Check it out! You can read a brand spanking new piece of mine over at Defenestration!
It’s called “The New Looks for Fall” and it’s here.
Howard, Akie and I took on Kim Kardashian’s nuptials for this week’s Perpetual Post. Because we looooove her soooo much!
MOLLY SCHOEMANN: As Tolstoy liked to say, “All happy families are alike, but unhappy families are much better for ratings.” Following this principle, I can’t imagine the Kardashian Klan ever reaching a point of tranquility, since they appear to favor publicity more than anything else. There’s constant drama and heartbreak and confusion—all very conveniently made public. If questionable levels of quasi-fame is what this family is after (and it apparently is), they’re handling things the right way! After all– a loving, stable household is extremely boring to everyone outside it. Not only that, but the public doesn’t want to hear about how happy celebrities are and how well their marriages and lives are going. For one thing, it gives the rest of us one more way in which we don’t measure up to them. Also, we like gossip! And finally, why should celebrities get to have everything? They already have money, fame and endless adulation from every corner. The least they can do is show us how miserable and divisive their personal lives are! It’s the price they pay for fame, right?
This is why I have a bad feeling about the inexplicably sudden marriage of Kim Kardashian to whats-his-head. (Even though I don’t really want to waste feelings on it). The whole situation smacks of a really kind of disgusting, self-aggrandizing, and shallow publicity stunt. And really, I’m a little confused as to why the marriage of woman of mediocre talents who is famous for being famous should mean anything to anyone. After all, now Kim Kardashian is married. Does this change anything for anyone? Have the tectonic plates shifted? Do we now know what love is?
No, no, and no—and that’s going to be a problem. Kim’s played her ace with this over the top wedding stunt. The only way the Kardashians are going to stay in the spotlight is if they continue to manufacture drama, and Kim Kardashian the dull, happily married woman is not going to hold our interest for very long. There’s a reason Shakespeare’s plays tended to end with the big joyous weddings—nobody much cared what happened after that. The wedding is over—now for the irreconcilable differences.
Thanks to our country’s crumbling infrastructure, I’d like to propose the following new reality television drama for A&E:
I-85 Truckers
Watch as some of America’s toughest truckers tackle the nightmarish corridors of infamous Interstate 85! Potholes, giant fissures, abandoned mattresses, and miles with faded, unreadable yellow lines all combine to test the mettle of even the most experienced truckers. Will the ancient, rickety bridges finally collapse? Will our drivers be crushed by falling chunks of overpass?
Follow six intrepid men and women of the road as they risk their lives and their loads on creaky elevated expressways and shambling turnpikes through high mountain passes with rusted out guardrails. Will this season’s crew make it from Alabama to Virginia in one piece?
Whenever I hear Britney Spears on the radio these days, I can’t help but think of her as some sort of non-entity; a quivering mound of protoplasm in a halter top and platform sandals that bleats out lyrics every few months on command when it notices it has been placed in a recording studio. Those lyrics are then autotuned and overproduced into the familiar, record-selling sound we’ve come to expect from Britney, which is then set to a pounding house beat and released gently into its number-one slot on the billboard charts.
This train of thought led me to recall those legendary brainless, soulless chicken-substitutes that are grown in laboratories across the country and served to unsuspecting (or suspecting) patrons at KFC– which as we all know can no longer be called ‘Kentucky Fried Chicken’, as it no longer actually serves actual chickens.
Those depressing, zombie-chicken caricatures of living flesh, despite their unsavory origins, produce appealing enough fried drumsticks and meaty breaded breasts of the kind we’ve come to expect from KFC. They’re tender and juicy and utterly regulated. Superficially delicious and satisfying, they’re enjoyable in part because of their predictable sameness and dependability. They have, after all, been precisely engineered to meet our criteria for a fast, fried, chicken-y dinner of adequate taste and quality. But think too long about their origins, and you’re bound to feel a little queasy.
