So What Are You Wearing To Your Own Funeral?

A WEIRD ART PROJECT BY LAURA JANE FAULDS

A few weeks ago I posted this thing about dresses, in which I somehow managed to find a way to relate blogging about dresses to dying, because I am a real-life superhero and my super-power is figuring out how to relate every single thing about life to death. It's so cool. My entire creative output/social life is one neverending memento mori. 

Anyway, I don't feel like reiterating an idea I've already written about because I like to move FORWARD, so I'm just going to cut and paste exactly what I already said: ...and then I was like, maybe I should make the post about how these three dresses are all dresses that I'd want to get buried in, in my coffin, and then I started thinking about how maybe that's the ultimate mark of whether a dress is Great or not, and then I thought it might be cool to ask a bunch of people what outfit they'd like to be buried in and then blog about it. So maybe I'll do that!  

So yeah, I'm doing that. This post is a... CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS! I am going to give you a totally reasonable deadline for this one. Your deadline is... APRIL 8th, 2013! That is more than enough time for you to get your shit together and email me a picture of your bad dead self wearing a cool outfit that represents who you were and how your rolled during the amount of time you spent living on this crazy old planet of ours. You have almost the entire month of March to mull it all over, and then you can procrastinate working on it for most of the first week of April- April 8th falls a Monday, which gives you the weekend of April 6th and 7th to get 'er done. But I just want to warn you that April 7th is the night of the season premiere of Mad Men so don't procrastinate taking your death photo until that night! Take it that afternoon. Sunday afternoons are so boring anyway! You just ate brunch and now you're bored and tired, counting down the hours until the Mad Men premiere. Take a picture of yourself and send it to me! BONUS POINTS IF YOU LOOK DEAD IN YOUR PHOTO. 

This is neither the time nor the place for cute selfies. I don't want to see your motherfucking cheekbones (unless they are naturally prominent). Don't do that dumb 2001 supermodel jutty shoulders thing. Pretend you're DEAD! I want to see you lying down with your eyes closed. I mean if you don't feel comfortable doing that, that's cool too, but just make sure YOUR ACCOMPANYING PARAGRAPH IS SOLID and also MORBID. Just write a little thing about why you'd want your dead self to be buried in this outfit and really get into the DEATH aspect of it! Pretend you're me and death is all you want to talk about ever. Just go there. Confront it! The Great Unknown! 

Also, the convenient part of participating in this creepy little project of mine is that if you do die, in the next little while I mean, people will know what to do. Because think about what would happen if you died in the near future and never told anyone what outfit you want to be buried in. Seriously. Think about it. Think about who would have to choose your dead self's outfit. Yup. That's right, you guys! It would be YOUR MOM. Your mother, left up to her own devices. So unless you want to be buried in something SO traditionally feminine that accentuates your curves plus MATCHING HANDBAG

CONTRIBUTE TO MY WEIRD ART PROJECT AND SAVE YOURSELF

April 8th, 2013. Please send all submissions to laurajanefaulds at gmail dot com. 

Here Are Some Beautiful and Adorable Postcards Sent to Ringo Starr from John & Paul & George

Last weekend there was a sale at this bookstore in my neighborhood that I generally try to avoid on account of its bad vibes and also because it was featured in the movie Celeste and Jesse Forever, which is some of the lamest and most anti-feminist bullshit I've experienced so far in 2013. However! On Saturday I passed by on my way home from buying an apple and a Snoopy t-shirt at the Silver Lake farmers market, and in the window there was a book called Postcards from the Boys by Ringo Starr. It was part of the sale and I got it for nine bucks and it's definitely the best and most delightful nine bucks I've ever spent in my life. It's a collection of postcards that John and Paul and George sent Ringo "through the years," and each postcard is accompanied by some bonkers story from Richie -- here's a pretty solid example of his storytelling approach:

"The sad thing about going to Wales was that was when Brian died. Later we went to Rishikesh and it was amazing. It was always difficult for me because I had this food situation so I always took a suitcase full of clothes and a suitcase full of beans so I could eat! Now I take all those great protein bars. There was so much good music in Rishikesh."

I also really like this sentence: "The first German I learnt was the word for 'cornflakes' and Stu Sutcliffe took me to this Chinese restaurant that did pfannkuchen - pancakes - and they were like eight inches thick with lemon and sugar."

