It's a Cowbell

Annie Lennox

Grace Jones

Sinead O‘Connor

Dolores O‘Riordan

Patti Smith

Tracy Chapman

Joan Jett (photo credited to Brad Elterman)

Pauline Black (photo credited to Ebet Roberts)

Meshell Ndegeocello (photo credited to Raymond Boyd)

Tanita Tikaram (photo credited to Bernard Weil)

ages 7-12: be an ‘old soul’

ages 12-16: allow the darkness to consume you

ages 16-19: be a kid for the first time ever

ages 19-30: develop dad lore

ages 30-35: court a beautiful lady

ages 35-40: get married, start a family

ages 40-55: promise to clean out the gutters and never do it again

ages 55-60: allow the darkness to consume you once more

ages 60-75: swinger cruises with your beautiful wife

ages 75-86: be an eccentric grandfather

To get people to stay active, they do need to learn that actually things are still bad when they only hurt the marginalized group. People who don't internalize that make terrible allies that could betray the marginalized group at any moment.

im sure im not the first person to point this out, but i find it so interesting how miki and kozue are basically identical save for the slightest difference in hair, both style and color. kozue’s hair is darker than miki’s, which as far as color coding goes is pretty straightforward: the “pure,” naive sibling and the cynical, jaded sibling—light and dark. but then there’s also the matter of kozue’s upwards swoop in the back of her hair, as opposed to miki’s which is kept neatly, straight down his head.

at first, you could easily just assume that it’s a matter of kozue’s hair being slightly longer than miki’s, but then akio accelerates his car in “miki’s nest box,” and the back of miki’s hair flies up, and suddenly resembles kozue’s. kozue’s perpetually windswept ‘do is suddenly contextualized as symbolic of her knowledge of sex (as a tool for power), which miki only truly becomes aware of in akio’s car.

but to do so, miki’s bangs also fly up, losing his previous point of commonality with kozue. right before akio speeds up his car, miki is “given” the wheel (figuratively speaking). for miki to gain the hidden knowledge of adults (back of his head, obscured from view) that kozue possesses, he must also lose all common ground with her (front of the head, identical head on). he must shed his childish fringe that evokes his innocence and his sameness with his sister (one and the same, see: the sunlit garden), which is further complicated by the fact that they are both more and less similar than miki thinks.

ultimately, miki’s sexual maturity requires him to distinguish himself from kozue (visually thru gender performance but also thru power, ie, where to sit in the car), since leaving childhood means becoming a man means exerting power over brides and princesses and witches (which both his objects of affection/obsession, kozue and anthy, illustrate are not in fact discrete designations but rather just slightly different labels applied to the same thing, only dependent on how you’re looking at it/her).