In a way, those sad, brainless laboratory chickens remind me of our current crop of celebrities, pop stars and prize athletes. They’ve been hand-selected by the same greedy, shadowy boards to meet our exact standards for dazzling celebrity sex appeal. Young and tender, sexy and shiny-haired yet pleasantly homogenous; while they weren’t exactly grown in laboratories, we know that they’re not naturally made, either. We know that what they say and do and the way they perform is not the genuine article. The legacies they create weren’t born of a natural wellspring of passion, creativity, or intellect. But we eat them up and follow their antics mindlessly, because they’re what we’ve come to expect, to demand. We think they’re no better than what we deserve.
Well, I’ve about had my fill of these KFcelebrities. I’m ready to bestow my interest, envy and admiration on genuine artists, writers, and other public figures who grew into fame in their own ways, in their own terms. People with real meat on their bones!
2) When someone doesn’t like a certain food or animal, it doesn’t always mean that they just haven’t tried the right KIND of food or met YOUR animal.
Some people don’t like cheese. Some people hate dogs. My initial response to both of these revelations is always acting as though some sort of gauntlet has been thrown and I must immediately rise to the challenge of changing that person’s mind. But it’s time I laid those feelings to rest.
Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, and it is not my responsibility—nor have I just been personally invited—to rock that person’s world by introducing them to the one cheese or dog that will turn their unacceptable-to-me sentiments upside-down. Yes, there are many, many kinds of cheese in the world, and maybe that person hasn’t tried St. Andres triple-crème brie (which my roommates and I used to refer to as ‘crack cheese’), and maybe that, to me, suggests that they have given up on cheese with a prematurity that verges on tragic. But I do not need to prosthelytize so heartily. I can enjoy cheese just as much even knowing that there are people out there who do not like it. After all, that does ultimately mean that there is more cheese for me. So why complain!
Not only that, but the few foods I actively dislike, such as crab and okra, I will vehemently refuse to try in any new and exciting flavor combinations or old family recipes. I just don’t like them, ok? While I understand objectively that it is in fact delicious, the very taste of crab makes me sick because of this one time when I ate crab stuffed shrimp and was then violently ill for several hours. And okra, even deliciously fried, has a squishy, slippery texture I despise. So quit asking, ok? Trust me to know what I like and don’t.
This revelation may or may not have been prompted by the time I insisted that my coworker try black olives, which he had not had in years, but recalled disliking. As he raced to the bathroom, I wondered what had been the point in forcing him to eat a food he was pretty sure he hated. When you get right down to it, the only real motivation in such situations is the desire to be right; to have someone turn to you and say, “Wow, actually these ARE good! What was I thinking all those years?” But when you run the risk of having a subject turn to you and say woundedly, “Why? Oh God, why?” as he chokes on his own bile—well, was it really worth it? There are better things to be right about. And ultimately, is someone else’s unexpected enjoyment of a food that you enjoy all that personally fulfilling?
So it goes with animals. If someone is terrified of dogs, most likely because of some early childhood experience which left them heavily scarred, there is no need for you to make statements along the lines of, ‘But my dog is so sweet and gentle—you’ll love him!’ He’s still a dog, yes? Then he’s terrifying to this person. It doesn’t matter if he’s going to mix your friend a martini or present her with $25 gift card to Target. She won’t think he’s cute. She won’t want to pet him. He won’t change her mind, and she doesn’t want to meet him.
Finally, just because you are not personally responsible for changing people’s minds about things they doesn’t like, doesn’t mean that they are doomed to wander through the rest of their days constantly missing out on the opportunity to eat pickles. I myself used to hate shrimp, and eventually I tried eating them and gradually learned to love them. And it wasn’t because one day someone skewered a shrimp on a toothpick and put it in my face at a cocktail party and made me gag it down until I realized how great it was. It was because I made the decision myself to learn to like shrimp. You can lead a person to foods they hate, but only they can decide whether or not that is going to change. Trust them to know when the time is right to expand their tastes.
1) I am not an event photographer.
For a long time I believed that if I were present at an event, and taking pictures constantly throughout that event, that afterwards I would have a collection of meaningful, memorable photographs that I could share with others to give them the thrilling feeling that they had actually been there.
Wrongo!
While I was pretty good during high school and college at documenting the shenanigans my friends and I engaged in, being skilled at ordering subjects to smile and hold up their beers while two of them mock arm wrestle on a dorm bed does not make you the equivalent of an event photographer, no matter how much of that moment you may have captured. Face it: It was not a complicated moment.
