On female friendships

"So divorced are we from the idea that these are the pitfalls of human friendships across every spectrum that even in feminist/womanist spaces, discussions of female friendships will frequently yield comments like, "Well, I have a hard time being friends with women because so many women are gossipy, competitive, jealous bitches."

No. So many people are like that.

That this woman can't successfully be friends with that woman does not mean women can't be friends. It means that those two women can't be friends."

From Shakesville, read the rest here.

Pitchfork Music Festival 2010

This year marked the second time I've attended Pitchfork since the inception of my blog, and also the third (out of five possible years) that I've attended Pitchfork period. I only went on Saturday and Sunday this year (ticket prices have gone up and I prioritized) but I will say that I intended to only attend Saturday and had such a good time that I bought a Sunday ticket and came on Sunday anyway, despite my best-laid plans.

Unfortunately I forgot to take my camera to either day, so I can't do a proper photo+writeup post about it, but I will go through the concerts I attended.

I arrived with my brother and cousin on Saturday with a mild hangover and a belly full of refriend beans and rice. We met up with a friend of ours who was very gung-ho about forcing a bottle of vodka lemonade onto us, and there began my bad idea boozing at Saturday Pitchfork. We were standing by stage A, half-assedly listening to Delorean, a band named after something incredibly trendy in that 2000's nostalgia for the 80'ss kind of way. They sounded good to me; I had never heard them before. I downloaded their album last night and put it on and it didn't sound nearly as good as their live show. It was vaguely like Cut Copy and I still think In Ghost Colours sounds better as a studio album. Since I'm about to see Cut Copy at Lollapalooza, I guess I can judge then whether they sound better live too.

Anyway, after that I walked around the poster fair and saw these amazing Gossip Girl posters that I totally wanted to buy (two images, one of Chuck Bass, one of Leighton Meester) but they were 50 bucks for a set and I chickened out about spending that much money (probably because I was planning on coming back for Sunday). Anyway, I got the business card of the artist and here is his website: Dead Meat Design. And here is one of the posters:

Afterwards I sat around with a couple of my cousin's friends and drank rum and coke with my brother to the point that I felt a little sick because it was like 90 degrees out with full sun and I was drinking booze instead of water. At some point I waited in line for half an hour to fill up my water bottle at the water fountain--they really should have more of those, but they also want us to spend money on bottled water, so I understand why they don't do it. Although it's still hella lame. Around this time Raekwon came on and I idly listened to it and felt like a poser because I have never listened to Wu Tang Clan, not once. I mean, maybe there was a song in the back of my head that just popped up, but I couldn't think of it right now. So anyway, yeah I'm not THAT cool when it comes to my music tastes, as evidenced by my Sunday experience, which I will describe shortly.

Then we stood up to listen to Wolf Parade. They put on an all right show; it really suffered from happening when it was still light out. Wolf Parade in general is kind of a huge disappointment for me because their first album was SO GOOD and everything since has been SO MEH. Also, it was the fourth time I've seen them live which means they're the band I've seen most often in concert, which is just screwy because they are nowhere near my favorite. Sometimes life works out this way.

The highlight of the night and the reason for the season was LCD Soundsystem's headliner set.

And..... It...... Was.Amazing.

They opened their show with Us v. Them. They played three songs off their new album: Pow Pow Pow, Drunk Girls (of course), and I Can Change. I Can Change is one of my favorites off the album so I was excited about that, but if I had my way I would have substituted All I Want and Dance Yourself Clean for the other two. Off of the first LP they played Yeah Yeah Yeah (Crass Version), Tribulations, Daft Punk is Playing at My House, and Losing My Edge. They also played Someone Great and All My Friends off of Sound of Silver, and now that I'm done listing most of the show, I may have actually remembered the entire set (which is a very rare occurrence for me).

They closed the show with New York, I Love You and in the last refrain broke into a split second cover of Empire State of Mind. As a friend of mine said, to insert a song about the glories of New York into their song about how New York is becoming hollow was a genius move, especially combined with the fact that LCD Soundsystem is ending and this is their final tour.

Everything about that show was amazing. I was close enough to the stage for it to be pretty loud and to see James Murphy and every song was a revelation. During Someone Great I even got choked up, mainly because that song's lyrics are so heart-rending.

