American Horror Story is having a freakishly busy day. Not too long after we wrote a massive dissection of its short first trailer, we got news of the release of the opening credits, which, as usual, tend to trump the quality of the actual show. The titles, using a carnivalesque version of the same credit score the show’s always used, also take some artistic liberties with character portrayals, featuring a performer with a leg for a penis, as well as babies that auto-decapitate and then re-capitate (should be a word). It’s so carnivalesque, in fact, that it might simply make you miss the oh-so-prematuraly cancelled Carnivale.
In other pop-cultural fantasy news, here’s a ray of sunshine for aspiring female directors worried about succeeding in a male-hegemonized industry: all they have to do get on the path to fulfilling their life goals is direct a short film based on the anti-feminist YA series, Twilight (yes, that Twilight, THE Twilight you thought was finished both literarily and cinematically, but, like its vampiric…vampires, remains undead).
But that’s not the only option out there: you can, of course, also apply Beyoncé’s spin on “lean in” feminism — that of literally not sitting down, which Harvard Business students allegedly pegged as one of the keys to Beyoncé’s success. If such issues of branded feminism — feminisms that are inherently ensconced in corporate America and thus perhaps (?) bolster male-dominated structures — make your head spin, and render you perplexed as to where you stand, generally, on issues of pop-cultural “feminism,” read this awesome Brooklyn Rail article about this exact form of confusion.
Now that the promos for Sarah Silverman’s SNL episode have been released, people are vaguely starting to remember that the comedian herself was once very briefly a member of the SNL cast. Here’s a full rundown of the reasons she was fired very soon after she began: most notable among them is that she “has her own voice.”
In unrelated news — news which isn’t really news, as it’s from 1977 — here are two songs from Björk’s first album, released when she was eleven (her mother did the cover-art). This, alongside that video where she explains how the innards of television sets are tiny cities, get rediscovered every couple of years. But now that there’s news of a new album produced by Arca, perhaps it’s time to revisit these tracks that definitely WEREN’T produced by Arca.