New McQueen

Alexander McQueen Resort 2011, the first collection since McQueen's death, is out and it looks great.  Especially the Joan of Arc jacket on this one.  I PINE!

Bean Salsa

What follows is my Aunt Kathy's recipe.  She made it for my brother's birthday a few weeks ago and I HAD to make it today.  It is so fucking good and I am so fucking proud of myself.

Combine 1/2 cup apple cider vinegar and 1/2 cup sugar.  Bring to a boil; cool.

In a large bowl, combine

2 cans small white beans, rinsed and drained

1 can black beans, rinsed and drained

1 can shoepeg corn (You can use frozen corn or another variety if you can't find this.)

3 peppers - red, yellow, and green, diced

1 red onion, diced (I used about half a large onion.)

Pour vinegar mixture over the vegetables and stir to coat.

I just used green peppers because they are cheaper.  Look!  I diced that!  

The final dish.  It's as beautiful as it is delicious.

Minneapolis: A Picture Essay

Minneapolis is way underrated.  I'm talking the fucking city, though, suburbs are hell.  Yes, downtown smells like poop wrapped in lunch meat and the transit is just a joke.  But there's nowhere I'd rather be living today and I'll tell you why.

This building.

I don't know what's in it but it's real big.  It's at like 2nd st and Hennepin.  I think the sun likes the shape of it too because it lights it up real pretty.

Try listening to "You Make My Dreams Come True" by Hall and Oates while looking at this fountain and not smiling.


Moments after this picture was taken I saw a bicyclist spit on a car for cutting him off.  Just like life.

They've been working on this church on Hennepin for a while and someone must have tagged "Free Thought" on the scaffolding.  The workers don't seem to care, maybe because they agree with the message?

Lake Calhoun is overrun with creepy tan half-naked old dudes, but it's still a boss lake, and pretty damn clean, considering.

And falling asleep next to it with some Hemmingway in the hot afternoon sun is pretty boss too.

Sometimes Minneapolis can seem a little too comfortable and boring, and then your friend invites you to her awesome condo with a view full of this.

Sometimes ducks follow you home.

Karate masters sweep their own stoop here.

You can always see this hanging at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, for FREE.

Although this city is definitely built for cars, there's still room for pedestrians and bicyclists.  Even more now, since the city put in these.  I ride my own bike, but I really love this anyway, for many reasons.

After being over-served 2 for 1 glasses of wine...

...Minneapolis looks just as pretty and blury as a picture taken from a moving vehicle.

Cover Girl

It's hard for a girl to cover Kid Cudi, let alone MGMT and Ratatat, but this girl did good.  She did good.

Hands on the wheel, get drunk, high hat

Best Outcome of Kagan Confirmation Hearings

If I had to endure a committee of old white men who love the sound of their own voices discuss a topic on which they have no education, I would be doodling too.

Good Job Franken, a nice likeness of Jeff Sessions, although I think you left out the devil horns.

Can't Stop Replaying

Although the whole "dancing on my own" is a bit "dancing with tears in my eyes", no?

Agreed

-Via This

Duke, Duke, Duke

So many things.

First, the intro guys face when the music starts
White people were all bad dancers in the 60's, weren't they? Even the professionals
The costume is very James Brown with the cape, no?
One of the greatest riffs comes in at 0:48, 1:24 and 2: 01

In Defense of Objectification

According to jezebel, Why shameless objectification can be a good thing.  They've been doing a series on sexy World Cup soccer players.  Like this one.  Thighs like tree trunks, I am a fan.

1) Context matters.
In our current universe, men do not have trouble being taken seriously based on their looks or perceived sexiness, nor is their worth in society primarily judged by them. Our drooling over Benny Feilhaber isn't just a drop in the bucket — it also won't contribute to the overall oppression of men, soccer playing or otherwise. They will not be told their primary value is based on whether women want to fuck them. They will not be paid less on the dollar or subject to violence in representation or acts. They will not be treated like meat or chattel. Period.

