Time's Top 10 Best Fashion Moments of 2011

Kate Middleton, Kate Moss and the Smiths.

Time magazine has released some really excellent Top 10 lists for 2011. These lists help you reminiscence about the amazing year, or make you glad that we're almost out of it. One of the lists this year are the celebrity fashion trend setters who made us want to spend more on a dress that cost more than we make in a year. Let's take a look at some of Time's Top 10 Best Fashion Moments of 2011:

Kate Middleton, that Wedding. We saw that Middleton wedding dress--high collar, lace, vintage-looking--on every cover on every publication this year. People all over the world watched Kate walk down the aisle. Sure, it was beautiful, but it's real impact has been on the wedding industry, which has created many a Middleton-esque dress this year. Ladies, that doesn't mean that Prince Charles is included.

Michelle Obama, State Dinner with China. For the state dinner at the White House with Chinese President Hu Jintao, Michelle Obama chose a dramatic red dress designed by Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen. Michelle usually chooses a designer from the country whose leader she is hosting, but this time she picked a English, rather than Chinese, designer. She also annoyed Diane von Furstenberg, who thought she should have picked an American designer, with her choice. Perhaps Mrs. Obama should stop be so deliberate with her designer choices--she can't please everyone.

Kate Moss, Another 10th Anniversary Magazine Party. To her baby's father's magazine anniversary party, Kate Moss wore a dress that appears to be made from sparkly cellophane--you have to look for a moment to realize that she isn't holding a really large bouquet of flowers in her arm. She topped the look with a white, faux-fur shawl. Time says that she pulled the outfit off because it fit her well, and they liked the contrast of colors. I don't know. Maybe the outfit looked different in person, but when you appear looking like a package about to be unwrapped in front of hundreds of people, I'd probably steer clear.

The Smith Family, Pretty Much Any Red Carpet. Yes, all of the Smiths are attractive and talented. Yes, they all dress very well and set a style standard that is unachievable by any family, anywhere. Don't show off so much, Smiths; you'll completely ruin the Joneses.

What did you think were the fashion moments that rocked the celebrity universe this year?

Nostalgia

How does it affect your life?

Often, I feel that nostalgia is the most significant factor in influencing my life. There are times when I can be perfectly cognitively aware that things were not really better before than they are now, but I can’t help reminiscing that life once was better. Maybe, eventually, I’ll stop sensing the distance between what I remember and how it actually was, and truly believe that things used to be better way back when.

“Way back when stories” were the tales my grandmother used to tell me when I was kid about her own childhood. She told me about how a bus ride to the movies, a ticket to the show and a box of popcorn only cost ten cents. She used to talk about digging a swimming hole in her backyard and filling it with water during the Great Depression. She talked about how things were safer in her childhood. Overall, the message of the stories was always that people were simply better back then.

Now that she’s over 50, I hear my mother echoing the same kind of sentiments as my grandmother. She talks about how all politicians are corrupt, which, according to her, is a new development. Politics are irrevocably partisan now, she says, as they never were before. Perhaps nostalgia doesn’t come into play to the same degree as it did with my grandmother, but there’s certainly some nostalgic factors that make my mother misremember the past as it actually was.

I can see this kind of nostalgia in myself, as well. I taught at a high school last year, and I remember thinking that my high school classmates and I worked harder, were assigned more work and cared more about school than the students in this school. It was a shockingly back-in-my-day! sort of moment for me—like I remembered that I'd trekked twenty miles to go to high school or something—and I surprised myself. Perhaps high school was hard for me personally, but I don’t think that there’s been a huge degradation of the typical high school student in the last five years.

Nostalgia plays an important significance in everyone’s life. It influences our quality-of-life in that we often think that the world—and everything in it—used to be better. It makes living-in-the-present impossible, and by nature requires comparisons between people, places and experiences from one’s past.

What role does nostalgia play in your life? How do you work on living in the present?

 

 

The Most Overexposed Celebrities of 2011

Go home already!

In 2011, some celebrities were always around. You would start to wonder how they got from New York to L.A. so quickly and how they made that many wardrobe quick-changes. Most of all, you wished that they would just stay home from a single red carpet premiere (nobody wanted to see Larry Crowne, not even you, Lea Michele) and eat some ramen noodles in their sweatpants.

