#could you imagine a docuseries about the Devils | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

polarisbibliotheque · 6 months ago

Text

Silly writer things and some musical ramblings

*sigh* just a little silly writing update to you all before I come back with serious stuff, shattering whole worlds, making you cry over feels for these unhinged half-demons,

I 100.000% blame my sister for throwing me back into my Richie Sambora crush and I must warn you all it will show in the next things I write for Dante - we'll have 'you yee'd your last 'haw' silly red devil in these premises soon enough and I regret nothing.

Though Dante will be more like this, probably

Before you guys ask, it's the Bon Jovi docuseries. I first listened to them when I was 6 y/o, probably, and Livin' on a Prayer was the first song I felt things I didn't even know I could feel with music. I saw Richie singing and playing, bam, love at first guitar chord.

Plus, Wanted Dead or Alive is one of Dante's life anthems, he would sing and play it 10/10 dressed like Richie, I'll die on this hill. I'll leave you with the video that made me go "I wanna be a badass guitar player someday":

(and some of my music ramblings under the cut for those interested in it, feel free to not read it but give the video a shot! Seriously. It's a very long ramble, though you might learn a thing or two on music!)

youtube

OK! MUSICAL SHENANIGANS!

Little disclaimer: I'm just getting back to it, so sorry for blabbering about this here - I kinda need an outlet and I have no one else to talk to about all this. Music has been my best friend ever since I was a kid and I had to muffle it for a very long time in my life, I'm just now coming back to life and it feels amazing!

I had piano classes at school, but I always wanted to play and learn things that weren't quite in the curriculum...

Hence why I got used to watching videos and observing musicians extensively. It's kinda creepy actually

So, Richie has a triple neck guitar here, first time I ever saw one. The first neck, I think it's something close to a mandolin, second neck a normal 6 strings guitar, third neck a 12 strings guitar - basically, 2 strings instead of just one like a regular guitar. The 12 strings is the one that gives Wanted Dead or Alive that cowboy feels to it.

Now, that behemoth of a guitar must weight a fucking ton. My normal, 6 strings stratocaster already weights like hell - don't ever be fooled by those guitarists manhandling their guitars around like nothing 'cause those things are heavy - imagine a triple threat like that. No wonder he plays most of it sitting down.

Hence why Dante can play and wield Nevan like it's made of cardboard, it's his demonic side showing, that showoff

Another thing to note, is that when he gets his electric guitar, his strap is adjusted so his guitar isn't super low on his body... And he doesn't look like young Beatles with the guitars on their chests. He looks cool, I can play my guitar like Richie and I'll be cool, 'cause I CAN'T for THE LIFE OF ME play with my guitar almost on my knees. I personally find it easier and better to play like he does.

My arms aren't that long, I'm pocket-sized, thanks Richie for avenging me back in the 80's and looking cool regardless.

And size has nothing to do with it, 'cause this man is big - and I say that by his hands. My main pet peeve with guitarists worldwide: men have big hands and can wrap them easily around the guitar necks and play 5 finger chords using their thumbs like it's nothing.

Not exclusive to men, though: my sister can do the same, but she doesn't play anything. Blessings were wasted on her :')

Nevertheless, I love watching guitarists hands and how they do stuff: how they hold their picks, how they play the notes, how they move their hands. Richie has wonderful hands and hand movements, and there's a lot to learn there by carefully watching him play.

For instance: I can rest assured I'm not learning alternate picking and training to play faster wrong, 'cause Richie rests his pinky finger of his rhythm hand on the guitar while picking the strings and it's exactly what I naturally do.

I can ditch all those "5 things you're doing wrong when playing guitar!! Avoid this!! Bet you're doing the 3rd example!!" videos, 'cause if Richie Fucking Sambora plays like this, then I'm not doing it wrong, just differently. It gives you some reassurance if you don't have a teacher or if your teacher is an asshole.

