I don't think you realize how much I need a pair of oxfords and one of those vintage cars. One of my favorite look books Mod Cloth has put out in a while.
Follow the link. I dare you.
http://www.modcloth.com/lookbooks/road-trip-052410?=5_24_homepage
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Friday, May 14, 2010
MIx Tapes and Life: the annotated spontiety
I peeled my slightly sticky face from the page of my book and squinted my eyes. I had fallen asleep out on the lawn again, listening to Led Zeppelin I in a homework-induced rage. The cold had finally left for certainly more exotic places, maybe almost for good, and I was in a glowing little fried up pile of books and headphones. I have been reading Nick Hornby's High Fidelity. I must inside me have a little too much man chemical or something because I connect with boys and men and 'romantic' man books waaay before I even begin reading an acne and hormone filled tweenie romance filled with saccharine scenes of chance encounters and gushing all over my hands if I am foolish enough to pick one up. Something about girls talking about boys and romanticizeing and fictitiousizing them in the way that, in my surely vast experience, they do has always made me puke up my verbose guts and disassociate myself with most of female population. Maybe that is just the nature of the high school climate, the retched and fascinating thing that it is. I am fairly sure that high school in general is just someones sick science experiement, and at any moment the lid will be pulled off the top of the school and a large hand will dip down, adding some hormones here, some self-inflicted drama there, collecting data. I'm sure you've seen the hand. Thus we come to the conclusion that life is just like a mixed tape. What? You didn't come to that conclusion from that rambling paragraph very aptly analyzing what does or doesn't happen in a woman's mind?
The art of making a mixed tape, or buying cassettes of any kind has fallen largely out of practice by the majority of the population. I know, you're thinking, what?! But its true--this new fangled device by the name of Compact Disc, commonly referred to by its friends, CD (the new kid even has one of those hip two letter nicknames), has seized the world by storm and replaced poor nostalgic Tape and Record.
What exactly is attractive about this shiny, tight little gadget of sorts, besides mere convenience? It cannot possibly hold all of the memories of a decade, band, or human in its nearly one dimensional plate of information. It has no emotional value, and quite frankly neither does the music that it might be storing so matter of factually. If you haven't noticed, good music is a endangered species, in need of desperate revival, and thus, so is the Art of the Mixed Tape. It is much more time consuming, and requires much more thoughtfulness-- the track list itself, the title you give your magnificent piece of compilated material. Track lists are made so hastily these days. Now don't get me wrong, I am sure there have been quite a number of dumpy tapes made, especially in the eighties. But when you concoct your own recipe for an emotion you want a mixed tape to evoke or soothe, a moody brooding tape, or a sunny optimistic one, there can be a great deal of mental arrangement and prowess that is involved. I have made myself several mixed tapes in the last few weeks. This is particularly convenient for me since I only have a tape player in my car, and so that is what I listen to when I am in the car. There is one entirely consisting of Dylan tunes, in chronological order, and thus a sort of mini biography. There is a dark perhaps brooding, definitely upset sort of hipster tape that contains the Violent Femmes, The Velvet Underground, The Kinks, Camper Van Beethoven, and an overdose of Nick Drake. There is my strictly psychedelic tape, featuring much acid rock like Jefferson Airplane and the Byrds, Janis and Hendrix, finishing with Casey Jones performed by the Dead. That one specifically is kinda funny cuz the last solo is cut off because the tape ended. Who can mass produce that sort of personality? One of my favorite tapes I've made was one containing the original vs slightly more modern cover of the song. So Robert Johnson would play Stop Breaking Down and then you would hear the White Stripes take, or Crossroads, and then Cream's cover. Pete Seeger's Turn Turn Turn and then the Byrds much more profitable version. There is a certain joy to be had when the tape player jolts to a stop and a tape full of songs that had not previously ever been put in that order before you put them that way are stored safely on that black ribbon and just asking to be jammed into the tape deck of your car and played with the windows rolled down. Then you pull the liner notes out and sometimes you are wildly disappointed by the content and the laziness of your friends, but sometimes you are greeted by ever reassuring annotations, a little personal explanation justifying each song that is about to be presented to you through song.