Let’s take a look at some of the most overexposed celebrities of 2011: 

Lady Gaga. Lady Gaga probably made an appearance at every awards show and premiere-adjacent function this year wearing a geometrical and/or metallic outfit. The verdict is still out on whether or not the woman is a robot, but her ability to be everyone at once this year is certainly bolstering my theory.

Herman Cain. The former Rebpulican frontrunner (who is thankfully out the race. Thank god) was quoting Pokémon all around this fine country of ours. No word to why he couldn’t make it to Iowa and New Hampshire.

Sexually promiscuous and corrupt politicians. These sleazy guys were falling out of the woodwork like temporarily suit-and-tied cockroaches. Blagojevich got fourteen years, but as well all know, cockroaches never die.

Bruno Mars. I’m still sort of confused about who Bruno Mars is, but he’s had about a hundred hit songs this year, and the youths seem to love him.

Kim Kardashian. Kim Kardashian is the brunt of all kinds of jokes because she married some guy for a paltry 72-days. I don’t really know why we knew Kim Kardashian before her quick marriage, but apparently she was doing something. Can someone please tell me for what she’s famous?

Ellen. Ellen has her talk show and her wife and her temporary hosting gig on American Idol and her paparazzi stalkers and her house for sale—phew. I love Ellen to pieces, but I’m starting to feel like she’s a little overexposed. Preserve your mystery, lady.

Rosie O’Donnell. Rosie’s back on the air speaking over and interrupting her guests on a new talk show on Oprah’s network. How the mighty forces have collaborated. She’s also rented a U-Haul with some pretty blonde in Chicago, and they’re getting hitched soon.

Glee kids. The Glee kids were all over the media this year. If Glee is off the air, then you’ll see Rachel Berry (Lea Michele) on the cover of a magazine. They pop into premieres, parties, release what seems like hundreds of compilation albums and video games, and still find time to do what made them famous in the first place: make the show.

The Biggest Scandals of 2011

A walk down why'd-they-do-it? lane.

The newest scandal for the end of 2011 is that illustrious potential presidential nominee, Herman Cain, had an affair with a woman for thirteen years. Ginger White said that Cain flew her out to various cities where he was speaking so that they could continue their sexscapades in hotel rooms. White was only the latest in a string of women accusing Cain of having affairs with him, but really, are multiple sex scandals the only way to ruin the man’s presidential bid? He quoted Pokémon at a debate.

Cain’s repeated allegations of sexual infidelity were only one of many scandals that wrapped up the news in 2011. Here are a few more whoppers:

Penn State Sex Abuse Scandal. Defensive coordinator Gerald “Jerry” Sandusky was charged with sexually abusing eight young boys during a 15-year period at the university. Since Sandusky’s arrest, head coach Joe Paterno and university president Graham Spanier have been fired, and athletic director Tim Curley and vice president Gary Schultz have stepped down from their posts.   

Kim Kardashian’s 72-Hour Marriage. Famous-for-who-knows-what Kim Kardashian married New Jersey Nets player Kris Humphries in August 2011. A mere 72 days later, Kardashian was over the marriage, divorcing Humphries with the cause of irreconcilable differences.

Charlie Sheen Lost his Mind. Charlie Sheen has been a whack job for a while, saying that 9/11 was a controlled demolition and living with a couple of porn star “goddesses,” but he really lost his mind in 2011. He went on a number of talk shows to rant incoherently about curing diseases with his brain and being on a drug called Charlie Sheen. He was subsequently fired from his television show Two and a Half Men, and, to add insult to injury, replaced by Ashton Kutcher.

Rebecca Black Released a Terrible Song. The fourteen-year-old’s parents paid $4,000 to let their little girl make a video and song that she would loathe to remember after she turned 18. Unlike most of us, Black was not so lucky and her song “Friday” went viral, wracking up more than 150 million views on YouTube. The singer received numerous death threats and had to drop out of school, but apparently, she’s at it again. Now, she’s started her own record label.

