#1990s body glitter

[y2kbeautyandother2000sstuff]

Naturistics Body Glitters in in Stardust and Angelic and Lip Sparkles Lip Gloss in Kiwi, Passion Fruit and Strawberry

late 1990s-early 2000s (does anyone know a more exact year?)

Found on Ebay, user cassiecosmetics

[90s-2000s-barbie]

1990s - 2000s Body Glitter Trend

[omgthatdress]

An Analysis of the Ubiquity of Mall Brands in the late 1990s to early 2000s, or

I Fucking Hate These Guys

by OMG!thatdress

If you were a tween to teenager from roughly 1997 to 2004, chances are, you were left with profound life-long trauma caused by someone wearing Tommy Hilfiger, Abercrombie & Fitch, Ralph Lauren, Nautica, American Eagle, The Gap, Old Navy, or, if you were came along a little later, Hollister or Aeropoastale.

I cannot overstate to my young followers how over-saturated these brand names were in teen culture at the turn of the millennium, the extend to which EVERYONE was wearing them, and yet, in a weird way, how light the imprint they actually left on fashion history was.

Watching iconic teen shows of the era, you don't see any of them because a.) TV teenagers tend to be way cooler and more stylish than awkward and desperate real teenagers actually are, and b.) these brands were all copyright protected, which kept their names and logos off the airwaves.

Look in a middle school yearbook, however, you'll see it. Look at your aunt and uncle's high school photo albums, you'll see it. Ask any late Gen X or early Millennial. It was real and it was fucking awful.

The big question is why? Why? WHY, GOD WHY?! There's a lot of answers to that question.

First of all, I'm going to cite this absolutely wonderful article from Collector's Weekly about why everyone's grandma had a hideous orange couch in the 70s, and give the most simple and straightforward answer: it's what was available.

This is when the concept of online shopping is still very much in its infancy, and the hub of American consumer culture was still your local mall. If you needed new clothes, you went to the mall. And guess what stores were at every local mall? You guessed it.

For the second answer, I'm going to dig up this utter relic from the early days of internet meme-ing, that has nonetheless stuck with me and had a profound impact of my understanding of how popular fashion works:

I'm pretty sure that the reason Abercrombie & Fitch manages to survive as a brand today rests solely increasingly middle-aged Millennial men whose sense of style has refused to evolve past the shit their mom bought them in high school.

And why the hell would they? Nobody wore Abercrombie because it made them stand out or feel special. I'm still pretty convinced that nobody actually *liked* the aesthetic or thought the clothes actually looked good. You need not look past the basic color palette to understand these were not brands meant for uniqueness or self-expression.

While Britney Spears pranced around stage in her iconic neon colors and body glitter, American teenagers existed in a never-ending hellscape of washed-out neutrals, faded denim, and American flag primary colors.

All of which served its exact purpose: it was safety. It was a way to appear cool if you didn't want to go through the ordeal of actually having a personality or a sense of style. Which, of course, goes back to point number one: it was just shit you bought at the mall because you needed clothes.

It wasn't enough to save you once the school bully caught that whiff of autism and/or queerness on you, but it was enough that you could blend into the herd and pray no one ever noticed you.

Underneath it all was a very subtle undercurrent of class and classism: to wear mall brands was to declare to the world that you could indeed afford to shop at the mall. It meant you weren't, god forbid, poor.

Status symbol clothing goes back to the invention of clothing itself. The concept of brands as status symbols is still very much alive and well, its just more limited to actual luxury brands nowadays. One need look no further than your favorite high-end children's clothing website to see that rich parents still very much think it important that you know their five-year-old is wiping its boogers on Versace.

None of these brands were actual high-end luxury brands, but they still advertised and presented themselves as such. Their ads featured signifiers of "all-american" (read: White) wealth: yachts, skiing, horses, beaches, shirtless dudes with chiseled abs playing verious sportsballs.

The color palettes and cuts mimicked the preppy "Ivy" style of the New England old-money elite, along with their hobbies and lifestyle. You may not actually own a horse, but you can wear a polo shirt. You may not be able to run without breaking your ankle, but you wear the same shirt as the dude holding a football in the ad.

It was an elitist, White and skinny image that didn't age well into the diversity and body-positivity of the 2010s.

In 2003, a lawsuit was filed against Abercrombie & Fitch alleging systematic racial discrimination. People of color were rarely hired, and if they were, they were given jobs in the back, away from customer view. In 2005, the U.S. district court approved a settlement of $50,000. A few years ago, Netflix released the documentary White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch which admittedly I haven't watched yet because my hatred runs too deep to remind myself of its existence.

