Femme Fatale

I realized today that I want to be so many people but there's just so little time. I need to go through my 1950s Mexican poncho phase, and my kimono phase, and my schoolgirl phase, and my film noir phase, and my... SO MANY PEOPLE TO BE!! But right now, I'm mostly focused on the femme fatale look. The girl who breaks boys' hearts (but I won't do that 'cause being mean sux!!). I just wanna look like a film noir heartbreaker. I recently--as in a few nights ago--discovered how easy that is. With my new(ish) haircut, all I needed to do was groom my lil eyebrows and gather some photos for inspiration. I watched some tutorials on eyebrow-grooming by Amy Rose from Rookie, and then got some more makeup ideas from Hannah (also on Rookie). Since I don't like to wear makeup 'cause it makes my skin feel all nasty, I decided what I would do is just use some brown eyeshadow and brush it into my brows to make them look darker and fuller. Makeup is a fascinating thing that I don't understand, but I will testify to the fact that simply by doing this, my eyes looked brighter and my skin looked nicer. It's magic, goshdarnit. But then I felt like bein' a bit more doe-eyed so I put on just a smidge of mascara. I haven't worn that stuff in a year because I was born with long eyelashes and it's kind of a gross thing to put near your lil shiny peepers, but it felt right in the moment. I think in the future it would look better if I only used an eyelash curler, but I have to get over my fear of them first. I really want to experiment with alternating playing up my eyes, eyebrows, and lips, and seeing what happens. Then I just need to perfect my pout, dabble on some body glitter, and everything will be complete. 

In case you're looking to achieve the same look, here's some inspo-rayshun for ya. 

[Photos via the Internet.]

Sexy leggy lacy lady.

My girl Audrey. (Halloween costume?)

Good ol' Daisy Buchanan.

Damn. Damn. Look at those brows/eyes/lips. And that frickin' hair. She broke so many hearts, I can tell, just with those eyes alone.

Fierce ladies rule the freaking world.

This one's like a cross between the flapper look and Twiggy (a little), and that's all I ever wanna look like. 

Someday I'll learn how to apply lipstick that well.

 

Audrey Thorne from Twin Peaks. She's kind of known for her stellar eyebrows and red-red-lips. 

Time is meant for change, ain't it?

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My Mom Loves Technology

My mom loves to use her phone (not an iPhone) and her iPad to take pictures, no matter where we are, no matter the occasion. It's freaking hilarious. My sister hates it but it's just too funny for me to be annoyed by it. But really, thank god she documents these things, because how else would we have a bunch of ridiculous pictures taken in airports and in front of famous churches? Think of this as installment number one of my France trip diary, while we wait for me to get my act together and get my cameras developed. (Most of these are just of me because my family is picky and probably won't want me to post any pictures of them here, even though some of them ARE SO FUNNY. (My mom likes to take selfies (or as she calls them, 'face-ies') on long train rides and sometimes I join her.))

[All photos by my mom. Good job.]

My new favorite t-shirt: "Feminism is the radical notion that women are people."

Getting an unidentified meal at midnight in Reykjavik, Iceland (unidentified merely because what meal does one eat at midnight, especially when it feels like 4 pm because it's so light out).

Exhausted and frustrated at the train station in St. Cloud because our train decided to not go to our stop and we didn't have enough sense to realize the trains that were going to our stop were just on a different track so we sat there for an hour, just waiting. 

Me, my sister, and her friend Charlie posing up a frickin' storm in front of the famous church in Chartres. 

Shirt: made by me

Shorts: thrifted in LA

Scarf: ~childhood~

Shoes: Keds (via Savers)

Me on my birthday, about to stab anyone that tries to take one of my snails. 

Shirt: my mom's in the 70s

Overalls: thrifted in LA

Trying to blow out a candle that was simply resistant to my lung capacity. 

Already sour 16.

Also the drink is not blue, the cup is, that's just water.

Sipping some delicious café crème near Notre Dame (yeah okay try and charge 5,80 euros for a cup of coffee somewhere else see what happens). 

Shirt: gift from my aunt

Shorts: thrifted in LA

Watch: birthday present from my grandparents

Sunglasses: France

J-chillin' on the side of the Seine, having a real-life blast, livin' on the edge. 

Shoes: Trotters (via Savers)

I have a habit of wearing the same outfit a million times, especially when I travel. Overalls just seemed like the right choice every time. Also, now you can see how dorky I really am because I wear my running shoes in public. Hey, if I'm going to be a kickboxing ballerina, I need to be in tip-top shape. 

(At the airport on our way back home, hence the obviously genuine sadness.)

