2B — Thursday, March 31, 2016
the real-side
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

EPISODE REVIEW

On the heels of “Batman v 

Superman: Dawn of Justice,” 
CBS’s “Supergirl” is surging 
ahead in ratings with its 
own take on the superhero 
crossover 
genre. 
Breaking 
through 
network 
walls, The 
CW teams up 
with CBS to 
bring Barry 
Allen (Grant 
Gustin, 
“Glee”) into 
National City 
with a running start. Over 
the past season, “Supergirl” 
and “The Flash” have been 
relatively successful among 
the millennial fanbase. The 
newest episode of “Supergirl,” 
“World’s Finest,” earned a 
21-percent overall rise in 
viewers, though the fate 
of “Supergirl” is yet to be 

revealed.

Over the two-season run 

of “The Flash,” we’ve been 
privy to two crossover events 
with The CW’s prodigal 
son, “Arrow.” These team-
ups, much like “Batman v 
Superman,” brought the 
violence, while “World’s 
Finest” is all lollipops and 
rainbows — a well-overdue 
break from the violence 
surrounding the DC Comics 
community as of late. The 
episode explores the “theory 
of the multiverse,” one of 
DC’s most popular and 
attentive elements that has 
only recently been touched 
on in “The Flash.” Although 
they (literally) come from 
different universes, Barry 
and Kara (Melissa Benoist, 
“Glee”) easily find a rhythm, 
eventually working together, 
as opposed to the usual hero-
sidekick dynamic, even if 
Barry does unintentionally 

play wingman for a while.

The transformation of 

Siobhan Smythe (Italia Ricci, 
“Chasing Life”) into the Silver 
Banshee, a moment that might 
have been epic, is slightly 
undermined by the Flash’s 
unexpected arrival, and it may 
have been more effective in 
a later episode. But you can’t 
argue with the offbeat humor 
that accompanies Barry to this 
Earth. Along with the fact that 
he brought ice cream.

Looking at the episode as 

a whole, “World’s Finest” 
is an exposé of everything 
that separates the worlds of 
“Supergirl” and “The Flash” 
from DC’s darker corners. 
Adding in the wonderfully 
adorable and singular 
chemistry between Gustin 
and Benoist, this episode has 
bumped “Batman v Superman” 
and “Flash vs. Arrow” straight 
to the curbs of Gotham.

- MEGAN MITCHELL

A-

Supergirl

Season 1, 
Episode 18 

Mondays 
at 8 p.m.

CBS 

By REBECCA LERNER

Daily Film Editor

In the exclusive circles of the 

art world, Peggy Guggenheim is 
infamous. 
A patron 
for some of 
the most 
accom-
plished art-
ists of the 
20th centu-
ry, today she 
is known 
for her 
adventurous 
sex life and 
her lifelong 
devotion to 
modern art before it was cool.

But “Peggy Guggenheim: Art 

Addict” describes, in no uncer-
tain terms, the person behind 
the heiress to the Guggenheim 
fortune. Director Lisa Immordino 
Vreeland, granddaughter-in-law 
of Diana Vreeland, dives as deep 
as she can into the intricacies and 
eccentricities of Guggenheim’s 
life. However, when dealing with 
a subject as insecure and, frankly, 
strange as Guggenheim, it is 
impossible to get what feels like 
the full story. 

Framed around the audio 

recordings of an interview with 
Guggenheim herself during the 
last year of her life in 1979, the film 
allows her to speak for herself. But 
I couldn’t imagine a woman like 
Guggenheim would let anyone 
else talk for her. Describing her-
self as both a nymphomaniac and 
an art addict, she name drops her 
various cliques of lovers and art-
ists with casual ease and humor. 
The talking heads, including 
surprising figures such as Robert 

De Niro and art critic John Rich-
ardson, only add to this carefully 
drawn portrait of Guggenheim.

Told in chronological order 

and divided into the different 
emotional passages of her life, the 
film describes how Guggenheim 
has always been “the wayward 
Guggenheim” — the black sheep of 
a prestigious family that was the 
equivalent of American nobility. 
After her father died going down 
in the Titanic, she was left with 
450,000 dollars. While this may 
seem substantial for a teenager, it 
was a meager allowance for a Gug-
genheim.

She moved to Paris and opened 

her first gallery on a whim, decid-
ing that a gallery would be less 
expensive than a publishing 
company. In the very nonchalant 
way to which the viewer must 
very quickly adjust, Guggenheim 
affirms that she couldn’t have 
opened the gallery if her (mother) 
hadn’t died. Though Guggenheim 
routinely discusses incredibly sad 
topics in the film, including the 
suicide of her daughter, her multi-
ple divorces and the botched nose 
job that led to her lifelong insecu-
rity in her appearance, she never 
quite varies from the same posh 
voice with which she addresses 
everything.

