Thing of the Week: The Holiday Where Ghosts Make Candy, Laura Jane's New Couch (Which Is A Metaphor), A Tie from Jen

LIZ'S THING OF THE WEEK: The Holiday Where Ghosts Make Candy

I'm really Halloween-candy-obsessed this year, probably the most Halloween-candy-obsessed I've been since six Halloweens ago, aka the Halloween I got assigned a story about rich-people candy for a big-deal magazine. The magazine paid me to go over all town and try all different candy and talk to people about candy and then write about the candy -- they even paid for the candy itself. What a dream that was. The best was a place on La Cienega that doesn't exist anymore; they had giant candy corn made of marzipan, and blood orange/lime pate de fruit gummy worms, and this thing called Bag Of Dirt which was just crushed chocolate cookies but soooo yum. I haven't found anything that exciting this year and yesterday I went to Dylan's Candy Bar in search of creme brulee candy corn, but apparently we don't get to have that here in Los Angeles. And no Candy Corn Oreos either! And I also still haven't found any goddamn pumpkin iced coffee, so after Dylan's I went to Farmers Market and bought pumpkin iced cream and iced coffee, and dunked a spoonful of ice cream into the iced coffee and swirled it all together, and it was so cinnamon-y and pumpkin-y and creamy and perfect. I make do with what I got.

LJ'S THING OF THE WEEK: My New Couch & Nook

(At left: Out with the old! At right: In with the new!)

The week I quit smoking, I couldn't sleep. I lay up all night every night switching my pillow from the head to the foot of my bed downloading free relaxation-hypnosis apps off my phone and crying while trying to count backward from a million and boiling water to pour down my ear canals because if you google-search "how to get rid of tinnitus" that's the ONLY practical suggestion it gives you.

It was dark but not really that dark. People were like "What's up?" and I was like "I'm having this really chill existential crisis right now," and then time passed and I could sleep again. Point is, on one of those nuts gross insomnia nights, insomnia that lasted so long I'd have to watch the sun come up which is such a depressing thing to have to do if you weren't just doing drugs or having sex for tons of hours, I had this totally NOT chill emotional breakdown about my COUCH, the monstrosity with so much foam and stuffing barfing itself out of itself seen above. I hate that couch and, on that one horrific night, it became a metaphor for everything I hated about my life. It made me so sad about myself, my not owning anything high-quality or nice, my being too poor to afford nice things. (In addition to my couch sucking, my bed sucks.)

Two days later, my dad impulse-bought himself a new leather easy chair and asked me if I wanted to take his old couch because karma is real and I'm a good person and I was all "YESSSSS PLEASE DAD" and then helped my dad move in his new chair to amp up my karma even more. I looked extremely forward to New Couch Day for the entire month of September and talked about it SO MUCH- "I just want to have, like, nice things. You know? Like, I really want to not have Venetian blinds anymore. How much do curtains cost? I think I'm going to buy myself curtains for Christmas," etc. The day before Couch Day, I bought myself 2 Kobo scented candles because I was so stoked for my room to start being $$$HEAVEN$$$, and smelling good is part of heavenliness ($$$). On Couch Day I drank an Iced Venti Soy Latte and ate an avocado out of its shell. I tipped my couch onto its side and sat inside the bare-bones frame of it like it was a prison cell made of a ribcage. Later on I took the streetcar to my Dad's and had a cool convo with my dad's doorman- he told me I'm a superstar!- and then my Dad and I carried various couches up and down various flights of stairs for several hours until finally the story ended and I became the proud owner of my new beautiful little nook (seen above)! It's a metaphor for everything I love about my life. I saved the old pillows from barf couch because NEVER FORGET WHERE YOU CAME FROM.

