Dispatches from a second story bedroom

Lady Menudo smoothed out on the R&B tip with a pop feel, appeal, to it

I wish the quality of this video were better because I am having a serious Jones for the full on Rolston color explosion right now. If you had a subscription to Us Magazine before it became Us Weekly you'd know what I was talking about. 

I like how the 90s version of the 60s, the 90s version of Fosse, and the 90s version of a Minelli musical all reside in this video. Even the 90s version En Vogue resides within it because they've become the Lady Temptations with a bunch of new members I've never seen before and who are younger than the group itself. This is your OG En Vogue.  

My feeling is, you can't be one of the Temps and not have at least been born in the 60s. I feel crazy for even having to make that statement.  So to see some En Vogue member who probably wasn't even old enough to have been considered age appropriate for the Destiny's Child upheaval (circa 1999-2000) is distressing to my old oves (that's short for ovaries). It's like old balls but for ladies.

I like revisiting old movies with costumes from even older times. One of my favorite old movies doing an even older time is The Gene Krupa Story starring Sal Mineo and a strain of ganj that is apparently as desperate making as heroin. The costumes are laughably bad, extras look like they showed up after school and were escorted directly onto set. There is a lot of Mad Men season 1 style clothing boppin' around all that swing music. It's pretty great if you adjust your expections and boy did I. Give it a try. You might like it too.

take the time, do it right.

I'm sure that reading gawker is like eating right before bed but how else would I come across stuff like this?

I am imagining not gold platform Beckham pumps for the win. Even though I'm not super jazzed by her shoe selection I feel like this is her true self and not all the studs and vinyl and shoulder pads? I get that she's in show business and studs and buckles are to Rihanna, what sequins were to every Bob Mackied starlet ever. 

WHAAAAT? Marilyn McCoo and Andy Gibb pre-Gimme a Break! guest spot/MI via OD must be freaked the fuck out? I like that Wendy is holding her own against Madame and Madame isn't being her regular cunty self. I can't believe middle America was interested in W.O.W. ever. I can't guarantee that I saw this performance but I sure did love Solid Gold. If my little brains did see this I am sure it must have informed my earliest nightmares. SO THANKS AMERICAN BROADCASTING COMPANY.

I'm not sure what the thread between these two things was in my head, I just took a couple of benadryls. Maybe my point was studs, buckles and leather mommy shit is as old as sequins? Know yer role? I dunno, she obviously looks bangin' in color and needs to keep it up instead of trying to wear thigh high patent leather boots because she's getting to Beyoncé levels of fame and flesh toned performance pantyhose under said boots looks ridiculous. Leave the leather to the professionals like Wendy.

lady-size

I've seen this movie a few times and never noticed this track in the film. One of my faves by one of my faves. The rest is of the soundtrack is the usual 90s dreck and or things you already know or own. 

Oh man, 90s minimalism, I missed you. Check the chunky white shoes and skinny apron front style late century Calvin. Late century. Could you just kill yourself thinking about things you've experienced in terms of which century they fall in? God, millennial babies don't get what a mind fuck this is for us olds. 

You get to love your Sassy magazine bequeathed from riotgrrl olds or bought on eBay the way we loved early 80s Cosmopolitans left in the art room for collage purposes in 8th grade. Because the internet did not exist yet. The Internet Did Not Exist Yet. Imagine a time when you had to wait for things to come in the mail, like for real, not just 5-7 business days. 6-8 weeks, that used to be a thing. We used to order shit from catalogs. Band shirts came from warehouses in Florida and New Jersey or worst of all Spencer's Gifts. And we liked it.

Designer lust was more impassioned and hypothetical like real teenage lust because you literally could not get your hands on things you saw in magazines; even if you called the number of the New York store in the back of Seventeen on the Where To Buy page. I know because I tried. Then there were the long distance charges and your parents to contend with about who was going to pay that phone bill with that 3 dollar call to some urban center you'd only get to visit once you paid for your own round trip ticket there. Being a teenager at any point in history sucks but technology and commerce are working to make it less so. So enjoy it TV babies. Shit just keeps getting more awesome.

you've got to manage

 

Sorry Bjork, Marlene beat you by half a century. Deal with it.

haunting my sunday

It's strange that you can go years without hearing something and then have it stuck in your head like a hamster running on a mobius strip. You've been on my mind grapes today. Freak me out, I forgot how innocent they can sound. 

I'm waiting to see how music will be used in Mad Men as we are firmly entrenched in 1965 already and the kids start taking over. I'm not expecting that it will be integral for next season but they're really restrained themselves so far. Are we going to continue to experience the cultural revolution of the 60s through the eyes of a forward thinking dinosaur? 

How long can Don shame spiral and keep us invested in his personal debauchery?  Lost weekends a la Ray Milland, adopting his California persona in New York and fucking well below his weight class because it's too hard to hunt anymore? How much more can I take? 