Eight-inch-thick lemony/sugary Chinese pancakes in Germany! Holy cow. Anyway this page with a postcard from Paul (aka 'you-know-who') sheds some light on Ringo's love of postcards and makes me cry a little because, hi, how sweet is it that "Ringo loves postcards" was something the other Beatles cared about and totally indulged? It's so sweet. A little while ago my housemate John said something about how "It seems like the Beatles took care of each other in a way that the Rolling Stones didn't" and that's such a nice point.

This is the front of Paul's "Woof! Woof" card, btdubs:

Paul's kind of a goofball! Here's another 'you-know-who' card:

Paul's also a big fan of the "apology postcard":

And this one just kills me: 



Paul even sends postcards in rebus form! I mean, of course he does. If there wasn't a rebus postcard I'd be like "WHAT THE FUCK PAUL MCCARTNEY. Slacker," and he'd totally agree with me.

Thing Of The Week: Weed Hounds, "Putty In Your Hands" by Jean & the Statesides/ Drumstick Cat, Necklaces & A Shirt & A Song

JEN'S THING OF THE WEEK: Weed Hounds

Last night Weed Hounds (best band ever) played a show for the first time in 2 years! It was a big one, too. Sold out! I love the hounds. They were so good. One of my best buds Laura is in the band, but I swear I would love them even if I didn't know her. It is a fun element though, going to support your friend be incredible. And I'm really glad to know her. Anyway! I am the #1 Weed Hounds fan so I pretty much go to every show I can. I'm feeling really tired and unable to describe music. I can say they're genuinely dreamy and if you wanted to listen to them you could here or here.


LJ'S THING OF THE WEEK: "Putty In Your Hands" by Jean & the Statesides/ Drumstick Cat

"Putty In Your Hands" is perfect and chirpy. It's really great to put on at the exact second you're walking out your front door. It makes you feel like leaving your house is an incredibly ballsy and go get 'em move. It makes you feel like you're walking through the opening credits of a TV show about the go get 'em-est ballsy person there ever was.

Also, here's Drumstick Cat. He (or she) does not have one single thing to do with "Putty In Your Hands" by Jean & the Statesides, but I've been meaning to blog him forevs, and this feels like the right moment.

My friend Christine Instagrammed Drumstick Cat at the end of last year and I asked her to email me this picture because I see a lot of myself in Drumstick Cat. I don't care if spirit animals are played; Drumstick Cat is my obvious spirit animal. He's a black cat with mad feral vibes and he's hanging out with ice cream because ice cream is the best sweet treat and Drumstick Cat knows it. Anyway, it weirdly took my phone a month and a half for me to receive the Facebook message of Drumstick Cat's photo Christine sent me on December 30th, which was kind of the worst thing that ever happened because it means phones are capable of fucking up that bad, which means that, from now on, every time a dude I have a crush on doesn't immediately respond to some form of e-comm I've sent him I'm going to be all, "What if it's a Drumstick Cat situation?", so that's a thing now: "Drumstick Cat Situation." Let's make it happen.  

LIZ'S THING OF THE WEEK: Things I Bought This Week

I love my pot leaf necklace + strawberry necklace, which I bought at Lemon Frog Shop:

 

and my shirt with Keith Richards's giant face on it:



I also really love the Lemonheads's cover of "Step By Step" by New Kids On The Block, which I'd never heard before last Monday and is pretty much exactly the same as the original:

