brb, gonna go get my body caftan-ready:
1. Select a caftan of your chosen gauge and length. Stroke its gauzy fabric and whisper into its folds.
2. Let your flesh settle into the crevices of your comfortable, comfortable caftan.
3. Crumbs? Let them fall where they may, swaddled in your caftan.
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Everyone, Jane Marie is doling out life lessons!!!
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Everyone else is probably over it, but will you talk about True Detective with me?
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My friend’s therapist told her not to sleep with her new guy on the second date, but she did, and then she texted her therapist the next morning and said: “Did not follow the plan. Is all lost?” This is not a link, I just love that text.
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This is pretty amazing, I think.
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I love Tom Colicchio, and I ESPECIALLY love that he talks about hunger.
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No part of this is comforting:
Even then—even if a hypothetical virus reproduced 10 times faster than the speediest ones we know about—it would still take at least a week to spread through the Greater Tokyo area.
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The nine archetypal heroines.
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Let’s just do this instead of whatever it is we’re doing. You KNOW some of those ladies are faking it because a life of contemplation in dope surroundings is its own reward.
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Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
All the times I’ve whispered “Jane Marie, teach me how to live” and it turns out she was listening all along!
Getting my body caftan-ready as I type. Also now resigning myself to a day of online caftan shopping.
be sure to report back here if you find anything exciting!
http://www.etsy.com/listing/189092655/vintage-mor…
this one is GORGEOUS. me waaaaant.
https://www.etsy.com/listing/187584918/caftan-mid…
https://www.etsy.com/listing/182866526/80s-cotton…
I’ll stop now.
Ladies. This photo was taken mere weeks ago in Ross Dress-For-Less:
That’s where I bought a caftan, hated by my spouse, loved by me, two years ago.
I had the most delish, slinky caftan that I would wear camping because, you know, we’re not animals, sheesh. Woe to me, I stopped wearing it because I got so much grief from my fellow campers so my beautiful caftan ended up at a thrift store. Sigh.
You’re back! How was your holiday?
True Detectives… I just couldn’t get into it. I don’t know if it was because I didn’t really like the 90s flashbacks, or that there weren’t enough women in it. Sometimes I just get tired of hearing men talk.
Haha, that caftan pattern reminds me so much of growing up and having my mum make clothes for me…
“Sometimes I just get tired of hearing men talk.”
This. I’ve been reluctant to watch it because there are so few women. I was wondering if I was the only person uninterested in True Detective for this reason.
Nope, same here. Literally nothing is less interesting to me than explorations of American masculinity. Hasn’t that been explored enough?
Nope! Horrible-yet-complicated White Men? All the women brutalized in one way or another? Nah.
Yes to all of this! I’ve officially reached Prestige Drama about White Male Antihero burnout and sometimes I feel like no one else gets that.
I’ve also had a surfeit of cop shows, so something that is both (i.e. True Detective or Hannibal) isn’t even going on my list.
Likewise, for both tv and film. I’m even a little worried from the trailers that there’ll be some Middle-Aged White Dude Angst shoehorned into Godzilla, of all things. We don’t need angst, we just need monsters to wreck shit, that is literally all the genre demands!
I’ve seen it and it’s actually mostly Young White Dude Angst. So… not actually better. But the parts where monsters are wrecking shit are great!
Oh well, at least Godzilla is hardly likely to accuse anyone of being a Millennial.
I returned to The L Word for this reason. Time to reconsider Jenny Schecter post-Walter White and Don Draper.
In general I find it hard to watch a lot of TV/film because of that. I feel like they’re not telling my story.
I thought TD was really good leading up to episode 4 when it looked like there would be some Lovecraftish abyss opening sci-fi to fuck up all their monologues and mood lighting.
Then I spent the next three episodes thinking, “oh my god, Marty’s totally the guy behind all this and he is totally going to pin it on Rust and get away with it and all of this will have been for something!!”
FYI neither of those things happened and I’ll probably be mad forever because I totally fucking FELL FOR IT and watched 8 weeks of women being marginalized, objectified, and brutalized just for matthew mcconaughey to realize It Was All Going To Be Okay. i’m so dumb.
Right?? That ending was the actual worst.
