What About Style?

Let's be fair. By the mid-twentieth, global outlook and style in Massachusetts may have been on the road toward joking matter (or at least I think so—John Wieners is an inscrutable spectre), but this, Salem's supposed 'House of the Seven Gables," is a gem. Real, old clapboard and real, old windows may be my most favorite attributes in any American house, and here they SING. My personal experience of this town (and general region) was a difficult one, but as an image and a notion, as a wholly separate object, this house is gorgeous and meaningful—a call for substance in style.

Who Watches the Dorks Who Line Up to Watch the Watchmen?

ME, that's who. Just returned from an exhilarating day at the Javits Center for the 4th annual NY Comic Con (my third) and boy are there a lot of inexplicable statuesque hot chick/fat dude with ponytail couples in this world. In fact, 'dude with ponytail' is the most popular costume at the Con surpassed only by the simpler (no need to grow hair past your chin) 'dude dressed as Kevin Smith.'

I considered snapping pics of every dude with a ponytail that I saw and making a collage, but I got distracted by all of the Anime kids and only managed to get this guy.

As a Bronze/Silver Age comic book geek, I can't keep up with what the kids are reading. At every Con I've attended there's been flocks of 13–15 year olds dressed as whores (the girls) and androgynous fluffy domesticated animals (the boys). I wouldn't mind getting into Anime, because clearly that's where the genre has gone, and its style and themes have bled into even the most traditional of comics (Spiderman may as well speak Japanese and cause seizures), but shit is so goddamn confusing. I saw 3 separate girls today dressed as french maids and carrying around oversized Bugs Bunny-like mallets. There's a major clash between the overt sexuality of Anime kids (and the old men who love them) and the withdrawn, stuttering, overweight Marvel/DC fanatics of yesterday. Both groups kind of suck, but the former invokes the kind of discomfort felt when watching a Sarah McLachlan soundtracked ASPCA commercial. Also, they make me feel old.

By far, the most exciting happening: our chance to view the first 20 minutes of the upcoming Watchmen feature film. Because mad scientist/writer of the original graphic novel, Alan Moore, hasn't signed off on the film ("I will be spitting venom all over it") most fans expect it to suck hard, yours truly included. But today's special preview was totally promising; co-creator/illustrator Dave Gibbons was present to introduce it. And ... for once, a comic book movie looked like a comic book! The opening fight between Adrian Veidt and the Comedian was so jokey! Pages flipped! The camera panned around each frame like a reader's eye on a comic book panel! Perhaps the most influential comic book ever (and one of the most important literary works of the last century) has received the film treatment it deserves. Final verdict to come March 6th, around 2AM.

Anyway, the trailer's below. More on the Con tomorrow.



**Here's some tabloid trivia for my fellow A&Pers, who I'm fairly sure have zero interest in the entirety of this post. Two former fiances of Mary Louise Parker star in the film, Billy Crudup and Jeffrey Dean Morgan. Oh, to be a fly on the wall at that craft services table.**

Verses

Cultural Affairs in Boston was always a favorite title, maybe because I find Boston devoid of.

I'm OK. You're OK.

Between 1991 and 1992, La Fondation Hergé brought us a television series culled from 21 of the author and artist's brilliant, sunny, chic, and lily-white Belg' detective graphic-novelas. This weekend, why don't you sit next to the radiator, pour a bourbon and branch, and watch King Ottokar's Sceptre.

Love in this Club

Are these five people related? I do not know. But "If You Were Here" is such a good song! And I think that Thompson Twins, whether or not they derived their name from Tintin, are the best sort of super-earnest soldiers in the 80s movement for "avant-garde" or "outsider" pop stylings (and by stylings I mean hair and jewelry). We love Thompson and Thomson and Thomson.

Folk Art for This Weekend

In a Google Image search for "the Internet," I came across this student work entitled, Jamal's Internet Collage. It reminded me of the time that Mr. Fry (our 7th grade Computer Class teacher) asked Pillow and I to use the (fresh, young) Internet to plan a budget (he was such a tool) tropical vacation. I guess it was an exercise in Yahoo navigation? Anyhow, we used the whole of our allotted funds to pay for two nights at the Four Seasons Hualalai, where we claimed we could find men to buy us drinks and extreme drunkenness and bikini-cladness would render food unnecessary. Mr. Fry was incensed. We were quite pleased with ourselves.

