El Perro Del Mar

El Perro del Mar is the musical work of Swedish songstress Sarah Assbring. Drawing influence from ’60s girl-group music, church hymns, buddhist mantras, and twee pop, Assbring makes slow, sad, achingly beautiful pop-songs that favor simple repetition over overblown ostentation.

Assbring (born in 1977) was raised in Gothenburg, and was exposed to music at an early age via the record collection of her jazz-loving father. From her childhood, Assbring wanted to “first and foremost” be a singer. “I remember being amazed by Annie Lennox and Kate Bush as a kid,” Assbring has recalled, to Identity Theory. “I was totally into their way of going in and out of different personalities, almost as a form of acting when singing.”

Assbring abandoned early piano lessons because of their “restrictive” nature, and took to singing in a church choir throughout her adolescence and into early adulthood.

In 2003, mired in depression and feeling like a victim of her own “destructive and negative” attitude, Assbring escaped on a holiday to Spain. On an isolated beach, she came across a dog, and via a strange process of self-identification —”I had had this feeling of feeling like a dog, all hopeless and tired,” she told Pitchfork— she came to two conclusions: she had to start making music, and her name had to be El Perro del Mar (Spanish for “the Dog from the Sea”).

via Altmusic.about.com

Change of Heart

From The Valley To The Stars

El Perro del Mar on iTunes:

Over the past several months, I’ve begun to watch competitive cooking shows obsessively. I mean, I don’t really know how to turn on my own oven and have never cooked anything in my life, but watching food shows has given me a desire to learn how to cook something simple…someday in the far future. But while these competitive food shows are certainly good for cooking tips, I couldn’t help but notice that women are largely underrepresented.

One of my favorite shows is Chopped, where four professional chefs are given a very short amount of time to make a dish composed of three or four random ingredients. There is usually only one female competitor on each episode. Every once in a while, you’ll see two women, but it’s unusual. There was only one episode I can remember where all four competitors were female, and the rarity of such an occurrence was pointed out by one of the judges.

Iron Chef, which is probably one of the biggest competitive cooking shows out there, has noticeably few women. In the show, a chef challenges one of the Iron Chefs to a cook-off. There were no female Iron Chefs on the original Japanese version. I don’t watch the show that often, but I’ve never seen an episode with a female competitor. I don’t think my perception of the show as a boys’ club is too far off, since Wikipedia’s section on notable challengers lists twenty men’s names.

To the Food Network’s credit, teams of judges on these shows tend to be closer to equal in terms of gender representation (although not quite). Of the 18 professional chefs and restaurateurs that have served as judges on Chopped, seven are female, and two out of five judges that have served on every season are female. There’s almost always at least one or two women on the judging panels of Iron Chef, Iron Chef America, and Next Iron Chef. On every season of The Next Food Network Star, two out of four judges were female.

Also, interestingly enough, the pastry and dessert shows feature more women than men. Cupcake Wars, where competitors have to bake themed cupcakes for an event, is Chopped’s opposite: usually there are three female competitors and one male, and every once in a while there are two men. Sweet Genius, pastry chef Ron Ben-Israel’s way to find up-and-coming dessert artists, usually features two women and two men. Challenge, an extreme cake competition, also averages out at two men and two women. Perhaps this is because desserts are seen as less intense or less difficult to prepare than “serious” gourmet cooking, and therefore women are allowed to participate in equal numbers (even though that’s bullshit).

If these shows are supposed to represent reality, it surprises me that there aren’t more women in the professional cooking field. The Food Network seriously needs to work on equal representation of men and women chefs in their shows.

April Smith

“I was the surprise,” says April Smith, the bonus baby her parents won late and whose moxie and dash astounded everyone she met. Today, she remains a welcome bolt: a loose-lipped, cocked-hip gal whose music and mien could buoy the Titanic.

As she took her place in the family, April developed a muscular, mellifluous voice and high-flying showmanship. Her mom adored Queen (”If you didn’t know a Brian May solo in the first few notes, you weren’t her child”) and her dad gave her his old 8-track tape player, letting her buy Elvis and Led Zeppelin tapes at yard sales. During summer vacations with Aunt Cricket and Uncle Fred, April discovered songwriters like Tom Waits and Kinky Friedman, stealing Fred’s cassettes and absorbing observational story-songs in a backyard tent. Waits so impressed April that she felt compelled to dress up – using Fred’s hat, pipe and Junior Mints (she placed them on her teeth) each time she played his music.