I hate people who put so many rules in music. I'm kinda like Barbossa, the Code (theory) is more of a guideline than rules set in stone, anyway. I'm learning theory, but I personally believe the ~feeling~ is more important

One thing I always do, is watch where they play on the fret and their rhythm hand movement, and I managed to figure out some songs I had trouble with just by watching them playing live.

Figured out the C9 chord while watching this video of Richie and "why isn't he playing the C chord that I play when I learned this song?" because the man knows best and taught me a thing or two I didn't know ;)

Hahahaha so, my fellow musicians, I do this with all instruments. I learn the chords, but I always watch thoroughly various videos of the guys who made the songs playing live so I can double, triple, quadruple check if I'm doing it right or how to get unstuck in a particularly annoying part I cannot figure out for the life of me.

You know those videos people make of musicians playing live on social media? Currently I'm getting a lot of Nameless Ghouls on my instagram hahahaha and said videos are WONDERFUL to watch hands and learn. I have a hand issue

And I'll end this on: Richie's ragged voice singing his part of the song at the end does things to me. Sorry Jon. But Richie snatched my heart right then and there.

I hope you guys who were patient enough to read this learned something from it and NOW I shall go write a little more and go to sleep, 'cause it's almost 2 a.m over here and I think it's showing :)

3 notes · View notes

shortsrifle7-blog · 5 years ago

Text

Samin Nosrat Turned Her TV Dream Into a Reality With Netflix’s ‘Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat’

After writing one of the seminal food books of the last decade, author Samin Nosrat is now expanding her quest to uncover the roots of deliciousness into a new Netflix series premiering this Thursday, October 11.

Just like the book of the same name, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat explores the science behind essential cooking techniques, with information about how to apply these lessons in your home kitchen. Travel is also a key component of the new series, with Nosrat visiting some of the world’s greatest food destinations to learn from artisans, chefs, and home cooks. The fourth episode, “Heat,” features a stopover at Chez Panisse, the Berkeley, California, institution where Nosrat started her cooking career. Although the San Diego-born, Iranian-American chef is a relative newcomer to the world of television — she appeared in one episode of the Michael Pollan docuseries Cooked — Nosrat quickly earned a reputation among the production crew for being a “natural” on camera.

Eater recently caught up with Nosrat to talk about the journey from page to screen and her thoughts on the future of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.

Eater: You first worked with director Caroline Suh on the Michael Pollan series Cooked. How did you get from that show to Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat? Samin Nosrat: She was the showrunner of Cooked and directed the episode I was in. When we met in Berkeley, it was like love at first sight. She told me that day, “You’re going to have your own show,” and she was telling me the story of Jamie Oliver being discovered in the background of some other show.

What did you like about working together? That day, with that crew, it was really grounded. It was definitely the biggest crew I’d been around, but I felt so amazing. There was this way where they kept being like, “Can you do this again? Can you do it this way? Can you answer this question?” And I was so happy to give them whatever they wanted, because I felt like we were all on the same page working toward this larger goal of getting it just right. I feel that in restaurants, like at Chez Panisse, and I have felt that in other collective environments where I’m working with colleagues toward a goal. But it’s a rare thing to end up in a creative environment where everyone just wants to make the best possible thing. It was just a magical feeling, and I really felt like she was like my guardian angel.

“It’s a universal philosophy of cooking, and anywhere we go, we can teach this.”

That episode was really fun. Caroline let me talk about a lot of stuff — she was so genuinely curious. I talked a lot about feminism in the kitchen. There was a lot of things they didn’t use, but I felt like they were really listening to stuff that I spent years thinking about. They went back and made the episode, and I think it performed well — there’s so much I don’t know, because people are very secretive at Netflix. I think they were interested in a season two, but I’m not Michael Pollan. He didn’t want to do a season two.

