October | 2009 | Barbarella Psychadella 2009 October | Becoming a Great Woman of Letters, one jello mold at a time.

October, 2009

Dress/Song Episode 10: Crying in the Rain

October 25, 2009 by ms. xandra

It was raining in Los Angeles! Um, almost two weeks ago now. But it was so exciting to have two days of rain in which I could wear raincoats and cardigans and boots that I am still reliving it in my heart. And to help me relive it in my heart, I have been listening to this song:

Carole King, Crying in the Rain:

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I like the Carole King version bestest. She wrote it, obviously, because she is such an awesome lady. The Everly Brothers version is more widely known, and is also lovely:

And then there’s the A-Ha cover. Also really really good:

I don’t really have anything intelligent to say about this song, other than I love it. I love it because it is melodramatic (“fuck you, you’ll never see me cry, I’m going to cry in the RAIN”) and sad but sounds so disarmingly cute if you’re not paying attention to the words.

So, raincoats. Raincoats, raincoats, raincoats. My favorite raincoat is my blue, polkadotted, double-breasted, vinyl-tablecloth-material raincoat that I wear at music festivals in the rain, thereby contributing to my reputation as the Least Practically Dressed Lady at the Folk Festival. Here are some other awesome raincoats:

From Catbooks1940s. Absolutely in love with the full skirt!

From The Dusty Dog Vintage. I love: This color of green, double breastedness, belts.

From a la garconniere. Adorable and wonderful!

And HOW CHARMING ARE THESE BOOTS? Only the most charming, ever. You will be SINGING in the rain with these boots on. (I was thinking very hard about whether or not to include that very bad joke, and decided that yes, indeed, I would go there.)

from Modcloth.

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Why everything is so annoying, explained

October 21, 2009 by ms. xandra

I have this new theory that there exists a finite amount of self-esteem in the world, along with a finite amount of self-awareness. The problem we have now is that all of the world’s self-esteem is in the possession of the kind of people who don’t deserve to have it, while the people who do deserve some self-esteem are instead saddled with so much self-awarness that they are totally neurotic. This explains why I have so many friends who are brilliant geniuses but who don’t realize that they are brilliant geniuses because they are too busy being self-critical, while irritating, obnoxious people feel great about themselves while remaining blissfully unaware of how irritating and obnoxious they are.

And speaking of self-doubt, a funny thing happend the other day when I was looking up ficus tree care on the internet. I have a third roommate, who you might not know about, and my third roommate is Doctor Ficus Johnson (Ph.D. in Ficology), who is a rather lovely tree that moved in after a friend moved out of town and left Doctor Ficus Johnson to us. And because I care, I wanted to check and make sure I was watering Ficus enough. And there, at the top of ficustree.com, it asked “Do you have what it takes to care for a ficus?” and then I wondered, “What if I don’t? What if I don’t even have what it takes to care for a ficus? Jesus Christ, what’s going to happen to me if I can’t even take care of a ficus?” And then I realized that I was being an idiot.

No dress post for yesterday, sorry – I was too busy spending seven hours deciding which Frankie and Annette movie I want to include on my list for my Special Field exams.

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Pretty excellent

October 17, 2009 by ms. xandra

1. Less than a week until Windows 7! I am not normally excited about these kinds of things. But I have been having a MAJOR falling out with Windows Vista over the past little while, and I am at the point where I would murder babies if it would get me a different operating system. And also Microsoft has a student deal so I can get it for $30! Oh, the benefits of staying in school for far longer than is proper.

2. Canter’s matzo ball soup! You are hopefully going to cure my cold, but at the very least you are totally delicious. Also, Canter’s, you are one of my most favorite places in the universe, I love you so.

3. The REAL pretty excellent news of the day is that I’ve gotten funding to go to England this summer to do dissertation research and to podcast about it! (I know that “a podcast about dissertation research” sounds epically boring, but since my project is about Awesome Shit like northern soul and lady punk rock and mods vs. rockers it will be very un-boring, I promise.) SO! If you’ve been to England, please consider yourself solicited for traveling advice because I’ve never been. I am, predictably, TOTALLY STOKED about this.

