Adventures of Barbarella

Karl

A mysterious collar arrived this morning.

Vanity. Narcissism. Humility. Pride. Idolatry.

Vanity.
Narcissism.
Humility.
Pride.
Idolatry.
Insecurity.
Jealousy.
Kindness

which are "wrong", which are "right"?

I think anything that turns into ostentation is ridiculously boring. I also think boasting of insecurities is the most offensive and dangerous, to yourself, and to the world

Are narcissists ever jealous? I would think they can be, but i've never met one who was. Since they express no empathy it would make sense that they could not get jealous. There's a hell of a lot of competitiveness though which can be mistaken for jealousy

EDIT:

I was asking my friend about this, who's quite an expert on the subject, and he adds that "Narcissists present jealousy as a response. Causally motivated somewhat differently though. Often the emotion is a ´learned´reaction."

 

Sent from my iPhone

"Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the common place, the slaves of the ordinary"

Cecil Beaton

2010 Memorable Mentions

When the sensational mama Jo spoke during our Striptease class about how confidence is everything. She was so right, and so eloquent when she said (i misquote her):

"Those women that walk around, head up high, with airs of grandeur and behave as if they were the prettiest, most desirable thing to exist..We love to hate them, and we might complain and moan to other women.."look at that girl..the way she dresses, the way she talks, flaunts, struts..

Isn't she FABULOUS?""

Proust Questionnaire by Request

What do you regard as the lowest depth of mystery?

To be forgotten

 

Where would you like to live?

By the sea

 

What is your idea of earthly happiness?

Sunlight

 

To what faults do you feel most indulgent?

Arrogance… 

 

Who are your favourite heroes of fiction?

Dorian Grey, Anthony Patch, The Little Prince, Indiana Jones, Danny Succo, many more

 

Who are your favourite characters in history?

Lord Byron, Caesar

 

Who are your favourite heroines in real life?

The women in my family

 

Who are your favourite heroines of fiction?

Catherine Earnshaw, Jo March from Little Women, Barbarella, Alice from Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty, Holly Go lightly, Lolita, Lorelei Lee…

 

Your favourite painter?

Picasso if it can only be one

 

Your favourite Musician?

Paul McCartney/Lennon

 

The quality you most admire in a man?

Courage

 

Your favourite virtue?

Loyalty

 

Your favourite occupation?

Singing

 

Who would you have liked to be?

I couldn't be anybody else

 

Your most marked characteristic?

I'm very very happy and very very sad

 

What do you most value in your friends?

Again loyalty

 

What is your principle defect?

Fear

 

What to your mind would be the greatest of misfortunes?

To be deprived of your senses..

 

What would you like to be?

More grounded

 

What is your favourite color?

Blue, like everybody's

 

What is your favourite flower?

Damask roses and they must be pink!

 

 

What is your favourite bird?

The swallow, but I love common little birds as well

 

Who are your favourite prose writers?

The Bronte sisters..they are full of emotion

 

Who are your heroes in real life?

The women in my family

 

Who are your favourite heroines in history?

Cleopatra of course

 

What are your favourite names?

It depends who they're for.

 

What is it you most dislike?

Bad taste

 

What historical figures do you most despise?

i've never been a fan of stalin..

 

What event in military history do you most admire?

Is the song "Give Peace a chance" considered military history?

 

What natural gift would you most like to posses?

To be able to draw 

 

How would you like to die?

In an embrace or a kiss...

 

What is your present state of mind?

Quite alert for being 5am!

 

What is your motto?

Everything sounds ridiculous when you call it a "motto"

"The Little Dictionary of Fashion" by Christian Dior

 
 
 
I picked up this charming little book from the Victoria & Albert museum the other day. Divided in letters like a dictionary, t's the closest I've found to a good reference guide to style. It gives you a clear perspective on things and it's very good to unclutter your mind.

Some favourite quotes:

Nonsense: I could write a book about nonsense in fashion! (...) Good fashion is always a natural evolution and based on common sense. I dislike trick fashions - designed only for publicity's sense. They may be eye-catching but they are never elegant.

Individuality: Until the time we are converted into robots - and I hope this time will never come - individuality will always be one of the conditions of real elegance. (...) Try to understand well what is your personality and never forget that individuality does not mean eccentricity.  

