life:

Her sex-symbol image aside, Marilyn Monroe was an avid reader of 20th-century literature and was often photographed curling up with a book, as in this Peter Stackpole shot taken at her Hollywood home in 1953.

(see more photos here)

Probably the Monroe pic I personally find most attractive. Which is saying a lot.

Kinky Afro by Happy Mondays.

I found myself up late last night listening to a lot of Madchester. Not sure why (probably by way of the Trainspotting soundtrack), but I think I’m a fan now.

As far as I can gather from what I’ve read and listened to and such, this brilliantly awful video sums up the changes that were taking place in British music from the late 80s to the mid-90s pretty nicely; a bunch of almost militantly awkward and goofy looking (but talented) middle/working class dudes, surrounded by members of the cover girl set, playing and dancing about as if they were on top of the world. And for a brief time, they really were.

Live Forever: The Rise and Fall of Brit Pop is a really good doc on the shifts in British pop music, culture, and politics during the era.

nevver:

Scale of Saturn, Curiosity Counts

(Source: tnr.com)

nevver:

Socialist

Whether to denounce it as a step down the path to unspeakable decadence or to exalt it as self-evidently right and just, everyone in public life today has a position on gay marriage. All the presidential candidates in the current electoral cycle have been asked about it, and all have had responses carefully packaged to ingratiate themselves with their constituencies. If the past few years may serve as a guide, it is likely that in the coming elections the subtle middle will be thoroughly excluded, as candidates and voters alike flock to one of two opposite poles: either holding that “marriage is between a man and a woman,” or, on the contrary, that everyone has an equal right to marriage. These are thought-arresting platitudes; they are not articulate positions, nor even the rudiments of arguments for such positions. The greatest problem with both is their brash confidence in the moral abhorrence or necessity of gay marriage, absent any historical or critical interest in the nature of marriage itself.

- The opening to an essay on gay marriage called Working Arrangement by the Lapham Quarterly’s Justin E. H. Smith

This is a really, really insipid line of argument. Basically, Mr. Smith’s idea is that traditional marriage has changed over the course of history from a relationship defined by an initial transaction between families, independent from the notion of love as we understand it today, to a relationship defined by the empty pursuit of an inherently unsustainable level of desire/love/passion through “work” in the late capitalistic/soulless sense of the word. Because of this, achieving gay marriage might not be worth it, given that 1) modern marriage sucks and is under threat as an institution and 2) the achievement of gay marriage would mean an end to the non-capitalistic, passionate, and fiercely creative freedom that gay people have enjoyed for centuries. In short:

In this respect, gay marriage is not a reduction to absurdity of an ancient institution, so much as it is an instance of late capitalism’s voracious absorption of everything that might otherwise stand as an obstacle to it. Just as society has learned to absorb countercultural signifiers into advertising for the junk that must be hocked in order for capitalism to survive, just as the big oil companies have cultivated the ingenious art of “greenwashing” and incorporated eco-babble into their own PR campaigns—so too has bourgeois marriage absorbed what was left of the sexual opposition.

How Mr. Smith could, having written over 4,000 words, still manage to miss every relevant point on the issue is honestly beyond me. A sampling of the worst arguments:

(Source: laphamsquarterly.org)

stfuconservatives:

heh

Lana Del Rey - Off to the Races. I’ve decided that the magic is in her choruses. Literally hooky enough to take almost any honest listener in. And the exaggerated vocal inflections in this one…killer. To me, anyways.

millionsmillions:

If you read one article on racial (particularly Asian) otherness as related to The Smiths, make it this one by Sukhdev Sandhu.

These days it’s hard to open a paper without some slightly whipped-up controversy about Morrissey being a racist, but back in the mid-1980s his lyrics and persona mapped out a structure of feeling that spoke to my own floundering selfhood. He sang about shame and unlovability: I had bloodied myself as a 12-year-old using a kitchen knife to scrape away what I saw as the tainting brownness of my skin – a browness that made me only half a person, half the Englishman I wanted to be. He sang about loneliness and isolation: I was rarely invited to the homes of schoolfriends, and certainly never invited them to my mine, for fear that they would snigger at the photographs of turbaned relatives that lined its walls. He sang about weakness: the mantra from my parents was that we were vulnerable because of our religion and had to act as meekly as possible so as not to become targets for thugs and bully boys.

Many of my cousins who lived in Southall and Coventry, places with larger Asian communities, sometimes felt the same emotions. Like me they weren’t into bhangra, so they turned instead to reggae or hip hop, barricade music they associated with street toughness and self-respecting masculinity. Perhaps because I was growing up in a whiter corner of England, or perhaps just for aesthetic reasons, I was drawn to music that was less about collective pride than about individual abjection, music that created theatrical extroversion out of bedroom-bound introversion. I instinctively preferred weakness to strength, treble to bass: “How Soon Is Now”, “Barbarism Begins at Home”, “Shakespeare’s Sister” – the wah-wah rockist parts of the Smiths’ discography were always my least favourite.

Well that was refreshing.