I have a feeling Peggy's emancipation is a trap and that in the end her liberation will also come with even more serious consequences than in the first season. I keep rooting for her because she's had really great moments every episode this season of personal growth. I have serious suspicion that Matt Weiner has some negative things to say about free love and women's liberation that will be channeled through her, to say nothing of how Allison behaved already. Matt Weiner hates women?

This season's onus is on everyone over the age of 30. They're all in their own personal hang time and they'll all eventually come crashing back down to earth. I keep waiting for the chair kicked to be out from under them in the last 7 episodes and we'll get to watch as no one gets what they want but what they think they need. Stephanie already said how everyone else can see what is wrong with you and you can't.  The Wire taught me never to expect a protagonist to do the right thing or expect that things will work out for the best. Shit. Just. Happens. 

you can't put your arms around a memory

 

The Story of The Supremes

I am glad that someone made a book and youtubes of this V&A Museum show from 2008. There are so many choice tubes of Supremes performances. Seriously, it's a frosty lipgloss k-hole you won't feel bad about falling into. Do it!

all in service

So many insights! I posted it to give you ladies a day to re-learn the basics. Fourteen minutes for the fourteenth day of February.

Bette Davis on Mars

Un-fuck-with-able.

Was it brain, or brawn, or the month that you were born?

Apologies to anyone reading at work with Cheryl from accounting in the next cube possibly viewing topless Russian lesbians who've seen a thing or two. I have a very bipolar visual aesthetic that isn't so easily reconciled under blogdom and I still don't know exactly how to do cuts with this format because I am wicked retahded when it comes to computers.

This shit feels like it's bouncing off the walls of a rubber room in an asylum. My apologies go out to Cheryl, I guess, even though Cheryl is a bitch who needs to MHOB. No I will not resize tits to a more manageable desktop size. Email or comment how if you want to see less of this shit in the future. I need to learn.

I personally need more stimulation than your average bear. More beauty. More horror. More of everything polarizing. It's why I love these photos so much and the books they came from, Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia Volume I and Volume II. I checked them out from the library because apparently they're expensive and out of print? I don't understand why things I like have to be rarefied enough through lack of general interest to go out of print but have small cultish numbers supporting their existence with the insane after market to collectibles nerds. Sigh. Why can't I be into normal shit?

If you have Netflix you can rent Alix Lambert's "The Mark of Cain". It humanizes the entire enterprise of criminality. It doesn't try and turn any of the inmates into Jean Valjean, it just reminds you that criminals are humans with frailty and aspirations just like you. It also has these moments of brilliance, in one scene we hear the personal narrative of an inmate with no compunction about killing the three gypsies who robbed his mother's grave for their lack of reverence that transitions seamlessly into him performing a traditional folk tap dance, staying shirtless the entire time. The entire time. Yep. Awesome. To say nothing of the louche charm that runs through all hardened criminals, an unapologetic air that makes you want to know them more. One dude even users a fucking Holly Golightly cigarette holder. In prison. How are you not already not in love just based on my description?

I'm in the middle of reading "Excellent Cadavers" by Alexander Stille too. It explains in great detail how a system of rules and codes that were inviolable by men within the organization. Mafiosi, when introduced to members of other mafia families are introduced as la stessa cossa (the same thing). Similarly the older prisoners in the Russian camps refer to themselves as thieves-in-law.   They're bound by the same sort of honor code within their respective families of criminality.

The tattoos are symbolic of experiences, traits, time served, criminal classification, sexual classification and other various loyalties. It's hard to take westernized "body art" seriously after seeing the insane amount of effort, history and context built into these prison tattoos. Tattoo guns created from modified electric razors, black ink made from burning the soles off shoes, using urine as an ink emulsifier. You have to think long and hard about a process that involves those sorts of steps and has the added bonus of serious blood poisoning without any assistance from antibiotics. These elegant yet crude methods made tattoos appealing and make the bearer as indomitable as the stars on their knee caps.

 I've always felt very Simon Doonan about tattoos. I like that there's finally a little sect of tattooing that I'm 100% on board with. Gulag tattoos worn with militaristic pride, used as a semaphoric cant.  I like that. I get that. I want that. Y'know?

Was it like that time they found my grandpa at the bus station?

My interlolz are floating on the hope that based on other photos he really does dress like this in his down time. It also gives me an excuse to give to anyone who ever was on the fence about this brand. This brand confuses your grandpa! Don't keep those two hags in business. They both married well, this is a vanity project gone all scourge of the Earth.

Also, can we talk about hyphenates? Unless you can trace an actual aristocratic lineage and need to keep the hyphens to separate all the inbred lack of blood viscosity, then there's no other reason for this sort of nouveau riche nonsense. Although in fairness- if I married a member of Duran Duran I might want to hedge my bets by hyphenating 'cause you know that shit is ending in D-I-V-O-R-C-E. That'd look hot spelled out in Swarovski crystals across a velour covered ass, wouldn't it?