a levee…that was one day gonna break.
Jennifer Lopez had it in her to be one of the best actresses of our generation.
She still does have it, technically.
I’d say it again for the people balking in the back but it’d be pointless because they are blighted by their hate of her.
But… this call is beyond her usually mentioned artistic oeuvre.
You can’t judge the albums because the brunt are not her raw voice handling business. There’s no point in not saying it. We all already know. & mofos bought millions of the albums anyway. Always knowing, so whatever.
But…Go watch The Cell. …and then extrapolate that talent out , fully and solely invested in out across 30 years. Alongside what she did in the more romantic comedy genre. The Cell was never an outlier. The decision to even DO that movie with all the fluff she was being offered having gotten into those rooms… speaks even now.
Not one other actress of her generation had the cajones to tackle that subject matter then. Not one of them.
That’s flinty as fuck.
Hardly any of them would have the balls even now.
This popstar shit damn near ruined her.
Wanting to be in the same breaths of those who had invested in their singing craft in ways it never even behooved her to was stupid as fuck but there’s not a creative out there who hasn’t drank at least a lil of our own fucking koolaid coming up on the path to get from A to G, one way or another.
She gets so much grace on that shit though.
Because ALL of them from that era were instructed To do that dispersing to become the juggernauts. By the true 1%ers making money off the masses hand over fist by them trying to become those all-arts industries maestros. It was called the Cottage Industry construct and was the only real way forward for an artist wanting to make money beyond the usually fucked up record deals so many got bamboozled into signing and making peanuts from.
Madonna was always able to devour a lens persona wise… but acting? It Took everything she did have in her To nail Eva Peron( & she did nail it) – but I truly believe she did for HERSELF…to stop chasing the acting thing & live out the creative love of her life.
Her best musical work came after being able to let that go & step fully into every aspect of her Anima.
Beyonce’s acting oeuvre has a similar arc. There were multiple forays…and product positioning to prove herself As an “everything”, including as an actor, but after giving it all she had for it (Dreamgirls wise, & killing it) …Her musical work became the societal Ave Maria , Motha of God madness it has been for the masses in the 21st century.
The current mental meltdowns over Beyonce doing country weirdly are hitting some of the same shit Jlo’s running into too, just completely different sectors. Don’t come for me, Beyhive, there’s a point TO the comparison, I promise.
I haven’t even listened to the entire Beyonce country album. I will. In my own time { bzzzzzbzzzz~ settle down}.
But I’ve got too much shit on tap to be humming more of Texas, Hold’em than I already absently am doing this spring. & that is a call my Own art Geist made and will stick to until I finish x, y and z.
But every person jabbing their jaw over the possibility that Beyonce Houston twang since she started the thang Knowles, Carter, Jenkins[ you know what I mean lol ] had a Country album in her needs to be checked for fucking head trauma.
And for the record… To the racist white fucks bleating about how the progeny of the people their pappy’s pappy made fucking prisoners of war { whose blood was spilled all over the territories that y’all now Call country and imbued that territory with fucking defiant holy-ground- ness in the first fucking place by not rising up and killing all of pappy’s offspring off in retaliation for that abusive bloodbath trucked through for hundreds of years } YOU have no claim to the sound of the music that came Out of that land by the grace of God after your ignorant, beastly, criminal ancestors had been nothing but abominations across it…so Shut the fuck up, you niggardly, moronic, inbred on purpose imbeciles. Your spirits are ablaze against Beyonce’s black ass doing ‘country’ as well as she is doing it…because it makes it obvious y’all stole IT too.
[…back to our regularly scheduled content..]
cough*
Telling ya….this “This is me …now, got dammit” movie & the “Told: I’m telling it even tho everybody said I shouldn’t tell it” documentary that goes with it and the superbowl documentary of last year…
these things now collectively seen as the End of the “Jlo era” from the outside looking in…
Are gonna be seen as the beginning of her being able to look herself in the eye all the way as an artist. With none of the arrogant mendacity she’s been shielding her arc with up to this point, creatively speaking. If she survives having done this.
AB
There was no surprise to me at all that the superbowl documentary relied so heavily on the Oscar push for Hustlers for its gravitas.
Why?
Because acting is …That’s her true gifting.
I saw it revealing itself to her, even then when I watched it.
The pitfalls of what she’d professionally leaned into leading with to gain ground within the Machine of the 2000s focused on that ass…that had in effect bitten her in that ass…were all over that movie. I’d bet money that her delving into “the why” behind how she wasn’t “given it…” factored into all this output now.
Because the question that this is me …Now [ the musicumentary(?)] is trying to answer was clearly raised in that last one. Outside, looking in.
The Shakira shiiiiiit irked her(& it wouldn’t have if that was her true gifting).
…That Oscar snub wounded her.
But it’s through the wounds the real light of revelation gets in & out sometimes.
In my opinion…She 100% needed to do this freaking moviisical & documentary.
It’s the purest attempt at a latter-day portrait of an artist facing the fire of where they Might be mid that I have Ever seen in my fn Life.
