Friday, December 31, 2010

comedian interviews a racist

The below video features comedian Wyatt Cenac interviewing Tom Metzger. Metzger is a white supremacist who founded WAR (White Aryan Resistance). Metzger was also involved with the Ku Klux Klan in the 70s.

It seems the below video is intended to be comicall. I'm surprised Metzger agreed to do it. Initially I didn't know what to think of it but I think it shows us how ridiculous racism is. So, while Metzger may have thought the interview was just another venue in which to spew hate it seems that he is the one made to look a fool.

Dynamic Duos


Eddie Vedder joins Ben Harper during his set opening for Pearl Jam as they do a rendition of the Queen / Bowie classic UNDER PRESSURE in San Diego's Veijas Arena on October 9, 2009.

And for those of you who missed my former post with Ben Harper and Jack Black...here ya go..


Jack Black and Kyle Gass joined Ben Harper on stage at the Get Out & Vote concert in Milwaukee to perform the Queen/David Bowie classic

Rosie the Riveter dies at 86



Geraldine Hoff Doyle was the model for the World War II "Rosie the Riveter" poster. Doyle died in Lansing, Michigan on December 26, 2010 at the age of 86.

In 1942 Doyle was 17 year old. She was a metal presser in a Michigan factory. A photo taken by a wire service photographer was turned into a war poster by graphic artist J. Howard Miller.

It turns out that Doyle only worked two weeks as a day laborer before quitting as she feared a hand injury would prevent her from playing the cello. Doyle had learned had learned that another woman had injured herself doing the same job.

The photo was used for an internal project at Westinghouse and wasn’t widely distributed until the 1980′s as a prop for women’s equality in the workplace.

Doyle wasn't aware of the poster until 1984 when she discovered the original photograph in a 1940′s back issue of Modern Maturity magazine. The magazine today is known as AARP The Magazine.


Photo: Modern Maturity

The term "Rosie the Riveter" is rooted from a 1942 song about the women who took over factory jobs when American men went off to war.

Daughter Stephanie Gregg said in an interview that "She would say that she was the 'We Can Do It!" girl."
"She never wanted to take anything away from all the Rosie the Riveters who were doing the riveting."

Doyle was married to dentist Leo Doyle. They were married for 66 years. Leo Doyle died in early 2010.

Doyle is survived by five children, 18 grandchildren and 25 great-grandchildren.

A memorial service is scheduled for Saturday, January 8 in Lansing, Michigan.

Thursday, December 30, 2010

New Year's Cupcakes

New Year Cupcakes!



From HoosierHomemade_latham via flickr

Sunday, December 26, 2010

they're there even though you don't see them


mondolithic.com


I need you to recognize my friends
cuz they're there even though you don't see them
They got their own chair, a plate, and a seat
You know I won't touch my food unless they eat
~"I'm a Child" by Devendra Banhart

I was listening to this great song called "I Feel Like a Child" by Devendra Banhart. The above quote struck me as quite whimsical as children often let there imaginations fly without filter. It seems that as we grow older we don't quite remember what it was to be a child. And I think it's very fair when kids and teens look into the faces of their parents and say, "You don't understand." I often told myself that I hope I do not forget what it was like to be a child or a teen. Although, we cannot fully remember what it was like I think it's important to know that we all want to be understood in some way, no matter what age we have reached.

Being that I am a psychiatric social worker I couldn't help but also relate the lyrics to interactions I've had with patients. I work with adults who experience mental illness and many experience Schizophrenia.

I found the above image at a website called Monolithic Studios. The title of the post is "Schizophrenia". It was a reminder that I will never quite understand what it's like to have voices in my head. To have friends or enemies that keep me company everywhere I go.

Next Year's Christmas

So, recently I was perusing one of my favorite blogsites, Twinkie's Blargh. The blog belongs to Twinkiechan! who is an amazing crochet artist. She crochet's mostly scarves and they are all food themed. I've bought several of her scarves and I am thrilled to have them.