Hey Girl Hey (the little green book!)

Clearly the A&P staff believe whole-heartedly (look at all of these bold adverbs!) in the decriminalization and eventual legalization of marijuana. For instance, we've been expressing some chagrin (see below) over the recent Phelps bong scandale. But why ceaselessly kvetch, when we could start taking action?! I think that it's time to push (forgive pun) a little book called, It's Just a Plant. If we could get a copy into the hands of every legislator, these would be some changin' times! Who's with me?

Carpool Lane

This product reminds me of this one girl in high school who read romance novels and was ambushed with a super soaker full of urine while getting dressed for her sister's wedding. Remember that girl? Anyway, from Overstock.com, a pillow for the gal who could use some extra polyester to fondle in the night. A customer review reads:

This was a gift for my 16yr old Grand Daughter. She loved the pillow and many of her girlfriends want to know where they can purchase their own "FRIEND". When she opened her gift the 1st question was -"What is it?" Then everyone had to 'hold' the handsom new friend too. I took the pillow to a local monogram shops and had the personal monogram of her favorite movie star put on the pocket!..Her New Friend hangs out on the back of her desk chair, the back seat of her SUV and even went for a sleepover last weekend. Thanks again and please give me more ideas for my Grand Children.

Wasting (Spoiling?) Our Flaveur!

First, those YouTube hooligans removed various materials from our reach. Now, they've insisted on branding every last video with a super-ugly title and inexplicable star rating, rendering so many aesthetic A&P posts much less so. HATRED. What can we do?!

Plague

I don't really have the plague so much as a common cold and my period, but this week has been rough (and FREEZING!). I've hardly been able to be Able. However, I have been able to check other people's blogs. As ever Michael K. of Dlisted, our gay uncle and spirit guide, has provided wealth (lists of birthdays and beautiful photographs which I have handily poached). Yesterday, he gave us this--the name of the site is unjust, but the service provided, pretty special. I've also found these: a not-so-serious tragedy that (I'm going out on a limb here) might have happened in Florida and a serious tragedy or almost-tragedy, that is, from a remove, the most fascinating internet-derived artwork I've ever seen.

Are You Listening, Kellogg?

In the wake of Michael Phelps's ridiculous bong fiasco (did anyone care when pictures surfaced of the Golden Butterface groping strippers and slamming booze? Just wonderin'...), Lil' Wayne spake an enormous truth in his pre-Grammy's interview with Katie Couric. When asked if his penchant for weed and prescription cough syrup made him a bad role model, Wayne cooly testified that "if you need an example for how to live, then you shouldn't have been born." Amen, amen, amen.

Fish in a Glass Tube

"FUCK YOU you fucking Puritans, I'm moving to Canada and come London, me and the other bong-tooting loonies are going to smoke you out of your pools."

Make Love to Me

What Genius Lies Where

I Stumbled Onto This Weird Corner of the Internet Today

and I can't. stop. watching.

Chinese Democracy

In the wake of her most recent photos-on-the-internet debacle, Miley Cyrus has taken to her blog to defend herself. This one's a real doozy:

I definitely feel like the press is trying to make me out as the new 'BAD GIRL'! I feel like now that Britney is back on top of her game again, they need someone to pick on! Lucky me!

Miley, dear, you will never in any capacity have any remote connection to Britney Spears. You're being picked on because you're an idiot. But you're 16, so it's to be expected. Just ride it out, you may not be an idiot for much longer. Maybe.

Love in this Club

(Sorry, K.) Anton Chekhov, country doctor, poet of the hopeless and bored, deceased and famous gentleman who I did not know was so good-looking until yesterday.

Old No Country

Lately, I've been celebrating severest kamp in my posts about consumer goods and stylings. But in all seriousness, I've received a few springy catalogues in the mail, and (I've felt this for some time, but) Anthropologie makes the ugliest ish on the planet. Look and see, nary a successful design object! Ooof! A&P hates twee! As catalogues go, I adore Gorsuch, mecca for ski and other thirty-something trophy wife wear (see, I can't turn this "kamping" off!).

Folk Art for (Sick/Snow Day) Wednesday

I've embedded a bombardment of portraits of/from The National, Petrova's tip, a (or the) Russian banquet hall in Brighton Beach. Such love for the name, the caviar, carved watermelon rinds, and floorshows.

