Monday, September 6, 2010
Time off
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
On female friendships
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."
Monday, July 19, 2010
Pitchfork Music Festival 2010
Thursday, July 15, 2010
And then Tiger Beatdown went and did a post on fashion the day after my fashion rant
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
taking fashion photography back
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.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
On Taylor Swift's "You Belong with Me" Part 2
Love this! Love the ending! Gah this makes me happy.
Friday, July 2, 2010
AusNTM cycle 6 coming out this month.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
On Racism in the Corporate Lunchroom
So you go down to lunch to eat with all the other white temps in your white washed building except for the Bilingual department where are the Spanish speakers dwell (I kid you the fuck not) and everyone is talking about innocent things. Stuff white people like. The Royal Tenenbaums comes up in conversation. Then the next thing the girl next to you who works in Science is talking about how hilarious it is that when she worked at Chuck E. Cheeze, all of the "gangstas" used to come in wearing hot pink jumpsuits and putting on their chapstick. "You're not scary," she says defiantly, following her speech with, "Don't you guys remember when they were all wearing pink? It was so funny, I wish they still were." Then this other girl, a girl you don't like very much anyway because she made you miss the train once, she decides that she needs to mention that she loves it when "they" "swagger." She then describes a man's swagger that she saw the other day on the street. (And this girl once asked me what it was like to go to a liberal school because her parents are so conservative).
The point of this story is: post-racial society my ass, the only words missing from this conversation are "Black people" and/or "Negroes." This conversation hit me viscerally in many ways because these people do not know who I am. The only thing they know is my name, the fact that I'm also a temp for this corporation, and that I'm white. Without knowing a shred about my personal life or my politics, they assume that they are in safe company .
There is this blogger, Harriet Jacobs. Maybe I've mentioned her before. She runs a pretty kickass blog called Fugitivus (click here to get to it) where she has taken on these issues before. I would feel remiss in addressing any of my experience here without quoting her and her wondrous blog capabilities because often she can say what I cannot. I thought of this excerpt when I was in this situation:
"This is what comes of being the “right” race in a racist society. You are an assumed depository for vile, racist conversations and opinions, and your assumed compatriots operate under the belief that this is not damaging, enraging, difficult, isolating, or painful to hear. I do not feel like an overtly radical person. On the spectrum of anti-racism, I consider myself a tick to the left of moderate. But even that perception is radical, because to get there, I’ve had to move my liberal white friends a whole football field to the right of moderate, into “I’m not racist racist, but I am better, smarter, and more rational than the hypothetical dark masses that exist in my brain” territory." (taken from this post)
What I find so noteworthy about my experience in the lunchroom is that I am complicit in racist statements because I cannot argue with them. It's my job and I make it a point not to talk about my politics, social or otherwise. The best I could do was judge them furiously in my brain; these judgments have been sticking around for several days. Ultimately, what bothers me is that these assumptions are so monolithic: all black people do this and all white people are just waiting to have their moment behind black people's backs. (The "isn't it fun to talk like this" moment). I am not interested in participating in these kinds of discussions with strangers. I don't care what color my skin is: my perceived whiteness should not be an excuse to say racist bullshit around me. Not only do I not want to hear what hateful things are dwelling in other white people's brains, I don't want to be part of that whole post-racial, color-blind system that uses vaguer pronouns to say the same things that white people said 50 years ago.
So yeah, I'm pissed about this still. I know that being a white person who is angry that a bunch of other white people assumed stuff about her because she was white really is a drop in the ocean of systematic racism and that my complaints seem meager. But I can't let this experience slide completely unopposed, even if all I managed was a measly blog post.