We Can't Stop

I couldn’t sleep last night, was kept awake by stoned thoughts of Miley Cyrus, of Chris Crocker, of America. I have watched the Miley Cyrus VMA performance probably thirty times already. I can’t get enough of it. I think there is something in there, something waiting to be parsed out, and I know it is not the thing that other people are trying to project on to it, self-proclaimed leftists trying to do postcolonial readings of the performance or conservatives and liberals alike both showing their fear and disgust of certain forms of female sexuality, saying she should have worn more clothes or that it was inappropriate. That all of these readings are off, way off, show instead the stupidity of their proponents. It was a beautiful acid dream of a performance. My head pretty much exploded with joy while watching it and I have been assembling the pieces of my Humpty Dumpty self that were scattered around my living room, trying to reassemble them and understand why it was exactly I loved the performance so much.

It was tacky, but knowingly so - this beautiful and celebratory embrace of all that constitutes life in America in the early 21st Century. You had her coming out in some demented mouseketeer get-up, a defiant fuck you to her Disney past. She continued this theme later in the performance when she started dancing with Robin Thicke, the mouse swimsuit stripped off, but a large white foam finger very reminiscent of Mickey Mouse’s large gloved white hands now on her person, a hand she groped both Thicke and herself with. It was wonderful. Also wonderful was the fact that she put to rest the critique put forth by liberals with too much time on their hands that the song, “Blurred Lines,” was a rape anthem. You had Miley Cyrus take control of the song from Thicke, that the song was not about an intoxicated woman that a guy could take advantage of (that it never was), but that instead you saw it for what it was, this fun pop song about people getting loose, getting messy, and that not being a problem.

Miley owned that stage and did her thing and I love the fact that the whole crowd at Barclays Center and that the whole Internet watching the thing online in clips and gifs were all aghast, horrified at this woman not seeming to care what society or conventions dictate as appropriate behavior for a young woman. Get it, girl.

These thoughts somehow bled into thoughts of Chris Crocker, probably because I watched his YouTube commentary video of the Miley performance. I lay awake, unable to sleep, thinking about how much I love Chris Crocker. His emotional exhbiitionism is something I can relate so much to. I have this diary, which is a smaller scale version of his video exhibitionism through YouTube and Vine. I think there is something so admirable in how he puts himself out there tirelessly.

These thoughts circled around and around, spiraling up toward some very broad insights about what life is about and what America is about, and it all seemed very profound to me at the time. I was going to write them down, but I was already in bed and I was already only going to get a couple of hours of sleep. And so I masturbated instead (really though, it might have been the same thing), knowing it would help me fall asleep.