In case you didn’t cop FADER 55 yet (for shame) here is the result of my trip to Milan to interview Italian house gobmonsters CROOKERS.
I also got a tan.

I didn’t think I could cry anymore. Was wrong.

The reportage in the Times on arts and architecture Beijing has lately been pretty excellent as of late, but this is hitting me right in the heart, right in my soul. Moreover, you are sleeping if you miss the slideshow. Lin Tianmao!

I saw these dudes on Monday at the Mercury Lounge. They distintegrated my mind they were so good. And I hate Brit rock! It’s more like New Order with jabbier dance shit. This song is from their next LP, it’s called “Ex Lover” and I have listened to it something like 47 times. The sound quality kinda sucks on this video so listen to the song too.

Vanessa Paradis’s photos for Miu Miu’s ad campaign totally dropped and all I can think about, aside from my envy at the fact that she gets to do it with Johnny Depp on a nightly, is that this fly snitch has popped out two seeds! TWO! I hope if I have at least one kid (god forbid) I look half as awesome in the wake of the afterbirth. But then, elle est francais, et that means she has superior genes cause the French are acclimated to having pan au chocolat and crossaint d’anande and shit, all before noon. Regardless, I am glad they had the makeup artist paint her face pink and red, it’s almost like they let her kids do it, which looks rad and somewhat “Ladies and Gentlemen the Fabulous Stains“-vs.-Debbie Harry after 32 hours at Studio 54. And secondly, I am hoping the “VP” sewn onto all the new clothes is a reimagination of what the world would be like if Vanessa PAradis were the Vice Prez instead of Dickhole Cheney. Oh wait those are her initials. NEVER MIND.

Here is Vanessa Paradis in an equally impressive sartorial masterpiece which follows my “summer is all about Salt N Pepa Black’s Magic” outfit decree.

Just in case you are wondering (hi, my family) here is the progress of my dislocated elbow after one month. I cannot straighten it completely nor can i totally bend it back, but today was the first day since the disaster that I could wash my hair with two hands AND put my hair in a ponytail without somewhat awkward assistance from my roommate Esan. GO MY NEW SCAR. It’s like a tattoo of vogue. Oh yeah! I can tell you that now, cause the new FADER, F56 (and my first as head bitch in charge) is dropping in like a week. While busting said arm, I was doing a story on the resurgence and never-gone-awayness of VOGUEINg, the gayboy/tranny underground house scene, and the super amazing dudes and dudettes who are like 21 and positioning themselves as the new Brooklyn dance vanguard, aka “banjee cunts ,” aka the girls of ill streetwear designers Hood by Air who are also the resident in-concert dancers for the queer DFA disco ensemble Hercules and Love Affair. Yes I fucking got a compound dislocation while VOGUEING. GET OVER IT!
Sidebar sidebar: While I was in Milan working on the Crookers story, and turned on Italian MTV to soundtrack my shower, Hercules and Love Affair’s “Blind” video was on, I swear to baby jeezy, nine times an hour. P.S. Italian MTV shows videos. Let’s riot NOW. P.P.S. here is a photo of my arm and the Hercules and Love Affair “Blind” video.

note A. extreme bicep atrophying from lack of ability to use said bicep and B. amazing pastel and oil painting of what I believe to be a shirtless and eye-patched Mussolini which I purchased ravenously for approx 14 dollars at the PS 321 flea market. in background under arm. I feel it sooo hard.

BONUS. Here is a video of Lola Balenciaga, of the House of Balenciaga, at a vogue ball I attended recently. She is the one in the lemon lime pum pum shorts. She won for the “Vogue Fem Realness” category. Meaning she is “feminine realness,” meaning if you saw her on the street, you would never know that at one point in her life she was a dude. Word?

Two people I am feeling super hard right now. Lizzi Bougatsos of Gang Gang Dance, partly because the new forthcoming GGD album is AMAZE (coming in october snitches, i can’t go in that deep) and partly because she is the type of lady i wanted to be when i was in high school: cool new york artist band singer slash lighting pigs head’s on fire in european forests with rita ackerman?!! Oh you have to just watch the video. The other person I’m feeling/contemplating is Keke Palmer, my favorite teenager who is not a blood relation. Her album last year, So Uncool was a. one of my faves, b. slept on, c. all of the above? C is the correct answer you get an extra carrot stick at lunch tomorrow. And dude it’s not just cause she’s in that football movie with Cube. I interviewed her last year when she was on an episode of Just Jordan. I have it on DVD if you need to watch it. So Keke is BFFs with the kid who plays Chris Rock on “Everybody Hates Chris” and she writes songs with her sister that are like techno pop&B and she’s smart and awesome. WE GOSSIPED ABOUT BOYFRIENDS. I TOTALLY FORGOT THAT! Ha. And also Lizzi Bougatsos has a side proj called IUD (the coolest birth control before the spray on condom) in which she mostly drums and screams into the mic and it’s amazing. And Keke Palmer made this great song called “Bottoms Up,” which some person amazingly synched to their Alyssa Milano Amber Alert video on youtube:

somehow i feel like this video is something lizzi would have considered. the circle is complete.