4. Tonight I am going to do some reading, then get hopped up on decongestants and watch Summer Heights High. Sounds pretty excellent.

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A dress and a song, episode 9: Back to the Future, Leslie and the Lys

October 17, 2009 by ms. xandra

Ladies and gentlemen, I am so totally having a major Leslie Hall moment right now. Leslie Hall is kind of magic. I really appreciate her wholehearted embrace of all things opulently vulgar, and at the same time, sometimes I find her mysterious and incomprehensible, but in a very delightful way. She’s doing something really interesting with a sort of middle-American, white, totally square kind of femininity (think: stretch pants, ugly sweaters, cats) and is combing it with a lot of sheer awesome (think: zombies, Back to the Future, UFOs, killer dance moves) and a lot of major awkwardness. And while she’s been embraced by the sort of hipstery feministy set (represent!) and there is a lot of irony in what she does, I think that at the same time there’s an earnestness (there’s that word again!) and a lot of love behind her music. Take this totally rad song about crafting:

Leslie Hall is making fun of crafting BECAUSE CRAFTING IS SO AWESOME and she knows it. I am also currently fairly obsessed with Blame it On the Booty, which I have been watching approximately 10.5 times a day. There’s a pretty hilarious version of fat acceptance going on here that I really delight in:

So, someone who saw this link says to me the other day, “tell me about Blame it On the Booty.” And, like, please, try to explain Leslie Hall to anybody. It’s inexplicable. But because I sit around and think about these things all the time, I did actually have something to say. Leslie Hall, I have decided, is performing a particular aesthetic that I have termed the Hipster Grotesque. That is to say, she tries to be as hideous as possible for the purpose of being somehow ironic. What’s interesting about Leslie Hall, is that when she does this I LOVE IT, whereas when I see hipsters in Silver Lake in bad 80s getup it makes me want to give them all makeovers and attitude adjustments. And I think it’s because Leslie Hall clearly knows how ridiculous she is being, and it’s that self-awareness combined with this sort of earnest joy that make what she does so appealing to me. It’s like she’s reclaimed irony for the overly self-aware fat girl set. (Look for my forthcoming Exciting Academic Paper, “Wearing Gold Spandex Pants I Made a Hip Hop Album: On Leslie Hall and the Hipster Grotesque,” coming soon to a musicology seminar near you.)

Also there’s something to be said about the fact that she calls herself a rapper. There’s some kind of critique of whiteness at work here too, but I need to think about it some more before I can come up with some sort of more cogent theory. But I think you can draw parallels to things like the Flight of the Conchords doing a Biz Markie impersonation – I’m interested in what it is that makes it so funny when white people who are impossibly hip pretend to be impossibly square and do hip hop.

ANYHOW, here is a really amazing song about Back to the Future!

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If I were to, say, “do some musicology” on this song, I might talk about how Leslie has a pretty irregular usage of rhythm here, and perhaps speculate that the way timing works in this song is a reflection of how time travel technology destabilizes the idea of time as we know it, while the driving rhythms of the chorus represent the act of hurtling through time and space in a Delorean. (FUN UNRELATED FACT: For a very long time I thought the Pixies’ “My Velouria” was actually called “My Delorean.”)

And while I really wholeheartedly support Leslie’s decision to live her life in spandex, I know it’s not for everybody, and is not necessarily a life choice that I would make. But I think this glorious hot pink thing is perfect for this song, because it’s ideal attire when you go back to 1955 to hang out with mom and dad at prom, and also I’m pretty sure Leslie Hall would really dig the colour, not to mention the sequins:

From Calendar Girl Vintage

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Dress/Song Episode 8: The Raincoats, Only Loved at Night

