The other week I watched Howl, and now all I can think about is Remington typewriters and readings in smoky New York clubs, and James Franco as Allen Ginsberg talking about falling in love with Jack Kerouac, and about falling in love with Neal Cassady, and about wanting to write so that they would “understand, nakedly, how I felt”, and about being in the psych ward, and saying, “There is no Beat Generation. It’s just a bunch of guys trying to get published.”

And all I can think is that if I was a cute guy all I would ever wear would be big black Ray-Bans and white t-shirts and plaid shirts. And then I thought, well, maybe I’ll just do that anyway.

Sometimes I get this feeling like, hey remember how I used to draw and stuff? And then I sit down with my charcoals and I realise how out of practice I am and it’s one of those things that just is not like riding a bike. So I cheat a little and I trace bits and copy stuff and I scribble and cry, and my cat walks all over it with his cute little paws and tries to eat it. But then I scan it in and adjust it a little and I feel kind of happy.

Anyway, I did this thing of Andrej and it was fun for me.

[Updated, maybe with slightly more collected thoughts this time.]

The Stars (Are Out Tonight), the second single from David Bowie’s upcoming record The Next Day, was released earlier this week, and it’s kind of everything. The song is beautiful, grungy and melodic, with a sweeping energy that is unmistakably Bowie. But what’s more exciting is the way it is brought to life in a strange, gorgeous and beguiling video, starring Tilda Swinton, Andrej Pejic, Saskia de Brauw, and Iselin Steiro.

It’s like a creepy little arthouse film – disturbing, sexy and utterly bizarre. Bowie and Swinton (who many have long suspected may actually be the same person) play a straight-laced, middle-aged couple living quietly in the suburbs. “We have a nice life,” Swinton says, kissing Bowie on the cheek as they do their supermarket shopping. He is starting distractedly at a magazine cover featuring an incredibly young, glamorous and decadent celebrity couple plastered on the cover. Then he tosses it aside. “We have a nice life,” he agrees firmly.

As the swell of the song kicks in, we see snapshots of their nice, pastel-coloured life, but there’s something strange going on. Slowly, their space is being invaded by this very celebrity couple, played by the astonishingly beautiful Pejic and de Brauw, swapping genders and looking predictably fantastic. The two skinny, androgynous figures creep up behind the older couple, making bizarre dancing movements. They sneak into their bedroom at night, Pejic brushing his lips against Bowie’s as he sleeps. They have wild sex that ignites something terrifying and exhilarating in everyone. Eventually they take their place completely. All the while, the stunning Norwegian model Iselin Steiro, looking uncannily like a young Bowie, is performing in the living room, singing, “We will never be rid of these stars/ But I hope they live forever.”

The video perfectly captures what makes Bowie so brilliant. Though there are strong links to the past, it references his legacy without being nostalgic – it feels as fresh and forward-looking as his best work always has. And it feels pretty exciting. The way gender is so effortlessly blurred and blended and just tossed aside feels incredibly refreshing – not because it’s a new idea at all, but because it reminds us that this kind of creativity exists. It reminds us of all the self-possession, individuality and insouciant self expression that people like Bowie and Pejic represent. And that’s something really beautiful and inspiring, whatever else you read into it.

I’m sure it’s also kind of making a comment about celebrity culture and our obsession with beautiful and famous people, but truthfully I’m too entranced by all the beautiful and famous people in it to really care much. But watch it for yourself:

I know it’s so three years ago to even care, but I think I need to take a moment to debrief on the end of Gossip Girl. Sure, it sort of fizzled out after the first few seasons, and the finale was just a little too sappy to really make up for it, but there was still something about it that made me remember why I loved it so much to start with.

So first things first: Dan was Gossip Girl all along. Obviously, there are SO many holes we could poke in this if we could be bothered, but who cares – I kind of like it anyway. In a weird sort of way I think Dan has always been my favourite. Even though he’s incredibly annoying, he was always the one I could “relate to” or whatever, so I always found myself on his side.

Given that, I like the twist that he had all the power the whole time, when they all thought he was the most powerless. And yeah, it was pretty cruel, but in the end it’s no more vicious than any of the stuff Serena and Blair and Chuck and everyone do to each other every day. Like Dan points out, their twisted concept of friendship means they can all swing erratically between cruelty and love and betrayal and revenge and forgiveness all the time, and nothing ever really changes – “You destroy each other, then you sit around at Thanksgiving and call each other family.”