It was a hatred of Abercrombie & the (white, thin, neurotypical, heterosexual) conformity that it represented that drove me screaming into the loving arms of Hot Topic and Linkin Park. Jordan Calhoun wrote an excellent article for the Atlantic about his experience growing up poor and Black and not fitting in to the Abercrombie aesthetic.

I would be very remiss if I didn't bring up the "urban" mall brands of the early 2000s: Fubu, Sean Jean, Ecko, Baby Phat, among others. They were favored by Black teenagers and White teenagers who wanted to be Black. I know there's a lot to be said about these brands, but I'm too Caucasian to really be able to talk about them with nuance. Maybe someone else will, and I will be very happy to listen.

As much as I hate Tommy Hilfiger, I really do have to give him credit for recognizing the incredibly lucrative "street wear" market and selling power of hip-hop. While most of these mall brands kept their image sparkling White, Tommy made Aaliyah his brand ambassador and regularly appeared in the wardrobes of popular rap and R&B artists of the time.

It'd be very easy and very reductive to say that the changing ideology of the 2010s was the downfall of preppy mall brands, but really, the thing that truly killed them was the downfall of the mall itself. Shopping habits changed, and logos and brand names no longer held the power they once had.

The moral of the story is that being a teenager is fucking hell, and these popular brands both offered the safety of conformity and a status symbol to hold over the heads of the poor and uncool. The irony is that everyone who hated them as teenagers (read: ME) and the freaks who grew up to truly love the power of self-expression through personal style (read: ME) became the truly cool people. If you wore Abercrombie you grew up to vote for Donald Trump.

GO GOTH. PREPS SUCK. THE END.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Published: Oct 24, 2023

I was around 10 the first time my mother asked if I thought I was a boy.

There was a period from the 1970s-1990s where the concept “tomboys”, although perhaps originally intended as a derogatory term, provided a space for pre-pubescent girls to act, play and dress in ways that were not stereotypically coded feminine; in other words, some of the freedoms boys were granted. My mother clearly felt that raising a daughter and a son should be drastically different experiences. This was not largely the case, as I wanted to be just like my older brother.

Growing up, my parents had strict ideas around the roles of men and women in society. Men were “head of the household” and had the final say on decisions, as well as being the primary disciplinarian; women’s primary roles were as caregivers. My parents were religious, raising me in a religion where homosexuality was taught to be immoral and unnatural.

In some ways, I fulfilled many stereotypes of feminine attributes: being gentle, soft-spoken, and nurturing towards others. I enjoyed playing with dolls and soft toys; however I also had a keen interest in cars and transformers. As a painfully shy child, I preferred the company of fictional characters in books more than people; this level of social awkwardness alone cast me as “odd”.

However, what had been convenient and financially fiscal - hand-me-down clothing from my brother - had become my clothing of choice. I only wanted to wear “boys’ clothing”, much of which came in my favourite colour (blue) versus the bright warm colours of “girls’ clothing”. Having worn both, I had realised that boys’ clothing was looser fitting, had more flexibility of motion, and was more comfortable. I disliked glitter, sequins, lace and frills, none of which was found on boys’ clothing. As a very shy child who refused to wear the clothing supposedly designated for my sex, this often invoked commentary and disapproval from adults around my appearance and my body. Boys’ clothing, with its longer sleeves and longer torso, covered up more of my body; a body I was painfully aware that others were observing and judging, sometimes openly.

My mother had told me how excited she was when she learned she was going to have a daughter to “do girly things with”, fantasising of frilly dresses and ballet rehearsals. Instead, she had me. Although my parents allowed me to play with the same toys as my brother, pursue the same sport as my brother, and (eventually) choose my own clothing, my mother’s question showed that she still didn’t understand: “Do you think you’re a boy?” My mother, likely feeling that she had been short-changed around the perks promised with raising a girl, could not understand how her daughter, who declined most things coded feminine, could indeed be a girl who was comfortable with this fact. 10 year old me didn’t understand just how loaded the question was, but did find it strange and hurtful, replying, “No, I’m a girl” in a confused tone.

Thankfully, as the concept of “tomboy” was popular while I was growing up, this meant there was a known word that described the type of girl I was; one that allowed me to know that, no matter what I liked or did, I was still a girl.

There was another word that described the type of girl I was. I was around 8 the first time I heard the word “gay”.  A boy slightly older than me had spit the word out, yelling at another child “I’m not gay!” This caught my interest. Although the word itself was unknown, the meaning had been clear with the derision and emphasis the boy had placed on the word, his face consorting in disgust as the word left his mouth. It must be something really bad was the clear impression.