October 13, 2009 by ms. xandra

In honor of OH MY GOD YOU GUYS I GOT TO SEE THE RAINCOATS PLAY LAST NIGHT today’s song is OBVIOUSLY going to be a Raincoats song. The Raincoats are the kind of band who make me feel less alone in the world. They are occasionally a little bit earnest in that “oh, the Second Wave” kind of way, but they are the kind of pioneers who really, really did pave the way for future feminist interventions in punk rock. And when Gina Birth sang “you ask if I’m a feminist – well, why the hell wouldn’t I be?” I was able to shelf my well-cultivated cynicism and actually earnestly join in feeling the earnestness. And I almost cried, because The Raincoats have been one of my favorite bands forever. It’s funny – I’ve always been all about getting teenage girls to pick up guitars, but really, the most powerful lady guitar moment I’ve witnessed was these middle-aged women totally rocking out and being amazing.

Only Loved At Night is a completely heartbreaking song, and I love it. The odd, clockwork percussion and chiming guitars demarcate time in a very haunting way, and the vaguely impressionistic words paint a very tragic portrait. The Raincoats have two very distinct songwriting voices working in the band – Gina Birch‘s songs provide quirky, awkward, lovely, sparkly and insightful wit; while Ana Da Silva’s songs often seem darker and more ellusive – and this song is classic Da Silva. Here are the Raincoats in 1981:

And I can’t find a dress for the Raincoats. I mean, I can, in my head. I know exactly what it would look like. That’s kind of how I work – I usually have a pretty clear mental image of what dress will go with each song, or sometimes I work backwards if I’ve seen a dress I like and want a song to match it, but I can’t come up with anything this time out. And the dress I can envision for this song is kind of impossible, it’s like the platonic ideal of dresses that does not exist in the real world. Because it would have to be sort of punky because that’s where the Raincoats came from, but it could never be all 1977 black and white and safety pins and torn fishnets because that just wouldn’t work. It would have to be some kind of strange hybrid of Vivienne Westwood meets wild, spinster woman living in a cabin in the woods, who knows lots of herbal remedies and/or magic spells and would take me under her wing and teach me how to be unafraid. This is how I picture a Raincoats dress, and this picture doesn’t translate to any kind of tangible reality. So, dear readers, if you happen to see this dress around somewhere, do let me know.

Viv Albertine, late of The Slits, also played last night, and she was just lovely, too. Again, there was that charming combination of earnestness and poetry and creatively unskilled musicianship about her that tends to be associated with that particular moment in girly punk rock in the UK. And she told a hilarious story about how Vivienne Westwood wouldn’t let anybody wear brown because brown is too wishy-washy or something and punk rock had to be all black and white and contrasts. There is no brown in punk rock. The best moment in stage banter history came when she referred to 1970s British punk as “oh, the bleakness.” And of course, some dude behind me was complaining that her songs weren’t any good, but of course he didn’t think they were any good. Bands like the Slits and the Raincoats exist so outside of the criteria of what punk rock dudebro fandom would consider “good” that they are speaking an almost entirely different language. And it’s so important for me that someone like Viv Albertine is still singing. It’s really rare for me to find artists who can articulate a perspective so close to my own in such a clear, poetic way, and I hope to god Viv and Ana and Gina live forever and keep making noise.

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A dress and a song, episode 7: In California, Lisa Marr and/or Neko Case

October 10, 2009 by ms. xandra

Oh my, but I am behind on my bloggy goings-on this week. I am blaming last Monday. It was the worst. It completely threw off my equlibrium for the rest of the week. The best to understand what Monday was like would be to imagine you were in a production of the Vagina Monologues, only it was meant to make you feel bad about yourself, and also was written by Kafka. And there you would have my Monday afternoon, indeed, the worst possible Monday afternoon. And then Tuesday was also shitty, mostly because Monday’s shittiness was lingering in the form of an insistent headache, and then Wednesday was less shitty, but only because I very firmly insisted that Things Could Not Be Any Worse, So Today Will Indeed Be Better. And it was. I finished all of my work by 10:00 tonight and then sat down and watched a warm, feel good movie about revenge. And now things are relatively pretty good. And tomorrow I get to see the Raincoats play, which is totally wonderful.

