A lifestyle blog documenting my move from the city to the country (and back to the city) as well as my daily inspirations, including food, fashion, travel and love. And celebrities.
No wonder it bombed. From the moment it started, like the fame-obsessed teenagers it portrays, I was hooked. And the opening song, Crown on the Ground by Sleigh Bells, didn't hurt. Not one bit.
Directed, written and produced by Sofia Coppola and inspired by real-life events chronicled in a Vanity Fair article by Nancy Jo Sales, the movie provides a not so pretty look at the people who crave, and those who have, the pretty things. The Bling Ring was a group of seven teenagers, also referred to as the Hollywood Hills Burglar Bunch, who lived in and around the celebrity mothership: Calabasas, California. They were a bunch of fairly wealthy, fairly confused and fairly adderalled teenagers who figured that being infamous was second-best to being famous.
And they had a taste for the finer things in life.
In total, they stole over 3$ million dollars worth of celebrity loot, including designer handbags, shoes and clothes, makeup, perfume and even underwear. Not to mention booze, drugs (hello five grams of coke found at Paris Hilton's crib!) and a gun (Brian Austin Green's).
There favourite "victim" was Paris but they also helped themselves to crap owned by Miranda Kerr, Megan Fox, Rachel Bilson, Lindsay Lohan and Audrina Patridge who was particularly miffed at having to replace her custom-made denim, "jeans made to fit my body to my perfect shape."
Poor her.
Paris allowed The Bling Ring crew to film in her home and I was honestly shocked to see how much stuff she actually has. Rooms and rooms and rooms of stuff. An entire room dedicated to sunglasses.
It's pretty gross if you ask me. And don't even get me started on the cushions depicting... what or who else? Herself.
Narcissism 101. In the end, The Bling Ring provides a fascinating "behind the closets" look at Hollywood's most wanted. It's well written, nicely filmed, and the music rocks.
As for the people it portrays... well, they're a pretty sorry bunch. Criminals and victims alike.
The Bling Ring was Rachel Lee, Nick Prugo, Alexis Neiers, Diana Tamayo, Courtney Ames, Johnny Ajar and Roy Lopez Jr.
What do you do with more fresh, garden-grown tomatoes than you can shake a stick at?
Make old-fashioned, home-made ketchup, what else? After a long, hot summer of planting, watering, twining, tending and, the moment we were all waiting for, picking, I was left with... lots and lots and lots of tomatoes! But one can only enjoy so much insalata caprese. So, instead of wasting the bounty (as opposed to the Bountiful), I decided to contact the beau's mother for an old-fashioned, home-made ketchup recipe.
And she did not disappoint!
Made with (approximately) six tomatoes, six peaches, six pears, six white onions, three green peppers, 5 cups of granulated sugar, two cups of white vinegar, two tablespoons of salt and a teaspoon each of cloves, cinnamon, black pepper and celery seeds, the resulting fruit ketchup has a slightly darker hue than the store-bought variety and a complexity of flavour that is a joy to behold (and savour). The entire process took about three hours with two pushkins (the mamita and I) working double-time.
What was most time consuming was peeling everything. To properly peel a tomato, for example, you must first score it with an X before dropping it into boiling water. After about 30 seconds, you can take it out and immerse it in ice water. It is then ready to be peeled. While peeling the tomatoes I was reminded of a particularly gruesome bris scene from Seinfeld.
Moving on...
After peeling, slicing, dicing, combining and bringing everything to a simmering, slow boil - while stirring often - we were left with lots and lots and lots... of fruit ketchup. Go figure!
Move over Heinz. There's a new ketchup boss in town.
There’s a fine line between madness and creativity. It's hard to know exactly where it is, but it becomes pretty obvious once it has been crossed (think of Vincent Van Gogh lopping off his lower lobe, Ernest Hemingway pulling the trigger or Sylvia Plath turning the oven on).
I was perusing a friend's Facebook page the other day when I noticed a link to an article titled 'Creativity - similar to schizophrenia?' The article states that studies have shown "striking similarities in the thought pathways of highly creative people and those with schizophrenia." As someone who has known both highly creative people, as well as those with varying degrees of mental illness, I can't say I disagree.