Blair tries to convince Chuck to run away to a desert island together, where they won’t even need money because they can “live off the land.”

Gossip Girl has always had that sort of Fitzgeraldian moral slant to it, where the world of the Upper East Side is brought to life with a peculiar mix of awe and yearning and repulsion. Just like F Scott Fitzgerald did in many of his most famous works, like The Great Gatsby and The Beautiful and Damned, it presents the lives of the rich and beautiful as frivolous and toxic, but at the same time they are lavishly glamorised. Which means we can long to be a part of it, vicariously soak up all the diamonds and champagne, but at the same time we come away feeling a bit morally superior.

There are obvious parallels we can draw between Gossip Girl and Fitzgerald  – so obvious that Dan even makes that point himself when he’s explaining to the others how he came to be Gossip Girl. (The Beautiful and Damned is also supposedly Serena’s favourite book, quite possibly because it’s the only book she’s ever read – see look at me being all snooty and judgemental, assuming that she can’t possibly be smart and have such amazing hair. But still, the only other book I remember ever seeing her open was The Old Man and the Sea, and that’s only because Nate had left a stash of weed in between its covers…) The whole thing is about being outside a world that is flashy, extravagant, privileged, and that seems impossible to penetrate. “Let me tell you about the very rich,” Fitzgerald wrote in his 1926 short story The Rich Boy.

“They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves.”

And that’s where characters like Dan are needed to hold the whole thing together, to give us an intermediary between our world and this fantasy world of the rich and beautiful. These are the characters we are supposed to identify with – the outsiders. There’s Nick Caraway, the sheltered, humble Midwesterner who bewilderedly enters the lavish world of Gatsby and the Buchannans and is both critical of “the whole rotten bunch” and dazzled by them. Then in Gossip Girl we’ve got Dan, who defines himself by his outsider status as Lonely Boy, the sensitive writer from Brooklyn, but desperately wants to be in the inside, in love with a girl who epitomises the world he disparages.

Serena decides that Gossip Girl was really kind of a “love letter to all of us.” Um, really S?

It’s not just the disgusting amount of money that makes Dan (and us, maybe) feel like their world is corrupt. The other thing that sets Gossip Girl apart from normal life and other sort of “teen dramas” on TV is how unbelievably nasty they all are to each other. Just as Fitzgerald portrays the 1920s as an era of decayed social and moral values, the world of Gossip Girl is full of scheming, lying, cheating and betrayal. There’s nothing they love more than a good revenge scheme, and there’s never any shortage of worthy targets. William van der Woodsen made them all believe Lily had cancer, just so he could spend time with her. Juliet drugged Serena and left her in a seedy motel in Queens to make it look like she did it herself. Blair’s minions wrote WHORE all over the dresses Little J was showing to Tim Gunn. Chuck traded Blair for his hotel. Serena filmed herself having sex with Dan while he was dating Blair, in the exact same place that she had sex with Nate years ago when he was dating Blair. And so on and so on.

Georgina Sparks + Jack Bass = the best decision the writers have ever made?

Which leads us to Chuck Bass – a character who started out as a pure villain (he did try to date rape both Serena and Jenny, who was like 14, in the very first episode) but in the end is a good guy hiding behind a veneer of badness. Sure he can still be selfish and cold and manipulative, but it’s hard not to adore him. Much like Gatsby, who gets the reverent modifier “Great”, Chuck Bass has a sort of grandeur about him, and his name definitely has a certain gravitas – how many special passes has “I’m Chuck Bass” given him? But like Gatsby again, the reason we perhaps forgive his more morally reprehensible qualities, is that his one weakness is a complete and consuming love. Everything bad Gatsby did was to ultimately to impress Daisy – his real “dream” wasn’t to be rich, but to be good enough for her. Similarly, the one thing in the world Chuck Bass truly cares about is Blair – and the way they both flourish into better people when they’re together is one of the most heartwarming and redemptive parts of the show. When he loses her time and time again, Chuck’s life becomes consumed by the sole, desperate task of getting her back – his love for Blair is what provides his motivation, his inspiration, and what makes him a better person.