Fit: A good dress is, first of all, a well-fitted dress. (...) It is the fitting that helps to emphasize the loveliness of yourself and to hide the little faults you might have.

Elegance: (...) I will only say now that elegance must be the right combination of distinction, naturalness, care, and simplicity. Outside this, believe me, there is no elegance. Just pretension. 

Colours: Colours are wonderful and glamorising - but they must be used with care. Even the prettiest colour, if you wear it every day, will lose its effect. Colour needs change. We wouldn't appreciate blue skies if they were always blue, it is the clouds, the ever-changing scene, that makes the sky so beautiful.

  

 

Children. My perspective on this.

I think we've become a little rigid about what kids should and should not be, should or should not do....I blame it on the media, with its PC bullshit. The media is a business, it shows what sells. We buy it, so lets not be hypocritical. TV will air Little Miss Perfect pageant competitions and then humiliate one of those moms on Tyra. And we'll watch both.

Anyway. I've been hearing a lot lately about kid-related dilemmas. It really is a dilemma because there are no hard and fast rules about what children should be, and there shouldn't. Les news:

- Australia banning porn stars with A cup boobs from films because they might remind you of pedophilia. That's stupid on so many levels i'm gonna pass on explaining it. But to start off, children don't have breasts!

-  Miley Cyrus' little sister wearing tutu skirts. And that is a problem "because tutu skirts are used in sexy halloween costumes and lingerie". Another WTF moment. Tutu skirt = Ballerina attire. The problem here is that ADULTS think that is sexy. And that has little to do with what anyone wears, and more to do with our over-sexualised culture. And we support that by watching it, voting on it, releasing 90% of pop music with lyrics like "i wanna bang that ass..." and thinking that dressing up like a prostitute is perfectly normal and acceptable, even "beautiful". Bondage shoes, lace tops, micro skirts, cleavage like the one Katy Perry sported the other day...Good for them and all of us who are slutty, but call it what it is. It is not "elegant"...it's aggressively dirty. 

-  Little girls wearing makeup. Again, the problem is not that a child wants to play with her mom's lipstick, the problem is when she feels that she needs it, or when grown men are aroused by that. And that has nothing to do with the lipstick.

- Child pageant competitions. This has less to do with girls wanting to grow quicker, and more to do with mommies using girls as their pets. Simple as that. Moms do on their little girls whatever they would do on themselves to appear attractive, which is very different to what the girls would do to appear attractive. And yes it's wrong, not because girls look like barbies, but because one should not use their child as a toy.

In Roman Times uncles were doing it with their (male) little nieces and having sex in public baths with male and female friends. In edwardian times girls were marrying 40 year olds by age 13. In the 70s, the Studio 54 partygoers were having (unsafe) sex with a different girl every night (or 4)...that didn't stop until the 90s...These things were "normal". We've come a long way very quickly in keeping things "safe".  But as adults, we are sexual animals and we see sex in everything that is beautiful or attractive and that's not wrong, just don't get children mixed up in it.

Children are not sexual, they don't understand what that means and don't care for it either. I came across (by mistake) a porn movie when i was around 5 or 6. I didn't know what was going on, i thought those two people were Adam and Eve making Jesus because they were naked (I wasn't too clear on bible history) . I remember thinking "that's weird", and changed channel to The Prince of Bel Air. It never crossed my mind again until i heard of what sex was and that it was "forbidden". Ban something and it will sure get a lot of attention! Soon everything that children wear or do will be seen as "sexual" if we go down this route.

 

Plus Sized: The Circus

 
The acclaimed W plus size model pictures. I'm sorry, but when a model looks this sexual, it stops being fashion and it becomes men magazine glamour.

I could care less about how skinny or fat she is, that's not the point. Fashion models are not only skinny; they're mannequins, they're awkward, they're freaks and ghosts, they transform themselves. No one is trying to claim they're sexy, they don't look sexual or pretty. They are transparent. YOU DON'T SEE THEM. They work to present clothes.

So yea, fashion modelling FAIL. That said,  I applaud these and I think there is a big big gap to be filled by curvy commercial models in men's magazines.  

________________________________

FAT VS SKINNY and the Real Woman

I refuse to go into this topic for longer than necessary, but I am offended at how the media has been presenting this "issue".

