AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Monday, December 21, 2009
karl lagerfeld short film "Vol de Jour"
I got ahold of this youtube short by Karl Lagerfeld today; for those of you who don't know, Lagerfeld is the head designer for Chanel and also his own line. (Wiki entry here). He likes to occasionally spout of inflammatory things about how nobody wants to see fat women in fashion. He must be the stereotypical fashion guru, with his black and white uniform that include black glasses and white hair. I imagine they based the Zoolander character Mugatu after him (Derelicte, anyone?)
Regardless, he was born in 1933 so he's somewhere around 76 years old and he's still going strong. Recently he made this short film starring Lara Stone, one of the "It" models of the moment (she's Dutch) and some hunk of burning love male model named Baptiste Giabiconi. Without searching him on google, I'm gonna say "ITALIANO." This movie is...well, it's not the best. It's about a couple of very attractive shoplifters who go around stealing Chanel clothes. There's an awkward phase towards the end where Stone tries on clothes for Giabiconi and it gets strangely boring. The whole thing reads as a student film to me, except with remarkably attractive people and lush settings. My favorite part of it is the weird harpsichord music.
I wanted to post it to S and K because this movie reads like a lech's exercise in stalking some beautiful young people. It's true that I watched it while thinking about Lagerfeld himself, but this couple comes across as boring in the film. Beautiful, but boring. We're only interested in them because Lagerfeld is interested in them, and Lagerfeld is (let's face is) SEVENTY-SIX. I'm not trying to spout of some ageist bullshit about older people controlling fashion: I'm just saying it's more than a little fucked up that a 76 year old man picks and chooses the hottest new models. Stone is 26, 50 years his junior. Even the way the male model drags Stone around on the screen makes me nervous. We've got some serious female objectification on our hands.
I realize that I'm opening up a whole can of fashion worms here: most of the fashion industry is dictated by older titans who somehow get to say which pretty young thing matters and which pretty young thing doesn't. (And hell, get a load of the language I'm using here--"pretty young things"--female models are always the object for our consumption aren't they?) Stone herself, at 26, is practically ancient. But overall I'm not interested in indicting the entire fashion industry at this point in time. I just want to note that I saw this clip, I thought my readers might enjoy it, and I wanted to say a few words about how Karl Lagerfeld kinda weirds me out.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
I've got christmas on the noggin!
And I can't get it out! I found this old claymation christmas special from the 80s (featuring the california raisins) that my family used to watch when I was growing up. Youtube is a wondrous place that brings back all things good and magical in the world! You, fair reader, could use a dose of christmas cheer. Watch this please!
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Life stuff is totally in the way right now
Hey blog-readers,
I've been falling down on the blog front lately. It's all right, you can say it. I haven't posted much written material in a week or so. There are many contributing factors to this blog-writing malaise. First, I just got a twitter, ostensibly for the purpose of getting people to read the blog, but of course I became semi-obsessed with it and I find that every time I mean to go write on the blog I end up looking at pictures Danny DeVito has put in his feed. Second, I am about to have a holiday party at my apartment on friday. It's our first party and I'm pretty obsessed with making it cute. I spent much of this evening taping more shit to our walls and making snowflake decorations. Third, I haven't had a temp job since the last one ended on Wednesday of last week, so I think I'm going stir crazy. That usually just turns my mind to mush instead of making me into a productive blogger. Luckily I spent most of this evening running around the apartment trying to make it all fancy, so I'm hoping this energy carries me forward into the weekend. And therefore, the holiday party. HOLLER.
Ah, such is life. SO difficult. So....precious (why is gollum always in my head at this time of year! Damn you weird association between Lord of the Rings and Christmastime!).
Oh, and also? It's FUCKING COLD AS BALLS IN CHICAGO!
I'll be back this weekend with more to offer. Love and candy canes.
I've been falling down on the blog front lately. It's all right, you can say it. I haven't posted much written material in a week or so. There are many contributing factors to this blog-writing malaise. First, I just got a twitter, ostensibly for the purpose of getting people to read the blog, but of course I became semi-obsessed with it and I find that every time I mean to go write on the blog I end up looking at pictures Danny DeVito has put in his feed. Second, I am about to have a holiday party at my apartment on friday. It's our first party and I'm pretty obsessed with making it cute. I spent much of this evening taping more shit to our walls and making snowflake decorations. Third, I haven't had a temp job since the last one ended on Wednesday of last week, so I think I'm going stir crazy. That usually just turns my mind to mush instead of making me into a productive blogger. Luckily I spent most of this evening running around the apartment trying to make it all fancy, so I'm hoping this energy carries me forward into the weekend. And therefore, the holiday party. HOLLER.
Ah, such is life. SO difficult. So....precious (why is gollum always in my head at this time of year! Damn you weird association between Lord of the Rings and Christmastime!).
Oh, and also? It's FUCKING COLD AS BALLS IN CHICAGO!
I'll be back this weekend with more to offer. Love and candy canes.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
THIS SONG IS MY JAM
best chorus of the year, y/y?
For those of you who don't know, it's Empire State of Mind by Jay-Z featuring Alicia Keys.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Saturday, December 5, 2009
i have succumbed to the evils that be and have created a twitter account in conjunction with this blog. Follow me at http://twitter.com/essandk.
