#Bono’s underpants

[todayfamousbirthdays]

May your birthday be filled with laughter! Leonardo Bono (TV Actor), 26 years old. Cheers on your birthday. One step closer to adult underpants. https://ift.tt/32SVXNO

[paranoidwino]

So, for those of you who ‘are in the know’, and for those of you who aren’t, here’s a personal excerpt of joy and undiluted jubilation. Just kidding.

So, there’s an apartment (pro tip, it’s mine) in the town where I used to live. Yeah, it’s mine.  Or it was until I had to move back with my parents because of reasons.

What do you do with an empty apartment and you kinda need the money? Yeah, I rented it. Hopefully, it’s the right term.

The first tenants were assholes and forgot to pay more often than not, but when they left the house was more or less how I gave it to them.

Yes, now it’s going to get worse.

To avoid the problem of being scammed again, I went to an agency that could help me. Long story short my house is put for rent for 500$ a month (3 bedrooms, one bath, living room kitchen and washing machine room in a fantastic location but fine, okay, the market is low...). They find me a tenant in like 10 days, which I kinda expect because the price was that low.

We give them the house and I’ll move without mentioning the incidents with the woman calling me a liar, them sneaking a dog inside, him hitting the woman in front of the kids so bad that he’s sent to jail only to get out 3 weeks later to provide for the family... oh wait I just mentioned that.

Long story short before all of this jail hailstorm happened they stopped paying us (and okay fool me once fool me twice), answering our calls, opening the windows.

They stay barricaded in my house for SIX months.

Then he’s sent to jail, she can’t provide for the family, he’s out, he’s back with her (social services just shrug at us and avoid any kind of contact we try to use). 

So I do the only thing i can do. I get a lawyer.

This man, the lawyer, is the kindest soul on this green earth I guarantee you because despite me not having the money to afford him, he takes the case pro bono and only charges me the $67 for court prices.

This man is an angel and deserves an award.

They leave, signing a TON of forms that liberate us and them from any contract so on so forth with the promise of giving me back some money... I think it was 1000$ but they poofed so fast that I didn’t see a penny.

A week later the man comes to my lawyer (because I refused to have any contact with him without my lawyer and since he’s had a record of violence I made certain to respect that at all costs) and gives us the keys.

Many are smashed and so is the remote control of the gate.

We rush to the apartment and change ALL of the keys and locks.

......The house is completely destroyed.

My furniture is broken, the beds destroyed, the wardrobe has all of the drawers pulled out.

There’s junk everywhere, fluids on the walls and I pray it’s just oil or juice.

Mould all over, the smell is rancid (so rancid you need a mask), there are used pants and underpants and panties and however you call it everywhere, there’s “FUCK YOU” printed on the windows with permanent markers, used razors in the toilet the sinks are a mess. the oven and the shelves they stole.

 The windows are forced open with taupe and there’s more and more junk.

I want to cry every time I think of my house reduced like this.

Anyway, today we managed to FINALLY remove all the junk.

One step ahead towards fixing my house.

I’m just so done with tenants.

*Scream of rage*

[biofunmy]

Back to Basics for a Designer Whose Business Got Too Tight

Scott Sternberg would prefer you not call him “quirky,” as has happened many times before. It’s “a word people like to use for me a lot,” Mr. Sternberg said, “which I don’t love.”

So we will not repeat the offense, further than to note that, while Mr. Sternberg may not be quirky, there he was, in all his Peter Panish youthfulness, with his penchant for stripy shirts and Polaroid film, seated in a geodesic dome of his own design as vintage monitors played the funny little videos he creates, ruminating about utopia.

If Mr. Sternberg has a quirk — let’s say for a minute that he does — it is for ginning up not just clothes (which he does) or videos (which he does) or even geodesic domes (which he has, for his label’s first-ever pop-up, in the SoHo branch of the furniture seller Design Within Reach), but also an entire world in which all of these things come together, with its own rhythms, cadence, colors and meticulously designed aesthetic.

Mr. Sternberg, 44, is what is usually called a fashion designer, insofar as he is in the business of making and selling clothes. If you know his name, it is most likely that you remember his former label Band of Outsiders, which, from 2004 to 2015, had a profound impact on the way stylish American men dressed, squeezing them into slim shirts and skinny ties and Sperry Top-Siders: prep-school style in quotation marks, self-aware and self-effacing.

