Dunking doughnuts outside the 54th floor, Louis and Mrs. Armstrong at the Sphinx, a woman neck-deep in grapes, Malyshka the Russian Space Dog of Sputnik II ... oh and so indescribably MUCH more. Photos from The Atlantic's amazing archive.
In fuzzy-history-we-think-we-know: did you realize that the Equal Rights Amendment passed forty-six years ago, almost to the month? But it has never been ratified. Yes, ladies - and women too - there is still a deficit of two states' ayes to enforce what even CONGRESS was able to say yes to, way on back in 1972. More than a quarter of states in the theoretically United States still don't care to accept the amendment, two generations on. I am not proud to note my home state remains a holdout.
Tom Williams has a good post, reviewing New Grub Street by George Gissing. As interesting as the work looks, one of Tom's points is meta - that the work contains the flaws it rails against. He also points out that the complaints of the fictional author in New Grub Street are still with us today. To take this one more layer of meta, this morning before I saw his post, I happened to get up and turn on The Loves of Edgar Allen Poe as my background to waking up and getting ready. I was fascinated by its repeated commentary on a writer's raw deal in publishing, out of the Poe character's mouth, and got curious about the world of publishing circa, say 1941 or 1942 (the movie came out in 1942). Little is to be found about Brian Foy, who wrote the screenplay, in a cursory search, but he seems to have started life as a child entertainer before becoming a writer - easy to imagine he was exploited in more than one way in his given professions. I leave the link to Tom's post with only the observation that there is either hope or despair in knowing that it's never been easy in publishing.
Tom has another post of interest - short, beautiful, and poignant - about the Palace of Peace, the elite, and rumors of war. Sigh.
Showing posts with label 20th century. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 20th century. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 20, 2018
Friday, August 25, 2017
Voyager's Golden Record
Have you ever heard it?
Because talk about a click beyond. Please take this trip.
It is record of the gloriousness of our very planet, and the finest accomplishment of which humanity is capable. Not merely the sounds - all of which share some piece of Earth's magnificence - but the Voyagers, the record, the images. Sharing life.
Here, the official tracks, courtesy of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory archive (not created by JPL).
Also, we need to make t-shirts that say, "Out there, our concepts of velocity become provincial." (Meanwhile, every sound on the record is provincial! Though some might disagree about The Laughing Man.)
Here is MIT's unofficial copy; for those of you who know what HiFi means, it brings with it the enjoyable pops and cracks of the albums we played on those. Which has an Earthling charm of its own.
PBS's as-usual wonderful special on the 40-year-old Voyager twins.
Because talk about a click beyond. Please take this trip.
It is record of the gloriousness of our very planet, and the finest accomplishment of which humanity is capable. Not merely the sounds - all of which share some piece of Earth's magnificence - but the Voyagers, the record, the images. Sharing life.
Here, the official tracks, courtesy of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory archive (not created by JPL).
Also, we need to make t-shirts that say, "Out there, our concepts of velocity become provincial." (Meanwhile, every sound on the record is provincial! Though some might disagree about The Laughing Man.)
Here is MIT's unofficial copy; for those of you who know what HiFi means, it brings with it the enjoyable pops and cracks of the albums we played on those. Which has an Earthling charm of its own.
PBS's as-usual wonderful special on the 40-year-old Voyager twins.
Friday, July 14, 2017
Daytime-ization
Not too long ago, I said I was going to do a post about the twentieth century transformation of evening and formal textiles/jewels into day wear. The idea is one I've cogitated on for many years, not as a blog post, but in a more philosophical sense. I was reading one of Ann Rice's Lestat novels, probably Queen of the Damned, in which he had awoken to the modern world and observed how everyone now had access to glimmering clothes and finery. Written in the 80s, and read by me in the 90s, the idea did stick with me - that we had an abundance of riches, in the modern world, which were unreachable in centuries past.
A little age, education, and experience puts a great deal of perspective on the equation of flimsy acetate with cloth-of-gold. But the point of abundance is not quite negated, and the point that we're a flashier lot these days holds pretty firm.
As much as I rail against the idea that humanity has "evolved" (oh, and thesemantics baggage in that word) from stupidity and filth into any new-and-improved form, it doesn't do to deny we've invented a whole lot of stuff. Good and bad. But production is a different question than quality - see also, the difference between centuries-old handmade cloth of gold and mass manufactured lame or acetate of any variety of shiny-ness, boldness, etc.
And so we turn to quality, and the evolution of its usage.
As a younger lady, I was addicted to Miss Manners. Sure, what she actually had to say was always splendid, but the real draw was her writing. Like Roger Ebert (with whose movie reviews I almost *never* agreed), I read her columns faithfully, because she could express ideas with eloquent insight. AND so often the ideas were something much more than answers to straightforward questions.
One of the more concrete things you can learn from the study of etiquette is the language of gems. Like the language of flowers, certain stones denote certain implications, not all of which have to do with the months of our births.
All this may seem very quaint and perhaps romantic to many people, but the value and magic of nonverbal communication never dies. We just find different ways to do it.
It was the concrete rules of dress that laid the groundwork for the somewhat more subjective messages sent by what we wore - and when. Ask a fan.
And so it was: there was a time diamonds would never have been worn during the daytime. In the evening, they conferred elegance, glamour, and conspicuous consumption upon the wearer, but during the day, anyone in any glittering gem (pearls and I believe mourning jet were acceptable; if anyone knows more than I, I'd love your comments!!) was nothing but gauche. Display had rules. Getting the rules wrong only demonstrated someone's ignorance of wealth, but probably what we now call "trying too hard" (if not, worse, actual depravity).
Then diamond engagement rings became de rigueur, and the rules began to shift.
Certain necklines were acceptable only in the evening as well, and dress followed the appropriateness of the hour of the day, the age of the wearer, their status and station (see above), and the activities they had afoot. Morning dress, riding habits, low gowns, certain hats.
Oh, hats. There is a wonderful fun bit in one of the early episodes of "Are You Being Served", iterating the acceptable hat styles for various levels of employee at Grace Brothers department store. Bowlers are right out, unfortunately, for Captain Peacock, a floor walker - higher in status than the sales staff, but not so high as manager Mister Rumbold.
And yet, a bowler suits Peacock ever so well.
Another fine scene involves the proper fluffing of a pocket handkerchief.
These things matter, was the issue - and big issues they were, even so late as the 1970s. It wasn't so long ago. Mrs. Slocombe might wear any color hair she desired - but Captain Peacock needed dispensation to sport that bowler.
For a look at an encapsulated moment in the timeline of women's fashion, watch seasons one and two of the American show, "Remington Steele". Most famous for bringing Pierce Brosnan onto the Hollywood scene, what tends to be forgotten now about this series is the driving "sit" of this particular com, which was that a woman in 1982 presuming to act as a private investigator was so utterly outre' she had to invent: "a decidedly masculine superior." Hijinks ensued, and a jolly good heartthrob I still don't mind taking a gander at.
In season one of the show, Laura Holt (Stephanie Zimbalist), our inventress, spends an interesting amount of time in hats. Fedoras in particular. She heads to a horse farm wearing a more tweedy ensemble (and woolen cap), but more than one episode sees her costumed almost for one of the old movies Steele constantly invokes as they follow their cases. But she's not costumed like the femmes fatale of these classics; she is modeled more on Sam Spade - or even Columbo. Structured tailoring, subdued colors, sturdy textiles. And always covered. She presents entirely feminine, but her character design still does not flutter nor blush. Even her most spangled evening wear (and spangles there are) speak to power, to her skill in the work she does and the refusal to become a conquest, even as most eps end in breathless kisses in the early going.
The upshot is a woman in "a man's world" - demanding respect and commanding authority.
Season two plays up, in every possible aspect, the Bondian parallels (we will not point to aspirations on Brosnan's part) of HIS character. And hers shows up in shorts and bathing suits rather suddenly. The season premiere is a lesson in what producers felt they had on their hands, and even all but cops the famous Bond theme music.
The good news is, Laura Holt is not reduced to being a Bond girl, but the contrast in production design - in costume design - captures something else of the time. By season three, she's almost always sporting elaborately swirling hairstyles - more Gibson Girl than Big 80s Hair, but still a notable change from our introduction to the character, who only got Gibson for special occasions, and not even all of those.
Even in 1982, as realistic as it was to portray a female lead in need of an imaginary man to make it in business, the fact was, women's place in American society was not quite what it had been years before, when the series was actually conceived (1969).
So, season two. They stopped presenting Laura in the clothes of male private detectives partially because the series changed in tone - and because she had nice legs and so forth - but also because women overall were becoming a little less likely, even then, to package themselves mannishly in order to make it. A little.
Fast forward a couple of years, and we have Maddie Hayes in "Moonlighting" - conceptually similar on several counts, and trying to push even farther. Hayes hardly ever wears anything but brights, in silky fabrics, and always with heels. (Note that Cybill Shepherd famously rebelled against heels, herself.) The fact that this character (and Shepherd) was a former model provided the excuse for the frippery, and the sexual tension in "Moonlighting" was if anything even more prominent than that in RS, but the difference in the female leads' outfitting was fundamental.
Women didn't just gain knees in the early 80s. Take a look at the textiles I mention. From Laura Holt to Maddie Hayes hardly represents all womankind by a long shot (pretty, young, white), but the fashions on these shows make an interesting microcosmic study of the decade. Because Hayes' fashion actually WAS a bit like what we were seeing in the real world. Jacquard silk drop-waist/slim-skirt dresses DID get very popular. My mom wore a baby pink chiffon dress like this for my 1993 wedding.
Following this advent/onslaught of affordable, light, silk or faux silk dresses, I recall a big surge in men's short-sleeved silk shirts, sometimes with mandarin collars. Beloved Ex wore this look well, and I had silk right down to a pair of *pants* in the material, and many long scarves did dedicated duty as belts. In the early 2000s, the light men's shirts of this sort were still on tap with Mr. X as well. This is the transition of a sort of evening fabric firmly into the daylight.
Belts - we got to like showy little belts in the 80s. Skinny gave way to more cummerbund sizes (that scarf wrapped around me twice, back then), and even leather belts were soft, wide, and more and more sash-like. Buckles became increasingly jewelry-like. And then rhinestones crept off buckles and into our workaday earrings, even onto shoes. BLING burgeoned. There are reasons even that word gained the traction it did, when it did.
And more evening daringness made its way into our days.
(Notoriously, of course, many people's hair got excessive. I can't pretend guiltlessness in this, but I did fail Clue-Catchers 101. In some things, it is good to be a slacker.)
Another thing that burgeoned in the 80s was designer labels. It's hard to overstate the nature of this change to anyone who hasn't lived on both sides of the designer era. And this, too, is something of an evening concept brought through the rest of the day. I had heard of a "Halston gown" when I was little, but nobody was wearing specific-maker-anything in the 70s during the day, to speak of.
In the 70s, it was in fact just weird to wear a shirt that advertised its maker. We'd gotten some memo or other, about a thing called "designer jeans" - but it took the Reagan 80s to cement product placement in our wardrobes. In my world, knowing about Aigner and Izod led almost faster than we realized, to the Hilfiger style revolution still with us, in which everything from sunglasses to purses to jewelry and clothing are logo'd, and that's actually desirable.
(Not so much with me, but that is another day's rant.)
And then came the body parts formerly reserved for special occasions. Grrl Power midriffs have given way by now to "cold shoulder" and side-boob/side/butt, but it is still conceived as special to show the nighttime bits during the day. (Even though this isn't really new, in 20th century terms and thanks to humanity's chronological myopia, it was.) Statement Necklaces and ever-expanding eyebrows ("called it!!") came in after giant implants and fake tans with frost lipstick. Even minimalism seeks a certain boldness. More than the workaday.
And, along with wearing chiffon tops in the middle of any ordinary day, the very textiles we are dressed in are ever more ephemeral, which makes an interesting counterpoint to the perception of ever more "glamour" in their deployment. When clothes are meant to be trashed six months out, can they really be all that elegant ... ?
Things don't change, not really - but our deployment of them keeps us thinking we are brand new.
A little age, education, and experience puts a great deal of perspective on the equation of flimsy acetate with cloth-of-gold. But the point of abundance is not quite negated, and the point that we're a flashier lot these days holds pretty firm.
As much as I rail against the idea that humanity has "evolved" (oh, and the
And so we turn to quality, and the evolution of its usage.
As a younger lady, I was addicted to Miss Manners. Sure, what she actually had to say was always splendid, but the real draw was her writing. Like Roger Ebert (with whose movie reviews I almost *never* agreed), I read her columns faithfully, because she could express ideas with eloquent insight. AND so often the ideas were something much more than answers to straightforward questions.
One of the more concrete things you can learn from the study of etiquette is the language of gems. Like the language of flowers, certain stones denote certain implications, not all of which have to do with the months of our births.
All this may seem very quaint and perhaps romantic to many people, but the value and magic of nonverbal communication never dies. We just find different ways to do it.
It was the concrete rules of dress that laid the groundwork for the somewhat more subjective messages sent by what we wore - and when. Ask a fan.
And so it was: there was a time diamonds would never have been worn during the daytime. In the evening, they conferred elegance, glamour, and conspicuous consumption upon the wearer, but during the day, anyone in any glittering gem (pearls and I believe mourning jet were acceptable; if anyone knows more than I, I'd love your comments!!) was nothing but gauche. Display had rules. Getting the rules wrong only demonstrated someone's ignorance of wealth, but probably what we now call "trying too hard" (if not, worse, actual depravity).
Then diamond engagement rings became de rigueur, and the rules began to shift.
Certain necklines were acceptable only in the evening as well, and dress followed the appropriateness of the hour of the day, the age of the wearer, their status and station (see above), and the activities they had afoot. Morning dress, riding habits, low gowns, certain hats.
Oh, hats. There is a wonderful fun bit in one of the early episodes of "Are You Being Served", iterating the acceptable hat styles for various levels of employee at Grace Brothers department store. Bowlers are right out, unfortunately, for Captain Peacock, a floor walker - higher in status than the sales staff, but not so high as manager Mister Rumbold.
And yet, a bowler suits Peacock ever so well.
Another fine scene involves the proper fluffing of a pocket handkerchief.
These things matter, was the issue - and big issues they were, even so late as the 1970s. It wasn't so long ago. Mrs. Slocombe might wear any color hair she desired - but Captain Peacock needed dispensation to sport that bowler.
For a look at an encapsulated moment in the timeline of women's fashion, watch seasons one and two of the American show, "Remington Steele". Most famous for bringing Pierce Brosnan onto the Hollywood scene, what tends to be forgotten now about this series is the driving "sit" of this particular com, which was that a woman in 1982 presuming to act as a private investigator was so utterly outre' she had to invent: "a decidedly masculine superior." Hijinks ensued, and a jolly good heartthrob I still don't mind taking a gander at.
In season one of the show, Laura Holt (Stephanie Zimbalist), our inventress, spends an interesting amount of time in hats. Fedoras in particular. She heads to a horse farm wearing a more tweedy ensemble (and woolen cap), but more than one episode sees her costumed almost for one of the old movies Steele constantly invokes as they follow their cases. But she's not costumed like the femmes fatale of these classics; she is modeled more on Sam Spade - or even Columbo. Structured tailoring, subdued colors, sturdy textiles. And always covered. She presents entirely feminine, but her character design still does not flutter nor blush. Even her most spangled evening wear (and spangles there are) speak to power, to her skill in the work she does and the refusal to become a conquest, even as most eps end in breathless kisses in the early going.