I know, I also initially thought it was going to turn into some kind of awesome Lovecraftian/fantasy/occult thing like it was a Neil Gaiman novel… and it never did. And then the culprit turned out to be a repulsive, incestuous, reclusive (yet politically well-connected?) dude who we had never met before the finale (well, the very end of episode six) who lived out in the bayou and who was not someone from any of the previous episodes? (The LARB reviews of TD were great, and definitely touched on how this was not quite fair play: http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/true-detective-f…
And then the end of the finale! Between Marty’s estranged family (all women) (who hated him, and with good reason) coming back to crowd around his hospital bed and hold his hand (I legitimately thought that was dream sequence), and Rust’s final speech which boiled down to basically a retread of Sam’s “But I know that there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo!” one from The Two Towers… I felt betrayed that I had ever fallen for it too.
I like your version of TD SO MUCH BETTER.
So many men talking…so much “exploring the negatives of American masculinity” through having shit happen to women and having men talk about how bad that is…so many intensely hypocritical shots of naked women writhing for the camera.
I have been getting burned out on intensely violent TV shows, and I figured I could have one more in addition to my beloved Game of Thrones. I chose True Detective, and now that it’s over I think I maybe should have chosen Hannibal, if only because it has fan-created eyeshadow colours.
Not least of all because the women have agency and Bryan Fuller has said he’ll never use rape as a plot point.
“Sometimes I just get tired of hearing men talk.”
I want that tattooed on my forehead, under my bangs. Then whenever I want to shut down a bloviating dude I’ll brush my bangs away super casual, and just shrug nonchalantly.
I would get bangs again for this.
Ha! That is such a great idea.
It looked for a bit like it was going to be a critique of fucked up masculinity, but it turns into just another celebration of it.
To damn True Detective with faint praise, it’s probably the best Alan Moore adaptation anyone’s done so far. But actual Alan Moore would have had some queer characters, and women and non-white characters wouldn’t have been so thin.
Speaking as a straight white guy, I’m sure it is still possible to tell interesting stories about straight white guys – but there are so fucking many of them out there already. I, too, just get tired of hearing men talk.
Exactly! I was riveted by the first 4 or 5 episodes of True Detective precisely because it seemed to be a piercing critique of the way prestige dramas routinely employ women’s bodies as the canvas upon which men’s anguish plays out.
The women – wife, daughters, girlfriends, sex workers, witnesses – were treated by the men around them, including the Rust Cohle and Marty Hart, as objects for men to use, enjoy, question, or judge, but when the women actually spoke, they were incisive, observant, and clear-thinking.
When Rust came for dinner at the Hart home, in three minutes Maggie extracts more information from him than Marty has heard in months as Rust’s partner. The proprietor of the bunny ranch pegs Marty’s indignation in a split second. His own daughters see more about the truth of his marriage and their father’s regard for them than he ever sees.
Further, the girls from the school photo seen in an early episode show up later in the series, mostly unremarked. For example, the Marshland Medea, whom Rust talks into a confession, then instructs to kill herself at the first opportunity? She’s sitting crosslegged in the first row of that photo. Several of the other faces there turn up as witnesses later.
I was sure the show was going to pull a reveal, that it would swerve away from its White Male Antihero underpinnings and make a masterful critique of the way thrilllers routinely sideline women to ancillary roles while lamenting that IT IS HARD TO BE A MAN. But it didn’t; turns out that IT IS HARD TO BE A MAN is the unironic message of True Detective.
Right? It’s boring for everyone.
I couldn’t get into True Detective either. Once I realized it was actually all about the history of these dudes, and not some weird police case, I was out.
I liked the first couple of episodes–I loved the use of the landscape–but my interest petered out and ultimately I never got around to watching the last two. Why does it always have to be young marginalized women getting brutalized? Why can’t it ever be white male social conservatives?
That’s something that Hannibal has been doing interestingly, at least with the Murder Of The Week brutalizations -mostly men, once a white conservative politician. It really makes a contrast with the endless parade of dead sex workers in many crime shows.
Plus they actually changed some characters so they’d be ladies because Fuller didn’t want a sausagefest. (Hahah, it seems kinda inappropriate to use that term given the cannibalism.)
