Last week (even though Alexa Chung was on the cover and it cost $10.oo), I bought a British Vogue at Port Authority.
In high school, Brit Vogue was my favorite Vogue, because I didn't read French and because Diana Vreeland's autobiography and a lot of other books and a night at Aspinall's and a lunch at Fortnum & Mason of shepherd's pie and banana milkshake and a Grazia magazine and a tallboy of cider had convinced me that I was destined for London, for the Courtauld and a bespoked, coldfish husband or something. I've changed my mind. London is grey and far and trashy without the BIG and convenience store of home (what I mean is: trashy but not as good at being trashy as here and also without nice malls and Walmarts and a million other things like deserts and baseball [not cricket]). And fashion magazines will never thrill me and inform me, as they did when I felt like a nervous and hopeful pre-debutante of the World; I can no longer see "blue skies ahead" in an accessories feature.
But Brit Vogue's still charming and dippy with like five Kate Moss covers per annum and a lot of fine little things you can buy at Liberty and reporting on new Airbus airplanes.
There was no interview with Alexa Chung, just four pictures of her in denim alongside an article about denim and romance of/with/in America. There was a whole lot about loving America in general, which is like 'sure YESS!' and very sweet.
A funny feature called, "Going Out vs. Staying In" imaged and styled two groups of female friends: a set of wealthy daughters-of-soandso, one of whom runs a public relations firm another who owns a new, swank nightclurrrb (our age! what?) in black leather, the other crowd, a bit younger, piling into a house in the far suburbs Upriver, models and musicians in vintage babydoll dresses and socks. The thing didn't stink of class-problems; mostly 'cause the "posh" girls were sort of Sex and the City and naff, yawn, nightclurrrb? And the girls in this Victorian house out-of-town were adorable and hip and inhabiting authentically beautiful space, principal among them a brunette called Marina who lists her influences: "Britney Spears, gymnasts, cheerleaders, anything American!" The article said her band was called Marina and the Diamonds. I looked her up on the Youtube and found:


The first is on-concept (right?) but pretty awful. The second is a big mezcla of stuff that's already happened and happened (and recently). But it's good. I like her vocal, and the EP is called American Jewels, and I guess I'm flattered. I'll pass out the next time I hear a Euro talking about American politics, but please do go on and on about our GLAMOUR (it's major.....like, TRACE CYRUS, featured below [who obv recycles a lot of British ideas but ones that kind of started as American ideas anyway and in Franklin, Tennessee and Hollywood, Orlando, and Twitter...]).

news

From NYRblog---

Conspicuously absent from the debate, in France and in Britain, is any consideration of the Islamic veil’s historic dimensions. It seems clear from earliest sources that the first Muslim women went about unveiled; and some of Muhammad’s female followers fought courageously alongside his men. The custom of veiling appears to have developed later as a reaction to the institution of slavery. As the Islamic state expanded, a growing flood of slaves were captured as booty, and sold in the slave markets. Many of these were young women who were incorporated into Muslim households as concubines. Slave women were required to expose the head, arms, legs, and upper parts of the chest, and to enhance their value slave merchants ensured that they were well versed in singing, dancing, music and poetry—necessary skills for the arts of seduction and love.

In the face of this challenge the supposedly respectable women retreated into the sanctity of the home. By the twelfth century Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (1149-1209), one of the most renowned and influential of Quranic commentators was arguing that “a free woman’s entire body is a shameful nakedness in itself” and must be fully covered. Razi’s reasoning was commercial: Quranic writings on modesty did not apply to slaves because they were items of property whose purchase or sale required “an investigative and careful inspection.”

The long-term social consequences are hardly surprising, given that in parts of the Muslim world slavery was only formally abolished in the middle of the last century. Veiling and sexual apartheid, though not universal, became the hallmark of urban Muslim societies from Indonesia to Morocco. With colonial administrators regarding female seclusion as barriers to the “civilizing mission” of empire, wearing the veil inevitably became a form of resistance to foreign conquest. In the West, its symbolic charge is far from being depleted. It may justly be regarded as a symbol of patriarchal oppression, but like punk and other urban styles, it can also mean a deliberate rejection of the current cultural norms imposed on women of every age, shape, appearance and size.