While watching The View the other day (that's right, you heard me, The View!) author Stephen King made an interesting statement. He said that when he sits down to right a book he goes into a kind of trance. Once he's done, he's not even sure where his ideas came from.
It's not surprising (to me, at least) that people able to write sentences poignant enough to elicit tears, paint paintings beautiful enough to take your breath away, or write music so powerful it literally brings you to your knees, have a little more going on up there than the rest of us.
We are all assaulted with a battery of sensory information - some might even call it overload - on a daily basis. Both schizophrenics and creative geniuses have a lower level of latent inhibition (LI). This means they don't filter, or discard, the information as readily as most.
The creative ones are able to manipulate it without being overwhelmed by it while the truly mad ones simply allow it to seep into their consciousness, unable to distinguish between internal and external stimuli.
Creativity does have it's dark side though, with creative types more prone to depression, bipolar disorder and even schizophrenia. "People who have mental illness in their family (also) have a higher chance of being creative." As my spirit animal Jack Kerouac wrote in The Bible On the Road: the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars. Cue tears.
I absolutely hate blood, have a bit of a phobia about it actually, yet my favourite shows - apart from the Kardashians - literally revolve around it.
Ooze with it.
I'm referring of course, to Dexter and True Blood.
Dexter, for those of you who have been living in a bloodless cave the past eight years, is a Showtime series that revolves around Dexter Morgan, a blood splatter spatter analyst with the Miami police who also happens to be a sociopathic killer.
A killer who kills according to a strict moral code established by his late, adoptive father Harry and Dr. Evelyn Vogel, a neuropsychiatrist who specializes in psychopaths.
As you do. Dressed to kill (ha!) in cargo pants and an army green thermal shirt, all Dexter needs to do the deed and then take out the trash is his trusty set of extra sharp knives and an inordinate amount of Saran Wrap. Easy peasy lemon squeezey.
What I love most about Dexter is the dark comedy aspect of the show, as well as the complexity of the character in itself.
For example, after having his son Harrison, Dexter says "I'm killing for two now," totally deadpan.
High-larious! That kind of black humour really cracks me up. Kind of like this, which is totally inappropriate but also completely hysterical... for some odd reason. Holocaust ring... snort!
ha!
As for Mr. Morgan... he isn't a good guy or a bad guy. He is, as the show's official website states, "a man in profound conflict with the world and himself."
Second hint: he became famous, and lived, in Montreal though he is originally from Grenoble, France. The answer is André René Roussimoff though he is better known as André the Giant.
the Obey Giant
Born to Jewish parents of Polish and Bulgarian ancestry in 1946,André the Giant suffered from acromegaly, better known as gigantism. Due to his incredible size, and strength, AG became a wrestler at the age of 17 but only achieved worldwide fame in the early seventies, when he moved to Montreal and began wrestling at the Forum.
The Obey Giant, a huge skater community symbol, was created in 1989 by Shepard Fairey as a street art and viral marketing campaign. It eventually became known as the Obey Giant though it was first called André the Giant has a Posse.
So how, exactly, does a gigantic wrestler became a skateboarding symbol?
And how many skateboarders even know that the face on their shirt, or hat, actually belongs to André René Roussimoff?
I'm guessing very few!
Which got me thinking... how does a symbol become a symbol when it loses its meaning or message?
The term "the medium is the message," originally coined by MM (a Canadian "philosopher" widely regarded as the father of communications and media studies) in 1964, refers to the fact that in the age of communications the medium influences the message, sometimes even overriding it, becoming the message in itself or altering how it is perceived. Other McLuhanisms include "the future of the book is the blurb," "all advertising advertises advertising," and "money is the poor man's credit card."
Well said Mister McLuhan.
I remember asking an acquaintance of mine, many moons ago, what made her buy the shirt she was wearing. It featured the likeness of a well-known activist. She answered that she agreed with his principles. Gandhi's I mean. Except the guy on her shirt was Che Guevara.
The medium is the message, y'all.
While there is literally a world of difference between the Indian leader of nationalism and the Argentinian Marxist revolutionary - one believed in peace the other in radical guerrilla tactics - both have become ubiquitous commercial successes for representing... something.
But what exactly? The medium is the message. Here are a few pics I took this week while ruminating on McLuhan's most famous McLuhanism...