I Want To Take Acid When I'm 90 & Then Die

BY LAURA JANE FAULDS/ ILLUSTRATIONS BY JEN MAY

I like waking up the morning after I got really drunk and watching the hazy pictures of what happened in my head like when we were kids and there were still photographs, they were glossy and the paper had a bit of a snap to it, you’d shuffle through the pack of them really fast one by one and even as a kid when your fingers were crayons it was like slight of hand the way they moved. You did it elegant, like when you have to count money for your job and you start off pretty awkward but two months later your fingers know how to move around the weight of that paper. Fingers are good at paper. I want to be that lazy kind of elegant about everything.
        I like aging. I used to wake up the morning after getting really drunk and I’d watch the hazy pictures shuffling and I hated them, I’d done a bunch of stupid shit and I regretted it. The truth was heavy, it was trash, I didn’t want it. It was a dumb person’s body pressing down the back of my ribs and I hated everyone and I hated myself for hating them. Life was something I looked forward to, not the thing I did.
        I’m older now. When I wake up and remember what I said and did the pictures make me laugh. They were the cool kind of stupid. I had a great time and I liked my friends and I still do. I said everything I wanted to say and I did everything I wanted to do. I represented myself perfectly.
        There’s no song about what it feels like. I’m not depressed. I eat whatever I want and I grew my hair out. I can run really fast, I run every day, I don’t want to run away but I’m leaving. I haven’t lied in a million months. The only thing that bums me out is other people lying. At the gym there’s three TVs playing three different 24-hour news stations and the news is always people dying. Death is the news’ favorite news and I get why- because it’s spooky, but it’s also so boring! The news is all, “Who died in the most interesting way today?” or “Who is the most interesting person that died today?” when it could just as easily be “Who lived in the most interesting way today?” or “Who is an interesting person?” but I think maybe the dirty logic behind it is that the news is there to remind people no matter how crappy their day was at very least they’re not DJ AM or Oscar Pistorius’ girlfriend. People feel so fucking sorry for themselves for not being a statue at the Louvre carved out of sapphires draped in chiffonade and jellied lilac leaves while their favorite band drinks champagne cut with lemonade and plays their favorite song at their ideal volume as their statue self gets fucked by the 1950s movie star of their choice and they are twenty pounds skinnier than they actually are and also billionaires, and then they watch the news so they can feel guilty about it and feel sorry for themselves for feeling sorry for themselves! Which is such an interesting and useful way to live your life.

I love Enlightened

BY JEN

I really love the show Enlightened. It’s on HBO, after Girls (or before-- I’m not sure actually), and apparently no one watches it. It seems like there won’t be a 3^rd season. It’s sad because the show is amazing. 

It took me a few episodes to “get” it. I wasn’t sure if I was into it or bored or what. I loved it.  It’s kind of a lot to take – super emotional and honest and earnest. There’s not really any sex and if there are drugs they’re sad, not cool. Laura Dern, who I believe is a national treasure, is as usual, incredible. She’s so bad ass! Is that lame, to say bad ass? I think so.  She’s the best actress ever and her character is both insufferable and loveable.  I feel like every character on the show sort of forces you to recognize some uncomfortable elements of yourself. It’s like reading your horoscope or going to therapy.

 

Enlightened is based more on the limits of connection and relationships than actual connections. One time I was watching it alone while eating udon noodles and I actually covered my face and said,“Oh my god no," out loud. It was too sensitive. I was feeling too much. You (I) want to protect all of the characters even if they’re being really selfish or whatever. They’re fragile.  Amy (Laura Dern) does a lot of voiceovers throughout the show. At first I felt like it was a really cheesy device until one of them made me cry. It’s effective and honest and about her being alone. Hey, guess what? We’re all alone all of the time.

I don’t really want to go into plot because I feel you should just watch it. But basically, the show is about Amy, who worked at a pharmaceutical company, had a mental breakdown and went to a spiritual rehab place in Hawaii. She’s meditated and "found" herself. She was on a journey and now she’s back. Amy is living at her mom's house and working at the same company, this time in the basement with all the freaks. She wants to change the world, connect with people and save the environment. It’s sort of all about the fall out of that way of thinking being confronted with reality. There's more to it than that.

In the first season there’s an episode from the point of view of Amy’s Mom (played by Diane Ladd, LD’s real mom obvs), that deals with the emotional aspect of grocery shopping! You will cry. I cried.

All of this and there probably isn’t going to be another season! Can you believe it? The creator of the show Mike White (who also stars in it as my fave character Tyler. Shout out to Tyler!! LYLAS) wrote for Freaks & Geeks.  What a total bummer it would be if Enlightened ended up like Freaks & Geeks – something people binge-watch years later and say what a shame, there should have been more seasons! What would Amy Jellicoe do if her favorite TV show was in danger of ending? She’d probably go to the HBO offices, walk into a meeting, kneel down next to the CEO or whatever and demand Enlightened  be renewed. What should we do? I think probably just like, tweet at HBO or something. We should do something.

HOTTEST TO LEAST HOT: The Rolling Stones

WORDS BY LAURA JANE/ ILLUSTRATION BY JEN

Hi! Welcome to HOTTEST TO LEAST HOT, a new feature on Strawberry Fields Whatever where we rank members of different bands from hottest to least hot. I know double standards are a generally shitty thing or whatever, but I'm personally really into the double standard that allows me to rank mens' attractiveness levels in a public forum and not have it be completely revolting. I've been blogging for six years and have always done my best to use it to bring joy and laughter into the world; I would like to carry on in this wonderful tradition for years and years to come! There are so many groups of attractive-to-not-so-attractive men that I feel would benefit from being ranked by me. For instance, Bob Dylan is the hottest and least-hot Bob Dylan. And then there's the Clash! Let's face it, ladies. Topper Headon is really ugs compared to Paul, Mick and Joe. Somebody needs to disseminate that information and then riff on it. 