Even I’m not so cynical that I didn’t feel all warm and fuzzy at Chuck and Blair’s wedding and weep a little about how beautiful Blair looked.

Except. In the end, Chuck kills Bart Bass. Can we talk about that? I mean first of all, I don’t even really get how he got away with it all so quickly, especially after he and Blair had been on the run from the cops, and they were suspicious enough that they arrested him in the middle of his wedding, but anyway. Whether or not he is legally responsible for his dad’s death, he very deliberately let him die when he could have stopped it from happening. And sure, Bart did turn out to be pretty evil, and had tried to kill Chuck in the previous episode, and would probably have let Chuck fall from the building if the situation was reversed. But the best moments in the show have always been when Chuck made small gestures that proved he has a heart, that he’s a good guy. I don’t know, I think it would have been a much nicer twist if Chuck had saved his father – and then let him rot for life in jail – and shown once and for all that he wasn’t like his father. (Also, that whole scene just reminded me far too much of Beauty and the Beast when Gaston falls off the tower. I kept kind of expecting it to be one of Blair’s dream sequences or something. Weird.)

The other thing that kind of disappointed me is Serena. From the very first episode, she’s said she wants to change – she doesn’t want to be the reckless, shallow party girl who goes around having fun and leaving other people to clean up her messes. As mentioned before, her favourite book is The Beautiful and Damned – a novel that plays with the expectation and vitality of youth, the promise of infinite possibilities in life, which are frittered away by the careless. Gloria and Anthony Patch drift along through their glamorous life, being beautiful and having fun, but more or less doing nothing while they wait for something of meaning to arrive. They’re lost in this world without any real passion, and while they’re waiting to be inspired, time (and youth and beauty) runs out on them, in the end leaving them with nothing.

Was Serena’s wedding dress the worst thing about the final episode?

In the same way, everything comes easily to Serena. She’s hailed as the image of perfection, and anything she wants seems to just be handed to her – but she’s still just drifting, looking for some kind of passion or purpose in life. Without having to lift a finger she’s accepted into Brown, but decides at the last minute not to go, and when she is (of course) accepted into Columbia the next year, she still doesn’t really seem to actually do any homework or anything – mostly because she’s busy pursuing a romance with her professor. People hand her glamorous jobs and she dabbles in each one for a while, but although she wants to desperately to prove she’s more than just the shallow society girl she is widely thought to be, nothing seems to truly inspire her. Like Gloria and Anthony, she seems to be waiting for something.

And in the flash-forward to five years later, her big news is she’s getting married. Which is great for her I guess. But it would have been great to see her finally doing something on her own, finding some cause or project she loves and actually working towards doing something great with it. As much as I really don’t buy Nate being editor of a newspaper and running for mayor, at least he’s doing something without relying too much on what gets given to him because he’s part of the van der Bilt family.

Little J showed up for Dan and Serena’s wedding to sit there and look bored. Bless her; five years later and she still has those hair extensions. But she also has a J by Waldorf shopping bag with her so that’s cute.

In the end, I’m of course reading too much into it all. It’s just a show  – but it was a pretty fun one, and I kind of still wish there was more. And next time, more Nelly Yuki please.

In honour of Taylor Swift Week (because, shut up, yeah?) I’m thinking about everything red.  Everything that looks red, and feels red, but is also black and white in a way. Lacy, romantic Valentino dresses. My favourite Kate Moss lipstick. Someone playing an acoustic guitar, just for me. I see perfect nights, saturated with the smell of champagne, where you laugh so much your belly hurts, and you think your girlfriends are the most beautiful creatures you’ve ever seen. Or dancing to Call Me Maybe in someone’s backyard. Or lazy mornings curled up with someone warm, feeling their skin against yours and knowing you’ll remember it one day. Knowing that it’s rare, but also so simple. Dreading the day when you might hate each other. Remembering out of nowhere a forgotten ember of hurt, and wondering if he ever remembers you, if he still has a box of your things. I see nights walking slowly down the street alone, feeling like you’re underwater, and coming home to throw your high heels at the wall and cry into your cat’s fur. I see Vera Wang wedding gowns, stained an inky garnet, dripping off pale skin. Red leaves, cold wind, long hair. Falling in love with the smallest things, and wondering how anyone in the world couldn’t be in love with that gap in his teeth.

