Basically I'll watch any movie with Matthew McConaughey in it, and one of the
few McConaughemovies streaming on Netflix is The Paperboy, which I kind
of hated but also loved a little. It's set in Florida in 1969 and
it's directed by Lee Daniels; it's gruesome as hell and it gave me
awful, insomnia-triggering nightmares on Sunday night. But then there
are also some Paperboy moments that are so beautiful - mostly because of
Nicole Kidman, whom I'd never thought to care about before. She
plays a woman from Alabama named Charlotte Bless who gets her kicks
writing love letters to prisoners, including a convicted murderer named
Hillary Van Wetter, who's played by John Cusack and so hideously scary
that I'm pretty sure my John Cusack feelings are now fucked for life. After watching The Paperboy I read a bunch of reviews of it, and a lot of dude
reviewers were whining about how there's so many shots of Zac Efron in
his underwear. But I really hardly even noticed that; I was too busy
loving Nicole Kidman. A lot of the reviews also make a deal about stuff like her blowjob-pantomime scene and the part where she pees on Zac Efron at the beach, but I'm more fascinated by the way Charlotte's got a fucked-up heart and lust for darkness but she's also the brightest thing. She's always in canary-yellow and hot-pink and crazy florals and dreamy blue, and all that swirly-girliness is a cool contrast to her infatuation with exceptionally bad men. She looks like Brigitte Bardot and a trashy Barbie doll, and she makes me wish the word "sexpot" weren't stupidly obsolete these days. But then at the same time there's this mystical/groovy quality to her: like, she talks about how people in love have telepathic powers and she ends a lot of sentences with the word "dig," used interrogatively, in her tough Alabama accent. I don't want to be her, but I could watch her talk and walk around for hours on end. Mostly I wish I could take her character (along with Matthew McConaughey's and Zac
Efron's and Macy Gray's), and put them in another movie with a storyline
that's more indulgent of my excessively romantic temperament. That movie could keep a lot of actual moments from The Paperboy and use them to make something more uniformly dreamy, like the part where Charlotte and Jack dance in the rain:
It could also have a bunch of these other shots of Charlotte being amazing. I don't know, I just think tiger print + baby-pink lipstick is a pretty smart move.
And those sunglasses are so fly. And I love her headscarf. The beach scene has this really gorgeous shot of Zac Efron swimming really far out into the ocean, maybe some of the best movie-swimming I've ever seen, and then there's an equally gorgeous shot of some jellyfish floating up to him underwater (which then turns terrifying, and ends with the aforementioned Nicole-Kidman-peeing-on-Zac-Efron bit, which I'm just not that high on).
Yesterday in the middle of walking home from running errands and listening to Love Minus Zero/ No Limit it occurred to me that Bob Dylan has penmanship, and that it inevitably must look like something. I swear I've never been so grateful for the Internet as I was last night, walking in the front door of my apartment and Googling "bob dylan penmanship" before I even took off my shoes. It's such a bummer to think about all the poor people from the 1980s who walked home listening to Love Minus Zero and wondering what Bob Dylan's penmanship looked like but then had to wait for Rolling Stone magazine to print an image of it or whatever. Bob Dylan writes cute, sassy little As. I feel like here you can definitely tell that he's a Gemini:
And this is sweet:
But clearly the John & Yoko letter is the kicker here. Its coolness obviously goes way beyond the novelty of seeing what Bob Dylan's penmanship looks like. I think so much about the Bob Dylan lyric Name me someone who's not a parasite, and I'll go out and say a prayer for him- that sentence is literally one of the top five things I think about, ever. I like how Bob Dylan is always kind of bummed out about his own having to be an asshole. He wants not to be an asshole! But the cruddy old world makes it so darn tough. John and Yoko, however, are not parasites! So he's so sweet and gorgeous about them! "They help others to see pure light," he thinks. Me too, Bob Dylan! I think so too. -LJ
A few years ago LJ and Liz started a writing project based on taking Beatles songs and retelling them as stories or essays or story-essays. We named the project Let It Be Beautiful, and eventually turned our stories/essays/story-essays into little books and began selling them on Etsy.
