Do you have some sort of businesswoman special?

Surprise me View in browser March 08, 2019 Carolee Schneemann    Intro text This week Last year I wrote about Kylie Jenner and the "self-made" label. Now that Forbes has finally applied it to her, it's worth revisiting the column. Here's something that often gets lost: Forbes has a points-based "formula" they use to calculate just how self-made someone is, and they'll call anyone self-made if they didn't directly inherit millions. Kylie scored a 7/10 on the self-made scale. Wild. Oprah, for context, is a 10/10. On the podcast, we're talking about making it—with "it" being the show itself: An update to our Businesswoman Special episode of a few years ago. It's our way of being transparent about the business side of our show, including how much we make per episode, how lucrative touring really is, how the podcast landscape is changing, and how we balance the fact that we all have multiple jobs. Inspired, as always, by the aspirations and candor of Romy and Michele: "Just remember that from this point on, we are sophisticated, educated, successful career women." "God, this underwear is totally riding up my butt crack." I'm reading Wesley Morris re-evaluates Michael Jackson, and our collective desire to see him selectively. How Gabriel García Márquez began to write. Six decades of Barbie. Who is 17-year-old capital-letter-averse pop star Billie Eilish? Helen Childress wrote Reality Bites based on her own life, and then got erased from the narrative around the film. A Girl Scout troop just for girls experiencing homelessness. Every black woman deserves a doula. For survivors of Japanese-American incarceration and their descendants in California, documentation has become resistance. Rehab recruiters are capitalizing on the opioid crisis. Meet the digital El Chapo. Memorial t-shirts. The banality of empathy. On a luxury retreat for "elderly" (meaning, over age 30) tech workers. The new infertility startups focused on men. The Japanese chef bringing kaiseki to America, and the woman who founded Pepperidge Farm. "Brexit has turned me into a prepper." What happens to all those beads after Mardi Gras. Why eyeglasses are so expensive in the U.S. Amina's money philosophy: "I don’t need to feel some sort of way about asking for $70,000 at work when Elizabeth Holmes is making hundreds of millions to kill people with her fake blood machine. Know what I mean?" I DO. Think about breathing. The Friend by Sigrid Nunez. Members only This is the tongue-in-cheek chart (pie-in-cheek?) that I made last year during the first period of "self-made" headlines about Kylie Jenner. I'm sharing it with you today as a tease to get you to become a paying member for just $5/year. You'll receive one of these hand-made charts every Friday! I’m looking & listening A sobering conversation between David Wallace-Wells and Chris Hayes about climate change and (in)action. John Berger and Susan Sontag disagree about storytelling. An interview show about making creative work within constraints, especially the constraints borne of parent-child relationships, hosted by my pal Channing Kennedy while holding his kid. What happened when Jessica Hopper tried to out the doctor who groped her. Grace Jones walks the runway. GIFspiration Oprah is a real self-made success story, and I'll know I've made it when I have several bathtubs molded and shaped to my body: Pausing on my way out to use one of her many bathrooms before the drive back to Los Angeles, I say to Oprah, "Remember at your house in Telluride when you showed me your tub that was molded and shaped to your body?” “Yup,” she says. “I still have a nice bathtub. I major in bathtubs. I spend my time looking for the best possible bathtub a woman can buy. And actually, Stedman’s never been in this one." I think about this detail all the time. I endorse Artist Carolee Schneemann, who died this week. “I think I’m stubborn," she told The Guardian in 2015. "In the beginning, I had no precedent for being valued. Everything that came from a woman’s experience was considered trivial. I wasn’t sure if my work would shift that paradigm or not, but I had to try." A few of her performance pieces are online: "Snows" (1967) and "Meat Joy" (1964), which are probably not advisable to click if you're working in an office. You can read about "Interior Scroll" (1975), which involved her pulling a long strip of paper out of her body, from which she read out an imaginary conversation with a dismissive male film-maker. The image above is from "Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera" (1963). Schneemann said, "My early work with the body was like a bridge, built so that other women could pass over it. I gave them permission." She didn't have a major museum retrospective until 2016. "I was told my work was crap for 20 years. Succeeding doesn’t require courage so much as being stubborn," she told AnOther magazine. "When I started making kinetic theatre works, I didn’t even have the courage to stand upright! I used to direct actions while crawling around; thankfully the pleasures of Meat Joy changed that. Shut yourself in a room where no-one can bother you. You don’t have to be good – just see what happens, and keep going." That's how she made herself. You endorse Thanks to reader Marianne, and to a few others, who replied to me last week about my "Selma Blair is an inspiration" line in the "I'm Reading" section. I very much appreciate their openness and generosity in taking the time to educate me. Because I'm probably not the only person who was ignorant about this, I am sharing Marianne's email, which they were kind enough to even put in endorsement format. -AF Not calling someone with a disability an inspiration. "Just google 'don't call me an inspiration' sometime. Right now if you're curious! Or here's an article - not the best one I've read, it's kinda clickbaity which is why googling it would be more useful - but it does get across the point pretty clearly and it's quick to read. No idea how Selma Blair feels about that particular phrase - she might enjoy it for all I know! - but as a disabled person myself I have always hated that way of people talking about me in the context of disability, especially when it comes from folks I perceive as not disabled. I probably picked it up from my grandmother, who was my own role model, a bad-ass who took her wheelchair on more solo trips to different parts of the world than most people ever see, but who also winced when people said 'you're an inspiration.' Call us a bad-ass, a motherfucking hero, a role model, a goddess, whatever you want, even 'an inspiration' I guess - I'm not really saying anyone should *have* to stop calling anyone anything positive and I know you use the word in other contexts .... but whether you keep calling physically disabled people an inspiration, or don't, just know you're probably calling up a lot of past weird encounters with ableist people for a lot of us when you use that word." -Marianne. What do you endorse? Submit something here. The Classifieds Want to be a bigger pitcher? In-depth, encouraging article or essay pitch feedback from a journalist of 10+ yrs. Intro price: $40/£30. thepitchsessions.com The Vault is like The New Yorker but more interesting, because it’s run by women and features stories and art by women. Isn’t it time for a fresh perspective? Get any story free with code ‘ANNFRIEDMAN’ NEW podcast telling true but little-known stories about authors and poets. First episode of Bidwell Hollow now available! Here's how to listen. There aren't many places on the internet where you can hear directly from people managing chronic skin conditions & living full lives. Subscribe to our newsletter and get skin stories straight to your inbox. Remember, all skin is good skin—our stories prove it. Join the EarBuds Podcast Collective Listening Movement: a wkly email w/ a theme + 5 pods on that theme, each wk curated by another person! You can place an ad in this newsletter for less than the price of Kylie's Kylighter Bundle. Click for rates + info. 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