Mr. Sternberg thinks of himself less as a designer or a creative director than as a world builder. He and Band of Outsiders parted company, and his new brand, Entireworld (aha!), is less exclusive and less niche; a collection, essentially, of basics. It is clothing considered from the bottom up — one if its founding garments was a pair of underpants.

Now with a few more staples to round it out, Mr. Sternberg hopes for nothing less than to dress the entire world. A year into its life, the question is: Can he?

The Entireworld world, a fantasyland in Disney colors (Disney World is an acknowledged influence), is a cheerful, welcoming one. Mr. Sternberg’s Band of Outsider tailored jackets could once run $1,800 or more; Entireworld’s T-shirts are $32.

The same sensibility — Mr. Sternberg’s cinematic adorable — animates both. Many of the same friends who posed pro bono for guerrilla Polaroid ad campaigns are now in Instagram videos, singing, mugging or prat-falling: Jason Schwartzman, Kirsten Dunst, Andrew Garfield, Spike Jonze.

Over a series of interviews beginning in April 2018, at its inception, and continuing through Entireworld’s first year, Mr. Sternberg explained his vision of this world and how it was built on the ashes of its predecessor. In so doing, he offered a view into the tectonic shifts in the fashion industry, the instability of the high-fashion, runway model he left behind and the traditional gatekeepers who perpetuate it.

Mr. Sternberg had been featured in every fashion magazine, won the industry’s top awards, hosted Anna Wintour and Kanye West at his fashion shows. Still, he said at a public conversation at Design Within Reach with Deborah Needleman (the former T Magazine editor), “the fashion system can feel like jail.”

Band of Outsiders did $15 million in wholesale business its height, but Mr. Sternberg, overstretched and under-resourced, who sought and received investment, couldn’t keep up with the immense pressure to grow. He found out that his last hope for additional funding passed on the morning he opened the first Band of Outsiders shop in the United States, in SoHo. (The first-ever store had opened in Tokyo.)

He received a loan from CLCC, a Belgian fashion fund, for $2 million, but soon clashed with his new backers. Ultimately, Mr. Sternberg’s company defaulted on the loan and Mr. Sternberg himself walked away from the Band. CLCC assumed ownership, and Band of Outsiders continues without him, with a new design team in place. Mr. Sternberg called their first collection “a disaster.”

The challenges of designing and producing collection after collection of men’s and women’s wear are significant, and Band of Outsiders eventually grew to encompass several lines. The collections were well received but also vulnerable to the whims of trend and timeliness, and the vagaries of inconsistent production.

Even Band’s signature slim cuts were in part a self-fulfilling prophecy: After an initial run of shirts were (correctly) snug, other orders arrived from the factories in similar style. “Everything just came in a little bit small,” Mr. Sternberg said. “I’m not kidding.”

Band’s cuts — like those of Thom Browne, whose shrunken suits were a more conceptual foil to Mr. Sternberg’s easier Americana — helped convince curious young men to embrace a snugger silhouette. But that fit made democratizing and expanding the brand nearly impossible. In any case, high-fashion esotericism had never been Mr. Sternberg’s intention.

“That’s just not me,” he said. “That’s not how I see my legacy.”

If fashion is by definition exclusive, Entireworld is inclusive; fashion segments the world into groups of like-minded (and like-dressed) cohorts, but everyone wears underwear. In a video announcing the creation of Entireworld last year, Mr. Sternberg faced the camera and, as his face dissolved into a montage of stylish men and women (Mick Jagger, Sade, The Dude), acknowledged his past failings and vowed to take a different tack.

“I started thinking about what it would be like to create something more democratic this time, without compromising anything about the design or quality,” he said. “About the stuff we live in every day.”

But now, instead of staging fashion shows and courting the fashion press, instead of depending on the patronage of department stores and boutiques, Mr. Sternberg’s Entireworld is sold primarily from its own website.

Mr. Sternberg runs the entire business out of a bland commercial office building in the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles, from where he conjures a utopia only he can see. He is the man behind the curtain. Entireworld, and the thousand tiny windows onto it offered on Instagram posts and its cheeky, sunny website, is Oz.

Of course, the thing about Oz is that the man behind the curtain is pulling the levers, working to convince you to buy a $32 T-shirt from him, rather than a $10 three-pack from Hanes. He will tell you that his feels better, fits better and wears better; he will not be wrong.

But a basic is a basic, and to many, the difference is hard to parse. Mr. Sternberg is under pressure to make Entireworld so appealing that even its basics have ineffable magic that coaxes credits cards out of wallets.