I will be posting tweets relocating to new blog posts and just being effervescent, so enjoy!
I will be posting tweets relocating to new blog posts and just being effervescent, so enjoy!
death and the internet
A while ago I was planning on writing a post about this Korean model named Daul Kim who had committed suicide and whose blog used to be available to the general public. (I still have a link to her blog in my links list, and I've decided to keep it there as a testament to her presence in the world, even if the police have made the blog restricted). All of her writing was interesting, poetic, disjointed. Almost all of her posts were titled "Say hi to..." and her last post was "Say Hi to Forever," although it was just a post where she embedded a youtube video. Throughout the entirety of the blog were references to her hopes and the future--indicators that she imagined living past the age of 20, although she did not.
At the time I was reading about her death and avidly reading her blog, I felt like I was in an internet car crash. The traffic has backed up for a second as everyone takes a moment to twist their necks and look at the damage. And now, as more and more people are making the internet part of their daily lives, we have more and more internet crashes available to us. When someone dies, their internet persona lives on, although in stasus. Now we can look at how people respond to the dead person's memory through the equivalent of online tombstones--is it even fair to remove a departed's facebook profile? The profile becomes digital proof that yes, this person existed.
Let's bring it all back to yesterday. As of yesterday at 3 PM, I still hadn't gotten around to writing about Daul Kim's death and her blog--in fact, I probably never was going to write about it. But then I got a call with some very bad news. My friend (and my good girl friend's husband) died unexpectedly. It's been fewer than 24 hours since I've gotten this news and it still wrenches my heart whenever I think about it clearly. To say that I lost someone when I was 22 for the rest of my life: that is a heavy burden to bear. And yet, I keep looking at his facebook profile. I can't stop. I barely looked at it when he was alive because I just don't really look that closely at my friends' facebook profiles. But now every shred of evidence of who he was and what he believed that made its way to the profile is important to me. I've gone back several times. I think about whether I should post something, or whether anyone will post anything. I wonder where he is now. I sent him a message on facebook. It was not that sentimental. I just wish I could hear him tell me to take care of myself one more time.
A memory, although not a digital one: My friends and I were playing "Loaded questions: Adult Version." It's a silly game where the group gets asked a question and everyone writes down their individual answers. Then the judge hears the answers to the question without knowing who wrote them and has to try to guess which answers matches which of the players. One of the questions during the game asked the players to compliment someone else in the room. My departed friend's answer was this "Essnk, you giggle a lot." I loved that compliment. It said so much about the person giving it--that he thought the fact that I giggled stated plainly was a compliment. I laughed for what felt like hours when I heard the response. This memory is something I keep coming back to, in the short amount of time since I heard that he passed away. I just keep thinking about giggling and wishing that I could be there to giggle for him again. That maybe, somehow, giggling could have solved anything.
These are the things I think about when I cling desparately to his internet presence. I just wanted the Essnk community to be aware of something I am going through. As this blog is a part of me now, I needed to write about this death.
At the time I was reading about her death and avidly reading her blog, I felt like I was in an internet car crash. The traffic has backed up for a second as everyone takes a moment to twist their necks and look at the damage. And now, as more and more people are making the internet part of their daily lives, we have more and more internet crashes available to us. When someone dies, their internet persona lives on, although in stasus. Now we can look at how people respond to the dead person's memory through the equivalent of online tombstones--is it even fair to remove a departed's facebook profile? The profile becomes digital proof that yes, this person existed.
Let's bring it all back to yesterday. As of yesterday at 3 PM, I still hadn't gotten around to writing about Daul Kim's death and her blog--in fact, I probably never was going to write about it. But then I got a call with some very bad news. My friend (and my good girl friend's husband) died unexpectedly. It's been fewer than 24 hours since I've gotten this news and it still wrenches my heart whenever I think about it clearly. To say that I lost someone when I was 22 for the rest of my life: that is a heavy burden to bear. And yet, I keep looking at his facebook profile. I can't stop. I barely looked at it when he was alive because I just don't really look that closely at my friends' facebook profiles. But now every shred of evidence of who he was and what he believed that made its way to the profile is important to me. I've gone back several times. I think about whether I should post something, or whether anyone will post anything. I wonder where he is now. I sent him a message on facebook. It was not that sentimental. I just wish I could hear him tell me to take care of myself one more time.
A memory, although not a digital one: My friends and I were playing "Loaded questions: Adult Version." It's a silly game where the group gets asked a question and everyone writes down their individual answers. Then the judge hears the answers to the question without knowing who wrote them and has to try to guess which answers matches which of the players. One of the questions during the game asked the players to compliment someone else in the room. My departed friend's answer was this "Essnk, you giggle a lot." I loved that compliment. It said so much about the person giving it--that he thought the fact that I giggled stated plainly was a compliment. I laughed for what felt like hours when I heard the response. This memory is something I keep coming back to, in the short amount of time since I heard that he passed away. I just keep thinking about giggling and wishing that I could be there to giggle for him again. That maybe, somehow, giggling could have solved anything.
These are the things I think about when I cling desparately to his internet presence. I just wanted the Essnk community to be aware of something I am going through. As this blog is a part of me now, I needed to write about this death.
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