storyteller

for any address to twitter you can replace the “x.com” with “nitter.net” and you will be able to browse as if you have an account. Lifesaver.

Also painting the brick turns that entire house into a mildew factory.

Text from the article:

"Tomato girl, that girl, clean girl, coconut girl, downtown girl, it girl, soft girl, dark feminine girl, light feminine girl, ballerina girl, coquette girl, cottage core girl, vanilla girl, strawberry girl, party girl, indie sleaze girl, west village girl, east village girl, french girl, italian girl, riviera girl, mermaid girl, rockstar girlfriend, trophy wife, old money girl, new money girl, office siren, pilates girl, yoga girl, beach girl, farmer’s market girl, e-girl, cool girl, weird girl

What was once a fun way to find your niche or like-minded people has now become a part of the cyclical hell now known as the micro trend. These ‘aesthetics’ used to be lasting and instantly recognisable like the more foundational subcultures that came before them, but nowadays we’re really just saying shit. What do you mean you can just order a whole pre-curated style package because a TikTok slideshow told you that you’re like soooo #y2k?A “curated” Y2K TikTok shop package

Now the art of personal style is dying, and we all look the same.

Punk was a response to Thatcherite Britain. Rave culture was a reaction to the Criminal Justice Act. Goth emerged from post-industrial bleakness. These subcultures had music, politics, community; you didn’t buy into them, you lived them. So what on gods green earth is Tomato Girl reacting to? A slow summer and a Pinterest board? What does coquette stand for politically? What is the Guinness moustache 2 dot swap boy rebelling against? Nothing.

We’ve kept the aesthetic shell of subculture and hollowed out everything that made it mean something.

And look, let’s not get too nostalgic about it, we’re not sat here pretending there was ever some golden age where fashion was pure and untouched by money. Malcolm McLaren was selling punk from a shop on King’s Road before half those kids even knew what they were rebelling against. Subculture and commerce have always been in bed together; obviously, that’s not new. The difference is the speed; people used to spend years, genuinely YEARS, developing a look.

Trying things, abandoning them, finding a silhouette that felt like theirs, wearing something until it fell apart. Now you get three weeks before the algorithm decides it’s over, and you’re already behind. It’s not that fashion got commercialised, it’s that the commercialisation got so fast and so all-consuming that there’s no breathing room left to develop an actual point of view before someone’s already packaged it, sold it and moved on.80’S PUNK IMAGE: SHIRLEY BAKERS

“Now the art of personal style is dying, and we all look the same.”

Now, back to my previous list of micro niche TikTok aesthetics or whatever you want to call them. I wonder if you may have noticed a word repeating itself a wee bit. We’re no longer women, we’re now, in fact, perpetually girls. And honestly, I don’t think that’s an accident. A girl is easier to package than a woman, easier to sell back to herself, easier to reduce to a mood board and an Amazon storefront; a girl can be a Pinterest board. But a woman, she has contradictions and weird phases and a jacket she’s had since she was seventeen that doesn’t go with anything, but she’ll never get rid of, and quite frankly, that’s a lot harder to shift units with. The word girl implies youth, softness, the kind of smallness that makes you easy to categorise and easier to market to. Which, if you’ve been paying attention, is exactly the point.

As Rayne Fisher-Quann, aka the Internet Princess, famously stated in her essay “Standing on the Shoulders of Complex Female Characters,”

“It’s become very common online for women to express their identities through an artfully curated list of things they consume or aspire to consume…the aesthetics of consumption have in turn become a conduit to make the self more easily consumable.”

These ‘aesthetics’ previously known as subcultures are now entirely about consumption; it’s no longer about politics and musical taste but more about buying or being perceived as someone who might buy something. For example, the quiet luxury trend was not about actually being rich and being quiet and graceful about it, but in fact, the point was more for people to think that you might be.

And although many would argue, really, there’s no such thing as personal style - cue the cerulean blue scene from The Devil Wears Prada - there’s no denying that across all media, people both facially and in terms of fashion are all starting to look the same, slowly moulding into one big beige lip flip slick back bunned fox eyed blob. Yet to make ourselves seem original, we declare that we’re wearing these items in a different way than the ‘other girls’.

“I’m not wearing Ugg boots in a clean girl way, I’m wearing them in an off-duty ballerina Slavic girl winter way”

Okay, girl, whatever you say. Either way, you’re still following the trend, and these big corporations don’t care whether your shoes are being worn in a basic way or a coquettish way because the money is still going into their pockets.