On Sunday I bit the bullet and bought a scalped ticket for 60 dollars because I had so much fun on Saturday I wanted a repeat (and sitting by myself in my apartment while everyone I knew was at Pitchfork sounded awful). I got there with my roommate around 2:15 and first off we saw Girls, and got pretty close to the stage. I thought that their set was a pleasant surprise because I sincerely thought every song would be a straight up version from their album, but during a couple of their slower songs they took it to the next level and made it loud and droning. I was surprised at how much I liked the difference between their sun-drenched surfer rock sound and then straight guitar noise. It really worked for them. Also the lead singer was wearing silver socks.

Afterwards I hung out at the Beach House stage and enjoyed every second. Their set went by way too fast, probably because I was just lounging in the shade, but also they played a lot of songs off their latest album, which I love. They played my favorite, Zebra. And oh heck, I'll include this detail even though it's embarrassing: I cried during a couple of their songs. It happened for layered reasons, but one of them was definitely that their music just sounded so emotional and raw and beautiful that loud, and it went straight to the heartstrings. God, I'm a wuss.

Afterwards my people wanted to see some bands I wasn't interested in, so I wandered around the record fair and bought a key necklace from Spinal Fusion, whose shop you can find here. Very cool stuff, although she didn't have a button at her table for my neighborhood, Edgewater, among her Chicago-related products.

I then ate a vegan ice cream cone (the only ice cream available was vegan) and I found it very good. I think there is a hope for a vegan-only nation, although converting everybody from dairy is a hard task. I still can't make that leap because of Cheese. It's all about Cheese. Cheese which is so important I MUST CAPITALIZE IT. CHEESE.

After my respite from music, I went back to Stage A for Major Lazer, which had to be the silliest thing in the context of a music festival. Major Lazer is a collaboration between Diplo and Switch. Since it's basically just club music, they had some dancers bouncing about the front of the stage, and this guy with a mike who kept saying "CHICAGO! PUT YOUR HANDS UP!" and acting like he was the creator of the music. "HEY DIPLO, SLOW IT DOWN FOR A SECOND. I WANT TO SWITCH IT UP FOR CHICAGO!!" This repeated every few minutes. The best part of the whole thing were these two Chinese dragons on stage. Once they left, I found my roommate and we went to Neon Indian.

Neon Indian's set was kind of erratic, mainly because the lead singer had a theremin that he enjoyed dicking around with in between songs. So a song would be grooving along and sounding totally rad, and then he would cut it short to put in some noise. I like a bit of noise and some difference in the songs when I see a band, but if you get your apathetic crowd actually moving, I suggest you do NOT cut the song short to dick around with your noise machines. Just thoughts. Their two biggest songs still sounded great (which are "I shoulda taken acid with you" and "Deadbeat Summer").

Afterwards we went back to the main stages for Big Boi, who actually played "I like the way you move" while he had these little kid breakdancers on stage. The only girl in the group, who was about 10 years old I'd say, spun on her head for a good 3 minutes at the end of the song. When you're spinning on your head, I imagine each minute feels like an hour, so I'm still impressed with that. They begged us to like their page on facebook, but I can't remember what they were called now, so I guess we'll just have to live without that particular detail. Also he played a couple of minutes of "Bombs Over Baghdad" which was crazy! Probably because Pitchfork named it the song of the decade.

Then, finally, it was Pavement's big reunion show. Which I did not stay for all of, so you can just go ahead and revoke my indie cred card right now. As much as I would have liked to stay, I never listened to Pavement growing up and so I couldn't fuel the experience with nostalgia. I also didn't want to deal with how crazy the trains are after the headlining act (as it stands they were crazy enough when I left). What I saw of the show was awesome, and their stage was set up with really cool strings of regular light bulbs. They had this shock-jock DJ from the 90s with someone named like Rocking Mike (can't remember now) introduce the band, and it was kind of ridiculous. I think he was pulling a lot of asshole shit for entertainment value, but he claimed that Pitchfork was the minor leagues to Lollapalooza's major leagues, and wouldn't we rather be in Grant Park right now? Okay, yeah, so I am going to Lollapalooza this year, but I can tell you that my musical experience at Pitchfork is as good as Lolla is going to be (if not better). So anyway.

That is my write-up of Pitchfork 2010. HOLLER.