& it’s not just courageous as fuck. It’s revolutionary as fuck.
AngelBrynner
Why?
This birch just spent 20 to 4O million of the 400 million she has on the books…to create something … that she was told Every Step of the way was professional suicide and she did it anyway, trusting something from the doing OF it was going to benefit her.
She tithed… into her own professional trauma. She paid a tenth of her fortune to be burned at the fucking stake, being “misunderstood” as she was finally starting to figure out how to understand her fucking self.
Bitch got up there and set herself on fucking fire… and in the process burnt alll the old tropes thaaaaat had been defining her, riding her for 30 years…Off.
Then she tossed her inner kid into the driver’s seat and said “fuck it, let’s go.”
The ONE Thing…I realllllllly wished she’d have done … that she didn’t with all this incandescent navel gazing… Is to have REALLY choreographically DONE a Gene Kelly flourish at the end, in the rainy scene. She’s got the umbrella work in her, as anybody who’s seen that get right video has to begrudgingly attest to. The combo of her flavor on that & an ode to Kelly’s athleticism could have choked fuckers up.
…but I got why she didn’t. It was supposed to be the innerkid powering the arthead heart and now driving the ship.
…so she played in the rain like a kid.
Y’al fussy motherfuckers may have just energetically missed the fn point.
And Mrs. Affleck has taken every slap.
Finally.
Because the haranguing y’all are cybernetically beaning her with now (in effigy, at least)…is alll the licentious shit y’all blast ANYONE AROUND YOU WITH THE SHY BALLS TO STEP OUT & TRY TO be AN ARTIST WITH anyway.
Yeah, I said it.
We’ve covered her shitty behavioral whathaveyous… now what about walls every lil arthead coming up around your ass has to build in order to survive being around your negative Nelly asses?
Y’all shiiiiiit on so many creative hearts around y’all at their beginnings! & in ways that often End them! & it is not right! It never has been.
They carry those fucking scars From Y’all right up that fucking mountain top y’all said they’d never reach.
& it ruins it for them because they’re still dragging the fucked up energy of y’all’s inertia-laden, angry, envious asses.
The reason more of these now-moneyed creatives don’t take the chances that would catapult them into being their authentic selves is all the poison darts y’all fuckers spit at anybody willing to at least try to go after a modicum of the things y’all didn’t even have the balls to imagine trying to do.
Yeah she became a caricature of a monster along the way…. But she just culled the mindset up out of all of us that was vibrationally tied to Her shit …and manifestations of variations of it in our shit that made her “failure” so schadenfreude esquely enjoyed… & she burnt it all to ash. In everybody’s faces. Kinda Badass. Kinda ballsy. Lil bit old-school bodacious Broad-esque.
Just saying lol.
AB
What I am saying is the firestorm she’s been hit with [ with 360 million in the bank…] is the same fucking firestorm that hits a fledgling artist trying to break out of the constraints of Podunk, Missouri. All they’ve convinced themselves they had to be to Be an arthead that had fuck all to do with being one, all the posturing and narcissistic BS self-gassing up that it took…to get the fuck out of Podunk, Missouri, away from y’all, To go after their real dreams… develops on the other side of their dreams surviving being stomped out by the worst amongst y’all.
With 36 dollars in the bank. It’s the same fire. This one everyone can just see from the sky.
& real talk? Some of those flames are spot-on.
Alot of that posturing & haughty, phony gladhanding HAS to be burnt the fuck outta you before you can get it done the way your soul came here To geterdone.
Artists are often encouraged to be grandiose assholes once the money hits…for target practice.
I don’t think this will kill JLo at all.
I think her doing this fucking movie is the strongest artistic leap she’s ever made.
& motherfuckers crowing about $20 to $40 million who wouldn’t even spend 40 bucks trying to make their own dream come to life, let alone $400… should take several seats…and look at that part of them silently watching their leading edge try to RIP this bitch’s botched audacity to shreds…instead of having the balls to go after their own desires.
That same thing that was howling “don’t look at me!!” in her exists in every one of you calling out her shit without taking naan a motherfucking chance to go figure out who the fuck you all the way are. Publicly or privately.
Because it’s never about them when you’re looking at the celebrated, raising them up or taking them down.
It’s always about our own shadows & the shit we say & do in our small circles of influence… that we need to correct.
I am not a JLo apologist.
I know what she sat back & allowed when it came to her music production wise back then. She was shady as fuck and technically on paper in a negligent universe[ in lieu of a loving one] deserves all the pain and absence of peace and love she’d theoretically experienced[if the visual volumes are read right]. She owes some bitches apologies that are fucking Meant…or she owes berth. She’s been giving…berth. Wise call.
But I am ambivalent on her “villainy.”
Why? Because y’all held up motherfuckers who couldn’t Do any of it live except the eyefucking part over the ones playing 40 fucking instruments for real and singing their fucking souls out for real this entire century.
Because it sells. That’s why there’s less & less actual talent on display these days, more nonsense leaned into. The efficacy sells and streams and bolsters hollow dreams.