Low (Addendum)

We once said that "Low was where we came from." And that may have been a little fictiony (the best sort of fiction, big-hearted and delusional). PMC reminded me on Sunday that I may love and understand "Low Countries," but I was never a naturalized citizen of them so much as a charmed exchange student (an ethnographer maybe?). You see, this A&P post of several weeks ago was quoted on a blog called Smart City Memphis, an iteration of the public radio program about urban development(s). I, little old soupy me, was brought (sort of unawares) into a serious discourse on the present and future state of Bluff City. This brought on the first negative comment from a (seeming) first non-friend/family reader of A&P, a certain "Anonymous"--

They don't make music like that here anymore and haven't for a long time. It's easy to post positive when yo don't live in it and were privileged when you lived here. right now, you can fly a plane over Memphis and see that MOST of it is very run down, go to all those neighborhoods and ask those people how they like living here.
It's an atro-city.
It's a great big whitewash that never gets any better, it only gets worse and bigger.

There is a difference from cynicism and ultimate reality, look it up.

At once, I was struck with a foolish panic--"Does 'Anonymous' know who I am?!" Of course not. You don't have to know me personally to read my position of "privilege." It's inherent in my writing. Yet more interesting, it's proposed as inherent in my love of Memphis, a place that may well be lovable only to those who have had certain benefits. I feel that my affection for "Low" is genuine, but I must concede, however I may wish it otherwise in a given moment (evidenced by my taste in television shows or boyfriends), it is not really where I come from. I stand by the fact that the extreme "High" and "Low" architectural and social elements in Memphis, always, ever side-by-side, have gone a ways in shaping each of our eyes and minds. But that game of aesthetics is quintessentially, born-with-luckily "High."

Last notes on "High and Low"—
We (really I) have been wrangling with readings of our tagline since the inception of the blog; and, in the process, I've ignored a few nuances, mostly by not doing what I am best at, listing. For the record, "High and Low" references:
searching and editing
hunting
(a-ha)
arts and culture
collage?
pot
liquor
mood disorders
topography
volume
fat content
castes
tastes
pressure systems
channels
shelves
temperatures

Best Thing Going (For a Few Days)

I don't know how I got hooked on this band (which is code for "Yeah, I clicked a MySpace ad."), but Nico Vega is about to become my favorite new thing (assuming Garbage stays on hiatus). I was floored by the beautiful mix of hipster-shit-we-secretly-love, metal (Iknowright), and electropop. Unfortunately, most critics simply pingeonhole them as (another) "indie rock trio."

Really, I like to speak as little as possible about the bands I love, so I'll just give you a snippet of their own bio, a few parts of which A&P should probably steal:

"Nico Vega [is] a modern day saint. A warrior that has led us to a more fulfilling, lighter way of being. She represents people and unity. She fights for all of us and teaches us to fight for each other. She is an idea that has evolved into a message and she fuels us in our bellies. She is the person we are all capable of being, but she holds the bar high above our head so that we must reach to be better human beings. We all have honesty inside of us, we all know how to love, we are all made of the same flesh, and we are all stuck here together."

Yeah, that, and Rich, their guitarist is liquid sex in this video . . . their self-titled album came out Tuesday.

Again and Again and Again

More brilliance from the Holy Mother Jordan! Friends, I want to be buried in these clothes.

Folk Diptych for Monday

More Miraculous Birthdays!--February 2nd.

Farrah Fawcett (62)
Gucci Mane (29)
Shakira (32)
Marissa Jaret Winokour (36)
Dana International (37)
Jennifer Westfeldt (39)
Michael T. Weiss (47)
Christie Brinkley (55)
Duane 'Dog' Chapman (56)
Brent Spiner (60)
Ina Garten (60)
Barry Diller (67)
Elaine Stritch (84)
Liz Smith (86)

Enlightenment

We've mentioned some recent, criminal removal of arts materials from the free and easy interwebs. Here's the how/why.

What About Style?—1995-6.

