With placement this sneaky, you'd think they were trying to convert the carpet.
No but seriously. Why did I never notice that Forever 21 was trying to Christianify it's shoppers with a poorly placed Bible reference on their shopping bags?
John 3:16 is printed on the bottoms referring to the famous passage: "For God so loved his only son that he put a hit on him so you could live forever... like Edward Cullen."
Thanks Forever21, but if I wanted an invitation to Sunday school I'd have just bought animal crackers and grape juice.
Great news!!! The Harvard Voice, which I am proud to be a member of, has been up to some fantastic things.
Particularly, it's launched a new blog called "Noice" and a side project called HarvardFML. Both of which you can access with a simple click. In addition to being a staff writer I am also the web/blog director under the great control of m'dear Alisha Ramos... so I just felt that it merits a shout out on Lionswithantlers.
Mmm noice. It's going to be the shit. THE shit. We're so proud and we hope you like it :).
...because they're last place I'd want to be on even the most busted of nights.
Acknowledging my bias: I am a lady and one of mixed race (none of those races being white). So the predatory terror and hodgepodge of sketchiness that smears itself along the walls and floors of these godforsaken relics of OldWhiteHarvard is something that I may feel more acutely than some. Most smart girls avoid these places like a public toilet with an old poo stagnating in it. Even still, sometimes I just find myself there... no explanation for that. And also, no excuse:
um, yeah...
Sometimes they can be the only places you can "stand in a circle around our pocket book and shoes... I just wanna dance". Especially considering Boston is not poppin', just not. So hordes -or shall I say whoredz- of underage ladies bounce their nubile selves into these joints for the mild entertainment of strange men in tuxes and medallions, or beachwear and ratty flipflops and backwards caps. All of these poor slights a little mixed up and just desperate for the attention they don't get without being bent over a beer pong table. Most of them just peek in, looking for something or someone, hoping to satisfy a weak curiosity... and always ending up disappointed for one reason or another.
All the misogyny, elitism, classism, and racism aside*... Final Clubs, or Finals Clubs, are like so many other institutions at Harvard. They're just rapidly deteriorating in the original quality that once made them what they were. Like the Lampoon that used to be funny; or the Crimson that used to get you somewhere; or like the Harvard name that used to not be attached to a clothing line. Everything losing its polish or spark or initial je ne sais quoi. And while I could bash on the whole Final Club scene, it's almost like teasing a retard. Just sort of pathetic on my part, really. And while I sort of hope that they're secretly doing more than planning the next weekend's party theme in these centuries-old buildings (like something remotely cool/cinematic like money laundering, illegal gambling, art smuggling, or minor drug trade)... I think we all know that they're just homo-ly daydreaming about which superneato underclassman they want to "punch" this season.
I couldn't decide on a punny enough title for today's post, so there you have it, three choices.
Anyway, a few weeks back I emailed one of my favorite music bloggers (who is, as I have since discovered, also a musician) as I am currently in a serious creative slump. His name is Drew Worden and his wordpress blog, linesthroughlines, is scrupulously maintained and fucking fantastic. I somewhat presumptuously requested that he share with me a list of his favorite lyricists hoping it might spark a little sumpinsumpin in me that's been missing for a while.
To my surprise, he responded! In the sweetest, most generous way. Admittedly, upon getting his email back my heart was practically baking cookies in my chest, excited for the musical revelation to come. I doubt Drew will ever read this, but if you're out there buddy, thanks! I immediately was able to write a song, then I set mahself to thinking.
Who are my favorite lyricists?
Its hard to say. I like some really goofy shit sometimes, and its hard to deny the heart what it wants... even if sometimes what it wants is the refrain of a Hanson song. But attempting honesty as best as possible, without trying to be hip or novel, here are my faves:
1.) Aimee Argote of Des Ark I've mentioned homegirl in a previous post, but god damn! She writes the most poignant things about ex girlfriends and ex boyfriends that I swear to Merlin, feel like they were torn from the perforated pages of my soul notes. Hyperbolic similes aside, she can be so perfectly raw and honest and masterful.