Mr. Sternberg has to capture that market with less of the support he once enjoyed. “Have we captured the attention of traditional media outlets the way I expected to, the way I did at Band? Eh,” he said, giving a grunt of not-really. He has skipped the fashion shows and presentations he once staged. As a result, Entireworld has made a smaller splash.

But those who love it — those who may be rising to replace the old gatekeepers — have vouched for it. “Basically have not taken this sweatshirt off since I got it last week,” Leandra Medine, better known as the Man Repeller, posted to her Instagram not long after the label’s debut.

At Design Within Reach, Mr. Sternberg had his first real-world test, hanging racks of Entireworld clothes among Alexander Girard dolls and Man Ray chess sets and Hans Wegner chairs. Pegged to New York’s NYCxDesign programming, the Entireworld shop stayed open for 11 days, and customers came away with hot-pink sweatsuits and cotton sweaters.

“It was definitely something we had never done,” said Kim Phillips, the head of public relations and events for Design Within Reach. “It was sticking my neck out there for sure.”

Mr. Sternberg called the experiment gratifying. “An idea like this, I really believe more than ever has a place, especially when I see the sales and repeat sales,” he said. “I think the real challenge is — I know the real challenge is — that the amount of capital it’ll take to get where we need to getis formidable.”

To start Entireworld, Mr. Sternberg raised $1.5 million from a group of private investors, and he has sought further investment to grow and scale it. Within its first year, he said, the company has sold more than three quarters of its initial inventory and reached more than $1 million in sales without paying for any advertising.

Numbers like these, while impressive, mean Entireworld is dwarfed by many of its competitors, limited by finite capital but not in an ideal position to attract more. “There’s a real disconnect,” Mr. Sternberg said, between his values and the goals of the investors he is hoping to attract.

“Investors want a return, and they want a return in a certain amount of time,” he said. “I understand all these things, clearly, but they still don’t change my view that sticking to my guns in terms of what this is and what it should be shouldn’t bow too much to the pressure of what investors think it should be right now.”

And while the signs have been good — Ms. Phillips said that she and Mr. Sternberg were talking about the pop-up traveling to other Design Within Reach locations, and sales continue to climb online — the economic reality of keeping a fashion business afloat is a chilly reality intruding into utopia. The world isn’t Entireworld, yet. But Mr. Sternberg said there had been no question of not trying his hand in the rag trade again.

“Unfortunately not,” he said with a laugh. “I am an entrepreneur by birth. I am at my most ebullient, excited, energetic when there’s a big challenge and a huge bucket that needs these ideas to fill it out. It’s painful. It’s not easy. There’s just this unexplainable, probably illogical urge to do this stuff.”

Sahred From Source link Fashion and Style

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[duaneodavila]

Xir Back

Jordan Peterson may have made a career out of refusing to use made-up personal pronouns, but the demand that others use each individuals choice of pronoun hasn’t fallen by the wayside in fits of laughter over the silliness of the self-indulgent. In fact, the New York Times is back on the case.

Using an analogy that only xe could endure. Barnard English prof Jennifer Finney Boylan throws out the underhanded pitch.

Mrs. Sonny Bono, Jorge Mario Bergoglio and Donald J. Trump walk into a bar. Assuming you’re the bartender, by what names will you address them?

Oh, wait, that’s easy. Call them “Cher,” “Your Holiness” and “Mr. President.”

Because those are the names by which they are known.

See what she did there? This is why she doesn’t teach logic. Putting aside “her truth” that Mrs. Sonny Bono is Cher, as opposed to Mary Whitaker, she conflated proper names with third-person pronouns. This might have escaped your notice, but since Boylan is an English prof, it probably didn’t escape hers.

“Hers”? Is that the pronoun she would prefer I use to discuss her? Because the use of third-person pronouns isn’t the same as speaking to “her” directly, where I would use her proper name.

Yes, pronouns. Even though Barnard is a women’s college, it’s routine for there to be students in the room who don’t use “she.” In part, this is because men from Columbia (our sibling institution) routinely cross Broadway to enroll in a class at Barnard, and also because I might have a few transgender students in one of my classes. (Barnard admits students who identify as female at the time of their application to the college; students coming out as trans men while matriculating continue to be welcomed as part of the community.) Still other students use the gender nonspecific singular “they,” or the gender-neutral pronouns “ze” or “hir” or “xem.”

There are lots of others as well.

Boylan isn’t so foolish as to make her pitch on the basis of any claim to violence, and instead says she, calling herself a “grammar snob,” shares our pain. But it’s a simple matter of respect.