It’s become a performance of proximity, who got there first, who’s wearing it in the right way or the new way, who is in the know, who started the trend or really gets the trend and who is just a follower, like seriously if I had a quid for everytime I heard or even said myself “but they just don’t GET IT like I do” I would be lying on a beach in Thailand right now.

We speak of those with basic style as less than not for political reasons, or because we want to help the less fashion inclined, but because we want to inflate our own egos, we are better than you because we chose to follow a different trend. Although you may deem it as cooler, a trend is a trend, no matter the outcome.

And it’s not just how we dress, it’s who gets to be in the room. There’s a Reel doing the rounds at the moment that’s said what we’ve all been thinking – stop inviting the same rotating cast of freeloading influencers to everything and bring back actual curation.

Invite the film nerds to the screenings, the fashion nerds to the shows, and the music nerds to the listening parties. Right now, we’ve got people who couldn’t name a single track standing front row at gigs time and again that they got into for free, and will leave before the encore to make sure they get their post up while it’s still relevant. Proximity to a scene is not the same as being part of one. But I suppose when the whole point is just to be seen there, does it even matter if you give a shit what any of it is actually about? Apparently not, babes. Open bar, free food and a branded photobooth? Guess we’ll see you at the next one.

We’ve now reached what people call cultural stagnation. To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, whenever the aesthetics become politicised, then fascism is in trend, when it seems like art, beauty and fashion have hit a wall because we keep repackaging the same shit. The average person is no longer developing their aesthetic taste, and nothing feels new because we only seek algorithmic approval, so our taste is intrinsically tied to whatever gives us the most social clout. After being told what is considered to be the pinnacle of beauty, we find ourselves all trying to wear the faces of Hailey Bieber and Kylie Jenner while trying to achieve the bodies of the likes of Gracie Abrams (convincing women to dedicate all their energy to worrying about their weight is a whole other conversation). And we really do sit and complain about “everybody looks the same” until somebody actually looks different, then we hit them with the “Greek gods would go to war for you/ I love your confidence!” type comment section.

“Stop inviting the same rotating cast of freeloading influencers to everything and bring back actual curation.

Invite the film nerds to the screenings, the fashion nerds to the shows, and the music nerds to the listening parties. Right now, we’ve got people who couldn’t name a single track standing front row at gigs time and again that they got into for free, and will leave before the encore to make sure they get their post up while it’s still relevant. Proximity to a scene is not the same as being part of one. But I suppose when the whole point is just to be seen there, does it even matter if you give a shit what any of it is actually about?”

We buy bags with pre-added charms and jackets that are pre-distressed because the trend cycles go so fast, our clothing doesn’t even get the chance to feel lived in, everything is a signifier and can’t just be worn because it’s loved, but more to show or prove that you are someone. If she wears tabis, she’s a ‘real’ fashion girl; she goes to art galleries and posts fit check TikToks with her photographer boyfriend; if she wears Arcteryx, she’s chill, she drinks Guinness and goes on hikes for the gram. If she wears fur coats, she loves a messy night out, smokes tabs and is let in everywhere, no questions asked, because she knows the band. If she wears Tom’s trunks, she went to private school, loves drum and bass and goes skiing on the weekends.

None of those things have to be true; we just have to believe that they could be. It’s like we’re all desperately trying to make a point about ourselves, and really we’re all just performative asf. And duh, life itself is a performance, but we’ve essentially turned getting dressed into a personality test we administer to ourselves every morning, desperately asking, are we niche enough to be interesting but still hot enough to be desired, weird enough to have taste but not so weird that nobody wants to fuck us?

And when you actually clock what these aesthetics are, they are almost entirely built around a femininity that exists to be perceived. Not felt from the inside but read from the outside, filed correctly, appreciated from a distance. Somewhere along the line, the question stopped being how do I want to feel in my clothes and became will they get it? We absorbed the male gaze so young and so completely that we now curate ourselves for it voluntarily, document it ourselves, post it ourselves, tag the brand ourselves and call it self-expression. And babes, that is not self-expression, that is free advertising.

“Are we niche enough to be interesting but still hot enough to be desired, weird enough to have taste but not so weird that nobody wants to fuck us?”

Gen Z gets blamed for this, but it makes sense when you’ve grown up in an attention economy that demands you be legible at a glance. Personal style used to be the accumulation of a life: a concert tee, a dead relative’s coat, shoes worn down on one side. Now it’s a mood board made real, assembled to be read rather than felt. We’re not getting dressed, we’re making a case for ourselves. We’re at a point now where when we see somebody online showcasing their beautiful individual look, we are no longer inspired to find originality for ourselves, but instead find ourselves in comment sections demanding a step-by-step tutorial on how to copy the entire look.