The upshot is a woman in "a man's world" - demanding respect and commanding authority.
Season two plays up, in every possible aspect, the Bondian parallels (we will not point to aspirations on Brosnan's part) of HIS character. And hers shows up in shorts and bathing suits rather suddenly. The season premiere is a lesson in what producers felt they had on their hands, and even all but cops the famous Bond theme music.
The good news is, Laura Holt is not reduced to being a Bond girl, but the contrast in production design - in costume design - captures something else of the time. By season three, she's almost always sporting elaborately swirling hairstyles - more Gibson Girl than Big 80s Hair, but still a notable change from our introduction to the character, who only got Gibson for special occasions, and not even all of those.
Even in 1982, as realistic as it was to portray a female lead in need of an imaginary man to make it in business, the fact was, women's place in American society was not quite what it had been years before, when the series was actually conceived (1969).
So, season two. They stopped presenting Laura in the clothes of male private detectives partially because the series changed in tone - and because she had nice legs and so forth - but also because women overall were becoming a little less likely, even then, to package themselves mannishly in order to make it. A little.
Fast forward a couple of years, and we have Maddie Hayes in "Moonlighting" - conceptually similar on several counts, and trying to push even farther. Hayes hardly ever wears anything but brights, in silky fabrics, and always with heels. (Note that Cybill Shepherd famously rebelled against heels, herself.) The fact that this character (and Shepherd) was a former model provided the excuse for the frippery, and the sexual tension in "Moonlighting" was if anything even more prominent than that in RS, but the difference in the female leads' outfitting was fundamental.
Women didn't just gain knees in the early 80s. Take a look at the textiles I mention. From Laura Holt to Maddie Hayes hardly represents all womankind by a long shot (pretty, young, white), but the fashions on these shows make an interesting microcosmic study of the decade. Because Hayes' fashion actually WAS a bit like what we were seeing in the real world. Jacquard silk drop-waist/slim-skirt dresses DID get very popular. My mom wore a baby pink chiffon dress like this for my 1993 wedding.
Following this advent/onslaught of affordable, light, silk or faux silk dresses, I recall a big surge in men's short-sleeved silk shirts, sometimes with mandarin collars. Beloved Ex wore this look well, and I had silk right down to a pair of *pants* in the material, and many long scarves did dedicated duty as belts. In the early 2000s, the light men's shirts of this sort were still on tap with Mr. X as well. This is the transition of a sort of evening fabric firmly into the daylight.
Belts - we got to like showy little belts in the 80s. Skinny gave way to more cummerbund sizes (that scarf wrapped around me twice, back then), and even leather belts were soft, wide, and more and more sash-like. Buckles became increasingly jewelry-like. And then rhinestones crept off buckles and into our workaday earrings, even onto shoes. BLING burgeoned. There are reasons even that word gained the traction it did, when it did.
And more evening daringness made its way into our days.
(Notoriously, of course, many people's hair got excessive. I can't pretend guiltlessness in this, but I did fail Clue-Catchers 101. In some things, it is good to be a slacker.)
Another thing that burgeoned in the 80s was designer labels. It's hard to overstate the nature of this change to anyone who hasn't lived on both sides of the designer era. And this, too, is something of an evening concept brought through the rest of the day. I had heard of a "Halston gown" when I was little, but nobody was wearing specific-maker-anything in the 70s during the day, to speak of.
In the 70s, it was in fact just weird to wear a shirt that advertised its maker. We'd gotten some memo or other, about a thing called "designer jeans" - but it took the Reagan 80s to cement product placement in our wardrobes. In my world, knowing about Aigner and Izod led almost faster than we realized, to the Hilfiger style revolution still with us, in which everything from sunglasses to purses to jewelry and clothing are logo'd, and that's actually desirable.
(Not so much with me, but that is another day's rant.)
And then came the body parts formerly reserved for special occasions. Grrl Power midriffs have given way by now to "cold shoulder" and side-boob/side/butt, but it is still conceived as special to show the nighttime bits during the day. (Even though this isn't really new, in 20th century terms and thanks to humanity's chronological myopia, it was.) Statement Necklaces and ever-expanding eyebrows ("called it!!") came in after giant implants and fake tans with frost lipstick. Even minimalism seeks a certain boldness. More than the workaday.
And, along with wearing chiffon tops in the middle of any ordinary day, the very textiles we are dressed in are ever more ephemeral, which makes an interesting counterpoint to the perception of ever more "glamour" in their deployment. When clothes are meant to be trashed six months out, can they really be all that elegant ... ?
Things don't change, not really - but our deployment of them keeps us thinking we are brand new.
Thursday, June 15, 2017
"I don't live by the river"
Editing at the top to add this curious note. One of the people at this concert dropped into my brother's life briefly, pretty much at the moment I was inspired to write this post. I hadn't gotten around to posting it yet when he told me about the encounter, days later.
Curious thing, life.
Should've worn the Chris Crafts.
But, I mean, it was a concert. It was The Clash. The little Asian cotton Maryjanes were the thing. I wore The Thing. And my nerdy jeans and beige socks, yeah. But then the cool top, it was kind of new wave. Vivid turquoise stripes, cool puffed sleeves.
As cool as *I* got in 1982.
I was fifteen.
My brother asked me to go to a concert with him. It was weird, but with his girlfriend's little sister going, maybe he kind of had to. Or maybe he was just being cool with me. It was about this period in our lives that sort of thing began to happen here and there.
Whether he had to bring me, or wanted to ... Didn't matter. We were excited. I remember us spotting other cars as we got closer to Williamsburg, "Bet they're going." Seeking shared anticipation.
Fortunately, for a change: not seeking boys. This isn't because I was with my brother, though usually he terrified any boys I might find interesting, event he other punks. No, it was because Joe Strummer with a mohawk looked too much like my big brother.
So I enjoyed the whole show without dreary old sex interfering mentally, and actually experienced the concert.
That unique smell - of The Reagan Years ... of the ozone-crackled electricity that was the music itself (mountains of speakers and amps) ... of that much youth packed into a venue. The incredible, the ineffable scent and sensation and sight of youth, in the early 80s. Angry youth, but exultant too.
The crush was intense at the front. I was with the other kid sister, against the barricade; barely more than a child. Some guy saw me (us?) and got concerned. Or maybe he just wanted my spot. But ... it was after ... Maybe he really was scared for me. He signaled the roadies, they pulled me out of my cherry position. My memory has failed, in 35 years, as to her being pulled up to, but probably so. Dragged up onto the stage, shooed off it, shepherded around - and ended up out of the crush. I was annoyed.
Where my brother and his girlfriend were, who knew - I didn't care, there was nothing to be afraid of. Not even death by general admission. Safe. Wherever the older sibs were, they were never farther than the walls of the venue. Nobody in the crowd was out to hurt us. There was a show to go on.
And so, I wormed my way BACK up to the front, once again causing annoyance, but this time to the guy who had ordered us "saved" from the crowd. Maybe the other kid sister and I did this together. I just remember I was there.
I latched onto the barricade like a tick.
The Clash. Front row. Sea of kids, strange adulation and imperative demand. It was sensational.
At some point, we pulled ourselves back out - noise-fatigue, or the desire to find the others, or maybe they found us. I have some recollection of standing on the seats, scream-singing, bopping.
I had lost one of my flimsy cotton shoes, either in the dragging moment of my salvation, or stomped off during the second round, surrounded by combat boots. Stuck the other shoe in my back pocket - heaven knows why. Maybe I thought I'd find the lost one after the show. Maybe I even did. History and memory have failed in this detail.
Standing on a seat, beer-sopped socks, the muck of spit and sweat and beer and cigarettes. Just a few hours of a life; a meeting of four people. Of thousands.
Then a drive home, on an autumnal night. Ears ringing.
"Rock the Casbah" was the big deal that year, and it was pretty great. But even today, I maintain that "London Calling" is one of the great tracks in recording history. It echoes in a way beyond the mere sonic definition.
The weekend before that concert, The Clash appeared on SNL. Little Opie Cunningham was the host (this was before he disappeared completely *behind* cameras). He drank a beer live on camera, protested his Little Opie Cunningham-ness, and got ribbed by Eddie Murphy.
The ineffable scent of the 80s. The sound of soaring, roaring, echoing, raw music. GOOD music, but raw in a way that's really only synthesized anymore.
I really did see all the good concerts.
Curious thing, life.
Should've worn the Chris Crafts.
But, I mean, it was a concert. It was The Clash. The little Asian cotton Maryjanes were the thing. I wore The Thing. And my nerdy jeans and beige socks, yeah. But then the cool top, it was kind of new wave. Vivid turquoise stripes, cool puffed sleeves.
As cool as *I* got in 1982.
I was fifteen.
My brother asked me to go to a concert with him. It was weird, but with his girlfriend's little sister going, maybe he kind of had to. Or maybe he was just being cool with me. It was about this period in our lives that sort of thing began to happen here and there.
Whether he had to bring me, or wanted to ... Didn't matter. We were excited. I remember us spotting other cars as we got closer to Williamsburg, "Bet they're going." Seeking shared anticipation.
Fortunately, for a change: not seeking boys. This isn't because I was with my brother, though usually he terrified any boys I might find interesting, event he other punks. No, it was because Joe Strummer with a mohawk looked too much like my big brother.
So I enjoyed the whole show without dreary old sex interfering mentally, and actually experienced the concert.
That unique smell - of The Reagan Years ... of the ozone-crackled electricity that was the music itself (mountains of speakers and amps) ... of that much youth packed into a venue. The incredible, the ineffable scent and sensation and sight of youth, in the early 80s. Angry youth, but exultant too.
The crush was intense at the front. I was with the other kid sister, against the barricade; barely more than a child. Some guy saw me (us?) and got concerned. Or maybe he just wanted my spot. But ... it was after ... Maybe he really was scared for me. He signaled the roadies, they pulled me out of my cherry position. My memory has failed, in 35 years, as to her being pulled up to, but probably so. Dragged up onto the stage, shooed off it, shepherded around - and ended up out of the crush. I was annoyed.
Where my brother and his girlfriend were, who knew - I didn't care, there was nothing to be afraid of. Not even death by general admission. Safe. Wherever the older sibs were, they were never farther than the walls of the venue. Nobody in the crowd was out to hurt us. There was a show to go on.
And so, I wormed my way BACK up to the front, once again causing annoyance, but this time to the guy who had ordered us "saved" from the crowd. Maybe the other kid sister and I did this together. I just remember I was there.
I latched onto the barricade like a tick.
The Clash. Front row. Sea of kids, strange adulation and imperative demand. It was sensational.
At some point, we pulled ourselves back out - noise-fatigue, or the desire to find the others, or maybe they found us. I have some recollection of standing on the seats, scream-singing, bopping.
I had lost one of my flimsy cotton shoes, either in the dragging moment of my salvation, or stomped off during the second round, surrounded by combat boots. Stuck the other shoe in my back pocket - heaven knows why. Maybe I thought I'd find the lost one after the show. Maybe I even did. History and memory have failed in this detail.
Standing on a seat, beer-sopped socks, the muck of spit and sweat and beer and cigarettes. Just a few hours of a life; a meeting of four people. Of thousands.
Then a drive home, on an autumnal night. Ears ringing.
"Rock the Casbah" was the big deal that year, and it was pretty great. But even today, I maintain that "London Calling" is one of the great tracks in recording history. It echoes in a way beyond the mere sonic definition.
The weekend before that concert, The Clash appeared on SNL. Little Opie Cunningham was the host (this was before he disappeared completely *behind* cameras). He drank a beer live on camera, protested his Little Opie Cunningham-ness, and got ribbed by Eddie Murphy.
The ineffable scent of the 80s. The sound of soaring, roaring, echoing, raw music. GOOD music, but raw in a way that's really only synthesized anymore.
I really did see all the good concerts.
Thursday, March 2, 2017
Collection
Well, NPR is trying to make me fall in love with them today.
This story may only be exciting for ME, as a sufferer, but as we get into the warm-and-itchy season of eczema, I'm interested in research and treatments. I've heard of nemolizumab in a rash (har) of ads for a drug for psoriasis, and even wondered why psoriasis seems to get all the attention. Well, it seems it has been looked at for eczema too. For now, I'll stick with my old standby, but I'll keep an eye open as this progresses.
"How much would you expect to pay for ALL THIS ... mold?" As astonished as I am that developer-of-penicillin Alexander Fleming's mold was preserved at all, the price tag astonished me just a little more. The writing here is HILARIOUS, it's a fun piece - give it a click ... and discover the many luminaries who have also owned a piece of the mold.
Plastic Figures. Legos! Legos immortalizing just a few of the women of NASA!
This story may only be exciting for ME, as a sufferer, but as we get into the warm-and-itchy season of eczema, I'm interested in research and treatments. I've heard of nemolizumab in a rash (har) of ads for a drug for psoriasis, and even wondered why psoriasis seems to get all the attention. Well, it seems it has been looked at for eczema too. For now, I'll stick with my old standby, but I'll keep an eye open as this progresses.
A little splotch of history
"How much would you expect to pay for ALL THIS ... mold?" As astonished as I am that developer-of-penicillin Alexander Fleming's mold was preserved at all, the price tag astonished me just a little more. The writing here is HILARIOUS, it's a fun piece - give it a click ... and discover the many luminaries who have also owned a piece of the mold.
Other projects that were vying for Lego production included depictions of the Addams Family Mansion and the Large Hadron Collider.
Plastic Figures. Legos! Legos immortalizing just a few of the women of NASA!
Tuesday, February 28, 2017
Collection
Archaeogaming. It's a tantalizing word, an interesting idea. As I said to my favorite gamer and my favorite archaeologist, I should figure out how to apply this to writing. But then - "Oh. Wait. I became a writer exactly so I wouldn't have to play nicely with others."
Isn't that a glorious sentence? Subtle, poetic, evocative - and yet concrete, communicative. There is a whole essay's worth more here, from Elyse M. Goldsmith, and a shout-out to Bowie. Make with the click, y'all.
The History Blog has a pair of great posts this week. First, footprints not in the sand: an ancient child's tootsies, captured in three millennia old mortar. Also, how cool is the name Manfred Bietek? Second, interested in a project? You can transcribe WWI era love letters for posterity. Cool.
My daughter and I are as different as fire and rain and as alike as ice and water.
Isn't that a glorious sentence? Subtle, poetic, evocative - and yet concrete, communicative. There is a whole essay's worth more here, from Elyse M. Goldsmith, and a shout-out to Bowie. Make with the click, y'all.
The History Blog has a pair of great posts this week. First, footprints not in the sand: an ancient child's tootsies, captured in three millennia old mortar. Also, how cool is the name Manfred Bietek? Second, interested in a project? You can transcribe WWI era love letters for posterity. Cool.
Friday, November 6, 2015
New Hair?
My fifth grade teacher used to comment excitedly, when one of the kids came in after a haircut, "New hair! New hair!" It was one of her mildly unexpected turns of phrase that came off as comedic because it was nonconformist.
