Carousel: Week Ending 19th March 2010
[ 19 March 2010 ]
La-la-la-la-links!
Attention: MEN! I know there isn’t a lot of good fashion writing around for you. I’m sorry about that. The good news is I have a new friend, his name is Jacob Kamara, & he knows what he’s talking about.
Liberalism, atheism, male sexual exclusivity linked to IQ from CNN.
Oh, wow, amazing. Joobili!!! I’m all over it!
Kris has the travel bug, a girl after my own heart. I’ve been to Neuschwanstein Castle, it is absolutely amazing.
Sunday Life: In which I quit the Sunday afternoon email catch-up habit & Sunday Life: In which I try out the new way to travel are both by Sarah Wilson, & as you know, I am a huge (ffffffffhuge!) fan of hers!
Zoetica rocks Sugarpill (again!), this time yellow eyes worn with black lipstick. Sounds kinda hideous? IT AIN’T!
I have never actually read A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius (I KNOW! Gasp-o-rama! I actually tried but couldn’t get into it… ?! Feel free to beat me with enormous branches) but based on this email exchange alone I love Dave Eggers. I wish I had read this before my panel on Sunday, it is totally on point.
I address some of this question in the addendum, but I want to address the “sell a lot of magazines by being pretty and ‘authentic’” part here. Honestly, Saadi, what the fuck are you talking about? You’re applying principles of mass-marketing to a money-hemorrhaging literary magazine produced out of my apartment. Please. No one here is trying to sell a lot of magazines. Why would we making a literary magazine in the first place, if sales numbers were our goal? And why would we be printing this thing in Iceland, and printing only 12,000 copies? Jesus, son, you have got to stop tearing apart and doubting the people who are obviously, clearly, doing good work. I mean, who the fuck do you believe in? The Baffler is nice-looking, too, and they print 20,000 copies. Does that put Tom Frank in league with Tony Robbins? I’m exasperated. Saadi, you have to trust me, and you have to trust Tom Frank, because Tom Frank, for example, matters. If Tom Frank, tomorrow, agreed to be in a commercial for the Discover Card – as Kurt Vonnegut did a few years ago, for whatever reason – you would still have to trust Tom Frank and respect him, because he has for a decade been doing work that matters, and you have no idea about his motivations or needs or state of mind when he say okay to the Discover gig. I am giving you really good advice, here, Saadi, and and offer it to other readers of the Advocate, because I wish I had the same advice pounded into my head at your age, when I was a bigger, more smug and suspicious asshole than you – I was the biggest asshole of all. To me, everyone was a sellout. Any band that sold over 30,000 albums was a sellout. Any writer who appeared in any mainstream magazine was a sellout. I was a complete, weaselly little prick, and I had no idea what I was talking about, and goddamn if I don’t wish I could take all that back, because I knew nothing then, just as you know nothing now. You simply cannot judge someone, especially someone whose work you have respected, when they disappoint you, superficially, once or twice. Think of the fuckheads who turned their back on Dylan when he started using electric guitars, for Christ’s sake. What kind of niggardly imbecile would call Dylan Judas when he plugged into an amp? What kind of small-hearted person wants an artist to adhere to a set of rules, to stay forever within a narrow envelope which we’ve created for them?
What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand. What matters is that the Flaming Lips’s new album is ravishing and I’ve listened to it a thousand times already, sometimes for days on end, and it enriches me and makes me want to save people. What matters is that it will stand forever, long after any narrow-hearted curmudgeons have forgotten their appearance on goddamn 90210. What matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, not who’s up and who’s down, but what someone has done and if they meant it. What matters is that you want to see and make and do, on as grand a scale as you want, regardless of what the tiny voices of tiny people say. Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a fuckload of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters. What matters is saying yes.
Vanessa Bauer is a fantastic illustrator.
The Joy of Unfollow & What I Learned At Couples Counseling. (READ THIS!) I also took the unfollowing one to heart. Oh it feels good.
Nonpareil Jo has The Forgotten Negatives Project. She says…
I’ve set up The Forgotten Negatives Project whereby I take film that has been shot but, for whatever reason, not developed (you’d be surprised how many people have film lying around that they never got around to having developed!). The resulting images are then examined in order to find some kind of narrative or common thread amongst these photographs that were ‘forgotten’ by their original owners. It started as a uni project but I will be continuing it long after I leave uni in the summer. So far I have had some amazing images from the films I have been given and I’m beyond excited about the potential of this project!
What is Nowhere magazine? “Offbeat travel articles written by novelists and poets who view travel through their idiosyncratic artistic lens.” Oh, hello!
