I've always wanted to pay $140 to make it look like I am walking on a 3-year old's birthday cake! Thanks to Jeffrey Campbell, it's now possible:
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
George Washington - Just in time for President's Day!
When I first started this blog, roughly six years ago, it was before blogs were monetized, before I had any notion that I could make money doing this, or before I had any knowledge that anyone else's eyes scanned my words but my own. Of course, it did begin with a vain hope that someone else would read it, but that is never guaranteed. And the way this thing took off surprised the hell out of me. It began as an innocent project - an experiment - and it changed my life. Every career path I am on right now converges on this blog as its origin.
But, at the time I started it, I was in school. An ambitious young Grace was getting two degrees (philosophy and psychology) at Oklahoma City University. I started High Fashion Girl my junior year. One of my philosophy professors was confused, unable to understand why I'd dabble in something so "shallow" when I spent my high school and college years dedicated to the life of the mind. When he said that, it made me feel like I had betrayed the Academy or something. However, one of my professors understood why I was doing this. "You are a person who looks for beauty in the world," he said, "Fashion is all about beauty. Go out and look at the beauty of the world."
I feel like that all happened a long time ago.
Six years is a decent passage of time upon which to reflect, and I'm in a reflective mood tonight. I can't believe this journey I've been on so far. Yet, because I wasn't anticipating any success with this, I feel like I began with a narrow scope that's been limiting my abilities to "blog" adequately anymore. When I started High Fashion Girl, I probably didn't know the difference between Ready-to-Wear and Couture, or how to tell a designer's clothes on the spot. I've learned so much, and in such a relatively short amount of time. Fashion has evoked a febrile reaction in me, causing me to explore new depths I had never been to before. It seems counter-intuitive that fashion could provide such intellectual nourishment, but through it I have been able to explore so much in the worlds of metaphysics, semiotics, linguistics, humanism, sociology, art, and aesthetics. As I've learned more, I have wanted to talk about more, but I feel so limited by the promise of "high fashion girl". I'm not a high fashion girl. I'm just Grace. I don't think there's a "brand" in there for anyone to get excited about, but I think I have a lot more to offer in the ways of being well-rounded and self-taught than just strictly being a "fashion" person.
That was an uneccessarily long introduction that I wrote to explain why I'm going to be talking about something so apropos of nothing as David Gordon Green's amazing debut film, George Washington. But, I have to talk about it. However, you are by no means a captive audience, so feel free to click away to something more interesting if this bores you.
When this movie begins, it is the color of a Coney Island winter,. Slowly, the lush, green of a summertime North Carolina country warms up the screen. George Washington centers on the friendship of four children, with auxilary adult characters providing scraps of wisdom among moments of humorous relief. The perspective is provided by the 12-year old narrator, Nasia, and the intimate glimpse into her thoughts allows us to see that it is often in the simplicty of youth (which some might call ignorance) that wisdom is found in plainspoken moments of introspection.
The wonder of childhood is the filter for the lens, and before tragedy strikes, there are several sparkling moments of pure naivety that made me grin wide. The children play in a setting that juxtaposes the trash heaps, landfills and junkyards of the post-depression South against a soundtrack of chirping birds and ambient, elegiac folk music. The kudzu creep of North Carolina woods holds everything in place. And the balance of their young lives is precarious.
Though masterfully shot and beautifully renderered, this is a throat ripping drama about children trying to understand a tragedy most adults never have to deal with. They cover it up. They lose their innocence. Unable to make sense of so much, one of the characters, Vernon, cries, "Man, I wish there was one belief: my belief." Solipsism is so comforting, and reality is so frightening and unpredictable. The truth is, we're all looking for salvation, Vernon.
George, the main character, is an emotionally frail child. I don't know if the foreshadowing was just overly subtle, but even from the beginning, I sensed something was off about him. George tries to redeem himself from a terrible mistake, relying on the idea that there is spiritual balance in the world. One good deed should cancel out a bad deed, right? One life can be given for another.