I had the opportunity to quench my curiosity that same week. In line with other tasks that could be deemed naughty, looking up bad words in the dictionary required careful timing to when family members were distracted elsewhere. I timed my moment carefully and looked up “gay”, which naturally led to my learning the term “homosexual” - oh. Reading the definition, it was almost like a warm recognition spread across my chest, embracing me. I hadn’t known that homosexuals existed, but I was pretty sure I was one. After this, I would sometimes sneak out the dictionary just to read these words again; although just ink on paper, it was proof that other people like me existed.

I would later use this word - gay - against myself, turning it from something comforting and wonderful, to the same kind of contempt that shrouded the word whenever I heard others use it in real life. Laying in bed at age 11, I had prayed to not be gay, promising myself that I would never tell anyone about these feelings and grow up to marry a man. Although it had been fine when my feelings towards certain girls had just been an intense desire to be their friend and be near them, these feelings had become much harder to ignore now they had turned into more concrete thoughts, such as how beautiful a certain girl was, how shiny and luscious was her hair, and daydreaming around our hands accidentally touching. It was much harder to deny the very clear signs of a crush, particularly when all my female friends had crushes on boys. In order to fit in, I focused my energies on talking about how “cute” one of the boys in the class was - I had never interacted with him, however he had soft features and long eyelashes, and seemed gentle in nature. I would then go home and dream about my female friend and her lovely, long dark hair.

Coming into puberty, I had also started learning more about my religion’s views on homosexuality, specifically that it was immoral and unacceptable. This led to a lot of emotional hurt and confusion for me. At this point, homosexuals may as well have been mythical creatures, discussed by others, but never appearing as an identifiable person in real life.

* * *

Several years older, 15 year old me was struggling. Since puberty, I had been trying to push away any inkling of desire I had towards other girls.; it hadn’t worked. Now with slightly more understanding around the world and how I fitted into it, I had started the process of accepting that these feelings weren’t going anywhere and were, perhaps, just a normal part of me. I had also started considering that if I had been created with intent, as my religion taught, then no mistakes were possible, and my attraction towards girls, which had always been there in some form, was as natural and as similar as anyone else’s. Although it had improved, my social awkwardness still made me frequently feel like an outsider, with my secret and furtive crushes on other girls further making me feel different in a way I couldn’t discuss with anyone. This feeling would decrease when I eventually met other lesbians, however this wouldn’t happen for several years.

I had started to shop in the women’s department, and outgrown my obsession with cars, instead falling into an obsession with music; something familiar to many teenagers. Still, I preferred comfortable clothing that would be classed as “gender neutral”: jeans, baggy t-shirts, converse shoes. I wore my mid-length hair messy, fantasising about the short hairstyles lesbian duo Tegan and Sara sported. I spent a lot of time listening to music with female musicians who played guitar, preferring artists who openly sung about and desired other women, or those who sang with ambiguity in their love songs, allowing me to place my own meaning on them. My penchant for female musicians had not escaped the notice of my friends, who gently teased me about it, although they didn’t seem to understand the cause for this fixation.

Again, now a teenager, the same question from my mother, phrased slightly differently this time: “do you feel like you’re a man?” I remember telling my friend about this at a sleepover the same night - her response was silence. She didn’t know what to say.

* * *

Several years passed. I was now an out lesbian with a rainbow flag proudly adorning the wall of my share-house bedroom. This included being out to my parents, who had taken the news reasonably well and had been supportive. Having a friendly gay male couple move into their neighbourhood in my late teenage years had significantly increased their understanding and acceptance of homosexual relationships - and had allowed me to finally meet others “like me”. I had fulfilled my fantasy of cutting off the majority of my hair, with the longest section being a fringe that flopped into my eyes. I had also gone back to shopping in the men’s wear section, though my wide hips and narrow shoulders made finding men’s clothing that fit me well difficult. I had finally had my first kiss, although not yet a girlfriend, though most of my time was spent dreaming about this.

My parents had reassured me that they loved and accepted me when I told them I was a lesbian. They had continued to reaffirm this in the following months, however despite this acceptance, my mother showed that she still doesn’t understand, asking me the same question again, some months after I came out: “do you want to be a man?” It was as if every five years, the thought occurred to her again that I must have gender identity disorder because of the way I looked and acted.

I’m in my late 20s now. I have been an out lesbian for a decade, and have had several girlfriends, although my current relationship is by far the longest. My parents adore my girlfriend, buying her birthday presents, and always letting me know how much they approve. My mother comments on how nice my girlfriend’s dresses are and how much she likes her long hair, telling me, “you would look so nice in that”. I feel fatigued with a lifetime of trying to convince her I am genuinely comfortable like this, and tired of defending my short hair, which is my favourite part of my appearance. My girlfriend gets angry on my behalf whenever my mother makes these comments, defending me and saying she thinks I look beautiful as I am.