Trial Time

So this is as pointless a venture as last week's lampooning of New York Magazine's Snooki-hating fashion blogger--

Today's New York Times travel section includes a feature (and mostly painful slideshow) on 'hip Memphis,' and I feel the need to address some probs-lems/the naff whole.

Times' staffer, Melena Ryzik, author of a Times' blog called--OH MY G-D--The Carpetbagger (it's about red carpets and people but still), flew down to Memphis to perform/report her awkward, condescending cultural carpetbagging. Yuck.

I am pleased that our friend Dwayne Butcher's blog is linked. And it's a damn trip to read about that warty troll who glares from behind her pitchers of PBR at The Lamplighter (which we call by its full name, btw) in any newspaper, let alone the "of-record" one (and, just to clarify my name-calling, she's only a troll to girls, actually smiles at boys, which might explain the pins at Goner, though really, who are we to guess at the motives of Goner employees [c'est impossible]).

The article begins with Elvis, or a stated attempt to avoid him (which is probably why she never mentions that Elvis lost his virginity at Ernestine & Hazel's). The title of the piece starts: "Roll Over Elvis." This is nuts. And telling. Ryzik leads with the assertion that she is "cool" (in the most cloying, deaf Gen-Xer-y way) and down-with-locals because she wants to look beyond Elvis, or ignore him altogether. It's true that Elvis is "the lead" for most tourists to the Bluffs, the reaction most folks have to my volunteered hometown--

"Where are you from?"
"Memphis, Tennessee."
"Oh....Elvis!"

--For good reason. Elvis is the tops. She writes,

IT’S hard to shake Elvis in Memphis. His pompadoured, crooning visage peers out from all corners, from jukeboxes to diner counters. But the King was nowhere to be found at Electrocity, a semi-legal warehouse party that was recently held in an unheated garage in the city’s energetic Midtown neighborhood.

Jesus. I grew up in Midtown, a large swathe of the city that contains multiple neighborhoods, some quite sleepy. (And I can't touch that rave party. Y'all know how ridiculous its inclusion is. And Nocturnal [joke/hell]?! And Mollie Fontaine [yuppie downtown lifestylze mess]?! And Odessa [iffy amoeba of an art space that throws parties...I can't].)

Anyway, in Memphis, I saw Elvis everywhere. When I drove to and from the airport. When I, as stated, had a beer at Ernestine's second floor; I felt him most of all in one of their particularly creepy, cokey bathrooms (claw-footed tub rusting in the corner). When I went to school each morning in Overton Park. When I headed downtown past Baptist Memorial (now, regretfully, demolished). This list will get dull fast....the thing is, he permeates wonderfully, not through kitsch so much as ghostly imprint.
I've been to Graceland some 12 or 13 times, and cried too, in the Beautiful Meditation Garden or in front of Gladys' lavender poodle-motifed bedroom, cried for a folk hero whose story is so much about America (Egg got it).

And a lot of what Ryzik talks about, dives and juke joints, existed before Elvis, alongside Elvis. He might beef with a contemporary ambivalence toward sharp-dressing, but that's about it. He knew all about Memphis' soul and strangeness, its scrappy accessibility. Other stuff, The Cove and the Hi-Tone and Deli, new or newish spots, contain very little to provoke. They serve fried food and booze and bands play. What's this article about again?

The Bucc (opened a decade+ before Elvis passed), I've mentioned here before. It's my most favorite bar in the world, mine and Pillow's Friday afternoon office. It is incredibly loose and warm, uniquely so. And gross and rough too. What Melena Ryzik and her paper did not comprehend, beyond the peeling paint and torn up vinyl booths, is what a visiting friend once summed up with a buzzed, thrilling declaration, "There's no rules here!" It's a thing I've felt in New York as well, though NY's version is about a chilled carelessness, the BIG and LOST of the place. In Memphis, unbounded sensations spring from a dangerous slowness, a haze, a shared state of drunkeness and decrepitude and empty lots, plenty violence happening "someplace else" (preoccupying our law enforcement), death impending (no joke).

Of course, this is all selective, there are manicured blocks and nice schools, churches and shops too.