Caroline knew that I was making this four-part book, and Jigsaw Productions knew about that. She was like, “Send me drafts of your chapters, and let’s bring this to Jigsaw.” She really shepherded it to them, and there was a way that they could see the potential for it. To me, it makes absolute sense: It’s a universal philosophy of cooking, and anywhere we go, we can teach this. So, Jigsaw was super on it, they brought it to Netflix, and it was so crazy how it was just, “Yes, yes, yes, yes.”

All things considered, how many years did it take to write the book? I had the idea 18 years ago, and then it took me about seven years of active work, teaching the classes, working on the curriculum, distilling the curriculum into something that could be on the page, writing the book proposal, selling the book, and writing the book. Were you going to ask me if I ever imagined it would be a show?

Yes! Did you ever dream of a TV show? I think the first time I taught a cooking class was 2007. I remember coming back to work and telling the other cooks and chefs that I worked with, “This seems really inefficient, teaching people how to cook, like, 12 rich ladies in Berkeley at a time.” And I was like, “What if I had a show, where I taught people how to cook? It would reach so many more people, and it would be much more efficient, and I could get the message to the people who need to hear this, other than recreational home cooks.” And I remember that, because this was Berkeley, people were like, “TV is the devil.” But it always was somewhere in the back of my mind.

And then the other thing is that, right after I sold my book, I went to the number one top-rated astrologer on Yelp, a psychic in San Francisco. It was this expensive thing that I’d heard about forever, and I was like, “I’m going to go to her.” She didn’t know anything about me, but I told her I had a book, and she said, “Your book’s going to get optioned for a movie deal.” And I was like, “Are you sure about that? Maybe a show?” And she was like, “No, I see a movie deal.” And what’s funny is that the way that the deal was structured is that it was a film option, not a TV option, because it was a documentary film series. She was right.

How did the travel aspect come into the mix? Was that something you wanted from the beginning? It was in there since the earliest rounds of the treatment. That’s when you’re dreaming, and I was like, “Were going to go to nine countries per episode.” And then we had to deal with the realities of budgeting.

We went to LA to pitch Netflix in person the day before Halloween 2016. We had this great pitch — it was so awesome — and then it takes a day for them go get back to you. So the day I got the news of “we want it,” was two days after the Trump election, and I was in my bed, very depressed. I very much questioned, “What does it mean for me to decide to be a public person, when the public has sent me a very clear message that I’m not the kind of person that they want to see on camera?” I had to sit with that.

Accomplishment-wise, of course, it was amazing news. But in the moment, when I was looking out at the world, I was like, “What does this mean?” Initially, I really wanted to go to Iran for the “acid” episode. And then I was thinking about like, what will it mean for the world — and what will it mean in my life — to be seen in a hijab speaking Farsi? I spent a lot of time thinking about that stuff.

Right now, the reason I cook and the reason I care about this as a line of work is that it’s kind of like the lowest-hanging fruit in terms of [being] the tool for a storyteller; to tell universal stories, connect people from diverse backgrounds, increase curiosity, and teach you about the world. And I thought, “Well, if I can do that with this, it’s my job.”

What I wouldn’t have given as a little kid in San Diego to have seen someone like me on TV! In second grade, I was called a terrorist. My whole life has been this. So if I can mean that for somebody else — for another little kid, or not even a little kid — then that’s what I wanted to do.

“The truth is, sure, of course there’s all this diversity of flavor everywhere we go, but fundamentally, deliciousness in deliciousness.”

It seems like, by letting food be the prism through which you get to explore the world, you’re allowed the freedom to seamlessly bounce from place to place. On the show, you make it seem like... We are all connected! The more I kept doing research for the book, I was reading a lot of science studies and stuff, about the way we taste, the way we derive pleasure, and the ultimate human relationship to eating. And the stuff about salt, fat, acid, and heat is fundamentally human. We need salt because our bodies can’t produce it. We need certain fats that our bodies can’t produce. Acid makes our mouths water, and that starts the digestive process. We all want to taste delicious foods. And the truth is, sure, of course, there’s all this diversity of flavor everywhere we go, but fundamentally, deliciousness is deliciousness.

