I dended up eleted some blogs off my google-reader and some vague acquaintences off facebook today. Seeing the jpg results of girls-wielding-dSLRs-with-too-much-firepower-for-their-skill-level and then abusing the living daylights out of Photoshop was starting to depress me. That may be because I too have a camera with too much firepower for my non-existent skill level. I can get pretty Dr. Pepper about it, feel misunderstood, and try to make it obvious that unlike my Canon-Wielding-Desaturating-Overexposing counterparts, I have no aspiration to being any kind of photographer (so much so that I end up using a fancy camera to simply take photos of my cat (greater sin?)) but at the end of the day, the very fact I own the camera and handle it so unprofessionally almost automatically brands me as another wretched photowench. At least I can say I’ve never reduced my children to tears by force-posing them. And that’s not just because I’m childless.
I hate Vivienne Westwood’s “Charity T-shirts”. They remind me of the cheap t-shirts sleazy Italian men sell on stalls in Italian tourist traps with photo-genitalia splayed over the ‘appropriate’ body location. I also think that any idiot can scrawl CLIMATE CHANGE! and HAITI! over a black shirt and call it good. What a load of rubbish.
While I’m on the topic of fashion, my professor was talking about fashion as creativity this week during lecture. He brought up the suicide of McQueen and was talking about creativity vs. manufactured arts and said, with a straight face: “not that I care to know much about fashion, I suppose”. If it weren’t for his black-and-maroon paisley brocade pants, pointy leather boots, oversized white shirt, Chanel cufflinks, and a well-fitted suit jacket with a flowery kerchief around his neck, I might have believed him.
I’m really tired of feeling clumsy and physically estranged from myself. I’m sick of being uncomfortable all the time and rotating my four items of clothing designed for the Poddington Pea Pregnaforms. I’m not entirely convinced I have enough confidence in my body to pull labour off. I’m bothered that I’m at the mercy of the NHS for this pregnancy. I’m nervous about the risk the NHS runs of not having an obstetrician around if things go wrong and I need a caesarean. The caveat to all of the above is that I’m still thrilled my body has sustained the pregnancy so well thus far and that we’re adding a baby-boy to the Martin ensemble.
We just finished watching The Might Boosh (Season 3, which is by far the best one). This is one of my favourite parts. Howard is shrunk and injected into Vince so he can harpoon the Jazz Virus which is terrorizing Vince’s anti-jazz system. Here we have Howard trying to get directions to the Brain from Vince’s white blood cells:
This might have been made funnier by watching the Behind-the-Scenes where Noel Fielding was dressed in a green suit in front of a green screen with a giant platelet-headdress on. That may have made no sense at all.
The other night as I fell asleep, I was thinking how cool it would be if Tetris had the equivalent of Link’s iron-clad boot. i.e. if Tetris had a ONYX tetronimoe that fell once in a while and crushed out all the gaps under the files it fell on. That would be nifty.
Cosmetic surgery is morbidly fascinating to me. People have such odd perceptions of their bodies and are willing to inflict incredible pain on themselves for the most bizarre reasons (I can’t think of a good reason for gluing plastic to your jawbone, or getting fat injected into your penis, or having your virginity ’surgically restored’, or getting your breasts enlarged so the cupsize letter represents the first letter of your forename – I’m looking at you, Heidi Montag). Buhhh. Anyway. Yesterday I was reading about some new fangled procedure that’s meant to restore youthful exuberance back to into saggy cheeks. The mad scientist/doctor removes blood from the body and then reinjects it back into the face using a ultra-fine needles. It’s all very Hellraiser to me. Apparently this process stimulates the growth of fat-cells and reduces the need for botox. The side effects are up to six weeks of severe facial bruising and living with the fact you just paid someone stab you in the face with your own blood. I’m considering selling my cheek-fat cells on the black market. Maybe my well-fed squirrel cheeks have their use afterall.
A bunch of psychiatrists from the Royal College are trying to get digitally ‘enhanced’ images kitemarked in magazines. Basically, if an image has had more than a certain percentage of the image altered, these psychiatrists are pushing to get it annotated. I think it’s a great idea. If McDonald’s is banned from targeting youths with foodstuffs linked to obesity, then Bazaar should be banned from hawking bobblehead models who have been linked to the development of body dysmorphia. Of course some people’s bodies and body images aren’t affected negatively by McDonalds pushing Big Macs on them or couture designers assaulting people with skeletons in clothes, but there’s undeniably high correlation between both forms of advertising and both forms of eating issues so it can’t hurt to try and discourage the encouragement of either extreme.
I’m not really with the Royal College Psychiatrists on the ‘ban size zero models’ thing though. Don’t get me wrong, I’m staunchly against the modelling industry’s maltreatment of human beings (e.g. the use of models who are under sixteen, the pressure to pull an Ana Reston), the pushing of emaciated forms and the expression that a waist size any bigger than that of a seven year old is fashion felony). I just don’t think that banning models of a particular measurement will correct people’s warped perceptions of ‘beauty’ or ‘thin’.
I’m more offended by magazines photoshopped bobbleheads than runway models. The runway is a gangplank for mobile coathanders, the idea being to give the clothing cadenza, not the human form. Frankly, if career-aged people want to kill themselves with a short stint as a coathanger, and suffer Karl Lagerfield yelling “NO ONE WANTS TO LOOK AT A FAT MODEL, WHAT ARE YOU, A SIZE 1?” voluntarily; whatever. You just have to make eye contact with a runway model to know that the tastiest thing they’ve eaten since puberty was half-a-raisin and their greatest satisfaction in life comes from punitive forms of self-denial. That lifestyle has zero appeal to anyone not predisposed to eating disorder. Runwaytopia and it’s league of emaciated are at least real (and so are their anorexia related deaths – I wish the fashion industry wouldn’t try and hide that so much). It’s the bobbleheads in magazines that wind me up most. People forget the images are practically paintings (not even the runway models can compete with a photoshopped skeleton) and end up thinking that the POW look is hot.
In Milan they decided that models had to have a BMI of 18.5, which is still micro (and you can kinda cram for those doctors appointments by drinking 6 litres of water before you get weighed, like a featherweight weigh-in, in reverse) but at least they’re making an effort. London is refusing to do this since 18.5 is ‘too high’.
Anyway. The fashion industry is retarded but I doubt banning size zero models will fix that. Kitemarking heavily altered images in ads sounds good though.