Arnold Schwarzenegger Revealed He Had a Teenaged Love Child. Schwarzenegger lost his wife, Maria Shriver, to divorce this year when he revealed that he’d fathered a son with his maid fourteen years earlier. The maid, Mildred Baena, was employed for the couple for over 20 years, and Schwarzenegger found ways to spend covert time with the child over the years. Sad.

 

 

 

 

 

Re-Visiting Friends From High School

A slippery slope.

I went to a small private high school and graduated with a class of 40. A lot of us went to the same school since elementary school, so you probably could say that we knew each other well. Knew that Robert was once pimply. Understood that Natalie was once fat. Remembered that George couldn't remembered his nines times tables in the third grade.

It's strange to have a bunch of people who you don't really know anymore remember who you used to be.

The city where I grew up isn't small. It's grown to almost 500,000 in the years since I left, but that still doesn't prevent me from running into the people I knew from high school every time I return for a vacation or a holiday. This isn't an uncommon phenomenon--whether you're from a small town or a huge city, it seems that some forces bring you together with the people you don't want to see.

I ran into a huge group of my high school classmates at a bar in my hometown on Friday nights. A few of them still live there, and spend tons of time together eating and, I suppose, reminiscing about high school. More still look forward to holiday break times so they can see their friends from high school again.

They said that I looked good. They wondered why they hadn't seen me since high school.

I remembered when a now-beautiful blonde and I dressed up in goofy costumes for Halloween in the seventh grade. I remembered when a now-bulked-up boy was a scrawny freshman who couldn't find a date. I'm sure that they would remember how at our high school graduation the superlative about me was that I couldn't go without my coffee, but they wouldn't have known how mad that anecdote made my mother afterwards.  

It's not that I didn't like who I was in high school. I feel pretty good about my teenaged decisions.

Instead, I think the trouble that I have with running into old friends from high school is that they still expect me to be that girl, and to some extent, I turn into that old girl again. I'm nastier; I'm less confident; I'm less positive. I have different interests and better friends and a life away from this city.

I wonder--did they love high school so much that they never want to outgrow it? And seeing them, I wonder--did I love college so much that I never want to outgrow? I live near all of my friends from college, and I can't imagine having better friends than I do now.

They remind me of who I was, and maybe that scares me a bit. But what's their reason for loving it so much? Did we peak at 18? At 22?

Americans Ignore Weather

But we probably shouldn't.

The other day on my trip home for Thanksgiving, we traveled through a windstorm in Denver. The ride was bumpy the whole way in, and swung like a hang glider as we rose out of the city. It was entirely unpleasant.

But the trip got me thinking about how we try and pretend weather doesn't exist in this country.

I'm not advocating that plane trips should be canceled because of a little wind storm. But the idea certainly isn't applied only to travel in bad weather.

In the summertime, we have air-conditioning so we can't feel the heat. We have refrigeration units that mean that we can transport meat and produce long distances. We think that we deserve to be able to drive in snow and ice, so we have four-wheel drive that will allow us to drive through the worst blizzards.

Where have these modern inventions gotten us?

We have global warming, high food prices and thousands of car accidents each year in the wintertime.

It's all part of a larger issue: we aren't listening to Mother Nature. Locally-sourced food was once the easiest to eat, and it was also more nutritious and better sustained a local economy. Even in the age of restaurants, locally-sourced food was the lifeblood of unique, mom-and-pop places. In the advent of refrigerated trucks, we lose all of this because of the expectation of travelling produce and out-of-season produce year round.

There are perhaps solutions to weather-related problems like locally-sourced food, but what about the others? They are more difficult because we are too used to being comfortable and the world is too fast.

I don't want to go without air conditioning for a summer. I did once or twice, but I had a fan to make up for it. Even though I know the consequences of air conditioning, it would be difficult to forgo it altogether. People would spend the time complaining and getting sleepy. But there certainly isn't time for naps in the summer. Life is much too busy.

Same for driving in winter. We are too busy or too important to be without our agency to drive, even for a day.

But isn't it blissful when you allow yourself to be trapped from your busy life by the elements? You turn off the air-conditioning and take a heat-soaked nap or a swim in the lake. Your driveway is covered in eight inches of snow, so you get under a heap of blankets and drink hot chocolate.