Miss A. never married, because she was a career woman, and her concentration on her job and her kids was such that there was not room for other such encompassing commitments. Miss A. wore polyester skirt and pants suits in purple, neon lime green, pink, and red. Miss A. had the blackest of black hair, and Snow White pale skin. Miss A. is, very likey, no small part of my own sense of style, even if I don't express it in Visa of Dacron double-knit polyester. Miss A. had a post-retirement career in the movies, working as an extra in quite an array of Hollywood and independent productions; I shared the background with her once, in the 90s, and it was fun to see her after twenty years or so.
I can see her rocking this kind of thing (rocking its bobby sox off):
Miss A. never married, because she was a career woman, and her concentration on her job and her kids was such that there was not room for other such encompassing commitments. Miss A. wore polyester skirt and pants suits in purple, neon lime green, pink, and red. Miss A. had the blackest of black hair, and Snow White pale skin. Miss A. is, very likey, no small part of my own sense of style, even if I don't express it in Visa of Dacron double-knit polyester. Miss A. had a post-retirement career in the movies, working as an extra in quite an array of Hollywood and independent productions; I shared the background with her once, in the 90s, and it was fun to see her after twenty years or so.
I can see her rocking this kind of thing (rocking its bobby sox off):
Wednesday, August 5, 2015
Vintage Theory
I have a theory and it is mine, but you can have it - indeed, you can comment on it and all those lovely things we can do in blog-land. So go to it!
Today, I wore a soft jersey shirt with a raw-edged asymmetrical cut. It's a flattering top, very very soft, and several years old. The jersey has held up very well, and the raw edge is still perfect, no strings coming loose nor runs trying to open up in the weave. It's wonderfully comfortable, washable, and has a unique style. It is also the first top I bought in what has become a trend: the long-line asymmetrical sleeveless knit top with curious draping/ruching/mixed textiles, and at the time I bought it, it was daring and forward thinking. It's still an excellent design, still not widely imitated to effect as good as its own.
But it is several years old. And it is made of a very light, delicate jersey knit.
This got me thinking.
With the various vogues for vintage style - and this dates well back before Mad Men, Downton Abbey, or even the fashion, beginning in my own much-molded youth, for rockabilly styles - it's always been a mix of re-created ... and ORIGINAL ... vintage clothes. Inspiration for big-shouldered 80s styles lay in an interest in 40s fashion silhouettes, and we resurrect and imitate Victorian, New Look, Flapper, even 18th-century clothes.
Okay, we're not wearing 18th-century, but I've seen people who wear original 19th-century coats in my day. And certainly much of the 20th century is represented in vintage shops and so on.
Here is the thing I realized:
When the first whiffs of 80s retro came along, I waited for the vintage to come out. And it never did.
Beginning almost alarmingly soon after the decade died, by 1990, Madonna was playing around in giant bellbottoms, and cork plats came into style all too quickly, ushering in the still-extant-to-some-extent 70s fashion rehash. The 60s have been in style since the 80s; plastic-fantastic colors and shapes and Carnaby cute replaying almost without let all along - winklepickers, granny purses, big hair and long hair and staid, nubby boucle knits and Flower Power.
We have pieces of these original decades. I have a 1940s grosgrain purse of my great-grandmothers, which is in spectacular, strong condition, and which I can carry on special occasions. I have a hat nearly as old, a straw hat of my grandmother's. I've seen American Duchess's Lauren modeling dresses she plans to WEAR, not just collect. I myself own a magenta moire' New Look dress made in the UK and very definitely original (that rare original large enough to fit a modern woman's body).
The reason these things can be recycled/reused is this: they were made well enough to survive.
The 80s retro never took off in the way previous decades did because there really isn't as much in the way of surviving originals. They are definitely still *around* - but the quality of clothes made in the 1980s does not stand up to the standards of previous manufacture or hand-making. Even the 70s still used more natural (resilient) fiber and tailoring made to be altered and some expectation that garments should be built to last.
In the 80s, earlier synthetics were perfected ("") and proliferated. In the 80s, seam allowances disappeared, never to be seen since. In the 80s, commerce overcame design, and fashion overcame style to a great extent. In the 80s, the concept of perennial pieces began to be depressed, if not actually opressed or repressed, and short attention spans for fads were built into an industry whose market influence discouraged classic must-have pieces and began heavily to emphasize label uber-alles.
There hasn't even been much whiff of 90s retro, and 15 years on I hear people occasionally actually talking about what they miss in 90s fashion. But the skater-skirts-with-tights and chunky Mary Janes are going to have to be rebuilt this time, because the ones we had bit the rayon-shrinkage or Payless-poorly-constructed dust, or at least are thinner on the ground (and, yeah, in textile) than better made clothes have been for those interested in older decades used to be.
All of it's getting thinner on the ground, of course. With profligates like me WEARING sixty-year-old dresses, they're not going to last the way furniture or architecture might. With others DIY'ing pieces already perhaps compromised - or NOT - even what survives intact is deliberately deconstructed (if not actually destroyed, at least by some lights).
With actual construction being the crap that it mostly is, there won't be many Members Only (or L'Autre Mode ... heh) jackets to go with prefabricated fake DIY Chucks or stirrup pants or Benetton slouches in United candy colors.
No wonder 80s retro didn't take off the way 70s and 60s and so on did before. It'd have to be remade altogether.
And who wants to do that ... ???
Today, I wore a soft jersey shirt with a raw-edged asymmetrical cut. It's a flattering top, very very soft, and several years old. The jersey has held up very well, and the raw edge is still perfect, no strings coming loose nor runs trying to open up in the weave. It's wonderfully comfortable, washable, and has a unique style. It is also the first top I bought in what has become a trend: the long-line asymmetrical sleeveless knit top with curious draping/ruching/mixed textiles, and at the time I bought it, it was daring and forward thinking. It's still an excellent design, still not widely imitated to effect as good as its own.
But it is several years old. And it is made of a very light, delicate jersey knit.
This got me thinking.
With the various vogues for vintage style - and this dates well back before Mad Men, Downton Abbey, or even the fashion, beginning in my own much-molded youth, for rockabilly styles - it's always been a mix of re-created ... and ORIGINAL ... vintage clothes. Inspiration for big-shouldered 80s styles lay in an interest in 40s fashion silhouettes, and we resurrect and imitate Victorian, New Look, Flapper, even 18th-century clothes.
Okay, we're not wearing 18th-century, but I've seen people who wear original 19th-century coats in my day. And certainly much of the 20th century is represented in vintage shops and so on.
Here is the thing I realized:
When the first whiffs of 80s retro came along, I waited for the vintage to come out. And it never did.
Beginning almost alarmingly soon after the decade died, by 1990, Madonna was playing around in giant bellbottoms, and cork plats came into style all too quickly, ushering in the still-extant-to-some-extent 70s fashion rehash. The 60s have been in style since the 80s; plastic-fantastic colors and shapes and Carnaby cute replaying almost without let all along - winklepickers, granny purses, big hair and long hair and staid, nubby boucle knits and Flower Power.
We have pieces of these original decades. I have a 1940s grosgrain purse of my great-grandmothers, which is in spectacular, strong condition, and which I can carry on special occasions. I have a hat nearly as old, a straw hat of my grandmother's. I've seen American Duchess's Lauren modeling dresses she plans to WEAR, not just collect. I myself own a magenta moire' New Look dress made in the UK and very definitely original (that rare original large enough to fit a modern woman's body).
The reason these things can be recycled/reused is this: they were made well enough to survive.
The 80s retro never took off in the way previous decades did because there really isn't as much in the way of surviving originals. They are definitely still *around* - but the quality of clothes made in the 1980s does not stand up to the standards of previous manufacture or hand-making. Even the 70s still used more natural (resilient) fiber and tailoring made to be altered and some expectation that garments should be built to last.
In the 80s, earlier synthetics were perfected ("") and proliferated. In the 80s, seam allowances disappeared, never to be seen since. In the 80s, commerce overcame design, and fashion overcame style to a great extent. In the 80s, the concept of perennial pieces began to be depressed, if not actually opressed or repressed, and short attention spans for fads were built into an industry whose market influence discouraged classic must-have pieces and began heavily to emphasize label uber-alles.
There hasn't even been much whiff of 90s retro, and 15 years on I hear people occasionally actually talking about what they miss in 90s fashion. But the skater-skirts-with-tights and chunky Mary Janes are going to have to be rebuilt this time, because the ones we had bit the rayon-shrinkage or Payless-poorly-constructed dust, or at least are thinner on the ground (and, yeah, in textile) than better made clothes have been for those interested in older decades used to be.
All of it's getting thinner on the ground, of course. With profligates like me WEARING sixty-year-old dresses, they're not going to last the way furniture or architecture might. With others DIY'ing pieces already perhaps compromised - or NOT - even what survives intact is deliberately deconstructed (if not actually destroyed, at least by some lights).
With actual construction being the crap that it mostly is, there won't be many Members Only (or L'Autre Mode ... heh) jackets to go with prefabricated fake DIY Chucks or stirrup pants or Benetton slouches in United candy colors.
No wonder 80s retro didn't take off the way 70s and 60s and so on did before. It'd have to be remade altogether.
And who wants to do that ... ???
Friday, May 22, 2015
Peculiarities
It’s a boring old truism that one of the jobs of a writer is to spend some level of mind-time, *all* the time, on finely observing people, the world, and experience and quantifying these things for themselves so they can eventually steal these considerations, then cannibalize and synthesize them within stories.
It’s a fascinating fact that this self-consuming manufacture comes out of our minds into really cool stories, plays, movies, poems, the texts of graphic novels, and all the genres and forms my wee and paltry little brain has slighted or forgotten. The recent reading of H. G. Wells has provided a master class in tension and character, and the ridiculous as well as the finer points of a society we’d like to pretend was consigned to a dustbin 103 years ago … And all in what, at bottom, is the straight
forward and simple story of two people who get married. If I reduced Marriage to its plot, nothing could compel most people to read it. It would not be possible to baldly explain his wit; and yet, phrases from throughout the work have stuck with me, and may do so for a long time to come.
THAT is awfully good writing.
Now and then, I contemplate regurgitating those things on which I spend my own mind-time day by day. I consider blogging the experience of my commute home, or the way the rain fell yesterday – not from the sky, but from a single oak tree, shuddering from what unknown cause I could not imagine – or the absorbing and yet ugly sensations of what it is like to suffer from prolonged, untreated eczema intentionally, at its height and in preparation to meet a new doctor.
Most of the time, I either turn away from writing these minute observations or vignettes. Illness and injury are my stumbling blocks, and I am all too likely to tarry on the details there, because honestly this sort of experience engages me – probably unhealthily – but there it is. Usually, though, I go in real time, writing my moments or those I witness, letting the words mean something in their course, and letting them go as they pass. Not unheeded, but unrecorded. Some considerations need no more memorial than that we know they *are*, that life has been witnessed. Maybe a prayer, later on. Maybe oblivion, though the moment becomes part of that great swath of memory whose details are invisible, but exist even so.
All caveats intact (though Marriage is nowhere near so awfully uncomfortable as The Cone, it has its share of problematic philosophies), I spent every page – indeed, almost every paragraph, through many long passages – dying to know What Comes Next. What would happen, what decision might be made? Marriage___ may be the deepest exploration of (mostly) two characters I have ever read, and certainly it does expend copious philosophy in the bargain. The latter may be less gripping, but I never put it down, as it were. I read every word, and committed many to memory on purpose.
I honestly recommend it pretty widely – and people who know me know I am rarely to be found spouting about my reading. Either because I have this intimacy issue with my reading, or because in my childhood I was often amusedly chided for sharing in exhaustive detail every last story that crossed my path, *sharing* a book is all but imposible for me except in the most personal of circumstances. And yet – for my readership here, the writers, the history lovers, the random one-offs – I hereby recommend a book. Its language is sumptuous and wonderfully slightly-foreign. Its story is ordinary, and yet keeps you wanting more throughout. Plain as it is, it’s also an astoundingly limber piece of literature. A drawing room comedy; a Sagan- or Tyson-esque musing on science, religion (and the lack of it) and philosopy; a scathing social critique and/or satire at moments; a road novel; a romance. It’s the most acute rendering of a young girl’s mind I’ve ever seen an old man render, and at points an evocation of family relationships par excellence.
Yes. There is recourse to the term half-breed in one act of this saga, which is queasily unforgiveable, and the gender and Semitic politics have aged badly. Indeed, the recurrence, for a while, of the term Eugenics is not clearly pejorative, which is giddy-making in the extreme.
No good-guy here wears a purely white hat; even if there aren’t really any black-hats on hand. And it’s not as if we’re above such problematic currents in any writing today … Perhaps, in a way, it’s worthwhile to read flawed fiction in any case – warts and all.
***
For those of my readers who are writers: do you write down your vignette moments? Do you blog them? (Or share them in the vomments at Janet Reid’s blog?)
I wonder sometimes whether it’s economy or callousness on my part, that I let go so easily of the screeds, scenes, and letters I write half-in-my-sleep; that I sacrifice moments which excite me one hour, but I lose because time gets away from me?
How much of what you think to put on your own blogs/sites do you think better of later, or for one reason or other file away unpublished – invisible, but there, like those experiences we all observe … ?
It’s a fascinating fact that this self-consuming manufacture comes out of our minds into really cool stories, plays, movies, poems, the texts of graphic novels, and all the genres and forms my wee and paltry little brain has slighted or forgotten. The recent reading of H. G. Wells has provided a master class in tension and character, and the ridiculous as well as the finer points of a society we’d like to pretend was consigned to a dustbin 103 years ago … And all in what, at bottom, is the straight
forward and simple story of two people who get married. If I reduced Marriage to its plot, nothing could compel most people to read it. It would not be possible to baldly explain his wit; and yet, phrases from throughout the work have stuck with me, and may do so for a long time to come.
THAT is awfully good writing.
Now and then, I contemplate regurgitating those things on which I spend my own mind-time day by day. I consider blogging the experience of my commute home, or the way the rain fell yesterday – not from the sky, but from a single oak tree, shuddering from what unknown cause I could not imagine – or the absorbing and yet ugly sensations of what it is like to suffer from prolonged, untreated eczema intentionally, at its height and in preparation to meet a new doctor.
Most of the time, I either turn away from writing these minute observations or vignettes. Illness and injury are my stumbling blocks, and I am all too likely to tarry on the details there, because honestly this sort of experience engages me – probably unhealthily – but there it is. Usually, though, I go in real time, writing my moments or those I witness, letting the words mean something in their course, and letting them go as they pass. Not unheeded, but unrecorded. Some considerations need no more memorial than that we know they *are*, that life has been witnessed. Maybe a prayer, later on. Maybe oblivion, though the moment becomes part of that great swath of memory whose details are invisible, but exist even so.
All caveats intact (though Marriage is nowhere near so awfully uncomfortable as The Cone, it has its share of problematic philosophies), I spent every page – indeed, almost every paragraph, through many long passages – dying to know What Comes Next. What would happen, what decision might be made? Marriage___ may be the deepest exploration of (mostly) two characters I have ever read, and certainly it does expend copious philosophy in the bargain. The latter may be less gripping, but I never put it down, as it were. I read every word, and committed many to memory on purpose.