Would you like to do another season? And if so, would you do it the same way or would you structure it differently? I learned so much that I would want to put everything I’ve learned into practice, absolutely. I think whatever I make next, it will look different. I think I would totally do something with them again — I loved working with Netflix, so much. It’s a dream.

The other day when I was at [the television trade conference] TCA, I was going through the press gauntlet and went over to the TV Guide booth. They took my picture and said, “How’s your day?” And I said, “Well, did you grow up thinking your picture was going to be in TV Guide? Because I didn’t.” I never thought this could happen or would happen. It’s just beyond my comprehension, and I feel so lucky to have a tool to make people’s lives a little bit better.

One thing I learned — a basic, practical thing — was that writing a column about cooking, while you’re traveling around the world making a show about cooking, when you have to write your stuff, report your stuff, and fact check it... that almost killed me. It was really hard to be so on top of my schedule to make sure I was at home testing, submitting, and filing. So I think that anything that I do next time, there will have to be a way where what I’m writing about and what I’m filming about line up, so I’m not losing my mind doing 10 different things at the same time.

I do think there is an argument to be made for more seasons of this show, because I do think it’s a universal idea. I think that people have been talking about this a lot after Anthony Bourdain’s passing, where, from the outside you’re like, “Wow, a food travel show? That’s the best job ever. Wow, you get to go to all these places and do all this stuff and meet all these people.” I just want to say for the record, when we were on the Mexico shoot, Caroline and I ate more Johnny Rockets hamburgers than any Mexican food, because our hotel had a Johnny Rockets in it, and we’d get home so late and leave so early. I wasn’t eating all of the foods in Mérida. It’s not a vacation.

Now I understand what’s involved, and so I think in some ways I’d like to do a show that doesn’t move around so much. But also, with my book and with the show, I think I maybe have earned the trust of whoever I’m going to work with that it’s okay to break rules a little bit and do things a little bit differently and not by the formula that’s always been done. I need a little downtime to have a creative moment and figure out what that could look like. But I think there’s infinite ways that you can make exciting, new, beautiful food shows, and I totally want to do it.

And also, whatever I do next, I do think that the most meaningful part of this for me was getting the opportunity to work with a lot of different people who are not historically shown on television. Not only people of color, but focusing on home cooks rather than restaurant cooking — focusing on the grannies. Any time I could, I was bringing that kind of stuff in, because I do feel like what we get to see on TV is pretty limited. So hopefully, again, now I will have the kind of power where I can insist on that.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

• Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat [Netflix] • All Food TV Coverage [E]

Eat, Drink, Watch.

Food entertainment news and streaming recommendations every Friday

By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy and European users agree to the data transfer policy.

Source: https://www.eater.com/2018/10/10/17949862/samin-nosrat-salt-fat-acid-heat-netflix

0 notes

njawaidofficial · 7 years ago

Text

Not All Bad Girls Go To Prison

https://styleveryday.com/not-all-bad-girls-go-to-prison/

Not All Bad Girls Go To Prison

Sarah Maxwell and Alexis Miller

Netflix

“She don’t care who you are, how big you are, she’ll fight you if she needs to and it cracks me up.” That’s the introduction given by 16-year-old Sarah Maxwell when we first meet fellow inmate Alexis Miller, an otherwise soft-spoken 15-year-old with dimples and cascading brunette locks, in Episode 5 of Girls Incarcerated: Young and Locked Up, an eight-episode docuseries released on Netflix in March. It would work equally well as a tagline for the whole series, which delves into the lives of teen girls serving time in Indiana’s Madison Juvenile Correctional Facility for a range of mostly petty offenses like repeated runaways and drug and alcohol consumption, but in a few cases assault and vehicular manslaughter.