2) These guys are healthy and at the peak of fitness.
The culture at large is celebrating these men's bodies for their skill, agility, and strength — achieved partly through genetic blessing, yes, but also through training and hard work. It's true that this is setting up an ideal that most men cannot and do not achieve, but as ideals go, one achieved through activity and, it seems, fun isn't so bad. And presumably no unhealthy starvation or surgical enhancements were involved.

3) At the World Cup and elsewhere, ogling knows no borders.
The other day, a reader remarked on a photo of a North Korean player that it was rare in Western culture to see an Asian man celebrated as being sexy. Other objects of our admiration have come from every continent. Even though they share certain body traits based on their training, these guys come in all colors and facial features and national origins—just as hotness does.

4) They're having fun doing what they love.
This needs little explanation. No sexyface, no corpse-like poses, just spontaneous shirt-shedding and teammate grabbing.

5) Women also like to look.
Everyone keeps telling us that women aren't visually stimulated and are cuddly balls of empathy and need a narrative. I suggest they check out some of the comment threads on #shamelessobjectification. There is something liberating about a woman expressing her pleasure in looking at a man's body as she sees fit.

Midair

Ending a job in a half hour.  Starting a new (better?) job on Thursday.  Between then I'll be midair.

Menswear

5 o clock in downtown Minneapolis is a sea of pale blue button down shirts.  Do all these guys realize they are wearing the same god damn shirt?  Did their mothers purchase it for them?  How many of them do they own?

Golly.  There is just so much you can do with menswear and still be professional.  I saw one middle-aged gentleman yesterday wearing a suit with caramel leather oxfords and a straw fedora.  He looked so boss. I'm such huge fan of oxfords, trousers, suspenders, bow ties, and pork pie hats.  I wish I could pull off the menswear look but instead I just add pieces in here and there.  My penny loafers are one of my most prized possessions. 

If you've ever browsed through the sartorialist, you know what I mean.

Both Can Be Both

I tried to write a post about The End of Men article by The Atlantic earlier this week.  I couldn't.

Instead, listen to Ms. Steinem.


Watch CBS News Videos Online
Men can be nurturing.  Women can be authoritarian.  Both can be both.

Huey P. Newton, Style Icon

This is in bad taste, undoubtedly, but let's do this.

During Black History Month, GQ compiled a list of 20 black style pioneers.  There are some great ones on the list like Harry Belafonte, Marvin Gay, Richard Pryor, Otis Redding, and of course Sammy Davis, Jr.  Coming in at number 10 on the list?  Huey P. Newton of the Black Panther Party.  Totally rebel chic.  Let's explore.

-Image via marxists (I know, right?)

-via Steven Kasher















Guns are great accessories for any outfit

Ya Dig?

Slow On The Pick Up

 Is this NYT's profile old enough to be nostalgic? Probably not.  The situation has gotten worse since March but the game is still the same.  I am BIG on Rahm Emanuel.  He's the greatest political character right now.  He also seems to know exactly what he's doing and I think the problem is that no one wants to let him off his leash and do it.  No he is not some idealist who tries to fight the big fight.  But those guys often fail or at least end up creating a lot more problems.  Rahm wants to win. 

 "EVEN TODAY, Emanuel sometimes has a hard time talking about the Massachusetts election. Asked recently by a visitor what happened, Emanuel simply sighed and said: “I can’t. I don’t have enough medication.” The debacle unleashed a lot of pent-up frustration within the party at Emanuel — and by extension, though less viscerally, at Obama. Liberal activists told The Wall Street Journal that Emanuel had berated them at a private strategy meeting by calling their tactics “retarded” (along with another word), touching off a firestorm that led him to apologize to the head of the Special Olympics. Lost amid the focus on the so-called R-word was the context of the discussion. Emanuel was scolding the activists for running television advertisements against moderate Democrats who were not supporting the public option, neatly encapsulating the central tension between their philosophies of governing. The activists were willing to go to war even with Democrats for a policy idea they deeply cared about, while Emanuel saw that as ridiculously counterproductive."

