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– Joanna Newsom on the cover of her album, The Milk-Eyed MenderMy friend Emily Prince designed and embroidered it for me. I wanted an album cover that depicted real, touchable, substantial materials & handiwork (partly because of the album title, with its references to mending, and its excerption from the album’s central song—”Sadie”—which is full of sewing-related lyrics). It was actually a sort of distressing thing, initially, because I wanted to include everything significant and beautiful to me, and I didn’t know how that could be done. Emily and I started by itemising some objects which have accrued symbolic, nostalgic strength for us over the years (like narwhales, owls, hot air balloons, skeletons). We decided that she’d embroider these, and have them inhabit little fields of calico and burlap, the edges of which could touch and intersect, to give a sense of dense, almost airless amalgamation…because I think those symbols are at their most powerful when they brush up against each other. I’ve always been sort of obsessed by the alchemy of closeness, of cramming things together, compacting myth denser and denser.
Then we started collecting real objects… teeth, feathers, buttons, bones, acorns, a dead butterfly, leaves, coins, that sort of thing. And Emily attached them all to her tapestry. The photo went right in the center, with a macaroni frame, so it looked sort of like something a third-grader would make as a Mother’s Day gift, and sort of like a shrine for a dead person.
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Books are friends that never leave.
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“Automechanic” - Jenny O.
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Now, there are also plenty of other really great reasons not to talk about Dunham’s attractiveness or lack thereof — women: not reducible to objects, even when they’re on screens and stuff — but assuming it’s going to come up (and sometimes is even one of the things a movie/TV show/etc is trying to bring up), the most basic thought that should be in a man’s mind is: “I am not an arbiter of what is attractive.” This is pretty basic self-awareness stuff, but there it is: You can acknowledge someone is outside the norm without assigning a value to that fact. More to the point, unless the question is explicitly “Do you find Person X attractive?” — which, just to spell it out here, it effectively never is in a cultural criticism context — your opinion on the matter does not matter one tiny, goddamn iota.
– David Barry
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Li Hui
I couldn’t not post this.
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“Cry for Judas” - The Mountain Goats
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This has completely ruined Saved by the Bell for me. →
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Francois Harland
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“We The Common” - Thao and the Get Down Stay Down
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A Brief History of the Elusive Card Carrying Feminist
Rumors of the Feminist Card began circulating in the late 1800s and early 1900s during the rise of the women’s suffrage movement. Women who identified with the sociopolitically unpopular notion that women were equal to men would mysteriously receive a small card, by post, with the word FEMINIST, printed on one side in black ink, the other side blank. These cards were considered dangerous, and the consequences, should a woman be found with her FEMINIST card, were grave, so many women hid their feminist cards in the hems of their skirts or near their G-spots where they knew their husbands would never find them. When questioned about their cards, these women denied such existence vehemently, a practice that continues until today.
The FEMINIST cards were useful for allowing feminists to find like-minded women in a time when few women could publicly share their seemingly heretical ideas about equality. In church or other such male-approved gatherings, women would surreptitiously hold their FEMINIST card in a gloved left hand, and look around to see if other women were presenting their cards as such. After, these women would congregate in each other’s parlors to discuss freedom, voting, getting rid of corsets, and the latest skin treatments under the guise of sewing circles and “charity” work.
Once women received the right to vote, rather than become part of the mainstream, card carrying feminists became even more secretive. Women in the public eye would openly declare, to anyone who would listen, “I am not a card carrying feminist,” even though such was rarely the case. The more vehement the disavowals, it was often discovered, the more ardent the feminist.
In the 1970s, FEMINIST cards began appearing at women’s homes with much more frequency and before long, nearly one in three women had a FEMINIST card hidden somewhere in her home or on her person. Today, women holding these cards still congregate wherever and whenever, exchanging bold ideas about the future of women. When they are together, they proudly admit they are card carrying feminists.
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John Crawford
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“Old Friend” - Sea Wolf
