Author Archives: mellissahughes

Disappointed in my Bitches

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I’m a loyal subscriber to Jezebel, and in particular to Tracie Egan, or Slut Machine, her Jezebel pen name…. I first stumbled upon Tracie’s writing for VICE magazine last year, in which she convinced them to fund her rape fantasy. I had some serious issues with the whole concept, first as a rape victim, secondly as one who is concerned with the fucking LACK of prosecution in rape cases, third, as someone against blurring the lines of legitimate rape, the whole concept of gray rape, remember that?? and finally as a feminist who’s interested in the psychology of sexuality. Despite the raciness of the post, I was hooked on her writing both on her personal blog and on Jezebel, on her ability to describe crusty yeast infections, on her willingness to share and in fact over-share so much of both the excitement and ho-hum-ness of women’s daily lives. She wrote the way I wanted to write, blah blah blah.

Jezebel has been a bit disappointing recently. It’s not just a women’s site for news… and I can’t in good conscious call it feminist, although within the celeb tabloid gossip they tackle the same issues that the more hardcore sites like Feministing, the Feministe, and the F Word do…they just have a lighter, more comical, and sometimes completely destructively insensitive response.

Such is the case in the following video from Lizz Winstead’s show Thinking and Drinking, in which Tracie and Moe were invited to speak. They both showed up drunk, despite the fact that lots of women had paid to hear them talk about issues that they knew would be on the table… they ended up making total asses of themselves…

Ridiculous generalizations about the type of men who are rapists, the IQ’s of the type of girls that get raped…it’s pretty sad..it pissed off a lot of patrons, and showing up drunk for a talk is kind of disrespectful to your audience. I’m open for a lot of interpretation on various feminist issues, and non-consensual sex is definitely an issue that extends beyond feminism… callousness from the Jezzies is thoroughly disappointing. Can we all agree that rape is a problem, and not one to be taken so lightly? I’m all for humor, but insulting your readers and indulging in victim blaming is probably not the best way to keep them coming back to your site.

Wall-E Review: From a Feminist’s perspective

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Despite the names Wall-E and Eva (the female protagonist) these two characters are predominantly genderless, and one has to question why Pixar decided to go with a male name, especially when Wall-E’s character could be seen as the more stereotypically effeminate of the two, (watching musicals, dancing, yearning for a hand to hold) and Eve was a little trigger happy for the first 45 minutes… Perhaps it was an attempt at gender fluidity? or perhaps the time has still not come for a female protagonist cartoon, and not one starring a princess in a far away kingdom needing to be rescued by a handsome prince!

Despite that, I thought that Wall-E and Eva stood on completely equal footing. Wall-E, again the more effeminate character longed for companionship until Eva was sent from outer space to seek out “life” and return it to the Axiom ship, where grotesquely obese humans suck meals from slurpy cups and ride around on hovering lounge chairs while high paced media is superimposed over their natural surroundings.

I’m not going to comment on the consumerism angle, cuz everyone else already has, but for me, the Eve symbolism was pretty awesome. Eva (which is the Latin form for Eve, first woman) comes from some heavenly source, and is kind of a bad ass chick robot femme fatale on a mission. When that mission is completed, and “life” is found, it is placed inside her “womb” she falls silent, having fulfilled her reproductive duties… After Eva brings life back to the Axiom, a new plan is revealed, and the pinnacle moment of the movie, I thought, was when her programming ordered her to report to the Captain’s deck with the plant and she deliberately said no. System Override. Free Will in action, baby!

Eva’s physical form is actually pretty womby. Completely footless, she could easily be seen as a giant hovering egg, with pretty blue LED eyes. In the Greek myth Pandora, we know that the original translation for pythosis not a box, but a large olive jar used to store foods for the winter. ‘Box’ has the obvious genital slang, but a roomy, womby jar has quite a different sense of symbolism. When Pandora opened the jar/box, the evils of the world were let loose, only elpis, or hope remained. Or, from within the vagina only comes trouble for man, except hope (life) clinging to the jar the way a fertilized embryo clings to the uterine wall. It is in this sense that Eva is the bringer of hope to Wall-E.