Anyway, below is an image from her blog which reveals a close up of her Christmas tree. I fell in love!


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I am usually not a fan of pink but I found myself falling in love with the look of this tree. Being that I'm also obsessed with cupcakes, this tree suits me well.

I have come to find that pink Christmas trees aren't really an original idea. If you look up images on the internet as I did you will see a million of them. Ah well, it's new to me! Next year? I'm getting myself a pink tree!


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To be honest I haven't celebrated the holidays in quite some time. For the last four years I've been working on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years. I'm sure I sound like a Hum Bug but I haven't felt the desire to have the traditional and not to mention obligated holiday feast with the family. I'm not all that close with my family and I no longer feel connected to the holidays as I used to.


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Over the years Thanksgiving has become less about giving thanks and more about a traditional meal and stale, repetative conversation. For my family there is no longer a coming together of love, thoughts and ideas but rather a boring exchange.


CutieGoodie’s Etsy shop

Christmas...
Well, I love the twinklie lights..I can't get enough. I love the city when it's decorated and there are some holiday movies that I really enjoy. Other than that Christmas has held less glee and less sparkle over the years.


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This year I actually didn't have to work and I spent the day with a friend of mine. We watched movies and chated about this and that. It was a day well spent.


Cupcake Ornaments
from Kiwi and Kiki’s Etsy Shop.


Next year I think I'm going to put some effort in to Christmas. But it's going to be Christmas MY way. I am well aware that most of my friends will be spending the actual day of Christmas with their families. But I think I will set a day aside where I can gather friends and we can sit around a pink tree and eat grilled cheese sandwiches, root bear, shirley temple drinks and cupcakes for dessert. Sounds good to me!

A day of togetherness, decoration, fun food and good cheer!

Friday, December 24, 2010

fools


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"A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool"

~William Shakespeare

Ani Difranco at the Dead Man Walking Concert 1998


Ani at the Dead Man Walking concert in March 1998 singing Fuel

"fuel" by Ani DiFranco

they were digging a new foundation in manhattan
and they discovered a slave cemetery there
may their souls rest easy now that lynching is frowned upon
and we've moved on to the electric chair

and i wonder who's gonna be president
tweedle dumb or tweedle dumber?
and who's gonna have the big
blockbuster box office
this summer
how 'bout we put up a wall
between the houses and the highway
and then you can go your way
and i can go my way

except all the radios agree with all the t.v.'s
and the magazines agree with all the radios
and i keep hearing that same damn song
everywhere i go
maybe i should put a bucket over my head
and a marshmallow in each ear
and stumble around for another dumb numb week
for another hum drum hit song to appear

people used to make records
as in a record of an event
the event of people
playing music in a room
now everything is cross-marketing
it's about sunglasses and shoes
or guns or drugs
you choose

we got it rehashed
we got it half-assed
we're digging up all the graves
and we're spitting on the past
and we can choose between the colors
of the lipstick on the whores
'cuz we know the difference
between the font of twenty percent more
and the font of teriyaki
you tell me
how does it make you feel?
you tell me what's real
they say that alcoholics are always alcoholics
even when they're as dry as my lips for years
even when they're stranded on a small desert island
with no place in two thousand miles to buy beer
and i wonder is he different
is he different
has he changed
what he's about
or is he just a liar
with nothing to lie about
am i headed for the same brick wall
is there anything i can do
about anything at all

except go back to that corner in manhattan
and dig deeper
dig deeper this time
down beneath the impossible pain of our history
beneath unknown bones
beneath the bedrock of the mystery
beneath the sewage system and the path train
beneath the cobblestones and the water main
beneath the traffic of friendships and street deals
beneath the screeching of kamikaze cab wheels
beneath everything i can think of to think about
beneath it all
beneath all get out
beneath the good and the kind and the stupid and the cruel
there's a fire that's just waiting for fuel