I started out by ranking the Rolling Stones from least to most attractive because the Beatles are all perfectly and equally beautiful (except Ringo; he's a little uglier), and the Rolling Stones have obviously said a lot of sexist shit in their time and this is their punishment for saying it. So there I go proving karma is real yet again. 

LEAST HOT: Bill Wyman 

Bill Wyman looks like a grandmother. He was born a grandmother, and he'll die a grandmother. He also has one of those weird muscly faces that forces you to super-consider that old adage of "It takes x amount of muscles to smile, and x+100 muscles to frown," but not in the way the adage intended. It's not positive. 

But he has his moments. But I have terrible taste in men. Once, when I was eighteen and lived in a dormitory, I forced my friend Chelsea to watch this video on The Strokes' official website of Nikolai Fraiture wheeling a suitcase through an airport. That video was literally my favorite thing on the entire Internet at that point in my life. I was making her watch it because I was trying to prove to her how beautiful Nikolai is, which he is. But only I think that! Only I, and Nikolai's wife maybe, think that Nikolai is the most beautiful man in the world.

Point is, Chelsea said: "You're attracted to awkwardness, and that's really sweet," and it's true, and it's sweet, I like that fact about myself, and Bill Wyman is totally the Nikolai Fraiture of the Rolling Stones. He'd probably be #3 on this list if he hadn't married an 18-year-old when he was 52, which is revolting. Sorry! He didn't marry that woman for love; he married her so he could have sex with her. There, Bill Wyman. I said it. Also, Keith Richards shit-talks the fuck out of him in Life, and I'll take Keith RIchards' word for just about anything. I trust Keith Richards in a very deep and important way. There's this part where he talks about how Bill Wyman makes a very weak cup of tea, it's barely even tea, just a cup of hot water that he dips a teabag into, and Keith's so disgusted by Bill's stupid approach to tea-making, and I think about that part of Life almost every single day of mine. It rings so true! I know exactly what it feels like to hate a person so much that even the way they take their tea makes you squirm. 

That being said, I think it would be really fun to drive down the Autobahn while listening to "I Wanna Get Me A Gun." 

2nd-LEAST HOT: Brian Jones

Brian Jones is a clayface, and that's a shame. A clayface is my new name I just made up for people whose faces look like they are made out of clay. Brian "Clayface" Jones. (That's a Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds joke). He also has no neck. However, one July evening three summers ago, my friend Ally and I were drinking sangria on a patio. We ended up sitting next to this wacky old semi-homeless woman named Monica. Monica and I formed a very deep connection in a very intense and important way. She told me that her soul used to belong to the Rolling Stones but then she realized that Mick and Keith were Satanists who killed Brian Jones, which I definitely don't agree with. But while she was explaining her crazy Satanism conspiracy theory she happened to utter the sentence, "I always try to err on the side of God," which is easily one of the top 5 most life-changing sentences that have ever been spoken in my presence. So yeah, Brian Jones was definitely short and had oddly pronounced bags under his eyes and really bad bangs, but for the entire rest of my life every time I ever think of him I'll think of trying to err on the side of God, and for that reason in my mind he's become an angel. A hotter-than-Bill-Wyman angel. 

Three Dresses I Guess I'd Die For

First things first, I feel like it's important to tell you all that I am listening to Beethoven's Grosse Fuge and having an out of control tinnitus attack at the same time as I'm writing this, so all in all, it might end up being a pretty dark and intense post for being about dresses. 

I originally named this post "Three Dresses I'd Die For" sort of absently, but then on the subway to work I fell into a thinking needlessly deeply about things on the subway thought-zone about how creepy the concept of dying for a dress is. And then I was like, maybe I should make the post about how these three dresses are all dresses that I'd want to get buried in, in my coffin, and then I started thinking about how maybe that's the ultimate mark of whether a dress is Great or not, and then I thought it might be cool to ask a bunch of people what outfit they'd like to be buried in and then blog about it. So maybe I'll do that! 