Now we have four brand-new zines, our first new Beatles books in almost two years. LJ wrote While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Birthday, Liz wrote Sexy Sadie and I Wanna Be Your Man, and Jen illustrated all four zines. The zines cost $4 each or $15 for all four, and you can buy everything in our Etsy shop. Here's a little sneak peek at each book:
i. WHILE MY GUITAR GENTLY WEEPS
While My Guitar Gently Weeps is about the time LJ fell down the stairs at work and landed chin-first on a piece of shattered margarita glass, and about LJ locking herself in the office at work to eat dried papaya and read a J.D. Salinger quote, and also about wanting to drink a glass of aggressive white wine with notes of pineapple.
ii. I WANNA BE YOUR MAN
I Wanna Be Your Man is a valentine to some guys in some rock bands. It's about Mick Jagger and self-possession, Neil Young and being sick/free, Alex Chilton and graceful bitterness, Jonathan Richman and sweetness/responsibility, and Richard
Hell and self-transcendence.
iii. BIRTHDAY
Birthday is about being the moon, finding a copy of Franny and Zooey in the street, wanting to shoot a gun boredly at the ceiling, and not being indoctrinated by anything but the Beatles. It's also about colorstrology and kissing.
iv. SEXY SADIE
Sexy Sadie is a short story about a girl who looks like Joni Mitchell
but wants to look like Chrissie Hynde, and about her best friend who
possibly looks like Ray Davies. It takes place on the night of the day after Christmas and there's a lot about eyeliner and eyelashes and records and hair, with a little bit of alcoholism and semi-unrequited love.
So yeah, buy them all! We'll probably also throw in a Strawberry Fields Whatever sticker, because we are so sweet. Happy day-after-George Harrison's-birthday to everyone xo
David Bowie named his album Low Low because he was feeling low when he wrote and recorded it. It came out on January 14th, 1977, which is perfect. Everything about Low sounds like January. It is sharp and sparkling like an icicle, like sunlight reflecting over snow that fell a week ago. Snow that's just been sitting there, hanging out and being gorgeous but annoying you, the air's too cold to melt it since it's January and so a skin of thin, crisp ice forms across the top. When you step into the snowscape with your boot it cracks the ice and sounds crunchy like the sound of cutting paper on TV. Low is that layer of ice. It's glitter, yellow-white and light blue.
David Bowie recorded Low at a place called the Chateau d'Herouville in France. It was built in 1740 and is a dirty colour white like a dapply horse who's been running through the mud. It looks like it's probably haunted, but let's be honest with ourselves- nothing is haunted. You associate Low with the city Berlin but I like that it's from somewhere more ornate. I've never been to Berlin but based on everything I've ever heard about it, it seems like it's the exact opposite of every kind of thing I like.
You can hear the sadness in Low if you strain for it, but it's very faraway. David Bowie at his saddest still reads as peppy from mostly anybody else. He says there's "oodles of pain" on it but there you go, right? Low's pain is one that's been modified by the cuteness of the word oodles. It's not an album about a fucked up human bleeding his "issues" all over his audience like an "oodles of pain" album by John Lennon or Kanye West would be. It's just slightly more morose and less danceable than your average David Bowie record. I Iike that about David Bowie- it's a very rare and endearing trait in an artist, being happy more often than you are sad.
This January, I have been sad only marginally more often than I've been happy. Most of the time, I'm neutral. I work so much and my job is so involving that I feel like I only really exist two days a week, on my days off. The other five I slip into a coma of general management and don't have time to think about anything else, though lately I've been starting to figure out how to be more "real" as a general manager, getting a little rowdier and punchier with my staff, though that winning attitude's more of a February thing. In February at least there's hope. In January you're trapped inside of something, a season. You are at the very bottom of the canyon. In February, you've started climbing out of it.