Ani at the Dead Man Walking concert in March 1998 singing Up Up Up Up Up Up

"up up up" by Ani DiFranco

up up up up up up
points the spire of the steeple
but god's work isn't done by god
it's done by people

up up up up up up
points the fingers of the trees
the lumberjacks
with their bloody axes
are on their knees

and just when you think that you've got enough
enough grows
and everywhere that you go in life
enough knows

up up up up up up
dances the steam from the sewer
as she rounds the corner
the brutal wind blows right through her

up up up up up up
raises the stakes of the game
each day sinks its bootprint into her clay
and she's not the same

and just when you think that you've got enough
enough grows
and everywhere that you go in life
enough knows

and half of learning how to play
is learning what not to play
and she's learning the spaces she leaves
have their own things to say
then she's trying to sing just enough
so that the air around her moves
and make music like mercy
that gives what it is
and has nothing to prove

she crawls out on a limb
and begins to build her home
it's enough just to look around
to know she's not alone

up up up up up up
points the spire of the steeple
but god's work isn't done by god
it's done by people

Crime for Crime


Ani Difranco at the Dead Man Walking concert in March, 1998, where she performed the song Crime for Crime

This song is about opposing the death penalty. I am thankful to AnimalJam for posting. And I gotta say I love vintage Ani videos so thank you!


Ani Difranco talking backstage

"crime for crime" by Ani DiFranco

the big day has come
the bell is sounding
i run my hands through my hair one last time
outside the prison walls
the town is gathering
people are trading crime for crime

everyone needs to see the prisoner
they need to make it even easier
they see me as a symbol, and not a human being
that way they can kill me
say it's not murder, it's a metaphor
we are killing off our own failure
and starting clean

standing in the gallows
everyone turned my way
i hear a voice ask me
if i've got any last words to say
and i'm looking out over the field of familiar eyes
somewhere in a woman's arms a baby cries

i think guilt and innocence
they are a matter of degree
what might be justice to you
might not be justice to me
i went too far, i'm sorry
i guess now i'm going home
so let any amongst you cast the first stone
now we've got all these complicated machines
so no one person ever has to have blood on their hands
we've got complex organizations
and if everyone just does their job
no one person has to understand

you might be the wrong color
you might be too poor
justice isn't something just anyone can afford
you might not pull the trigger
you might be out in the car
and you might get a lethal injection
'cause we take a metaphor that far

the big day has come
the bell is sounding
i run my hands through my hair one last time
outside the prison walls
the town has gathered
people are trading crime for crime

The Difference Between Race & Ethnicity

I found this posted on Womanist Musings.



John Lennon on feminism and fatherhood

Below is an article from The Huffington Post entitled

John Lennon on Fatherhood, Feminism, and Phony Tough Guy Posturing

Three decades after his tragic death in New York City at age forty, John Lennon retains quite a grip on our cultural imagination. He has been the subject of countless biographies, magazine articles, and documentaries. In November, a BBC Masterpiece Theater special explored his final days with the Beatles; and the recently released independent film Nowhere Boy delved into his childhood and adolescence. His has been one of the most chronicled lives of our times.

Now some new information about Lennon has surfaced. Rolling Stone magazine writer Jonathon Cott interviewed Lennon just three days before his murder on December 8, 1980. After Lennon's death, only brief excerpts from the interview were published. Recently, Cott unearthed the original tapes and Rolling Stone published the entire interview in the December 23, 2010 issue.

Music critics and fans are understandably interested in the details the interview furnishes about Lennon's plans for a musical comeback just before his untimely death. I was intrigued by something else. Throughout the interview, the rock icon provides a wealth of commentary that relates to his evolving ideas about manhood. When Lennon was gunned down in front of his apartment on the Upper West Side by a deeply disturbed 25-year-old man, the world lost not only one of the greatest musical talents of the 20th century. It also lost an artist whose sense of himself as a man reflected the cultural shifts in gender norms that had been catalyzed by multicultural women's movements, and whose fame and example helped pioneer a new kind of masculinity for his and subsequent generations of men.