Props to my mom for rocking the iPad and cellphone. That takes courage.

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Soul Food

A spiritual experience. It wasn't quite what I was actively searching for, but it was a hidden desire, buried deep underneath layers of post-middle school dust and slowly being shaken awake by my recently kindled fascination with yoga. But I think I found it. Or I found one. 

Religion is and always has been debatable, but spirituality? No, that's personal, you can't deny someone a supernal, holy moment. I think, perhaps, that's one of the things I love about Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros. The band--quite literally a band of people--offers the world a chunk of rawness dislodged from the core of each of them, and ultimately from the core of humanity. And what is more raw than one's spirituality? One could argue love, or sex, but in the end, spirituality encompasses both of those in a succinct, broader sense. Edward Sharpe was borne of deep loss, a natural root of pain, and thus began a route to combatting that inherent and inevitable pain of existence. Oftentimes when people are grieving, or in a bad mental place, they claim--although "claim" alludes to disbelief; belief in the claim is subjective--to see supernatural apparitions, voices of (a) God/god, angels, seraphs, holy choirs, etcetera. That's where Edward Sharpe's music comes from. That place of distress, and then the spiritual release, the saving grace. 

I wasn't in desperate need of a cosmic intervention per se when I discovered the band's first CD, Up From Below. I was only thirteen, but the music spoke to me in a way that everyone else was afraid to. They sang of intense love, of sexual desire, of mind-altering substances, of things that thirteen-year-olds are taught, generally, to be wrong. But I was never deterred by the messages I was sent throughout my childhood. When I read Romeo and Juliet, I found myself even more attracted to the idea of I'll-die-for-you love; everyone else in my seventh grade class wrote their papers arguing free will, whereas I was the sole student that fervently argued the power of fate. Our "adolescent issues" class was aimed at teaching us the perils of teenage sexual encounters ("If you have sex you will get pregnant and die" -- Mean Girls) and the irreversible dangers of alcohol and illicit drugs (say no to everyone! Everyone is trying to get you addicted to everything! Say NO!), and I will admit that for a while, I religiously, for lack of a better word, believed in those rules. And then I heard the music. 

Their voices crack(ed), they clap(ped) and stomp(ed), they were (are) loud and they didn't (don't) care, they love(d) the universe with no reserve. Me: a frightened quiet middle school graduate with too much to do. I wanted whatever it was that they had. I played the CD on repeat, all sixteen songs, and I prayed for a gust of fairy-dust-wind to whisk me away and take me to the magical land in which I could find all these wonderful and foreign things of which they spoke. 

CD number two came out a year later, entitled Here, a word that I just recently discovered the importance of. The songs were a little sadder, a little happier, a little more aware of what they wanted. I was a little sadder, a little happier, a little more/less aware of what I wanted.

Edward Sharpe songs are the kind of songs you must treat like classical music: you must either play them very softly or very loudly, never in between, or else the effect is lost. Perfect for falling asleep to, perfect for blasting from speakers while lying on the floor waiting to feel okay again, perfect for a jubilant dance party, perfect for sing-along car rides, perfect for putting on mixtapes, perfect for getting you through long subway rides...Just all around perfect, but perfect in their imperfection. Like people. Humans. That's it, maybe; their music is irrevocably human. And that's really the only thing we can truly know about, as people: what it's like to be who we are. We can study a million other things, astrology, zoology, botany, but in the end we're not stars or tigers or flowers, we're human beings. And that's where Edward Sharpe writes and composes from, that impossible-to-ignore but often impossible-to-tap-into place of pure existence. Not human survival, no Darwinian theories or Freudian philosophies or academia at all, because none of that is truly relatable.

But these songs--they hit on something, a rare and treasured thing that is nearly inexplicable, but may best be described as harmony, as finding the point of peace among discordance. If you look at the demographics of people that listen to their music, it will shock you. This much I can tell you from going to see them play at Governor's Ball in June. There were Long Island teenagers, doctors, middle-aged office workers, art students--and this was only among the people I could see within a five-foot-radius of myself. Everyone was swaying and singing and chanting and maybe even crying together, complete strangers united by a common sound and feeling. I could attribute that to the universality of their music, but another theory comes to mind. The band's all-around vibe, emanating from their songs, their appearance, and their performance, exudes a feeling of "I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT ME," something that everyone needs more of. Especially in modern society, a time and place in which almost all we do is care what other people think about us, this is refreshing. I'm a guy and I have long hair and sometimes I don't wear shoes and cry? YEAH WHO CARES. I'm a girl and I have short hair and I don't shave my legs and I'm fragile? GO AWAY IF YOU THINK I CARE. I'm singing about things that aren't dancing in clubs and getting drunk out of my mind, and instead I'm talking about universal love and spirituality and peace? THERE'S NO WAY YOU'RE GOING TO MAKE ME THINK I'M WEIRD. 

If Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeroes teaches us anything, it's that we shouldn't be afraid. (This is really drilled into us in their eponymous third album that came out last month.) Don't fear, the world loves you, we love you, the flowers and the sand and the asteroids love you, and as long as you love yourself, "everything will be alright forever and forever and forever" (The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac). Wear what you want, say what you want, do what you want, because the only thing that's holding you back from living without inhibition is what you think everyone else will think of you. Thus the only thing holding you back is you, because in the end, you are you and that's really all that's certain. They don't teach us to break the laws and go smash things and commit arson and murder, but more that we're not as trapped as we think we are. The shackles are invisible, all it takes is a little bit of power to break yourself free. 

*Of course this all relates to fashion. Everything relates to fashion because fashion iz lyfe amirite holla at me if I'm rite 

[First five photos taken by me; last two photos taken from Google.]

Lead singer Alexander Ebert at Governor's Ball

Lead singer Alexander Ebert stomping it out at Governor's Ball

Lead singer Alexander Ebert stomping it out on the other side at Governor's Ball

Lead singer Alexander Ebert concentrating on the ~soul~ at Governor's Ball

Band member and vocalist Jade Castrinos acting cute while singing at Governor's Ball

Band member and vocalist Jade Castrinos swaying with a tambourine

The whole crew on the grass

Check out all of their albums on iTunes, or on YouTube (The YooHoo, as sometimes I like to refer to it, as in, "How can I download these darn em-pee twos from The YooHoo?!"), or Spotify, or wherever.

PS DON'T FORGET TO ENTER THE SOLE PROVISIONS GIVEAWAY...PLEASE....

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On Est Toujours Fatigué

C'est vrai. Je crois que je vais tomber sur la terre dans quelques jours. Dès que j'ai écrit sur la blog la dernière fois, nous avons marché, peut-être, 70 kilometres. Et nous avons voyagé par train ou par bus de Paris, à Avignon, à Les-Baux-de-Provence, à Saint-Rémy-de Provence (le lieu où Vincent van Gogh a peint la plus part ses tableaux plus célèbres), et maintenant, nous nous sommes arrêtées dans une gare à Marseille, attendant notre train à Aix-en-Provence. Nous resterons là pour un jour, et puis nous irons à Cannes, et puis Nice, et nous dînerons à Ventimiglia, en Italie, jeudi soir, et enfin, nous retournerons à Paris. Lundi, on part pour les Etats-Unis, malheureusement. 

It's true. I think I'll fall flat on the ground in a few days time. Since I last wrote on this blog, we've walked approximately 70 kilometers. And we've traveled by train or by bus from Paris, to Avignon, to Les-Baux-de-Provence, to Saint-Rémy-de-Provence (the place where Vincent van Gogh painted most of his most famous works), and right now, we're chillin' at a train station in Marseille, waiting for our train to take us to Aix-en-Provence. We'll be staying there for one day, and then we're going to Cannes, then Nice, and then we'll have dinner in Ventimiglia in Italy Thursday night, and finally, we'll return to Paris. We leave for the US on Monday, sadly.

Je suis passée mon anniversaire à Paris. J'ai fait une promenade à vélo le matin, et l'après-midi nous sommes partis pour le cité (mais d'abord l'ami de ma soeur m'a achetée des pantalons à la style d'une pirate à la marché). Nous avons marché des Invalides au Quartier Latin, et selon ma requête, nous sommes allés au Shakespeare & Co., une librairie anglaise située au début du quartier, et juste en face de la Seine. Elle a une affiliation avec City Lights Books, la librairie en Californie qui a imprimé les livres et poèmes des écrivains du Beat Generation (mes écrivains favoris, comme Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, et cetera.). Après que j'ai trouvé les livres que j'ai voulu acheter--un livre qui s'agit de la vie et l'oeuvre d'Egon Schiele, et un petit livre des écritures et poèmes écrit par Kerouac--j'ai demandé à une employée de me dire qu'est-ce que c'est l'affiliation entre Shakespeare & Co. et City Lights, et elle m'a dit que Lawrence Ferlinghetti, la propriétaire du City Lights, aimait Shakespeare & Co. et la fréquentait souvent. Elle m'a dit de demander à un autre employé pour plus d'information. Je l'ai cherché, et il m'a dit d'un hôtel qui est pas loin de la librairie où les écrivains Beat sont restés dans les années 50s et 60s. (J'ai visité cet hôtel lendemain, et je suis retournée à Shakespeare et j'ai dit à cet employé qu'est-ce que j'ai vu, et il m'a dit qu'il y a plusieurs choses que je n'ai pas vu, comme la Dream Machine, et autres choses.) Puis, nous avons marché au Marais, où on a trouvé des "thrift shops" et j'ai acheté une longue robe bordeaux en velours pour seulement dix euros. C'est très jolie. Après, nous sommes allés au Montmartre pour dîner près de Sacre Coeur et manger des crêpes. J'ai mangé des escargots et une crêpe avec Nutella et chantilly. Après ce jour fatiguant, nous sommes retournés chez nous, et ma mère m'a donnée des autres cadeaux, une édition de Le Petit Prince (mais en anglais) inclus. Je suis en train de le lire.

