someone pointed out to me once that while guys name their songs after girls all the time (ie. "Layla," "Gloria," "Celia"... etc,) "you never hear a song by a girl that's called, like, 'Steve.'"
Two Steves, one Apple... no songs :(
that was about a year i heard taylor swift's song "hey stephen" on fearless. it was almost like she'd overheard our conversation, and was smart enough to realize that being the first to rise to the challenge would totally GIVE HER THE EDGE over all those ditsy cheerleaders who are traipsing around trying to scoop her man.
"all those other girls, well, they're beautiful
but would they write a song for you?"
no, they wouldn't. and that's why after this line she GIGGLES. taylor knows that steve will choose her, the girl with substance and talent. the song's message is so empowering it's almost... feminist. (but let's not get ahead of ourselves.)
girls don't usually sing like this to guys. when a girl wants to sing about romantic longing, she usually confides in a third party; she doesn't start singing to the guy until after their relationship has begun. (if she just wants sex, of course, she can be direct from the beginning, à la "If U Seek Amy") which is why i think it's pretty cool that taylor (who's a serious christian) comes out and says something as direct as this:
"i can't help it if you look like an angel
i can't help it if i wanna kiss you in the rain"
she's assertive, but also romantic, two adjectives that our culture places at opposite poles (at least when they're applied to girls): being assertive means competing with boys, not pursuing them, and being romantic means playing passive and hard-to-get. which explains at the same time why no one before has written a song called "steve" ... and also why taylor swift is pretty cool.
(this sentiment might be a little outdated since fearless came out last november, but "hey stephen" is an album track so you can't complain you've heard it too many times on the radio or anything.)
yayyyyy taylor!
It's a composite picture of the members of Massive Attack, created to promote a concert series they curated last June in London.
bought a sweet
that's knit with ear flaps
swam in
's therapeutic mineral waters
watched
do his very best bruce willis impression in "taken"
have walked everywhere&am veryvery tired
tmrw: geysers&waterfalls
see you out in NATUUUURE
xxoo,
mavis
A number of my friends are in love. I am not. I try not to give them advice about their relationships. Events in my own life have made me doubt that I have very good judgment in this department, even when weighing in as an objective third party.
And besides,
Are the lessons from my experience even applicable to someone else's? Isn't every love unique? Isn't love purely subjective? And shouldn't each new love ideally be untainted by harmful expectations based on previous experience? What if... what if we just don't know anything
You don't know anything
I don't know anything
about love?
Would that be a bad thing?
why does a blog whose bread and butter is calling women ten thousand times skinnier and prettier than you "fat" until you want to escape down a crack between your couch cushions with a bag of extra crunchy cheetos and NEVER BE HEARD FROM AGAIN prominently feature an ad for "dietribe," a show about... normal-looking women? you'd say it's consistent, since they're normal-looking women being encouraged to diet, except that they're there, on the front page, and no one is calling them whales or claiming to have clawed out their eyes at the sight of them.
guys, sexism is over! whoo!
but really. sorry about how this blog is becoming "the hater." but i'll have plenty positive to say when exams are over tomorrow and i get to head to ICELAND, land of soothing hot springs and vibrating hallucinogenic pop music. here's a foretaste of all the THINGS FROM ICELAND THAT I LOVE that will soon appear on this blog: bjork's hair. because the woman herself, and her music, are too awesome to be discussed during the purgatory that is exam period. but those BRAIDS. look upon them, mortals, and be ENSNARED.
plus i agree with ross. "radical chic" struck me as mean-spirited and unfair; leonard bernstein may have ended up a kook but a casual listen to "west side story" is all it takes to figure out that he had more substance than wolfe gave him credit for. and you'd think that as a talented but out-of-touch geezer himself (sometime listen to him sneer "cohabitation" like a foreign word - it's like he's been in a coma since the seventies), tom would cut lenny a break this time around.
