Projections in the sand

This is the kind of art that makes me jealous.

"Go all out in romance and let the chips fall where they may."

"Exceptional people deserve special concessions." (e.g. I don't know, me?)

This is the kind of art that makes me jealous.

Simple, meaningful, and aesthetically interesting.

I'm unsure of their origin, but I'm thinking Singapore. (via my friend Evan's Facebook.)

Marc Jacobs, 2005

Amy Larocca of New York Magazine wrote a quietly riveting article on Marc Jacobs in 2005 and I only stumbled upon it a few days ago. As is typical, I'm never interested in something immediately, and stashed it away in my left-of-the-screen-oriented menu bar for a rainy day. Obviously, the "rainy day" idiom is just that, but today it's pouring.

A few highlights:

On his clothes:

“It’s more psychological,” Jacobs says. “For people that don’t have any interest in the psychology of nuance, who need everything to be in their face, who don’t want to analyze . . . those aren’t the people I romanticize about dressing.”

“I don’t have any problem with what people refer to as sexy clothes,” Jacobs says. “I mean, everybody likes sex. The world would be a better place if people just engaged in sex and didn’t worry about it. But what I prefer is that even if someone feels hedonistic, they don’t look it. Curiosity about sex is much more interesting to me than domination. Like, Britney and Paris and Pamela might be someone’s definition of sexy, but they’re not mine. My clothes are not hot. Never. Never."

"I like romantic allusions to the past: what the babysitter wore, what the art teacher wore, what I wore during my experimental days in fashion when I was going to the Mudd Club and wanted to be a New Wave kid or a punk kid but was really a poseur. It’s the awkwardness of posing and feeling like I was in, but I never was in. Awkwardness gives me great comfort. I’ve never been cool, but I’ve felt cool. I’ve been in the cool place, but I wasn’t really cool—I was trying to pass for hip or cool. It’s the awkwardness that’s nice.”

“When I first moved here [Paris], my life was just like a frustrated version of what my life had been in New York,” Jacobs says. He didn’t (and still doesn’t) speak French. He didn’t like the food, the pace, the absence of multiethnic, all-hours takeout food. But, sober, he began to enjoy the city’s gentler rhythms: the quieter nightlife, the diminished options and temptations. Now his life is centered around two dogs and an apartment in a bougie corner of the 8th Arrondissement by the Champs de Mars, surrounded by families and diplomats and the odd tourist on his way to the Eiffel Tower. “I always get this certain anxiety when I’m in New York,” Jacobs says. “I see these billboards and Websites and movie openings and galleries and everyone’s like, ‘Have you seen Desperate Housewives? Have you seen The O.C.?’ I start hyperventilating. How can you stay on top of the art scene and what’s on TV, and read all those books? In New York, I just feel paralyzed by all that I’m missing. I feel stupid, uninformed. I don’t feel like that as much in Paris. It’s healthier for me.”

[Ed. Around this time in 2005, everyone should recall the worldwide proliferation of neon-tinted Louis Vuitton prints printed on white or black traditional bags. They were designed by someone arguably more creative than Jacobs' himself, Takashi Murakami, who recently collaborated with Kanye West.]

“It’s not like I can make the Murakami moment happen again,” he says. “It’s not like if I went to the beach for a week and thought about it, I could come back with an answer. There are moments where it’s like, Oh, God, everything’s okay right now, but if I don’t come up with something soon, how are they going to feel about me then? This is the root of my psychological problems. There’s an exercise that I learned in therapy to be present, to be open to new experiences and then let go of the results. That’s what’s worked for me in the past. Of course, it doesn’t mean it’s going to work for me in the future."

“There are nights when I can’t sleep. I go into a fantasyland and tableau sort of thinking, like, Tonight would be the perfect night to say, ‘Honey, I’m really tired and worried about work. And tell me about your day. Do you think someone will read this and try to get in touch with me?” He looks hopeful. “If I read that about someone, I’d drop him a note.”

Well, my day was fine, Marc, what about you?

Art in iTunes

So I designed this album art for a really talented friend of mine, Jennifer Sullivan, and it released on iTunes this week! Super cool, even though it's my worst work yet. But she looks gorgeous and the EP is fantastic. Everyone buy it here, if you like Norah Jones and Fiona Apple.

The Death Penalty

There is no need to retype or explain this story; its speaks for itself.

From Wikipedia.

"Virginia Christian (1895 – August 16, 1912) was the last female juvenile offender executed in the United States.^[1] She was also the only female juvenile executed via electric chair and, to date, the last woman executed by the Commonwealth of Virginia.^[2]

Christian, an African-American maid, was convicted for the murder of her white employer Mrs. Ida Virginia Belote, a white woman, aged 72 years, in her home at Hampton on March 18.^[3] It is said she confessed shortly after she was arrested.

Belote frequently mistreated Christian, and in mid-March 1912, a violent argument ensued between the two in which Belote accused Christian of stealing a locket and a skirt. Belote hit Christian with a cuspidor—commonly called a “spittoon”—which sent Christian into a violent frenzy. The altercation escalated when Christian and Belote ran for two broom handles Belote used to prop up her bedroom windows. Christian grabbed one of the broom handles and struck Belote on the forehead. In an attempt to stifle Belote’s screams, Christian stuffed a towel down Belote’s throat, and the woman died by suffocation. When Christian left the house, she stole Belote’s purse with some money and a ring. One newspaper reported that police found Belote’s body “laying face down in a pool of blood, and her head was horribly mutilated and a towel was stuffed into her mouth and throat” (Streib & Sametz, 1989, p. 25; see also Moten, 1997). The police soon arrested Christian, and during questioning she admitted to hitting Belote but was shocked that Belote was dead. Christian claimed she had no intent to kill Belote. With a lynch mob looming in the background, an Elizabeth City County Court tried and convicted Christian for murder and the trial judge sentenced her to death in the state’s electric chair. One day after her 17th birthday in August 1912, a short 5 months after the crime, Virginia authorities executed Christian at the state penitentiary in Richmond.^[3]

Governor William Hodges Mann declined to commute the death sentence, despite a plea from Virginia's mother, Charlotte Christian, who wrote to him:

My dear Mr. Governor: Please forgive me for bothering you ... I have been paralyzed for more than three years and I could not look after Gennie as I wants to. I know she done an awful wicked thing when she killed Miss Belote and I hear that people at the penitentiary wants to kill her. But I am praying night and day on my knees to God that he will soften your heart. If you only save my child who is so little, God will bless you forever.^[3]

Christian was electrocuted in the state prison in Richmond. She was 17 years old. The paper reported that her body was to be turned over to the state medical school, because her parents did not have the money to transport the body from Richmond."

Sometimes, it really sucks having a blog.

Sometimes, there are feelings inside of me that even verbal discussion cannot rectify. Written language is far more distilled, more real. I'm sure someone somewhere would tell me I'm wrong. But either way, I can't even write out these emotions; the risk of peo- no, specific people taking my words out of context is too great.

I am BLOGGEDLY OPRESSED, PAINFULLY LOVESICK, and DESPERATELY TIRED OF MY PATH.

xoxo,

The "HAPPIEST" Activist

Longwinded Mantra

Line by Baz Luhrmann, design by me.