poor and rich

Pic of Nicole Richie and Lindsay Lohan from The Awl.

decline and fall

Picture number one: jobless man and wife at bean harvest, late 1930s.

Image via

Picture number two, anonymous shopper at Walmart, from the site, People of Walmart.

Now, you tell me: who's number one? The guy in the tent, one step up from the soup kitchen? Or the guy with the "I'm Number One" t-shirt?

Geography lesson

I guess, as a native, Zizek would know, but it seems . . . lacking.
Plus, it doesn't at all look like the Mason-Dixon line -- y'know, the one that divides the US North and South.

Sylvie Vartran

Her parents were from Armenia and Hungary, which seems to prove that being French can be an existential condition.

Sunny Phillip Larkin Explains It All

This Be the Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
  They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
  And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
  By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
  And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
  It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
  And don't have any kids yourself.

Out of the past

"Using techniques she picked up with the Miami Forensic Imaging Bureau, photographer Angela Strassheim captures black and white bloodstains. After a violent incident at the college where she taught, the Manhattan-based photographer began researching crime scenes and convincing new residents, some oblivious to the unpeaceful past, to let her photograph their homes. Sprayed down with “Blue Star,” hidden spatters and streaks of blood are illuminated and captured through long exposure photographs"

I've often walked into rooms and felt . . .not blood on the walls, necessarily, but traces of things that may have happened.

via

John Waters on Christmas

I talk to people about how you can’t ignore Christmas. You can love it, you can hate it, but you can’t ignore it. I love it without irony, but I understand why some people hate it. It’s a financial burden, it’s an emotional burden, it’s a decorating burden. But it’s a happy time for criminals and a happy time for people who are attracted to elderly men who are overweight and wear velvet. It’s a time for perversion.

Giving gifts is incredibly difficult. The smarter you are, the easier it is to find a gift for you, because you have interests. And if you’re really smart, you tell people what you want and they get it for you. If you leave it up to people who you know are going to get you bad gifts, that’s your own stupid fault. Basically, a lot of the time people want to be told what to get you, because then they don’t have to worry if you’ll like it. But the best kind of presents are when someone you know collects something, and you find something that they never even knew existed. That’s the top present, even if it costs a nickle. It’s just finding something that they want that they didn’t know existed.

 I'm suddenly feeling better about Christmas.

via

Anouk Aimee

 

Photo by William Klein

Chelsea

Photo by Mark Sink

I'm shocked. Shocked!

"We started our research seeking men in their twenties who had never consumed pornography. We couldn't find any," says Simon Louis Lajeunesse, a postdoctoral student and professor at the School of Social Work.

Canadian researchers studying the effects of porn encountered that obstacle. Still, they say it doesn't seem to damage people.

Of course, they can't really make a comparison with guys who haven't watched porn, because they apparently don't exist.

Read the article.

Put the Blame on Mame

Rita Hayworth's "clothed striptease" directed by King Vidor.

Brian Eno, and the fine line between clever and stupid

We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness. (via)

So, this is a decently perceptive comment, altough I doubt very many people are taking advantage of the ubiquity of culture to access Hildegaard of Bingen, to use his example. Or that it's made her more or less "cool."

Why is Brian Eno, of all people, framing things in terms of cool/uncool as if he was a tweener from Dubuque?

Celebrating the end of the division implies that it mattered, once.

And it should never matter to genuine adults. (You could cite the exception, perhaps of  marketers and the sellers of culture who could make money out of the notion that consuming something makes you cool.  But that's not paricularly cool, either.)