I am thankful that I never came across the often repeated and homophobic rhetoric that only boys like girls, and therefore lesbians are actually just straight males on the inside. My conviction of my own self, that I am a girl who likes girls, has protected me in this way, but may not have had I had been born a decade later, where it seems many young girls similar to myself are being taken to gender clinics. Or that my mother’s conviction that I am secretly a transman - which has been a reoccurring theme across my life so far - could have caused consultation with a medical professional to convince me of this very fact; something that, as a child who felt different and never seemed to fit, I am sure I would have trusted the adult expert’s views on.

Somehow - bewilderingly - now almost 30, my mother again asks me if I feel like I’m a man and if I’m actually trans. I explain as patiently as I can that no, I’m a lesbian woman and it’s hurtful to me that she seems to refuse to truly accept this, questioning whether I can be a woman because I don’t match her view of what a woman looks like.

She listens to my words and apologises, saying she thinks she understands now. I can’t help but wonder if we’ll be having this same conversation in another five years.

==

It's weird that they would prefer that their god made a "mistake" and put her in "the wrong body," than that their god doesn't make mistakes, and that she's who he wants her to be.

It's a bad sign when a far-left ideology and a conservative religious view coincide.

[fem-lit]

The surgeons are taking the feminist redefinition of health as beauty and perverting it into a notion of “beauty” as health; and, thus, of whatever they are selling as health: hunger as health, pain and bloodshed as health. Anguish and illness have been “beauty” before: In the nineteenth century, the tubercular woman—with her glittering eyes, pearly skin, and fevered lips—was the ideal. Gender and Stress describes the media’s idealization of anorexics; the iconography of the Victorians idealized “beautiful” hysterics fainting in front of male doctors, asylum doctors dwelt lasciviously on the wasted bodies of anorexics in their care, and later psychiatric handbooks ask doctors to admire the “calm and beautiful face” of the anesthetized woman who has undergone electroshock therapy. Like current coverage by women’s journalism of the surgical ideal, Victorian journalism aimed at women waxed lyrical on the sentimental attractiveness of feminine debility, invalidism, and death.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

[ourladyofserows]

Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949-1990)

Marker Cones, 1982

Chromogenic print

“As DeSana developed his Suburban series in the early 1980s, gender and sexuality became increasingly ambiguous in his images. Here, photographed from behind, the body is a headless, unidentifiable creature composed of shapes. The marker cones evoke a similar indeterminacy: they are socially gendered “feminine” as makeshift stilettos and “masculine” as signifiers of roadside construction or sports, perhaps pointing to DeSana’s own experiences or ideas about the disciplining of bodies. A glittering field of bright-green artificial grass adds to this surreal composition, evoking the Astroturf surface of a football field.” - Exhibition label, Brooklyn Museum, New York

[sgokie2024]

“New York glitter-punk outfit The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black began life as a near-death experience. Shortly before forming the band in 1990, front woman Kembra Pfahler was strangled in a brutal mugging and almost died. While recovering, battered and zonked on painkillers, she watched the 1975 horror movie Trilogy of Terror on television. The film stars Karen Black, the quirky cross-eyed actress whose wildly erratic career encompasses everything from some of the key American films of the 1970s (Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Nashville, Day of the Locust) to mainstream Hollywood schmaltz (Airport 1975) to obscure straight-to-VHS exploitation / horror dreck. In Trilogy’s best-known segment, Black is stalked by and eventually possessed by a cursed malevolent Zuni fetish doll which has come to life. [SPOILER ALERT] It concludes with a final jolting image of the now-crazed and murderous, knife-wielding Black grinning blank-eyed and maniacal to the camera to reveal a mouthful of razor-sharp teeth identical to the Zuni doll’s … In her traumatized state, that savage and disturbing image -- combined with almost dying -- made a powerful impression on Pfahler. Inspired, she would blacken out her teeth, conceal her natural fine-featured beauty under cadaverous make-up and take to the stage clad in little more than a pair of thigh boots and a coat of body paint. Pfahler’s look can suggest a character from a John Waters film given an “ugly make-over”: think of Divine as the acid-scarred Dawn Davenport in Female Trouble (1974), an image which seems to anticipate TVHKB’s twisted glamour. Like Divine before her, Pfahler shaves off her eyebrows and shaves back her hairline to accommodate her extreme eye make-up. “I want to be both very beautiful and very repulsive,” Pfahler would explain to The Toronto Star in 1994.”