I honestly recommend it pretty widely – and people who know me know I am rarely to be found spouting about my reading. Either because I have this intimacy issue with my reading, or because in my childhood I was often amusedly chided for sharing in exhaustive detail every last story that crossed my path, *sharing* a book is all but imposible for me except in the most personal of circumstances. And yet – for my readership here, the writers, the history lovers, the random one-offs – I hereby recommend a book. Its language is sumptuous and wonderfully slightly-foreign. Its story is ordinary, and yet keeps you wanting more throughout. Plain as it is, it’s also an astoundingly limber piece of literature. A drawing room comedy; a Sagan- or Tyson-esque musing on science, religion (and the lack of it) and philosopy; a scathing social critique and/or satire at moments; a road novel; a romance. It’s the most acute rendering of a young girl’s mind I’ve ever seen an old man render, and at points an evocation of family relationships par excellence.
Yes. There is recourse to the term half-breed in one act of this saga, which is queasily unforgiveable, and the gender and Semitic politics have aged badly. Indeed, the recurrence, for a while, of the term Eugenics is not clearly pejorative, which is giddy-making in the extreme.
No good-guy here wears a purely white hat; even if there aren’t really any black-hats on hand. And it’s not as if we’re above such problematic currents in any writing today … Perhaps, in a way, it’s worthwhile to read flawed fiction in any case – warts and all.
***
For those of my readers who are writers: do you write down your vignette moments? Do you blog them? (Or share them in the vomments at Janet Reid’s blog?)
I wonder sometimes whether it’s economy or callousness on my part, that I let go so easily of the screeds, scenes, and letters I write half-in-my-sleep; that I sacrifice moments which excite me one hour, but I lose because time gets away from me?
How much of what you think to put on your own blogs/sites do you think better of later, or for one reason or other file away unpublished – invisible, but there, like those experiences we all observe … ?
Saturday, March 21, 2015
Collection
It's been some time since I linked any updates on Richard III's exhumation and reburial and so on, so here's The History Blog's latest on this week's upcoming (Thursday, 3/26) ceremonies for those who've also been somewhat sporadic in keeping up. As always, good links included, and nice details.
Medieval People of Color looks at (please pardon the pun) a different kind of diversity in this post, with well-known paintings recreated for the blind . This is the sort of idea that begs the question, "How come we never did this before? Have we done this before ... ?" And it's true - sometimes the fascination and beauty in art are in the small details. An interesting exhibit not only for the visually-challenged; looking at classics in a new way.
The British Museum (and its blog) examines nudes in ancient Greek art "as an expression of social, moral, and political values." Today, it's covering nudity that perhaps most reflects my country's and culture's social, moral, and political values ...
Kim Rendfield hosts Marina Julia Neary, who tells us about life behind the rusting curtain, and whose title alone, "Saved by the Bang" (for a novel touching on Chernobyl) has me itching to see just how much I can balance on the TBR pile ... Oh dear! Side note, the discussion of spelling of her given name is a neat look into
Passion of Former Days has French kisses (vintage (not scandalous!) French postcards). With original notes, as sent at the time. Ooh la la!
Keep an eye peeled in 100 days for Tom Williams' next outing, Burke at Waterloo!
Medieval People of Color looks at (please pardon the pun) a different kind of diversity in this post, with well-known paintings recreated for the blind . This is the sort of idea that begs the question, "How come we never did this before? Have we done this before ... ?" And it's true - sometimes the fascination and beauty in art are in the small details. An interesting exhibit not only for the visually-challenged; looking at classics in a new way.
The British Museum (and its blog) examines nudes in ancient Greek art "as an expression of social, moral, and political values." Today, it's covering nudity that perhaps most reflects my country's and culture's social, moral, and political values ...
Kim Rendfield hosts Marina Julia Neary, who tells us about life behind the rusting curtain, and whose title alone, "Saved by the Bang" (for a novel touching on Chernobyl) has me itching to see just how much I can balance on the TBR pile ... Oh dear! Side note, the discussion of spelling of her given name is a neat look into
Passion of Former Days has French kisses (vintage (not scandalous!) French postcards). With original notes, as sent at the time. Ooh la la!
Keep an eye peeled in 100 days for Tom Williams' next outing, Burke at Waterloo!
Monday, December 8, 2014
34 Years
I can still remember the little early-morning crowd who used to glom onto that one science teacher we thought was cool, hanging out before first period in middle school. It was me, and TEO – still in my life today – the girl we called “Fuzz” because she had the then-ubiquitous tight curly perm, a couple other of the cool-nerds. The teacher liked to impart to us wisdom beyond the classroom, particularly that of good music.
The morning my mom told me John Lennon had been murdered, forty seemed an incredibly advanced age to me. That he was still important at that age, as a rockstar, was widely regarded as incredible back then. Of course, now, with the Rolling Stones still relevant and what Beatles we have left literally institutionalized, and Jimmy Page enjoying a somewhat disturbing sainthood under the crown of silver hair and his crinkling eyes, aged rockstars are not the shocker they once were. But in 1980, when John Lennon died, it was still a bit of a joke.
His murder was no joke to us. I’d hardly even begun my juvenile career as a Beatlemaniac – and, you have to remember, back then, they’d only been split up for a decade. Even as creakingly OLD as they seemed to someone my age … they were all still alive. There was still this fantasy that they’d get back together, somehow.
Lennon’s death was the death of that dream, and the beginning of a self-seriousness about music I never got very good at maintaining, but which seemed a beacon in my life at twelve.
Holy crud, I was only twelve.
I remember, hideously, the offhand way my mom told me at breakfast, and the fact I had to go to school anyway. We gathered at the foot of those short stairs in the green-tiled hall, devastated. And there was hardly time to mourn together before homeroom.
For years after that, the two years of middle school in particular, I cultivated my fandom of the Beatles. I still have the album I bought in Greece. I still have them all. I can remember adoring “Dizzie Miss Lizzie” because it was my own monogram, DML. Any connection I could make, at that age. It was important.
I never have had the heart to give away the “Fifteenth Anniversary” (!!!) tee shirt my brother gave me back then. It’s still important, and I don’t even know why.
For all my memories of trippy music like Zeppelin or Pink Floyd … The Beatles were really my first real music, the first *I* cared about, the first *I* sought out and cultivated and cared for. My dad’s music, and my mom’s and my church’s, have come to mean much over the years. But The Beatles were the first musical interest I had that was only my own.
In a post like this, there’s a powerful desire to say, “I can’t believe it was thirty-four years ago” – but, the fact is, I can feel every moment in time between the heart I have today and the girl I was then, still even working to build a heart at all. Things affected me so profoundly then entirely because I had hardly experienced profundity at all.
Thirty-four years later, the thought of Lennon at seventy-four is an exercise, a curiosity, a sadness, a new loss. It’s like thinking about my dad, who would himself be not so much older than that. It’s like every what-if and woulda-coulda-shoulda we come to know between twelve and forty-six. It’s bitter, but not hard anymore. Not bittersweet. Nothing sweet in the senselessness that stole from us his voice, his mind.
Lennon was a prototype of the mouthpiece rockstar that’s become so ubiquitous since that it’s lost all meaning. But his early, activist, earnest yearning – for peace, for peace in himself, for art and rock and roll and to be a good man – has a naivete’ about it most of the celebrity cause endorsers don’t quite have anymore. Sure, they’re naïve, but not because they believe they can make a difference. They’re just naïve about the fact they’re not actually important.
John Lennon’s naivete’ was something different. It was honestly innocent – he wanted to use his mega-fame the same way they want to use it today, but he didn’t have all the algorithms and management on the job. He just had this yearning, and some dizzy understanding that, accidentally, he’d become – well, bigger than G-d, to drag out the old horse even if not for a good beating. (He was right in the sense of that statement, no matter how it read. Can’t fault the guy for being dumb – only tone deaf, for one epochal moment.)
Thinking about that green-tiled hall, the polished cement floors, the girl with whom I mourned the murder most deeply – the losses of relationships and lives far closer to my own – over thirty four years, sentimentality over John Lennon’s murder is almost an indulgence. For all the connection I wanted to feel, the older woman I’ve become knows that was not about me, and feels for the family left with media stories about anniversaries. For the older son, whose relationship was not the one with the most fulfilment going on when his father was stolen. For the younger one, who throughout his life has endured sharing his father – and his loss – with presumptuous strangers. For a widow reviled before and after this terrible loss. For those who learned they would never play with him again.
My loss was so dramatic, back then. I was angry at my mother for dropping the news without sensitivity to How Very Important it was to me, and for all those fancies one has about idols at the age of twelve.
When I listen to Double Fantasy or the Beatles, if I do so this evening, it’ll be pretty dramatic again.
But only because, even if he died too young: John Lennon did what he set out to do. He affected people he never met. He made music that means something ineffeable and something individual – incredibly intimate – the world over.
As epitaphs go, I don’t imagine a single media story will improve on that legacy; this anniversary, or any other.
Saturday, June 7, 2014
Kitchen Ripping
There are those who might not find the following photos to look much like an "improvement" - but, for me, it's another in a year which so far has been one of outstanding blessings and great thanksgiving.
When I moved into my home, every single inch of the floor, both storeys, was carpeted. 1970s red deep-pile shag in the former-porch/now-office wing room. Pea green, thick carpeting through the other wing, dining room, foyer, and living room - and on up the steps and into the master bedroom. In the guest bedroom, faded-lime green deep-pile shag again.
The bathrooms were carpeted. And my home was previously owned by a widowed 86-year-old man. With all the best of intentions, over the course of 30-odd years, a man will ... miss. I will not forget the day I came home from work to find the carpet removed from one of the bathrooms, and a note from my brother (my family used to work on this house even when I wasn't here - wonderful people), saying, "No greater love hath any mother ... than that yours removed your peepee carpet!"
Good times. Hee.
All these years later, she and I got together yesterday (I took a few hours off work this time), and tore out the kitchen carpet.
Which - given the rather trying training period with Penelope - was itself a bit of a peepee carpet, I can admit.
Anyway - no greater love hath any mother and daughter than when we get to do a grubby job together - every year or two, we find our way to spend a few hours fixing up my yard, cleaning my basement ... tearing up carpet that never should have been in the first place ... (Yes, the work always tends to be at/on my home. Mom's home is perfection, you see!)
My dad would love it - well, does, I have little doubt. He always did like when his girls found some way to work together, figuratively *or* literally.
Beneath the carpet was not, as you might imagine, a simply stunning alternative, pristine and clean and ready for the decorating magazines. But it's hardwood exactly like the rest of the house.
A lamentable detail is that, in the 1970s when all the carpeting went down, hardwood was so passe' they apparently figured it would never, ever, ever, ever, ever see the light of day again - and so did some painting without benefit of dropcloths, and so on. The entire house, most of which has had its floors exposed for many years now, needs sanding and refinishing. The kitchen merely represents the most obvious need - the black glue and partially ossified carpet padding here and there.
But the boards are solid upstairs and down, but for two slender strips in the foyer, which have termite damage at least a generation old which clearly got dealt with in a hurry. Two little boards, out of an entire house. And one loose one, at the wall under the refrigerator. That's the worst of it.
Maybe next time, mom and I rent floor sanders.
Hah!
When I moved into my home, every single inch of the floor, both storeys, was carpeted. 1970s red deep-pile shag in the former-porch/now-office wing room. Pea green, thick carpeting through the other wing, dining room, foyer, and living room - and on up the steps and into the master bedroom. In the guest bedroom, faded-lime green deep-pile shag again.
The bathrooms were carpeted. And my home was previously owned by a widowed 86-year-old man. With all the best of intentions, over the course of 30-odd years, a man will ... miss. I will not forget the day I came home from work to find the carpet removed from one of the bathrooms, and a note from my brother (my family used to work on this house even when I wasn't here - wonderful people), saying, "No greater love hath any mother ... than that yours removed your peepee carpet!"
Good times. Hee.
All these years later, she and I got together yesterday (I took a few hours off work this time), and tore out the kitchen carpet.
Which - given the rather trying training period with Penelope - was itself a bit of a peepee carpet, I can admit.
Anyway - no greater love hath any mother and daughter than when we get to do a grubby job together - every year or two, we find our way to spend a few hours fixing up my yard, cleaning my basement ... tearing up carpet that never should have been in the first place ... (Yes, the work always tends to be at/on my home. Mom's home is perfection, you see!)
My dad would love it - well, does, I have little doubt. He always did like when his girls found some way to work together, figuratively *or* literally.
Beneath the carpet was not, as you might imagine, a simply stunning alternative, pristine and clean and ready for the decorating magazines. But it's hardwood exactly like the rest of the house.
A lamentable detail is that, in the 1970s when all the carpeting went down, hardwood was so passe' they apparently figured it would never, ever, ever, ever, ever see the light of day again - and so did some painting without benefit of dropcloths, and so on. The entire house, most of which has had its floors exposed for many years now, needs sanding and refinishing. The kitchen merely represents the most obvious need - the black glue and partially ossified carpet padding here and there.
But the boards are solid upstairs and down, but for two slender strips in the foyer, which have termite damage at least a generation old which clearly got dealt with in a hurry. Two little boards, out of an entire house. And one loose one, at the wall under the refrigerator. That's the worst of it.
 |
| Before Still Life with Kong Toys |
 |
| After! |
Maybe next time, mom and I rent floor sanders.
Hah!
Thursday, May 22, 2014
"A Short Dip" and Other Stories
There is a very particular grainy, color-saturated-even-as-color-has-faded look and feel to GENUINE vintage photos. It's been imitated a great deal in the past fifteen years or so, but never quite synthesized.
Aaron Rose took a series of photos at Coney Island in the 1960s; they feel both exactly of their time and quite immediate.
The incredible crowd shots - the first photo of the series is particularly exciting. It's one of those very rare vintage shots which is NOT just a sea of white, middle-class people. Many browns, many ages. That is unfortunately atypical in our historical images, so a scene showing hardly ANY pasty faces is quite striking. Take a look at the woman's hair at the bottom center, the statuesque goddess in profile. Faces of strength, joy, and relaxation.
The amorous embraces, in particular, feel like they are *happening* - a pale knee kicked up, cradling a lover, almost unremarked behind the stunning symmetry of a body builder posing imposingly. A mature couple lying on the sand, the woman's indistinct but perfect hand draped around his curling hair and fading into a perfectly overexposed arm. The Black man and woman, not in an embrace, but lying close together, her eyes looking just barely away from his face, her expression inscrutable, eternal. The green asian pattern on her cotton sleeveless shift.
Plaid and cotton. Heat and haze. Leopard bathing suit all the vintage girls will die for. The tall, skinny man taken from below, so he appears almost endlessly tall, even with tiny stretches of un-matched horizontal stripes in a short jacket, in his trunks. His cigarette. Lawn chairs strung with that particular light, scratching plastic banding we used for so many years. They all seem to be green and white, those chairs.
It is summer time.
Makes me want to take a short dip in the evening, at the old pool where I spent so much of my childhood. After everyon's gone home for supper, but dad feels like cooling off, just for a minute. Nobody around but the evening insects in the encroaching trees. Sound of water and swamp, smell of chlorine - the scent of pool water on hot concrete cooling off, settling quietly in the evening. The heat of the lamps under the water - how I used to cling to those when the water began to feel chilly. Imagining the shadows my little self must have made.