This would be the moment some readers — especially those, like me, who were painstakingly trained to be grammar snobs — might lament the atrociousness of the singular they, not to mention the strangeness of invented pronouns like ze and hir. There was a time when, if I heard an individual refer to himself or herself as “they,” I would have assumed ze might be crackers.

But I use the singular they all the time now — as well as other nonbinary pronouns — because the absence of a gender nonspecific singular pronoun in English really does present a problem, not just for transgender folks but for all people who feel that every word out of their mouths need not necessarily reveal the mysteries of their underpants.

If Boylan, the grammar snob, can do it, who are we to question?

And while conservatives — and others for whom the vexing issue of gender identity is considered a problem of no importance — might well resent any evolution in the mother tongue, it’s worth remembering that English has a long history of adapting to cultural change. That’s something we should celebrate, not lament.

The language is constantly evolving, so stop clinging to tradition, you dinosaur. Which is a great argument for language that better serves its function, to communicate ideas more precisely. Boylan makes a slightly better point when raising the introduction of the word “Ms.” to eliminate the distinction between married and unwed women.

The honorific “Ms.,” first proposed in an issue of The Sunday Republican of Springfield, Mass., in 1901, was finally adopted by The New York Times in 1986.

Except Ms. was finally accepted as a social convention that applied to all women, with the caveat that women who objected to it would be given the honorific of their choice if known. The better analogy would be to say the default pronoun from this point forward will be “xe” rather than “he,” but that’s not what she’s saying.

More simply, though, I’ll call my students they, or “xir,” or “e” (the pronoun coined by the mathematician Michael Spivak) simply because calling people by the names they prefer is a matter of respect. (Even calling them “preferred” pronouns does a disservice, because people aren’t choosing their identities out of fussiness or caprice; they are doing so, usually, as part of a hard-fought search for truth.) Using this language doesn’t mean that I see the world through their eyes. But it does mean I greet them with an open heart.

In other words, if you fail or refuse to use a person’s chosen pronoun, you are being disrespectful and greet them with a closed heart. Bear in mind, you’re not talking to them, but about them to others. And yet, each of them not only gets to dictate the words you use, but gets to compel you to speak in tongues to others about them or be branded a hater.

Why fight it? Why not just acquiesce to whatever pleases others as a sign of “respect” for their feelings? Forget for a moment the silliness of a language, a means of communication, reduced to confusion under the guise of other people’s feelings. Why can’t we just use the words that would be more pleasing to another person? Would it kill us to be kind?

This is a teachable moment. The word Boylan abuses isn’t “he” or “her,” or even the singular “they,” but “respect.” If you fail to use the words that please another, you are a bad person because you have chosen to be disrespectful of their feelings. Their feelings, therefore, are more important than our common language. They are entitled to decide what you are then obliged to say, and your failure to adhere to their desires makes you disrespectful.

George Orwell appreciated this manipulation of language, and warned against it. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson said it in his own way.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

While every young and sensitive soul may be master of xis own domain, is each to be master of your words? It’s better to teach them to respect the language than feel entitled to be its master.

Copyright © 2007-2017 Simple Justice NY, LLC This feed is for personal, non-commercial and Newstex use only. The use of this feed anywhere else violates copyright. If this content is not in your news reader, it means the page you are viewing infringes copyright. (Digital Fingerprint: 51981395c77d7762065ca2c084b63e47) Xir Back republished via Simple Justice

[therealmeatsweats-blog]

An excerpt from the forthcoming Meat Sweats investigative documentary, “Gritty Licks, Sultry Syncopation”, by local couch music critic, William McKindley Updike.

“In an intro to their belting of Helter Skelter in 1987’s rockumentary Rattle and Hum, Bono declared that Charles Manson stole the song from The Beatles and that U2 was “stealing it back.” With his crazy eyes and gnarly goatee, Charlie Manson seriously gave Helter Skelter a bad name. But Bono ultimately came to the rescue.

A hot new band in DC is attempting to do something equally epic—they are waging a sonic war to salvage their eponymous name from what most people would think is, well, just icky. Because the fame of this quintet is starting to bloom like an E Coli outbreak from the floor of a crusty Chicago slaughterhouse, you, dear reader, probably know of whom I speaking. Yes, it is none other than The Meat Sweats, whose mission, like Bono’s bird flipping to Mr. Manson, is to reclaim the unsavory reputation of the malady of meat immoderation, and turn it into something sonically beautiful.