The next morning, I woke up and drank my coffee while watching the second episode of season 3 of Downton Abbey on my CHIC new couch with no soul being sucked out of me or FOAM rubbing against my leg, everything about it was perfect except for how INSANELY FUCKING BORING Season 3 of Downton Abbey is so far. I digress but like basically the ONLY reason I've stuck it out for the past 2.2 seasons is because of my DESPERATE OBSESSION with hoping for a storyline about Thomas' gayness!!!!! Even in the preview for Season 3 there was a Thomas' gayness teaser but NOPE it's just like "Oh, they had a picnic-themed party at Downton and a character named Alfred no one cares about burned a hole in Cousin Matthew's dinner jacket and then some other people expressed opinions about dinner jackets!" Like honestly Julian Fellowes, GIVE THE PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT: at least five minutes per EVERY SINGLE EPISODE OF DOWNTON ABBEY FOREVER to be about Thomas' gayness BEGINNING NOW. But seriously though oh my God, remember how sad it was when Thomas bought all that sugar and kept it in a shed and then realized it wasn't really sugar and destroyed all the sugar and it was all because he's so fucked up about how he wants to have sex with men but it's 1920??? That was so sad. 

 JEN'S THING OF THE WEEK: Too Many Things, It's A Tie

#1. I had heard about this dance party in the dark at a church in Greenpoint a while ago. I was kind of like, “oh, cool..maybe?” and immediately forgot about it. My friend Matt went and told me about it and then on Tuesday I went. Matt had told me it was truly weird and really fun. It is! I love it! It’s called No Lights No Lycra and I want to go all the time. It’s in a huge rec room type deal in a church and it is dark. The lights are off and there are green star lazers everywhere and everyone is there to just dance and have fun and no one cares what you do and no one will touch you or perv out on you. They played Get Into the Groove! And Mariah! And Green Day! And Robyn! At some point I was dancing/spinning around to this song that was hard to dance to in a challenging good way and I felt like I was in the dance scene in the Virgin Suicides. Happy Haps.

#2. My 8 course meal at Kajitsu that was so beautiful and delicious.  Kajitsu serves the Buddhist shojin cuisine. It’s based on the principle of not taking life and reading those words on the website made me cry once. I discovered that I really love ginkgo nuts and the hand etched sake glasses were devastatingly beautiful.

#3.  SARA was in town from San Francisco for a day. Sara is the best. I took a break at work and we had a mid day hang/Upper East Side thrift store session. She was a surprise guest  at Goldblum Night and we ate an incredible amount of snacks for dinner.

#4. Tonight I’m hanging out with Rachel & Mimi & I like them a lot so I’m really excited about that.

#5. Tomorrow I’m going to Salem to have a Witch Weekend which is I guess technically next week’s thing maybe but I’m feeling good about it right now so whatever.

Potential Backstories from the Wigan Beatles Concert, October 1964

Reality of the situation is, I care more about this photograph than I do about most people I have known. It was taken at a Beatles concert in Wigan, England on October 13th, 1964. At the end of last May I decided to go full-on with my obsession and start writing stories about the girls kissing in the back. I named the girls Jackie and Olivia. Jackie is on the left, and Olivia is on the right. 

I hate the stupid girl yelling in the front. She is such a distraction from the intense beauty of Jackie and Olivia making out. Maybe they aren't making out. The other night my friend Chelsea and I were at a bar and these strangers asked us "What's making out?" and then a couple days later the Korean dishwasher at my work asked me "What's making out?" It's so crazy how life is like that. Nobody ever asked me what making out is my entire life and then it happened twice in one week. The answer to that question is so boring. Kissing with touching, blah blah blah. Maybe they only kissed once. 

It's very easy for me to get obsessed with Jackie and Olivia because I don't know what happened but I'd like to guess what happened. My thing at the end of last May was that I decided I was going to write a story explaining every single potential backstory that could possibly explain why these two girls were either making out or kissing at a Beatles concert in 1964. My favorite of the two is always Olivia, on the right. I relate to her because she has dark hair and poor eyesight and is wearing a cardigan. 