That’s what Red sounds like to me.

It kind of looks like this.

(Image sources: Ann He for Wallflower; The Cool Hunter;  Vera Wang;  Rolling Stone;  GollyBard on Etsy;  RUSSH;  Kate Moss for Rimmel; Weight Watchers; Karl Lagerfeld for Numero; Cristina Lauren; Bryan Boy; Bookmarc by Marc Jacobs)

Compliments are a tricky thing, and the role they play in relationships can be even more tricky, especially when you start to look at the different gendered dynamics. In a four-part blog series, the always-insightful Autumn Whitefield-Madrano of the Beheld discusses the main ones.

(Image from the New York Times)

I keep thinking about this article I read a few weeks back about a 16-year-old girl in Mumbai who is running sex education classes for teenage girls in her community. This is exactly the sort of thing that needs to happen more and I’m filled with so much awe and admiration for this girl and others like her who are doing such amazing things. Read read read it. 

 Lizzie Wurtzel is of course one of my idols (which makes me feel like I have the right to call her Lizzie, like we’re friends or something. What? In Prozac Nation and stuff no one ever calls her Elizabeth), but I’m still mulling over what I think of her piece on “1% wives” in the Atlantic. Basically, she’s arguing that we should stop pretending that choosing to be a housewife is feminist just because it’s a woman’s choice – and despite how harsh it is, she actually makes some fairly compelling points. Obviously it’s a pretty controversial point of view, and it’s very much in conflict with the argument I always make – that feminism means whatever you want it to mean. But, whether I agree with it or not … it’s interesting to think about.

Old freaking news, but I’m still pretty captivated by this Candy magazine fashion editorial, featuring of course the incredible Andrej Pejic. Seriously, is anybody cooler than him?

Speaking of Andrej, he’s also supposedly filming some kind of reality show (though despite all the blogs saying the rumours have been confirmed, as far as I can tell they only seem to have been “confirmed” by other fashion blogs, so you know.) I wonder if it will be anything like this short film he did recently (link not totally SWF, BTW).

I love it when fashion is inspired by books, so I like the news that Banana Republic is launching a line inspired by Anna Karenina. I love it a little less that it’s inspired by the film, which in itself I feel a little funny about, but still.

The phrase “I’m not like other girls” is thrown around a lot. Like, more often than makes sense. I’m sure I’ve said it lots of times, and I probably believed it when I was saying it. But that’s sort of the problem – in those moments, I’m believing in this cultural idea of “what girls are like”, and that’s just stupid. This blog post captures it all a lot more insightfully than I can right now.  

Japanese literature always makes me long to go to Japan, and spending the past two days immersed in Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto I went back to re-read my incredibly cool and talented pal Sian Campbell’s guest post on Liticism about some beautiful Japanese books she read.

Dressing to stand out and dressing to fit in and 70s punk. Danielle Meder of Final Fashion has some interesting thoughts about collectivism vs. individualism.

Well, really – when is my big cat-boy NOT on my mind?

Cross-posted at ArtsHub

A tightly packaged collection of new Australian writing, Overland has always been amongst the most engaging and intellectually stimulating Australian literary journals. With a blend of politics, economics, literature and culture interspersed with short fiction and poetry, Overland achieves a commendable balance of progressive thought and entertainment.

True to standard, issue 206 presents a solid and cohesive selection of work. One of the standout voices is that of aspiring African-Australian actor Tariro Mavondo. In her personal essay ‘The danger of a single story’, she considers the way ethnic diversity is treated in Australian cultural products, particularly television shows. Remembering black characters in shows like Home and Away and Neighbours ¬– always portrayed as ‘the desperate illegal other’ – Mavondo explores the position of the migrant artist, and wonders if the current push for ‘colour-blind casting’ in theatre will help to encourage change.

Michael Green’s ‘Death in Footscray’ considers a more sinister occurrence of ethnic discrimination in Australia. In light of the suspicious death of an Ethiopian youth in Melbourne’s West, Green investigates racialised policing and the effect of such cases on the community. The frustration at the dawdling legal procedures, the feeling of having no answers is vividly captured in the image of Green and the victim’s father together puzzling over a jargon filled letter from the coroner.