My commute to work is stupid. I have to double-back two blocks the one way and then another three the other, and I hate double-backing, but in the wintertime I have no choice. It's either: 1) walk to work in the freezing cold, 2) take a cab there, or 3) double-back a little bit. I'm sure you feel me on this one. My commute's about the length of the first four songs on Low if you listen to Speed of Life and Breaking Glass twice, which I always do. It took me maybe thirty-five listens of Speed of Life before I realized, "Hey, there's no singing!" It doesn't need it. It's like a really great steak that a really good sauce would only ruin.
Breaking Glass is my baby, my pet. I like how you can hear the Brian Eno in it. When Brian Eno shows up a song it's like running into somebody you're actual friends with who you haven't seen in forever on the street. Like today I ran into my boyfriend on the streetcar, and it made me feel like God for sure is real. Brian Eno sounds always remind me of waterfalls made of light, but on Breaking Glass they're like waterfalls made of light that have frozen. Just hanging there, hanging out.
In January business at my restaurant was very slow, because in January business at every restaurant is very slow. It's cold and people want to eat take-out under blankets at their houses. Plus they feel fat as a hangover from Christmas and the last thing they want to spend all their post-Christmas no-money on is food. So on weeknights I would have to cut all my staff to save the restaurant from going bankrupt, and then I'd have to busser-close the restaurant myself, which means a ton of things but mostly is a bitch because of sweeping and mopping the floor. I'd sweep and mop to this song and just kind of dance around in a way that felt really cool and David Bowie-y to me but probably wouldn't call David Bowie to mind in anyone else's opinion.
My restaurant has four floors if you count the basement and sometimes once we're all closed up I'll run from the bottom to the top of it five times as cardio, which I think says a lot about who I've been this January- "You're a wonderful person, but you've got problems," David Bowie might tell me, very democratically. Crazy things go on in a person's head when they're not allowed to spend time outside. Time spent out in nature, underneath the sun and moon and sky, should be the best thing any one person's life has got going, and in January that time is ripped away from you. It becomes your enemy.
Sound and Vision is my favorite David Bowie song. It's usually the exact length of the walk from my streetcar stop to my restaurant, and on days when it isn't, I just don't even have it in me anymore. I don't want to bother with my day. I feel like the point of living out a day is to find out if anything interesting happens over the course of it and if I don't get to start out with at least hearing David Bowie sing "Blue, blue, electric blue, that's the color of my room," well I quit then. I'd rather just burrow out beneath my comforter and never know.
One Friday I woke up feeling gruff as hell but fifteen minutes into dinner service I paired a tempranillo with the octopus ceviche to a fat old man who looked like a gargantuan toddler, and I mean that as a compliment, and then I found out he was crazy-rich and owned a vineyard in Serbia and deeply approved of my wine pairing, which made me feel like I'm on the right track in a deeply important way- and that's why I show up. For anything. Everything's so fucked this time of year and yeah, I wonder all the time about sound and vision, and how these days are all for nothing, the winter: it's all because of nothing. We whine and moan our nights and days away, nothing to read and nothing to say, slips of paper inside our parka pockets reading Ways In Which The Winter Inconveniences My Human Life, "my cuter boots are also slipperier" and so on, when all it really means is that the Earth is further away from the Sun. It means nothing. It's only the Sun's fault.
