Sunday, April 19, 2009
Ian Tomlison, Susan Boyle and Keri Ferrell
The only link between them is they're all on my mind this afternoon.
1) Ian Tomlinson
On April 1, protestors gathered in London to demonstrate against the G20 leadership of the capitalist world. The police responded by 'kettling' them into tight spaces and not letting them leave, much like corralling cattle. Those who got in the way were beaten, like Ian Tomlinson, a 47 year old newsvendor who was on his way home. He collapsed and later died.
Ian Tomlinson on his last walk.
At first the police claimed they helped Tomlinson when he collapsed, but protestors threw bottles at them. The right-wing net trolls leapt all over this, calling the demonstrators monstrous and subhuman. The cops investigated themselves and found nothing wrong; a coroner called the cause of death 'heart attack'. But flaws soon emerged in the story, chiefly because someone filmed Tomlinson being struck by the police. Soon things began to unravel. An independent investigation was launched; the officers involved were suspended; a new autopsy was conducted, finding the cause of death to be abdominal hemmorhage - internal bleeding. At this point, we may be looking at the first time (to my knowledge) a police officer could be charged with manslaughter.
Anyone who's ever gone to a global justice demonstration knows the police don't hold back from beating and bloodying those who get in their way. But this appears to be the tipping point where suddenly the demonstrators' stories start being believed. The head of the independent commission is reminding police they're the servants, not the masters of the people, and he credits videos by protestors' mobile phones with the evidence needed to prosecute.
Just some bad apples.
It's sweet to see naive liberals up in arms about heavy-handed policing - it means they thought everything was working fine before. But more significant is that the words of hundreds of protestors over the years mean nothing. Even the police murders at Genoa only led to assault convictions. However, video evidence is enough to start heads rolling. All those new surveillance technologies interfere with the state's ability to suppress dissent. And as a society, we fetishize technology to the extent that it supplants the evidence of real people who, being 'biased', can't be believed.
2) Susan Boyle
She's the 47 year old Scottish spinster with a learning disability who spent her life looking after her mother and has never been kissed. Then, on Britain's Got Talent, she bucked expectations and proved she could sing.
I know it's corny. The whole thing looks staged: for one thing, why do the audience leap to their feet as soon as she starts singing? And Tanya Gold makes the excellent point that the drama of redemption wouldn't work unless we judged her for being hideous - and therefore a talentless hag - in the first place. Moreover, her story lends itself to the worst sort of merit-based triumphalism: the narrative that 'the little person can succeed against all odds' is very handy to capitalist ideology in a recession, when little people are getting stomped on. But that said, I found her performance touching. And maybe the 30 million youtube hits show people are willing to identify with the underdog, not the glamorous and powerful.
3) Kari Ferrell
Keri Ferrell. Pic used without permission, but that's kind of the point.
Kari Ferrell is the 'hipster grifter', a 22 year old Korean-American wanted for defrauding hipsters of $60,000. Coming out of the Salt Lake City punk scene, she used her sexuality to gain friends and borrow money from gob-smacked young scene boys (and some women.) Then she moved to Brooklyn, talked her way into a job at Vice Magazine, and went through a series of boyfriends, borrowing money from them and repaying them with cheques from a closed account. She's now on the run again.
I find Ferrell fascinating for a number of reasons. Firstly, she cultivated the hipster aesthetic: she even has a tattoo on her back that reads "I love beards." Secondly, she sounds less like a calculating fraud artist, and more like someone with borderline personality disorder: she told numerous friends she was dying of cancer, to the point of showing them bloodied kleenexes which she'd apparently coughed up blood into. She sounds like someone who desperately needs drama and the attention that flows from it. Thirdly, despite my ongoing dislike for hipsters, I don't think that having skinny jeans and plastic-slat sunglasses means you deserve to be ripped off. (Except if you work at the evil, reactionary Vice Magazine - in which case you deserve everything you get.) But she was smart enough to speak the hipster code, and inveigled herself into the scene by looking and speaking the right way.
Asian, therefore cute, therefore harmless? - Cibo Matto
Finally, she's a young Asian woman who doesn't fit the proper image of aggressive huckster. The stereotypes of race and gender she falls under are 'cute, exotic and harmless'. Cibo Matto, the 1990s alt-rock fronted by two Japanese women, struggled with the trope, which dictated that no matter how much funk & hip-hop they incorporated into their act, they were seen as 'quirky' first and musicians second. Ferrell made the best of what she was given. That doesn't make her a folk-hero, but if a desperate, needy woman found herself in a world that trusted cute, Asian women, I don't think it's her fault if she used that to her advantage.