Now you say, alright this is all very sentimental and moving and I'm digging out all my old tapes as we speak this still doesn't have anything to do with anything you rambling air headed tangent entertaining just-as-pimply-as-the-rest faux blogger you. But it does. These mix tapes you spend a couple of dutiful hours consulting records and CD's and recording with much thought over what used to be your parents super lame Boston (A side) and Styx (B side) tape and thus giving it a much more purposeful and meaningful life. Life is just the same. When you listen to that mix of different singers and generations and times and protests, you have no idea what to expect, what you are going to hear next, where you are going to be swept. Are you going to be cheered eight miles high up? Know that all you have to do is keep on truckn'? Learn everything there is to know about Cuban politics or what love is? Isn't this eerily similar to your day today? Something someone said made you want to go hole up in a corner and write a dark and brooding poem, and something someone else said made you want to tell your friends how great they are by taking them all out to lunch, and that thing you read in the paper made you feel like the piece of crap kid you are, but it was all made okay when you turned on the radio and Hey Jude was playing.
And wouldn't it be great if life was annotated as well? Then you would know whyyy Billy would ever let such a stupid comment slip out, or why you would have ever thought it in your best interest to ask Summer Wheatly to the dance. You can confidently pull out the liner notes and it will say "To listen to after you were feeling very confident and rightly so because you are daaang good lookin' but have just had your hopes and dreams crushed by some doll in a mini skirt." Then you could say ahh! I'm not a complete idiot Mick Jagger has done it too and suddenly you don't feel quite so stupid and quite so alone. You know what they say, stupidity loves company. I think that's where we get those groups like PETA or congress, or perhaps the American Philatelic Society.
Mix tapes have just got it all man, the good the bad and the ugliest. The cool thing is though, is that you get to control it all this time, unlike that crap day you had yesterday. You are the tape jockey. So what are you doing sitting here reading this silly monologue? Get out there and mix it up.
The art of making a mixed tape, or buying cassettes of any kind has fallen largely out of practice by the majority of the population. I know, you're thinking, what?! But its true--this new fangled device by the name of Compact Disc, commonly referred to by its friends, CD (the new kid even has one of those hip two letter nicknames), has seized the world by storm and replaced poor nostalgic Tape and Record.
What exactly is attractive about this shiny, tight little gadget of sorts, besides mere convenience? It cannot possibly hold all of the memories of a decade, band, or human in its nearly one dimensional plate of information. It has no emotional value, and quite frankly neither does the music that it might be storing so matter of factually. If you haven't noticed, good music is a endangered species, in need of desperate revival, and thus, so is the Art of the Mixed Tape. It is much more time consuming, and requires much more thoughtfulness-- the track list itself, the title you give your magnificent piece of compilated material. Track lists are made so hastily these days. Now don't get me wrong, I am sure there have been quite a number of dumpy tapes made, especially in the eighties. But when you concoct your own recipe for an emotion you want a mixed tape to evoke or soothe, a moody brooding tape, or a sunny optimistic one, there can be a great deal of mental arrangement and prowess that is involved. I have made myself several mixed tapes in the last few weeks. This is particularly convenient for me since I only have a tape player in my car, and so that is what I listen to when I am in the car. There is one entirely consisting of Dylan tunes, in chronological order, and thus a sort of mini biography. There is a dark perhaps brooding, definitely upset sort of hipster tape that contains the Violent Femmes, The Velvet Underground, The Kinks, Camper Van Beethoven, and an overdose of Nick Drake. There is my strictly psychedelic tape, featuring much acid rock like Jefferson Airplane and the Byrds, Janis and Hendrix, finishing with Casey Jones performed by the Dead. That one specifically is kinda funny cuz the last solo is cut off because the tape ended. Who can mass produce that sort of personality? One of my favorite tapes I've made was one containing the original vs slightly more modern cover of the song. So Robert Johnson would play Stop Breaking Down and then you would hear the White Stripes take, or Crossroads, and then Cream's cover. Pete Seeger's Turn Turn Turn and then the Byrds much more profitable version. There is a certain joy to be had when the tape player jolts to a stop and a tape full of songs that had not previously ever been put in that order before you put them that way are stored safely on that black ribbon and just asking to be jammed into the tape deck of your car and played with the windows rolled down. Then you pull the liner notes out and sometimes you are wildly disappointed by the content and the laziness of your friends, but sometimes you are greeted by ever reassuring annotations, a little personal explanation justifying each song that is about to be presented to you through song.
Now you say, alright this is all very sentimental and moving and I'm digging out all my old tapes as we speak this still doesn't have anything to do with anything you rambling air headed tangent entertaining just-as-pimply-as-the-rest faux blogger you. But it does. These mix tapes you spend a couple of dutiful hours consulting records and CD's and recording with much thought over what used to be your parents super lame Boston (A side) and Styx (B side) tape and thus giving it a much more purposeful and meaningful life. Life is just the same. When you listen to that mix of different singers and generations and times and protests, you have no idea what to expect, what you are going to hear next, where you are going to be swept. Are you going to be cheered eight miles high up? Know that all you have to do is keep on truckn'? Learn everything there is to know about Cuban politics or what love is? Isn't this eerily similar to your day today? Something someone said made you want to go hole up in a corner and write a dark and brooding poem, and something someone else said made you want to tell your friends how great they are by taking them all out to lunch, and that thing you read in the paper made you feel like the piece of crap kid you are, but it was all made okay when you turned on the radio and Hey Jude was playing.