/ From my own blog post “The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black at Meltdown Festival 10 August 2012” /

Born on this day 63 years ago (4 August 1961): Californian surfer girl-turned-NYC provocative performance artist, Cinema of Transgression actress and Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black voodoo-dolly singer Kembra Pfahler. Pictured: portrait of Pfahler by Fumi Nagasaka, 2019. Read more here: https://tinyurl.com/yxezrp27

[parttimestudentfulltimehuman]

The simultaneous rejection and embrace of womanhood

The idea for this theme derived from my set of photos with my mom as the main subject: high school-senior-mom, wedding-day-mom, and after-I-was-born-mom. It demonstrates her growth into womanhood wonderfully, and as a girl who’s stepping into her 20s, I’m on the path of discovering what womanhood means to me too.

Berthe Morisot, Woman at Her Toilette, 1870-1880. Oil on canvas.

Impressionism

Mary Cassatt, Mother and Child, 1905. Oil on canvas.

Impressionism

Faith Wilding, Peach Cunt, 1971. Watercolor on paper.

Contemporary Art - Feminist Art Movement

Carrie Mae Weems, The Kitchen Table Series, 1990. Photography.

Contemporary Art - Feminist Art Movement

High school-senior-mom, 1996. Photography.

Family artifact

Nancy Spero, 'Sheela-Na-Gig at Home', 2000. Handprinting and printed collage on paper, installation with underwear and clothesline.

Contemporary Art

Wedding-day-mom, 2002. Photography.

Family artifact

After-I-was-born-mom, 2003. Photography. 

Family artifact

Sa’dia Rehman, Divine Guidance, 2010. Sculptural installation.

Contemporary Art

Marcy Chevali, With a Little Pink Spot, 2013. Scuptural installation.

Contemporary Art

Fleabag (TV Show), 2016 - 2019

Hester Finch, Motherhood & Pregnancy. Soft pastels on paper.

Contemporary Art

WHEN I SAY THAT WE ARE ALL TEEN GIRLS

by Olivia Gatwood, 2019

what I mean is that when my grandmother

called to ask why I didn’t respond to her letter,

all I heard was, Why didn’t you

text me back? Why don’t you love me?

And how can I talk about my grandmother

without also mentioning that if everyone

is a teen girl, then so are the birds, their soaring

cliques, their squawking throats,

and the sea, of course, the sea,

its moody push and pull, the way we drill

into it, fill it with our trash, take and take

and take from it and still it holds us

each time we walk into it.

What is more teen girl than not being

loved but wanting it so badly

that you accept the smallest crumbs and call

yourself full; what is more teen girl than

my father’s favorite wrench, its eternal loyalty

and willingness to loosen the most stubborn of bolts;

what is more teen girl than my mother’s chewed

nail beds, than the whine of the floorboards in her

house?

What is more teen girl than my dog, Jack,

whose bark is shrill and unnecessary,

who has never once stopped a burglar

or heeled on command but sometimes

when I laugh, his tail wags

so hard it thumps against the wall, sometimes

it sounds like a heartbeat, sometimes I yell at him

for talking too much, for his messy room,

sometimes I put him in pink, striped polos

and I think he feels pretty,

I think he likes to feel pretty,

I think Jack is a teen girl.

and the mountains, oh, the mountains,

what teen girls they are, those colossal show-offs,

and the moon, glittering and distant

and dictating all of our emotions.

My lover’s tender but heavy breath while she sleeps

is a teen girl, how it holds me and keeps

me awake all at once, how I sometimes wish

to silence it, until she turns her body and

the room goes quiet and suddenly I want it back.

Imagine the teen girls gone from our world,

and how quickly we would beg for their return,

how grateful would we be then for their loud

enthusiasm

and ability to make a crop top out of anything.

Even the men who laugh their condescending laughs

when a teen girl faints at the sight of her

favorite pop star, even those men are teen girls,

the way they want so badly to be so big

and important and worshipped by someone.

Pluto, the teen girl, and her rejection

from the popular universe,

and my father, a teen girl, who insists he doesn’t

believe in horoscopes but wants me to tell

him about the best traits of a Scorpio,

I tell him, We are all just teen girls,

and my father, having raised me, recounts the time he

found the box of love notes and condom wrappers I

hid in my closet, all of the bloody sheets, the missing

socks,

the radio blaring over my pitchy sobs,

the time I was certain I would die of heartbreak

and in a moment was in love with a small, new boy,

and of course there are the teen girls,

the real teen girls, huddled on the subway

after school, limbs draped over each other’s shoulders

bones knocking, an awkward wind chime

and all of the commuters, who plug in their

headphones

to mute the giggle, silence the gaggle and squeak,

not knowing where they learned to do this,

to roll their eyes and turn up the music,

not knowing where they learned this palpable rage,

not knowing the teen girls are our most distinguished

professors, who teach us to bury the burst

until we close our bedroom doors,

and then cry with blood in the neck,

foot through the door, face in the pillow,

the teen girls who teach us to scream.

