Superbowl Halftime Show - M.I.A. Flips the Bird

[Peregrine]

Just watched the youtube video of the half time show. What a tasteless, tacky clownshow. "world peace". Bloody useless cliche. I've nothing to ad, just my total disgust with what is deemed entertainment. Carry on.

[Nordic]

I never heard of M.I.A. until about 3 days ago when a fellow I work for now and then posted this video on FB.



http://m.youtube.com/watch?desktop_uri= ... D-LE&gl=US

Now I'm seeing several other people posting it.

Its pretty trippy in its own right, in some weird world-stage, cross-cultural ethnographic kind of way.

Is she really married to a Bronfman? That just ruins it. Oh, and performing at the superbowl. That ruins it too.

But really WTF?

For me this was like when you learn a new word, then suddenly see it everywhere.

[Belligerent Savant]

.

Bronfman's eldest son Benjamin is also known as Ben Brewer, a rock musician. Brewer was the guitar player and vocalist for the New York-based alternative rock band The Exit. He is engaged to Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam, better known under the stage name of M.I.A.; they have a son, Ikhyd Edgar Arular Bronfman, born on 11 February 2009.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Bronfman,_Jr.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Bronfman

Benjamin Zachary Bronfman (born August 6, 1982), is an environmentalist, entrepreneur, and musician. Bronfman is currently a Strategic Advisor & principal of Global Thermostat and Algae Systems LLC. He was a member of rock band The Exit (going by the name Ben Brewer), and he is currently a member of the music collective, Teachers, and co-founder of the Green Owl record label. He is the son of actress Sherry Brewer and Edgar Bronfman, Jr., CEO of Warner Music Group.

The eldest of his parents’ three children, Benjamin is engaged to musician and activist, Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam, better known under the stage name, M.I.A. The couple had their first child, Ikhyd Edgar Arular Bronfman, on February 11, 2009.

http://www.greendesignbriefs.com/compon ... ticle/6311

NASA's Ames Research Center (Moffett Field, CA) licensed the patent-pending algae photo-bioreactor to Algae Systems, LLC (Carson City, NV) which plans to develop and pilot the technology in Tampa Bay, FL. Algae Systems is a new company dedicated to commercializing the method. The company plans to refine and integrate the NASA technology into biorefineries to produce renewable energy products, including diesel and jet fuel.

The OMEGA system consists of large plastic bags with inserts of forward-osmosis membranes that grow freshwater algae in processed wastewater by photosynthesis. Using the sun's energy, the algae absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and nutrients from the wastewater to produce biomass and oxygen. As the algae grow, the nutrients are contained in the enclosures, while the cleansed freshwater is released into the surrounding ocean through the forward-osmosis membranes.

"Algae Systems takes sewage from cities and feeds it to living algae, creating fuels, fertilizers and clean water, while removing CO2 from the atmosphere in the process. In just three years, our fuels will be cost competitive with oil. At scale, our fuels could replace fossil fuels within a generation."

http://globalthermostat.com/

[justdrew]

By Lindy West, msnbc.com contributor

I can't believe you posted that.


Seatown's aflutter over Lindy as usual. Edited to add Penn is the cunt.
...

It's an ok piece I thought, those ads deserve to have the crap kicked out of them. I guess it's time to stop giving Penn J. any credit, I'm now finally striking his name from my book. What a dick.

oh wait, but yeah, he CAN go fuck himself then.

this shit from a guy who's based the last ten years of his life "hating" people on his stupid tv show (which I don't watch) and a career based on personal superiority.

----

as for madonna, I don't care; her imagery, if I were to reference anything, might be Lilith

[crikkett]

Creepy.

The words say 'world peace' but that's an eagle, not a dove.

[justdrew]

Creepy.

The words say 'world peace' but that's an eagle, not a dove.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?tit ... d_eagleism

[Belligerent Savant]

.

The words say 'world peace' but that's an eagle, not a dove.

Astute observation.

[Pele'sDaughter]

First thing that popped into my mind.

Well there's a rose in a fisted glove

And the eagle flies with the dove

And if you can't be with the one you love, honey

Love the one you're with

You gotta love the one you're with

You gotta love the one you're with

http://www.metrolyrics.com/love-the-one ... -nash.html

[kelley]

if it's an eagle, herald of the gods, symbol of the republic, projection of empire, aquila, aigle de drapeau, nazi adler . . . if it's a dove, the figure represents not simply 'world peace', with the literal spelling of the word in place of an olive branch, but the appeal (as related to both plea and desire) of this concept. if nothing else, the comportment of this vague shape suggests to me the holy spirit hovering above the mystic of the lamb in jan van eyck's ghent altarpiece, which depicts an eternal reign of the divine christ.

this is what i mean by pastiche. there's no poetics of ambiguity in madonna's presentation of this iconography. instead, it's just the muddled esperanto of a procession of styles that's come to characterize 'postmodernism'. there's no wit in the quotation and no understanding of the reference; it really is drained of any suggestive or expressive power beyond the will of the individual who brandishes it.