Lennon is revered on the left as an artist who used his public platform to oppose the U.S. war in Vietnam; his anthems "Happy Xmas (War is Over)," "Give Peace a Chance" and of course "Imagine" are revered by peace activists (and others) worldwide. But Lennon was perhaps the most well-known male artist of his era to embrace feminism -- and incorporate feminist insights about masculinity and relationships into his art.

After a brief period of high-profile anti-Vietnam war activism in the early 1970s, the former Beatle turned to subjects in his music and personal life that spoke to some of the changes faced by men of his generation: growing up and assuming adult responsibilities, nurturing more egalitarian relationships with women, being emotionally present for their children. One of his songs that decried sexism, "Woman is The Ni#&*er of the World" (1972), earned Lennon a spot in Michael Kimmel and Tom Mosmiller's 1992 anthology Against the Tide: Pro-Feminist Men in the United States 1776-1990, a documentary history.

Lennon was a complicated person who struggled (often quite publicly) with his shortcomings as a father, a partner and a friend. He could be difficult and emotionally abusive. Many writers have noted that his audacious ambition and stunning musical achievements as a young man were propelled - in part - by his efforts to produce art through which he could communicate - and perhaps transcend - the pain he experienced as a young boy, when his parents effectively abandoned him. It is no small irony - and it is indefensible -- that Lennon similarly neglected his first son, Julian.

But despite the shortcomings of the man behind the myth, as a Beatle and as a solo act John Lennon produced some of the most popular and memorable music in history. His songs have become a part of our cultural fabric and collective psyche; the enduring popularity of his artistic contributions is testament to the fact that he connected -- emotionally and intellectually - with hundreds of millions (billions?) of people.

In light of that connection and Lennon's continuing appeal, I wanted to spotlight some of the things he said in his last interview about a number of topics related to the major gender transformations of his -- and our -- time: fatherhood, tough guy posturing, feminism, and women. Three decades later his thoughts on these critical subjects are just as relevant and enduring as his music.

On fatherhood:

The thing about the child is... it's still hard. I'm not the greatest dad on earth, I'm doing me best. But I'm a very irritable guy, and I get depressed. I'm up and down, up and down, and he's (then-five-year-old son Sean) had to deal with that too - withdrawing from him and then giving, and withdrawing and giving. I don't know how much it will affect him in later life, but I've been physically there.

On tough guy posturing:

I'm often afraid, but I'm not afraid to be afraid, otherwise it's all scary. But it's more painful to try not to be yourself. People spend a lot of time trying to be somebody else, and I think it leads to terrible diseases. Maybe you get cancer or something. A lot of tough guys get cancer, have you noticed? John Wayne, Steve McQueen. I think it has something to do -- I don't know, I'm no expert -- with constantly living or getting trapped in an image or an illusion of themselves, suppressing some part of themselves, whether it's the feminine side or the fearful side.


I'm well aware of that because I come from the macho school of pretense. I was never really a street kid or a tough guy. I used to dress like a Teddy boy and identify with Marlon Brando and Elvis Presley, but I never really was in real street fights or real down-home gangs. I was just a suburban kid, imitating the rockers. But it was a big part of one's life to look tough. I spent the whole of my childhood with shoulders up around the top of me head and me glasses off because glasses were sissy, and walking in complete fear, but with the toughest-looking face you've ever seen... I wanted to be this tough James Dean all the time. It took a lot of wrestling to stop doing that, even though I still fall into it when I get insecure and nervous.

On love, race and feminism:

...we hear from all kinds of people. One kid living up in Yorkshire wrote this heartfelt letter about being both Oriental and English and identifying with John and Yoko. The odd kid in the class. There are a lot of those kids who identify with us -- as a couple, a biracial couple, who stand for love, peace, feminism and the positive things of the world.