"...Emanuel wants to jam a wedge into the fissure inside the Republican Party between, as he frames it, the descending wing that believes in small government and the ascending wing that believes in no government. Republicans lose, in this theory, whether they cooperate with Obama or not. “We’ve got to drive the ball at them,” a senior White House official told me. “Driving the ball at them, making them pick between small government and no government, putting them in their responsibility-and-accountability box. You walk away? You’re walking away from responsibility, and the public’s angry at you. You participate? Your base hates you.""

Antique Thursday Playlist

In going through my old emails I also found a playlist from a radio show I had at school.  I had been listening a lot to a Frankie Vallie station on Pandora. 

Enjoy!

Baby I Need Your Loving by The Four Tops


Runaround Sue by Dion and the Belmonts


Walk Like A Man by Frankie Vallie and the Four Seasons

M.I.A. Profile

To back up my previous assertion that men's magazines are superior to women's magazines I will urge you to read GQ's She Might Get Loud: M.I.A. by Gary Shteyngart.  Gary (like we're old friends.  I've never heard of him) may not be a great writer, but they don't have writers even an eighth as funny writing for Elle, Glamour, or Cosmo.  And as far as M.I.A. profiles go, it's not bad.  At least he didn't quote her talking about being an outsider while munching on truffle flavored french fries the author herself had ordered.

"I stopped seriously listening to music when Ice Cube began appearing in the Friday movies. When I was a kid at Oberlin ­College, somewhere in Ohio, one of the whitest and crunchiest institutions in America, our obsessions focused on Ice Cube and Kurt Cobain, who managed to die my junior year abroad as I was flying Olympic Airways from Athens to Zurich. The pilots found out midflight, and the young stewardesses began to cry in unison as they tried to pour us our glasses of cloudy retsina. Back then, you see, musicians were still gods who walked among us. But it was the beefy gentleman emerging straight outta Compton, a self-described crazy motherfucker named Ice Cube, who provided our daily soundtrack as we jacked up my roomie's Saab and aimed it at Oberlin's sole ­McDonald's, located in the most ­"urban" part of this sad village of 8,000 crushed souls. Ice Cube's music—racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic (full disclosure: my roommate Mike "the Zap" Zapler and I were both nominally Hebrews)—rocked our little black Swedish convertible all the way down College Street as we dreamed of a Big Mac as hot and rancid as Cube's funky lyrics. The Zap and I were both political-science majors with a lot to lose, but Ice Cube seemed like he came from a world where the apocalypse had already wiped clean any vestige of hope—an exciting, existentialist posture for a 20-year-old cracker still unsure of how to play the opposite sex. Since its East Coast inception and up to its recent blinged-out downfall, hip-hop has always been an exhilarating form of tourism for privileged young Americans, a journey into that shit-stained part of the country that always seems so near and yet so far. Bitch, you shoulda put a sock on the pickle, Ice Cube rapped firmly as he educated two guys in a Saab about the correct uses of birth control in a tone no Oberlin woman would ever tolerate. And your pussy wouldn't be blowing smoke signals. Uh, yes, I'll take that with fries."

Letters To My Father

While cleaning out an old email inbox I came across some great correspondence between me and my father.

Subject: Papa

From: Me

Date: Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 11:47 PM
To: Father

Ciao.  How are you?  Feeling better?  I'm making a scarf but running out of the gray yarn so I might have to be creative.  I also don't know how to end the scarf so it may end up very very long.  Did you hear about Plaxico who shot himself in the leg.  At a club.  With sweatpants on.  Because the gun slipped out of his sweatpants.  I know, right?  P.s. he is named after a Plastics Company.  At least none of your children grew up to be that guy.

I saw a picture of an ornament on the White House Christmas tree that just had Teddy Roosevelt's head painted on it and I think that's what I want for Christmas.  Make it happen.  Also, a life-size bust of his head.  And a ukulele.  I'm serious about the ukulele though, I think it's my calling.  I can learn tip toe through the tulips and we can skip through fields together while I play it.  Or I can play Christian pop songs on it and make everyone sit around in a circle at Christmas and have them sign along and feel really awkward. Oh, the possibilities!  Also, a beret and a sweater with a cat on it would really make it all perfect.

I have a headache. 