Shane picked me up in his Anthony Bourdain road vehicle yesterday, which is weird enough–people have cars? in new york? but photographers have equipment to cart around I guess. Then he drove me to Ft Greene in the middle of the day (which is like 10 blocks from my apartment) and forced me–FORCED ME–to drink like 42 glasses of wine. My therapist is on summer vacation at her L.I. timeshare so this is what we do–get wasteroided and have real talk about ourselves and the people we know, and our feelings, duh. Shane is awesome, super smart and talented and calls me “ESCO” which I totally love because it makes me feel like Nas. P.S. He is in this Jonathan Mannion-directed Jazmine Sullivan video, he plays the token white tatted-up producer and he is fake-moving those knobs with the ferocity of an Oakley-deprived Scott Storch. He looks like he is calculating the effects of the Mayan Apocalypse on volcanic activity below the equator. By the way Jazmine Sullivan is the fucking truth. She is genius. Like chills-up-the-spine shit. I hope she gets super famous because I’m sick of seeing ppl like Solange and Ashanti and Michelle Williams churn out HIGHLY B-GRADE dubious material w/no personality and everyone just accepts it. Why must ppl allow for slippage in their female R&B singers at a much higher rate than even rappers? I have a theory that this spate of bad music is because they are female, and the industry is retarded and still thinks that by getting the same redundant producers to do a track on every album it will be a hit. Guess what Antonio, Rodney Jerkins is not the god of this ish. WHAT DOES THE BIBLE SAY ABOUT FALSE IDOLS. Watch this video Shane appears at 1:20 and then Missy grabs his dome (no sensual) and makes him laugh. He looks like he thinks he is an extra in LA Law.

The whole point of this is that even though I got home and was safely tucked in my polka-dotted bed-cradle by midnight, today my brain feels like a cantalopue gone overripe and perhaps tugged at by scavenging birds as I slept. And the annoying people next door are having one of the parties where their friends come over, get drunk in the backyard, and they play shitty music which then wafts into my open third-floor window, along with all the other windows on the block. These are the same people who complain when we have block parties because we play hip-hop and reggae too loud, even though the entire neighborhood is in attendance and participatory. Yet they think we want to listen to their fucking craptacular CCR or what the fuck ever. Now they are singing “Happy Birthday,” I’m about to pop a glock. Like IRON FLAG style. NEVER LEAVE HOME WITHOUT IT! Ha. God I’m so not hard. Substitute glock with “eyeliner” in that Wu song and you have a pretty good approximation of what my life is like. Eyeliner, Blackberry, iPod, book (now: Aleksander Hemon’s “The Lazarus Project,” which is excellent). I will cut a ho if I have to tho. Um.

For some reason the Chicago Sun-Times wanted to interview me about Katy Perry, who will never be in The FADER, or even NEAR the FADER with a 29-foot pole. I end up sounding like a curmudgeon and repeat the word “vaguely” twice. READ IT NOW

I recently responded to a Professor at Duke asking this feminists-in-the-media listserv I’m on about how we define third-wave feminism (for their future archive on the same) and I realized I wrote basically a personal (wo)manifesto on the topic. And also because I haven’t had tons of time to blog, much less pontificate on feminist philosophy, for like four months, I’m putting it out there. Discuss.
How would you characterize or define third wave feminism? (Keywords or short phrases that come to mind are fine.)
Third wave feminism – a diverse group of heavily pop culture-informed young women who live daily with the great strides and advantages made by the second wave, but who must work out the nuances, whether it’s better access to ob-gyn and abortion clinics, to navigating complex sexual landscapes in the aftermath of certain societal gender shifts. We are the babies of the OGs.
Do you consider yourself part of the third wave feminist movement?
I did, until the 2008 Democratic Primary Election season. The way some second wavers reacted to Obama, and the reasons they went in for Hillary (second wavers being boomers) exposed how split the ideas of the second wave are from the late-gen third wavers. I believe this season was the birth of the fourth wave, and I consider myself a part of it. I can pinpoint the one moment I felt this: when Gloria Steinem wrote an op-ed in the NY Times basically comparing gender discrimination to race discrimination and deciding women have had it worse than blacks. As if there aren’t black women, or as if you can even compare the two, or most importantly, as if civil rights and gender rights weren’t both inalienable, and aren’t part of the same end-game. The fourth wave is able to see clearly that social justice does not stop with gender, that if women are to be granted equalities across the board, that we must fight for equality for each one, all. The work, revelations (indeed the growing-up process) of the third wave got us to this point. I relate to second wavers less and less.
What do you see as the most important issues for today’s feminist activists? On the flip side, are there issues or constituent groups that are left out of the third wave?
Women of color, and women in poverty, particularly in the ’90s, got a lot of lipservice from the thirdwave, but there was not enough followthrough. One of the most important issues today for feminist activists is including all women in our agendas, particularly since young women of color have the highest instances of HIV contraction and if that isn’t a feminist issue I don’t know what is. Also, as ever, the right to choose is a fragile queen in our menagerie.
Fighting for women globally, especially in countries facing genocide, are key. Women are mass-raped in Darfur and they are sold into sex-slavery in Myanmar and they are sometimes beaten to death in Iran. The ongoing murders and disappearances of women of Ciudad Juarez is an ongoing, and vital, issue. We must use our power to work for these women in crisis, without disrespecting cultural differences and/or stomp in with our entitled western ideas and try to “fix” things. We must recognize feminist issues within larger ones–how globalisation, global warming, speed-industrialism, economic turmoil, late-stage capitalism, adversely affects women across the world.
Name a few individuals and organizations that you would consider to be key players in the third wave movement.
mine are mostly feminism through the arts, as an arts editor and cultural critic:
chicaluna.com
Michelle Habell-Pallan
Tricia Rose
Mark Anthony Neal, self-described hip-hop male feminist (and duke professor!!)
Beverly Guy-Sheftall
Moya Bailey, activist formerly of Spelman College
Rosa Clemente
Elena Poniatowska
Lydia Cacho
Joan Morgan
Majora Carter
riot grrrl
bikini kill (in the ’90s)
code pink
not on our watch
rock n roll camp for girls