But suffice it to say that I have been feeling dispirited. And when I feel dispirited, I get homesick and spend a lot of time sitting around with a bottle of wine and my Portable Dorothy Parker, which clearly is a recipe for a lot of bitter laughter, and really establishes a set of conditions under which nobody should be allowed to blog, and so I didn’t, lest I tell the internet anything regrettable.

So in honor of my not-very-good week, here’s a beautiful, sad song about being mopey and Canadian in Los Angeles. How about that dreary descending bass line, kids? I tell ya.

The Lisa Marr Experiment, In California:

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And Neko Case covers it, in gloriously navel-gazing fashion:

Neko Case, In California

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And because I miss Canada, by association I miss warm cozy winter coats. I have a really impressive collection of vintage winter coats that languish in my parents basement. The weirdest thing about living in California has been the way the seasons, or lack thereof, completely screws up my sense of time. This is not a complaint about the weather, because I hate snow. But the constancy of the seasons makes it hard for me to really comprehend what time of year it actually is – like, my parents told me they’re calling for snow at home next week, while, just over a week ago, it was so hot here that I went outside and thought I was going to have a heart attack. I find it really difficult to understand that it is, in fact, October. But I think what really makes my grasp on temporality so elusive is the light – while the temperature does remain fairly consistent here, apart from the almost unbearable heat for a few weeks in the summer, and the one or two weeks (typically coinciding with people visiting me from Canada) when it rains steadily in December or January, it’s the way the daylight remains constant and unchanging that is strangely disconcerting. David Lynch said something once about how the light in Los Angeles is what makes the city so perfect for filmmaking, and it’s true. I even maintain that pictures of me that were taken in Los Angeles look significantly better than pictures taken elsewhere. But another thing the light is good for is making me forget what month it is. And I love the way the sunlight looks on the hills when I’m walking up to Sunset to catch the bus, but that’s why I still rejoice on those rare overcast days.

So instead of dresses, today, some winter coats, that would never do in Los Angeles sunshine, for when you’re in California, dreaming of snow:

The most glorious coat that ever was, from A-hem Vintage on Etsy.

Also gorgeous, also from A-Hem Vintage.

And because the coat I miss most of all, is my floor-length, blue velvet coat with purple buttons, two gorgeous blue coats:

From Cheesecake Vintage,

Most amazing collar detail! from SkivvyLuLu Vintage.

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A dress and a song, Episode 6: Vera Lynn, We’ll Meet Again

October 2, 2009 by ms. xandra

This just in: college freshmen do not get Dr. Strangelove.

It was going to be beautiful. The exciting and intellectually stimulating discussion I had planned on the red scare was going so well, and my students seemed honestly excited and engaged, and this was all leading up to what I had pegged as a grand finale: we would watch the clip from Dr. Strangelove about the commie plot to flouridate water, and everyone would laugh and it would crystallize everything we’d been talking about and we would have a really fun time talking about nefarious communist plots before I sent them home for the weekend. Instead, they watched the Strangelove clip and promptly shut down. They sat there. They stared at me. Nobody said anything. The half hour of really great discussion that had preceded this silence was but a distant memory, vanished, like the fart of a hummingbird on a windy day. I vamped for a few minutes. I dismissed them five minutes early.

So, dear students who do not understand why Dr. Strangelove is so funny, I dedicate this post to you. Most importantly, though, I dedicate this song, sung by Miss Vera Lynn, the Forces’ Sweetheart, and set to a delightful scenic montage by Mr. Stanley Kubrick, to you:

Fun fact that I learned from wikipedia that is therefore undeniably true: The BBC included this song in a package of recordings that they made especially for listening to in your fallout shelter, to keep those nuclear winter blues away.

And maybe next time we have a class about communists, I will wear this dress to really get the point about the red scare across: for it is certainly red, and at a mere $450, the price manages to be pretty scary:

(from Timeless Vixen Vintage)

Or there’s always this red atomic number; truly a McCarthian delight:

(from Sydney’s Vintage. Also, you should totally click through on the above photo and check out the back of that dress!)

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