Goodnight and Good luck,

----------
From: Father
Date: Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 6:38 AM
To: Me
I forwarded this E-mail to the Independent to be printed with the letters to Santa...I also highlighted what may be a Freudian Slip....I love you so!

Subject: California dreaming
From: Me
Date: Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 10:01 PM

To: Father

Father,

I just can't go on living with all this stress with school.  I'm leaving for California in the morning.  I'm just gonna hitchhike it.  If that fails, I'll just walk.  I have to leave.  Please understand.  I'm going to live on the beach for a while.  Maybe I'll find a commune that will take me in.  I can help grow marijuana plants and play the ukulele.  Maybe I could find work at the renaissance festival and work as a wench while searching for spiritual guidance from fellow rennies.  I have everything packed up.  Please don't try to stop me.  This is my destiny.

I love you,

P.S. please don't be sad, because, like Barry, I feel sad when you're sad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebSYPnllFx8

From: Father
Date: Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 6:18 AM

To: Me

As an alternative to the dangerous road, I suggest just kicking back and let the Barry  videos lead you into total Nirvana.  I watched five until I reached a Chipmunks version that jolted me back into the real world....I love you...Dad------

A Recovered Pageant Queen

This weekend I plan on returning to my hometown for the annual celebration weekend.  It has the usual beer garden, polka music, Sunday parade, and eating-contests that small-town Germans go shit crazy over.  It also has a pageant.  I think it's technically a scholarship competition (ha!).  It's a very small production and the judging is based entirely on an interview.  The process is actually pretty tame.  It's not based on looks or how well you walk in a bikini.  It is, however, still based on feminine ideals like poise and elegance. 

Well, at the tender age of 16 I was deemed the most poised and elegant.  I was named Queen and spent the next year riding around in vehicles performing choreographed waving to strangers while wearing formal gowns and up-dos in 90 degree heat.  I didn't want to do it.  It required a lot of convincing from my sister (a former queen herself).  I did it probably more out of sibling rivalry and for the sake of competition than anything else.  I was proud of myself at the time.  But looking back?

It's gross that such young girls participate in competitions of who is essentially the most female or the best woman.  There are good values at play like intelligence and public-speaking.  One of the questions I was asked by the judges was how I would change the education system.  I don't remember my answer (I was 16!).  At least, I'm sure I'd have a better one now.

And despite that the competition is judged by a group of non-locals, it does feel like the young girls are really being judged by the whole town.  Their pictures and bios are published in the newspaper and everyone is invited to form opinions on who should win, and to express their disagreement with the judging.  Their opinions reflect on what they value most.  She's the prettiest, she's the sweetest, she's the nicest.  I also definitely feel like there are class issues at play that I won't go into.

After the judging these girls get adorned with jewelry, placed on top a float and driven around town.  Am I the only one who sees how fucking pathetic this all is?  And completely inconsequential?  You can't put Miss-Small Town Minnesota 2004 on your resume.  And the scholarship award?  $100.  16 year-olds are not going to put $100 away in the bank to use for college later.  They are going to use it to buy  a white gown to wear at the parade next weekend.

Hope Not

A vintage Esquire cover.  Btw, ever notice how men's magazines talk UP to the reader?  They have some really intelligent, cool articles.  Interspersed with some sexism and homophobia, you can find well-informed stories about porn and abortion clinics in men's magazines but stupid little blurbs like what to say about political issues at parties in women's magazines.  Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Go Holla Yo Self

I read a post entitled "'Damn, Baby': Some Thoughts on Holla Back"on Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog over at The Atlantic a few days ago.  Holla Back is a blog where people who have been harassed on the street share their accounts and even pictures of their harassers.  I see it as a great way for people to seek revenge against their harassers.  According to the article,

"One thing that nearly all of the posts have in common is an acknowledgement of the effects that street harassment have on women. Most write that they felt shaken, angry, helpless, or tearful after an incident. They write that it took time for them to pull themselves together. That's the thing I think many men don't understand about the harassment: it completely strips a woman of autonomy and it forces a reaction that lasts long after the incident is over. Many times, harassers are seeking a positive reaction, and when they don't get that, they turn to calling the woman they complimented moments earlier a "bitch." And either way, the woman has been forcibly dragged out of her own thoughts. That's why so many women studiously ignore all strangers on the street, I think. It's a form of insulation from getting shook."