I thought that there would be four stories and the first would be that both girls were gay and that this (kissing) was a thing that happened for them both all the time but that within the loudness and splendor of the Beatles show they could just kiss like krazy in PUBLIC and nobody would notice because they were all watching the Beatles. Sad and beautiful. It started with Olivia sitting by a fountain outside of a bookstore and watching every grown-up woman, imagining herself growing up to be any of them, that they are her. The stories of these women are tragedies and when she imagines herself growing up to be one of them she is confronting the possibility of herself becoming a tragedy and it’s a dare. She is daring herself to become a tragedy.

In the second story Jackie loves Paul and Olivia loves John but only Jackie loves Paul. It's all about Olivia being totally into chicks and Jackie being stupid- "She never really knew anything about anything. It's okay." There's a part where Olivia is watching Jackie and her eyes get red and watery and I think that's an interesting thing that barely ever happens but sometimes does, when you're watching a beautiful person be beautiful. The section ends with the sentence "He cares more about moving naturally than he does about looking cool in the Beatles and that’s cool to her. And she’ll remember that, she’ll remember that about John Lennon. For the rest of her life, the rest of the Beatles." 

In the third story Jackie's into girls and Olivia's into John and it only ever grew to be one sentence long, because I don't care about the character of Jackie very much. It's just a paragraph about Olivia sitting by a fountain outside of a bookstore and snapping the fabric of her cable-knit stocking against her leg and absently watching the dust fly off it. 

In the last story Jackie loves Paul and Olivia loves John and they end up kissing because they wish they were kissing John and Paul but all they have is each other and, in the moment, that's good enough. I relate to that more than anything. I'd like to keep writing about that feeling, being fourteen and kissing your pal because she's the closest thing you've got to John Lennon, just by being the person you were sitting next to on the night you wanted to kiss John Lennon so bad you forgot your own name. I like looking at and thinking about Jackie's bangs, "Jackie can’t get her bangs to go the right way and it’s fucking her up and she’s late because she can’t get that kink out and eventually she realizes she has no choice but to go see the Beatles play with a kink in her bangs." Cute. 

I love Olivia's shoelaces and the way she's the one who took it far enough to rest her palm on the other girl's thigh. If either of the girls in this photograph happen to be your cousin's ex-boyfriend's mother or whatever, please be in touch.

Seven Things I Want Really Bad Right Now

BY LIZ

i. THE 'WHO HAS MORE FUN THAN PEOPLE?' SHIRT JOSH HAMILTON WORE ON LOUIE. After writing my thing about Big Star and Diggers and how Josh Hamilton is the best person in the world, I watched the season 1 episode of Louie where Louie gets stoned with Josh Hamilton and Josh Hamilton is wearing an amazing shirt that says "Who Has More Fun Than People?" I want that shirt so badly. Not, like, a reproduction of it, but the actual shirt that Josh Hamilton wore during the filming of the episode. It's so beautifully faded and those little rips up near the collar are gorgeous. Plus I bet Josh Hamilton smells really good, like some sort of soap you'd buy at Whole Foods, like almond sandalwood or something. I also want his dog from that episode ("the first dog"). 

ii. SOME GODDAMNED PUMPKIN ICED COFFEE. Is the existence of pumpkin iced coffee outlawed in Los Angeles/the world in general? It's sure starting to feel that way. And what else are we supposed to drink when it's October but 100-something degrees out for days on end? Good grief.

iii. LOTS MORE OF URBAN DECAY'S 'SNATCH' EYESHADOW

There's some in my Kime Buzzelli for Urban Decay eyeshadow palette but it's running out, as you can see. It's such a great color, peachy-pink and so glittery, and when I wear it the glitter sort of spills off my eyelids and onto my shoulders and I love it.

A Belated 'Thank You' To Paul Rudd For Enabling My Somewhat Distorted Love Of Big Star

BY LIZ

Did you ever see the movie Diggers? It came out five years ago and it's always streaming on Netflix; it's written by Ken Marino (I LOVE YOU KEN MARINO) and it's the story of four buddies who are clam-diggers on Long Island in 1976. Paul Rudd's the main dude, this 34-year-old clam-digger/wannabe-photographer named Hunt who's sad-sacky-y but mostly in an endearing, non-draggy way that doesn't make me want to smack him in the nose. Hardly anything happens in the movie; all the dudes really ever do is hang around bars and smoke a lot and shit-talk each other and talk about girls and being broke. The dialogue's a little inelegant some of the time but I don't care, I love it wildly and I want to live inside its sweet, scrappy world where everyone's got beautiful jeans and dreamy hair and Big Star's always on the radio. 