With an eye for wide-shot vistas like Terrence Malick and the dialogue pacing of Hal Hartley, this is may be the most remarkable debut film by any director I've ever seen. There are no wasted moments in this film, each one sparkles with precise poignance. Green is also restrained rather than self-indulgent, infusing his characters with a still and bitter grace. It's hard to reconcile this with the fact that he's the same guy who directed Pineapple Express and Your Highness, but as Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
So, yeah, it's almost President's Day! Somehow this is all supposed to connect. I just really want you to watch this movie.
But, at the time I started it, I was in school. An ambitious young Grace was getting two degrees (philosophy and psychology) at Oklahoma City University. I started High Fashion Girl my junior year. One of my philosophy professors was confused, unable to understand why I'd dabble in something so "shallow" when I spent my high school and college years dedicated to the life of the mind. When he said that, it made me feel like I had betrayed the Academy or something. However, one of my professors understood why I was doing this. "You are a person who looks for beauty in the world," he said, "Fashion is all about beauty. Go out and look at the beauty of the world."
I feel like that all happened a long time ago.
Six years is a decent passage of time upon which to reflect, and I'm in a reflective mood tonight. I can't believe this journey I've been on so far. Yet, because I wasn't anticipating any success with this, I feel like I began with a narrow scope that's been limiting my abilities to "blog" adequately anymore. When I started High Fashion Girl, I probably didn't know the difference between Ready-to-Wear and Couture, or how to tell a designer's clothes on the spot. I've learned so much, and in such a relatively short amount of time. Fashion has evoked a febrile reaction in me, causing me to explore new depths I had never been to before. It seems counter-intuitive that fashion could provide such intellectual nourishment, but through it I have been able to explore so much in the worlds of metaphysics, semiotics, linguistics, humanism, sociology, art, and aesthetics. As I've learned more, I have wanted to talk about more, but I feel so limited by the promise of "high fashion girl". I'm not a high fashion girl. I'm just Grace. I don't think there's a "brand" in there for anyone to get excited about, but I think I have a lot more to offer in the ways of being well-rounded and self-taught than just strictly being a "fashion" person.
That was an uneccessarily long introduction that I wrote to explain why I'm going to be talking about something so apropos of nothing as David Gordon Green's amazing debut film, George Washington. But, I have to talk about it. However, you are by no means a captive audience, so feel free to click away to something more interesting if this bores you.
When this movie begins, it is the color of a Coney Island winter,. Slowly, the lush, green of a summertime North Carolina country warms up the screen. George Washington centers on the friendship of four children, with auxilary adult characters providing scraps of wisdom among moments of humorous relief. The perspective is provided by the 12-year old narrator, Nasia, and the intimate glimpse into her thoughts allows us to see that it is often in the simplicty of youth (which some might call ignorance) that wisdom is found in plainspoken moments of introspection.
The wonder of childhood is the filter for the lens, and before tragedy strikes, there are several sparkling moments of pure naivety that made me grin wide. The children play in a setting that juxtaposes the trash heaps, landfills and junkyards of the post-depression South against a soundtrack of chirping birds and ambient, elegiac folk music. The kudzu creep of North Carolina woods holds everything in place. And the balance of their young lives is precarious.
Though masterfully shot and beautifully renderered, this is a throat ripping drama about children trying to understand a tragedy most adults never have to deal with. They cover it up. They lose their innocence. Unable to make sense of so much, one of the characters, Vernon, cries, "Man, I wish there was one belief: my belief." Solipsism is so comforting, and reality is so frightening and unpredictable. The truth is, we're all looking for salvation, Vernon.
George, the main character, is an emotionally frail child. I don't know if the foreshadowing was just overly subtle, but even from the beginning, I sensed something was off about him. George tries to redeem himself from a terrible mistake, relying on the idea that there is spiritual balance in the world. One good deed should cancel out a bad deed, right? One life can be given for another.
With an eye for wide-shot vistas like Terrence Malick and the dialogue pacing of Hal Hartley, this is may be the most remarkable debut film by any director I've ever seen. There are no wasted moments in this film, each one sparkles with precise poignance. Green is also restrained rather than self-indulgent, infusing his characters with a still and bitter grace. It's hard to reconcile this with the fact that he's the same guy who directed Pineapple Express and Your Highness, but as Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
So, yeah, it's almost President's Day! Somehow this is all supposed to connect. I just really want you to watch this movie.
Tuesday, February 07, 2012
What the F*** Did I Just Watch?
