family

Nicole Holofcener once again foregrounds female subjectivity in Please Give, which uses white women's tears to comment on sisterhood, motherhood, and class privilege.

My sisters and I grew up listening to tons of great music together (Hannah is already on her way to being a famous guitarist and singer at 17!). So it was an obvious choice for us to get together and do a Bitchtapes when our sister, Jesse, came to visit us from Austin. What better topic than songs about sisters, brothers, and sibling relations? Track list after the jump!

Over the weekend, St. Vincent's upcoming album, Strange Mercy, started streaming on NPR. The woman behind the band, multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter Annie Clark, started out as a member of the Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens' tour mate. She is known for juxtaposing sweet, Feist-like vocals with dark, often violent imagery. The disconnect between body and soul (that is, between the material and spiritual) is a central theme of her third album. The newest single, Cruel," examines this disconnect in the context of the trivial cruelties of day to day family life. 

On Monday, the GA Voice broke the news that Atlanta's Crest Lawn Memorial Park cemetery will soon have a section "for gay people—couples, their children, single people, people who want to be with their chosen families." The Advocate and Queerty quickly picked up on the story, and it's likely to get bigger as the days go by, especially with the catchy misnomer "gay cemetery." (The lightning-quick spread of the innacurate term "Ground-Zero Mosque" comes to mind.)

For a number of reasons, the idea of a specifically queer section in a cemetery is troubling to me.

 

Why the pretense of "virginity" to my parents made so many things much more difficult. (Warning: the following involves sluthood, sexual assault and talking about either with one's parents.)

I feel like everywhere I turn someone else is saying something about polyamory. Perhaps the recent upset over Proposition 8 in California provided somewhat of a platform for poly communities to openly speak about the legitimation of alternative family structures—not just beyond that of one man and one woman, but beyond gay and lesbian couples as well.