Guggenheim was revolutionary 

in so many ways. After opening 
her gallery in Paris right before 
World War II broke out and Hitler 
invaded France, she waited until 
the last second to move back to 
America to continue her work. 
There’s a fantastic line when 
her interviewer asks her, “You 
realize you could have been sent 
to a concentration camp?” and 
she responds, “Of course!” in 
her offhand and erratic manner. 

Guggenheim is all at once naïve 
and sophisticated, intimidatingly 
smart and alarmingly foolish. 
She’s described as not particularly 
beautiful, but incredibly charis-
matic and sexual. We see this in 
every portrait of her and every 
word that she says — she’s an 
alluring compilation of contradic-
tions, impossible to tear our ears 
and eyes from. 

After the Nazi invasion, she 

opened a gallery in New York 
called Art of This Century. It was 
here that she became truly known 
in the U.S. for her avant-garde 
lifestyle and artistic choices. She 
opened the exhibit 31 Women, 
one of the only spaces for female 
expression in the patriarchal art 
world. After tiring of New York, 
she moved to Venice, and her 
home-turned-art-museum has 
since become one of the world’s 
most popular spaces for modern 
art.

Watching the film feels like 

opening a scrapbook. The lively 
colors of the b-roll under the audio 
of Guggenheim’s interview are 
reminiscent of the art that she 
worked so hard to present. The 
opening titles are splattered with 
Pollack-esque paint, and the rest 
of the film seems like a collage 
pasted together by a modern artist 
that we should know, but don’t.

The film inspired so many 

questions in me. It made me want 
to learn about the artists that Gug-
genheim loved and was loved by; 
it made me want to ask about the 
types of art that people are mak-
ing right now, the kind that would 
excite the artists I’d just learned 
about. But one question really 
stuck with me as I walked out 
of the theater: am I in love with 
Peggy Guggenheim?

Peggy: Art addict

MUSIC VIDEO REVIEW

By DANIELLE YACOBSON

Daily Arts Writer

Numb and raw, a single 

thought consumed me as Thurs-
day night’s premiere of “Sisters 
in Law” came 
to an end: I 
just wasted 
45 minutes of 
my life that I 
would never 
get back.

The premise 

of the show 
has some 
potential; it 
documents the 
careers of five 
Black, female attorneys in Hous-
ton as they navigate through their 
professional field. A look into the 
lives of high-powered, minority 
women kicking ass in a well-
respected profession would be a 
welcome addition to television, 
a positive change of pace from 
the usual mudslinging. Instead, 
WE TV created a series follow-
ing the “Sisters” as they “juggle 
their families, busy careers, and 
even more demanding social cal-
endars.” It becomes clear that the 
central struggle of the episode 
is how much food to order for a 
socialite fundraiser — and with 
that, it’s obvious that the show 
will make no real attempt to 

explore the world’s injustices.

The series’ attempt at a clever 

title is the only true reference to 
the law at all. Perhaps it’s because 
disclosing confidential attorney-
client information is illegal. Still, 
instead of discussing their legal 
practices or firms, the women 
spend the majority of their screen 
time dissecting their love-hate 
relationships with each other. 
However successful these women 
might be in their off-camera lives, 
their portrayal on screen is that 
of little intelligence, egotism and 
insincerity, completely eradicat-
ing any hope of a feminist por-
trayal of working professionals.

Since the premiere has virtu-

ally no insight into the legal sys-
tem, the episode instead revolves 
around the backstabbing and 
finger-pointing that seems to 
be the foundation of all reality 
television. In fact, the series was 
filmed, produced and packaged 
exactly like an episode of “The 
Real Housewives.” It even has 
that awkward intro when each 
women smiles seductively at the 
camera as she shifts her weight 
from one stiletto to the other 
beside a block-letter projection 
of her name. From the artificial 
elevator music added to footage 
of individual interviews to the 
heavy hand of the producers’ 
editing, piecing together seg-

ments of conversations for dra-
matic effect, “Sister in Law” is 
significantly less entertaining and 
more depressing than most real-
ity TV. Which is saying a lot.

At the episode’s climactic fun-

draiser, the group explodes into 
an emotionally assaulting debate 
on whether Abraham Lincoln 
was a Republican. One of the 
“Sisters” astutely noted, “It’s get-
ting really ratchet.” Yes. Yes it is.

Enough with the catfighting, 

people! I don’t care if Jolanda 
is living proof that, “You can 
take the girl out of the hood, 
but you can’t take the hood out 
of the girl.” It’s about time that 
women stop ripping each other 
apart for entertaining television 
and stepping on each others’ 
backs to get ahead. Women who 
break through the glass ceiling 
shouldn’t be stabbing each other 
with the fallout of glass shards.