The bottom line is we need to remember that we really are not that important. We really are not that busy. Whatever we do, Mother Nature will always get her way.

Freedom of the press in the Internet Age

The rules are all changing.

Freedom of the press, like freedom of trade and commerce, can get messy. Left wing and right wing radicals’ interpretations of the same issue can be miles apart. Flashily packaged news with doom-bringer headlines sells information like a new car. Despite modern day challenges, however, freedom of the press, like these other freedoms is the protector of democracy because it is the bringer of information to the people, and unlike freedom of trade and commerce, should not be governmentally regulated.

Output of news media, like the economy, has to change with the changing consumer. The hundred-year-old Christian Science Monitor was the large scale print media casualty to go exclusively online. A popular information source is The Daily Show with John Stewart, which blurs the line between comedy and news show. Still, the media must tweak the way its content is packaged and sold to the new consumer, who reads online and likes extremely palatable information. In this way, commerce and the press are very similar, but both changes are necessary, one for the continuation of a market society and the other for a continuation of information.

Perhaps hand-in-hand with the new packaging of the media comes with it more and more biased opinions. Bill Rovach, a former Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, said now “you have a journalism that is moderated, in effect, by advocates of one side or the other, which is the antithesis of the journalists’ role.” This effect is evident—from The O’Reilly Factor on the right to Rovach’s own former publication the New York Times on the left—but often tied with a bow of fair and balanced. This often presents itself as a conundrum to the information consumer--how and is it possible to get unbiased news information from an unbiased new source? Is overly biased news coverage restricting the free flow of information to the news consumer?

The answer to these questions cannot be answered in our constantly changing media climate, but one thing is certain—governmental regulation and aid to the media is not the answer. Governmental regulation of biased media not only has the potential to regulate information they may find unflattering, but underestimates the intelligence of their citizens. Unlike the government’s Big Business Bailout, excessive aid to media outlets would give the government an unwarranted finger in the pie in its output. No one can predict the changes the media will have to make to stay afloat in our volatile economy, but, unlike the regulation of commerce, governmental assistance is not the answer.

United States Stereotypes

What do you think about Iowa?

A cartoon depicting the fifty states as seen by New Yorkers is making the rounds on the Interweb these days. Somehow New Yorkers know that Kansas City exists? Who knew. Inspired by this map, here is a list of what Americans seem to think about every state in this fine country:

California: Hippies making wine unless they live in northern California growing another kind of plant, in San Francisco making gay babies or in Los Angeles killing cinema’s soul.

Washington: Slightly nerdy, techie hipsters trying to passive-aggressively belittle their Starbucks baristas while absorbed in their Apple products and espresso drinks.

Nebraska: Corn begot Warren Buffett; Warren Buffet begot steak; from hence the corn you came, Warren, to the corn you will again return.

Florida: Elderly Jews battle alligators (or are those crocodiles?) for the prime spots on fly-swarmed beaches.

New Hampshire: A kid in my class in college said that rocks invaded her New Hampshire backyard every spring. ? This is all I know about New Hampshire. Correct me if you know any more.

Illinois: Chicago is the city of Big Shoulders and tall buildings and Lake Michigan. The Chicago suburbs take up the whole state it seems, so if you live in Illinois, you just say, “I’m from the Chicago suburbs.”

Idaho: In between harvesting yukon gold potatoes, Idahoans have time to kick the nonexistent black people out of their state in Klu Klux Klan hats.

Alabama: Psychotic football fans. Civil War recreators mixing up the outcome.

Wisconsin: Cheese, beer and Packers isn’t entirely a stereotype, but if you had cheese and beer as delicious as the cheese and beer in this state, you wouldn’t care that you were entirely living up to your reputation, either.

New York: New York City: the Greatest City on Earth! If you live in New York, but not New York City, people are confused.

Kentucky: Shiny, happy white people with southern accents eating Kentucky Fried Chicken in their shiny, happy, white Sunday best. You don’t know their secrets, though,they may have gone all Deliverance with their favorite Derby jockeys in their backrooms.