Hester Finch, Burning Nudes. Soft pastels on paper.

Contemporary Art

Nothing New, 2021. Taylor Swift ft. Phoebe Bridgers.

Installation view of Sanja Iveković: Works of Heart (1974–2022) at Kunstalle Wien, Vienna, 2022, showing Ženska kuća (Women’s House). 1998–ongoing. Mixed-media installation.

Contemporary Art - Feminist Art Movement

[realityhop]

Katherine Ryan: Glitter Room (2019)

"Once upon a time, the Protestant work ethic was a leveling, democratizing attitude and social force.  It served as a critique of aristocratic exemption from necessary labor because it insisted that everybody had to justify their consumption of goods by their prior production of value—everybody."

— James Livingston, No More Work (2016)

"When the mob ran Vegas... If you ended up dead in a ditch in the desert, it was probably because you tried to get in the way of the money."

— Ram Denison, Money Machine (2020)

"Why Is Money So Difficult to Discuss? In a word, money is a scary topic."

— L. Randall Wray, Making Money Work for Us

"As a Dionysian sexualist, Sade abolishes the great chain of being, sinking man into the continuum of nature, but he cannot shake off the intellectual hierarchism of his age. [...] Sade’s libertines freely wallow in filth and find no humiliation in being flogged or sodomized in public.  The excretory voiding of one person into the mouth of another is Dionysian monologue, a pagan oratory.”

— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

"All savages speak and by speaking they reveal their solidarity with the decency and kindness that are the root of civilisation.  Conversely all civilised men are capable of savagery. [...] The Marquis de Sade, rebellious in his imprisonment, had to give his rebellion a voice.  He spoke out, as violence itself never does.  In his rebellion he had to defend himself, or rather to attack, seeking to fight on the ground of the moral man to whom language belongs."

— Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality (1957)

"What Berlin plausibly argues is that value-pluralism can be used to support a moral minimum, precarious, shifting and ridden with conflicts, which has priority over any political ideal.  If we read him in this way, which is consistent with much of his work, Berlin is not so much a theorist of liberty as a philosopher of human decency." — Isaiah Berlin (2013)

"A dispassionate view of Nature showed it to be indifferent to happiness, human or otherwise.  Incessant predation, destruction and death are the natural order of things.  In view of these facts, Sade posed a question: should not the enlightened individual, liberated from religious delusions, accept this order and revel in it?  By doing so, he or she will find pleasure, even as the species as a whole remains sunk in suffering." — Seven Types of Atheism (2018)

“Where Montaigne turns to nature, Pascal turns to God.” — Feline Philosophy (2020)

— John N. Gray

“Your significance doesn’t depend on your position.  Your significance doesn’t depend on a title.  Your significance depends on the power of the spirit of God working through you.”

— Senator Josh Hawley | Twitter (2023)

"Sublimation and renewed focus on the spiritual isn't always the right response to loneliness."

— LeahLibresco | Twitter (2014)

"We are obliged to enjoy ourselves to pieces, or, more precisely, to consume ourselves to pieces, and in comparison with not so long ago the contemporary drive regulation is reduced to a minimum."

— Paul Verhaeghe, On the New discontents of Civilisation (2015)

"4chan was populated by a group of declassed individuals set so far apart from society and so wholly lacking in identity that they began to obsess over it."

— Dale Beran, It Came From Something Awful

"You know, there's kind of two options the left has for disillusioned men.  The first is the Marxist promise of economic revolution. [...] So while feminism tells women you hate your body and you’re constantly doubting yourself because society did this to you and needs to change, we kind of just tell men: ‘you’re lonely and suicidal because you’re toxic.  Stop it!’  We tell them they're broken without really telling them how to fix themselves."

— ContraPoints, “Men” | YouTube (2019)

“Maybe human work at its most elementary, work, as it were, at the zero level, is the work of cleaning the traces of a stain.  The work of erasing the stains, keeping at bay this chaotic netherworld, which threatens to explode at any time and engulf us. […] What’s the source of Chaplin’s comic genius?  What’s the archetypal comic situation in Chaplin’s films?  It’s being mistaken for somebody or functioning as a disturbing spot, as a disturbing stain.”

— Slavoj Žižek, Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006)

“To fight against the desire to be erased.”

— Kate Zambreno, Heroines (2012)

“Humiliation strips people of their self-esteem and reduces them to vulnerable creatures rather than significant beings in a world of meaning.”

— Solomon/Greenberg/Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (2015)

"[”Closer” is] super negative and super hateful.  It’s ‘I am a piece of shit and I am declaring that and if you think you want me, here I am.’”