There's actually only three Big Star songs in Diggers ("Don't Lie To Me," "Thirteen," "O My Soul"), but Diggers has informed my Big Star opinions in a deep and major way. Because of Diggers, Big Star is a band about feeling hopeless and all right at the same time, ideally in Indian summer, in some sleepy nowheresville kinda town with lots of great big trees and the ocean. Right now I'm heavy in love with the song "Feel," how when Chris Bell sings "I feel like I'm dying/I'm never gonna live again" he sounds way desperate but loose and easy too; he's tough without being aggro, that chill virility thing all over again. The dudes in Diggers are so possessed of a chill virility.

Because of Diggers, Big Star's also about falling for the wrong girl(/boy) but maybe getting something good out of it anyway:

Thing of the Week: LJ's Tuesday, Liz's Sunday, & the Season of the Witch!

LJ'S THING OF THE WEEK: Tuesday

I work every night of the week except Tuesday and in saying that I don't mean to complain or complainobrag- I don't have to work six days of the week if I don't want to; it's completely my choice. Nobody ever has to do anything they don't want to, EVER. I just like my work a lot, so I work a lot. 

Tuesdays are a cool day to have off because nothing ever fucking happens on a Tuesday ever so I totally own that day of the week now. Tuesdays are crazy days because I do EVERYTHING on a Tuesday. They are jam-packed full of errands and social events and eating and drinking. Oh yikes for a split-second I just considered calling drinking "libations" in that sentence, EWWWWWWWWW #barf #nope #DRINKING

This past Tuesday was so good!!!! In the morning I went to the passport office, to get my passport renewed. I didn't have very high hopes for this particular event of my day but then I got there and I was like "FINE, WHATEVER, THIS IS A THING, FINE" and then I was sitting in a plastic chair playing a crossword puzzle on my phone when all of a sudden I heard a scratchy girl voice say "OH MY GOD" and I looked up and it was my new friend Naomi Skwarna! Crazy, right? All these weird coincidences are happening in my life lately which are making me feel like "things are going so right for me wowwww I'm so HAPPYHAPS!" but also like "Am I in Season 6 of LOST? Why is my life so much like Season 6 of LOST? Is the fact that I'm watching Season 6 of LOST while in the middle of a phase where all these Season 6 of LOST-y things are happening to me a SIGN? Am I Cop-Sawyer or Jack-with-Son? Am I DEAD?"

Anyway I'm not dead I don't think, and it was a really awesome coincidence is what it was. Naomi and I were fantastically LOUD at the passport office and annoyed everyone, especially while we were Instagramming the legendary photo of our passport photos seen above (it's called "Assassins"; C447 and C439 are now our spy code-names; PS we're spies!). These two fortysomething women who were also "friends at the passport office" (CUTE THING TO BE) in particular wanted to kill us, and then we all ended up eating at Subway afterwards! All four of us! It was so cute and Naomi and I shared a turkey sub and talked about sex really loud in the Subway and the women still hated us. Then I went to the gym and on my way home I saw a feral/black kitten in the park and really related to it and admired its body language. We made that crazy eye contact you sometimes make with an animal where you're just like "Ugh, stop looking into my soul but also NEVER STOP, nobody has ever understood me like you do and I can't get enough of it. This is weird."

Then I got home and tons of awesome shit had come in the mail: Jen's Bruce Springsteen comic, a LAURA necklace made out of vintage glass beads, and a ring shaped like a crab, because I'm a Cancer and subsequently have to believe that things shaped like crabs are cool. Then I saw a poodle with his hair shaved into a Mohawk. Or maybe her.

