I love this kid

17 Year-Old Gay Vermont Youth Speaks Out On Marriage Equality
http://community.livejournal.com/ontd_political/2629934.html

fashion protest?

I want you (and by you I mean the literally one or two people who may read this) to understand that very little thinking goes into these blog posts, which is why more often that not I end up posting something trivial to bitch about, but I don't quite know myself what in particular bothers me. It's more like I'm vaguely disturbed and instead of thinking about it at a deeper level, I'd rather just put it out there even while my thoughts are still fuzzy and undecided.

And so, HOW WEIRD IS THIS AD? I guess a major point of anxiety for me has been trying to reconcile my love of aesthetics and fashion with my interest in politics. Not that they're necessarily at odds with each other, but yes, sometimes the worship of fashion gods and labels feels extravagant and wasteful in comparison to subalterns and postcoloniality and blahblahblah. But looking at this ad sort of clarifies for me (just like that Erin Wasson image) just how distant the world of Marc Jacobs and Karl Lagerfeld is from the one of actual political protests and activism and ANGER. It's, once again, almost mocking.

It reminds me of this piece on hipsterdom from Adbusters, that states "Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion... The cultural zeitgeists of the past have always been sparked by furious indignation and are reactionary movements. But the hipster’s self-involved and isolated maintenance does nothing to feed cultural evolution." (I'm equating the 'hipster' with the 'fashion-conscious' because even if the hipster is set up as the anti-label, they feed off each other so its essentially the same thing). My point? That we are at a loss for actual movements, that the well of protests has run dry and now the only thing worth marching for isn't human rights or protecting the earth or or... anything like that, but consumerism. The only thing worth protesting is the cut and design of textiles as a sign of social status?

At least, that's the message I get from this.

Images

Meulen Hotel in El Calafate
Perito Merino Glacier
Iguazu Falls
Buenos Aires

Back from the Southern Hemisphere

And I don't know what to do with myself.

Before leaving, I thought that a trip might be really productive just because I seriously needed to get out of Poughkeepsie. It worked out better than I had expected. I still don't have any idea about a career path, but at least now I feel motivated to find work, just so I can save up to head back to Buenos Aires for at least a few months. I also want to learn Spanish.

At the hostel, one of the people I met was a fairly successful writer working on a project about global belief systems. I was a little jealous because she seemed pretty young and said that she didn't have any unpaid internships. Editors just called her based on her work in college. She seemed to have a pretty easy go of it, getting paid to travel for a full year and conduct interviews. But when I looked up the project (utruthproject.org) I had some misgivings about it... instead of attempting to "discover commonalities within the human drama that supersede surface differences" so many of the answers just reinforce past assumptions, such as women from Southeast Asia claiming that family is most important. Maybe it was just the wording that bothered me ("going where no woman has gone before") as if leaving the United States is some huge accomplishment, or that people from other nations are just scenery to be discovered and not "men" or "women" themselves. When I spoke to her about it, she said that she disliked Southeast Asia the most because people there seemed more cold and unwilling to respond to her. But if the only way to get answers out of them is to ask them to fill in the blank: I believe that ___, the wording already allows for very few answers. Also, why should people be willing to share their deepest beliefs to a near stranger, before said stranger has made any attempt to humble herself and respect the people she meets? I think her intentions are admirable, but its so privileged and kind of egotistical to assume that all the people she meets should respond to her in the way that she's looking for. Her inability to understand that, and her inability to accept potential language/cultural barriers kind of shows how her project is faulty.

I guess she can be lucky as a writer, but that doesn't make her that much more enlightened than the rest of us.