My thoughts:

a) Fat is not better than skinny. Skinny is not better than fat.
b) "Real women" are not fat. We're all real women.
c) No one should be bullied for being fat or skinny.
d) Being skinny should not be associated to malnutrition or eating disorders. It's incorrect, and it's misleading.
e) Being skinny doesn't give you superpowers that will allow you to do better at everything in life.

Being fat or skinny is not a bloody problem!

Also, and this is an entirely different subject, but obsessing over doing what other people with different qualities are doing is not "challenging" and it does not "prove" anything. It's stupid! All these "feminist ideas" with women wanting men jobs and fat women wanting skinny girl jobs and vice versa. It's dumb. We're all different and we do different things.

Why can't we all be ballet dancers? Why can't we all be firemen? Oh, here's an idea. Why can't fat ballerinas with eating disorders be firemen? That would sure PROVE like, everything.

Lady Gaga should make a song out of it

"

1 in 4 teenage girls will experience major depression, self-mutilation, binge eating, a serious suicide attempt or notable aggression before age 2. Expectations for teenage girls to be brainy, athletic, nurturing, and look like supermodels - while juggling homework, social networking and resumé-padding activities - are fueling a generational mental health crisis, according to a new book by University of California, Berkeley, psychologist Stephen Hinshaw.

Duh! In a male dominated society where balance between male and female has been lost, we're expected to be all we were a century ago (female) in its best version because we now have aesthetically perfect celebs to look up to, and at the same time accomplish everything males did then. To top it off we shall do it faster, since our greatest power is youth, and the world demands it in both love and career.

I'm alternating my hedonism novels reading by reading about the philosophy of mother God. It's really addictive. It has a lot to do with buddhism and traditional religions.

I'm not sure what will become of me if I'm left without internet or boyfriend for another four days, I might just turn into an elaborated specimen of the modern feminism ruled by the philosophy of cosmetics.

 

"Beauty is truth. Truth, beauty" Keats

Such thinking is precisely orthodox in terms of Platonic thought, Vedic or Taoist thought. Of all traditional thinking of humanity.

When Plato refers to the Absolut as 'kalon' or The Beautiful, he is making a statement that logically entails that of the poet Keats.

Why then, is the interrelation of the philosophy of beauty so alien to the modern mind?

YEA: WHY??

Life

The control of breath is meant to extend life in many cultures, which I understand since it is oxygen what makes us decay (yet we can't live without it).

It is coincidentially the same cultures that believe in magic through chanting, and therefore ultimately in the vibration (ie. 'music is all') that physically and spiritually puts us together. It is this vibration that makes up the whole.

EDIT: And that is what scientists call the String Theory. It all makes sense. I can go to sleep now.

I am really a panther

 

i've done so much research

I can now easily translate flat renting ads.

"with a great power shower" = no bathtub

"in the heart of" = right in between two stations, not close to either

"neutrally decorated" = cheap ikea knock-off with an impersonal hotel feel

 

WHY

Square toilet seats. My bum is round.

am i the only one who prefers texts to voicemail? It's so much easier, faster, to see 10 texts that you can easily respond or call, than to go through 10 voicemails that most people haven't even left there's just some background noise, and then jotting down or looking for numbers...deleting or keeping them cause sometimes they leave important information (that they should have texted)

why won't they just TEXT

Another thing I don't understand, is, knowing that I carry an iPhone AND a Blackberry with me at all times, wouldn't emailing me make a lot of sense...?

 

as you get older and cynical, you think about how love will end, rather than living the present, unaware that it can ever end, like you did in the beginning

that realization is heartbreaking in itself

it's true that you mostly regret what you don't do

but unnecessary and unwanted oversharing, is very regrettable too

(which is what this blog is for, right?)

i'm a revolutionary feminist

I believe women are the ones who bring beauty, happiness and harmony to the world and it is everybody's job to keep them smiling. We have many chores and we are expected to excel in all of them, it's a huge part of society. Don't pretend that doesn't exist...

Histrionic personality disorder

Is uncomfortable in situations in which he or she is not the center of attention
Interaction with others is often characterized by inappropriate sexually seductive or provocative behavior
Displays rapidly shifting and shallow expression of emotions
Consistently uses physical appearance to draw attention to self
Has a style of speech that is excessively impressionistic and lacking in detail
Shows self-dramatization, theatricality, and exaggerated expression of emotion
Is suggestible, i.e., easily influenced by others or circumstances
Considers relationships to be more intimate than they actually are.