Ikr, how great is that/are they?! AND Fuller stated a commitment to avoid needlessly sexual/sexualised violence against women -which, eh, has been skirting the edge of the Verger storyline, but is still definitely admirable as recognition of a problem and ingenuity in finding ways not to be part of it -for example, the abduction of the Mural victim pretty much only worked because he was male and as such highlighted the different socialisations of young men and young women in terms of their perceived vulnerability.
That piece from Dr. Schuster had me crying at work. Good news though, caftans are very tear-absorbent.
Yeah that was amazing. I’m with you – got a little tear going on!
I love vintage caftans and have a small but growing collection, and I wore them when I was pregnant. However, because I live in a conservative city, if I wear them I get stared at and bad service.
It’s like people couldn’t handle the fabulousness.
Maybe they will now that caftans are ok? Because it’s summer and I don’t care where those crumbs go!
Um YES Nicole Tom Colicchio!! I’ve been keeping my eye on his good food work but also VINDICATED because my crush on him will not be destroyed by all the haters in my life. He comes off, often, as very, very articulate.
Plus there are some really awesome gifs of him on Tumblr.
EDITED: see
Can we start a middle-aged celebrity crush thread? Please.
I’ll go next.
I can never remember this actor’s name, but I love him partially because hi hello look at him, but also – mostly – because he keeps appearing in terrible Teen Supernatural Drama shows (which are my favorite kind of shows).
I also love John Barrowman, so basically, you’ve got great taste in middle-aged celebrity dudes.
JR Bourne! (But mostly I think of him as Papa Argent).
Not only is Barrowman super cute, I have a special fondness for him since his take on Captain Jack helped me finally nail down how I felt about my sexuality, which may be summarized as (1) hot people are hot, and (2) there is nothing wrong with me for genuinely finding most everyone hot.
seconded re: the good Captain. I think one of my ideal relationships would be an Ianto/Jack setup, but we get to be both. Aw man I miss good Torchwood.
Hahahaha by” good Torchwood” am I to assume you mean “everything before COE?” 😉
<3 <3 <3
I will try to remember his name, instead of just calling him Hot Dad like I usually do.
Hot Dad is a perfectly acceptable substitute!
this dovetails nicely with my recent confusion over my Rory Kinnear crush. I don’t know if I will post though because it seems like a contextual one.
fuck it:
Ah, perfection (favourite St. Elsewhere eye-candy ever).
Clark Gregg tells an Actor’s Nightmare-type story on his episode of “The Nerdist” that is so perfectly horrifying that I found myself flinching and mumbling, “Oh no, no, oh my god,” under my breath as I listened to it, in public, as other people edged away from me. His self-deprecation does nothing to make him less attractive.
I don’t like The Nerdist at all, but I’m still listening to this.
UPDATES TO FOLLOW.
I AM DYING THIS IS THE WORST IT’S SO PAINFUL I HAVE MY HANDS OVER MY FACE I AM DYING
AHAHAHAHA oh god it’s so horrible; it’s like looking straight into the sun. The sun of complete, soul-annihilating humiliation. Hearing him tell that story can practically give you second-hand PTSD.
And it got even worse! Ugh, I love him.
“From hero…to goat, in four hours.”
I listen to Nerdist episodes if I am interested in the guest, and stories like this one and Chris Kluwe’s explanation of why he decided to nuke his NFL bridges with his Deadspin article have been an ample reward.
The caftan pattern in that picture reminds me of the bridesmaid dresses my grandma made for my mom in the seventies. This is a compliment. They were magnificent.
Man, I really need to get some pictures.
Yes, please!
Caftans remind me of Mrs Roper, and I just can’t shake that association. I’ll be dressing instead as Murderous Librarian
The Murderous Librarians would be an awesome band name.
Hey, so you’ll be dressing like me! Twinsies!
Caftans and one-piece bathing suits! Welcome to my mid-to-late 30s!
I don’t know whether I want to be cyborg, insect queen, hardboiled or murderous librarian.
I call Victorian Time-Traveler!
I will gleefully inhabit the Murderous Librarian archetype, if no one else wants it.
OMG right there is this really tatty house near us that has like a massive extended garage with a falling-in roof and a load of ‘decorations’ in the blighted tree(s) out front, mostly ancient Christmas trash and battered kitsch. We have started calling it Carcosa.