Looking further abroad, Hugo J Race creates an evocative picture of Sau Paulo nightlife in his feature ‘Blood and Chocolate’. Full of vivid characters and descriptions, the piece effectively recalls the ‘mystic undercurrent’ that animates the city streets, so that the pulsating energy of the music scene can almost be felt through the prose.

This strength of this issue of Overland is also bolstered by its selection of short fiction. James Bradley’s ‘The Inconvenient Dead’ is a strangely harrowing story in which the narrator is visited by a friend who has recently committed suicide. The matter-of-fact treatment of the story allows it to surpass sentimentality, instead evoking a vague sense of sadness. ‘Tractor Tractor’ by SJ Finn is rich with memorable characters and imagery of rural life, and Paul Dawson’s ‘Australian Academic’ is both cleverly approached and impressively written, with recurring phrases (“the skittish sigh of her stockings as she crossed and uncrossed her legs”) that linger long after reading.

Poetry provides a pleasant visual contrast and change of pace. This issue features the winner of the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize – the kaleidoscopic ‘rock candy’ by Joel Ephraims, which brings to mind images of snow globes and a feeling of fragility – alongside other evocative pieces that together offer a delicious sample of the wealth of talent that Australia’s literary scene has to offer.

Generally, the spectrum of responses stretches between these two poles:

• Girls is groundbreaking and completely relatable for our generation
• Girls is about privileged hipsters whining about White Girl Problems

After just two episodes, there’s already a pretty frenzied debate between the lovers and haters of this show (and also some bitching from some fool from the band Girls who thinks it’s super disrespectful that they stole the name.) There are clearly plenty of women who relate closely to the experiences of the girls on the show, who feel that it represents them and their lives and their generation. “It’s like they broke into my house and filmed my life,” one girl in the Shit Girls Say video says. But there are also a lot of women who can’t relate to it – and so they feel a little betrayed, like they were promised something else.

From their perspective, Girls is a very narrow-focused, insular sort of show – and that’s probably a fair assessment.  The characters are, I guess, privileged white hipsters. They’re tertiary educated, their parents give them money to support them while they do unpaid internships (the core dilemma of the first episode is that Hannah’s parents decide to stop supporting her financially, telling her “get a job, start a blog”) and they live in cool, shabby apartments in Brooklyn.

And yes, they’re white. To be honest, I didn’t actually notice the lack of racial diversity until I saw all the backlash. But then, I’m a privileged white girl too. I can relate to some of the situations and feelings these girls are going through, and I have no real authority to talk about what it’s like to not be represented. I believe Lena Dunham when she says it was a “complete accident” that there’s not much racial diversity on the show, but I also think it’s pretty reasonable to argue that in 2012, anyone who creates something that represents the world has a responsibility to be a bit more aware of things like that. Luckily, Dunham has been open to the criticism (despite others involved in the making of the show who unwisely got straight on the defensive) and has promised to be more conscious of it in the second season of the show, if she gets to make one. And to be fair, we’ve only seen two episodes of this season so far.

The main reason there has been so much disappointment and frustration about these “privileged white hipsters” is that there was so much hope pinned on the show to be revolutionary. Before the first episode had even aired, people (note: not Dunham) were hailing it as the voice of the new generation, Sex and the City but with “real girls”, a show that represents female experience in a way nothing else on TV does. That’s a lot of responsibility to saddle on a half-hour sitcom written, directed, produced and starred in by a 25-year-old. It’s hard to see how it could possibly have lived up to that kind of hype.

But let’s talk about what the show is doing well. There is something raw and honest about it, something gritty and “real.” Some of the things I took from the show so far that I think are interesting and worth noting are:

They’re not so polished

There’s a part of me that does want to watch skinny girls with glossy hair and expensive handbags and impossibly white teeth. I like watching The Hills and letting myself believe for twenty minutes that maybe I could be as glossy and glamorous as them if I just put a little bit of effort in. And yet, it’s also comforting once in a while to see people on TV who are a little bit more like me. I’m wary of the term “real girls” for a lot of reasons, but the fact that these girls are a bit scruffier and don’t have designer clothes is kind of refreshing.

