INDIE MOMENT OF THE WEEK

This week's award goes to: me! (For forgetting to do it on my self-imposed deadline and now slagging together a cursory entry.

Real winner: Elyse. No kidding. (I might just start calling the this the Elyse award.) "What'd she do this week that's so indie?" you might be asking. There is, in fact, quite a lot of stuff to choose from, though looking back at my previous couple entries, there's only one thing that comes prominently to mind: sitting out that "badonka-donk" dance. What she said, "Everybody gets together and shakes their donk-donk for a prize. I don't think I'm going to participate in that" [emphasis mine]. One might ask if she HATES FUN, and certainly the answer is YES. In other words, she recognized the dubious implications of the Great Donk Donk Danceoff (sexual commodification by way of objectified essentialism -- in plainspeak, the entire "contest" is tied into the "performance" of a single aspect of the anatomy). (Admittedly, the basic idea of not dancing is more of an IDM hallmark (dance music you can't/don't dance to) rather than indie, but more relevantly, Elyse willingly declined to take part in the contest -- self-marginalization = indie x 10.)

Even in how she refers to it, as "donk-donk" (the self-consciously and self-effacingly white, dorky, unhip, ploddingly unrhythmic term) rather than Robin's "badonka-donk," emphasizes her indieness via the white/black (re: indie/hip hop) cultural/linguistic divide.

(I was tempted to say that Elyse's meta moment -- acting as a reality tv viewer at the same time that she's a character in a reality show -- justified giving her this week's honor. But meta isn't so indie as it is nerdy/scholarly.)