Executive producer Nick Rigg has described the show — which follows the emotional and behavioral growth of roughly 15 inmates (referred to as “students”) along with empathetic commentary from their correction officers, counselors, teachers, and occasional family members — as “Orange Is the New Black for a 13 Reasons Why generation.” But unlike both of those series, Girls Incarcerated is not fiction. The series sits at a provocative nexus of popular unscripted programming, where a wave of documentary-style shows that spotlight the issue of incarceration in the US, such as MSNBC’s Lockup and OWN’s Released, intersects with the trope of the troubled teen seen in many reality programs, such as MTV’s Teen Mom and A&E’s Beyond Scared Straight. Rigg maintains that Girls Incarcerated is not a “reality” series in the way that we’ve come to understand the term, because, he says, “we weren’t going to make TV stars of these girls.” And yet the show highlights the girls’ innate star quality. They are funny, and outrageously so, delivering an uncanny mix of outsized confidence and childish goofiness direct to your living room.

Madison Juvenile Correctional Facility

Netflix

Asked about practicing Zumba during the prison’s daily rec hour, Paige McAtee, a wide-eyed 17-year-old with a heart-shaped neck tattoo, explains matter-of-factly that she wants a body like Nicki Minaj, before smacking her hips for the camera and succumbing to a giggle fit about the “jiggle.” In another scene, Miller gushes over a girl she’s crushing on, an inmate named Armani Buckner, in her diary: “Let me find out she find another girl I’d be gettin’ a murder charge lol no joke.” (In reality, Miller is serving time because she started using drugs and running away after her mother became homeless and released her to foster care.)

“I’m too pretty to fight.”

Later, when Buckner discovers her cat has died back home, Miller and a group of Madison inmates stand around the cat’s makeshift funeral in the prison yard, reassuring Buckner that her cat is “probably eatin’ hella tuna up there.” And when 16-year-old Najwa Pollard, agitated, argues with correctional staff over a piece of her mail that’s been returned to sender, Pollard threatens, “Do you really wanna go down this road? … It ain’t gonna be pretty. It’s not gonna be peaches ’n’ cream. It’s gonna be baked beans ’n’ burritos ’cause I’m farting up a storm in here!” Pollard eventually cooled off, which reminds me of a common refrain when the girls at Madison decide to de-escalate a confrontation before it turns physical: “I’m too pretty to fight.”

The cheeky and combative bravado of the show’s teenage protagonists is, on the surface level, wildly amusing. (Believe me when I say that the girls of Girls Incarcerated are experts in throwing shade so brutal they make Khloé Kardashian’s comebacks seem almost tactful.) And despite Rigg’s stated intentions, it’s not hard to imagine this as a selling point for the show’s producers — one of whom, Jordana Hochman, formerly acted as vice president of Oxygen Media and might have recognized the bizarre appeal of something like a state-sanctioned version of Bad Girls Club. It would be easy to dismiss Girls Incarcerated as yet another example of questionable reality television, one that uses entertainment value as an excuse to capitalize on the real-life circumstances of some of the nation’s most vulnerable populations: girls of color; girls who live in poverty; girls who run away from home; girls whose parents are imprisoned; girls who have been molested, raped, and abused.

Alexis Miller and Armani Buckner, and Najwa Pollard

Netflix

But Girls Incarcerated (thankfully) isn’t Bad Girls Club. Neither is it exactly like other popular television programs that gawk at out-of-control “bad” girls like the delinquent teen guests we’ve seen on Dr. Phil or the criminally self-obsessed aspiring reality stars of the 2010 E! series Pretty Wild. The inmates of Girls Incarcerated could only be cast on the show because they’d already been assigned their roles by the criminal justice system and trained to play those roles by the failure of the institutions around them, like public education and the foster care system. To some extent they’re performing for the show’s cameras, but there was no need for the producers to manufacture drama: These girls are already living it.