Look.
We live in a time where, constructively speaking, the brunt of us have technical access to tools to achieve our creative intents that the generations before us were fiscally blocked from. The impetuses and the outputs from more coddled spaces in society are going to impact the work produced and presented.
This also means a larger percentage of those with dreams of having names slapped on this & that from aspirational or egotistical places can easily test those things out without the soul-selling that used to often go down in order to get access to those levels. Those middlemen gatekeepers to getting your stuff out are now an option for those too lazy to try doing the work themselves. INSTEAD of the only way. Every creative field. There have been entire industries built of middlemen trapping creatives in fucked up contracts like slaves to incessantly give birth to mess they could hock.
But there’s pushback as of late. That’s… where you hear all the weird rumblings about how this & that artist was worth more to the machine dead than alive really comes from. That’s where all the chaos you’re hearing about artists demanding rights to their Masters back lately stems from too.
Even publishing books.
He who owns the ISBN…owns the actual equity.
Which is why KPM Press pointedly turns shit on its head the way it does. Whole other article.
Some traffic in Mastery, owning your masters…others trade on who owns them & their actual output-which is usually a carbon copy of ones who took chances and died without full recognition for it[pilfered, other tale], happy to be Pokemon.
It’s a choice we all have to make. & neither is wrong.
There will always be people who will always pick the gloss of someone “picking them To get to do something” over the sweat of figuring out the doing of it all themselves so they can know how to pick the help they need to expand…and will give up the isbns that could be equity to their own offspring / legacy to be presented “gang-gang” style.
& there will always be those around ready to sup on that.
Neither choice is inherently wrong unless you as the artist has chosen amiss.
Then you may as well slit your throat because nothing you do will ring TO you with the artistic integrity you crave to be seen with …until you start honoring the sacredness of being gifted for real at all. Even if the world loves you, you will be a byword to yourself until you correct that shit.
And you know what else?
Even those artheads of this swaddled generation are going to have to burn the fucking dross out of them if they really desire to be real artists.
Whatever their “dross” happens to be.
Because fire does what it does to all things. Fire burns.
And when you’re a true arthead, you never know the lip of which volcano erupting you may find yourself moseying along as you go. the landscape shifts. The terroirs transcend. But as long as you truly enjoy the ride without forsaking yourself…your Geist will shine through purely in whatever you choose to fully do.
I truly believe that Folds of folks are going to be supremely blessed by Jlo doing what she’s done.
From the swaddled creative masses coming up with none of the violence the generations before them had to survive to even get to try to hone their craft making weaker tea initially…
to the artists who have “made it” and not once had the balls to say what they really had on their hearts to say, listening to the ones sucking the blood out the the “safe” shit they keep compelling them to do that strangles the true creative in them so much their lives become reduced to excursions in avoiding the numbness and pain of living artistically neutered like that.
I AM curious to see …if she survives the bonfiery pyre she just set herself on fire atop… what her Phoenix feathers are going look like.
AB
Because she finally paid that cosmic arthead price.
If you’re not willing to burn it off to get the dross out your creative gold you do a disservice to your own soul.
& her daughter is being blessed from watching her mom have the balls to set herself on fire for HER work, fuck what ANYbody says about it.
..and thaaaaat ~ is important as fuck for a whole other slew of reasons. I don’t know if it’s true for the boy… but that girl isn’t even 16 and SHE sings like her fucking father. Marc Anthony is a f breaking Demi-Urge vocally and she’s been beautifully, happily, playfully bellowing all over the place for the last few tweeny years, just like her dad.
Now…because of her mom proving she can survive the flames of the fickle masses going full speed ahead with her own Geist that kid is going to be going into the machine with a different kind of armor if she decides to pursue music for real , thanks to what her mom just modeled. One just as important as what she gets from her father.
in closing…
Lol- yeah, this gets one more “in closing” forehead pop for the brayers mwahmwahmwahing about her spending 40 million when they’d not spend $4 on a?sketchbook dedicated to their own dreams and delusions of grandeur.
I’m glibly calling y’all dream killers for what you do to yourselves to talk You outta creative leaps…& to target those with even inklings of courage close range to ya…
but I’m also saying…
For fucks sake, do the Math! Sge accrued $400 million (net, allegedly), spent $20million (to 40 million allegedly) to set herself on fire…& at the last minute…After putting that tithe towards her own arthead development down…got how much from Amazon prime?
…an undisclosed amount.
She made a big enough recoup of whatever she’d just spent that she took it, whistling back to the bank ROI- wise.
The likelihood of y’all being the nastiest towards her having that split difference in your own account being nonexistent is one rub. The other is whatever is there probably ain’t there from taking risks & following your arthead geist, with all the implications that come from doing so.
I’d love the strategic audacity & willingness to burn in This is me whenever over these phony fake feel good big box biopics as of late where everybody’s being coy and fulla shit.
Yeah, I said it.
YOU have to see the genius & artistry in your life lived. Fuck what anyone else’s opinion of it is. You gotta be willing to Die on that hill on the way to truly living.