Pet Peeves: Ho-ing it up for Halloween

Halloween (or All Hallow's Eve) used to be a time to take stock of and celebrate the harvest, a time when people believed the divide between this world and the underworld became permeable, allowing the dead to cause havoc amongst the living. During celebrations, people would often dress like ghouls, goblins, and other scary creatures to mimic and placate or scare the ghosts away.

Now? Well, now we dress like whores. The movie Mean Girls captured this beautifully. Remember Lindsay Lohan's character Cady's big faux pas when she dressed up like a zombie bride for a high school Halloween party? Cady's inner dialogue: "In 'Girl World,' Halloween is the one night a year when a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it. The hard-core girls just wear lingerie and some form of animal ears."

And nothing's sacred. Even the most chaste and honorable costume ideas have a "sexy" twist nowadays. Angel? How about a bad angel? A nun? How about a naughty nun? Judge Judy? How about Judge Do-Me?

And me? I'm no better. That's me dressed like a belly dancer in college in the picture to the right here. . . . And didn't I just comment about being sick of the objectification of women as eye candy in a recent post, using the U2 belly dancer as an example? Yes, yes I did, Internet.

Hmm. Have I become a complete and utter hypocrite? Have I just become a finger-wagging prude in my 30's? Or was I just a young girl who was susceptible to societal gender stereotypes who has since matured? Ya, . . . I'd like to argue for the latter, . . . but, if I'm honest, the truth is probably closer to a combination of all three of those theories. Nevertheless, it's still the latter that bothers me the most . . . because it starts so early. Unless you've been in a coma for the past few years, you have to be aware of the most recent generation of little girls' unhealthy obsession with Disney princesses these days. (See a great Target Women video post regarding this too.) There they are to the left, each coquettishly tilting her head for the "camera." Yikes. Just when I think we've made so much progress, I realize how much things are still so gender-typed. Parents might as well just cut to the chase and dress their kids like this for Halloween! Boo, indeed.

Live Shows: DeVotchKa

Back on September 16th, Matt and I went to a DeVotchKa concert at El Ray. (We always admonish ourselves for instinctively saying the El Ray. Duh, "el" MEANS "the"! But, hey, even their website is called "theelrey.com," so I guess we can't feel that bad.) We saw them for the first time back in August of '06 at the Troubadour, and they were amazing. The opening of the show is still seared into my brain as one of the best I've ever seen. I remember, all of a sudden, the spotlights opened up on the second-floor walkway on the side of the room, and there were Nick and Shawn standing on the railing, leaning out over the crowd, playing in perfect unison the opening notes of La Llorrona ("weeping woman" in Spanish) on their trumpets. Wow. Just. Wow. They came out with a new CD earlier this year, so we were really looking forward to seeing them again. (For those who may think they don't know DeVotchKa - they did the soundtrack to Little Miss Sunshine [a must-see movie].)


How to describe DeVotchKa? Hmm. Well, as Jeanie Schroder, who plays the tuba, bass, and sings vocals for the band, says, "It's an eclectic mix of a lot of different sounds. It's got mariachi, it's got polka, it's got tango, it's got rock and roll, it's got gypsy music, and it all kind of mixes together." Yes, it all kind of mixes together . . . and it's killer. LOVE IT. They're just so talented. And Jeanie's not the only one who plays multiple instruments (extremely well). There's Thomas Hagerman who plays the violin, accordion, and toy piano; Nick Urata who plays guitar, theramin, trumpet, and sings lead vocals; Shawn King who plays drums, trumpet, and accordion; and they also often employ back-up violinists who bring even more depth to the whole big sound they create. Something else amazing? Nick whistling live. He's pitch-perfect and never misses a note (check out "Til the End of Time"). Truly impressive.

Some other interesting trivia about DeVotchKa? They started out as a back-up band for burlesque shows. Uh-huh. No, seriously, they did. As a bit of a throw-back to those days, their recent tour includes a performance piece involving a scantily-clad woman and a long piece of hanging fabric, akin to something you might see at a Cirque du Soleil show. I'm not sure how it was incorporated at other venues, but it was part of the encore the night I saw them. I didn't catch a picture of it myself, but I found these (left and right here) online from a couple of other shows. On the one hand, I was pretty amazed at the woman's performance. On the other? I was thinking, "Mm, exactly what does a writhing, half-naked woman have to do with this song?" Kind of how I felt when U2 starting bringing that belly dancer on tour to dance during "Mysterious Ways," except I could at least see the song connection there. It's just . . . the whole thing is not that far removed from the go-go dancer, the girls dancing in cages. They're not part of the band; they're just there to act as some sort of hypersexualized eye candy. The whole objectification of women thing, it just never ceases to annoy me.

(Note: Because I'm such a superb typist, when I initially went to look up pictures of the U2 belly dancer, I typed "belly dander." . . . I do not want to know what that search might have unearthed.)