Eighties redux has had a winning run. It seems as if we've chosen to retain what we like, securely fasten certain musics and ideas in the canon. However (at the moment) I'm more than a little sick of the early nineties. They've been on people's lips for about five years, though they've just really hit the generally accepted big-time. It's that very big-time-hitting that has left me cold, ready to move, ready to parse the slippery middle-nineties (predictable, I know). The A's and P's were in middle-school, so I mark the inception of that mini-era with the theatrical release in the summer of 1995 of Clueless, Jane Austen's Emma repurposed in Bel Air. The effect of the film was miraculous—no need to pause before entering it into the aforementioned "canon." Quite literally everyone I know (of our generation) has habitually quoted or referenced it for fourteen years (and counting). Clueless brought popular American attentions back to So.Cal. and energy and color and tweak and humor and RAVE (almost) and sex (the din of AIDS was suddenly a little less deafening—no one was worried about Christian's health).

Even the smacked-out underground (still North, gravitating toward Portland and away from Seattle) was setting aside bummy flannel and embracing psychedelic, acid sounds and colors (however, I was too young and pop-oriented to pay attention to that stuff). In many ways, I feel like the mid-nineties were about subtly nodding to cultural movements that originated in the eighties (New York and London club culture or 60s redux/remembrance) in mainstream aesthetic life. This theory could also be completely wack--what do I know? Like I said, we were in middle school, perfectly primed for the "overground."

Two ska-punk records from lower-Californian locales a bit over-rough and trashy for Cher Horowitz (who was so famously grossed out by skater-stoners and "Val parties") were released the next year: Sublime's Sublime out of Long Beach and No Doubt's Tragic Kingdom out of Anaheim, Orange County. And my, but they were monstrously successful (and my, but they sounded good to us twelve-year-olds). Sublime and our eager childhood consumption of its lyrics deserve a separate post one of these days (not least because I feel like talking about Gwen Stefani right now). The eponymous album dropped just over a month after the band's charismatic lead-singer was claimed by a heroin overdose. The songs were, on the hole, (hip-hoppish) balladeer reports from the grizzly, drugged periphery, some ugly West. But the sound was terribly sunny, the telling humorous, the ultimate contrast winning. You should glance at this video for "The Wrong Way" (my first favorite song on the record for some obvious and smarmy reasons and O.M.G.—is that Bijou Phillips?!).

No video girl (not even B.P.) could aid in this discussion of mid-nineties style (as you may have guessed, we're not talking about music so much as ideas about clothes and surfaces and impressions) like the pretty much incomparable Gwen Stefani. I've embedded the videos for two singles from that massive (every damn lyric memorized) album: "Don't Speak," the highest performer, a Spanish guitar-inflected power ballad (that sounds bizarrely Russian to my ears now) and "Sunday Morning," a rollicking late-comer. The video for "Don't Speak" addresses Gwen's mercurial rise above even her own bandmates. The other is a sort of cheap, scrappy affair involving cooking spaghetti and a methed-out (?) interlude. Stefani's platinum pin-up hair was such a revelation to me at the time (quite fix-ed in "Sunday" and strung-out in "Speak"). But these paragraphs have really amounted to a lot of pretense; I just want to look at/think about the dress that Gwen wears in "Speak," a forties cut and pattern with a tear in the side that is decidedly punk/post-punk. I don't imagine there will ever be a time when it doesn't work.

Behold Bloomberg!

Hog-wrangling (brought to you by the S.I. Advance)

Verses

"Fruits of My Labor"

Lucinda Williams

Baby, see how I been livin'

Velvet curtains on the windows

To keep the bright and unforgiving

Light from shinin' through

Baby, I remember all the things we did

When we slept together

In the blue behind your eyelids

Baby, sweet baby

Traced your scent through the gloom

'Til I found these purple flowers

I was spent

I was soon smellin' you for hours

Lavender, lotus blossoms to

Water, the dirt, flowers last for you

Baby, sweet baby

Tangerines and persimmons

And sugarcane

Grapes and honeydew melon

Enough fit for a queen

Lemon trees don't make a sound

'Till branches bend

And fruit falls to the ground

Baby, sweet baby

Come to my world and witness

The way things have changed

'Cause I finally did it baby

I got out of LaGrange

Got in my Mercury and drove out west

Pedal to the metal

And my luck to the test

Baby, sweet baby

I been tryin' to enjoy 

All the fruits of my labor

I been cryin' for you boy 

But truth is my savior

Baby, sweet baby

If it's all the same

Take the glory any day over the fame

Baby, sweet baby