Atlanta Street Style: June

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New York Street Style: May

Our photographer B.C. took to the streets of NY to capture the last days of transitional style. Take a peek at these looks before you slip into something a little more summery!

 

Big Sound Saturdays: Tired Man, Vol. 1

Punchin’ cows sure don’t arouse me anymore

I’m getting’ tired of listenin’ to the coyotes snore

Oh, sleepin’ on the Rio Grande is makin’ him snore –

I’m a tired cowboy

Just a tired guy!

Welcome, pals, to the dustbin of history; the never-ending tale of the Tired Man! The story of men being “fed up with it” is just called “History:” “Make it new!” quoth irate facist Ezra Pound, and modernism gets an audience! Fuck capitalism!, quoth Marx, and the dancing table becomes commodity magic! I know it’s glib to refract a broad moral history through the single lens of male fatigue, but what I’m saying is that these songs of men feeling bored and agitated and sleepy—mostly, obviously, because of a woman—cast a broader, and deeper, line when they get all shuffled together.

“Meninist” Leader Plans Pro-Rape Rallies in Over 165 Locations

Update: the “official” meet-ups have been cancelled out of fear of harrassment, because Roosh’s sense of irony is about as deep as his humanity. However, chances are the meet-ups will still continue without being under the ReturnofKings banner, so stay careful!

Literal piece of human garbage* “Roosh V” (aka Daryush Valizadeh) has put out a call to his followers and readers of “men’s rights” website ReturnofKings.com (it’s a DoNotLink, but click at the peril of your own eyeballs and brain). These charmingly trilby-clad men—and you better believe this is a men-only venture—will be gathering to take in the breeze, “make new friends,” and brainstorm ideas to legalize rape.  I repeat, these are rallies to legalize the widespread rape of women. If you live in a big city and pass by a public park around 8pm on February 6, you may suddenly feel the irresistible pull of pick-up-artist magic, as these men struggle with their overwhelming hatred and resentment of women, men with feelings, the LGBTQ community, etc. etc. Steer clear of any straggling groups of lonely, awkward men shuffling their feet—you may quickly be sucked into their brilliant and persuasive line of arguing that rape should be legal, or that mass murderers like Elliott Rodger were killing because they had been spurned by women one too many times. (According to Roosh, “having game” is an important key to staving off murder.)

The mastermind has this to say about his series of play-dates (from DNAinfo.com):

The Women Writers Men Will Read

by I.C.

In recent months I have seen a specific article return repeatedly to my Facebook newsfeed: Esquire’s now rather infamous list of “80 Best Books Every Man Should Read”—a list full of macho (and occasionally misogynistic) novels by authors ranging from Ernest Hemingway to Charles Bukowski. Flannery O’Connor is the only woman author featured in the list (with her collection of short stories A Good Man is Hard to Find), a fact that rightly spurred indignation in feminist quarters.  Flannery O’Connor was thus still very much on my mind as I spent this past Thanksgiving in Savannah, Georgia, her birthplace, an elegant Southern city with charming squares and venerable oak trees dripping with moss and mystery. While there, I visited O’Connor’s childhood home. I am a great admirer of her short stories, and O’Connor is widely considered one of the greatest American writers, as well as perhaps America’s greatest Christian writer.  Touring the house in which she spent the first thirteen years of her life, I discovered some of the influences that shaped O’Connor’s work.  But I also found my mind returning to that Esquire list, and thinking about the larger question it implied: which books by women will men read, and why?

Atlanta Street Style

Dreamy styles for your winter break <3

Boys in Cafés

 

Edouard Manet, Chez le Pére Lathuille

More or less true vignettes from the lives of E.L. and S.A.

Waiting for your drinks in a crowded café, the man next to you pulls a dog-eared copy of High Fidelity from his pocket, angling the cover toward you. You wonder if his bad haircut is a self-conscious attempt to emulate John Cusack, or is simply a happy coincidence.

 

 

He – stocking cap, linen pants, bemused smile – approaches the table where you are preparing for class with a volume of Kant only to say that he, too, once read continental philosophy before he discovered the true “embodied philosophy” of yoga. From now on, you read all books in public with the spine flat on the table.

 

 

On your first date he asks you what kind of soul you think you have. He’s a romantic soul, he says. A lover, like Jim Morrison.

 

 

He uses a $1 bill as a bookmark in his copy of Infinite Jest. This he keeps casually on his nightstand, though you’ve never seen the bookmark move.

 

 

Your seatmate on a flight to L.A. watches The Seventh Seal on his laptop. He makes a production of turning the subtitles off.

 

 

Before you have sex he tells you what all his tattoos mean.

 

 

A barista once told you that he decided to get a masters degree in Medieval literature because it “shares a lot of resonances” with Men’s Rights literature. You don’t tell him what motivated your graduate degree.

 

 

He finds your taste in music really impressive.

 

 

His okcupid profile begins with two quotes, one by Adrianne Riche and one by Ernest Hemingway.

 

 

Your neighbor invites you to a party that he calls a “salon” where you play surrealist party games. He tells you how much it would mean to him if you read Death in Venice. The copy he gives you is the one he borrowed from you months ago.

 

 

What a shame it is, he says wistfully, that he wasn’t raised more like Thomas Jefferson, who could read and write Latin by age 10. What he couldn’t have done with an eighteenth century education.

 

 

He says he wants to write a novel about the Human Condition.

 

 

You discover years later that all those profound aphorisms he used to write in your notebook were actually just unattributed Weezer lyrics.

 

Big Sound Saturdays: That’s My Best Friend!

Most of you may know about the Bechdel test. If a movie does not feature two women on screen without a man present in either frame or conversation, we use the Bechdel test to declare it to be on the wrong side of feminism. Of course, this test is overly simplistic and often inaccurate. The famed lesbian feminist cartoonist, Alison Bechdel, after whom the test is named, recently admitted, “You can certainly have a feminist movie where there is only one woman–or no women.”^[1] I agree. I think some episodes of the TV show Entourage are surprisingly feminist in how they bend expectations of masculinity. But I think it also useful to have a metric for measuring gender equality in something as hyper-masculine as the film industry. So it got me wondering: why is there no Bechdel test for music? Specifically, for hip-hop and R&B, two genres famous for being about either a) individual financial success, b) heterosexual prowess, c) defeating one’s enemies with hot rhymes or d) all of the above. One of the most famous movies to pass the Bechdel test is Thelma & Louise because it is all about female friendship. I thought the same might be true for rap songs about friends. So I went on a search for some smooth and/or hard jams about platonic love.

Weekly Link Roundup: 11/20/15

Goodreads from this week on feminist friendships, ISIS, and more.

What We Mean When We Talk About Choice

Let me tell you something. My feminism doesn’t much care about Beyoncé. My heart may beat to the beat of “Partition,” but debates about the potential feminism of Yoncé’s lyrics, ass, or marriage leave me cold. Bey’s choice to make her body and sexuality central to her persona is held up against the fact that such displays are always filtered through white supremacist patriarchy. We can only ever think of her as fully in control of her performance, image and body, or totally and abjectly victim of a system that uses women’s bodies against each other. Her self-determination is always besieged by the fear that she might have been working for the male gaze all along. But no, we shudder, the male gaze is foiled and frustrated just so long as we can convince ourselves that this was Bey’s choice.

 

Choice, we pant fiercely. Choice will keep Beyoncé safe — choice will save us all.