I LOVE Helter Skelter--Liliko is one of the great monsters, all desire and no satisfaction. We can't all be Kozue (born into our correct purpose and accepting of it).
the ending is also fantastic… somehow Liliko gets a happy ending (??) or at least as happy an ending as is possible for her. Meanwhile, all her opps suffer (except for Kozue).
Do they suffer? The one person who gets "got" is Liliko's awful boyfriend, and that's because his wife is trapped into attending the evil store through Liliko's actions. Everyone else just forgets... but Liliko's too strong to ever be really doomed. Not like somebody like her could ever really be happy!
Your observations about Marilyn Monroe makes me think about Questlove talking about "black genius" in the Sly Stone documentary, where he says something like "the career of Sly Stone makes me wonder whether it even makes sense to talk about black genius." I took the point to be that, in a situation where you are obviously better at creating art than the people around you, but the social and economic context means that you need to be inferior to those you are working with, how do you express your superiority without destroying your gifts in the process?
In Marilyn's case, being an artist who specialized in making people feel sexual desire for her image on film, in a world where people looked down on sexually desirable people as dangerous and morally corrupted, would not be an easy road. The sacrifice of blondes as the culmination of Protestant eros.
I did finish the Churchwell book feeling like what Marilyn needed were a couple of real friends. Not guys obsessed with saving her, which seems to be mostly what she got. (But probably also what she went looking for.) She was smart and she was moving in the right direction by starting her own production company, but she couldn't really get it off the ground.
I remember reading something about her having a supportive relationship with Paula Strasberg at one point - having several people like that, some of whom could manage her material concerns, others who could work with her to help her achieve her artistic goals, all would have been useful.
As a boomer, I've spent way to much time reading about the lives of the classic rock acts, but one useful thing that I learned there was how much the successful rock acts benefitted by having people who essentially ran interference for them so they could focus productively on their work. An example would be the roles of George Martin and Brian Epstein with the Beatles - when Epstein died, the break-up of the group became almost an inevitability, because there was no one making sure that their material needs were being addressed adequately. The Beatles fell sort of in the middle of the scale, since Epstein was only an adequate manager, while managers like Peter Grant and Irving Azoff really understood the way that rock tours and album sales worked, and could do a lot more for Led Zeppelin and The Eagles, respectively. At the other end are people like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, who never had adequate support, and Brian Jones, who was cut loose by the Stones when the resources of the rest of the band were insufficient to manage his personal demons.
It's worth reflecting on just how many people needed to be watching out for Taylor Swift in the early years of her career, and how lucky or talented she needed to be in finding reliable agents to assist her. The pretty, talented blonde girl who goes to Nashville to find a career, but ends up trusting the wrong people and destroying herself is a common enough story. The tendency is to ascribe such failures to the personal attributes of the star, but that ignores how hard it is to be sane when everyone working for you is trying to take advantage of you. I don't know enough of the Taylor story, but I suspect her relatively drama-free career is the product of a lot of wise and generous assistance from her parents.
The difficult thing about having people who run interference for you is that you do need to know enough to pick the right people, and if you're a young and naive person you may not pick right. Artists and athletes both seem prone to ending up in the hands of unscrupulous agents, financial managers, and so on, because they spend most of their time becoming excellent at a particular thing.
A lot of things came together in Taylor's favor, but I think having parents from the business world who didn't require her to be the family breadwinner is a big part of it, yeah. She doesn't actually have a manager but a team she oversees called "13 Management" and this structure seems to work well for her.
A funny story that circulates online sometimes is that while Taylor doesn't have a manager, when she was young she very briefly had the manager who had been a part of the rise of Britney Spears. He was fired and then he sued the Swifts. The lawsuit circulates mostly for its gossip value, because it contains some emails from her dad, and there isn't much out there in the way of private Swift communications. But to me it's funny because if you were a parent who wanted to learn about entertainment industry, Britney's manager probably has a lot to teach you. But… would you actually want that guy in any sense running your daughter's career? Hell no. So if the Swifts actually did what the guy was accusing them of doing—basically milking him for his expertise and then dumping him if I remember right—that seems really smart to me lol.
And right there's the difference between the entertainment industry and the world of conventional business - in normal business, the employer (the artist in the music industry) is always going to fire an employee at exactly the point that they stop contributing to their goals. Because musicians generally know so much less about business and contracts than the managers do, they end up acting like they're the employees trying to break away from their employer.
The fact that high schools don't teach classes on contract law is pretty amazing when you think about it - I know people who don't vote, but I don't know anyone who hasn't had serious questions about their rights under some agreement that they've made. Most of us have signed legally enforceable contracts as minors.
A strange desire to throw together three people who did not really have much in common (and create a trinity even though there have been other female stars, blonde and non-blonde, who died young).
I LOVE Helter Skelter--Liliko is one of the great monsters, all desire and no satisfaction. We can't all be Kozue (born into our correct purpose and accepting of it).
the ending is also fantastic… somehow Liliko gets a happy ending (??) or at least as happy an ending as is possible for her. Meanwhile, all her opps suffer (except for Kozue).