My most recent reminder of this fact was during a family reunion I attended over the summer. Being the sensitive, thoughtful photographer I am, I neglected to even pack a camera for the trip, so instead I spent one desperate evening sprinting around during a backyard barbeque, stiff-armed, pointing my cell phone at family members like a fencing sword while telling them to ‘hold it for a second’ as they innocently tried to converse with people they didn’t get to see very often while eating ribs (which is hard enough to do in itself).
The resulting pictures are about what you’d expect. People look confused, annoyed; they are blurry and indistinct walking in or out of the frame. Some have their mouths open in mid-sentence (the sentence was probably something along the lines of ‘oh, no’ or ‘what are you—?’). I got a couple of good snapshots of the younger kids mugging for the camera, their cheeks painted with sticky rib sauce. But little kids are notoriously good at going with the flow where cameras are concerned, having not yet discovered their self-loathing or their bad sides. They also instinctively understand that when someone is pointing a cell phone at them, it is to take a picture; a fact which is not always obvious to older generations.
98% of the pictures I ended up with are useless, which is too bad, since I also went around telling everyone “as soon as I get home, I’ll send you copies of these!” Hopefully they have since forgotten both that statement and my behavior.
Thank goodness I had the presence of mind to engage the services of an actual event photographer at my wedding, rather than just sticking a camera into the unwilling hands of several of the guests as I had originally planned. I now realize what an unfortunate disaster that would have been. Demanding anything of your wedding guests other than that they have a good time and eat and drink a lot is really not appropriate.
There are some jobs that you can do yourself, but there are also valid reasons that certain professional fields exist: because most of us are bad at doing those things and should hire someone who knows what they are doing if we want good results. It’s time I better learned to differentiate between the two. Who knows, maybe someday I’ll even stop cutting my own hair!
Akie and I discussed our burgeoning lawsuit against Kim Kardashian in today’s issue of the Perpetual Post. My side is below, you can find his here!
MOLLY SCHOEMANN: I am concerned about the precedent set by the historic Female Employees vs. Walmart lawsuit, which was recently thrown out of court for being too big to move forward. You see, that lawsuit was but a fraction of the size of the countersuit that I am currently assembling: Pretty Much All of Us vs. Kim Kardashian.
To give you a little background, which you probably don’t need but wish you did: Kardashian is suing an actress who recently appeared in an Old Navy commercial because she believes the actress resembles her and is thus damaging her public image. I’ve watched the commercial and honestly, the actress does look a bit like Kim Kardashian—but nobody would ever confuse the two of them for more than a few seconds. And the resemblance is mostly because the actress is a dark-haired, dark-eyed, spoiled-looking girl in a tacky outfit. Perhaps the problem is that Kim Kardashian saw herself in the actress, didn’t like what she saw, and, rather than engaging in some deep self-reflection to confront the problem, she indulged in the Hollywood alternative to soul-searching: hiring a lawyer.
Now, I could argue that Kardashian’s public image has nowhere to go but up. I could also argue that the actress being sued has every right to sue Kardashian right back for implying a resemblance between the two of them, which has potentially derailed any chance she has at ever being taken seriously or liked. But instead, I’m gathering together a number of plaintiffs across the country (essentially the entire country) and we’re going to sue Kim Kardashian for existing—since by doing so she is causing every single one of us irreparable pain and suffering.
Think about it. How many times have you been forced to confront the terrifyingly nightmarish fact of Kim Kardashian? Against your will, even? How many magazine covers have thrown her overexposed visage into your unwilling gaze? How many websites have written exhaustively about her many uninteresting relationships and her many untalented siblings and their uninteresting relationships? How many evenings have you channel-surfed past one of her terrible reality shows and shuddered reflexively at being forced to acknowledge that the world contains her? How will you ever get those precious moments of your life back? Who will restore your damaged memories and soothe your troubled soul?
Kim, we’re out for blood. And there’s not a jury in the world that won’t order you to pay out an enormous settlement to every single one of us. The only problem is going to be recruiting jurors who aren’t already part of my lawsuit. Come to think of it, that might be impossible. You win this round, Kim Kardashian. And all of us continue to lose.
I Heard Tell 