And wouldn't it be great if life was annotated as well? Then you would know whyyy Billy would ever let such a stupid comment slip out, or why you would have ever thought it in your best interest to ask Summer Wheatly to the dance. You can confidently pull out the liner notes and it will say "To listen to after you were feeling very confident and rightly so because you are daaang good lookin' but have just had your hopes and dreams crushed by some doll in a mini skirt." Then you could say ahh! I'm not a complete idiot Mick Jagger has done it too and suddenly you don't feel quite so stupid and quite so alone. You know what they say, stupidity loves company. I think that's where we get those groups like PETA or congress, or perhaps the American Philatelic Society.
Mix tapes have just got it all man, the good the bad and the ugliest. The cool thing is though, is that you get to control it all this time, unlike that crap day you had yesterday. You are the tape jockey. So what are you doing sitting here reading this silly monologue? Get out there and mix it up.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Reflections on My Day and the Epic Epicness of Public Education Vol. 1
I was walking down the street towards my school, that wretched school. Yeah it's really not that bad. But it is. My chucks made a sort of shuffle as they flexed along the sidewalk, laughing at me I'm sure as I tried to hide that I was sort of limping today (due to a hyper-extension I got while playing full contact basketball with my Baxter brothers) and was trying to make it seem like I just have a hip little swagger instead of a gimpy knee. I passed by the totally granola earth science teacher with his little cartoonist librarian girl friend.
"Hey schools out you're supposed to be headin' the other way!" he said.
"I know it!" I said, 'swaggering' along. "I know it."
I did know it too. Who should be expected to stay in school on a day like this? It wasn't a particularly warm day, but it was marginally warmer than it had been, and I find sunshine and uncle Walt to be more cheery than that friggen Pollyanna.
I waddled back out into the sunshine after I found out that detention had been canceled for the afternoon. How fortuitous. Shoving a mixed tape full of Dylan in I drove off with my head decidedly out the window. When I walked through the door my little brother was already opening his birthday presence. Shrugging off my baggage, literal and metaphorical, I sank into a bowl of Neapolitan ice cream and Leaves of Grass. Did you know that probably 80% of the kids at school don't appreciate transcendentalism and don't know what a beatnik is? You might think that I am stretching it, but I don't think I am. Maybe, maybe I am because I haven't actually taken a poll and it might be that teenage angst influencing things but I, so far, have only found 4 people I can have a decent conversation about music and books and movies with. Calvin, Kim, Eric and Ed. That is so a band name.
On a slightly different but not totally unrelated note, I was reading, and it was saying something along these lines: Here is how to not have a career:
1. Get dumped.
2. Junk college.
3. Get a job at a record shop
4. Work at record shops forever.
You know, I don't think that really sounds so dang bad! Do you? I feel that I have fairly considerable knowledge when it comes to music, and I mean good music by the way, and would totally rock at that job. I would probably loose a lot of that take home pay on fantastic records, but I wouldn't consider that a loss. Then I got thinking about jobs. And how the majority of them suck. And how going to college might possibly blow. But that you need jobs for records and movies and apartments and food and things, and that it is hard to get a really good job these days without a degree, and I don't even have a high school diploma yet. Then I was thinking that a more appropriate question to ask on job applications wouldn't be did you graduate from high school, but rather could you graduate from high school. I think we would have a much happier work force if we did.
I'm not so sure what I'm getting at, just that school right now really seems like a waste of my time, and I wish I could get out and get to that not having a career thing. Does that sound okay to you all? Whoever you all is?
"Hey schools out you're supposed to be headin' the other way!" he said.
"I know it!" I said, 'swaggering' along. "I know it."
I did know it too. Who should be expected to stay in school on a day like this? It wasn't a particularly warm day, but it was marginally warmer than it had been, and I find sunshine and uncle Walt to be more cheery than that friggen Pollyanna.
I waddled back out into the sunshine after I found out that detention had been canceled for the afternoon. How fortuitous. Shoving a mixed tape full of Dylan in I drove off with my head decidedly out the window. When I walked through the door my little brother was already opening his birthday presence. Shrugging off my baggage, literal and metaphorical, I sank into a bowl of Neapolitan ice cream and Leaves of Grass. Did you know that probably 80% of the kids at school don't appreciate transcendentalism and don't know what a beatnik is? You might think that I am stretching it, but I don't think I am. Maybe, maybe I am because I haven't actually taken a poll and it might be that teenage angst influencing things but I, so far, have only found 4 people I can have a decent conversation about music and books and movies with. Calvin, Kim, Eric and Ed. That is so a band name.
