Olive You, Choire Sicha!

I just read this piece by Choire Sicha on why green olives come in jars and black olives come in cans.

I hate to rub schmutz on so incisive a bit of journalism, but I fear that Choire Sicha's premise is flawed. Black olives do come in jars. I know this because I have two jars of black olives in my refrigerator right now. Jars.

Twisty's Shoe Blog

As worn by 15th century elves, £130 at Plantagenet Shoes

Let it not be said of Twisty that she does not enjoy the odd bag or occasional pair of shoes. Thus, we turn to the shoe blogs. Shoeblogging, in which a blogger posts photos of shoes along with useful commentary on same, such as "these shoes are fuckin' ugly!" is a sport we endorse. Amazingly, there are hardly any shoe blogs!

Let us begin with the industry standard, Manolo's Shoe Blog. Manolo has good taste in footwear, is a comic genius, and as a bonus, blogs in a fake Italian accent. Appreciation for acuity in fake Italian accentry ensues when you read the comments, wherein readers feel compelled to mimic Manolo, and in so doing, fall on their asses. More entertaining than even the shoe criticism is Manolo's artful celebrity mocking. In today's post, for example, Manolo features the photo below, titled "My Name Is Tommy And I Have A Torch" and captioned "Manolo says, Tom Cruise: one of the special people."



Then there's Kiss Me Stace blogger Designer Ella, who manages to find beauty even in affordable shoes:

"Kitty" by Gabriella Rocha, $18.90 at Zappos.com

Though sincere, Designer Ella is not always up to the little daily challenges of spelling, grammar, and syntax. Unfortunately this casts a shadow over her general perspicacity, and makes it difficult to credit such remarkable statements as "sneakers are not shoes." But one admires her steadfastness and dedication.

Finally, "the foremost [according to her website] shoe connoisseur on the scene today, author and TV personality" Miss Meghan blogs in the voice of a flighty shopgirl rhapsodizing to gay friends who can't get dates, and has such terrible taste in shoes she should probably be put in a home. That she has a shoe book coming out bodes ill for shoe-book-buying cognoscenti, since she has little interest in the conventions of written English. Her book, The Perfect Fit: What Your Shoes Say About You, "reveals a woman's true sole [sic] with insightful quizzes and homework."

Meanwhile, here is an example of the footwear found in a typical Miss Meghan-endorsed shoe shop. Upon this example I base my recommendation that her shoe blog be used for jeering or guffawing purposes only.



If you will excuse my harsh language, Gaspard Yurkievich's hoosierweight Wal-Mart Mama scrunchy boots with sequined cuffs could only be accessorized by a screaming toddler in a dirty diaper and an oversized sweatshirt reading "My Other Car Is A Broomstick."

Neither can I get behind Miss Meghan's breathlessly approbatory remarks on this, "THE bag for spring":



Over which bag, she emotes, "editors, marc jacobs aficionados and style mavens are already salivating." It looks like something you'd find stuck to the underside of a table in a bowling alley.

Twisty says, the shoeblogs, they are the excellent entertainment.

Stuck A Green Bean In My Yap And Called It Minestrone

As a dandy trapped in a middle-aged feminist's body, I like to enjoy the crap out of this website Dandyism.net, and then wrestle with self-loathing for three hours.

Here's what The Georgia Straight says about the -ism in question:

"It should be said that a dandy's life is not all poise, fine clothes, and glittering quips. Brummell died penniless in a French insane asylum, a social outcast. Baudelaire, who suffered from depression his whole life, was broke and paralyzed by venereal disease when he died in a French sanatorium, a social outcast. Wilde, his body and spirit broken by time spent in prison, died without two pennies to rub together in a French hotel, a social outcast. If Andre 3000 is indeed representative of the modern-day dandy, then how prescient of him to call his band Outkast." [here's that whole taco]

Aine-Jail With A Lip Ring

Because the Texan appetite for rustic sincerity knows no bounds, public radio in Austin is absolutely lousy with twangy singersongwriters, folksy honkytonkers, and cornpone. When I first moved back here after an absence of 25 years, these plucky and/or introspective gals failed to fascinate. But, like a relentless odor or the taste of diet Dr Pepper, eventually I sort of got used to them. This is what they sound like.

