Each of the headlines for these blog entries is a song name or lyric. There are a few exceptions; but, generally there is a clue tucked into how i ice each post. For this one, i thought i wanted to use a line from “Girl From the North Country,” from Nashville Skyline (1969). i thought the song contained the line, “See for me that her hair’s still red.” It doesn’t. The stanza i misremembered is sung by Johnny Cash, and it goes,

See for me that her hair’s hanging down,
If it curls and falls all down her breast.
See for me that her hair’s hanging down,
That’s the way I remember her best.

i thought i might go, instead, with a line from “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” from Blood on the Tracks (1975): “Purple clover, Queen Anne’s Lace,” which is followed by, “Crimson hair across your face.” i got stuck in a Wiki-K-hole, and i found this:

“Sometimes… I go to the artist and say, ‘What do you hear on the drums?’ Because sometimes when people write songs they can hear it completed, they hear everything they think’s gonna be on it”, says drummer Ken Buttrey. “I went over to Dylan and said, ‘I’m having a little trouble thinking of something to play. Do you have any ideas on [‘Lay Lady Lay’]?’… He said, ‘Bongos’… I immediately disregarded that, I couldn’t hear bongos in this thing at all… So I walked into the control room and said, ‘Bob [Johnston], what do you hear as regards [to] drums on this thing?’… [He] said, ‘Cowbells.’… Kris Kristofferson was working at Columbia Studios at the time as a janitor and he had just emptied my ashtray at the drums and I said, ‘Kris, do me a favor, here, hold these two things… hold these bongos in one hand and the cowbells in the other,’ and I swung this mike over to the cowbells and the bongos… I had no pattern or anything worked out. I just told Kris, ‘This is one of those spite deals. I’m gonna show ’em how bad their ideas’re gonna sound.’… We started playing the tune and I was just doodling around on these bongos and the cowbells and it was kinda working out pretty cool… Come chorus time I’d go to the set of drums. Next time you hear that [cut], listen how far off-mike the drums sound. There were no mikes on the drums, it was just leakage… But it worked out pretty good… To this day it’s one of the best drum patterns I ever came up with.”

So “Lay Lady Lay” (Nashville Skyline) won out. Because, even though i feel conflicted admitting it, i think it’s one of the sexiest songs ever recorded, and because this post was supposed to be about complicated sex, and because it marks a second in time where Kris Kristofferson was a janitor (goddamn!), and because of the horse trot ‘spite deal’ cowbells, and because ‘i long to see you in the morning light, i long to reach for you in the night’. Yes, because of all of that, because really great songs are accidental and collaborative, it wins.

As for the sex, i’d meant to begin here: i went to see the new Pixar movie, Brave, yesterday. i guess i’ve been in a media hole for a while, too, because i actually hadn’t even heard of it and had no idea what it was supposed to be “about.” Let’s just say it was right up my alley: Merida, a little fire-haired Scottish future queen, would rather ride her fluffy horse (Angus) through the woods and practice archery than listen to her extremely persistent mother’s lifelong instructions on how to become a proper princess. She breaks protocol, bigtime, at her betrothal ceremony. She scores a sketchy spell from a witch that does something horrible to her mother–the result of which is that they both learn very difficult lessons like how to love and understand each other and when it is appropriate to swallow one’s pride. It is a fast-paced tear-jerker. Tabling, for a moment, the completely fucked up absence of people of color in Pixar worlds of self-reflexive, inspirational rebellion and the many complications of this statement: i think that for people who imagine that representation shapes reality, it is nonetheless a welcome insertion into the lexicon of dolls and rides and party decorations available for the babies.

There is a very complicated moment when, having shown up her assy suitors in an archery contest–she decides to shoot for her own hand, and wins by a landslide–her mother says, you embarrassed them. For me, this is one of the film’s most poignant moments: swallowing your pride isn’t always about being subservient and eating shit. Sometimes it’s just a nice gesture not to rip someone apart–especially when it’s dead easy.

i came home and googled general responses to the movie. On the first page, i see an article in EW asking, “Could the heroine of Pixar’s Brave be gay?” More specifically: “But it’s quite possible that while watching Brave’s tomboyish heroine shoot arrows, fight like one of the boys, and squirm when her mother puts her in girly clothes, a thought might pop into the head of some viewers: Is Merida gay?” Now, if the three potential bridegroom options presented to her hadn’t been so revolting (a boy who looks like a gigantic toddler who can break big pieces of wood with his bare hands, a Braveheart-esque tantrumy dorkwad, and a squat, mumbling little spaz), this possibility would be even more interesting, but i do like the way that the lameness of the princes further deconstructs the “reality” behind conventional fairy tale narratives. What i like, even more, is that without ever once bringing it up, the extreme gender variance of the character suggests that this actually is a movie about sex–the way in which the sex that you have (your own complex interaction with gender norms and expectations) determines the sex that you have, and i think it’s fascinating that this EW writer imagines a world in which such an unconventional gender performance reads as gay.