— Trent Reznor (1995), found in Adam Steiner's Into The Never (2020)

"If intimacy says, “We’re close and the same,” and independence says, “We’re separate and different,” it is easy to see that intimacy and independence dovetail with connection and status. [...] Biological influence does not mean patterns of behavior can’t be changed.  And cultural influences are extremely deep and difficult to change."

— Deborah Tannen, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation (1990/2001)

[whisperthatruns]

Bird

The moon plays horn, leaning on the shoulder of the dark universe to the infinite glitter of chance. Tonight I watched Bird kill himself, larger than real life. I've always had a theory that some of us are born with nerve endings longer than our bodies. Out to here, father than his convoluted scales could reach. Those nights he played did he climb the stairway of forgetfulness, with his horn, a woman who is always beautiful to strangers? All poets understand the final uselessness of words. We are chords to other chords to other chords, if we're lucky, to melody. The moon is brighter than anything I can see when I come out of the theater, than music, than memory of music, or any mere poem. At least I can dance to "Ornithology" or sweet-talk beside "Charlie's Blues," but inside this poem I can't play a horn, hijack a plane to somewhere where music is the place those nerve endings dangle. Each rhapsody embodies counterpoint, and pain stuns the woman in high heels, the man behind the horn, sings the heart. To survive is sometimes a leap into madness. The fingers of saints are still hot from miracles, but can they save themselves? Where is the dimension a god lives who will take Bird home? I want to see it, I said to the Catalinas, to the Rincons, to anyone listening in the dark. I said, Let me hear you by any means: by horn, by fever, by night, even by some poem attempting flight home.

Joy Harjo, In Mad Love and War (1990)

[y2kbeautyandother2000sstuff]

Bath and Body Works Art Stuff Trick or Treat Candy Corn Crush Spooktacular Lip Gloss and Roll on Glitter

1996-2004

Found on Pinterest, user Olivia

[jaylahdenileuniverse]

Clothes:

Top: Kutesy Koolaid - Baline Sweater @ Ebody Reborn Event

Bottoms: Kutesy Koolaid - Baline Skirt @ Ebody Reborn Event

Accessories:

Rings: BIJOU - I'm Fine Rings

Nails: 1990 - Kawaii Glitter Set @ Dubai

Make-Up/Tattoo/Appliers:

Eyelashes: Mai Bilavio - Valentine Collection 1st Date

Eyes: Little 8 - Sev Eyes (Caramel)

Anatomy:

Body: Meshbody - Legacy

Head: LeLUTKA - Briannon Head 3.1

Hair: Doux - Clover Hairstyle

[nephilimmoretti]

[178]

Makeup Jack Spoon. Hara Glitter eyebags

Clothing [Brior] Delina Set

Accessories ! 1990 - Amina Set

Body Reborn by EBODY v1.69.6

Pose mirinae: makima

[bitter69uk]

“New York glitter-punk outfit The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black began life as a near-death experience. Shortly before forming the band in 1990, front woman Kembra Pfahler was strangled in a brutal mugging and almost died. While recovering, battered and zonked on painkillers, she watched the 1975 horror movie Trilogy of Terror on television. The film stars Karen Black, the quirky cross-eyed actress whose wildly erratic career encompasses everything from some of the key American films of the 1970s (Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Nashville, Day of the Locust) to mainstream Hollywood schmaltz (Airport 1975) to obscure straight-to-VHS exploitation / horror dreck. In Trilogy's best-known segment, Black is stalked by and eventually possessed by a cursed malevolent Zuni fetish doll which has come to life. [SPOILER ALERT] It concludes with a final jolting image of the now-crazed and murderous, knife-wielding Black grinning blank-eyed and maniacal to the camera to reveal a mouthful of razor-sharp teeth identical to the Zuni doll’s … In her traumatized state, that savage and disturbing image -- combined with almost dying -- made a powerful impression on Pfahler. Inspired, she would blacken out her teeth, conceal her natural fine-featured beauty under cadaverous make-up and take to the stage clad in little more than a pair of thigh boots and a coat of body paint. Pfahler’s look can suggest a character from a John Waters film given an “ugly make-over”: think of Divine as the acid-scarred Dawn Davenport in Female Trouble (1974), an image which seems to anticipate TVHKB’s twisted glamour. Like Divine before her, Pfahler shaves off her eyebrows and shaves back her hairline to accommodate her extreme eye make-up. “I want to be both very beautiful and very repulsive,” Pfahler would explain to The Toronto Star in 1994.”

/ From my own blog post “The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black at Meltdown Festival 10 August 2012” /

Born on this day 62 years ago (4 August 1961): California girl-turned-NYC provocative performance artist, Cinema of Transgression actress and Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black voodoo-dolly singer Kembra Pfahler. Photo of Pfahler by me!