The day after I moved to Minneapolis I took a walk into downtown. On my way home I cut through Loring Park which led me by a group of older men playing basketball. They tried to get my attention with some hey baby's and sweetheart's. There were about 5 or 6 of them shouting at me. I had my headphones in and I tried to completely shut it out, I stared straight ahead and picked up my pace. They became angry as I refused to acknowledge them and started calling me rude. Just as I passed by one of them shouted a phrase I'll probably never forget,

"Mmmm...All that ass...All that ass and no class."

It's funny now, and it's a funny story to tell, but it was so enraging in that moment.  Here I was, a woman all alone in the middle of a park in broad daylight just trying to get home being yelled at by a group of old men and I have no class?  I felt like yelling and screaming at them, I felt like throwing a few punches, and I felt like crying.

Half a year later, I felt brave enough to cut through the park once more.  This time I disrupted a much larger, much younger group of men playing basketball so much that the ball-carrier stopped and announced "damn that lady got back."  I even get it in the cute little neighborhood I live in.  Once, as I walked by the outdoor seating at a restaurant I was instructed "hey sweetheart, give me a smile." 

It's a fact of life for me now that I will be cat-called or yelled at from a strange man on foot or from a moving car every time I choose to walk, not just in Loring Park, but essentially anywhere I go.  Men believe they have the right to yell at me, comment on my appearance, and just creepily leer at me.  Basically, they believe they have the right to make me uncomfortable.  Maybe "hey girl, you looking sexy today" doesn't seem rude but the intent is not to compliment or make you feel good about yourself.  It's a power game.

As a result of this, my Minnesota nice has all but disappeared.  I don't smile at strangers, I don't look at strangers, I turn the music up so that I won't have to hear all the hey baby's.  As indignant and angry as it makes me, I never talk back or even acknowledge the comments.  I worry about escalating the situation.  If a strange man can be that disrespectful then I just don't know how far he'll take it.  I do feel a certain amount of fear when it happens because of my vulnerability.  It's easier to stare straight ahead and speed away than to stop and tell them off, let alone take their picture.  But I am glad that people are able to do that on sights like Holla Back.  At least it holds harassers accountable for disgusting, vile acts of verbal and physical violence.

Chickpea and Potato Tacos

I have managed, in my fumblings around the kitchen, to discover a great new dish.  It can be eaten as a meal in itself or shoved in a taco shell with some salsa and guacamole.

-Mix 1 packet taco seasoning with 1 tbsp soy sauce, 2 tsp lemon juice.

-Drain and rinse 1 can (15ounces) of chickpeas.

-Slice 1 large potato into medium sized bites.

-Toss potato, chickpeas, and seasonings together until evenly coated.

-Spread out mixture on baking pan.

-Bake at 400 degrees for about 25 minutes.

Philosophy of Gaga

Lady Power by Nancy Bauer is an article from The NY Times' "The Stone" series which features the writings of contemporary philosophers.  It touches on the way that young women are using their sexuality as a form of power using Lady Gaga as an example.  She first uses Jean-Paul Sartre's argument that we experience ourselves as metaphysically divided and we deal with this by acting in "bad faith" and contrasts it with Simone de Beauvoir.

Beauvoir repeatedly stresses that our chances for happiness often turn on our capacity for canny self-objectification.  Women are — still — heavily rewarded for pleasing men.  When we make ourselves into what men want, we are more likely to get what we want, or at least thought we wanted.  Unlike Sartre, Beauvoir believed in the possibility of human beings’ encountering each other simultaneously as subjects and as objects.  In fact, she thought that truly successful erotic encounters positively demand that we be “in-itself-for-itself” with one another, mutually recognizing ourselves and our partners as both subjects and objects.  The problem is that we are inclined to deal with the discomfort of our metaphysical ambiguity by splitting the difference:  men, we imagine, will relentlessly play the role of subjects; women, of objects.  Thus our age-old investment in norms of femininity and masculinity. The few times that Beauvoir uses the term “bad faith” she’s almost always lamenting our cleaving to gender roles as a way of dealing with what metaphysically ails us, rather than, à la Sartre, scolding women for doing the best they can in an unjust world.