Bathing suits before spandex. I had one of cotton, little elastic legs and waistband, flowered cotton. I had one a few years later - the MOD looking one, I got it in the hand-me-downs from that girl who was always the most beautiful in our schools - lime green. Ring in the center, ties around the neck. Instead of spandex, we had tiny little rubber threads. Worn too much - or bum-scraped across one too many concrete pool decks, as we sat on the edge waiting for Adult Swim to be over, or just playing by the chairs, sitting on the ground - those little threads would fray and lose cohesion with the rest of the suit. Filament-thin grey threads of rubber or latex, they'd worm out of the suit when they broke. And you'd get a baggy spot.
I'm old, and have come to that age where "looking back" is a leisure activity of the most stereotypical kind. My friend Holly, who could not let her hair get wet. I was so jealous of her Black hair - she could twist her ponytails into these long modified corkscrew braids. White girl hair doesn't do that. But I could swim underwater. I stayed underwater most of the time. And, at the end of the day, that queer soreness in the lungs - my mom called it being "waterlogged" - probably from holding my breath and breathing in strange patterns for hours and hours. All my younger friends, the first time in my life little kids adopted me for a friend - the little tow-blonde girl with the red suit with a navy bow. Four of them glommed on my back at once, riding in the 4-foot as I walked, letting them hang off of me. They'd surf, holding my hair, as I dragged them. I think one or two might have learned to swim that way.
The really really skinny girl from the sad family, and her really really fat sister. They were a little older than me, but they let me hang out with them.
My family. The time mom hurt herself so bad, diving. My brother and his friends. My dad. Swimming with my dad.
It is summer time. Time to breathe hot, muggy air and stand still - watching for lightning bugs. And listening to the nighttime hum of all the other insects ...
Aaron Rose took a series of photos at Coney Island in the 1960s; they feel both exactly of their time and quite immediate.
The incredible crowd shots - the first photo of the series is particularly exciting. It's one of those very rare vintage shots which is NOT just a sea of white, middle-class people. Many browns, many ages. That is unfortunately atypical in our historical images, so a scene showing hardly ANY pasty faces is quite striking. Take a look at the woman's hair at the bottom center, the statuesque goddess in profile. Faces of strength, joy, and relaxation.
The amorous embraces, in particular, feel like they are *happening* - a pale knee kicked up, cradling a lover, almost unremarked behind the stunning symmetry of a body builder posing imposingly. A mature couple lying on the sand, the woman's indistinct but perfect hand draped around his curling hair and fading into a perfectly overexposed arm. The Black man and woman, not in an embrace, but lying close together, her eyes looking just barely away from his face, her expression inscrutable, eternal. The green asian pattern on her cotton sleeveless shift.
Plaid and cotton. Heat and haze. Leopard bathing suit all the vintage girls will die for. The tall, skinny man taken from below, so he appears almost endlessly tall, even with tiny stretches of un-matched horizontal stripes in a short jacket, in his trunks. His cigarette. Lawn chairs strung with that particular light, scratching plastic banding we used for so many years. They all seem to be green and white, those chairs.
It is summer time.
Makes me want to take a short dip in the evening, at the old pool where I spent so much of my childhood. After everyon's gone home for supper, but dad feels like cooling off, just for a minute. Nobody around but the evening insects in the encroaching trees. Sound of water and swamp, smell of chlorine - the scent of pool water on hot concrete cooling off, settling quietly in the evening. The heat of the lamps under the water - how I used to cling to those when the water began to feel chilly. Imagining the shadows my little self must have made.
Bathing suits before spandex. I had one of cotton, little elastic legs and waistband, flowered cotton. I had one a few years later - the MOD looking one, I got it in the hand-me-downs from that girl who was always the most beautiful in our schools - lime green. Ring in the center, ties around the neck. Instead of spandex, we had tiny little rubber threads. Worn too much - or bum-scraped across one too many concrete pool decks, as we sat on the edge waiting for Adult Swim to be over, or just playing by the chairs, sitting on the ground - those little threads would fray and lose cohesion with the rest of the suit. Filament-thin grey threads of rubber or latex, they'd worm out of the suit when they broke. And you'd get a baggy spot.
I'm old, and have come to that age where "looking back" is a leisure activity of the most stereotypical kind. My friend Holly, who could not let her hair get wet. I was so jealous of her Black hair - she could twist her ponytails into these long modified corkscrew braids. White girl hair doesn't do that. But I could swim underwater. I stayed underwater most of the time. And, at the end of the day, that queer soreness in the lungs - my mom called it being "waterlogged" - probably from holding my breath and breathing in strange patterns for hours and hours. All my younger friends, the first time in my life little kids adopted me for a friend - the little tow-blonde girl with the red suit with a navy bow. Four of them glommed on my back at once, riding in the 4-foot as I walked, letting them hang off of me. They'd surf, holding my hair, as I dragged them. I think one or two might have learned to swim that way.
The really really skinny girl from the sad family, and her really really fat sister. They were a little older than me, but they let me hang out with them.
My family. The time mom hurt herself so bad, diving. My brother and his friends. My dad. Swimming with my dad.
It is summer time. Time to breathe hot, muggy air and stand still - watching for lightning bugs. And listening to the nighttime hum of all the other insects ...
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
"You Don't Understand, You Don't Understand"
The headline is a quote from 9/11, when Zuba called me from her walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, and explained to me how I would never, ever understand - "There's no Towers! There's no Towers!" My instant response was, No, I don't understand. I never could, I never would. But the fact that she reached out to me - from that Bridge, no less, has always been my bridge, my way to at least reach for comprehension.
Being the child of privilege, there is a LOT in this world I will never understand.
This article is a remarkable look at the heritage and the politics of Black hair in America, particularly Black women's hair.
Beauty and fashion are important. The choices we make, the looks we project, those fashions or styles or statements we make, passively or not - the things we subscribe to by choosing to literally wear them - have never been trivial, and arguably are more fraught than ever with intention, meaning, and power.
Just ask noted collaborator and anti Semite Coco Chanel, whose fashion house has spanned two centuries now and made billyuns and billyuns in profit worldwide. Ask any juror who ever let a rapist off based on the altitude of a victim's hemline. Ask LinkedIn, that purveyor of articles I refuse to even link, tut-tutting the idea of a woman IN SHORT SLEEVES, attempting to give a presentation and expecting to be taken seriously as a professional. (I am not kidding, this was in my "latest updates" today, and it was not a joke.)
What the United States Army is doing to Black women is unquestionably racially-specific, political, historical, clearly painful. Please read the Salon link. It's a great education.
Even for those of us who will never, truly can never, actually *understand*. Because even if I went through airport security with my hair Jacked Up to Jesus, it would NOT get patted down. Because there's no Towers, Diane, and no amount of frienship, love, sympathy, and deep pain will ever let me see them now.
Being the child of privilege, there is a LOT in this world I will never understand.
(T)he care taken with a black girl’s hair signaled that she was loved and cared for, that she belonged to somebody. Having one’s children out in the world with unkempt, uncombed hair has always been considered a major form of parental neglect in black communities.
Those of us who have “liberated” our hair are quick to think of the continued black cultural investments in long straight hair, perms, weaves and ever-more ubiquitous lace-front wigs, as evidence of a kind of pathological investment in European standards of beauty that will always elude us.
This article is a remarkable look at the heritage and the politics of Black hair in America, particularly Black women's hair.
Beauty and fashion are important. The choices we make, the looks we project, those fashions or styles or statements we make, passively or not - the things we subscribe to by choosing to literally wear them - have never been trivial, and arguably are more fraught than ever with intention, meaning, and power.
Just ask noted collaborator and anti Semite Coco Chanel, whose fashion house has spanned two centuries now and made billyuns and billyuns in profit worldwide. Ask any juror who ever let a rapist off based on the altitude of a victim's hemline. Ask LinkedIn, that purveyor of articles I refuse to even link, tut-tutting the idea of a woman IN SHORT SLEEVES, attempting to give a presentation and expecting to be taken seriously as a professional. (I am not kidding, this was in my "latest updates" today, and it was not a joke.)
What the United States Army is doing to Black women is unquestionably racially-specific, political, historical, clearly painful. Please read the Salon link. It's a great education.
Even for those of us who will never, truly can never, actually *understand*. Because even if I went through airport security with my hair Jacked Up to Jesus, it would NOT get patted down. Because there's no Towers, Diane, and no amount of frienship, love, sympathy, and deep pain will ever let me see them now.
Monday, March 17, 2014
Bloomin' Bicycling, Barefoot Little Heathen, and There Shall Be A Multitude of Hats
Though the transcription here (from the digized copy of an old newspaper clipping, included on the same page as an image) suffers, the points made by the writers of letters to an editor asking “Should women wear bloomers?” in the Los Angeles Herald, circa 1895) are worth winkling out – that clothing defines far more than the statement of an individual, but their affiliations within their societies, their communities, their expectations of themselves (and others … should those critics mired in the depths of vulgarity see and judge).
(Quotations left with transcription errors intact.)
My profile says “I contain multitudes” and one of the central ways this has always been expressed in my life is through the way I dress.
When I was a little girl, I was MAD for “twirly skirts.” There are a LOT of you reading right now who are immediately nodding; you know precisely the garment I’m describing, and you remember exactly the appeal of a dress or a skirt, cut full, which either belled or entirely fanned out when you spun in a circle, round and round. I can’t say how many conversations I’ve had in which fond memories of The Twirly Skirt arose, but it’s something many of us recall as being a fond and fun, and very particular part of childhood. I have memories, too, of a certain flame-haired imp I know, not so very far past these years (perhaps not at all), the sight of whose vivid coloring, in a bright pink tutu skirt, capering across the green of a lawn only the Pacific Northwest could produce – who might nod as gravely as any old lady my age might, understanding the joys of twirling across the grass, barefoot, in a properly designed flounce, with a properly calibrated spin …;
But I wore many things other than twirly skirts, as most of us did. Shorts were fun, and bathing suits, and – oh joy! – the new Mary Jane patent leather shoes every year, in time for Easter. Because – there was Sunday Best, and then there was EASTER Sunday Best. White tights, a pale green dress with a pink satin flower, or yellow bow – and patent leather shoes.
You didn’t get to wear Sunday Best every day, and so it held both the excitement of a luxury held in some reserve, but also the powerful association of pretty things with A Sense of Occasion. To this day, I still dress up for church, though it’s by no means necessary to do so in my congregation. Dressing on a Sunday morning carries with it the memory of family bustle, the feeling that you present yourself at your best for G-d and the gathering. Dressing on a Sunday morning – wearing those things I wasn’t allowed to wear “just” for school – had all the sartorial anticipation, beauty, and pleasure of a party dress. Dressing on a Sunday morning was probably half the means by which I could be persuaded into two hours (Sunday school, then the church service itself) to behave at all like a civilized child and go to church at all. If I went to boring-old-church, at least I got to do so all decked out.
And yet, after church, coming home and changing into play clothes was exhilarating, too. I learned the utility and comfort of different clothes early – and so, I learned early, that as much fun as it is to get dressed up, there is also reward in “boring” every day clothes, in which I could curl up and read, or run around outside, or hang off my mom’s elbow, whining about how there’s nothing in the world at all to do. (It is a sad truth that the latter of these comprised perhaps the bulk of my childhood …)
Clothing imparts a rhythm to life. Sundays had this heightened activity in terms of wardrobe; weekdays, I’d come home from school and almost certainly not change until time for beddy-bye and a nightgown. Going out to supper with my family, we’d dress up a bit, but not like for church. If family or friends were coming over, we may not change, but there’d be a hair-combing and a bit of a wash on tap (yes – har) for us, after a quick but effective inspection. The energy my mom imparted, from more attention or frustration for those occasions calling for more formality or visibility, set the energy for given events.
In me, this translated into an ongoing extension of that same sine wave of intensity in my habits of dress. I don’t get stressy over work clothes, but I do plan what I wear and how I hope to look – in recent times, this has resulted in the careful modulation of Interviewing Clothes worn on days I didn’t want anyone to think too hard about how I was looking, and an adjustment from a fairly formal place of employment to a new job in which I can get away with glittery nail polish – but am still forty-six years old, and not trying to look like a teenager. I’ve gained a little freedom to indulge the Frowsy Middle-Aged Authorial look around here … but I’ve also lost my key spectator, too. Because dressing for work is dressing for those friends who’ll ooh-and-aah over the latest new pashmina in my collection, or the great little vintage shoes I bought while out shopping with my friend and former workmate Cute Shoes, or (on rare occasion) showing off that I’ve dropped a pound or two. Dressing for work is about indulging in seasonal change by indulging in new colors, and pieces that have been in storage for a while.
But dressing for work, I have found, has lost MUCH of its charm since Cute Shoes and I no longer get to work together. And here we have the truth of the statement: that women dress for *each other* …;
After work clothes, for me these days, it’s dog-walking pants. For shopping trips and errands, it’s jeans and either brisk or bohemian casual tops or sweaters. For church, still, it’s low heels and dresses or skirts. I never feel I fit well in my nicer pants these days (and there lies at least one sewing project I’ve been putting off for too long).
There are men and women, I know, who never have to change their mode of dress, or who don’t want to. TV reality stars seem particularly prone to enslavement to an “image” – heavy makeup/false eyelashes, ridiculous stillettos, and evening and/or cocktail dress no matter the day, time, or occasion. Certain tatty magazines or shows produce GASPING images of “stars without makeup” as if (a) the stars’ looks reside only in pots of pigment, and/or (b) celebrities actually *sin* by ever appearing in anything but their approved, stylist-generated masks and costumes. It looks to me exhausting, and surely must take all the fun out of getting dressed up. Their states of undress are duly recorded and regurgitated for audiences, talking around makeup artists or their stylists or supposed-servants as they are outfitted for some scandals-on-tap scripted fiasco, providing entertainment as we see them how they “really” are (always a minimum of 75% of the way through any given process, so those “no makeup” shockers are actually not to be).
Likewise, there are certain people – famous and not – who formulate a more particular look for themselves early, and somehow end up unable to get out of it or develop it beyond a certain point. There’s a particular starlet, actually not far from my own age in fact, who’s spent some years rocking the insouciant vintage pinup girl thing, and as we age, I find myself wondering – how is this woman going to be able to grow old? Even Bettie Page stopped modeling at last – and, though honestly I think she made a very lovely old woman (the photo or two of her in her seventies are difficult to find, but they are out there), she consciously preserved her image by retiring both from it and the public eye, so her actual youth would never be compromised by ever-diminishing returns in the attempting-to-hold-on-to-it department. One of the truly odd things about that statement, above, that I don’t look my age, is that … it is because I’m not trying to look younger, per se, either. There isn’t too much jarringly age-inappropriate fadishness drawing attention to how old I really am – yet there isn’t too much holdover-from-when-I-*was*-younger, either. The clue-catcher 80s bangs don’t give me away, nor the untied LA Gear high-tops and scrunched down socks. If I look young enough, it’s precisely because I’m not working too hard to do so.
We’ve all seen examples of those who do; the pinups who end up, as Queen Mary was once described as appearing, basically enameled into an image they’ve lost forever. Epoxied, some of them. Or those who gracefully let go, and are castigated for ageing.