It's just that Memphis is my home of homes, home of hearts, and it is very beautiful and very difficult. I take it seriously, and nothing sounds as grave or complicated as it ought to in a foolish Times puff piece. I wish they wouldn't bother blundering all over stuff.

My Left Foot

I've avoided politics since the election, which is uncool. I don't condone being so fickle at such a crucial moment; I just can't help myself--actual economics bore me to tears. I stipulate "actuality," because on September 15th, when Lehmann fell, I read the Wall Street Journal breathlessly, hanging onto each red, downturning graph, not because of "actual" economic information, but because of cultural information, the feeling of moment (maybe history!). But I liked how informed I was before November, how much I was participating in government via pure curiosity (fundamentally democratic, no?). In an attempt to restore my interest in weighty news items (aside from whether Rihanna plans to prosecute Chris Brown), I am making a habit of checking Paul Krugman's new Times blog, The Conscience of a Liberal. And my but he never disappoints! I've tended to get all glazed and sleepy when folks have brought up the stimulus package, but Krugman keeps me wakeful with his ranging, broad knowledge of social history and unflappable passion and vigor. Si se puede!

In Winter

In winter, I dress like a political lesbian. Now, I'm a believer in uniforms. I think it's chic and dignified to know oneself sartorially and eschew "costumes" or anything else that reeks of effort (hunger, delusion). And certainly androgyny becomes more pervasive in culture by the minute, allowing me to wear my dad's old clothes to death (which is exactly what I've been doing). But I was seated beside Jared Kushner (pictured here with Ivanka Trump on his shoulders) and several good-looking, besuited others on a banquette in an intimate (something like six tables) dining room this afternoon, and well . . . I just wish I'd been in heels and a pencil skirt.

It's all well and good to wear smocks and shabby pants and oversize cashmere sweaters with gaping holes all of the time as an artist/librarian/experimental musician/blogger/Britney Spears-poet-laureate, but if I'm looking to make some paper (please, Lord--Able was not born to be a Bohemian past her 25th birthday) and break out of my tragic hipster-loser-bartender-ladyman dating cycle I must get me to a TAILOR. And though I tend to wear feminine sundresses in the warmer months (decidedly less butch), these only stand as testimony to my severe hippie-dom/teaheadedness (more politics). Everyday I distance myself further from the "straight world"--how, for one, will I ever reintroduce myself to underwear?!

Perhaps this is some grass-greener syndrome. Perhaps if I actually got hold of one of these shiny finance types I'd be bored and confused . . . can I really deny my fetish for confederate soldiers or that Ana Mendieta (above) is my utter pants idol? Here's the facts: I will always be a hippie. I was borned that way. But I can be a hippie with untattered, flattering clothes and commercial aspirations and a crew-cut of a boyfriend. Anything is possible. This is AMERICA (and in my heart of hearts I will always be bourgeois . . . I was borned that way too, you know, in America).

New New (read this magazine with me)

New York Magazine, of which I've been a pretty big fan since 1995 when I was stuck in a walk in closet of some glass-walled condo in Florida because of a big hurricane and read an issue with JFK, Jr. on the cover, has published some sort of "newness" portfolio this week. This, at once, makes sense to me and irritates me (but I'm a hoary 23-year-old curmudgeon). There is a great little article about our friend Antony Hegarty, who is not "new" himself, but has a "new" record. I sang a couple of these songs with him and found them so sweet and resonant and plaintive and Irish. The author does a marvelous job of illustrating his high-pitched, smart smart politesse. (Miranda July aside) I am also inclined to like Tao Lin, a profiled young writer, who comes off as charmingly anti-social. And, of course, I'm a big fan of Jason Furman's (pudgy-hot preppy de jour). Also, a fellow named Bradford Plumer writes an exciting set of solutions (imagine that) to universal problems. A lot of the other folks featured are kind of dull, and the magazine, in turn, clueless about my generation (quell suprise). Only two pieces made me eat my bonnet: an interview with a band called "Vivian Girls" and a few paragraphs about Santos' Party House. The trio of instrument-playing floozies spews hate-speech about synthesizers, and Santos has been worrying me because it feels so shrill and twee and EXHAUSTING and FAR too young (and I think nightlife should always involve a little aloofness).

The thing is . . . A&P likes (mostly) old stuff.