I spent my birthday in Paris. I took a bike ride in the morning, and in the afternoon we left for the city (but first my sister's friend bought me a pair of pirate pants at the market). We walked from Invalides to the Latin Quarter, and at my request, we went to Shakespeare & Co., an English bookstore situated at the start of the neighborhood, and right across the street from the Seine. It has an affiliation with City Lights Books, the bookstore in California that published the books and poems of the writers of the Beat Generation (my favorite authors, like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, etcetera). After I found the books I wanted to buy--a book about the life and works of Egon Schiele, and a little book of writings and poems by Kerouac--I asked an employee to tell me about the affiliation between Shakespeare & Co. and City Lights, and she told me that Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the owner of City Lights, loved Shakespeare & Co. and still continues to frequent it often. She told me to ask a different employee for more information on the subject. I found him and he told me about a hotel that's not far from the bookstore where the Beat writers had stayed in the 50s and 60s. (I visited the hotel the day after next, and then I went back to Shakespeare and told the guy what I'd seen, and he told me that there were a lot of things I hadn't been shown, like the Dream Machine and some other things.) Then we walked to the Marais, where we found some thrift shops and I bought a long bordeaux velvet gown for only ten euros. It's bangin'. After that, we went to Montmartre for dinner near Sacre Coeur and ate crêpes. I ate snails and a Nutella and whipped cream crêpe. After our ridiculously tiring day, we went home, and my mom gave me more gifts, including an English version of Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince). I'm in the middle of reading it right now.

On a marché beaucoup (trop, peut-être!), déjeuné avec nos amis de famille, et visité des cathédrales, des palais, et des châteaux. New York me manque un peu, mais je serai très triste de sortir ce pays dans moins qu'une semaine. 

We've walked a lot (too much, maybe), had lunch with some family friends, and visited cathedrals, palaces, and castles. I miss New York a little bit, but I'll be super sad when I have to leave this wonderful place in less than a week.

DON'T FORGET TO ENTER THE SOLE PROVISIONS GIVEAWAY! PLEASE! JE VOUS EN PRIE! 

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L'Année Dernière à Marienbad

Mon cousin Elie m'a recommandé quelques films que je dois regarder, quand je suis restée chez lui le mois dernier, et, savant que j'aime toutes les choses française (et que une partie de mes devoirs de l'été pour mon classe de français AP est de regarder et écrire des résumés pour des films français), il a inclus "L'Année Dernière à Marienbad" dans cette liste. Aujourd'hui c'était un jour paresseux, donc nous sommes restées dans notre quartier, faisant des petites choses amusantes. Ce soir, j'ai décidé de regarder ce film, et c'était magnifique. Je ne vais pas vous donner un résumé maintenant, mais pendant le film j'ai aperçu que les costumes de la femme qui avait une rôle principale (elle n'avait pas un nom) soient très jolies et uniques. Alors, j'ai pris des screenshots pour vous montrer, et pour vous donner, peut-être, un peu d'inspiration. 

My cousin Elie recommended some movies that I should watch when I stayed at his house a few weeks ago, and, knowing that I love all things French (and that part of my AP French summer homework is to watch and write reviews for some French films), included "L'Année Dernière à Marienbad" ("Last Year at Marienbad") in that list. Today was a lazy day, so we stayed in the neighborhood, doing assorted activities. Tonight, I decided to watch the movie, and it was incredible. I won't give you a whole description of it now, but while watching the film I realized that the costumes of the woman that played the main female role (she didn't have a name) were gorgeous and extremely unique. So, I took some screenshots to show you that perhaps will give you a lilabet of inspiration. 

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Très '60s, n'est-ce pas? 

Very '60s, right?

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