"We've got pills to ease our pain/And we've got bodies to hush our loneliness/There's enough of the two/ I think we're gonna make it through all right/We can get naked together/Take a turn and it's whatever/Just as long as we suffer from one another/You can hold my hand but you can never hold my heart" -The Subtleties of Chores and Unlocked Doors
"Oh it feels so good to be used when you're using"-Lord of the Ring and His Fascist Timekeepers
2.) Chris Thile Not always polished and perfect, but he writes the kind of things you'd love to hear that boy next door whisper in your ear.
"I am yours if you want me/and i'm sorry if you do/Cause i don't have that much to offer/ a girl who knows as much as you/ I am scared of your body/ I am scared of your soul /but i would rather be a letdown/ than let being with you go" -I'm Yours if You Want Me
"I came from California with an appetite for my own myths of music, love, and what they mean, I'm told it's borderline obscene. I tried to write this song before but had no one to write it for. My fellow travellers' vacant stares leave it up to you to care" -I'm Nowhere and You're Everything
3.)Andrew Bird Sometimes a pithy mouthful, but the texture and the imagery of his words is always excellent.
"so here at the end the war is over/there’s nothing left to defend/no cliffs of Dover/so let us put down our pens/ and this concludes our test/our minds are scattered about/from hell to breakfast" -Simple X
"you took my hand and led me down to watch a papillon parade we let the kittens lick our hair and drank our chalky lemonade you squeezed my hand and told me softly that I shouldn't be afraid 'cause all the while your finger's resting gently on the masterfade" -Masterfade
4.)Wes Miles of Ra Ra Riot
"Orange lamps shine by willow bay/Ice covers from the lake to where I lay/In a state/ In which I dream/If you were here/Winter wouldn't pass quite so slow/And if you were here/ Then I'd have a choice to live not be alone " -Winter '05
I wouldn't say the word now but this is not what I meant/ For a woman that's fallen over head and ears/ And still so warm, but I'm lonely too/Suddenly she is still and says, "I hope that things will be better here." - Oh, La
5.) Erykah Badu Not genius lyrics by any stretch of the imagination, but the delivery is so easy you half expect she's improvising on every line, no matter how many times and ways you hear her sing it. I love that.
I'm feelin' kind of hungry/'Cuz my high is comin' down/ Don't feed me yours/'Cuz your food does not endure/ I think I need a cup of tea/The world keeps burnin'/Oh what a day, what a day, what a day" -On and On
"Everything around you see/The Ankhs, the wraps, the plus degrees/And yes even the mysteries/Its all me/Sometimes it hard to move you see/When you growing publicly/But if I have to chose between/I choose me." - Me
6.) David Bowie You can't get away with making popular music with these kinds of lyrics any more. For shame.
"I stumble into town just like a sacred cow/Visions of swastikas in my head/Plans for everyone/It's in the whites of my eyes/My little China Girl/You shouldn't mess with me/I'll ruin everything you are/I'll give you television/I'll give you eyes of blue/I'll give you men who want to rule the world" -China Girl
"A soldier with a broken arm/Fixed his stare to the wheels of a Cadillac/A cop knelt and kiss the feet of a priest/And a queer threw up at the sight of that/I think I saw you in an ice-cream parlour/Drinking milk shakes cold and long/Smiling and waving and looking so fine/ Don't think you knew you were in this song" -Five Years
It's not much different (and I wish the Wayback Machine worked for the page so I could show y'all) but I just wanted to say...
Thank God Almighty they redesigned that uberfug my.harvard homepage. At least now it doesn't feel like my eyes are being fork-fed a burgundy and yellow tragedy of warmed-over boxes, tabs and form fields.
Hilarious and yet... disturbing the longer I think about it. That boy doesn't seem to realize that he's a fleshmonger, not a flamboyant cowboy.
I came upon these while looking for a suitable Michael Jackson knockoff jacket, and I was compelled to look further. Thankfully the pimp costume was in the Unique section of children's costumes and not in the Career section.