And then Tiger Beatdown went and did a post on fashion the day after my fashion rant

"And so when I hear, tights are not pants, or you should wear pantyhose to court, or I wouldn’t wear X cut of a shirt because it doesn’t look good on me, I think, who made these rules? Why are we following them? Why do we passively subscribe to an aesthetic system that requires us to daily fulfill the twin obligations of being “respectful” by not doing anything out of the ordinary and looking as thin and “feminine” as we can muster? I want fashion to be less about making other people comfortable, and more about personal expression and art. There is too much hierarchy. It is too top-down, from a murky top with too many leaders with too many conflicting messages."

Read the article here

taking fashion photography back

About a month ago now there was a post on one of the fashion blogs in my reader that has been stuck in my craw ever since: Read the post here

Excerpt:

Without getting too much into it at the moment, it's an example of a movement that is taking place, right now behind closed doors, by photographers who believe that fashion photography has lost its origin, and has become too commercialized, and too amateures. And they want to take things back, and at the same time dig deeper into their ability to create non tainted work.

Ehh? I'm pretty cynical about the fashion industry since I consume a lot of its imagery and know a fair amount of its hierarchies and yada yada yada. I have a pretty official stance on fashion photography, and it's basically that I want to make it as democratic as possible. I know that some of my ideas vis a vis fashion photos make no sense in terms of business. Okay, fashion on the grand scale is for all people. Everybody wears clothes. How much you buy into certain aesthetics or the luxury aspect of it depends on how much money you have and whether you really give a shit. I mean yeah, there are people out there who wear their t-shirt from the company picnic and their holy cargo shorts and their crocs and pretty much don't care ever, period. I offer no judgment on that. What I'm saying is: because class exists, because there are wealthy people and poor people, there is going to be wealthy fashion and poor fashion. This will result in the really high end luxury fashions and goods being photographed by people who are paid a lot for images that are put in magazines that hawk expensive goods; magazines that are expensive to make. But even knowing all that, I don't buy it. I don't want fashion to be about the luxury goods--I mean, certain articles of clothing can be well made and cost more--but the whole super star designer ball game we've got going on, where designers sign their name to shoes that cost 50 dollars to make and then price them at 5000--this shit does not sit well with me, whether or not it's a fact of life.

Okay, I'm not really looking to take down the entire fashion industry in this post. Obviously I set the scale really high here.

The idea of a fashion movement that wants to take fashion photography "back" makes me nervous. First of all, how does one even take things back to the time before fashion photog was "too commercialized and "amateures"? When was that glorious time in fashion photography history? The 90s? The 80s? Helmut Lang? If you get rid of amateurs in fashion photography, what are we left with? The elitist hierarchy that shoves Lagerfeld and only Lagerfeld down our throats? The kind of photography that demands that women's bodies only look a certain way?

On the other hand, the commercialization of fashion photography (which I'm assuming just means photoshop): now there's something I would like to revolutionize. I want to see real bodies in real contexts wearing these clothes. I want the fantasy but I also want the fantasy to be democratic; i.e. let's stop pitting rich white women as the ultimate goal and let all kinds of bodies participate in the luxury of interesting clothes. And let's get rid of the computer programs that make their skin look like plastic. Let's get rid of that everlasting temptation to remove just a couple inches off the waist, digitally. Or physically, that too.

So I don't know. I hope that this revolution from this blog post, this group of people behind closed doors: I hope they know what they're doing. I hope they do something fantastic and interesting. I hope they use all kinds of models. I hope that their revolution also actually matters, because it would be nice to see something out of the confines of the Vogue monarchy.

But "taking back fashion photography" is entirely missing the point. By all means, change its course. Just don't romanticize the past and miss the forest for the trees.

On Taylor Swift's "You Belong with Me" Part 2

Some of my more faithful readers may recall this post about how I thought that Taylor Swift's video for "You Belong with Me" should be made with a gay boy as the main character. Well, in this wonderous world of Youtube and Jezebel commenters, my wish is...my command! Check it:

Love this! Love the ending! Gah this makes me happy.

AusNTM cycle 6 coming out this month.

If you read this blog you should know that I'm an avid consumer of the Top Model franchise. ANTM of course if the mother, but Australia's Next Top Model is totally the hip, more attractive younger sister. And as a result of AusNTM, I will forever be in love with Australians. So here is the promo for Cycle 6 (and how amazing is it when Alex Perry says "Expensive"????)