Watching “Sisters in Law” 

was a life-changing experience. 
I might have enjoyed the occa-
sional episode of “Dance Moms” 
or “Keeping Up With the Kar-
dashians,” relishing in the escap-
ism of a world filled with drama 
that I will never actually get to 
see. But on the Thursday night 
that I watched “Sisters in Law,” I 
made a vow to never watch real-
ity television again. I’ve wasted 
too much time already. 

Worst ‘Sisters’ ever

TV REVIEW

By SHAYAN SHAFII

Daily Arts Writer

Last Friday night at the Popu-

lux in Detroit, I waited in line 
behind Yung Lean to order pizza. 
Just like in his videos, he ordered 
iced tea in a thick Swedish accent, 
yet no one identified him besides 
a handful of kids in obviously 
fake Japanese streetwear. You’d 
think the turquoise hair would be 
a dead giveaway. He was under-
standably brief with everyone, 
but I managed to sneak in a quick 
dap and told him I looked for-
ward to the show. The whole “Sad 
Boys” label is particularly hilari-
ous after seeing them quietly 
avoid eye contact while eating 
pizza in Detroit.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget 

that Yung Lean is only 19 years 
old. He’s been in the public eye 
for so long, and undergone so 
many bizarre phases, that he’s 
now expected to communicate 
some sort of adulthood. When he 
burst onto the scene, it was his 
Nordic interpretation of West-
ern hip-hop culture that caught 
everyone’s attention. His videos 
featured all of the choreography 
and movement of Chicago drill 
rap, but with white kids in Nike 
tech fleece. I can’t help but feel 
that their early obsession with 
Arizona Iced Tea had as much to 
do with the word “Arizona” as 
the vaporwave color palette on 
the cans.

Aging well was always going to 

be a test for him, though — how 
would he transition from kitschy 
nostalgia to making music that 
was actually about him? At what 
point would the N64 references 
go away? What does he actually 
have to say, anyway? I entered 

the show almost certain that 
Yung Lean himself had basically 
expired.

Before his set, fans were 

treated to an hour of indiscern-
ible wailing from Thaiboy Goon. 
While the performance was 
largely forgettable, I admired his 
willingness to keep going when 
not a single person in the audi-
ence knew the words. One of my 
favorite parts of the entire show 
was when Thaiboy brought out 
Bladee, who wore an oversized 
Chucky shirt that went down 
to his knees. He kept doing this 
thing where he put his hands up 
to his temples and his eyes would 
roll into the back of his head. He 
might’ve been singing in Swed-
ish for most of his set and no one 
would’ve known. I don’t know 
how much of this is for show, and 
how much is for real; they might 
actually just be this weird.

After the official Sad Boys 

Weed Carriers™ finished their 
set, Yung Lean himself stormed 
the stage performing “Hoover.” 
All hell broke loose. I’ve been to 
some rowdy shows, but never 
have I been shoved into a sub-
woofer that the actual artist was 
performing on top of. There was 
a ten-minute period where my 
sole focus was just finding a way 
to stand upright. With my palms 
pushing back on the stage, and 
the force of ten dudes in Thrasher 
hoodies pressed against my back, 
I couldn’t help but wonder what 
GG Allin shows might have been 
like. People were being dragged 
out of the crowd left and right; 
there were actual screams of pain 
flying around the stage. Lean 
chuckled and said, “This is one of 
the craziest shows we’ve had. I 
love Detroit.”

The front row was a circus 

act about as entertaining as the 
show itself. A guy in a tie-dye 
hoodie turned to me and said in 
a deadpan drawl, “I’m on 12 hits 
of acid right now,” and he wasn’t 
smiling. A girl in a t-shirt covered 
in frownie faces reached as far 
as possible, yelling “Please Yung 
Lean! Just one touch!” There was 
a guy in a Windows ’95 sweater. 
I couldn’t make this shit up if I 
tried.

I noticed that Lean had a more 

noticeably punk sound when 
performing his newest album, 
Warlord. He’s definitely trying 
to transition into some sort of 
Scandinavian rockstar, but as a 
teenager who still watches Chief 
Keef videos. Like child actors 
who often get typecast into roles 
before they establish an identity, 
Lean’s fans have come to expect 
more of his early meme-rap.

With that said, the crowd was 

obviously more excited to hear 
Lean’s older and more playful 
work. Less than four years old, 
“Ginseng Strip 2002” already 
feels like an Internet-rap staple. 
Everyone in the audience prob-
ably remembered where they 
were when they heard it for the 
first time. “Kyoto” had the entire 
crowd jumping and rapping in 
unison, though you could tell 
Lean has largely moved on from 
the faux-Japanese influence on 
his music.