Arizona: If you’re Mexican, don’t go here. If you’re under 65, you probably shouldn’t come either.  

Iowa: Must be pretty live-and-let-live in Iowa because they let homosexuals marry (although allowing the marriage of a man to his cow may be coming next) as long as those homosexuals bring a casserole to the next picnic function at church.  

To be continued….

 

Letter Writing Shouldn't Become a Lost Art

Do you write letters?

There’s something a little mysterious and romantic about post men and women. Theirs is one of the only jobs that I can think of that has such a visible presence. They also are one of the only jobs that requires such an obvious—and retro—get-up: the little blue shorts, the high white socks, the light-blue, pin-striped button-down. They also still drive that cute little vehicle. My grandpa was a postman who retired in the late ‘80’s, and the pictures I’ve seen of him on his route look identical to those of post men and women of today.

I think this timelessness is what’s so appealing about the United States Postal Service. Our methods of communications have changed so drastically in even the last twenty years, so the postal service is simultaneously a relic of a slower time, and a waning necessity.

Letters, too, are more special than ordinary email communication. They’ve taken on a kind of specialized nostalgia that they couldn’t have had when they were the only means of communication. Emails are a dime a dozen (or hundreds of dimes a dozen, depending on the importance of your jobs), but the letter—the handwritten correspondence—is more time-consuming, more specialized. Those things may not have meant much when my grandfather delivered letters, but they mean something now.

I hope that letter writing comes back some day, much like knitting and baking pies and growing gardens. It isn’t necessary in this world of modernity and convenience, but it is nicer and more personal. In a way, it’s good for the soul.

I try to write letters as much as I can, and, while I don’t think it’s a lost art, per say, I certainly don’t know how to do it. I usually follow the model of my grandma and write about my day, or, if I’m writing a thank you note, tell the letter's recipient over and over again how wonderful they are. It’s sort of strange because I consider myself something of a writer, but I can never think of anything poetic to write to my friends or family.

People skilled at letter writing—or, not too long ago, everyone—must have learned to store information, and pick out the nuggets that were the most beautiful. They must have been able to remember the exact sentiment that they thought about another person until they had the leisure to write it down. Documentation of a love affair, a friendship, the relationship between family and friends must have been beautiful to see and save.

Email isn’t cutting it.

Based on a True Story

I had a conversation with my grandmother the other day about how unfortunate she thought it was that the movie The Help wasn’t a true story. Or even based on one. If you haven’t seen the movie, it tells the story of several black maids and their white female employers in the south in the 1960’s. The main (white) character is a writer and she uses the story of the abused maids to propel her away from her racist hometown into the New York City big time.

Although the specifics of the movie are not true, the generalities of the movie are. Black women were often given no other option but to become maids, replicating the duties of the pre-emancipated south. They were verbally mistreated and subjected to humiliations like the blacks-only toilet suggested by one of the white ladies in the movie.

Who is to say that the plot of this movie doesn’t more accurately represent the situation at this period than a story that very loosely recreates the specifics of an event, still claiming the based on a true story label?

I started thinking about this idea when I watched Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan back-to-back in one war-filled week. Band of Brothers is billed as a true story about World War II and the famous 101st Airborne Division. Stephen Ambrose, the writer of the book on which the movie was based, has been charged with taking liberalities with his book, including saying that one man on which the an episode of the series centers died more than twenty years before he actually did.

Saving Private Ryan—Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’ bloody World War II vehicle—is based loosely on fact, and isn’t billed as a true story. The movie centers on a dangerous mission to retrieve one man, Private Ryan, whose three brothers have been killed in combat. The movie, but not the rescue mission itself, is based on the story of the Niland brothers, four brothers who all fought in the war. All but one of the brothers was presumed dead, but another brother eventually made it back to New York after being held prisoner in a POW camp. No rescue mission came to save the final Niland brother, and Spielberg was more inspired by a monument for eight siblings who were casualties of the American Civil War than the Nilands' story.

The miniseries certainly has truth in it, but is it necessarily more truthful than Saving Private Ryan? Is a “true” story simply more marketable than a fictional tale (perhaps Saving Private Ryan is an anomaly)?

What do you think? 

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