Edit: a friend of mine forwarded this to me - frickin hilarious:
1) Ian Tomlinson
On April 1, protestors gathered in London to demonstrate against the G20 leadership of the capitalist world. The police responded by 'kettling' them into tight spaces and not letting them leave, much like corralling cattle. Those who got in the way were beaten, like Ian Tomlinson, a 47 year old newsvendor who was on his way home. He collapsed and later died.
Ian Tomlinson on his last walk.
At first the police claimed they helped Tomlinson when he collapsed, but protestors threw bottles at them. The right-wing net trolls leapt all over this, calling the demonstrators monstrous and subhuman. The cops investigated themselves and found nothing wrong; a coroner called the cause of death 'heart attack'. But flaws soon emerged in the story, chiefly because someone filmed Tomlinson being struck by the police. Soon things began to unravel. An independent investigation was launched; the officers involved were suspended; a new autopsy was conducted, finding the cause of death to be abdominal hemmorhage - internal bleeding. At this point, we may be looking at the first time (to my knowledge) a police officer could be charged with manslaughter.
Anyone who's ever gone to a global justice demonstration knows the police don't hold back from beating and bloodying those who get in their way. But this appears to be the tipping point where suddenly the demonstrators' stories start being believed. The head of the independent commission is reminding police they're the servants, not the masters of the people, and he credits videos by protestors' mobile phones with the evidence needed to prosecute.
Just some bad apples.
It's sweet to see naive liberals up in arms about heavy-handed policing - it means they thought everything was working fine before. But more significant is that the words of hundreds of protestors over the years mean nothing. Even the police murders at Genoa only led to assault convictions. However, video evidence is enough to start heads rolling. All those new surveillance technologies interfere with the state's ability to suppress dissent. And as a society, we fetishize technology to the extent that it supplants the evidence of real people who, being 'biased', can't be believed.
2) Susan Boyle
She's the 47 year old Scottish spinster with a learning disability who spent her life looking after her mother and has never been kissed. Then, on Britain's Got Talent, she bucked expectations and proved she could sing.
I know it's corny. The whole thing looks staged: for one thing, why do the audience leap to their feet as soon as she starts singing? And Tanya Gold makes the excellent point that the drama of redemption wouldn't work unless we judged her for being hideous - and therefore a talentless hag - in the first place. Moreover, her story lends itself to the worst sort of merit-based triumphalism: the narrative that 'the little person can succeed against all odds' is very handy to capitalist ideology in a recession, when little people are getting stomped on. But that said, I found her performance touching. And maybe the 30 million youtube hits show people are willing to identify with the underdog, not the glamorous and powerful.
3) Kari Ferrell
Keri Ferrell. Pic used without permission, but that's kind of the point.
Kari Ferrell is the 'hipster grifter', a 22 year old Korean-American wanted for defrauding hipsters of $60,000. Coming out of the Salt Lake City punk scene, she used her sexuality to gain friends and borrow money from gob-smacked young scene boys (and some women.) Then she moved to Brooklyn, talked her way into a job at Vice Magazine, and went through a series of boyfriends, borrowing money from them and repaying them with cheques from a closed account. She's now on the run again.
I find Ferrell fascinating for a number of reasons. Firstly, she cultivated the hipster aesthetic: she even has a tattoo on her back that reads "I love beards." Secondly, she sounds less like a calculating fraud artist, and more like someone with borderline personality disorder: she told numerous friends she was dying of cancer, to the point of showing them bloodied kleenexes which she'd apparently coughed up blood into. She sounds like someone who desperately needs drama and the attention that flows from it. Thirdly, despite my ongoing dislike for hipsters, I don't think that having skinny jeans and plastic-slat sunglasses means you deserve to be ripped off. (Except if you work at the evil, reactionary Vice Magazine - in which case you deserve everything you get.) But she was smart enough to speak the hipster code, and inveigled herself into the scene by looking and speaking the right way.
Asian, therefore cute, therefore harmless? - Cibo Matto
Finally, she's a young Asian woman who doesn't fit the proper image of aggressive huckster. The stereotypes of race and gender she falls under are 'cute, exotic and harmless'. Cibo Matto, the 1990s alt-rock fronted by two Japanese women, struggled with the trope, which dictated that no matter how much funk & hip-hop they incorporated into their act, they were seen as 'quirky' first and musicians second. Ferrell made the best of what she was given. That doesn't make her a folk-hero, but if a desperate, needy woman found herself in a world that trusted cute, Asian women, I don't think it's her fault if she used that to her advantage.
Edit: a friend of mine forwarded this to me - frickin hilarious:
Labels: hipsters, police, protestors, Susan Boyle