Instead, the show’s awkward balance between tragically adult situations and the final vestiges of childhood enables us to view the “bad” girls of Madison as, surprisingly, just what they are: living, breathing human teen girls — not yet fully formed. While the criminal behavior of young girls is typically flattened by the media into two-dimensional spectacles that humiliate these girls and serve them up as cautionary tales, the show’s (sometimes sad, sometimes banal) contextualizing of the complex histories of a girl’s race, class, and childhood feels like a considerable shift in how our culture turns its gaze on “bad” girls.

Yet for all the empathetic reframing it does, the hopeful optimism offered by Girls Incarcerated still positions the detention center as a site of redemption for its teenage protagonists, none of whom are rich, and many of whom are girls of color. The question is why, when other, more privileged “bad” girls enjoy lower stakes for the same behavior — think about the troubled teen celebrities of the mid-aughts — are the girls of Girls Incarcerated still only afforded redemption stories on television if they are funneled through traditional punitive measures of the state?

Girls walk back to their unit at Madison Juvenile Correctional Facility.

Netflix

“What are we to do with the ambition of young Midwestern girls?” critic Jessa Crispin asks in her introduction to the 2013 edition of I Await the Devil’s Coming, the forceful and unapologetic autobiography of Mary MacLane, the “Wild Woman of Butte,” who published her diary in 1902, when she was just 19. The book, in which MacLane proudly proclaims herself an amoral genius devoted to the devil, scandalized the US for its surprisingly self-assured teen girl ego, so uncommon for girls of MacLane’s time, or any time for that matter.

MacLane’s memoir was, needless to say, a hit, selling 100,000 copies in its first month of publication alone and jettisoning the defiant teen out of Butte, Montana, and into the decadent life of fame, fortune, and devilish pleasures she so desired. MacLane became a household name, but after she was found dead in a Chicago hotel room at the age of 48, her books fell out of print and the legacy of her youthful rebellion was largely forgotten. Still, there is something timeless about MacLane. Crispin describes her as “a feminine, Midwestern Napoleon” — the “teenager who, born in another place with a slight change of disposition, the government would have to send for with its gunboats.”

Newspaper heiress Patty Hearst is led to her 1976 trial by two federal marshals.

Bettmann Archive / Getty Images

In other words, the United States has always been invested in the surveillance and governance of “bad” girls, though their construction in the media has shape-shifted considerably throughout the last several decades. In 1974, 19-year-old Patty Hearst, who was famously recorded wielding a semiautomatic rifle while robbing a bank with the Symbionese Liberation Army, symbolized the wayward female revolutionary of the 1960s and ’70s. By the 1990s, it was the flashy urban girl gang — armed with box cutters, beer bottles, screwdrivers, and knives — who lined their lips and coated their faces in Vaseline before flocking to the streets in defense of the “hood.”

While Hearst — a rich, white heiress — was framed in the media as a lost girl suffering from Stockholm syndrome whose loving parents (and the rest of the nation) wanted her home, broadcast news reports on the ’90s girl gangsters serve as examples of race- and class-based fearmongering that paint girls of color as violent detriments to US society. Despite being found guilty of armed robbery after her story of brainwashing and coercion was deemed unbelievable by a jury, Hearst was released from prison after only two years when her original seven-year sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter. She then enjoyed a brief acting career and quiet family life before being granted a full pardon by President Clinton in 2001. Talk about a redemptive arc.

In 2018, the girls of Girls Incarcerated are those teens sent for with gunboats, only the gunboats have now been replaced with a less metaphorical form of control: the juvenile justice system. They are angry, assertive, and loud, poised for a fight behind Madison’s barbed wire and cinder blocks — an entire squadron of “mouthy little girl[s],” which is the most common description given of any one of the teens featured on the show, both by the inmates themselves and their correction officers. The girls have all got mouths: Of course they know how to use them.