I added the "I guess" to the title to chill it out. I just paused the Grosse Fuge and now I'm back to being my regular chill self again. The other night I was out drinking with my co-workers (s/o to my co-workers! I love them so much) and we were talking about which restaurants in the world we'd most like to work at and I said, "Someplace really chill!" and then I was like, "I honestly don't know if there's a restaurant in this world chill enough for me," and then I thought about it and said, "Maybe a fish shack on the beach in Australia," and now I can't get this idea of "Fish shack on the beach in Australia" as being my Ultimate Chillness Locaysh out of my head. You know how tacky women's mags are always trying to help you find looks that can transition from day to night? Well my version of that is, here's three fabulous dresses that can transition from getting drunk at a fish shack in Australia to being buried in a coffin at your own funeral. 

-LJ

1. Gilbert Adrian evening dress from 1942

Lifelong pal-of-Strawberry Fields Whatever and co-proprietor of the wonderful (and this is coming from a person who thinks everything sucks) No One Can Sing The Blues Like No One Liina posted a link to this dress on my Facebook wall and now whenever I imagine myself doing anything cool in my head it's the dress I'm imagining myself wearing. Earlier today I was imagining myself, or a person in a story, being married to a concert violinist and living in Germany but really hating it and saying "Well I guess I'm going to go drink some fucking Riesling" while wearing this dress of course. Gorgeous. It's apropros of my life these days in that I've recently discovered that lamb is my favorite meat. I really like eating lambs. Dead lambs. (Grosse Fuge is back on!) A few weeks ago I was eating lunch with my mom at a Middle Eastern buffet yelling about how great Argo is while shovelling forkfuls of lamb into my face and it was a really beautiful moment in my life. I was like, "This is who I am." 

2. Bernhard Willhelm Jachooy dress

I don't know I guess if I really wanted this dress bad enough I could just buy it, since it's $132 on the Creatures of Comfort website and that's honestly not that bad of a price. It could be $232! $332! $432! I kind of wish it was. I fall in love with $432 dresses all the time but then forget about them really fast because there's no chance in the world that I could ever afford them so who even gives a shit. But $132 is such a weird amount of money. It represents all other potential prices somehow. I can afford it but I can't afford it. I could swing it if I really wanted but I'd definitely feel that $$$'s absence. I keep thinking about it like, "This Dress vs. 11 bottles of wine" and then I'm like "Well come on now Laura. That is SO MANY bottles of wine!" and the decision has already been made. I choose the wine.

3. The dress Gwen Stefani's wearing in the video for "Don't Speak"

A fun fact about my "process" is that while I was making this losery infographic out of 8000000 screen-caps I took of the "Don't Speak" video and kept x-ing rejected screen-caps, Photoshop would give me the option of "Save," "Cancel," or "Don't Save," and then I started singing "Don't Save" in my head to the tune of "Don't Speak," and it was soooooo stupid. I felt the same kind of low-impact embarrassed as I do when "You Sexy Thing" comes on at work and the restaurant's mostly empty and it's just me and one co-worker alone in a mostly empty restaurant listening to "You Sexy Thing." Ew. Certainly one of life's grosser moments.

Anyway, my major point about this dress is "Which woman's body wouldn't it flatter?" and the answer is "None of the above"- it's a trick question! It would flatter every woman's body. It's also the one out of the three that translates most coolly from fish shack on the beach to my own funeral. Also there's one part of the video where she's leaning over and you can see that the seam has burst down the side. It's pretty darling, and reminds you that Gwen Stefani used to be a chill normal person, and it kind of bums me out that she turned into this weird matriarch of her confusingly & seemingly aimed at nobody/gaudy/gold-sequinned L.A.M.B empire (the lamb and L.A.M.B of this post are a weird coincidence), because I feel like, had she been given the opportunity, she probably could have done a pretty cool job of being a chill normal person. I'll probably never write about Gwen Stefani again in my life so I just wanted to state for the official Gwen Stefani record of me that 1) Tony Kanal is a very beautiful man, 2) Kingston is a cooler name than Zuma, 3) I work out to "What You Waiting For" quite often and it really gets the job done & 4) Score for Gavin Rossdale that he married Gwen Stefani and now gets to just chillax and be a billionaire stay-at-home dad and do nothing but take Kingston and Zuma to the playground (they're ALWAYS at the playground) for the entire rest of his life. Gavin Rossdale's is the fish shack on a beach in Australia of lives.