True Detective – so many partially formed thoughts. This was really interesting
http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/oldest-story-tow…
Ed Yong is the best.
Seriously, he is AMAZING.
A while ago I watched a video of him, and now whenever he writes about penises I read the word in his voice and giggle uncontrollably. (He doesn’t even have a funny voice! I just have the maturity of a 9 year-old.)
I will never, ever be over True Detective. McConaughey just…to own my inner frat bro, he just crushed that role. And did anyone else really appreciate the industrial bayou realness of the landscape? So effing bleak, so perfect for that show. It was menacing and unpredictable and grim and everything it needed to be.
‘My friend’s therapist told her not to sleep with her new guy on the second date, but she did, and then she texted her therapist the next morning and said: “Did not follow the plan. Is all lost?” This is not a link, I just love that text.’
PAHAHAHAHAHAHHA best text in the history of the mobile telephone followed by this text that my friend got from her mother, “Am in Zumba class. Wish was dead.”
That is a great text! For third place, I nominate this one from my normally perfectly literate mom, struggling to use her new phone to explain the problem with the new phone’s keyboard: “FONE WANT HEEEAT”
Appparently the best text I have ever sent my bestie was me being like, “OMG I JUST SAW DEAN WINTERS’ PENIS THIS IS THE BEST.” at like 12:30 am.
Top Chef confessions thread.
My confession is that I quit watching after Stephanie won because my life was complete.
STEPHANIE FTW>
I almost quit watching this fuckin’ season god the ending made me SO INCREDIBLY ANGRY. I would be yelling at the dude being like Keep Crying White Dude! Cry harder! You suck! Go home to your stupid wife and kid! (then I felt a little bad about bringing the kid into it but god he was the worst).
On the other hand it seems like Tom and Padma give way less fucks and so the snark level is at gigantic heights.
I HAD NO IDEA IT WAS STILL AIRING. My god it’s got to be season 10 or something.
I am thinking that possibly professional chefs, who are notoriously pushy, can be a secret weapon of the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy. I am thinking that anyone who can run a high-stakes kitchen would be quite initimidating politically.
As an aspiring member of the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: Food Edition, I wholeheartedly support this. Lynn Rossetto Kasper, my personal hero and the Goddess of my kitchen, has been quietly but relentlessly pushing organics and other Left Wing food agendas for years in the name of Tasty Food, not politics.
we’re intimidating in general, i hear, though awkwardly so. if anyone in the grocery store ever shoves you aside from behind and then shouts (redundantly), “BEHIND YOU” it is definitely a chef.
ask a group of us about organic or farm-to-table food sometime and enjoy the ensuing massacre.
I would fake being a nun to live in that place.
SERIOUS PROPOSITION: Boston Toast Meet-Up/CAFTAN PARTY
Also – the first one in the slideshow looks weirdly like a tallis.
Flowy clothing is EVERYTHING. Let’s do this.
Yes please! Also, is there a Boston Toastie facebook thingy? I want to go to there.
Yep! We have a Google Group called “Boston Toast”!
Ooh, really? You are also all cordially invited to join this Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/491140164297275/
YOU’RE BACK!!! Yay. I love True Detective. How do we get Matthew McConaughey to stay slender and curly-haired like 1995 Rust now that the show is over?
First read that magazine title at the top as BUTTERFUCK and was disappointed to look again and see that I was wrong, but then excited because now I can start my own grimy 70s grindhouse-influenced baking magazine called BUTTERFUCK and make millions. Kickstarter soon.
BUTTERFUCK’S TIME IS NIGH
WOULD READ
SIGN ME UP
I almost stopped watching it because of the first episode (extremely gratuitous female nudity – so very gratuitous), but then was so glad I kept with it. Rusty at the end just fucking crushed me. God. Also I’m with you Nicole, that it has profoundly changed me and probably not for the better. The Yellow King is up there with Hannibal or Buffalo Bill in that sense. Actually, Yellow King hit me harder. He was much more indiscriminate regarding his victims. Just whoever. Whereas, the Silence of the Lambs crew had their preferences. In that way, the Yellow King is a billion times more terrifying. Wow. I missed the True Detective frenzy too (we watched it for free during an HBO promotion earlier) and it feels nice to get this stuff out!