The Mindfulist, your life considered. Ditto @themindfulist.
The right to bare arms, a radical self love story.
Tina from Violetville Vintage came to our magical tea party & documented it!
Stuck for something to do? Why not dress up your child as an assortment of dictators?
Asked what motivated her to undertake such a project, Kleivan replied, “We all have evil within us. Even small children are evil toward each other.”
Make a wish tree! I love you Yoko!
The comments on the Bikini Kill archive blog are rad.
Yesterday I sat on the ground with my sweet friends & their puppies & watched Dark Dark Dark perform. Click. That. Link. The song-writing is amazing. Listen!!! & like, maybe you should go & see them live. They were magnificent. Okay, look, I’m just going to embed this video & you can thank me later. It is goosebump music.
GRITtv: Kathleen Hanna: Three-Dimensional Role Model
UGH this is SO GOOD, watch ittttttttt!
Okay… happy Friday everyone! xox
RADICAL self-love & stardust,
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I just want to say that I absolutely love and look forward to your weekly carousel! Thank you so much for being an amazing blogger and inspiring me to become a more happy and spiritually in tune person~
The unfollowing stuff is pretty good!
I’ve recently unsubscribed from a tons of things, because I wanted to hear my own voice among all that noise… it worked wonders!!
Thank you Gala ;)
Tea parties are a big part of my life. I think I need to take it up a notch by enforcing a stricter dress code!
Oooh, where’d you get that summary of American Psycho? My uni friends were discussing visual film reviews today and this is totally the sort of thing I envisaged.
Cannot wait for American Psycho on Broadway!
Thank you for introducing Dark Dark Dark. I am in love.
Unsubscribing from junk email feels SO GOOD. It’s probably the most satisfying thing you can do online without deleting your browser history.
You should read Dave Eggers’ You Shall Know Our Velocity. It is HILARIOUS and BEAUTIFUL and it will most definitely feed your travel bug! Happy Friday!
I was dragged along to a show for a band I’d never heard of a few months back, and Dark Dark Dark actually opened for them. I may or may not have been under the influence of slightly illegal drugs at the time, but they were awesome.
and I love the American Psycho panels!
Love the Bikini Kill archive and Kathleen Hanna interview!
I love the ‘Unfollow’ article. I recently went through a mass ‘break-up’ on all my social networking sites and got rid of all the ‘excess’. People I don’t talk to anymore, negative people, people with bad values, people who are rude…and even now I noticed that when I wake up and scroll through my sites, I am much more happier reading the words of those I truly care about rather than those who just were in my life by chance of location.
HA. totally “unfollowing” my stupid ex.
Yeah, that new Flaming Lips is mind-blowing—I agree with that dude. And Tina from Violetville is a sweetheart! :)
KATHLEEN HANNA NOW AND FOREVER
am I missing something, or did the modcloth results not get posted?
So whatever happened to Love&Sequins? Been waiting (and paying) for it since december… :(
Love & Sequins & the competition winners (ModCloth + Murano) coming next week!
I never finished Heartbreaking Work, but, I absolutely love love love Dave Eggers. Just his work with the 826 makes me go wah wah wah.
Gala, Carousel rocks – how great is the world! And thank you for linking to Dave Egger’s wonderful, inspiring, spine-tingling rant (not quite the right word, but I mean it positively). He is joining my list of fabulous YES people (you and Wayne Coyne are already on there).
I love Kathleen Hanna so goddamn much.
dude, i’m loving the american psycho picture up the top! god that movie is so good!
this is one of the best carousels yet! i love that it focuses less on
fashion-y things and more on intellectually stimulating topics.
speaking of stimulating….i really liked the february 16th, 2006 voice post that i found on your livejournal 0_o
and the flaming lips rock my socks! (as did that 02/16/06 voice post)
S
I have to send a wish to the Imagine Peace Tower. I love the idea of creating a wish tree.
thanks for posting the Dark Dark Dark video (and coming to our SXSW day show!) – those dogs were so sweet.
Loving the cartoon :)
Just stopping by to say thanks so much for the link to the mens fashion blog SOO much better then some 40sec clip on youtube about layering you offer so much value you and your blog are definitly a work of art…PEACE
i love love love dave eggers, and having read all his novels, i’d recommend reading zeitoun, if you haven’t already. i love everything he’s written but i think it’s a really beautifully written, relatively simple but impossible to put down example of his work. then read everything else!
i hadn’t read that passage before however and it makes me feel a bit tingly. <3
I really really loved the Kathleen Hanna inerveiw, not only is she really interesting, I think the interview was also really well done.
I also like the Jacob Kamara articles, I always like to `steal` from men`s style