And before you boys get too comfortable, you’re doing it too. The Salomons hiking boy who’s never been further than the Peaks but owns three shell jackets and needs you to know he could survive a Norwegian winter. The moustache mullet patchwork tattoo guy who keeps his keys on a carabiner, the boy who wears vintage band tees and beat-up Sambas, who’s definitely seen Fontaines D.C. four times and will tell you that every time you play ‘Favourite’. The raw denim enthusiast in full Oni selvedge who’s been to Japan once, visited one workshop in Kojima, and hasn’t stopped talking about it since. The record store guy in a deadstock flannel and New Balance 574s who needs you to know he has the original pressing and absolutely did not find it on Discogs. The “I don’t really follow fashion” boy who somehow owns every single piece from the Uniqlo U drop and is inexplicably head to toe Margaret Howell. The skater boy who hasn’t been on a board since 2019 but exclusively wears Rassvet, Fucking Awesome and one very specific Supreme drop from 2017, he got resale. The “I just threw this on” boy in a perfectly proportioned Rick Owens leather and Lemaire trousers, who, to make it clear, did not ‘just throw it on’.

Men have spent years mocking women for being trend-followers while quietly developing their own just as rigid aesthetic uniforms. The difference is they call it “having taste” rather than following a trend, which is somehow the most on-brand thing imaginable.

I do think the word poser was pushed to the brink of extinction because people abused it and were pretentious about it back in the day. Like calling a teenage girl a poser because she had a budding interest in the alt scene that she was just starting to dabble in but hadn't fully committed to yet, or calling someone a poser because they liked a couple of Green Day songs but couldn't list the entire biography of all the band members. And it was often gendered, and was rightfully criticized for that.

When Life Gives You Corpses is a brilliant YA about a cursed praying mantis who falls for a young witch. Yield Under Great Persuasion is a raunchy, but surprisingly sweet story about two men repairing their relationship. Fabulous Bodies is a horror story about a queer rockstar rising from the dead.

This is Where the Future Bleeds is a fantasy set in a vividly imagined land, where two women (who happen to kiss) are the key to healing the broken sky. You're No Better is a story about a teen struggling in the shadow of his murderous parent. Oil on Canvas is about a woman who finds disturbing paintings in the home of her dead mother.

Read from Black authors this Black History Month and every month!

🖤❤️💛💚🖤

Belly of The Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness by Da'Shaun L. Harrison

Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings

The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love by Sonya Renee Taylor

Fat Girls In Black Bodies: Creating Communities of Our Own by Joy Arlene Renee Cox, PhD

Fattily Ever After: The Fat, Black Girls' Guide to Living Life Unapologetically by Stephanie Yeboah

Unashamed: Musings of a Fat, Black Muslim by Leah Vernon

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay

The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women's Unruly Political Bodies by Andrea Elizabeth Shaw

Bad Fat Black Girl: Notes From a Trap Feminist by Sesali Bowen

Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation by Dalia Kinsey, RD, LD

Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom

Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon

Fat. Black. Femme. Revealing The Power of Visibly Queer Voices in Media and Learning to Love Yourself by Jonathan P. Higgins, Ed.D.

Reclaiming The Black Body: Nourishing the Home Within by Alishia McCullough, LCMHC

The Body Liberation Project: How Understanding Racism and Diet Culture Helps Cultivate Joy and Build Collective Freedom by Chrissy King

#VERYFAT #VERYBRAVE: The Fat Girl's Guide to Being #Brave and Not a Dejected, Melancholy, Down-in-the-Dumps Weeping Fat Girl in a Bikini by Nicole Byer

It’s Always Been Ours: Rewriting The Story of Black Women’s Bodies by Jessica Wilson, MS, RD

Fat On, Fat Off: A Big Bitch Manifesto by Clarkisha Kent

Romance With Voluptuousness: Caribbean Women and Thick Bodies In The United States by Kamille Gentles-Peart

Inspirations for this text / recommended reading (on a Tor browser)

Malatesta, Let Us Be Of Good Cheer!

