be tormented by me, babe
It’s been a decade since our lord and savior Carly Rae Jepsen released E·MO·TION, only one of the best pop albums ever (and then the equally bangerlicious E·MO·TION Side B. Listen to “Roses” and just TRY to tell me it doesn’t destroy you). To mark the anniversary, she released 4 songs that didn’t make the cut. My current fave:
It never ceases to amaze me when a writer can put something into words that’s simultaneously specific and universal. The simplicity is pure artistry.
And it’s impossible to not compare the criminally underrated Carly with Taylor Swift, whose albums are each worse than the last. Taylor pens clunkers that are wordy, embarrassing, and unrelatable under the guise of being poetic, when she’s actually just a greedy, out-of-touch billionaire. (If your fans have to do mental gymnastics to justify your latest album’s quality, you’re doing it wrong.)
Meanwhile, Carly’s out there just doing her thing, unpretentious, unproblematic, showing instead of telling.
THIS is how you make a pop song.
who’s a threat?
“The US justice department has scrubbed a study from its website concluding that far-right extremists have killed far more Americans than any other domestic terrorist group.”
gender expansiveness
“There is no such thing as trans enough. The identities that fall under the umbrella of being trans are wide and varied, and there's as many different kinds as there are different kinds of people…Take two or three non-binary people, put them next to each other in a room, and their ideas of their own gender will be completely different.”
protect trans people
“The largest-ever survey of trans Americans reaffirms what the trans community has been saying for ages: trans people who go back to living as their sex assigned at birth do so because of transphobia, not because of doubts about gender or transition.” [emphasis mine]
[The study says,] “‘Only 4% of people who went back to living in their sex assigned at birth for a while cited that their reason was because they realized that gender transition was not for them. When considering all respondents who had transitioned, this number equates to only 0.36%.’”
must-watch: “buy now” on Netflix
Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy is streaming on Netflix and I highly recommend it.
Granted, most of the information isn’t new. It covers stuff like:
Planned obsolescence. Almost everything is made to break quickly these days, so unfortunately this isn’t as shocking a concept as it used to be. But I didn’t realize a group of lightbulb manufacturers actually met and conspired to cut the lifespan of bulbs in half so we’d all have to buy more! WTF!
The wastefulness of fashion and other industries, with companies ordering workers to ensure discarded items aren’t usable. A Bath & Bodyworks employee said that her manager ordered her to squeeze out unsold shower gel into a dumpster so homeless people couldn’t use it; Panda Express apparently does the same by mixing unsold food together so it’s inedible 😱
Greenwashing, as well as how companies feature kids in ads in order to seem more wholesome. (I was hoping the doc would focus more on psychological tactics like this that brands use to manipulate people.)
How electronics “recycling” and donating clothes to charity usually just means they’re shipped to poor countries and pollute the air, water, and land
Electronics companies making their devices impossible to repair so you have to buy more (the book Made to Break sounds like it’s in the same vein)
Much of it isn’t exactly groundbreaking (and the AI voice was annoying), but I still consider it a must-watch, because there are some nuggets that make the issues concrete and gut-punchy when so often “climate change” and “social justice” can seem vague and abstract. There was footage of people in Thailand surrounded by mountains of discarded electronics, breaking them apart and probably getting cancer in the process. Horrifying.
The interviews with former higher-ups at Adidas, Amazon, Unilever, Apple, etc. were illuminating—executives aren’t thinking about responsible disposal of their products, because no one is forcing them to (so we gotta!). And if they are, they’re lying about products being recyclable without actual follow-through.
The film was also a reminder that the higher you get at corporations, the more pressure there is to drink the Kool-Aid and not question anything. Overall, it was an indictment of capitalism, a reminder that growth at all costs is literally toxic.
The filmmakers tried to end on a hopeful note (probably because so much of it was devastating). A few states are passing “right to repair” legislation—in California, if items cost over $100, manufacturers have to ensure they can be repaired, diagnosed, or maintained for seven years! And organizations like The Or Foundation (clothing justice) and iFixIt (repair guides for everything) are doing good work.
Ultimately, as consumers, it’s not just about recycling more or switching from plastic to glass; it’s about buying less and pressuring corporations/politicians to change.
remind you of anyone?
“It’s a systematic marginalizing of populations, Glinda, that’s what the Wizard’s all about.”
—Elphaba, Wicked
aestheticism vs. sensualism
or beauty vs. pleasure
I don’t do resolutions, but a goal of mine for 2025 is to spend less time feeling guilt and shame. Fuck those. Feeling bad about myself is out; indulgence and beauty and pleasure and decadence and hedonism are very much IN. It’s the roaring ‘20s, baby!!!
But what do you call that? Aestheticism? Sensualism? I’ve heard people use them interchangeably, but I didn’t really understand the difference.
The interwebs tells me that aesthete (related to the word “aesthetics,” or appearance) is about beauty, while sensualism is more about enjoying all of your senses (pleasure). The line between the two gets fuzzy because there is pleasure in enjoying and savoring beauty.
For example, seeing an ornate vintage teacup in a thrift store is an aesthetic activity; enjoying the ritual of boiling the water, carefully steeping the tea, adding a little sugar or cream, and slowly sipping the tea from said vintage teacup is a sensualist activity.
Here’s my REALLY beautiful, aesthetically pleasing (not) diagram:
(That’s a finger, nose, mouth, ear, and eye, if you couldn’t tell from my GORGEOUS drawing skillz.)
In my humble non-expert opinion, all aesthetic activities are also sensual activities, but only SOME sensual activities (oh my!) are aesthetic.
Cool cool. Glad I figured that out. Back to my regularly scheduled programming of mostly just posting quotes that I stumble on and love. <3
beauty ≠ morality
“By framing beauty as a moral achievement rather than what it often is—a combination of genetics, resources and medical intervention—we create an impossible standard. Women are expected to meet increasingly demanding beauty standards while maintaining the fiction that their appearance is entirely ‘natural’. The pressure to be beautiful becomes entangled with the pressure to be ‘good’.”
—Ellen Atlanta, “Why Are Celebrities So Keen to Deny Cosmetic Work?” in Dazed
LOST TIME
“There are days where I feel such crippling sadness, thinking of the years lost in that ridiculous palace. I wonder who I could have been otherwise.”
—Rebecca Thorne, Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea
Lindy West on weight loss
“I don’t think you can pursue deliberate weight loss without endorsing [a] body hierarchy. If you think you look better when you’re thinner, that means you think thin people are better than fat people. And they’re not.”
—Lindy West, on the podcast “Weight For It”
Rick Owens on beauty and intolerance
“My personal effort has been to oppose intolerance in any way that I can by proposing aesthetics that are not the accepted standards or not the enforced standards. I talk about airport beauty: we’re forced to march through this gauntlet of beauty—the beauty ads, the beauty goods, perfume things—that is exactly the same globally…and it’s narrow, and it can be a little bit cruel…I want to offer something that is not exactly that…
“I want to balance out intolerance by promoting alternatives to what are the standards of beauty. When you can blur the standards of beauty, you can open up minds to think of other things, too.”
restlessness
“I was restless, I needed something to engage me, and art was that something.”
—Louise Nevelson
from Louise Nevelson by Arnold Glimcher