It goes both ways, of course, with those who can’t/don’t/won’t dress up for any occasion either. I’ve become acquainted of That One Person who has a matched set of sneakers/hoodies in multiple neon colors. It happens to be someone I like, and it’d be asinine in the first degree to think this person needs to vary their wardrobe beyond the eyeball-smacking palette. We don’t all have the same rhythms, and why should my multitudes apply to ANYONE but myself? As long as we’re all clean and covered to the current mores of society/our friends/our office/whatever, it’d be boring as hell for us all to dress the *same*. And, of course, the sneaks and hoodies look won’t age poorly; someone in their eighties or whatever is perfectly endearing, running around not letting him or herself become invisible, and blissfully exempt from any uniform of expectations the rest of us may choose to hew to.
… and when I am old, I shall say to heck with wearing purple – or a red hat – I shall wear whatever is comfortable to me in whatever mood I find. And – bless me – I’m old enough to do that now! When I am old ... I shall wear *hats*.
(Quotations left with transcription errors intact.)
The ill health of American women has long been deplored by all who have thought on the subject and all agree that lack of vigorous out-door exercise has been the chief reason for that Ul health. The bicycle promises to be the greteat boon to health that American women have known. It should oh that accoont he welcomed by men and women alike,for men suffer quite as much from tbe Ul health of women ns women themselves. Tbe continued newspaper comments on tbe suoject frighten tbe nervous, timid women wbo would be most helped physically by tbe use of the bicycle, and wbo would, but for this constant criticism, be using tbe health-giv-ing wbeel.
Tbat tbeie ia anything immoral to be feared from its adoption it the argument pf a sensualist, and shows the depth of vulgarity to wbich criticism may descend.
I have words of censure for the immodest exposures of person tbat every ball room furnishes, and for tbe extravagance of style which dictates tbat yards of material aball be put into sleeves serving no purpose but to jostle tbeir owner into prominence, and force her upon the attention of every passer-by. I abhor the untidiness of the long skirt on the street, and I deplore the wickednessof the tightly corseted waist, but for tbe bloomers, which make out-door exercise for women a fascinating delight, I nave only commendation and admiration. ...
My profile says “I contain multitudes” and one of the central ways this has always been expressed in my life is through the way I dress.
When I was a little girl, I was MAD for “twirly skirts.” There are a LOT of you reading right now who are immediately nodding; you know precisely the garment I’m describing, and you remember exactly the appeal of a dress or a skirt, cut full, which either belled or entirely fanned out when you spun in a circle, round and round. I can’t say how many conversations I’ve had in which fond memories of The Twirly Skirt arose, but it’s something many of us recall as being a fond and fun, and very particular part of childhood. I have memories, too, of a certain flame-haired imp I know, not so very far past these years (perhaps not at all), the sight of whose vivid coloring, in a bright pink tutu skirt, capering across the green of a lawn only the Pacific Northwest could produce – who might nod as gravely as any old lady my age might, understanding the joys of twirling across the grass, barefoot, in a properly designed flounce, with a properly calibrated spin …;
But I wore many things other than twirly skirts, as most of us did. Shorts were fun, and bathing suits, and – oh joy! – the new Mary Jane patent leather shoes every year, in time for Easter. Because – there was Sunday Best, and then there was EASTER Sunday Best. White tights, a pale green dress with a pink satin flower, or yellow bow – and patent leather shoes.
You didn’t get to wear Sunday Best every day, and so it held both the excitement of a luxury held in some reserve, but also the powerful association of pretty things with A Sense of Occasion. To this day, I still dress up for church, though it’s by no means necessary to do so in my congregation. Dressing on a Sunday morning carries with it the memory of family bustle, the feeling that you present yourself at your best for G-d and the gathering. Dressing on a Sunday morning – wearing those things I wasn’t allowed to wear “just” for school – had all the sartorial anticipation, beauty, and pleasure of a party dress. Dressing on a Sunday morning was probably half the means by which I could be persuaded into two hours (Sunday school, then the church service itself) to behave at all like a civilized child and go to church at all. If I went to boring-old-church, at least I got to do so all decked out.
And yet, after church, coming home and changing into play clothes was exhilarating, too. I learned the utility and comfort of different clothes early – and so, I learned early, that as much fun as it is to get dressed up, there is also reward in “boring” every day clothes, in which I could curl up and read, or run around outside, or hang off my mom’s elbow, whining about how there’s nothing in the world at all to do. (It is a sad truth that the latter of these comprised perhaps the bulk of my childhood …)
Clothing imparts a rhythm to life. Sundays had this heightened activity in terms of wardrobe; weekdays, I’d come home from school and almost certainly not change until time for beddy-bye and a nightgown. Going out to supper with my family, we’d dress up a bit, but not like for church. If family or friends were coming over, we may not change, but there’d be a hair-combing and a bit of a wash on tap (yes – har) for us, after a quick but effective inspection. The energy my mom imparted, from more attention or frustration for those occasions calling for more formality or visibility, set the energy for given events.
In me, this translated into an ongoing extension of that same sine wave of intensity in my habits of dress. I don’t get stressy over work clothes, but I do plan what I wear and how I hope to look – in recent times, this has resulted in the careful modulation of Interviewing Clothes worn on days I didn’t want anyone to think too hard about how I was looking, and an adjustment from a fairly formal place of employment to a new job in which I can get away with glittery nail polish – but am still forty-six years old, and not trying to look like a teenager. I’ve gained a little freedom to indulge the Frowsy Middle-Aged Authorial look around here … but I’ve also lost my key spectator, too. Because dressing for work is dressing for those friends who’ll ooh-and-aah over the latest new pashmina in my collection, or the great little vintage shoes I bought while out shopping with my friend and former workmate Cute Shoes, or (on rare occasion) showing off that I’ve dropped a pound or two. Dressing for work is about indulging in seasonal change by indulging in new colors, and pieces that have been in storage for a while.
But dressing for work, I have found, has lost MUCH of its charm since Cute Shoes and I no longer get to work together. And here we have the truth of the statement: that women dress for *each other* …;
After work clothes, for me these days, it’s dog-walking pants. For shopping trips and errands, it’s jeans and either brisk or bohemian casual tops or sweaters. For church, still, it’s low heels and dresses or skirts. I never feel I fit well in my nicer pants these days (and there lies at least one sewing project I’ve been putting off for too long).
There are men and women, I know, who never have to change their mode of dress, or who don’t want to. TV reality stars seem particularly prone to enslavement to an “image” – heavy makeup/false eyelashes, ridiculous stillettos, and evening and/or cocktail dress no matter the day, time, or occasion. Certain tatty magazines or shows produce GASPING images of “stars without makeup” as if (a) the stars’ looks reside only in pots of pigment, and/or (b) celebrities actually *sin* by ever appearing in anything but their approved, stylist-generated masks and costumes. It looks to me exhausting, and surely must take all the fun out of getting dressed up. Their states of undress are duly recorded and regurgitated for audiences, talking around makeup artists or their stylists or supposed-servants as they are outfitted for some scandals-on-tap scripted fiasco, providing entertainment as we see them how they “really” are (always a minimum of 75% of the way through any given process, so those “no makeup” shockers are actually not to be).
Likewise, there are certain people – famous and not – who formulate a more particular look for themselves early, and somehow end up unable to get out of it or develop it beyond a certain point. There’s a particular starlet, actually not far from my own age in fact, who’s spent some years rocking the insouciant vintage pinup girl thing, and as we age, I find myself wondering – how is this woman going to be able to grow old? Even Bettie Page stopped modeling at last – and, though honestly I think she made a very lovely old woman (the photo or two of her in her seventies are difficult to find, but they are out there), she consciously preserved her image by retiring both from it and the public eye, so her actual youth would never be compromised by ever-diminishing returns in the attempting-to-hold-on-to-it department. One of the truly odd things about that statement, above, that I don’t look my age, is that … it is because I’m not trying to look younger, per se, either. There isn’t too much jarringly age-inappropriate fadishness drawing attention to how old I really am – yet there isn’t too much holdover-from-when-I-*was*-younger, either. The clue-catcher 80s bangs don’t give me away, nor the untied LA Gear high-tops and scrunched down socks. If I look young enough, it’s precisely because I’m not working too hard to do so.
We’ve all seen examples of those who do; the pinups who end up, as Queen Mary was once described as appearing, basically enameled into an image they’ve lost forever. Epoxied, some of them. Or those who gracefully let go, and are castigated for ageing.
It goes both ways, of course, with those who can’t/don’t/won’t dress up for any occasion either. I’ve become acquainted of That One Person who has a matched set of sneakers/hoodies in multiple neon colors. It happens to be someone I like, and it’d be asinine in the first degree to think this person needs to vary their wardrobe beyond the eyeball-smacking palette. We don’t all have the same rhythms, and why should my multitudes apply to ANYONE but myself? As long as we’re all clean and covered to the current mores of society/our friends/our office/whatever, it’d be boring as hell for us all to dress the *same*. And, of course, the sneaks and hoodies look won’t age poorly; someone in their eighties or whatever is perfectly endearing, running around not letting him or herself become invisible, and blissfully exempt from any uniform of expectations the rest of us may choose to hew to.
… and when I am old, I shall say to heck with wearing purple – or a red hat – I shall wear whatever is comfortable to me in whatever mood I find. And – bless me – I’m old enough to do that now! When I am old ... I shall wear *hats*.
Thursday, October 17, 2013
Slacker
I have long hated Pandora Radio because it will not allow listeners to shut off its “you might also like” algorithms, which for me are (as with all such suggestion-generating applications) a terrible failure. I’m a contrarian by nature, and so have a ready supply of impatience for missteps in these intrusive little marketing devices, as well as a hearty disdain when a suggestion goes really wrong – so Pandora is just not the option for me, never has been. Slacker Radio’s “suggestiveness” can be pretty tightly minimized (and, for a fee, turned entirely off), and even when it’s on, it doesn’t seem to be quite so bewilderingly miscalculated as, say, Blockbuster or Pandora or my grocery store’s coupon-generating printers are.
Let it be said that, in addition to the contrarianness, I am old enough and private enough that these things continue to wig me out even something like eighteen years or so since their advent in earlier, rather less insinuatingly personal and scary forms. The fact is, I’ve ALWAYS found this type of marketing frightening, and always will. It icks me out, sets my teeth against certain brands, standards, and manifestations – and keeps my jaw on the ground, that so many people don’t seem to mind this insidious searching of their personal preferences.
All of which is beside the point.
The point is that, today at work, Slacker was still showing its autonomy at me, and it worked out. I’ve only crafted one station for myself, and it contains all my moods, from Apoptygma Berzerk to Priest to Adele and the Beatles and Type O Negative. Most days, in the office, Slacker stays in a somewhat electro/industrial vein, with some pop and what we once amusingly called “Alternative” thrown in. There are days, though, when I start off with Judas Priest’s “Alone” and then follows up with Metallica, and I stop and go “hm” for a moment, and decide – yes, that’s just about right, thank you, Slacker. Today, obviously, was one of those days, and it reminded me how much I like metal, enjoy Zeppelin, and old school hard rock. As much momentum as dance tunes can give to a day, there’s no arguing that Iron Maiden particularly slows me down. And then, because it’s sort of a funny diet I’ve fed the little beast, it’ll drop Duran Duran’s “The Chauffer” down in the middle of these things, and my odd little brain thinks, “that goes together better than you’d think” and then go on to whatever I’ve got to finish on the desk.
I once bought a Priest CD, along with a Leonard Cohen and a Billie Holiday. The clerk at the store (I was in California) gave me the smiling eyebrow and said, “Shopping for gifts?” I was a tad confused and said no, it was driving music (I was in California driving between SF and LA, and my rental had a CD in dash; at the time, this was pretty state of the art), all for me. It was clear I’d made something of a conquest just by failing to fit in a musical box, and I got to muse a bit about what it must be like, the parade of individual tastes one must serve selling music all day every day. Obviously, given that that was something like 15 years ago, I was pretty pleased with myself for my little toppling of expectations – and, equally obviously, I still revel, as I always have, in gravitating to what genuinely appeals to me, rather than to what is served to me (lord, just trying to imagine what my life would be like populated only with that music made for women such as myself is stifling). Just think what an eyebrow I might have gotten if I’d had Ice T in that little stack of CDs.
To our culture and society, there are aspects of my nonconformity which speak to an inherent immaturity: I refused to cut my hair when it became age-appropriate by those standards I consider to be utterly superfluous. I never stopped going out dancing – and I am forty-five. Being unmarried and not a parent, I have held on to habits generally reserved for “the young” (if not to say ‘those who are fifty pounds slimmer and fifty miles more currently fashionable’ than I am). Being a relic of the 80s and 90s, I still admit to listening to Judas Priest and yet also pretend to be conversant in Deadmaus and even FGFC820, which should be so far outside the frame of reference of a person such as myself as to be almost anger-inducingly alien to me.
To be sure, I sneer like the old broad I earned every second of being, at the names of twentysomething celebs and performers I’ve never heard of. It gives a special pleasure to indulge in this privilege of age, this frank indulgence of chrono-bigotry, even as I know precisely how irrelevant and, indeed, stupid it is. But it is as much a joy to ignore expectations as it is to play into and play with them ... and I get to listen to good music, at that.
Let it be said that, in addition to the contrarianness, I am old enough and private enough that these things continue to wig me out even something like eighteen years or so since their advent in earlier, rather less insinuatingly personal and scary forms. The fact is, I’ve ALWAYS found this type of marketing frightening, and always will. It icks me out, sets my teeth against certain brands, standards, and manifestations – and keeps my jaw on the ground, that so many people don’t seem to mind this insidious searching of their personal preferences.
All of which is beside the point.
The point is that, today at work, Slacker was still showing its autonomy at me, and it worked out. I’ve only crafted one station for myself, and it contains all my moods, from Apoptygma Berzerk to Priest to Adele and the Beatles and Type O Negative. Most days, in the office, Slacker stays in a somewhat electro/industrial vein, with some pop and what we once amusingly called “Alternative” thrown in. There are days, though, when I start off with Judas Priest’s “Alone” and then follows up with Metallica, and I stop and go “hm” for a moment, and decide – yes, that’s just about right, thank you, Slacker. Today, obviously, was one of those days, and it reminded me how much I like metal, enjoy Zeppelin, and old school hard rock. As much momentum as dance tunes can give to a day, there’s no arguing that Iron Maiden particularly slows me down. And then, because it’s sort of a funny diet I’ve fed the little beast, it’ll drop Duran Duran’s “The Chauffer” down in the middle of these things, and my odd little brain thinks, “that goes together better than you’d think” and then go on to whatever I’ve got to finish on the desk.
I once bought a Priest CD, along with a Leonard Cohen and a Billie Holiday. The clerk at the store (I was in California) gave me the smiling eyebrow and said, “Shopping for gifts?” I was a tad confused and said no, it was driving music (I was in California driving between SF and LA, and my rental had a CD in dash; at the time, this was pretty state of the art), all for me. It was clear I’d made something of a conquest just by failing to fit in a musical box, and I got to muse a bit about what it must be like, the parade of individual tastes one must serve selling music all day every day. Obviously, given that that was something like 15 years ago, I was pretty pleased with myself for my little toppling of expectations – and, equally obviously, I still revel, as I always have, in gravitating to what genuinely appeals to me, rather than to what is served to me (lord, just trying to imagine what my life would be like populated only with that music made for women such as myself is stifling). Just think what an eyebrow I might have gotten if I’d had Ice T in that little stack of CDs.