I got up at the crack of dawn this morning and had the bulk of my daily work done by around 8 a.m. I'm pretty sure that's a new record for me. With a suddenly unfettered morning, I turned my short attention span to the Hulu. My queue: barren. No favorite shows to waste a little time on, so I clicked through the new shows. Found Dating Rules From My Future Self which billed itself as a strange combination of light sci-fi and romantic comedy. Okay, interesting. Martin Starr is in it, so maybe it won't be utterly terrible?
Premise: Lucy (played by a rather blank-faced, dull Shiri Appleby) is recently engaged, sort of. Her douchey boss/boyfriend proposed to her upon their return from a vacation in Paris and she doesn't say "Yes" right away. Her hesitation should be evidence enough that she doesn't want to marry this guy, but instead of reading the signs clearly, Lucy is full of doubt.
In a pitch-meeting at the "App Creation" tech firm she works at, where douchey pseudo-fiance is also her boss, Lucy proposes an App idea where a user can complete a personality profile for their ideal self and an algorithm can answer the user's questions about big decisions they have to make - hoping that a concrete answer from a make-believer "future self" may help them eventually realize their ideal self.
Of course, things quickly turn strange when Lucy starts getting texts from an "Unknown" party that urge her to break off her engagement to the boyfriendboss. Unknown claims, eventually, to be Lucy's future self, and supports these claims by giving her eerily prescient advice that matches up to her present experiences. She begins to believe that this is her real future self communicating to her, and she follows Unknown's advice and dumps the boyfriend.
Okay, that's a strange premise, but hey, I've seen stranger. This is not my problem with the show. My problem with it is the overt and tacky way the show incorporates product placement.
Schick Quattro, Biore Strips and some kind of car (chevy?) are heavily and awkwardly promoted through the course of this short show (each episode is only about 7 minutes long). For instance, when Lucy breaks up with her boyfriend, her roommates urge her to go get laid. There's a scene where she's trying on the typically slutty** roommate's typically slutty clothes. The practical roommate informs Lucy that the next dress she's about to try on is so short that Lucy should consider "mowing the lawn" (i.e., shave her pubes), before trying it on. Cut To: Lingering, extreme close-up of Lucy eyefucking a Schick Quattro as she mulls over the temptation to shave her ladyparts. WTF? It's such a forced moment that it makes me cringe.
Oh yeah, and when she's trying to get over the boyfriend, slutty roommate and practical roommate urge her to do a "Cleanse" with them, which apparently entails lounging around with stupid looking Biore strips on, drinking green smoothies, and generally whining about men. Oh, but the linchpin in this ridiculous display comes at the end of the episode, when slutty roommate declares, "There's only one thing left to cleanse." Cut To: A slow-motion shot of the three girls washing that goddamn Chevy car (or whatever car that is they're trying to promote).
Stupidest.
Product.
Placement.
Ever.
This show is an insult to me because it's not a fucking show, it's a vehicle (literally, at times) for product promotion. They're not even subtle about it. They might as well be doing this:
You might ask why I continued watching the debacle that is Dating Rules from My Future Self, but my reason is simple: I had gawker syndrome. This was a complete train wreck of a show that not only failed to convince me to buy anything, it actually turned me off from these brands. I couldn't look away. I had to count how many times they showed her iPhone, the car, the razor, and the Biore strips. I had to drink in these images so that I could better understand how out- of-fucking-touch Hollywood and marketing firms really are.
Shows are getting worse and worse about blatant product placement. As if it wasn't bad enough that loud volume commercials have cut the average 30 min Television show down to a mere 21 minutes, they're also obnoxious and promote heavy use of logical fallacies (stereotypes, argument ad populum, appeals to authority, etc), trickery and reliance on ignorance to sell products.
If you're like me (i.e., righteously indignant), then you might do well to avoid this show. Or better yet: watch it with your friends and develop a drinking game where everyone takes a shot when they show a product. Or don't. You'll all get alcohol poisoning.
[**For the record, I'm not calling this roommate "slutty" from a moral judgement point-of-view. I'm all for doing your own thing. I'm just saying that unimaginative writers have a lot to do with creating these archetypally loose women. Example: In the show, Slutty McSlutterbuttons makes out with a guy she has not even met, while she's sober, in broad daylight. They're making this character's only dimension one of sluttitude, and they're not being subtle about it. Surprise, surprise.]
