belly of the beast. and today’s work station. #princeton #architecture #curvy (at Carl Icahn Laboratory / Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics)
you will hear thunder and remember me,
and think: she wanted storms.
a steady stream of whatever is catching my eye at the moment. skeery is a phonetical spelling of my last name.
• tweet
• sarahscire.com
• nyt bylines
• ask me
just skeery
a steady stream of whatever is catching my eye at the moment. skeery is a phonetical spelling of my last name.
• tweet
• sarahscire.com
• nyt bylines
• ask me
just skeery
Why do women care so much about what the magazines say and show?
They care because, though the magazines are trivialized, they represent something very important: women’s mass culture. A woman’s magazine is not just a magazine. The relationship between the woman reader and her magazine is so different from that between a man and his that they aren’t even in the same category. A man reading Popular Mechanics or Newsweek is browsing through just one perspective among countless others of general male-oriented culture, which is everywhere. A woman reading Glamour is holding woman-oriented mass culture between her two hands.
Women are deeply affected by what their magazines tell them (or what they think they tell them) because they are all most women have as a window on their own mass sensibility. General culture takes a male point of view on what’s newsworthy, so that the Super Bowl is on the front page while a change in child care legislation is buried in a paragraph on an inside page. It also takes a male point of view about how is worth looking at: Of fifty years of Life magazine covers, though many showed women, only 19 of those were not actresses or models; that is, not there because of their beauty…newspapers relegate women’s issues to the “women’s page”; TV news programming consigns “women’s stories” to the daytime. In contrast, women’s magazines are the only products of popular culture that (unlike romances) change with women’s reality, are mostly written by women for women about women’s issues, and take women’s concerns seriously.
Women react so strongly to their inconsistencies since they probably recognize that the magazines’ contradictions are their own. The magazines’ personalities are split between the beauty myth and feminism in exactly the same way those of their readers are split.
Are the magazines trivila, degrading, and antifeminist? The beauty myth is; the editorial content by now, wherever it can escape the myth, decidedly is not…twenty years ago the activists who demonstrated at the offices of The Ladies’ Home Journal offered a utopian list of article ideas: Instead of “Zsa Zsa Gabor’s Bed,” they proposed “How to Get an Abortion,” “How and Why Women Are Kept Apart,” “How To Get A Divorce,” “Developments in Day Care,” and “What Our Detergents Do To The Rivers And Streams.” And it happened: One recognizes each of these once-extreme suggestions as the typical fare of the new wave of women’s magazines.
“A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience.”
— The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf
Kate Moss and Lucian Freud by David Dawson
Reading BREAKFAST WITH LUCIAN by Geordie Greig (out in October 2013 from FSG) right now. It’s a loving—and yet unromantic—portrait of the complicated artist and man.
(Source: Spotify)
DID FRANK OCEAN AND RICCARDO TISCI SPEND THE NIGHT TOGETHER?
“It is difficult to square [Beyoncé’s] mainstream packaging with subversion of conventional and sexist views of gender. But ultimately, the policing of feminist cred is the real moral contradiction. And the judgment of how Beyoncé expresses her womanhood is emblematic of the way women in the public eye are routinely picked apart.”
“I saw a street called Myrtle Avenue, which runs from Borough Hall to Fresh Pond Road, and down this street no saint ever walked (else it would have crumbled), down this street no miracle ever passed, nor any poet, nor any species of human genius, nor did any flower ever grow there, nor did the sun strike it squarely, nor did the rain ever wash it. Dear reader, you must see Myrtle Avenue before you die, if only to realize how far into the future Dante saw.”
— Henry Miller, who grew up in Williamsburg, Bushwick and Park Slope, was a bona fide Brooklyn hater. (via the New Yorker)
duke ellington // symphony in black // with billie holiday