Heidi Lakin

Netflix

Take, for example, Madison’s young Heidi Lakin, who is locked up on violent assault charges (she beat up a kid and stole the keys to his car while drunk). Lakin is 16 years old, a wisecracking, bespectacled white girl with a soft spot for conspiracy theories and fart humor. “I like to fight,” says Lakin during an interview in the first episode, twisting her lips into a smirk for the camera before allowing: “But it’s a bad habit.” Anticipating an afternoon volleyball tournament between Unit 5 and Unit 6 later on in the series, she boasts, “5 is better than 6, of course, ’cause 6 is trash. Trash-ass females, trash-ass day room, trash-ass bedrooms — look at us.”

Or take Chrissy Hutchinson, whom we also meet in Episode 1, just a few weeks prior to her release from Madison. Hutchinson is 17, black, gay, and a bit of a heartthrob, sentenced to two years for a litany of charges, including selling drugs, stealing cars, and robbing homes. Proud of the change and emotional growth she’s accomplished inside, Hutchison, when interviewed about romantic relationships between the girls at Madison, smiles and says simply, ��I’m a stud.”

It’s a sort of larger-than-life self-posturing we can’t seem to get enough of when it comes to young girls, especially as entertainment on TV. And it’s no more on view than with “mean girl” Brianna “Princess Thug” Guerra, the queen bee of Madison Juvenile, who, at 17, has been in and out of lockup for going on four years. When we first meet Guerra, her arrival on scene is precipitated by a series of strained commentary from fellow inmates and correctional staff alike. We learn from those around her that the popular and perennially lip-glossed teen is “blunt and honest,” a confident “alpha personality” who “tells people exactly how she feels,” with an added dramatic flair from the sparkle of her dermal face piercing. Regarding Lakin, for example, Guerra doesn’t beat around the bush. “She spit in my best friend’s lotion,” she says, disgusted, followed by the obvious: “I don’t like her.”

Clockwise from top left: Chrissy Hutchinson, Aubrey Wilson, Brianna Guerra, and Sarah Maxwell

Netflix

Since the ’80s and ’90s we’ve seen this bravado on reality or talk show programs in the form of the out-of-control white girl, whose crimes are ultimately redeemed through the kind of short-lived celebrity that brings a payday. Consider Danielle Bregoli’s rise to internet stardom after appearing on the 2016 Dr. Phil episode “I Want to Give Up My Car-Stealing, Knife-Wielding, Twerking 13-Year-Old Daughter Who Tried to Frame Me for a Crime,” which somehow led the teen to a record deal and later a Billboard nom for Top Rap Female Artist in 2018.

The obvious problem with all representations of “bad” girls in the media is that, no matter what, there is a flattening of the truth.

There was also 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom star Farrah Abraham’s DUI and near collision with a police cruiser in 2013 (when Abraham was 21), to which she responded to press by tweeting “#I’mSuccessful & I don’t care about drama!” Abraham was sentenced to six months’ probation and a $500 fine, after which gossip blogs like TMZ continued to report about the “hard partying” mom who “knows how to get down,” allowing adequate wiggle room for Abraham to pass as “just a young girl having fun.” And in 2010, “Bling Ring” felon Alexis Neiers, an 18-year-old aspiring celebrity from a well-off part of the San Fernando Valley who was arrested for her involvement in the burglaries of several celebrities’ homes, secured an entire season of her own reality show, Pretty Wild, on E!.

Pretty Wild continued to film while Neiers was out on bail and negotiated the circumstances of her highly publicized court case, about which Vanity Fair’s Nancy Jo Sales reported that Neiers wore conspicuous “six-inch Louboutins” to her arraignment. The Vanity Fair article prompted this unforgettable voicemail scene in which a hysterical Neiers simultaneously prayed to God, swore at her mother, and shrieked through tears at Sales for misrepresenting her as a shallow, fame-obsessed brat, instead of the “great, amazing, talented, strong healthy girl” that she was — err, “not even a girl, a young woman.”

Alexis Neiers (right) and her attorney during the sentencing hearing for burglary charges in 2010.

Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times / Getty Images

0 notes