It’s not a perfect retelling of the classic first woman narrative: For one thing, Eva is not sent be Wall-E’s helpmate, nor is she created from Wall-E’s spare parts, AND she comes pre-named! I’m not sure if there’s some fancy schmancy name for womb imagery, like yonic is for the vagina, but Wall-E was rife with roomy womby visuals, and I thought it kicked ass.

More on the Coffee you Hate to Love

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My love-hate relationship with Starbucks just escalated to borderline destructive…. Yesterday morning I entered a Starbucks directly across the street from the South Tower at Columbus Circle. I was greeted by an employee with a headset who took my order, barked into her headset alla taco bell drive thru style, handed me my drink card and my coffee was ready for me by the time I approached the counter. Not bad. Brilliant in fact, ‘well played’ I thought to myself…

This morning, when I arrived for my coffee, the line was literally outside of the store, so I had to wait with the lady who asks for your spare change for the homeless. Now, I don’t give spare change away to anyone, so when I ignored her, amongst her ramblings of statistics, she managed to get in a “Always concerned with yourselves…” to which point I looked at her, yanked my headphones out of my ears and asked, “Really?” because really, standing here in my Target flip flops, in desperate need of a legitimate haircut, amongst the Coach bag clutching mani-pedi robots, I was hardly the enemy.

So yes, when I finally entered the house of coffee, the headphone chick took my order, but didn’t give me my drink card. I watched as a light went off in her little head as she counted (with fingers) how many people in that line just wanted regular coffee, and took off like a flash. A barista to save the day!! And here I thought, for like the MILLIONTH time, that Starbucks should really think about having a specific line for fru-fru drinks, and an express line for people who just want COFFEE. No “grande soy half caf cinnamon dolce latte, no whip, heated to 125 degrees- in a venti cup….” I have nothing but hatred for you bobbleheaded little androids!!

And after all of the line shenanigans, I still had to wait over in that side section as I watched the whole team of baristas with headsets maneuver like little worker bees, and there was something sooo disturbing about it.

Please indulge me: As I stood there, again wearing the Target flip flops, waiting for my oh so difficult to procure medium cup of black cofee, a woman approached the counter and ordered a “half caf soy latte”- the register attendee repeated back “half caf soy latte”-the woman in head set “half caf soy latte”-barista in back “half caf soy latte”, who after making the half caf soy latte hands the beverage back to the headset woman who repeated “half caf soy latte”, as she handed the beverage back to the register guy who then reiterates that her beverage is indeed a “half caf soy latte”. I watched this exchange for five minutes this morning as I waited for my grande cup of black coffee, and you have no idea how tempting it was for me to just run behind the counter, grab a medium cup, pull the freaking nozzle and pour my fucking cup of coffee…It was dark… and way darker than this Pike’s Roast blend shit they’re ladling out like yesterdays oatmeal to orphans.

Three reasons why I’m done with Jesus

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1. “Long Live the Pope”…. While I accept that being a musician means profiting from the church pockets, I choose not to participate in some parts of the mass, especially the Creed and the Prayers. The actual mass is fine with me as it’s through composed and real purty, and most of the time, in Anglican churches especially, the Hymns are really great, (and are really fun to analyze during sermons). However, yesterday I sang at a Roman Catholic Church and had to sing one verse of “Long Live the Pope”…(I spent the sermon creating my own verses- they involved birth control, abortion and Sodomy…)

2. The three burly cowboy hat wearing. TRUST JESUS pink triangle sign carrying protesters on the downtown 5 yesterday….

3. But THIS takes the cake. From Denton TX, Southern Baptist Biblical scholar Bruce Ware states “One reason that men abuse their wives is because women rebel against their husband’s God-given authority. And husbands on their parts, because they’re sinners, now respond to that threat to their authority either by being abusive, which is of course one of the ways men can respond when their authority is challenged–or, more commonly, to become passive, acquiescent, and simply not asserting the leadership they ought to as men in their homes and in churches”

WARNING LADIES: If you in any way try to assert your own opinion, you’ll be asking for a beating!!!

God, If I were in that congregation on Sunday morning, (and my parents ARE Southern Baptist, so I do occasionally attend their flavor of Jesus) I would absolutely have stood up and made some spectacle of myself. This article comes one week after McCain casually makes a joke about “not beating his wife anymore..” And while Ware points out that beating women is a sin, he also stresses that it’s women’s aggressiveness and refusal to submit that actually merits this type of abuse…. It’s the old “The woman made me do it!!!” excuse. Oddly fitting.