When it was all over, the 

crowd slowly dispersed out of 
the Populux, mostly limping. As I 
reached the exit, a tattered can of 
Arizona Iced Tea caught my eye. 
A small crowd quickly assembled 
around it to take pictures of the 
symbolic remnants, probably to 
post on Tumblr or something.

Lean likes pizza, too

CONCERT REVIEW

SUBMARINE ENTERTAINMENT PRODUCTION

Let’s do it, ride it, my pony.

FILM REVIEW

MUSIC VIDEO REVIEW

If living in a world where YG 

makes a diss track about (serious) 
presidential candidate Donald 
Trump is 
wrong, I 
don’t want 
to be right. 
Nothing 
about any of 
this would 
seem realistic 
in any ratio-
nal realm of 
the imagination, yet here we are, 
on March 30, 2016, and this is a 
thing that happened.

It’s a thing that doesn’t totally 

suck. Both YG and fellow Los 
Angeles rapper Nipsey Hussle 
come in hot after an opening 
snippet from black Valdosta State 
University students who were 
removed from a Trump rally Feb. 
29, and drop F bombs galore on 

Trump. They ridicule his plan 
to build a Mexican-funded wall 
separating Mexico and the U.S., 
with Nip pleading “It wouldn’t 
be the U.S.A without Mexicans 
/ And if it’s time to team up, shit, 
let’s begin / Black love, brown 
pride in the sets again / White 
people feel the same as my next 
to kin.” They find a way to reach 
their audience, whether the audi-
ence wants to take them seri-
ously or not.

The only major perplexity of 

the song is due to its production. 
The beat is eerily similar to that 
of “Twist My Fingaz,” a July 
2015 single teasing his second 
studio album, in addition to a lot 
of YG’s other work. The funky 
bass, the playful drum machine, 
even the hints of piano—they’re 
all there. YG’s sound is super 
West Coast, but it seems lazy to 

rely on nearly the exact same 
sound for two distinctively dif-
ferent songs.

It still goes, though; YG con-

tinues to be one of the easiest 
rappers to listen to, and more 
importantly, beyond the generic 
production are eloquently stated 
pleas campaigning for the good 
of this country (“I’m from a place 
where you prolly can’t go / Spea-
kin’ for some people that you 
prolly ain’t know”).

The rappers aren’t alone in 

hoping what they describe as 
a “Comedy Central-ass n---a” 
doesn’t lead the country. Their 
attempt to make sure everybody 
knows this is a valiant one, if 
anything, and they manage to 
entertain using relevant flow. It’s 
essentially rap lobbying, and they 
do a damn good job of it.

- JOEY SCHUMAN

“NO,” Meghan Trainor’s 

ultra-catchy, tell-em-how-it-is 
dance floor 
jam had me 
thinking I 
could like 
Trainor. 
The track’s 
accom-
panying 
music video 
reminds me why I don’t.

Nothing seems to add up 

and everything feels off, at 
best. The static that opens 
the video isn’t in tune with 
the song’s vibe and the open-
ing lyrics play as Trainor’s 
black boots walk across a 

dark sidewalk, leading to the 
drop of the chorus as Trainor 
and dancers come together to 
pump out their routine.

Set in an urban basement, 

Trainor’s club vibes are lost 
in the emptiness. The exclu-
sion of male dancers / extras 
is understandable; “NO” is for 
the girls. However, in cutting 
the dance floor along with its 
male-counterparts, the video 
only leaves viewers wondering 
why Trainor and Co. are alone 
in this basement — a stark con-
trast to the song’s infectious 
energy.

Fresh off a Best New Art-

ist Grammy win, Trainor has 

released a single that’s, well, 
actually good. The same can-
not be said for the video. Poor 
dance skills aside, the few 
moments of magic occur when 
the song and Trainor’s person-
ality are favored over the idea 
of a tightly choreographed 
pop video. The video finds 
its groove in a series of shots 
featuring Trainor in a black 
mesh top, sitting around with 
her friends serving up some 
serious sass to the camera, but 
other than that it feels like 
rehearsal for a better video.

P.S. Keep the red hair. Burn 

that silver coat. 

- CHRISTIAN KENNEDY

C-

NO

Meghan 
Trainor

B

Love as a 
Weapon

Little Scream

F

Sisters 
in Law

WE TV

Thursdays 

at 10 p.m.

B+

Peggy 
Guggenheim: 
Art Addict

Submarine 
Entertainment 
Production

Michigan Theater