Do they suffer? The one person who gets "got" is Liliko's awful boyfriend, and that's because his wife is trapped into attending the evil store through Liliko's actions. Everyone else just forgets... but Liliko's too strong to ever be really doomed. Not like somebody like her could ever really be happy!
I was thinking mostly of the boyfriend and his wife (who is an innocent person, but that does not stop her from being a Liliko opp).
Your observations about Marilyn Monroe makes me think about Questlove talking about "black genius" in the Sly Stone documentary, where he says something like "the career of Sly Stone makes me wonder whether it even makes sense to talk about black genius." I took the point to be that, in a situation where you are obviously better at creating art than the people around you, but the social and economic context means that you need to be inferior to those you are working with, how do you express your superiority without destroying your gifts in the process?
In Marilyn's case, being an artist who specialized in making people feel sexual desire for her image on film, in a world where people looked down on sexually desirable people as dangerous and morally corrupted, would not be an easy road. The sacrifice of blondes as the culmination of Protestant eros.
I did finish the Churchwell book feeling like what Marilyn needed were a couple of real friends. Not guys obsessed with saving her, which seems to be mostly what she got. (But probably also what she went looking for.) She was smart and she was moving in the right direction by starting her own production company, but she couldn't really get it off the ground.
I remember reading something about her having a supportive relationship with Paula Strasberg at one point - having several people like that, some of whom could manage her material concerns, others who could work with her to help her achieve her artistic goals, all would have been useful.
As a boomer, I've spent way to much time reading about the lives of the classic rock acts, but one useful thing that I learned there was how much the successful rock acts benefitted by having people who essentially ran interference for them so they could focus productively on their work. An example would be the roles of George Martin and Brian Epstein with the Beatles - when Epstein died, the break-up of the group became almost an inevitability, because there was no one making sure that their material needs were being addressed adequately. The Beatles fell sort of in the middle of the scale, since Epstein was only an adequate manager, while managers like Peter Grant and Irving Azoff really understood the way that rock tours and album sales worked, and could do a lot more for Led Zeppelin and The Eagles, respectively. At the other end are people like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, who never had adequate support, and Brian Jones, who was cut loose by the Stones when the resources of the rest of the band were insufficient to manage his personal demons.
It's worth reflecting on just how many people needed to be watching out for Taylor Swift in the early years of her career, and how lucky or talented she needed to be in finding reliable agents to assist her. The pretty, talented blonde girl who goes to Nashville to find a career, but ends up trusting the wrong people and destroying herself is a common enough story. The tendency is to ascribe such failures to the personal attributes of the star, but that ignores how hard it is to be sane when everyone working for you is trying to take advantage of you. I don't know enough of the Taylor story, but I suspect her relatively drama-free career is the product of a lot of wise and generous assistance from her parents.
The difficult thing about having people who run interference for you is that you do need to know enough to pick the right people, and if you're a young and naive person you may not pick right. Artists and athletes both seem prone to ending up in the hands of unscrupulous agents, financial managers, and so on, because they spend most of their time becoming excellent at a particular thing.
A lot of things came together in Taylor's favor, but I think having parents from the business world who didn't require her to be the family breadwinner is a big part of it, yeah. She doesn't actually have a manager but a team she oversees called "13 Management" and this structure seems to work well for her.
A funny story that circulates online sometimes is that while Taylor doesn't have a manager, when she was young she very briefly had the manager who had been a part of the rise of Britney Spears. He was fired and then he sued the Swifts. The lawsuit circulates mostly for its gossip value, because it contains some emails from her dad, and there isn't much out there in the way of private Swift communications. But to me it's funny because if you were a parent who wanted to learn about entertainment industry, Britney's manager probably has a lot to teach you. But… would you actually want that guy in any sense running your daughter's career? Hell no. So if the Swifts actually did what the guy was accusing them of doing—basically milking him for his expertise and then dumping him if I remember right—that seems really smart to me lol.
And right there's the difference between the entertainment industry and the world of conventional business - in normal business, the employer (the artist in the music industry) is always going to fire an employee at exactly the point that they stop contributing to their goals. Because musicians generally know so much less about business and contracts than the managers do, they end up acting like they're the employees trying to break away from their employer.
The fact that high schools don't teach classes on contract law is pretty amazing when you think about it - I know people who don't vote, but I don't know anyone who hasn't had serious questions about their rights under some agreement that they've made. Most of us have signed legally enforceable contracts as minors.
I don't think I ever saw a color photo of Sylvia Plath. I did not realize she was blonde. It must have been a darker blonde.
per Churchwell, she wasn't even blonde! She just dyed her hair for a couple months. They'll let anybody be a tragic blonde apparently…
A strange desire to throw together three people who did not really have much in common (and create a trinity even though there have been other female stars, blonde and non-blonde, who died young).