We Are the World

The Intelligent Craftafarian, Kate Davies, has received hundreds of cards and gifts from blog fans all over the world since her stroke. She has written most movingly of this. She has set up an archive to photograph every bit of it, and this, too, is most moving, lots of wonderful femme art and artists and energy. There is only a hint of the entire miniature nativity scene, knitted by nuns especially for Kate, complete with teeny woolly baby Jesus in a teeny woolly manger -- and of the many other gifts from knitters all over the world.

Most touching, the futurity of the seeds -- for blue spruce trees, for snap peas -- that many people sent. Though the gifts represent a powerful concatenating female energy, the three gifts from men are so tender and thoughtful -- a real horn long-handled shoe horn, a bracelet of beads made of what looks like significant British rocks she might have seen during her treks in the highlands, a Miles Davis CD.

Beautiful cards by women artists, among them Emily Birningham, and the unsurpassable Inge Look who, though a national heroine of Finland, is totally unknown to me. She has a postage stamp of her famous grannies, and a book, too. Called Paljain jaloin mummojen puutarhassa -- barefoot in the grannies' garden.


Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers

They're called the anarchist grannies by their many fans in Finland and I just know it's Miles Davis they got on the Victrola.

Poder al Pueblo

As with the legend of the Danish king and the yellow armband, I think we should all do this.

MEGO Ledes: 'I Want To Be a Happy JAP'

Much as we might rag on it, the awful truth must be looked at head-on: Reality TV, that fiction of verisimilitude, is, even for people who read W. G. Sebald and enjoy grim Scottish films with subtitles, supernally addictive.

-- Daphne Merkin, Dream Girl, The New York Times Magazine Women's Fashion Supplement

Daphne Merkin is the least talented most often published writer I know. She's like the Heidi Montag of journalism.

This lede is just so wrong in so many ways -- so assholic New Yorker, so deeply unfunny and witless in a way only the Times lets middle-aged women be (Joyce Wadler! Alex Kucynski!), a true discredit to her race -- I can't even begin to unpack this for you. Like network TV and the deeply boring W.G. Sebald and Trainspotting are not fictions of verisimilitude?

Because all the hip people in the universe are, like me, watching RuPaul's Drag Race and nothing else. Rag on Ru? Are you shitting me? You want fictions of verisimilitude? Baby, Ru -- who places himself, as a drag mama, at "just under 300 years old" -- has been dishing fictions of verisimilitude since -- We're born naked and after that, it's aaaaaaaaaaaall drag. Tatiana gave the best discourse on gender I've heard in 20 years the other night on the reunion show.* Addicted to season 453 of the Housewives of Orange County, as Merkin thinks she's being hip to claim? Dude, you'd have to be in a medically induced coma.

Well, there you go. There's a certain class of girls, let's just leave it at that, I went to college with them, for whom Valium is a way of life.

Oh my God Oh my God Oh my God, she says it! I actually read the rest of the piece, which is deeply, deeply loathsome, almost reptilian, as is Merkin's wont. And she says it! I want to be a happy JAP!!!!!

It's almost as good as being a deeply repellent stoned one.

My. eyes. glaze. over.

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* She felt she had been disrespected as a queen by the others carping on how she was only just a pretty face. As long as I've got a dick between my legs and a wig on my head, I'm a drag queen. (Authenticity as drag queens -- not transsexuals, or God forbid, women -- being one of the electrifying subthemes of the show.)