Interesting, no?

Don't Leave Me Mr. Emanuel

There's some speculation that Rahm Emanuel will be leaving his position as Chief of Staff later this year.  This will be a national tragedy.  Emanuel's filthy mouth, hard ass politics, and salt and pepper sexy has been keeping my cynicism at a reasonable level.  Without him in the white house, what will I do?

I Bet You'll Like This

Hopefully you've already heard of her.  Janelle Monae has been on my radar since her Gap commercials last Christmas.  Her dancing blows me away.  I'm determined to learn some of her fancy footwork.


This video you might not have seen, though.  I'm never a fan of spoken word though, so I skip through that part.

Here's To Produce

I don't like outing myself as vegan, especially to my family.  It makes for annoying conversation.  "Is cool whip vegan?  Can you eat ice cream?  Cake?  Fish?

I made a decision to go vegan back in February.  It resulted mostly from a need to eat less processed foods.  I was still on a sugar high from the holidays and ended up reading some trendy diet book that was basically advocating the removal of crap from daily diets.  Since then, I've gradually cut out caffeine, most processed foods, and animal products from my diet.  After two months I added dairy back in but have since returned to a mostly vegan diet.  I strive to eat the most basic, simplistic plant foods everyday which means lots of vegetables, fruit, whole grains, and beans.  When I do mess up (I have a very difficult time turning down free food), my body can feel the difference.  I've become an avid reader of nutritional labels.  No one should be ignorant of what goes inside their bodies.  I try to go for products that have the least number of and most recognizable ingredients.

But beyond health reasons, I've realized how huge of an impact an average meat and dairy diet has on the environment.  Animal-based diets use up significantly more water and energy to produce and of course have far more of an environmental impact than plant-based diets.  A 2006 UN report found that cattle farming "uses more land than any other human activity; it's also one of the largest contributors to water pollution and a bigger source of greenhouse-gas emissions than all the world's trains, planes, and automobiles combined." The following graphic, via GOOD illustrates this.

Much of the environmental damage is a result of the modern farming industry.  Small, local farming is certainly a much better alternative.  But the majority of the nation's food is not only environmentally damaging but also pumped full of...I'll just say bad stuff.  Our government has been subsidizing corn heavily and as a result companies have been cheaply filling our food with it.  I'd rather not be corn fed.  It makes me angry that buying vegetables and fruit at the grocery store costs more than if I were to fill up on the processed, packaged crap that food companies have been shoving down our throats.

-Image via Good Medicine Magazine

So while everyone yells at you for being obese and federal programs are instated to deal with the effects of it, the government has been playing probably the biggest role in making you that way.  There are many places in this country where the closest place to buy food is a gas station or a McDonald's.  The poorest areas are usually the most unhealthy.  They can either go to the Arby's around the corner or spend more by taking a half hour bus ride to the grocery store where they can actually find produce.

I'm not trying to turn you all into vegans.  I just think it's incredibly important that we all think about what's going into our bodies as well as what's going into the food that's going into our bodies and the significance it has on our society and environment.  And if you do want to make a difference, even small changes can have an impact.  Try local beef instead of cattle raised 200 miles away or maybe just forgo the meat for dinner and experiment with a meat-substitute.

Veganish

“I call myself an aspiring vegan — sometimes I say veganish,” Mr. Masson said. “I make mistakes sometimes.” If he’s at a restaurant and finds out he ate cake made with a bit of butter, he said: “I can live with that. It’s just too weird and too hostile to go ‘blech’ and throw up and say, ‘I can’t believe I just ate that.’ “

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Seymour An Introduction

I'm a fraud, I guess.  I hadn't even read Catcher in the Rye until after Salinger died.  Since, though, I've been reading as much as I can and I'm glad to have found it all now.