1. The part in Chronicles, Volume One Where Bob Dylan Says But what he say, I knew not what About James Joyce
Bob Dylan is so important to me that the only reason in the world I don't have his name tattooed on my body is because I think he would think that was pretty lame and pathetic of me. I read his book last Autumn; it's an excellent book. My third-favorite part of Bob Dylan's excellent book is when he talks about how Joan Baez was famous before him but he knew in some fiery and guttural way that one day he would get to her. That's so magical for Bob Dylan- I wish every crazy thing I knew in some fiery and guttural way would come so fantastically true. My second-favorite part of Bob Dylan's book is when he says that Al Capone "seems like a man who never got out alone in nature for a minute in his life," which is a cool point to make about Al Capone or anybody and also stresses that Bob Dylan thinks it's important to get out alone in nature for a minute or two in one's life, which is true- I'd be pretty heartbroken to find out if Bob Dylan didn't think that. My favorite part of Bob Dylan's book is when he says But what he say, I knew not what about James Joyce. It's one of my favorite sentences I've ever heard, humbly shoved into the extremely boring section of Bob Dylan's book about how he never collaborated with a playwright named Archibald Something on some project I forget now. The entire rest of Bob Dylan's book is written in proper, regular English, and then all of a sudden in the middle of reading it you're so thrilled to realize that you're about to find out about Bob Dylan's James Joyce opinions, and then it turns out that they're written in this wildly grammatically incorrect way: But what he say, I knew not what. The first time I read that sentence I immediately Googled it because it was so gorgeous, so perfect to me, that I thought it must have been a quote from something else that Bob Dylan reappropriated. But it wasn't. It was just Bob Dylan writing down the sentence But what he say, I knew not what about James Joyce, because that's what the world is. The amazing, perfect place where that sentence happened. -LJ
2. The Scene When Pete & Peggy & Ted Chaough Have Oysters & Whiskey Sours & Everyone's in Love with Each Other
That was one of my favorite things in 2013. It's from the third-to-last episode of season 6 of Mad Men, which is titled "Favors." Pete and Peggy and Ted Chaough have just flown on Ted Chaough's plane to some meeting with Ocean Spray somewhere, and they're nicely drunk and laughing a lot - giggling - and you can really feel the looseness of their shoulders. Ted Chaough and Peggy are in love and Pete's a little jealous:
but he's also happy for her and says that sweet thing about "I've seen that look." And then Ted Chaough goes to call his wife, and Pete and Peggy are in love with each other again for a minute, and then Peggy makes fun of Pete for being in love with Ted. It's all very romantic and Pete refers to it as "a romantic dinner," and the restaurant has checkered tablecloths and lots of nautical decor and those cute dumb red candles with netting. The best is how Peggy asks Ted to order her a whiskey sour and then the whiskey sour comes and Pete steals it, then pours half into his own glass:
and Peggy looks a little annoyed, but whatever, she's cool, it's all right. I was listening to a Grantland interview with Chuck Klosterman and he was talking about this scene and saying how Pete and Peggy have an "easy knowledge" of each other that's kind of rare on Mad Men/in life, and that really got to me. Easy knowledge is everything. Whiskey sours and oysters and loose shoulders and nice warm restaurants with wood paneling are everything. Along with this scene, another of my favorite things in 2013 was the end of "Freak Scene" by Dinosaur Jr., the part that goes "Sometimes I don't thrill you/Sometimes I think I'll kill you/Just don't let me fuck up will you/cuz when I need a friend it's still you." Sweetness hidden inside something weird and messy is one of the best kinds of sweetness, I feel.
I saw the Big Star documentary at a press screening last May and I loved it, because it's about Big Star. It also kind of bugged me, for reasons that are unfair, like how so tragically little footage of Big Star exists in the world. After a while I got antsy watching a bunch of dudes talk about how great Big Star is (even though those dudes include Lenny Kaye, who's basically my favorite person). But now the movie's streaming on Netflix and I rewatched it last Sunday and it was less antsy-making: probably because I knew what to expect, but also because I watched it in bed in my PJs when it was nice and hot and sunny out. Bed is the best place for watching a Big Star movie; Big Star is very closely associated with sleeping and dreaming and being lazy and feeling perfect about it, at least in my book.
The movie's called Nothing Can Hurt Me, by the way, which is so smart. It's a lyric from "Big Black Car," which is maybe my third favorite Big Star song, I think? If you could get songs tattooed on your body - not song lyrics but like actual songs, with their complete actual sound and aura - then I'd get "Big Black Car" tattooed on myself. But you can't, so I got Alex Chilton's name tattooed on me instead. So here is a list about Alex, and everyone/everything else I love in the Big Star movie:
i. ALL OF BIG STAR, ALL TOGETHER
For some reason the other day I read the first paragraph of the New York magazine review of Wolf of Wall Street, which says how in the movie Martin Scorsese "continues his worship of masculine energy: energy for its own sake, energy as a means of actualizing the self, energy because there’s nothing worse in Scorsese’s cosmos than passivity, which inevitably translates as impotence." I like Martin Scorsese's movies just fine, but mostly that sentence interests me because I'm into the idea of Big Star as an alternative to Scorsese-y energy: energy that's masculine and feminine, tough and dreamy, neither active nor passive, just...receptive. That's the sort of energy I worship.
