Don't Let Me Hear You Say Life's Taking You Nowhere

'Cause the VMAs are stupid anyway. Bey was absolutely robbed. And Kanye was just doing what he always does, which is rip off people that are way cooler than him.



Also, Kanye wins because he got to go home with the best trophy of all. I can't find a picture of Amber Rose's outfit that isn't going to take up the whole blog, but can we talk about it? Where does she shop? I want to go to there.

What About Style?--1986

What About Style?

Cruel edict.

I spent more than that on parfum yesterday.
And meals?....
Flowers?...
Everything she's wearing in this picture.
Her hair!

This reminds me of the time a girl I went to high school with, aged 14--let's call her January--made a titty-f***ing picturette with her boyfriend, a junior or senior just recently turned 18--let's call him Slater. Unbeknownst to January, Slater screened the venture for all of his dormmates. Eventually, the house-counselor got wind of it and then the cluster dean and some other deans and on and on. Technically, it was a matter of child pornography. Slater was sent home straight away, directed to be grateful (for not going to jail). And January, though not expelled or suspended, was subject to a bizarre series of strictures, all effective until her far-future graduation. Por ejemplo: she was banned from ever having a member of the opposite sex in her bedroom (a thing possible for all other students with house counselor approval). It was a god damn scarlet letter, an almost unbelievable, bitter, pointed sentence. January was quite a cool, resilient girl, and her parents were not so unrelenting as la escuela. All the same, that cabal of deans was wrong and power-abusing, and never made to answer for it.

Similarly, Ruth will have to report any possible expenditure that exceeds $100 to this fella. Here's hoping they fall in love?

What About Style?--1998-9

Cher's "Believe" video, which I assume I caught on The Box a time or two, is essential 1998-9. Have you watched it lately? I mean, the featured mass of clurrb-urchins was/(is?) pretty hep. And Cher--a golden lion at center, all headdress and injections! Transcendental.

Love In This Club: Roye'l

He's a fresh alternative, blending styles from the past, the present, and the future. Watch, and tell me you don't wish he was singing this about you:

Happy Birthday, Hildi Santo-Tomas!!!!

Hildi Santo-Tomas, the most genteel of the Trading Spaces crew, and most likely to nail a whole bunch of something insane on your walls. During the "overnight" portion of the show, I used to imagine that she and Laurie Hickson (the lesser belle of the ball) were getting drunk at the hotel bar and talking shit about the contestants. Later, when Laurie went upstairs "to put her face to bed", Hildi would make out with the bartender before slurring to one of the younger, prettier maids that she "used to be like you, y'know!"

What About Style?--1996-7

Recently, I spoke a little about 1995-1996, Clueless, two pop albums, a loud, Californian sensibility. And since that investigation of middle school and Gwen Stefani's clothes, I remembered to note Fiona Apple's "Criminal" video of the same/following year. Apple played some role in the female singer-songwriter/damaged lesbian(ish) thing that happened and happened and happened into the late nineties. But, visually speaking, at least in this very popular (relatively iconic) video, Apple was miles chicer than the Lillith crew. The seventies redux, acrid carpets and Jurgen Teller lighting schemes and wood-paneling and dark denim, is supreme and part of a wave that wouldn't crest until the new millennium (with Jurgen Teller [and Ryan McGinley] and Marc Jacobs and all "hipster-dom" and American Apparel). Watch and see, kind of visionary.

What About Style?

Bye-Bye Birdie and my father's college ties and sweaters were my introductions to the peppy, preppy, slightly confused (but indelibly chic and pleasing) early sixties. 'Cilla B. Presley and Frank Stella followed close behind. Here, Ann Margaret (Elvis's most high profile 'other woman') learns that Conrad Birdie, raven-haired Rock n' Roll heartthrob, is coming to Sweetapple, Ohio to give her a kiss.

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.

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When Lewis Hine photographed young South Carolinian, Roy Hammett, in 1912, he meant to expose the ills of child labor. I just can't get over the jacket and breezy short-pants (Alpha!!).