Had been thinking about the Lana Del Rey aesthetic as like "the themes of ideal Kodachrome Camelot Golden Age Americana deadpan...
Had been thinking about the Lana Del Rey aesthetic as like “the themes of ideal Kodachrome Camelot Golden Age Americana deadpan applied to the real modern day”
Which not wrong (and h/t @lanadelreyaesthetics) but I was playing RDR Online and the figure of Madam Nazar reminded me how much she specifically rhymes with a “gypsy” figure that’s fallen out of typology
And no, Kodachrome Camelot wouldn’t know what “Romani” even was but it’d be county fair knockoffs anyway, flowy dresses and tops and rich lips and that saunter
(Compare to I Dream of Jeannie orientalism and the figure of “the exotic dancer”)
One facet of this super 8 vs hypereal, Brady Bunch/modern era superimposition (that keeps coming around again… remember those Calvin Cline ads) of female sexualized power magic is the recent Valley of the Dolls fixation, notably Anna Biller’s work:
This is the opposite end of the Lana gradient, the present impregnating the technicolor past rather than the Polaroid past as a filter on the present. But VotD does seem like the gravitational center at this moment. This links via Sharon Tate (and an of the moment conflict of masculine supernatural/cultural power domination) to the summer of Manson redux we just went through. But there’s a Bradys house flipping show airing, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, that Chaos book finally coming out, me too as a movement, Sabrina, Epstein revelations, and female pop stars veering away from goddess towards damaged girlhood as identity and key to control (Eilish may not have the film stock aesthetic beyond the (techno)color scheme, but “Bruises, on both my knees for you,” “ Might seduce your dad type ,” “pity the men I know “… it’s like a rising of a kind of post 60s occult gender war, where the image of abuse acts as fuel. There’s something in this that captures the moment and the only thing missing is the abiding conspiracy paranoia to intrude on the aesthetic. Dunno (written fast, free association, might return more thoughtfully later).
Yeah, I didn’t have those examples before but that’s definitely the whole reenchant-heterosexuality-with-power-gradients, post-consent culture Fsub topping-from-the-bottom moment, right there