….a woman will demonstrate that she is in fact a Christian, that she has submitted to God’s ways by affirming and embracing her God-designed identity as–for the most part, generally this is true–as wife and mother, rather than chafing against it, rather than bucking against it, rather than wanting to be a man, wanting to be in a man’s position, wanting to teach and exercise authority over men,” Ware said. “Rather than wanting that, she accepts and embraces who she is as woman, because she knows God and she knows his ways are right and good, so she is marked as a Christian by her submission to God and in that her acceptance of God’s design for her as a woman.

WHY do women go to church????

Today! Make Music New York

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Today is the 2nd Annual Make Music New York Festival…. there will be 800 live, Free outdoor concerts today spread across the city and boroughs… More info can be found on the main website, but highlights definitely include Newspeak at 6:30 pm at the Cornelia Street Cafe. (Take anything to the W4 stop)

We begin the set with David T. Little’s Sweet Light Crude, a grungy rock ballad about loving something you know you shouldn’t, and move on to a new composition of New Amsterdam founder Sarah Snider, This Is What You’re Like ,a sort of modern day Penelope, sung from the perspective of a wife who’s husband has returned from war and all the adjustments that come with, and we close the set with Frederic Rzewski’s Coming Together which you remember from our ‘loud enough to make Rezewski move to the back’ rendition from the Rzewski show in May. That piece is just intense, and that’s all there is to it. It’s gonna be a great show. Hope to see some of you there.

Newspeak at Cornelia Street Cafe- 6:30 pm
29 Cornelia St and W.4th, West Village

Sweet Light Crude- David Little
This is What You’re Like- Sarah Snider
Coming Together Fredereic Rzewski

David Broome, keyboard
Caleb Burhans, violin
Mellissa Hughes, vocals
Taylor Levine, guitar
David T. Little, drums
Brian Snow, cello
Yuri Yamashita, aux. percussion
Eileen Mack, clarinets

Posted by mellissahughes on

I’m still alive, and still burning as this lovely card that my bestest friend Kendra mailed to me from Illinois reminds me. It’s been a light blog month for me, as I was traveling, and I haven’t really had much to say recently…. being alone will do that to you I guess. Matt, the horn jock, is staying in Canada for another two weeks, but Gurf is moving into Bill’s room tomorrow, so there will be another soul this far south in the borough to convince me to leave my hobbit hole every once in a while and interact with civilization.

To update you, my blackberry trauma is over, temporarily. After telling T-Mobile that I would not be purchasing a THIRD blackberry in an 18 month time period I bought the crappiest, oldest SAMSUNG model they had in the store. This phone is soooooo old!! Like, it doesn’t receive picture texts old, and good old-school T9 did not know the word BLOG, and when I tried to type WAL-greens the other day, the predictive text recommended Y2K…. yeah, Y2K!!! But the Google phone is a-coming, and the i phone is so cheap now, I can hold out for a little while longer, right?? I’m not gonna lie to you, I miss some of the features, like my camera, and BB messenger, and Google Maps, my God I relied on that… yet I don’t miss looking at my phone every minute for texts and e-mails etc. When all is said and done, it’s kind of amazing what we can live without when push comes to shove.

I’ve been working for Classical Music Archives like crazy, cataloging and updating their database. Classical Music Archives will hopefully, someday, be a cross between i tunes and Grove Music. Right now I’m trudging my way through all the Handel Operas. There’s a lot of them. I’ve listened to more Fritz Wunderlich recently than any human being should ever be subjected to.

In real music news, this Saturday is Make Music New York!! The one day where musicians take over the streets and pollute the city with loud noise. Newspeak plays outside the Cornelia Street Cafe at 6:30pm. On the program is Rzewski’s Coming Together, Little’s Sweet Light Crude, and a new piece of Sarah Snider’s- This is What You’re Like. Come on out! it’s free, and I’m sure there will be lots of kids (like mine!) and balloons, and food and beer…. yes, beer.

Also, in between my cataloging and indulgent LOST re-viewing, I’ve made a muxtape. It’s pretty chill summer music. I could listen to it all day, but it may not be your cup of tea. Give it a listen here. Wow, how’s that for a recommendation? God, I sound so pathetic. Too much Fritzy will do that to you.