But this Kasey Chambers is, like so many ubiquitous young Australians who yodel, deeply disturbing. "If I was in a movie I would stand the test of time and if I was in a movie I would get away with crime." Lyrics this dumb approach outsider art.

Oddly, Kasey Chambers is popular, not because she is retarded, but because she is a hillbilly cliché wrapped in a down-home caricature scented lightly with jailbait for added tabasco: aw-shucks sincere, with a voice like a 1o-year-old virgin bumpkin (or maybe a helium-sucking trailer-trash elf), she looks hot in a handkerchief haltertop.

There's no end to the allure of the 10-year-old virgin bumpkin.

And people who listen to radios never tire of mediocrities featuring pedal steel, especially when, like Chambers', they deal with such universal themes as Heading Into the Sun, the Sun Shining, Flying Away Like A Bluebird, You Needing Me, Me Needing You, Me Being an Aine-Jail, and You Being an Aine-Jail.* And if the little lady singin'em sounds like child (or maybe a Canada goose in a corset) so much the better.

The best thing about Kasey Chambers is this blurb from her website bio:

"Wayward Angel" [Chambers' current product] is a self-referential moniker which sums up the sugar'n'spice of this most singular Australian performer - a choice of phrase which cups in its hand Kasey's past, present and future and which, importantly, puts her sense of herself right up front."

Whatever Warner Bros is paying this copy writer, it's not enough!
_______________________________
* It is a law that in pop music angel is pronounced aine-jail.

Changing Sides

Brand Loyalty and Identity Crisis

Dr Pepper, which used to bill itself as the official soft drink of the iconoclast, has joined the 21st century celebration of Dude Nation with a new entry in the asshole-boyfriend genre of commercial advertising. The commercial, which deploys the popular hot-chick-with-a-so-so-guy formula, depicts a misguided fella subjecting himself to the worst imaginable tortures for the sake of love.

So what are the tortures to which I allude? Stuffing his manly dignity between his thighs, working through his natural vulval disgust, the suffering protagonist buys his girlfriend a box of tampons and folds a pair of girly undies in the laundromat. He actually touches the cootie-ridden accoutrements of down-there, and on national televison! He is literally--and by literally I mean symbolically--pussywhipped. But he draws the line when the girlfriend wants a sip of his Dr Pepper. He has braved the horrors of the female crotch, but this Dr Pepper incursion will not stand. He makes a mad dash for freedom, preserving his pop from contamination and restoring his self-esteem.

These are especially dark times for me, darker even than the day the secret cabal of gay European men got together and said "let's breeng back zee bell-bottoms! Hahahaha!" Like the Beatles and Lee Harvey Oswald, I used to be a Pepper. It is the national beverage of Texas, my homeland. Order a DP anywhere else on earth and the waiter will bring you a sweating bottle of Dom Perignon, but not here. I drank vats of Dr Pepper as a kid. I am, in fact, drinking a can right now. Imagine my surprise to suddenly find that my soft drink no longer proclaims me a daring rebel, but instead identifies me as a misogynist pig.

Science Cures Ugliness

Great news! The science of skin care is going high tech!

So The New York Times reports today. "Skin care," of course, means "wrinkle cream." Cosmetics companies sell a lot of wrinkle cream. To American women. To the tune of $7 billion a year, in fact. That may seem like a lot of dough to blow on "hope in a jar," but there's no mystery. Women are under the impression that if they get a wrinkle they might as well hang it up. Their pitiful little pittance of self-worth is contingent upon their not having wrinkles.

Self-worth, it turns out, is important to human beings.

So corporations whose profits are contingent on women's tragic yearning for self-worth are going to put nanobots in the wrinkle cream. To many women, who think nothing of having bowling balls stapled to their chests or human cadaver meat implanted in their lips, sending an army of gamma-amino butyric acid nanoparticles deep into their faces will be a tiptoe through the tulips.

In Europe--dear old sensible, hairy-legged Europe--where sometimes women are not even shunned if their physiques fail to resemble those of American porn centerfolds, and where the well-educated populace tends to regard with suspicion technologies that sub-atomically alter substances intended for absorption by human tissue, there's a consumer backlash. Why?

Well, a member of the Canadian NanoBusiness Alliance put it this way: "There's always a fear that nanoparticles will attack the body."

Not in America, though. In America, fear of ugliness trumps fear of nanoparticles. The longer you can look like a virgin whore, the longer you will be loved.