I won't say that Salinger is my favorite author.  I won't gush over his genius.  Any of my own words would be pathetic.  I will merely repeat some of his own passages from Seymour An Introduction and hopefully let his words reflect on me, the reader, for merely repeating them.

"...As though it were a trifle high. Oh, marvelous thought! Let him come out of this a trifle high. But what kind of high? High, i think, like someone you love coming up on the porch, grinning, grinning, after three hard sets of tennis, victorious tennis, to ask you if you saw that last shot he made. Yes. Oui."

"For the faithful, the patient, the hermetically pure, all the important things in this world - not life and death, perhaps, which are merely words, but the important things - work out rather beautifully."

 Even the passages I chose fall short.  What I'd like to do, really, is invite you over to sit on my porch under twilight and allow me to read the whole book to you.  And when I'm finished, to read you another.

Photo via Ilsa Brink

Generation Hate

I can't believe I read through this entire article before realizing it was written two years ago.  It's called Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization and it's irrelevant crap except that it got me thinking.  I would be a happy girl if I never heard the word hipster again.  It's way overused.  I've heard it used to describe punks, emos, club kids, and that kid in flannel.  I don't really see any similarities between them all and it's absolutely futile to point out their differences.  Yes, they're privileged, they're annoying and basically just immature.  I wish we had something else, my generation that is.  This article is basically a critique of our generation itself and has the delusion that previous generations were less shallow.

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the "hipster" – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

Yeah yeah yeah.  Ok, we're consumers.  But no worse than our parents.  Have you seen the world that we've inherited?  You can have it back, I don't want it.  Yes, I've hung out with these kids in bars.  Yes, they look like assholes until you meet that friend of a friend.  He's in a band, he wears tight pants, you've already written him off and then he tells a joke about his mother and catholic guilt and you laugh in spite of yourself and think "maybe the kids are ok" and finish your can of pbr.

We're not all entitled little rich kids.  Some of us ride bikes because we're actually poor despite our fancy undergrad degrees that got us that great retail gig or simply because bikes are an awesome form of transportation.  Why am I trying to defend myself?

We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.

 You're right, it's a lost cause.  I hope this is the end of Western civilization.  Let's party till it's over.

Broccoli Yam Surprise

I've been reading a lot of vegan cooking blogs lately.  Everything looks so god damn yummy it makes me very excited to be eating vegan again.  Every bean burger or chickpea salad makes me squeal until I start reading the directions.  They always claim to be super easy until they start in on the sautee this, roast that, food process the rest.  I don't have a food processor, the time, nor the money to buy all the ingredients to whip up these confections.  My laziness and lack of cooking skills has spurred my creativity though.  My latest go to dish is as follows.


1.  Cook up some brown rice (either stove top or buy the microwaveable kind).

2.  Chop up some broccoli and steam in the microwave.

3.  Cook one small yam (in the microwave, naturally).  Cut into bite size pieces.

4.  Mix all ingredients together and top off with House of Tsang's Peanut Sauce.

I don't intend for anyone to actually make this thing but believe me, it's yummy and healthy!

The following photos are from a magazine I designed as part of a women's studies project in college.  It was just a fun project I put together in a short amount of time addressing flaws I found while going through many women's magazines.  I titled it YOU magazine because I wanted it to be about the reader and what the reader actually wants to read in a magazine.  The cover stories are all cutouts from actually covers to point out how ridiculously false the cover stories of women's magazines are. 

This section addresses Glamour's Do's and Don'ts section which suggests that all women must follow certain rules when venturing out in public.  Certain colors, shapes, articles of clothing must never be worn or else you will be publicly shamed for your ignorance.  Simply walking outside invites public humiliation.  I wanted to address this by simply posting images of real women, diverse and beautiful simply doing their own thing.

My next section was addressing how intimidating fashion magazines can be.  There is no fun in fashion anymore.  Editorials are far too serious.  Fashion should be something to play with and experiment with. 

This section addresses probably the most serious of problems with women's magazines today: the lack of color.  I cut out every picture of non-white women that I could and this is what I ended up with.  The second page was cut off being uploaded but I believe I only found two Asian while going through about 10-15 magazines.