On learning from women:

I have to keep remembering that I never really was (a tough guy). That's what Yoko has taught me. I couldn't have done it alone -- it had to be a female to teach me. That's it. Yoko has been telling me all the time, 'It's all right, it's all right.' I look at early pictures of meself, and I was torn between being Marlon Brando and being the sensitive poet -- the Oscar Wilde part of me with the velvet, feminine side. I was always torn between the two, mainly opting for the macho side, because if you showed the other side, you were dead.

On his song "Woman" (1972):

'Woman' came about because, one sunny afternoon in Bermuda, it suddenly hit me what women do for us. Not just what my Yoko does for me, although I was thinking in those personal terms...but any truth is universal. What dawned on me was everything I was taking for granted. Women really are the other half of the sky, as I whisper at the beginning of the song. It's a 'we' or it ain't anything. The song reminds me of a Beatles track, though I wasn't trying to make it sound like a Beatles track. I did it as I did 'Girl' many years ago -- it just sort of hit me like a flood, and it came out like that. 'Woman' is the grown-up version of 'Girl.'

This interview -- and many others over the years -- makes clear that John Lennon was strong enough both to acknowledge his own vulnerability and fear, and also to embrace women's leadership, both personally and politically. For a man who would have turned 70 this year, he was way ahead of the curve. It is one of the defining tragedies of our cultural moment that a non-violent man - the leader of the Beatles! -- who possessed the rare gift of translating his gender-bending introspection into brilliant, accessible art was ultimately silenced by another man's violence.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jackson-katz/john-lennon-on-fatherhood_b_800333.html

tea tee



A tee for tea lovers. Buy it here ($14)
Originally posted on Holycool.net

tea lamp





Lamp made up of teapot, cups and saucers. Buy it here ($198)
Originally posted on Holycool.net

The perfect sleeve



Originally posted by Cupcakes Take the Cake. Inked by Jason Vaughn of Deluxe Tattoo with a little done by Ryan Mason of Scapegoat Tattoo, image by Lorena Cupcake.

Thursday, December 23, 2010

Whip It


Whip My Hair - Willow Smith

When I first heard this song I thought it was ridiculous but eventually I began to enjoy how sassy and tacky it was.

Apparently Neil Young (one of my favorite musical artists) found something appealing about it as well.


Whip My Hair ft Neil Young & Bruce Springsteen

Fruitcake!


The Superions - Fruitcake
The Superions is a side project of Fred Schneider of The B-52s

Annoyingly awesome!

Saturday, December 18, 2010

tea's proper use


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“Tea’s proper use is to amuse the idle, and relax the studious, and dilute the full meals of those who cannot use exercise, and will not use abstinence.”
~ Dr Samuel Johnson

Thursday, December 2, 2010

PETA and TSA scanners


(source)

This image has been posted in airports tagged with the line "Be Proud of Your Body Scan: Go Vegan". This ad is from the ever so sexist PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) campaign. PETA continues to attempt to reach an audience by using sexism as a draw-in.

Let me ask a question. What does veganism have to do with TSA scanners or a woman's body?

right on Lisa




"Look dad, I made a modest studio apartment for my Malibu Stacey doll! This is the kitchen, this is where she prints her weekly feminist newsletter..."
-Lisa Simpson

Hello Kitty Fetus?

Not quite sure what to say about this one..



This photo is from Hello Kitty Hell.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

swansea

Don't have much to say tonight. Tonight I'm all ears...


Swansea - Joanna Newsom at Crocodile Cafe in Seattle

If you wanna come on down
Down with your bones so white
And watch the freight trains pound
Into the wild wild night...

How I would love to gnaw
Gnaw on your bones so white
And watch as the freight trains paw
Paw at the wild wild night
...