And if a recent show at Columbia Heights’ sticky, yet eerily charming and newish club, The Pinch, is any indication, The Meat Sweats are well on their way to turn what many think is an irreligious outcome of one of the seven deadly sins (i.e. gluttony in case you don’t read your Bible everyday like I do) into something that the band’s beautiful groupies can’t stop themselves to chant for more of.

The Pinch show was such an outpouring of tasty chops and gritty licks, that if Neil Young had been there, and was not too old to still have tear ducts, he would have cried himself a Mississippi River. And speaking of that river, the quintet’s raucous rendition of Mississippi Queen would have sent the Confederate Army into submission had The Meat Sweats been around in 1860, if you know what I mean.

But fair warning—you need to prepare yourself physically and emotionally before you walk into a Meat Sweats show. Physically you are going to sweat—whether you’re a carnivore or a vegetarian. The band has some hypnotic power (perhaps it is delivered in the meaty vapor that seems to surround the band like a charred and oily version of The Peanuts’ Pigpen), and your body will not be able to stop until you drop. The second thing you need to know, is that clothing among the band members seems to be optional, and emotionally you need to be prepared for whatever you see. There will be robes, and de-robing. There may be gold lamè underpants. Or no pants. It is hard to say.

But one thing that will be undeniable—there will be more sweaty licks from these guys’ guitars than a Southern Baptist’s dog in heat. Take, for instance, the bands rousing rendition of Warron Zevon’s “I Need a Truck.” I’m fairly certain that I actually saw Zevon’s ghost clapping in the corner of The Pinch, or hell, they may have even brought the old werewolf back to life. It was that good. And their version of Spinal Tap’s “Sex Farm” literally felt as if someone put an actual spinal tap into my cerebrospinal fluid, and infused it with enough sultry syncopation that it made me dance as if possessed.

The history of how the Meat Sweats were formed is almost as interesting as the hair style of Ryan Adams, whom the band also covers. The members of The Meat Sweats crossed paths many times as young men in the U.S. competitive eating circuit. The boys of course specialized in the carnivorous arts, and one of them even once bested that tiny Japanese kid who always implausibly seems to win these things.

The competitions took them far and wide—even to the great (depending on your definition of such things) Annual Rocky Mountain Oyster Chug. Glorious or inglorious as the event was, these bastard children of Levon Helm (see what I did there, inglorious and bastards???) were faced with a fateful turn of events. In a frenzied fury of cooked cow balls, they filled their gullets not knowing or never minding that the bollocks were rotten (see what I did there, “never minding” “the bollocks”!??). It was only later that night that the reality became apparent, and the maggoty giggleberry driven meat sweats set in.

Though they had to enter a different kind of detox program than most rock-n-roll artists, the future band members were lost to the world for many years sweating it out in the hospital. But the sweaty mess that sought to destroy them also brought them together in what would later be called by Rolling Stone, the “brotherhood of the bad ball sacks.” At the detox farm, the boys bonded over their love for Lucinda Williams, The Band, and Sturgill Simpson, whom they cover in their live shows and offer thanks to them through their darkest hours bending over bed pans.

The boys of the band, who include Merle “Meaty Spice” Hammer, Carl “Head Cheese” Johnson, Frankie “Folk-Steak” McFadden, Lenny “Sloppy Joe” Lawson, and Gus “Grizzle” Jackson, will forever be bound by blood, meat sweats, and tears. They take their bond and their inspiration so seriously that I’m told that Meaty Spice’s drum kit is made from sweaty chicken skins instead of Mylar, that Head Cheese’s guitar strings are wound from feral cat gut, that Folk-Steak’s flute is filled with bacon fat, that Lenny’s keys are made from cow bones, and that Grizzle, well, he is just full of grizzle.

And the tightness of their jams confirms the collective cohesion. Whether they are floating and gnashing through “Railroad of Sin” or “Life of Sin,” or some other song about sin, they never miss a note or a chord change. They are so tight, you would think they were one symbiotic creature feeding off each other. And maybe whatever is left in all of them from the curse of the swamp nuts is what keeps them playing as one. And like The Borg from Star Trek, resistance to these jams is futile.

But if you want to catch The Meat Sweats, which I hope you do after reading this glowing review, you have to act quickly. Like most supergroups of famous and successful solo artists, they are temperamental perfectionists and practice so often that they actually only play one show every two years. If you see their name on a bill again, drop your meat tenderizer, or your tender meat, or whatever you have in your hand at that time, and go see these guys. You will get sweaty, an you might be embarrassed, but you will not be disappointed.”