To our culture and society, there are aspects of my nonconformity which speak to an inherent immaturity: I refused to cut my hair when it became age-appropriate by those standards I consider to be utterly superfluous. I never stopped going out dancing – and I am forty-five. Being unmarried and not a parent, I have held on to habits generally reserved for “the young” (if not to say ‘those who are fifty pounds slimmer and fifty miles more currently fashionable’ than I am). Being a relic of the 80s and 90s, I still admit to listening to Judas Priest and yet also pretend to be conversant in Deadmaus and even FGFC820, which should be so far outside the frame of reference of a person such as myself as to be almost anger-inducingly alien to me.
To be sure, I sneer like the old broad I earned every second of being, at the names of twentysomething celebs and performers I’ve never heard of. It gives a special pleasure to indulge in this privilege of age, this frank indulgence of chrono-bigotry, even as I know precisely how irrelevant and, indeed, stupid it is. But it is as much a joy to ignore expectations as it is to play into and play with them ... and I get to listen to good music, at that.
Tuesday, July 23, 2013
Prey: An Uncensored Post
This blog is usually written to a standard that literally anyone could read it - my mother, my coworkers, my bosses, my nieces.
This post is written to that same standard. And it has absolutely filthy language and ideas in it. Sadly: this needs to be said. Again and again and again.
The first coherent experience I had of a sexual predator, fortunately, was anecdotal and not personal. The Guy in the Yellow Camaro. It is so general as to almost be an urban legend, but when I was pretty young, maybe nine-ish, there was a guy in the neighborhood driving around in his car trying to get little girls into it. There were no horror stories (we heard) about his actually succeeding, but the word was out and the word was clear: girls were for hunting.
I've tried, without enthusiasm, and realized that to catalogue my experience with creeps would be impossible. I remember them all, but again - without enthusiasm. There was the guy at the lake, when my family and my cousins' family were all together eating chicken and swimming. The first stranger who ever told me to smile; we were on a trip and my family were all going to the bathroom or warming up the car - in any case, I was standing by myself in a restaurant and found the experience of a strange man attempting to turn my emotional state into his personal life decor - which must be *pretty* - ineffably horrifying and invasive. Those boys at that party thousands of miles from anything I understood, whose Maccabee beer-driven sexual desires were more important than mine or my cousin's humanity. I was fourteen.
The one who tried (and failed) to get in my pants all the while telling me he thought "that smell that girls have must be urine." Because he found it filthy, as girls were apparently, and his grasp of feminine anatomy began and ended with "wanna grasp" and that was it.
The one my freshman year who fortunately was too drunk, even as huge as he was, to overcome me for meaningless, but still more-important-than-my-personhood reasons.
The one my freshman year I never so much as stood in a room alone with, who sneered a sexual smear against me to one of my best friends.
The one who pulled my skirt up over my waist while Beloved Ex, then my boyfriend, was onstage.
The ones my mother heard, on the night before my college graduation, screaming "I WANT SOME PUSSY" outside my apartment window (not particularly at me). Mom got to like Beloved Ex, and understood why I was dating a "Townie", a whoooole lot better that night.
The one at that temp job who left anonymous notes on my car, when I worked sixty miles from home and was completely alone. I never did find out who that was.
The one who walked me to my car, because that's what you do, you walk women to their cars. So you can then attempt to coerce them into letting you into their cars so you can fuck them, again meaninglessly, because that is always more important than her dignity, her desire (or lack of it), her humanity - than anything about her except her genitals.
The ones who came up behind Beloved Ex that one night while he sat in his van waiting for it to warm up. They saw beautiful blond hair and said to it, "Hey, baby - you want some cock in you?"
Beloved Ex, bless his very fine soul, was utterly horrified by that. He was shaken. I still remember his coming over to my apartment after that, telling me about it, genuinely bewildered, deeply offended and shocked. "Do men SAY things like that? Really?"
Yes, B.E. Well ... not *men*, no. But human males come up with that sort of thing all the time.
I kvetch a lot, sarcastically, about the whole "there is no war on women" thing we hear all too regularly (from the same quarters who helpfully inform us "it's not about race" when a young black boy is heedlessly murdered). But it occurs to me ... one declares war on an enemy army. The men who say these things, who do these things, do not consider women to be anything like an actual force. We're seriously nothing more than a series of holes to these creatures. Nice to stick a penis in, but otherwise only to be dismissed, and violently if necessary.
***
For any male who has read this far - ANY male - and, yes, I am thinking of all those among you whom I know will read this, my family, my friends, any one and every one of you: this is what it is really like, to be a woman.
I am one of the lucky ones. I've held my own, pretty much, even through my own utterly stupid years. No man has ever hit me. No man has ever called me worse than "bitch". The man who did that cannot begin to know what it was he wielded, the abuse and damage that was simply by virtue of its being said by a man. None of you can ever experience what it is actually like, all our lives. Not even the ones who've heard things like, "Hey, baby, you want some cock in you?"
Because that happened once in the entire lifetime of a person now approaching half a century.
Because even if anything so shocking could be said to a man consistently, for life - merely by that physical presence we women hate to know is so different - the threat and the experience of it could never be the same. As it is for a girl of nine, walking with a cousin across a parking lot near a lake, family not more than a couple hundred yards away ... but as far as the moon, if things had gone differently. Being approached by a man pointing out her nascent breasts, being appraised like meat because that is what girls are for for too many men across our society.
Don't kid yourself it's just some creep in a yellow Camaro, either.
It's that rich boy in college, raised and tumescent with his own entitlement to satisfaction - and reared on ideas that women aren't really people.
It's the awkward guy in an office, who ties up a cherry stem, hands it to a woman after everyone has left the building, and says to her (honestly imagining this is a pick-up line ... and utterly unaware that there is no place for this behavior in this - deserted - setting), "NO HANDS." Or who tells her confounding and gruesome stories, of all things, about his ex wife's bloody and horrific childbirth of their son.
Or the one who walks up behind a woman, again at work, whispering to himself - very archly so she can hear it - "I just have to say something" and then corners her OUTSIDE THE BATHROOM for fifteen minutes, starting off with the question, "are you married?" as if a wedding ring is the sole possible defense for a woman in any possible scenario denying him her attention.
It's the banker who, in 1962 or '63, my mom and all her coworkers have to use a buddy-system to avoid being alone in the vault with.
It's a perfectly nice guy on a date, who begins talking about the sex swing he and his ex had as a viable option for future time together.
It is the stranger in a parking lot, sure, who says "want some cock in ya" to someone he can't even identify as female ...
... but it's also the ones in disguise. The ones we don't know for sure are harmless. The ones who force us, every day, all of our lives, to gauge our personal safety, completely aside from "hating" men - but entirely because in order to function normally in an abnormal and sometimes terrible world, it is necessary to keep with us the gift of fear, at all times. Without the healthy skepticism a certain level of fear for our personal wellbeing provides regarding interacting with other people, no woman can survive our society.
Period.
I am one of the lucky ones, and I am richly talented, full of life, confident, even sexy (sometimes ...). And there isn't a day in my life fear has no role at all.
Someone recently scoffed at me, after a new door was installed in my home. It has a large window, and I cover that window every night with a towel. In order to see in that window, it would be necessary to come far up my front walk, to be very close to my house, to be making a stalkerly point of attempting to look in. I cover the window anyway.
Live for twenty-five or so years of your life, as a woman alone in our country.
Live in that one apartment where the guy across the hall (a "nice" looking person, an upscale apartment building) comes to the door at three a.m., clearly with the intent of getting laid - and shocked that not only do you answer, when finally and awfully you feel forced to do, looking bleary and sleep-mussed (not in a sexy way), but that you evince instantaneous and forbidding hostility at the obviousness of his intent. That bastard is fortunate I never called the police.
Live for a couple years with a registered sex offender as another neighbor.
Live, essentially, your entire adult life as a woman alone. Not a woman hideously abused. Not a woman with unusual experience of others' sexual deviance. Just an ordinary woman. In our decidedly non-ordinary world. And see if you don't feel you have the right to cover a damned window, and let logic be damned.
***
My experience isn't even remotely encapsulated here. I share what I have to give a reader ... to give men, frankly ... the slightest shred of understanding what goes into the life, even, of a highly privileged and fortunate woman on her own. Every single one of you is a RISK, for us. Every hello in an elevator, every passing car honking, every would-be friendly fellow at the movie theater trying to strike up that conversation we must navigate with painstaking care so as not to offend, and so as not to encourage. Every. Single. One. Of you.
Every man, whether WE like it or not, at the point of introduction (no matter the introduction) can be a threat. That one boss who used to like to throw the rubber band ball at the front window of our office when women walked by - and who talked about the most illegally inappropriate things. The nice guy we go out with once several friends and family are informed exactly where and how long we will be on a first date. Even the friend of a friend, whom nobody could have known was into "that" ... or the man in the grocery store, who could be perfectly nice, but whose clear attempts to gain our attention will *not* desist no matter how utterly they are ignored. Even the weird religious guy and his wife who interviewed me for a job that one time and who scared the bejeezus out of me with endless probing questions about whether I went to church and what my social life was like. In an after-hours interview. When nobody was in the office but the three of us. *URK*
You think you are Just This Guy, See. And we get that, and we aren't hateful about that.
But we require proof. Just to survive. KNOW this. Know that I wrote this post specifically for you, and even to upset you. For you to show your son, for you to remember if you have a daughter. Know that nothing you ever do, say, nor consider, where a woman you don't know yet is concerned can be said or done without her having to go through a sophisticated process of calculation and vetting, just to swipe a damned ATM card at the damned grocery store. Know this: for your children.
Don't hold it against us because we put as much of a premium on our life and limb - and genitals - as some men put on their random and impersonal urge to domination and sexual release.
But do remember: our lives are not like yours.
And, no. Most of us, on the whole, are extremely unlikely to "want a little cock" in us if the approach is anything like so entitled, threatening, and dangerously random.
The man who doesn't even know I am a human being at all, I don't want to entrust with my decidedly human, and spiritually priceless, body.
This post is written to that same standard. And it has absolutely filthy language and ideas in it. Sadly: this needs to be said. Again and again and again.
The first coherent experience I had of a sexual predator, fortunately, was anecdotal and not personal. The Guy in the Yellow Camaro. It is so general as to almost be an urban legend, but when I was pretty young, maybe nine-ish, there was a guy in the neighborhood driving around in his car trying to get little girls into it. There were no horror stories (we heard) about his actually succeeding, but the word was out and the word was clear: girls were for hunting.
I've tried, without enthusiasm, and realized that to catalogue my experience with creeps would be impossible. I remember them all, but again - without enthusiasm. There was the guy at the lake, when my family and my cousins' family were all together eating chicken and swimming. The first stranger who ever told me to smile; we were on a trip and my family were all going to the bathroom or warming up the car - in any case, I was standing by myself in a restaurant and found the experience of a strange man attempting to turn my emotional state into his personal life decor - which must be *pretty* - ineffably horrifying and invasive. Those boys at that party thousands of miles from anything I understood, whose Maccabee beer-driven sexual desires were more important than mine or my cousin's humanity. I was fourteen.
The one who tried (and failed) to get in my pants all the while telling me he thought "that smell that girls have must be urine." Because he found it filthy, as girls were apparently, and his grasp of feminine anatomy began and ended with "wanna grasp" and that was it.
The one my freshman year who fortunately was too drunk, even as huge as he was, to overcome me for meaningless, but still more-important-than-my-personhood reasons.
The one my freshman year I never so much as stood in a room alone with, who sneered a sexual smear against me to one of my best friends.
The one who pulled my skirt up over my waist while Beloved Ex, then my boyfriend, was onstage.
The ones my mother heard, on the night before my college graduation, screaming "I WANT SOME PUSSY" outside my apartment window (not particularly at me). Mom got to like Beloved Ex, and understood why I was dating a "Townie", a whoooole lot better that night.
The one at that temp job who left anonymous notes on my car, when I worked sixty miles from home and was completely alone. I never did find out who that was.
The one who walked me to my car, because that's what you do, you walk women to their cars. So you can then attempt to coerce them into letting you into their cars so you can fuck them, again meaninglessly, because that is always more important than her dignity, her desire (or lack of it), her humanity - than anything about her except her genitals.
The ones who came up behind Beloved Ex that one night while he sat in his van waiting for it to warm up. They saw beautiful blond hair and said to it, "Hey, baby - you want some cock in you?"
Beloved Ex, bless his very fine soul, was utterly horrified by that. He was shaken. I still remember his coming over to my apartment after that, telling me about it, genuinely bewildered, deeply offended and shocked. "Do men SAY things like that? Really?"
Yes, B.E. Well ... not *men*, no. But human males come up with that sort of thing all the time.
I kvetch a lot, sarcastically, about the whole "there is no war on women" thing we hear all too regularly (from the same quarters who helpfully inform us "it's not about race" when a young black boy is heedlessly murdered). But it occurs to me ... one declares war on an enemy army. The men who say these things, who do these things, do not consider women to be anything like an actual force. We're seriously nothing more than a series of holes to these creatures. Nice to stick a penis in, but otherwise only to be dismissed, and violently if necessary.
***
For any male who has read this far - ANY male - and, yes, I am thinking of all those among you whom I know will read this, my family, my friends, any one and every one of you: this is what it is really like, to be a woman.
I am one of the lucky ones. I've held my own, pretty much, even through my own utterly stupid years. No man has ever hit me. No man has ever called me worse than "bitch". The man who did that cannot begin to know what it was he wielded, the abuse and damage that was simply by virtue of its being said by a man. None of you can ever experience what it is actually like, all our lives. Not even the ones who've heard things like, "Hey, baby, you want some cock in you?"
Because that happened once in the entire lifetime of a person now approaching half a century.
Because even if anything so shocking could be said to a man consistently, for life - merely by that physical presence we women hate to know is so different - the threat and the experience of it could never be the same. As it is for a girl of nine, walking with a cousin across a parking lot near a lake, family not more than a couple hundred yards away ... but as far as the moon, if things had gone differently. Being approached by a man pointing out her nascent breasts, being appraised like meat because that is what girls are for for too many men across our society.
Don't kid yourself it's just some creep in a yellow Camaro, either.
It's that rich boy in college, raised and tumescent with his own entitlement to satisfaction - and reared on ideas that women aren't really people.
It's the awkward guy in an office, who ties up a cherry stem, hands it to a woman after everyone has left the building, and says to her (honestly imagining this is a pick-up line ... and utterly unaware that there is no place for this behavior in this - deserted - setting), "NO HANDS." Or who tells her confounding and gruesome stories, of all things, about his ex wife's bloody and horrific childbirth of their son.
Or the one who walks up behind a woman, again at work, whispering to himself - very archly so she can hear it - "I just have to say something" and then corners her OUTSIDE THE BATHROOM for fifteen minutes, starting off with the question, "are you married?" as if a wedding ring is the sole possible defense for a woman in any possible scenario denying him her attention.
It's the banker who, in 1962 or '63, my mom and all her coworkers have to use a buddy-system to avoid being alone in the vault with.
It's a perfectly nice guy on a date, who begins talking about the sex swing he and his ex had as a viable option for future time together.
It is the stranger in a parking lot, sure, who says "want some cock in ya" to someone he can't even identify as female ...