I met up with a pal and we got CRAZY-HIGH and drank pints of Tankhouse. I guess the low point of my day was when I thought something was wrong with my finger. Every time I get too high I think my extremities are about to fall off. We went for dinner at a really kitschy Korean place where they cut the noodles with scissors and I overdid it on the everything but that's what Tuesdays are for!!! Overeating and believing that your fingers are falling off!

After dinner I met up with Erin and it was so beauts since we hadn't seen each other in forevs. It's not like I lie to all my other friends but when I hang out with Erin I realize how elusive the truth is because I'm telling it; it's a combination of being on the same wavelength and having known each other long enough that you no longer have to waste your time explaining any backstory. Friends who already know every fucking detail of the backstory. At the end of the night we went to a bar and asked the bartender to make us something delicious- the most delicious thing he could think of! He was all UHHHHH UHHHHH UHHHH and I thought he was going to fuck it up, but then he made us glasses of grass-flavored vodka and apple juice, and they tasted kind of like apple pie, but mostly they tasted like autumn. They tasted more like fall than anything else has ever tasted like fall.

LIZ'S THING OF THE WEEK: My Sunday Night at the Hollywood Bowl, starring Donald Glover, Animal Collective, and a Really Good Cookie

On Sunday I went to the Hollywood Bowl to see Animal Collective and on the walk up the hill Shazi and I stopped at Subway and she treated me to a Birthday Berry Cookie, which is available now for a limited time only. On the way into the Bowl we were talking about Donald Glover and then we got to the will-call line and guess who was a few people in front of us? Oh my god: Donald Glover, so supercute. And then we went to our seats and I ate the Birthday Berry Cookie and that was so cute too, it's got cranberries and blueberries and white chocolate chips. At first I thought the "Birthday" in "Birthday Berry" was the customer's birthday, kinda like "Every day's your birthday with the Birthday Berry Cookie!", but apparently it's for Subway's birthday. That's less delightful and a little bit selfish, but I guess it's all right.

Animal Collective was so good! My two fave songs off the new record are "Today's Supernatural" and "Pulleys," which reminds me of the story of Tikki Tikki Tembo-No Sa Rembo-Chari Bari Ruchi-Pip Peri Pembo, for reasons I don't quite understand. They played it during the encore and also the nice boys next to us gave us some "chocolate rum balls" that made my knees feel like they were air-conditioned. Here's "Pulleys" for you:

JEN'S THING OF THE WEEK: The Season of the Witch

Last night I went to see the Secret Rooms of Dirt Palace at soho20 gallery. It was fun & funny & sometimes witchy & i was into it. The narrator of the evening, Madame Von Malt Liqueur said something like, "It's September 27th, so you know what that means..it's almost October. October is the month of the witch". I am really feeling that sentiment right now. Last night I bought this silk screened patch I will hang on my wall so it will always be the season of the witch in my home. In my studio it's always the Season of the Bitch. While we are at it, why not listen to the Donovan song too?

The SFW Survey: Which Song Never Fails To Make You Cry?

Here's our deal: we're asking everyone in the world to answer song-related questions for us so that we can share your responses on Strawberry Fields Whatever and then all get to know each other so much better. Our next question is "Describe in detail the most perfectly soundtracked makeout experience of your life thus far." If you'd like to answer, please email your response here (letitbebeautiful at yahoo dot com), sometime before October 16th. Unfortunately, we will not be able to publish every submission we receive. (Our most sincere apologies go out to everyone who submitted to this week's round under the impression that all responses would be featured on SFW. We were overwhelmed with submissions and have decided to cap off all SFW Survey entries at 25 writers in the name of not crashing our blog. We loved reading all the words you wrote us and hope you will submit again.)

For this week: WHICH SONG NEVER FAILS TO MAKE YOU CRY? 