The group formerly know as “Bash Back”, I Don’t Bash Back I Shoot First: On Queer Gangs

Institute For The Study of Insurgent Warfare, Nine Theses On Insurgency

Mia Mingus’ concept of pod mapping

Basically every communiqué from the EZLN but see especially the Fourth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle

adrienne maree brown, We Will Not Cancel Us ; and Pleasure Activism

Aragorn!, Toward a non European Anarchism or Why a movement is the last thing that people of color need

Margaret Killjoy, (podcast) Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff: Gay Resistance to Nazis, 2022-05-30 and 2022-06-01

Kaneko Fumiko, A Work of My Own! (in: The Prison Memoirs of a Japanese Woman )

My 10 Favorite Books: Hugh Dancy

For his bookshop and website One Grand Books, the editor Aaron Hicklin asked people to name the 10 books they’d take with them if they were marooned on a desert island. The next in the series is the actor Hugh Dancy, who shares his list exclusively with T.

“The Pickwick Papers,” Charles Dickens

When I need to read something that I know will fill my imagination, lift my spirits and also be effortless, I go to Dickens, and this is the most preposterously, comically overflowing of them all.

“Women in Love,” D.H. Lawrence

Nobody has ever written like Lawrence (except bad imitators, and nothing’s more embarrassing than knockoff Lawrence. Sometimes he’s pretty embarrassing, too). This novel transports you.

“Sabbath’s Theater,” Philip Roth

The most anarchic, provocative, lewd and brilliant Roth novel. It feels like it’s on fire.

“Lucky Jim,” Kingsley Amis

I was recommended this when I was a teenager trying to figure out how to start reading “serious” books. Great recommendation, because on the surface it’s nothing of the sort, but it is brilliant.

“My Struggle,” Karl Ove Knausgaard

In part because reading the first two gave me the unsettling sensation of knowing what it’s like to be someone else better than I know what it’s like to be me, and in part because including it might force me to read the remaining four.

“Tristram Shandy,” Laurence Sterne

You could spend years on the first chapter alone, in fact people have. But in a good way. There’s so much going on and so much reinvention it’s bewildering.

“The Big Sleep,” Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler is one of life’s great pleasures, ideally in a bath with a drink to hand.

“The Left Hand of Darkness,” Ursula K. Le Guin

Forced to pick a single sci-fi novel, I’ll go with this because, in ways even beyond most sci-fi, it is so far ahead of its time. You’re left believing entirely in the worlds she’s imagined, including a better version of this one.

“The Best of Wodehouse: An Anthology,” P.G. Wodehouse

I know that on and off I’ll be reading this until I die.

“The Tremor of Forgery,” Patricia Highsmith

a friend recently asked me for book recs on the history of the gothic novel, so I thought I'd throw together a quick, non-exhaustive list of non-fiction recommendations:

The Gothic by Fred Bottling: roughly 200 pages long, this book is such a great introduction to the gothic and its many iterations since its emergence in the mid-18th century. very accessible, gives you a good overview rather than very specificized or niche depth.

The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology by Kate Ferguson Ellis: Focusing especially on the emergence of the middle-class female reading audience in the 18th century, Ellis traces the direct connection between the growing idealization of the home/domestic sphere and the popularity of the Gothic genre (women, importantly, were the primary consumers of Gothic fiction!)

Colonial and Post Colonial Gothic: The Carribean by Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert: a really fantastic article which highlights the role of imperialism, colonialization, and slavery within the early Gothic genre. I found the full PDF online -- please enjoy!

The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction: another really fantastic collection of essays which outline the history and the progression of the gothic across time (from the 1700's to the present) and space (starting in Great Britain than moving through and across the Atlantic). Like Bottling's text, this book would serve as a great critical introduction for those new to the genre.

Monster Culture (Seven Theses) by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen: this essay isn't strictly about the gothic, but it gives a useful and very popular framework for how to culturally and critically interpret the monster which lends itself very helpfully, i think, with studying Gothic texts. full article available here.

The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar: again, not strictly about the Gothic but still a worthwhile book to check out. at 700 pages, this is a tome of critical essays. some of it is a bit outdated, i don't personally agree with some of their interpretations (but that, arguably, makes their criticism all the more useful!) -- I don't think you need to read this entire book if you're not inclined, but their interpretations of Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights is worth skimming if you're interested in a feminist analysis of these gothic and gothic-adjacent texts.

Threw together another one of these lists because as it turns out, I personally have always read more book that I have watched movies or TV shows, so as far as personal picks go, this was definitely the better option.

There is very little rhyme or reason to this one -- some are books that left an impression on me as a kid, some are current favorites, and some are academic reading related to my future PhD hopes. For longer series of books, I generally included either my particular favorites or let the first one stand in for the whole series.

Curious how many on here people recognize!