Speaking of said section, WTF??? Take a look below. So the boys get realistic looking, feasible firefighter costumes but the girls can only wear the "uniform" with fishnets and heels? Gendered costuming/career expectations, or does the slutty Halloween costume thing just start earlier than I thought?
I should have included her in my last post. Genevieve Schatz of Company of Thieves. Oscar Wilde is a fantastic song, but here's another for good measure. She and the whole band are so sweet I swear they're affecting my teeth.
So I caved and bought the ELLE issue with the "Women in Music" cover a while back... I don't know what I expected. For God's sake it says "Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Fergie, Lady Gaga..." on the front.
But really, could they be more broad? I mean they could have included Shaka Khan or the Shirelles or any of the thousands of female artists ever. With Gwen Stefani on the cover, I guess I assumed (hoped, really) that it would be a womenin rock music issue. Which by golly I know just the ladies for.
See, as a lady myself, I love Gwen. I do! But poor Kathleen Hannah of riot grrl fame lamented it best when she noted that bands like hers get little to no airplay because "there's already a Gwen Stefani." There are plenty of women in rock music and its many subgenres... but so many of them lend their name to encompass their entire band which, let's face it, is sort of a shame: Avril Lavigne, Janis Joplin, Alanis Morissette, Ani DiFranco, Kate Bush, even my beloved Janelle Monae. I know that people do this because inevitably the lady is the starlet and people think of her as "solo", but I'm excluding them (and there are A LOT of them) because I've always been more partial to the ladies who hide behind a pseudonym. It's just more rock apropos.
In no order, because that would be cruel to them and me.
Shingai Shoniwa of NOISEttes
Kazu Makino of Blonde Redhead
Annie Clark of St. Vincent
Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond
Elizabeth Powell of Land of Talk
Brody Dalle of The Distillers
Amanda Palmer of The Dresden Dolls
Aimee Argote of Des Ark
Reiko Tada and Utako Tayama of Kiiiiiii
Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth
Each of these women has more talent, presence and fashion sense in one nasal hair than 20 Taylor Swifts in pyramid formation dressed head to toe in dip-dyed Rodarte.
I am too young to feel myself on the precipice of purposelessness. Is this the hallmark of my kind? An army of kids trained to be these well-rounded, ambidextrously-brained restavecs; a little bit good at everything but not particularly brilliant at anything. This is not a “pity me” thing or a “save us” thing, it’s just a thing.
Sometimes it feels like little Lloyd Dobler had it all figured out: “I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed...” In terms of a life goal or values, that’s not so bad right, to not want to profit off of anyone’s misery or to throw yourself into the cogs of capitalism? The more we romanticize this sanitary, humanitarian approach to living the more we realize we might be horribly misguided. And besides, Lloyd had Donovan’s stunning daughter to fool around with at the end of the day. Very few of us can boast similar claims.
What have we got to look forward to? What’s our future got in store? So what do you want to be when you grow up?
That last question becomes more and more threatening as growing up becomes the here and now. For children it's a question full of hope, fantasy, and encouragement. Now it’s just a shortcut to evaluate a person’s ambition and character.And it would be, were it not for the fact that people sharing the same professional aspirations can be quite dissimilar.Example: anyone from Donald Trump’s The Apprentice (…ok, depending on how you see it that might not actually help my point).
What am I getting at? Well, it's the new motto of our time, “It’s a recession.” What careers do people go for in times of trouble? The old stalwarts, the bare necessities, the economy-proof kind. The kind that I am frankly not inspired by, no offense*. In the 1960’s a time of (perhaps retrospectively dubious) uninterrupted economic growth saw to an almost unbridled flood of cultural innovations, challenges and social change. Even given the flowery nostalgia, culturally and creatively America was actually getting its shit together. The subcultures, the activists, the more useful hippies, the music, the racial and gender gains, it was all perfectly groovy. But what happens to kids in a recession, are they morally, spiritually, artistically bankrupt in addition to being bankrupt the classic way?
Our predominant subcultures are considered greatly characterized by a splitting apathy. Torn by either immense nihilism or hedonism, kids today are beyond comprehension for most. I mean the sight of a Williamsburg hipster or some ghetto kids on a stoop make some people nervous. But apart from that what do they have in common? Mass culture is less about a mass of people than about the size of what's out there. In this day and age it might more aptly be called Massive Culture. It's beautiful and damn uplifting – but for many it’s not happening.
I’ll be damned if we go the way of the 1980s all coked-up and soulless and wearing sort-of-awesome-and-sort-of-terrible clothes. No, this can’t be … where’s our literature, where’s our music, where’s all our sparkling legacy? It’s not here yet! And its true, the kids who inherited high speed internet, good cell phones, wikipedia, and 24/7 access to fantastic illegal downloads… they’re barely past their 20s. Hell I’m still 19 for at least a handful of months. So hold the fuck on, and before you condemn my generation give us time to impress you. I don’t necessarily have all my shit together but when I do I guarantee results (read that in a Billy Mays voice, please). We’re not all hipsters and idiots floating around waiting for something to happen. And to some extent what they said about every generation’s kids, am I right?
Ok and here’s where I actually get to my point, or my title rather. SCREW YOU, Kyle Smith of the NY Post. You don’t know diddly about Harry Potter or me. This bullshit criticism that my “entitled” generation as reflected by Harry has no morals or guidance, is same-old, same-old. Even if you couldn’t write for shit, after 4,224 pages and endless drafts I’d say there’s a fair chance that you’ll have include at least some worthy cultural insight. These dinosaurs who want us all to feel like a soulless bland generation of losers with no direction and one-dimensional characterization, they’re all just jealous. Kyle Smith was born in ’66, he doesn’t get Potter, and on top of it all he thinks “Paul McCartney [is] Pop’s most Indispensible Figure.” To which I say, “I still like The Beach Boys better, you crumb.”
Clearly a man who gives Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince the same rating as I Love You, Beth Cooper is in no position to be a critic. Admittedly, neither am I since I prefer to be constructive with my time. Besides, these self-loving, supposed prelapsarians are all just jealous. We have access to so much more knowledge and we’re ten times more adaptable to new means of obtaining it. Maybe all the wandering and the directionlessness is just dynamic potential. Maybe its all just too goddamn cool for you to comprehend.
In the meantime, just... just ignore LiLo, mkay?
*but obviously since I acknowledge the offensiveness I’m not really being sincere by saying it anyway am I?
Ok, so all the Alt kids love Tilda, and I'm not trying to be a cool-mongerer. But who can deny her besides the haters? If you looked this extraordinary you'd have to have the clothes to match.
Technicolor, to monochrome, to black.
Tilda, tilda, tilda, tilde, "~". She can even out-Bowie Bowie, goddamn.
I've been reading a lovely -if rather flatly translated- book of zen enlightenment stories called "Zen Antics". Sometimes it's not the published text that really gets you (though this does have a delightful tale of enlightenment achieved through a particularly bad bout of bucket-filling dysentery). But when it comes to a public library book, sometimes the annotations steal the show.
And only because I'm in that mood, here is a short poem comprised only of other people's margin annotations:
non essentials putting on airs ?
hm.. ! image actions not words
for seven straight days ? who is lost he brought a lance
nothing is all right so long as you dont regret it possum prepare for enlightenment
Apart from that...best line in the whole book? Why, so glad you asked! Here it is, read it, think it, love it, live it even:
"Imagine a ball of soft, pure, fragrant butter on top of your head."
I'm in the Carolinas... perhaps not in the most glamorous of places.
Four words:
I am so tan.
But to add: Myrtle Beach is still sort of a backwater kind of place. A place where people don't hesitate to tell me that I'm "exotic." To which they add, "But not in a bad way". I guess they mean the exotic dancer way? Otherwise, I'm not sure why that's supposed to be offensive.
We could break that down and say how sad it is that people are ingrained to think "different" is bad and further discuss why the word 'exotic' might be demeaning...
but I'd really rather just admire the extremity of my current tanline.
I'm at a serious loss... I keep him in rotation, I thumb the leaflets that came with those old CDs. But in my own kind of way I'm glad that Michael Jackson has found a way to renew fascination, renew interest in his amazing life. As someone who truly cares and believes that pop culture can be enriching and powerful instead of bitter and destructive, I remember Michael with the utmost respect and appreciation. He was a Renaissance man in his own peculiar way, aside from the singing and the dancing, he was also a fashion icon. For better or for worse he was an innovator and an inspiration. I really will miss him, it feels like certain chapters of your life turn to vapor with the passing of these people... the ones who've managed to chisel their legacy in collective memory.
The girls and boys today, all these fashion bloggers doing this semi-bondage, retro/vintage 80s thing... I bet they didn't realize til just now that they were always copying Michael. And there really is nothing wrong with that.
perfectly structured shoulders, tailored Givenchy and Balmain
sequins, military details, sashes, belts, stripes, that signature glove.
Bondage, biker, punk, Western, futuristic, d-rings and metallics galore.
the red "Thriller" and "Beat" it jackets, recalls Rebel Without a Cause, amazing details.
a suit, classic fedora, shortened slacks, armband detail.
I know I like to dig deep for evidence of racism sometimes, but I clicked the link that that image was once attached to, hoping that the Brooks Brothers's people would have some models who weren't white. Why? It might help illustrate that while they may possess the "style" of generations long since passed, they don't possess the same mindset. And as the "oldest surviving men's clothier in the United States [founded in 1818]*" you'd expect or at least hope for some change.
And they've delivered ... sort of. In that post-Obama binary kind of way that says "We may be old and uptight, but we're chummy with a sprinkling of black folk here and there!"
And when I say a sprinkling I really mean three black folks exactly:
So is this a step up or step down from brooks brothers in 2003 (courtesy of the WayBack Machine), when they were just using all the same canvas dummies instead of people? I'm really not sure. Still I am perplexed by how the inclusion of real models changes the entire message or branding of the product and at how there are many, many various caucasian models throughout the site. There is but one non-caucasian model per section (men, women, boys) and all three of those models are black. This goes for the print ads as well, and you have to wonder what they were after (I even checked Brooks Brothers Japan and its the same). I get the general idea of a target audience but when it comes to fashion and clothes I don't believe that there is such a thing. You want your clothes to sell. So don't limit your audience! And for God's sake don't think that you can mask your bias or "target" by chucking in some black people! I don't think that in the history of advertising, a skirt didn't sell because an Asian lady wore it in the catalog.
The same binary-type inclusion of black models as the only spare twinkle of minority presence is all over catalog and ad campaigns. Cases-in-point: abercrombie, target, american eagle.
I could go on but I'm lazy. Clearly, I'm not mad when I see black models get work but we could have more ofthis (Nordstroms) or this. I just dont think that effing GreatGlam of all places should outshine these people when it comes to projected diversity. But then again sluttiness and objectification is somewhat universal.
I may have ridiculously lax recycling practices (admittedly, I'm ok with a little littering in mostly man-made places like blacktops and supermarkets), but I do care. Don't get it twisted, I'm not a green freak - I don't give a rat's ass about "organic" produce or "free-range" anything. I mean there's very little from these pretty sticker labels that's well regulated enough to drive me out of apathy. However, this doesn't mean I don't believe in smart consumerism.
Since I cook all the time, and summer is a great time for seafood I just wanted to share this. It's a handy food guide from the Monterrey Bay Aquarium (one of my favorite places on earth). If you care about overfishing and environmental impact it's nice to know what's what.
It seems like small shit but Blue Planet devotees take heed. Overfishing leads to a number of disasterous things but one of my least favorite side effects has been the hundreds-upon-hundreds-fold explosion of Echizen Kurage, aka Nomura's Jellyfish. I mean, I love jellies but these bad motherf***ers average larger than most men are tall... and they roll mad deep, son:
