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In an MMMBop they're gone
Apr. 21st, 2012 06:36 pmDay 28: Your first celebrity crush.
I'm probably showing my age here, but when I was twelve, I had the most epic crush on Zac Hanson from Hanson. (Unlike most of my friends, who liked Taylor, I preferred Zac, who was closer to me in age and appeared to have more of a sense of humour.) I found this intensely embarrassing at the time, despite the fact that basically everyone around me was going mad for Hanson.
To be honest, though, most of my crushes of this type have been on fictional characters. I fell in love with Pagan Kidrouk of the Pagan Chronicles series when I was ten years old, and there's still a part of me that would follow him to the ends of the earth if he showed up on the doorstep. (While Pagan is 16-18 in the first three books of the series, he's in his late 30s in the fourth and dies when he's in his late 50s, so I feel less creepy than if only his adolescence was charted in the books.) I rarely had crushes on celebrities because I was aware from quite early on that whatever personality I could see was to a great degree a construct. In books and other media, I could actually see what a character's personality was.
I'm not sure how weird that makes me.
( the other days )
I've been blogging on Wordpress about female lyricists, 'Persephone girls' and apologising for giving voice to my feelings.
I have noticed that when people criticise these lyricists – Kate Bush and Florence Welch in particular – they are often criticised for their insistent introversion, for the way they verbalise their emotions. (I once read a review of Florence’s Ceremonials album that essentially criticised her for not being Bob Dylan.) It’s as if what they sing about, what they’re feeling, is small and personal and irrelevant, whereas when a man – say, Neil Young – sings about his feelings, they’re large and universal and important.
Oddly enough, in light of what I'm talking about in that Wordpress post, this post about the transformation of fairytales from stories of female empowerment to Disneyfied tales of passivity and purity popped up on Twitter just as I was writing. Check it out.
I'm probably showing my age here, but when I was twelve, I had the most epic crush on Zac Hanson from Hanson. (Unlike most of my friends, who liked Taylor, I preferred Zac, who was closer to me in age and appeared to have more of a sense of humour.) I found this intensely embarrassing at the time, despite the fact that basically everyone around me was going mad for Hanson.
To be honest, though, most of my crushes of this type have been on fictional characters. I fell in love with Pagan Kidrouk of the Pagan Chronicles series when I was ten years old, and there's still a part of me that would follow him to the ends of the earth if he showed up on the doorstep. (While Pagan is 16-18 in the first three books of the series, he's in his late 30s in the fourth and dies when he's in his late 50s, so I feel less creepy than if only his adolescence was charted in the books.) I rarely had crushes on celebrities because I was aware from quite early on that whatever personality I could see was to a great degree a construct. In books and other media, I could actually see what a character's personality was.
I'm not sure how weird that makes me.
( the other days )
I've been blogging on Wordpress about female lyricists, 'Persephone girls' and apologising for giving voice to my feelings.
I have noticed that when people criticise these lyricists – Kate Bush and Florence Welch in particular – they are often criticised for their insistent introversion, for the way they verbalise their emotions. (I once read a review of Florence’s Ceremonials album that essentially criticised her for not being Bob Dylan.) It’s as if what they sing about, what they’re feeling, is small and personal and irrelevant, whereas when a man – say, Neil Young – sings about his feelings, they’re large and universal and important.
Oddly enough, in light of what I'm talking about in that Wordpress post, this post about the transformation of fairytales from stories of female empowerment to Disneyfied tales of passivity and purity popped up on Twitter just as I was writing. Check it out.