... but it's also the ones in disguise. The ones we don't know for sure are harmless. The ones who force us, every day, all of our lives, to gauge our personal safety, completely aside from "hating" men - but entirely because in order to function normally in an abnormal and sometimes terrible world, it is necessary to keep with us the gift of fear, at all times. Without the healthy skepticism a certain level of fear for our personal wellbeing provides regarding interacting with other people, no woman can survive our society.
Period.
I am one of the lucky ones, and I am richly talented, full of life, confident, even sexy (sometimes ...). And there isn't a day in my life fear has no role at all.
Someone recently scoffed at me, after a new door was installed in my home. It has a large window, and I cover that window every night with a towel. In order to see in that window, it would be necessary to come far up my front walk, to be very close to my house, to be making a stalkerly point of attempting to look in. I cover the window anyway.
Live for twenty-five or so years of your life, as a woman alone in our country.
Live in that one apartment where the guy across the hall (a "nice" looking person, an upscale apartment building) comes to the door at three a.m., clearly with the intent of getting laid - and shocked that not only do you answer, when finally and awfully you feel forced to do, looking bleary and sleep-mussed (not in a sexy way), but that you evince instantaneous and forbidding hostility at the obviousness of his intent. That bastard is fortunate I never called the police.
Live for a couple years with a registered sex offender as another neighbor.
Live, essentially, your entire adult life as a woman alone. Not a woman hideously abused. Not a woman with unusual experience of others' sexual deviance. Just an ordinary woman. In our decidedly non-ordinary world. And see if you don't feel you have the right to cover a damned window, and let logic be damned.
***
My experience isn't even remotely encapsulated here. I share what I have to give a reader ... to give men, frankly ... the slightest shred of understanding what goes into the life, even, of a highly privileged and fortunate woman on her own. Every single one of you is a RISK, for us. Every hello in an elevator, every passing car honking, every would-be friendly fellow at the movie theater trying to strike up that conversation we must navigate with painstaking care so as not to offend, and so as not to encourage. Every. Single. One. Of you.
Every man, whether WE like it or not, at the point of introduction (no matter the introduction) can be a threat. That one boss who used to like to throw the rubber band ball at the front window of our office when women walked by - and who talked about the most illegally inappropriate things. The nice guy we go out with once several friends and family are informed exactly where and how long we will be on a first date. Even the friend of a friend, whom nobody could have known was into "that" ... or the man in the grocery store, who could be perfectly nice, but whose clear attempts to gain our attention will *not* desist no matter how utterly they are ignored. Even the weird religious guy and his wife who interviewed me for a job that one time and who scared the bejeezus out of me with endless probing questions about whether I went to church and what my social life was like. In an after-hours interview. When nobody was in the office but the three of us. *URK*
You think you are Just This Guy, See. And we get that, and we aren't hateful about that.
But we require proof. Just to survive. KNOW this. Know that I wrote this post specifically for you, and even to upset you. For you to show your son, for you to remember if you have a daughter. Know that nothing you ever do, say, nor consider, where a woman you don't know yet is concerned can be said or done without her having to go through a sophisticated process of calculation and vetting, just to swipe a damned ATM card at the damned grocery store. Know this: for your children.
Don't hold it against us because we put as much of a premium on our life and limb - and genitals - as some men put on their random and impersonal urge to domination and sexual release.
But do remember: our lives are not like yours.
And, no. Most of us, on the whole, are extremely unlikely to "want a little cock" in us if the approach is anything like so entitled, threatening, and dangerously random.
The man who doesn't even know I am a human being at all, I don't want to entrust with my decidedly human, and spiritually priceless, body.
Friday, July 12, 2013
Racism For the Cause
Images of anti-Japanese racism in America, specifically circa WWII, are unfortunately familiar to me from the cartoons of my youth. Even so, it's easy to allow ourselves to forget just how virulent and overt the problem actually was.
We know about internment camps, but I suspect we like to focus on the word camp in something more approximating summer-camp, or perhaps even just Hogan's Heroes' POW camp, than to believe that America ever (never mind so hideously recently) had anything like a concentration camp. But we did concentrate a certain population and our purpose was not moral.
ONLY YOU ... can fight racism. Fascinating, but incredibly ugly, images of jingoistic fire prevention messages from the forties - and, thank heavens, some of the ways we have evolved. I find the image of Smokey giving people bear hugs questionable, but at least it isn't outright offensive.
We know about internment camps, but I suspect we like to focus on the word camp in something more approximating summer-camp, or perhaps even just Hogan's Heroes' POW camp, than to believe that America ever (never mind so hideously recently) had anything like a concentration camp. But we did concentrate a certain population and our purpose was not moral.
ONLY YOU ... can fight racism. Fascinating, but incredibly ugly, images of jingoistic fire prevention messages from the forties - and, thank heavens, some of the ways we have evolved. I find the image of Smokey giving people bear hugs questionable, but at least it isn't outright offensive.
Thursday, June 20, 2013
Rest in Peace, Mr. Godwin
When I was about sixteen or seventeen, I bought a book based on its cover.
The book turned out not to be what it might look like ... I'm not sure whether I really experienced that nor cared at the time. I loved the novel from the very first time I read it. When the edition above slipped away at some point, I ended up replacing it with a used one from Bibliofind (long since subsumed by that perniciously helpful, ubiquitous behemoth, Amazon).
This one has a great very late 60s/early 70s feel, but is even less relevant to the story than the first one I had. I might not have bought this one. I might have missed out on The Best.
Lions is the best piece of historical fiction I have ever read. Only very recently, I was excited to find several friends online whose opinions I respect very much, who loved this book too, and others of Parke Godwin.
Godwin was not a young man. But he died yesterday. And I am sad, but grateful for his work.
Godwin and Donald Harington wrote two of the works I have loved most in this world. Very briefly, after I had begun work on The Ax and the Vase, but many years ago now - I had the joyous honor of corresponding with Harington via email. He was working on a new novel at that time, and he himself was about seventy then.
My brother - not a cover - first introduced me to Harington, when I was in college. He lent me The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, and I loved it, and ... that year for Christmas, my brother gave me his own copy, because I had asked for it and he could not find a copy to give me.
I am a wide-eyed and trusting fool, and when many years later I became friends, online, with a woman who worked at the same University with Harington, I sent her the book. As things go ... I've never seen that book again. For years, she would email me periodically, apologizing. But the getting-him-to-sign-it and the sending it back never happened. I hope she still has that copy somewhere; the idea of its not being merely lost, but actually trashed, or recycled, or otherwise destroyed as an artifact - breaks my heart. I feel less personal loss than immensely guilty about being such a careless steward of the GIFT that was given to me. And the loss of my brother's note to me, in that copy, is more painful than the novel. (Of that, oddly enough, and in a very weird and squicky way actually, I have another copy - a first edition in hard cover. I've never once opened nor read that one; with the result that I haven't read TAOTAO in quite a few long years now.)
I don't even know what became of my first copy of Lions. In that novel's case, the cover's first-look magic notwithstanding, the artifact doesn't matter to me.
Both of my favorite authors have died. Both wrote histfic - and many other things, too. They were immensely unalike - yet peers in their great talent.
I will miss you, Parke Godwin. May peace be with your loved ones and friends - and with you. I know many readers' gratitude always has been.
The book turned out not to be what it might look like ... I'm not sure whether I really experienced that nor cared at the time. I loved the novel from the very first time I read it. When the edition above slipped away at some point, I ended up replacing it with a used one from Bibliofind (long since subsumed by that perniciously helpful, ubiquitous behemoth, Amazon).
This one has a great very late 60s/early 70s feel, but is even less relevant to the story than the first one I had. I might not have bought this one. I might have missed out on The Best.
Lions is the best piece of historical fiction I have ever read. Only very recently, I was excited to find several friends online whose opinions I respect very much, who loved this book too, and others of Parke Godwin.
Godwin was not a young man. But he died yesterday. And I am sad, but grateful for his work.
Godwin and Donald Harington wrote two of the works I have loved most in this world. Very briefly, after I had begun work on The Ax and the Vase, but many years ago now - I had the joyous honor of corresponding with Harington via email. He was working on a new novel at that time, and he himself was about seventy then.
My brother - not a cover - first introduced me to Harington, when I was in college. He lent me The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, and I loved it, and ... that year for Christmas, my brother gave me his own copy, because I had asked for it and he could not find a copy to give me.
I am a wide-eyed and trusting fool, and when many years later I became friends, online, with a woman who worked at the same University with Harington, I sent her the book. As things go ... I've never seen that book again. For years, she would email me periodically, apologizing. But the getting-him-to-sign-it and the sending it back never happened. I hope she still has that copy somewhere; the idea of its not being merely lost, but actually trashed, or recycled, or otherwise destroyed as an artifact - breaks my heart. I feel less personal loss than immensely guilty about being such a careless steward of the GIFT that was given to me. And the loss of my brother's note to me, in that copy, is more painful than the novel. (Of that, oddly enough, and in a very weird and squicky way actually, I have another copy - a first edition in hard cover. I've never once opened nor read that one; with the result that I haven't read TAOTAO in quite a few long years now.)
I don't even know what became of my first copy of Lions. In that novel's case, the cover's first-look magic notwithstanding, the artifact doesn't matter to me.
Both of my favorite authors have died. Both wrote histfic - and many other things, too. They were immensely unalike - yet peers in their great talent.
I will miss you, Parke Godwin. May peace be with your loved ones and friends - and with you. I know many readers' gratitude always has been.
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
"David Bowie Is" ...
At last, a post that combines my love of artifacts, the history of costume, my middle-aged chick bragging rights about having seen all the cool concerts, and Ziggy/The Thin White Duke/any spider you ever found on Mars ...
No less than the Victoria and Albert Museum has sold, apparently, nearly 50,000 tickets to an exhibition of David Bowie memorabilia, creating what promises to be an exhaustive and multifariously fascinating retrospective of the man, the art, the career - and, yes, the costumes and his various dramatic personae. Hit the link if for no other reason than the photos The History Girls have posted (by special permission; so not reproduced here) - the Yamamoto bodysuit alone is worth the clicks (two clicks - if you don't view it full size, you aren't viewing it at all!).
Bowie is a valid subject for those interested in history for - pick your reason. He is the 20th (and 21st, as long as he's been quiet this century) century's answer to the Renaissance man - and his collaborations have reached farther across the arts and popular culture than anyone in Renaissance times, perhaps, could have, or could even have conceived of. Not merely by what he has himself done, but by his myriad associations and - let's face it - a dizzying fortune the like of which Michael Jackson never even dreamed - Bowie has accumulated force unlike any other rock star. Far more than personifying glam rock, he practically invented reinvention - a dynamic so necessary to pop stars today it's almost unthinkable to associate him with the idols who have lived within one image throughout generations-long careers. There was a time, boys and girls, when even Elvis's single transition from leather jackets to spangled pantsuits could cause cognitive dissonance. To this day, people still talk about the "fat Elvis" years as something almost alien to the rock and roll guy who gave us his most iconic music - and gleefully cheesy movie musicals.
David Bowie had already lived nine rock and roll lives even by the time *I* saw him in 1984 - and was candid about having damn near lost his, literally, thanks to some of the more florid chemical excesses of his glam years. The Thin White Duke wasn't ghostly merely in a visual way - he was the husk of a man all but displaying his own corpse. And that was thirty years ago.
Bowie is the man who caused me my undying adoration for snaggle teeth (I never did forgive him for getting braces - that was actually worse in my mind than marrying someone who wasn't me!). He was my second big arena show. He has crooned Wild Is the Wind into my ears since I was a weeping, overdramatic teenager, and my own encroaching age has only deepened my appreciation for the instrument of his voice.
I can hardly even comprehend the level of technical expertise, the sheer madness of his creativity, the scope of his contributions on the stage, and in all the lives of those who are his fans for one reason or other. Few people have developed the ability to offer quite so damned many reasons, at that.
What's funny is - as hagiographic as all this hyperbole embarrassingly is, and I don't deny it - the fact is, I'm trying NOT to be a gushy little fangirl. Bowie has DONE all these things - he just IS an immense presence, it's not my gooping about him that makes it so. If I'm honest, most of my goopier feelings about Bowie are long since dessicated in my own drying-up hide, and I just enjoy (a) the nostalgia memories of my own Bowie experiences bring on, and (b) his catalogue of music, which is literally matchless - without hyperbole.
For those who have the chance, I envy them the opportunity to see this exhibit.
For those who never have - y'all can envy *me* the memory of seeing him live, from the front row.
No less than the Victoria and Albert Museum has sold, apparently, nearly 50,000 tickets to an exhibition of David Bowie memorabilia, creating what promises to be an exhaustive and multifariously fascinating retrospective of the man, the art, the career - and, yes, the costumes and his various dramatic personae. Hit the link if for no other reason than the photos The History Girls have posted (by special permission; so not reproduced here) - the Yamamoto bodysuit alone is worth the clicks (two clicks - if you don't view it full size, you aren't viewing it at all!).
Bowie is a valid subject for those interested in history for - pick your reason. He is the 20th (and 21st, as long as he's been quiet this century) century's answer to the Renaissance man - and his collaborations have reached farther across the arts and popular culture than anyone in Renaissance times, perhaps, could have, or could even have conceived of. Not merely by what he has himself done, but by his myriad associations and - let's face it - a dizzying fortune the like of which Michael Jackson never even dreamed - Bowie has accumulated force unlike any other rock star. Far more than personifying glam rock, he practically invented reinvention - a dynamic so necessary to pop stars today it's almost unthinkable to associate him with the idols who have lived within one image throughout generations-long careers. There was a time, boys and girls, when even Elvis's single transition from leather jackets to spangled pantsuits could cause cognitive dissonance. To this day, people still talk about the "fat Elvis" years as something almost alien to the rock and roll guy who gave us his most iconic music - and gleefully cheesy movie musicals.
David Bowie had already lived nine rock and roll lives even by the time *I* saw him in 1984 - and was candid about having damn near lost his, literally, thanks to some of the more florid chemical excesses of his glam years. The Thin White Duke wasn't ghostly merely in a visual way - he was the husk of a man all but displaying his own corpse. And that was thirty years ago.
Bowie is the man who caused me my undying adoration for snaggle teeth (I never did forgive him for getting braces - that was actually worse in my mind than marrying someone who wasn't me!). He was my second big arena show. He has crooned Wild Is the Wind into my ears since I was a weeping, overdramatic teenager, and my own encroaching age has only deepened my appreciation for the instrument of his voice.
I can hardly even comprehend the level of technical expertise, the sheer madness of his creativity, the scope of his contributions on the stage, and in all the lives of those who are his fans for one reason or other. Few people have developed the ability to offer quite so damned many reasons, at that.
What's funny is - as hagiographic as all this hyperbole embarrassingly is, and I don't deny it - the fact is, I'm trying NOT to be a gushy little fangirl. Bowie has DONE all these things - he just IS an immense presence, it's not my gooping about him that makes it so. If I'm honest, most of my goopier feelings about Bowie are long since dessicated in my own drying-up hide, and I just enjoy (a) the nostalgia memories of my own Bowie experiences bring on, and (b) his catalogue of music, which is literally matchless - without hyperbole.
For those who have the chance, I envy them the opportunity to see this exhibit.
For those who never have - y'all can envy *me* the memory of seeing him live, from the front row.
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