the fire has apparently gone out of her loins:
In a withering put-down, the Los Angeles Times reviewer said Spears "looked more like Edie Sedgwick in the post-lobotomy scenes of the underground movie 'Ciao, Manhattan.'"AFP 10.Sep.07
Under the headline "Britney's Bumbling Comeback," the paper's online edition asked: "When will we be sick of watching this spectacle?"
"Never more than a passable singer, Spears was once a shockingly charismatic physical presence: she was youthful freedom personified, her gorgeous form and defiant beauty absolutely Nabokovian," the review said.
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Nabokovian, for those whose literary intake hasn't yet made it past "Trainspotting", really means "Lolita", and "Lolita" these days means teen sex. So essentially you have the LATimes, in the person of Ann Powers, previously the premier rock critic for the New York Times, accusing, or deriding, pretty near whupping like a red-headed step-child Britney Spears for not being "desirable" in that innocent-slut sexy-little-girl way we all learned to love her for in the beginning. Also the ex-husband and kids thing seems to kind of complicate the art thing as far as the media goes.
There's certainly no responsibility being expressed, at all, for what she is, what made her into what she is, how she became what she is - just her sad and disgusting lack of cathartic usefulness in the present moment. Which occurred in Las Vegas. Which is owned and run by...
Anyway, it makes me think of how Michael Jackson, less than a year before he became the most famous child molester in history, was accused of making public anti-Semitic comments, and even singing anti-Semitic comments.
He was reviled, somewhat, in the press, but that was back in the days before there was any really serious talk, among the masses out in the margins of the public sphere about Jewish intrigue in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, so being anti-Semitic at that time was just old-school bigotry, not a central issue except to those involved.
Then, suddenly, Jackson was a social pariah, a condition he still occupies today. The possibility that these two marks on Jackson's personal media calendar might be directly related, like most disturbing patterns in the modern social landscape, makes for discomfort in the at-home viewer, speaking as it does of power and intrigue and control in that landscape to a degree that, if true, makes the rest of us essentially domestic animals.
As opposed to the wild and free citizenry that once elevated young Britney to the Pantheon of modern young womanhood, or whatever Pantheon it is she's now being thrown out of, on her ass, by Ann Powers etc.