[sarahrserfati]

"Capturing a composite truth that stretches beyond historical fact, the works on view explore Beirut’s constant physical transformation during the protracted wars. In the early 1990s, Beirut’s ravaged downtown embarked on vast reconstruction, launching the largest urban redevelopment project of the city’s history with the establishment of the Beirut Central District. Examining the persistent effects of the war, as well as the use of photography and video as an index for archiving a violent past that lingers, the works in this exhibition cast a quizzical, mediated eye onto images of the city from this time.

In a large-scale video work consisting of kaleidoscopically mirrored loops, dilapidated buildings silently crumble into clouds of debris. As the playback reverses, the buildings reemerge from their ruins, only to crumble again. The footage is derived from video documentation of hundreds of buildings being demolished to make way for the new, glittering postwar city center. As the video plays forward and backward in a seamless and infinite loop, the dust billows dissolve into abstract blooms, confronting the viewer with the horror and beauty that history exerts onto living spaces. The iterative rise and fall, doubling and rebroadcasting, evokes the contingent nature of power relations, urban communities, and the body politic."

Via Paula Cooper Gallery

[brillliantcorners]

Mikhail Baryshnikov (dancer, born January 27, 1948, in Riga, Latvia) "Working is living to me,'' Mikhail Baryshnikov once said. He has worked hard and lived to the fullest. His name is synonymous with dance throughout the world. His dancing is a sublime vision at the dawn of a new century. Mikhail Nikolaevitch Baryshnikov was born in Riga in 1948 and began his ballet studies there in 1960. In 1964, he entered the Vaganova School in what was then called Leningrad, studying with the legendary Aleksander Pushkin and soon winning the top prize in the junior division of the International Varna Competition. Word began spreading of this extraordinary young dancer of precious classical purity and exquisite presence. Clive Barnes gave notice of what was to come after observing the student Baryshnikov in Pushkin's class, describing him as ""the mostemperfect dancer I have ever seen.'' He joined the Kirov Ballet and made his debut at the Maryinsky Theater in 1967, dancing the “Peasant” pas de deux in Giselle. Choreographers recognized in Baryshnikov a unique instrument for new dance, and soon Oleg Vinogradov, Konstantin Sergeyev, Igor Tchernichov, and Leonid Jakobson created ballets for him. Jakobson's 1969 Vestris, a feast of virtuosity and wit, became Baryshnikov's signature role and, along with his intensely otional Albrecht in Giselle, his calling card to his new home. Baryshnikov defected from the Soviet Union in 1974 in search for artistic and personal freedom in the West. He made his debut with the American Ballet Theatre that same year, dancing Giselle with Natalia Makarova. He stayed with ABT for the next four years, voraciously learning and defining new roles, expanding his horizons as well as those of male dancing. memorably, he also staged ABT's productions of The Nutcracker, Don Quixote and Cinderella. In 1978, Baryshnikov left ABT for New York City Ballet, where he could work with George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. He returned to ABT in 1980, not only as principal danceR&But also as artistic director, a distinguished position he held for almost a decade. In the years that followed, Baryshnikov's explorations of artistic frontiers became one of the most dazzling spectacles of the age: dances by Merce Cunningham and Erick Hawkins, the play Metamorphosis on Broadway, The Turning Point, White Nights and Dancers on screen, my Award-winning television specials with Twyla Tharp and Liza Minnelli, glittering galas for Martha Graham and Paul Taylor. Baryshnikov is a naturalized American citizen. In 1990, he teamed up with Mark Morris and founded the White Oak Project, a unique dance company that reflects Baryshnikov's passion for modern dance and bodies the extraordinary transformation of a paragon of Russian ballet into the very model of perfection in American modern dance. Not long after coming to the United States, Baryshnikov looked both back and ahead at the immense possibilities of a dancer's lifetime. "I have been very lucky to work in so many new ballets, but that is what a dancer's work is,'' he wrote in the 1978 Baryshnikov At Work. He likened the challenge of dancing different choreographies and styles to learning new languages, confessing that "there are never enough.'' He added that "every ballet, whether or not successful artistically or with the public, has given me something important. Everything that I've done has given me more freedom.'' Has anyone in the field of dance ever made so much of that freedom? The generosity of Baryshnikov's spirit braces the world. He has danced to Adam and Tchaikovsky, but also to Dmitri Shostakovich and Philip Glass, to Duke Ellington and Frank Sinatra. He has danced to silence, and he has danced to his own heartbeat. He has been the ideal Albrecht and Prince Siegfried, but he has also stepped out in style as a paragon of jazz dancing. He has been, and continues to be, a surprise. He bodies so many different and impossibly beautiful things to so many people that it is next to impossible to define him save to say this: Mikhail Baryshnikov is a dancer.