[Saurian Tail]

I see the eagle now that it has been pointed out. But here is what the inkblot test conjures up in my mind.

The Shadow Vessels from Z'ha'dum in Babylon 5:

[Bruce Dazzling]

I think my analysis would be disappointing, ST.

Although, I dare say, it's a real shot in the arm to see us old people represented in the media lately: Madonna, Betty White...

In 2004 we saw Janet's nipple and the next year they played it really, really safe with good old Paul McCartney!:

Not so fast, ST.

Here's Madonna's black super bowl star:



McCartney, on the other hand, was slightly more subtle...

[Bruce Dazzling]

Creepy.

The words say 'world peace' but that's an eagle, not a dove.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?tit ... d_eagleism

More likely a phoenix.

[vince]

I heard M.I.A. is from England... shouldn't she have given the 'two-finger' sign?
When I was a kid, I remember seeing the 'two-finger' on the show "The Young Ones", and to this day, I still don't know why they do it that way!

[Luther Blissett]

Huh. Well, your analysis actually encouraged me to watch much it, ST.

All I can say is: I'm glad I didn't let the Superbowl interrupt our Downton Abbey marathon yesterday.

Fuck! That's what I did too. Completely skipped the Super Bowl.

I can appreciate that Downton Abbey is exploring the early 20th century changes to class and social structures that ushered in the transition between Victoria and the Cold War, in an almost heavy-handed way. I expected it to be one thing, but it wasn't that. I'm eager to see what they have to say with the writing.

It offered a nice antidote to all the madness that was presumably going on out there in the world.

MIA is originally from Sri Lanka, educated in London. She was with a friend of mine for some time, and he produced her first album. I don't doubt that she could have had shady connections or sponsors, but at the time she was just an interesting artist with an interesting past.

[slomo]

http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/02/all-sc ... honor.html

By James Howard Kunstler
on February 6, 2012 9:43 AM

A Martian psychoanalyst observing the US Superbowl on TV would be shocked by the vicious animal spirits emanating from that spectacle, starting with the triumphal trumpet blasts borrowed straight from the old 1950s Hollywood epic movies echoing the prideful mis-steps of ancient Rome, along with the by-now clichéd CGI trick in the opening credits of gleaming metallic heraldic insignia spun into a military cordon of stars so as to protect the tender collective ego of this anxious nation. America wears its zeitgeist plastered right on its sweaty forehead.

Everybody knows that the commercial messages between the play-action amount to a national Rorschach test, and this year's collection made us look more psychopathic than ever - starting with the advertisement for the Chevy Silverado: Fade in on a devastated nameless American city, the buildings smashed, the streets littered with debris, a gray ash coating over everything, and no living creatures in evidence.... A newspaper headline proclaims "2012 Mayan Apocalypse...." How reassuring! Wait! Something stirs behind a heap of rubble... it cracks open... and out drives a plucky American male lumpen "worker" dude behind the wheel of a gleaming giant pickup truck. He is soon joined by other men and their trucks, all of them blithely unfazed by the end-of-the-world.

A curious scenario. What's the take away? I wondered, of course, where these plucky fellows would look for their next fill-up in the devastated landscape. Surely the service stations would miss the next scheduled fuel truck delivery. Are American men not expected to think beyond the immediate moment they are in? Are they on an intellectual level with lemurs and Holstein steers?

The Superbowl pageant is a window into the condition of American manhood, and the view is pretty pathetic. It's a picture of men who feel so weak, insecure, and fearful that they have to compensate with fantasies of limitless destructive power. Ads for several new movies and (I think) video games followed the Silverado apocalypse romp. There were unifying themes throughout. All depicted the problems of life as 1) coming from outside our own society (or world); 2) in the form of aliens who wield mystifying technological destructive power; and 3) leaving a few human remnants on a smoldering landscape after a cosmic showdown.

...

Then there was the grotesque half-time extravaganza featuring Madonna, which was a weird parallel commentary on the state of American womanhood. Pretending to be ageless and indomitable, the old trooper performed a variety of standing crotch-locks on her Praetorian guard of hoofers and then stumbled more than once on the ridiculous bleacher stage-set that looked as if was designed to trip the performers up. Message to American women: be sluts as long as you possibly can because there is nothing else for you in this culture. I couldn't help thinking that American chanteuses of yesteryear - say, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Carole King - sang about adult problems and emotions with a greater thematic range, and would never have subjected themselves to such a display of pitiful narcissism. (Did anyone notice that Madonna's corps de ballet all wore her monogram on their loincloths?) America needs a prayer, all right, but I don't think they'll find it by calling Madonna's name.

...