The Price of Style

...critics of Mrs. Obama fail to see the powerful message of self-possession that her appearance carries for millions of young women, especially African-American women. Style and the care you put into how you present yourself to the world are not just frivolous endeavors, they are powerful tools of communication. Mrs. Obama uses her own image and appearance to connect with other women and to teach them how to take care of themselves, how to improve their lives. That look is not expensive; it's priceless.

-Kate Betts, Leave Michelle's Clothes Alone 

Music for the People

 Why I listen to classical live or on CD:

It's Saturday morning, and I've got the radio tuned to a classical music station. I want to hear Vivaldi or Mozart or Bach, and instead I am hearing two wonks discussing the minutiae of musical performance. They are talking about the advantage of a diminished seventh over D minor sharp,. Perhaps they are discussing how allegro is the allegro con molto, the way the second fiddles use the pizzicato, or the harmonics of the wind section. Or is it about why the composer chose to set the movement in a 4/5ths rhythm as opposed to 7/8ths.

If you don't want to read the article, here's the compelling-end-sentence:

Music theory is for music nerds, but music is for everyone.

-Lennard Davis, How to Kill Classical Music?: Discuss It to Death on the Radio 

r-e-s-p-e-c-t

No matter if you hate them, you have to acknowledge:

Star power isn't opening something [a movie] that is already highly appealing to a mass audience that has the benefit of your name on the poster. Star power is scoring a reasonable or better opening weekend for a film that has nothing to offer except your name on the poster. On that scale, Miley Cyrus, Zac Efron, and Robert Pattinson are genuine movie stars.

--Scott Mendelson, Zac Efron, Robert Pattinson, and Miley Cyrus ARE genuine movie stars. Because true stardom is opening a movie with just your face on the poster. 

Twilight

I'm not really a fan of these kinds of movies... but I think I may borrow this from the library just for laughs; I certainly enjoyed watching the trailer more than I enjoyed reading the books.

How To Be

In a thing-centered culture, we believe that our job is to teach the young what they need to have  a job and support themselves. Students are left on their own for learning how to cope with life's existential challenges, how to relate well to others, how to lead maturely in business and government, how to raise children and how to be married. How to develop taste and values and come to grips with human mortality and make a contribution to world culture--these are largely left alone by educators with the hope, apparently, that people will find their way unconsciously.

...it's time to restore subjectivity to the subjects we study and to redefine our very idea of education. We could guide people as they learn not only things of value but also how to be. 

--Thomas Moore, Redefining Education: Cultivating the Soul

Updates

I am somewhat back from the 'dead'--this last month, I've been beleaguered by blood loss and various allergy drugs, but the new pills allow for more lucidity and a return to the awesome Internet.

My summer blogging has now stemmed into corporate blogging, with the recent launch of the new Le Salon Couture Boutique Blog, designed and maintained by yours truly for Le Salon, a local high-end bridal boutique I'm interning in for the rest of the summer.

I'll be blogging pretty regularly for about the next week, and then I'm off to China-Land-of-the-Internet-Censor on the 12th, back on September 1st; no new material will be loaded onto the blog, but there will be entries scheduled to be posted.

It's good to be back!

Secret Ingredients

I think Iron Chef America is a horrible, pale copycat of the original Japanese Iron Chef from FujiTV, and Mark Dacascos is nowhere near the level of awesome-ness that Chairman Kaga simply exuded; this compilation video, however, gives the US version a funny kick:

Melting Pot, Salad Bowl?

There is undeniably still a lot of controversy concerning interracial marriage and mixed races, but as many people feel uncomfortable admitting to their 'inner racist,' it doesn't get talked about much. Marie Claire has a nice, succinct article on multi-ethnicity, and for those who feel the merging of two groups is something odd-looking, consider this:

When he proclaimed the importance of racial miscegenation to Brazil in the 1930s, the celebrated Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre could scarcely have imagined that he was hailing the future supermodel capital of the world.

“The most obvious thing is the mixture of races that we have here,” says top São Paulo fashion photographer Marcio Neves—who works extensively with “new faces”—of why Brazil seems to produce so many models.

As Freyre noted in his landmark work Casa-Grande & Senzala (Big House and Slave Quarters), racial mixing has always been part of the fabric of Brazilian life. From indigenous Indian to African slave descendents, to German, Japanese, Arab, and Portuguese immigrants, the diversity of Brazil’s gene pool has clearly influenced the country’s prodigious production of beautiful people, and never more so than now.

--Dom Phillips, The Next Giseles 

'Avatar'

The dearth of racially appropriate casting in the U.S. simply means that fewer Asians were humiliated by appearing in what is surely the worst botch of a fantasy epic since Ralph Bakshi's animated desecration of The Lord of the Rings back in 1978. The actors who didn't get to be in The Last Airbender are like the passengers who arrived too late to catch the final flight of the Hindenburg.

--Richard Corliss, The Last Airbender: Worst Movie Epic Ever?

To accomplish his air-bending, Aang assumes a series of highly balletic tai chi poses, twirling and bowing his body, curling his hands around like a boy dancer. The movie should have been called Crouching Billy Elliott, Hidden Air Pocket.

--Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

I was... pleased to see Jackson Rathbone as a non-vampire (he has been in the past three “Twilight” movies), as he was in a TV series I used to watch, “Beautiful People,” which ran from 2005-06.

--Elizabeth Parker, FORMzine & Yes/No Films

note-taking scribbles

This is how I take notes, albeit, there's usually  more funny looking faces.