Saturday, December 20, 2014

Jenny Diski: A privileged pitiful life – Göteborgs-Posten

An interview with Victoria Beckham may Jenny Diski to think about how you can be so complacent with his own or his interview person over privileged, miserable life in an otherwise awful world.

I know that shedding is coming. My neck muscles have krampat up to a point at the top of the spine. I stare intently straight ahead and see nothing. If I were a cartoon (and who knows, maybe I am?) It would smoke out of my ears when my irritation boils over in his pot and the furious bubbles get the lid to rattle. I read a headline the other day and was careful not to read the article itself, because I was afraid it would put me in this state. Then I thought, well, if I want to write about it so I have to read the article (I’m not convinced it is true, but now it’s too late), for it may be that there is nothing that can mitigate the title, and I have to be objective and not take a simplistic, biased position. (I am absolutely sure that this is not true. We hereby declare I am a thousand words of subjective mindedness.)

The caption read: In the past, I saw myself as a celebrity, but now I see myself as successful. Need I continue? I guess at least I have to mention that the article under this heading is an interview with Victoria Beckham, the Guardian’s fashion reporter Jess Cartner-Morley. It is a eulogy over the former Spice Girl, Posh, which no longer call her, and singing the praises of her amazing ability to be a fashion designer, business woman, to have impeccable taste, being far more beautiful than all the photos and to be able to sit on the couch with his arm around her smallest child while she is being interviewed. The truly modern woman with its simultaneous capacity, she has everything just because she does everything and does it with such elegance and self-assurance that it is purely miraculous. Now I need not say more. You get the hang of, you know exactly why I’m so furious, not only the headline and the article as I should have hesitated to read, but also a wo rld that allows this paper-thin slices of reality portrayed as rational, though most people’s lives looks like it does.

The article does not mention Posh Spices wedding with David Beckham at a castle in Dublin in 1999, when they sat side by side on ornate sammetstroner in red and gold on a raised podium. She was wearing a white ball gown of satin and gold crown, he was dressed in a white tuxedo, and then they switched on matching purple outfits they wore at the reception and when they cut the cake. They told guests that they did not want any gifts, preferring gift cards. They called the house they moved into the “Beckingham Palace”. The talk is not about the kind of taste in the article in the Guardian, it is only we who have good memory that remembers it. Since he was a famous football player and she was a pop star had they both earned huge amounts of money for several years. If one is very rich in the first place, it is good taste something you can acquire later, when you discover that some of the people who want to socialize with one already learned the good taste lesson. Th ose who lack the innate sense of taste is basically very simple: stay always black, white and gray, and always choose the option that involves less, not more. I take no charge for this wisdom.

One problem with that title that made me so mad is that Victoria Beckham is almost, but not quite, cute clueless when she does not seem to understand what success, just like the taste , can come later, just money and fame are there from the beginning. It is a classic view of the poor little rich girl – in this case the poor little celebrity – who all suffer anguish of fame, almost like a disease, until her intelligence and talent bursts forth and show that the handsome prince after all married with her for her mind, not her looks or even just her fame. Victoria Beckham, says the article, became a fashion designer, and although some have suggested that her real talent is the ability to hiring the right helpers, this has given her self-respect and respect from the outside world. Or in fact the fashion world. The article explains that getting women to buy her clothes are to:

… Victoria Beckham is a living, breathing proof of fashion’s power to transform us. We buy clothes because we think they’ll help us become who we want to be. There are dresses with her name on the label – yours for about seventeen thousand dollars paragraph – that have made Victoria Beckham who she is today.

I guess seventeen thousand dollars is pretty cheap on a single blow is what required to achieve a transformation from me or you to Victoria Beckham. But I – and maybe it’s the same for her – dryers hardly think of all the women whose lives will never be transformed, because their talent can never be expressed, either because they lack opportunities like that that people generally do, or because they not even have access to life’s absolute necessities.

Yet she works hard, she rushing hither and thither, has a personal trainer every day, running, is “brand ambassador” and businesswoman. (I also think that she has an employee who carries her purse for her.) In addition, says Cartner-Morley appreciative, she talks to and including the phone with her children while she visits the room where her new London store is about to be prepared for premiere. Her life takes actually never break. Not even when she goes to bed, she says: “When I think of the next collection.” And just then she almost hit by a moment of reality. But it is a special kind of reality that only a celebrity can identify with, “It makes me sound crazy, right? I go to bed with David Beckham and think about clothes. “In fact, Victoria, that it is not what makes you sound crazy. Madness is in fact not the word I would choose to describe how you sound. Most people in the world do not see their partners as everyone Guardian’ ;s readers’ highest sexdröm. Still less would most people in the world believe that anyone would consider them crazy if after fifteen years of marriage went to bed and thought of nothing but sex. Spoiled? Selfish? Is it perhaps more so you sound?

But all this is just an amusing insight into the rich & famous association pathways. What makes me so angry is that almost everything else you happen to read in the Guardian about what is happening in the world is so terrible that I and probably you and anyone, no matter how famous and successful we are, can not grasp how to be so pleased with his own or his interview person over privileged, miserable life. It’s only been a few days since the number of deaths of civilians in Gaza stopped rising. Death toll in Ukraine is now at three thousand. Islamic State terrorizing the Middle East and give the West all the excuses you want to restrict the already truncated civil rights even more. And all this in an ongoing everyday situation where millions of people lack adequate food and medicines to stay alive, not to mention in good health. I realize that it is terribly bloated for me to pull up this against the poor Victoria Beckham’s little victory over their diff iculties. Everyone experiences his own pain as painful, I know. I know that we all have difficult to concentrate on the same thing for very long. But I can not help it. I’m as egocentrerad (at least) like any other, but in fact I think we should try to remember the suffering in the world, even if it is only as a background insight into our own joys and successes.

Translation: Helena Hansson

Interview with Victoria Beckham is available at: www.theguardian.com/fashion/2014/sep/05/-sp-victoria-beckham-fashion-empire-famous-successful

LikeTweet

No comments:

Post a Comment