On a slightly different but not totally unrelated note, I was reading, and it was saying something along these lines: Here is how to not have a career:
1. Get dumped.
2. Junk college.
3. Get a job at a record shop
4. Work at record shops forever.
You know, I don't think that really sounds so dang bad! Do you? I feel that I have fairly considerable knowledge when it comes to music, and I mean good music by the way, and would totally rock at that job. I would probably loose a lot of that take home pay on fantastic records, but I wouldn't consider that a loss. Then I got thinking about jobs. And how the majority of them suck. And how going to college might possibly blow. But that you need jobs for records and movies and apartments and food and things, and that it is hard to get a really good job these days without a degree, and I don't even have a high school diploma yet. Then I was thinking that a more appropriate question to ask on job applications wouldn't be did you graduate from high school, but rather could you graduate from high school. I think we would have a much happier work force if we did.
I'm not so sure what I'm getting at, just that school right now really seems like a waste of my time, and I wish I could get out and get to that not having a career thing. Does that sound okay to you all? Whoever you all is?
Monday, May 10, 2010
Ten Things I hate and Ten things I love right now
HATE:
1. Poorly devised educational systems
2. When your go-gurt doesn't open cleanly
3. Idaho's shifty stinking weather
4. Realizing its almost time for you to go to work
5. When you are swinging happily along on a swing and you hit your feet on a bunch of rocks as you swing by
6. Pigeon poo
7. Work relating to school
8. Still having to be in school
9. Schoolhateitis (aka senior-itis) when you are not currently a senior
10. The Machine in general
(ha just kidding on that one. I just have to put it for the sake of putting it. Lets get our rage on).
LOVE:
1. A tee shirt is the original cover of Catcher in the freaking Rye on it
2. Go-Gurt
3. That little bit of sunshine- does more to cheer you up than junk food and Shirley Temple movies
4. Singing to chickens
5. Cool new blogs you find written by child prodigies
(www.thestylerookie.com)
6. Cactus (the band) and their cover of Parchman Farm
7. Realizing you have the song Little Boxes being performed by Pete Seeger on your ipod right now when your 56 year old history teacher doesn't but wishes she did so she could show it to the class to point out 50's conformity issues and you coming to her rescue!
8. Wearing shirts that have Alice and Wonderland on them
9. Cupcakes!
10. Door bell ditching people...Yes I must admit I am an adrenaline junkie
1. Poorly devised educational systems
2. When your go-gurt doesn't open cleanly
3. Idaho's shifty stinking weather
4. Realizing its almost time for you to go to work
5. When you are swinging happily along on a swing and you hit your feet on a bunch of rocks as you swing by
6. Pigeon poo
7. Work relating to school
8. Still having to be in school
9. Schoolhateitis (aka senior-itis) when you are not currently a senior
10. The Machine in general
(ha just kidding on that one. I just have to put it for the sake of putting it. Lets get our rage on).
LOVE:
1. A tee shirt is the original cover of Catcher in the freaking Rye on it
2. Go-Gurt
3. That little bit of sunshine- does more to cheer you up than junk food and Shirley Temple movies
4. Singing to chickens
5. Cool new blogs you find written by child prodigies
(www.thestylerookie.com)
6. Cactus (the band) and their cover of Parchman Farm
7. Realizing you have the song Little Boxes being performed by Pete Seeger on your ipod right now when your 56 year old history teacher doesn't but wishes she did so she could show it to the class to point out 50's conformity issues and you coming to her rescue!
8. Wearing shirts that have Alice and Wonderland on them
9. Cupcakes!
10. Door bell ditching people...Yes I must admit I am an adrenaline junkie
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Alice you naughty girl...
Items in this set:
Winchelsea Dress, $400
Dresses - MELODY - RED - Forever Unique, 200 GBP
Skirt - Vintage Clock Print Skirt, 175 GBP
Sand Ankle Leather Bow Platform Sandal Shoes - Loriblu, $495
Satin Shoes, 450 GBP
Winchelsea Dress, $400
Dresses - MELODY - RED - Forever Unique, 200 GBP
Skirt - Vintage Clock Print Skirt, 175 GBP
Sand Ankle Leather Bow Platform Sandal Shoes - Loriblu, $495
Satin Shoes, 450 GBP
If I had these, i would be Alice Kingsley many times over.
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