I’m with Emily Nussbaum on True Detective. I’m sure the articles are old news to many Toasties but here they are:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/television/…
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/201…
I just found the finale disappointing, too. Some friends have raged “Well what did you expect, what could the finale have even BEEN that would have been satisfying to EVERYONE, not everything has to have a TWIST” but, well…I guess I could have done with a twist.
I felt like the finale wrapped up that show as well as it could, but it was a profound disappointment considering that until ~ ep5, I was convinced the show was consciously playing with a critique of its genre’s reliance on gendered violence and the marginalization of women. But… it wasn’t. It was employing those same tropes of women’s bodies as the object of violence, women’s voices as the background to VERY IMPORTANT MALE JOBS AND LIVES.
And once I realized that – that this misogyny was not ironic in the service of a reveal, but just a knowing use of a sickeningly common trope – all the air went out of the season for me.
It was a White Male Antihero story, and a well-crafted and compelling one, but I have had my fill of those a hundred times over. I was along for a different ride than this turned out to be.
Ha, I admitted to some ladyfriends a few years into the relationship that I’d slept with my husband on our second date, and they just shrugged and commented “Well, that’s just C.” Like he’s a special case (he is).
I was going down the list of “Finding Yourself” books on goodreads and man the reviews of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild are… pretty unempathetic. Does she come across as that unlikable in the book? It looked interesting/good to me, but then I’ve had suicidal breakdowns and drug problems in my life so I could never see someone talking about these things as a “pity party” or “self-indulgent whining” as the reviewers do.
I haven’t read WILD so I dunno, but I’ve definitely noticed a trend in comments that any book/movie character not sufficiently devoid of all emotion will inevitably be labeled a “self-indulgent whiner” by a sizeable (almost certainly male) portion of commenters.
I fucking loved Wild. I wasn’t always sympathetic to the Cheryl who was doing the things (some of her actions before going on the PCT made me want to tear my hair out), but always liked the Cheryl who was narrating, from sometime later on. And I’ve never had the kind of problems that she had, and I’ve never been particularly outdoorsy.
I am, however, a Woman who occasionally experiences and reflects upon a number of different Emotions, so yes, I may be biased.
Based on reviews before it came out I was dead set against reading WILD: “She’s a junkie who doesn’t know how to fill a backpack? No thank you please.” Then a former coworker said she’d finished it and thought of me, possibly because dead moms, and I grudgingly checked it out. Couldn’t put it down, absolutely loved it, and I think the critics did her a grave disservice and really shortchanged her strength as a writer by putting all that other junk front and center. Great book.
I’m just gonna say it: The True Detective finale was dummmmmmbbbbbb.
I got a lot of flack from my friends for saying I didn’t like it. I was accused of not “getting it” because it was “really about” the relationship between the two men and not the murder mystery.
To which I say, bullshit. If you want to frame character development in a murder procedural, fine, but it better have a damn satisfying ending, otherwise it’s all Macguffin and turns into Lost.
Like, I also realize it was more about the two dudes, but that does not mean the ending had to be a super boring, kind of offensive Southern Gothic cliche.
Like, I also realize it was more about the two dudes, but that does not mean the ending had to be a super boring, kind of offensive Southern Gothic cliche.
Based on reviews before it came out I was dead set against reading WILD: "She's a junkie who doesn't know how to fill a backpack? No thank you please." Then a former coworker said she'd finished it and thought of me, possibly because dead moms, and I grudgingly checked it out. Couldn't put it down, absolutely loved it, and I think the critics did her a grave disservice and really shortchanged her strength as a writer by putting all that other junk front and center. Great book.
Ugh I need a caftan. Also, when is like, the most socially acceptable time to sleep with a new person? Is it like Eliot from Scrubs said, and I should aspire to be “Three-Date Reid”? This is a cause of serious angst.
welp I’d not try and be three date Reid. 🙁 i’m sorry for your angst tho!
Ha! That is such a great idea.
In general I find it hard to watch a lot of TV/film because of that. I feel like they're not telling my story.
Right? It's boring for everyone.