Dunham is cute, with a very pretty round face and a sweet nature that emanated from her, but she’s also short and curvy and pale and decorated with amateur tattoos. And yet, she has no problem putting her body on display. There’s a lot of nudity in the show, and almost none of it is very sexy or flattering.

Sex is sometimes just awkward and weird

The girls in Girls are liberated women of the world who like to have sex, but the sex isn’t always that great. In fact, there are some seriously awkward sex scenes in this show. There’s no dimmed lighting or romantic music or really any passion.  It just… happens, and it’s no big deal.

Unless of course it gets weird. The scene at the beginning of the second episode which I don’t even want to describe because it’s so odd and disturbing is depicted so unflinchingly that you sort of get that “well, you can’t make that stuff up” kind of feeling.

Being loved isn’t always necessarily that great

One of the most interesting story arcs so far is the relationship between Marni and her boyfriend Charlie. They’ve been together for four years – kind of an eternity at this age – and although he’s still madly in love with her, she’s getting pretty over it. So the dynamic is: he’s like a huge adoring puppy dog always slobbering all over her, and she finds herself being a huge bitch because it just annoys her so much. “I can feel him being so nice to me and it just makes me so angry,” she says. She falls asleep in Hannah’s bed to avoid having sex with him; she says his touch now is “kind of like a weird uncle touching my knee” and the one sex scene we’ve seen between them so far definitely falls into the “awkward horrible sex” category as mentioned above.

I think it’s really interesting, because it’s such an incredibly normal and relatable situation, and yet it’s something that we don’t really admit to. Particularly as women, we’re conditioned to believe that finding someone who loves us so completely is the key to our happily ever after. We see the happy ending where the couple falls in love, and forget that five years down the track it might not be so amazing anymore. Then if you do find yourself feeling bored and stifled despite knowing that you’re loved, it feels pretty selfish and ungrateful and silly to then want to throw it away.

It’s hard to make money doing something you love

Look, admittedly this is a very “privileged” problem to have, but it’s true: it’s really hard to be a writer or an artist or whatever your passion might be when you also have to pay rent and eat food. People always harp on about how it’s so unrealistic in Sex and the City that Carrie could possibly afford an apartment in Manhattan and all those shoes just from writing a newspaper column, and even though I find the argument a bit beside the point of everything, it’s true. It’s not realistic.

The whole unpaid internship thing is a huge can of unfair worms and I don’t want to get into it really – but it is interesting to see it acknowledged on TV.

Girls doesn’t speak for every girl. It doesn’t represent every 20-something woman’s experience, and it’s definitely not “the new Sex and the City”, if such a thing could exist. But as Dunham’s character Hannah says in the first episode, “I think I may be the voice of my generation. Or at least, a voice, of a generation, somewhere.” Dunham is a voice, and as limited as her experienced might be, her perspective is worth sharing.

Kitten Utero
1993, Kitten Records

1. Serve the Kitten (“Kitten angst has paid off well/ Now I’m bored and old.”)

2. Scentless Kitten (“He was born senseless and scentless/ He was born a scentless kitten.”)

3. Heart Shaped Kitten (“Meat-eating kittens forgive no one just yet/ Cut myself on angel hair and kittens’ breath.”)

4. Kitten Me (“Kitten me my friend/ Kitten me again.”)

5. Frances Kitten Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle (“She’ll come back as a kitten/ And burn all the liars.”)

6. Dumb Kitten (“I think I’m kitten/ Or maybe just happy… My kitten is broke/ But I have some glue.”)

7. Very Kitten (“If you ever need kittens please don’t/ Hesitate to ask someone else first.”)

8. Kitten Milk It (“Left kitten, right kitten, broken kitten/ Lack of kittens and or sleeping.”)

9. Pennyroyal Kitten (“I’m a liar and a kitten/ … I’m anaemic kitten.”)

10. Kitten-Friendly Unit Shifter (“What is wrong with kitten?/ Kitten is what I need.)

11. Tourette’s Kitten (“Everything kitten sees/ Is all wrong.”)

12. All Kitten (“What else should I be?/ All kitten.”)