When she began to write songs, she incorporated elements musical and otherwise, some contradictory in theme or vibe – to anyone but April. Because she’d been so diversely inspired, it was a cinch to stitch together Queen’s majesty, big band’s sunny optimism, the terror and despair of horror flicks and Edgar Allan Poe writings, and the cottonmouthed wit and poignancy of Wes Anderson films. From this influential primordial stew came April’s new album Songs for a Sinking Ship.

The album’s sound was informed by the ’30s and ’40s, juke joints and cabaret, the Andrews Sisters and, of course, Waits. Smith covers a wide range as a singer and songwriter, from the heartbroken ballad “Beloved” to the cheeky tell-off “Stop Wondering” and the sexy swagger of “Wow and Flutter.” Her voice swoons and seduces, and then escalates to breathtaking peaks, backed by piano, upright bass, drums, guitar, horns, ukulele, accordion and even, when the occasion warrants, a suitcase used as a bass drum.

Her songs and her playful, confident performances – in which she’ll wear a tutu and impishly tease her band, The Great Picture Show – now win her fans everywhere. 

via April Smith Music

Colors

Movie Loves A Screen

April Smith and the Great Picture Show on iTunes

a still from the video

I would be lying if I said that while watching the recent viral video “Hot Problems” (or, to be accurate, about 45 seconds of “Hot Problems” before I gave up), I didn’t blankly stare in disbelief, then roll my eyes and feel more than a little bit disheartened. And yet, despite comments made by YouTube viewers as well as the mainstream media, the depression I felt after watching the musical attempts of 17-year-olds Drew Garrett and Lauren Willey was not based on the concept of this video representing a generation of conceited, vapid young women. As a teen myself, it’s blatantly apparent that there’s a much more concerning problem at the heart of this video, and, more specifically, the vitriolic response to it.

We live in a society that relentlessly targets young women and indoctrinates them into believing that, above all, their appearance should be their priority, the defining element of their identity. Young women are bombarded with images that glorify unattainable standards of beauty—in fact, by the age of 17 the average woman has received more than 250,000 commercial messages through the media, many featuring photoshopped, idealized and otherwise manipulated images of female beauty. Our televisions stream a version of “reality” in which young women are more preoccupied with their appearance and attracting men than with actually making any kind of substantive contribution to the world. In fact, thanks to this reality TV culture, one in four teen girls now expects to become famous; not famous for doing something, mind you, but famous for being. Being what? I’d bet all my money that such young women expect to be famous for being “hot”—for being a face on the cover of magazines, a body club promoters pay to show up at their clubs.

This is the standard we have set for young women. And yet when young women, like the stars of “Hot Problems,” consume this message and dare to throw it back to us, dare to call themselves hot, we destroy them. The media gleefully snatched the opportunity to tear these two apart. Comments on the YouTube video itself almost unanimously declare that the pair is ugly. Even supposedly reputable media sources like the Huffington Post more subtly questioned the girls’ attractiveness; the article’s title declared that the girls couldn’t get dates to prom, and the first line snidely stated, “These ‘hot’ girls’ problems are now everyone’s problems.” In an appearance on “Good Morning America,” the girls were asked to evaluate their own looks on national television, coaxed to clarify to the world that “we don’t think we’re that hot.”

Yes, I certainly find a video of two of my peers singing about how “hot” they are to be incredibly problematic for many reasons. I may have had a strong urge to futilely yell, “READ A BOOK” at my computer screen after being subjected to their admittedly painfully constructed lyrics. But what I find most problematic about this video is not what many sources seem to have identified as a conceited, over-confident representation of my generation; what I find most problematic is the response. I find it horrifying that we live in a society that can gleefully tear them down, not just effectively enforcing the idea that “hotness” is unattainable—that we’re doomed forever to a cycle of hating ourselves because our desired outcome is impossible—but more broadly that there doesn’t seem to be a way in which young women can win within this societal structure.