Of course, objectification is a problem but women's magazines still have a very prominent "male gaze" which I addressed by including pictures of men.  Honestly, men could easily use women's magazines as porn with all the scantily clad ladies throughout them.  These men don't look objectified like the women in men's magazines, they are dressed casually, and are showcasing their personalities.

Of course, aging women are nonexistent in such magazines.  But there are helpful stories about surgeries and botox!

The last two pages are just fun things I put together.  There were probably five different articles I found about Michelle Obama's arms and zero about actually doing things.  Women in fashion magazines are inactive, little dress-up dolls meant to attract men and fail at dieting.

Paranoia Perhaps

I've been coming across a lot of comments lately across the interweb that suggest that the Deepwater Horizon leak is far more of a clusterf@ck than previously stated.  There's some evidence pointing to possibility that the explosion that caused the leak has damaged both the casing of the well and the surrounding sea bed and efforts to cap the well will actually cause a much more enormous leak.  This could possibly be why the top kill effort was halted, because BP realized that capping the leak would create a worse problem.  One post I stumbled on yesterday from a thread on slate.com  seems to be pretty convincing.  They quote an interview with Shell Oil President John Hofmeister.

[Question] What are the chances that the well casing below the sea floor has been compromised, and that gas and oil are coming up the outside of the well casing, eroding the surrounding soft rock. Could this lead to a catastrophic geological failure, unstoppable even by the relief wells?
John Hofmeister: This is what some people fear has occurred. It is also why the “top kill” process was halted. If the casing is compromised the well is that much more difficult to shut down, including the risk that the relief wells may not be enough. If the relief wells do not result in stopping the flow, the next and drastic step is to implode the well on top of itself, which carries other risks as well.

The other article that was linked by gawker.com this morning is long, detailed, and sounds too horrifying to be true.  Take it with a grain of salt, these theories could just be theories, extremely convincing and plausible theories.  Basically this post explains that BP has been prolonging this and playing a waiting game because the well can never be capped and will most likely have to drain itself out, which by his estimates could be around 2 billion barrels or more.

It means they will never cap the gusher after the wellhead. They cannot...the more they try and restrict the oil gushing out the bop?...the more it will transfer to the leaks below. Just like a leaky garden hose with a nozzle on it. When you open up the nozzle?...it doesn't leak so bad, you close the nozzle?...it leaks real bad,
same dynamics.

Dear Jesus NO

An anti-abortion group in the U.K. has designed a new billboard to remind everyone that abortion kills Jesus.

"This advertisement sends a powerful message to everyone in Britain ... Whenever we kill an unborn child in an abortion, we are killing Jesus."

Speaking of hilarious anti-abortion billboards, my brother and his friends once spray painted a billboard that read abortion kills babies so that it read ninjas kill babies.  Hilarious and factual.

Musings On A Rainy Day

It's raining.  It's raining.

Lately, I've been feeling a bit restless which is probably only magnified on a dreary Tuesday.  I suspect that I'm not quite living up to my potential.  I shouldn't say lately, I guess.  I've been restless my whole life.  But time is passing so very quickly and I don't feel like I'm making any gains.  I've plateaued perhaps.  I'm stagnant.  I made the switch recently from non-profit to for-profit (not my own, assuredly) and I no longer have the feeling of working for something that matters or that makes people lives better.  Not that I was, really.  But now I sit at a desk, I process invoices, and I put heaving stacks of paper in numerical order.

No one needs a college degree to put a stack of paper in numerical order.  I'm surviving.  That might just be all I can ask for right now.  The only idea I have is to go back to school, perhaps then I can get a job that requires a college degree.

But mostly, I would just like to move into the woods.  I want to grow vegetables and chop wood and make pancakes.  I want to spend zero money for weeks on end.  I want my muscles to ache not from working out but from moving them for a purpose.  I want to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life and not, when I come to die, discover that I had not lived.

WOAH, sorry to go all Thoreau on you there.  That was weird.   

Squeel

Joe Biden chasing Rahm Emanuel with a super soaker.  More pictures over at gawker.

I Have No Words

This is the reality.  Pictures from the oil spill can be found here.