I relate to Ray Davies more than I relate to any person I’ve met or any other person I haven’t. I have an unfunny inside joke with myself which is that I should set up a fake Twitter account called “Only Ray Davies Understands Me” where I just Tweet the sentence “Only Ray Davies understands me” every time I think it which would be about a hundred times per day followed by long periods of silence followed by a hundred times per day again etc. Sometimes I have to take some serious time off The Kinks because listening to Ray’s words forces me to acknowledge some pretty dark and deep basal truths about myself that when I’m feelin’ easy I like to pretend don’t happen or at very least will never happen again. It’s always when I’m saddest that I fall into an all-consuming Kinks phase and it’s always the Kinks that save me from said all-consuming sadness. I’ve never met another human whose eyes I could look deep into while saying the sentence “I hate everything except the sky” and understand that they knew what I meant. And I would never want to test out saying “I hate everything except the sky” on any person that I love because the only person who’s allowed to tell me it’s not true about me is me.

I hate everything except the sky and running and writing and my friends and my family and the Kinks and some other bands but when I’m sad I only love the sky and only Ray Davies understands and so that’s why I go in for the Kinks when I’m bumming at my personal hardest. Only Ray Davies knows how to explain sadness in words and tunes in the exact way that I feel it, and I don’t know how I could ever feel closer to anyone than I do to the person who feels sad the same way I do. Happy’s the same for everyone, but sadness is subjective, and “Too Much On My Mind” is mine.

At my saddest I’m sad for no reason. When anything actually sad happens I just get weirdly exhilirated; God knows I love a tragedy. When I’m sad I think so hard my head hurts, and it’s awful. I hate thinking, because if I’m thinking it means I’m not writing, and if I’m thinking a lot, it means I’m not writing at all. I can’t sleep and I can’t turn it off. I get bad-up never solemn and the part that really kills me is the resignation, There’s too much on my mind and there is nothing I can do about it- it’s true, he’s right, that's exactly what it's like. There’s nothing you or anybody else can say and when somebody tries coaxing you into saying it the thoughts don’t know how to make themselves into words. You are only the inside of your head which you hate and your loved ones are a nuisance and you jump around your room and run as fast as you can trying to sweat all the life out of you but once you come back it’s all the same. Your skin is a dewy trap keeping your insides from falling out and your blood is some syrupy red stuff that keeps you alive for some reason you’ll never understand because ugh science and wouldn’t it be nice if it could all just be math and that would be you; you’d never have to know anything but the actual most boring though truest truth of it- you’d never stretch it anywhere, you’d never care.

There must be more to life than just to live it, he sings, and it gets me every time. That sentence is the point of me and the end of me. 

-Laura Jane

"Colors and the Kids" by Cat Power, which I already wrote about.

-Liz

"Ohio" by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. "What if you knew her & found her dead on the ground" really upsets me. The riff alone is triggering.

-Jen 

The 6 Best Donovan Songs To Listen To In September

WORDS BY LJ/DRAWING BY JEN

Donovan is Scottish. He is the posterchild for the vibes of the month of September. I don’t love him more than I love anyone but I fear I might love him more than anyone else loves him. He’s not a very relevant guy, Donovan, in 2012. 

Donovan went to Rishikesh with the Beatles, so I trust him. If you’re a cool/”out there”/”spiritually aware” enough guy that the Beatles were like “Okay, yeah. Yes. We want you to join us on our meditation trip to an ashram in India PS we’re the BEATLES the actual BEATLES this is a HISTORIC EVENT and we want you, YOU- you, Donovan- to join us,” you’re definitely okay by me. That speaks very highly of a person’s character, as far as I’m concerned.

Since I was 7 no maybe 9 I’ve always kind of loved Donovan- for “Atlantis,” “Sunshine Superman,” “Hurdy Gurdy Man” (But not “Mellow Yellow,” never “Mellow Yellow”- the other day Jenn and I were standing outside a church and a wacky old hippie wearing a chamois shirt unbuttoned down to his belly button told us about a bar we’d “dig” where the people are all “really mellow yellow” and that’s “Mellow Yellow” to me. YUCK)- but it’s only been a year since these songs have lived in my hands. 
          I talked to September about which Donovan songs are best to listen to inside of it and September nailed it down for me. These are the songs September chose.