Now, before launching into this, let me make one thing clear: I love the TV show Bones and have for a long time. I also kind of like Rizzoli & Isles, but there’s one thing that’s been irking me about these two series, even though they feature women in the leading roles and (especially in the case of Bones) have diverse casts. My problem is the fact that while both Temperance Brennan of Bones and Maura Isles of Rizzoli & Isles are portrayed as unusually smart and gifted females, they are also portrayed as socially awkward to a point that borders on a psychological disorder.

As anyone who has read The Yellow Wallpaper might know, there’s been a long standing tradition of portraying women as crazy and in need of psychiatric assistance in order to undermine their intelligence (or, as the folks at Jezebel recently pointed out, just to undermine them in general).By portraying both Temperance and Maura as gifted-but-mentally-challenged individuals this old stereotype is reinforced.

But there’s more to it. Think about all the police procedural dramas out there that have especially smart male characters (Gill Grissom of CSI is one example that comes to mind). While these male characters are sometimes portrayed as a bit goofy, there’s never the same social inhibition or hints at disorders as with Temperance and Miranda. In male characters, being smart is astonishing and awe-inspiring, but is rarely seen as being “crazy.” The only reason I can see for this is gender. I mean, wouldn’t Temperance’s social blunders be just as fun if she was a man? Or in the case of Miranda: would it detract from the show if she was socially well-adjusted? I really don’t thinks. After all, is it so much to ask of the writers of these shows to create opportunities for tension and/or humor without making a smart woman look like she should see a shrink?

Of course, there are smart female characters that are able to be smart without being portrayed as “crazy”: Catherine Willows in CSI, Stella Bonasera in CSI:NY or Angela Montenegro in Bones are all good examples. But it’s still revealing to see that women that are not only smart, but specifically exceptionally talented in male-dominated fields (forensic anthropology in Bones and medical examiner in Rizzoli & Isles) are portrayed as slightly crazy. The idea that too much knowledge is just not good for women, and that women can’t actually be as good (let alone better than) men in traditionally male-dominated fields still seems to linger in some people’s minds, which in turn leads to the perpetuation of this harmful stereotype. And here we are, still wondering why there aren’t more women in the so-called hard-sciences. When women who are in those fields on TV are portrayed as “crazy” is it such a stretch to understand why female viewers might shy away from those fields?

Nina Storey

Nina Storey uses the phrase “21st-century soul” to describe her music, “because it’s rooted in a soul sound with bluesy overtones,” she explained to AfterEllen.com. “The music that I write is a mix of singer-songwriter acoustic stuff, and then there’s rock, and then there’s quirky stuff that’s totally out of the box.”

A Boulder, Colo., native now living in Los Angeles, Storey has been singing pretty much her whole life — professionally since the age of 12. She is self-taught, but grew up in a very musical family: Her mother is a songwriter and producer (and also acts as her manager and publicist), and her dad is a sound engineer. Her parents always encouraged her to pursue her craft.

Storey said she hasn’t talked about her sexual orientation in interviews before this one. “I’ve always kept a very private personal life my entire musical career,” she said. “I’ve always been kind of protective of that. Mostly it’s just because I’m a pretty shy person, and it feels kind of vulnerable to me. But I think it’s really important to be a whole person. In my daily life, I’ve always been out and that’s never been an issue.”

The subject matter of Storey’s songs runs the gamut from relationships to politics and social commentary. “I definitely have some music that’s more pointed and more out, and then some stuff that’s more general,” she said. “Personally I’ve lived a life where I’ve had relationships with men and women and celebrated both of those things equally, and my music has always reflected that.”

But Storey and the persona of a particular song aren’t necessarily one and the same. “That’s the beautiful safety that you have writing,” she said. “It may or may not be about me. It may be thinly veiled or completely fictitious. I would like the listener to have the opportunity to interpret it however they want.”

Storey described some of her songs as gender-bending, such as “Better Man,” where she sings in the first person of the people who have inspired her to be a better man. She also has a song about someone transitioning. “I toy with the concept of identity,” Storey said.

“If you’re writing music from a passionate place, the listener is hopefully going to identify with that,” she said, regardless of their gender or sexual orientation.

Bio via After Ellen

This Naked Woman

When I’m Gone

Nina Storey on iTunes: