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.