Plus I just really love this picture because they're brothers. Weird brothers, I guess: I
can't imagine too many brothers spend a lot of time sitting around bedrooms together. They're probably like the Darjeeling Limited brothers, bitchy and impossible and hotheaded and wonderful. Wes Anderson is a nice alternative to Martin Scorsese.
ii. BIG STAR MINUS CHRIS BELL, I GUESS
It's sad that Chris Bell left when he did but we have to accept it, I guess. And they look pretty all right as a trio, especially here, with Alex being a big diva and Jody having amazing bangs as per yoozsh:
And what's happening on Alex's shirt here? Are those spaceships? They look like spaceships, but also like hamburgers. I don't know how you pull off wearing a shirt printed with cartoon things that look like spaceships and hamburgers and still be completely tough and elegant, but there you go: Alex Chilton.
If Strawberry Fields Whatever was going to have an official, or unofficial, jewelry designer, I would definitely have to make it be Venessa Arizaga. There's a lot of weird and beautiful things to look at on her website, which you can find by clicking on her name in the heading of this section. The bracelet seen above is called the Hawaiian Punch bracelet- my favorite part of it is the kiwi fruit, and how it makes me remember the taste of Hawaiian Punch on my tongue. She also names a lot of her jewelry after songs, songs that I love; most impressively, there's a Dear Landlord necklace, which is a very strange choice of Bob Dylan song to name a necklace after. I really have no choice but to support a jewelry designer who names her shit after John Wesley Harding album tracks.
PS: Also I think that SFW needs to have bonkers Venessa Arizaga friendship bracelets! This bracelet is called the Makai bracelet, and I think Jen May should have it:
Lately I've been dressing pretty boring and sexy because I'm a boss and want to be feared a little, so this wolf-shaped bag really hits the spot and honours my boring sartorial present and wacky sartorial past at the same time; plus what the fuck is the fucking point of wearing something not-animal shaped if there is an animal-shaped option available?
Welcomecompanions is a really weird brand; their website is worth checking out. The concept is, they make things that look like other things. For instance, this really gorgeous banana-leaf shaped purse (I would still rather a purse was shaped like a leaf than not-a-leaf, even though a leaf is still inferior to an animal)
I posted the link to this page of fantasy animal babies to my Facebook wall and the link did this really trashy thing where the picture it attached to the link said IT'S SCARY HOW REAL THEY LOOK. A RUSSIAN GIRL MADE THEM AND NEVER EXPECTED A HUGE RESPONSE... and there was nothing I could do but accept the fact that my Facebook page was going to look lame in an Internetty way which I guess it does implicitly for being a Facebook page. But my point is, it was worth it to me, because look at this little cheetah baby alien!
And look at this little deer baby alien! I feel like Kanye West should buy some of these for Nori.
Speaking of Kanye, look how fucking awesome this Kanye-coat is!
Kanye-coat, I really like the word Kanye-coat. Kanyecoat. This whole collection is definitely the best effort I've seen from fashion-Kanye to date, there's a sweater that says "Le Ski," which is nice. There are a couple of misses, like a collarless white maybe scuba-material jacket with elbow-length sleeves, but isn't that the greatest part of Kanye West? The misses?
The rest of the collection is mostly just chill and sexy dude clothes that would make me want to kiss the men wearing them if I ever had the good fortune of seeing a man wearing them. Excellent Kanyecoat after excellent Kanyecoat after excellent Kanyecoat.
In the traditional Kanye West style, Kanye accompanied this collection with a very long and weird speech that begins, It's like if you had a housekeeper, and she was the best housekeeper in the whole world, and she said she had the idea to start being a florist. You would pay her three times as much to not follow her dream of being a florist. That point about paying her three times as much to not follow her dream is SO not where I saw the housekeeper/florist metaphor going! I thought it was going to be about helping your housekeeper.