FULL ON SPOILER MODE STARTS NOW:
Premise: Lucy (played by a rather blank-faced, dull Shiri Appleby) is recently engaged, sort of. Her douchey boss/boyfriend proposed to her upon their return from a vacation in Paris and she doesn't say "Yes" right away. Her hesitation should be evidence enough that she doesn't want to marry this guy, but instead of reading the signs clearly, Lucy is full of doubt.
In a pitch-meeting at the "App Creation" tech firm she works at, where douchey pseudo-fiance is also her boss, Lucy proposes an App idea where a user can complete a personality profile for their ideal self and an algorithm can answer the user's questions about big decisions they have to make - hoping that a concrete answer from a make-believer "future self" may help them eventually realize their ideal self.
Of course, things quickly turn strange when Lucy starts getting texts from an "Unknown" party that urge her to break off her engagement to the boyfriendboss. Unknown claims, eventually, to be Lucy's future self, and supports these claims by giving her eerily prescient advice that matches up to her present experiences. She begins to believe that this is her real future self communicating to her, and she follows Unknown's advice and dumps the boyfriend.
Okay, that's a strange premise, but hey, I've seen stranger. This is not my problem with the show. My problem with it is the overt and tacky way the show incorporates product placement.
Schick Quattro, Biore Strips and some kind of car (chevy?) are heavily and awkwardly promoted through the course of this short show (each episode is only about 7 minutes long). For instance, when Lucy breaks up with her boyfriend, her roommates urge her to go get laid. There's a scene where she's trying on the typically slutty** roommate's typically slutty clothes. The practical roommate informs Lucy that the next dress she's about to try on is so short that Lucy should consider "mowing the lawn" (i.e., shave her pubes), before trying it on. Cut To: Lingering, extreme close-up of Lucy eyefucking a Schick Quattro as she mulls over the temptation to shave her ladyparts. WTF? It's such a forced moment that it makes me cringe.
From left to right: Practical, Lucy, Slutty
Oh yeah, and when she's trying to get over the boyfriend, slutty roommate and practical roommate urge her to do a "Cleanse" with them, which apparently entails lounging around with stupid looking Biore strips on, drinking green smoothies, and generally whining about men. Oh, but the linchpin in this ridiculous display comes at the end of the episode, when slutty roommate declares, "There's only one thing left to cleanse." Cut To: A slow-motion shot of the three girls washing that goddamn Chevy car (or whatever car that is they're trying to promote).
Stupidest.
Product.
Placement.
Ever.
This show is an insult to me because it's not a fucking show, it's a vehicle (literally, at times) for product promotion. They're not even subtle about it. They might as well be doing this:
You might ask why I continued watching the debacle that is Dating Rules from My Future Self, but my reason is simple: I had gawker syndrome. This was a complete train wreck of a show that not only failed to convince me to buy anything, it actually turned me off from these brands. I couldn't look away. I had to count how many times they showed her iPhone, the car, the razor, and the Biore strips. I had to drink in these images so that I could better understand how out- of-fucking-touch Hollywood and marketing firms really are.
Shows are getting worse and worse about blatant product placement. As if it wasn't bad enough that loud volume commercials have cut the average 30 min Television show down to a mere 21 minutes, they're also obnoxious and promote heavy use of logical fallacies (stereotypes, argument ad populum, appeals to authority, etc), trickery and reliance on ignorance to sell products.
If you're like me (i.e., righteously indignant), then you might do well to avoid this show. Or better yet: watch it with your friends and develop a drinking game where everyone takes a shot when they show a product. Or don't. You'll all get alcohol poisoning.
[**For the record, I'm not calling this roommate "slutty" from a moral judgement point-of-view. I'm all for doing your own thing. I'm just saying that unimaginative writers have a lot to do with creating these archetypally loose women. Example: In the show, Slutty McSlutterbuttons makes out with a guy she has not even met, while she's sober, in broad daylight. They're making this character's only dimension one of sluttitude, and they're not being subtle about it. Surprise, surprise.]
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