more skin.graft fabulousness

(this one is a collaboration which includes original art by darrah danielle in the design)

(guys – hottest. jacket. fucking. EVER!)

…photos by tinydragonproductions.com

    



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today’s awesome ad award goes to:

found in Pride Magazine (my friend brought it back after going up to s.f. last weekend to dj at the gay pride parade)

 

this needs no explanation. it’s just awesome.

    



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we reserve the right to refuse service to marginal subcultures

even funnier on the heels of the post about the nature of subconscious cultural aesthetic values, is this bit from ikea perfectly exemplifying what i like to call a “lifestyle slur“:

“Brightens up your grad’s dorm. Unlike a creepy gothic roommate, who can be a bad influence.”

….. all it takes to ward off the influence of bad poetry and clove cravings is funky colored scandinavian pillows?

this is amazing! djarum isn’t gonna know what hit it.

really, ikea! what are you thinking? even the goth students need cute pre-fab dorm room furniture, and instead of trying to figure out how you can get in on that sort of demand (hint: modified decor color palette) you deliberately hang a “no blacks” sign in your ad?

now you’ve gone and done it, ikea. there’s apparently already a tempest brewing in the goth online teacup, with folks sending out emails to their community mailing lists and including the contact info for ikea’s customer relations and social responsibility contacts. (maybe this could be a useful political activism strategy? just tie policy into lifestyle as opposed to social justice and people will get all caring about your shit and everything?)

anyway, ikea, let this be a lesson to you:

you don’t have to agree to EVERY snarky idea some hipster jr. advertising associate pulls out of his butt.

    



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(i promise i’ll get back to watering those “marketing” tags soon)

i mean, i have to…. otherwise, how are they ever supposed to grow?

but i just had such a horrifyingly depressing day at the doctor’s office, i can’t help this post.

first, there was the june 07 vanity fair that was chillin in the waiting room, all innocuous-like with bruce willis on the cover doing something totally ridiculous, that accosted me with THIS article:

The British jihadist. How did a nation move from cricket and fish-and-chips to burkas and shoe-bombers in a single generation?

…like imagine what would happen if the trend of radical fundamentalism slapped tolerance across the face with a glove, and then two trends went about having a proper british-style duel–and the article ends before you find you who’s going to win. (but why do you get the feeling it’s not who you’d prefer?)

followed by the woman in the too-tight paper lab-coat drawing my blood going off, apropos of nothing, about how being gay is a choice. but she didn’t mean it in the good kind of “identity expression” sort of choice. no. she meant it in the bad kind of “no, it ain’t genetic” kind of choice. it’s just a “craving,” she said. “like for candy.” (she didn’t mean THAT in a good way either).

why do i get the feeling she would have sided with obesity being a genetic predisposition tho?

anyone else feel like it’s…oh… COMPLETELY inappropriate for someone who works in the blood testing industry to be doing this kind of preachin?

 

 

    



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have you ever tried not being a mutant?

one of my favorite movie moments of the past decade has got to be that moment in x-men 2 when iceman and the rest of the teen mutants are hiding out at iceman’s house and his mom asks, him “have you ever tried….not…being a mutant?” like it would just solve everything.

i went to see the movie with a whole posse of my best friends, and was sitting next to one who happened to be gay, and he burst out laughing. i mean the whole theater was laughing, but it was even more pointed coming from sean. the question was the kind of thing that no doubt many a gay kid has had to endure from their parents, “well, have you ever tried… not… being gay?”

i think in general we like to assume that there are lifestyle choices we make, like listening to rockabilly, driving a harley, polyamory, veganism, white supremacism. and those we don’t, like what socioeconomic class we’re born into, our skin color, our gender, whether we’re good at math, and who we fall in love with.

technically, now more than ever before the once-immutable attributes of identity are becoming a choice. even those options that we did not pick for ourselves, that are dictated by genetics, hormones, or circumstance, are being challenged by the dissolution of outdated conventions and advancements in modern surgery. in a sense it’s almost like if you happen to have been born a straight female, and are still happy to be one, then it’s almost like it was a choice by the sheer act of compliance, if nothing else, when you take into account the varieties of gender and orientational mashups available these days.

i read dana boyd’s essay yesterday on “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace” about the lifestyle segregations that seem to be emerging from the user adoption pattern of the two sites, and what really struck me was the following:

Most teens who exclusively use Facebook are familiar with and have an opinion about MySpace. These teens are very aware of MySpace and they often have a negative opinion about it. They see it as gaudy, immature, and “so middle school.” They prefer the “clean” look of Facebook, noting that it is more mature and that MySpace is “so lame.” What hegemonic teens call gaudy can also be labeled as “glitzy” or “bling” or “fly” (or what my generation would call “phat”) by subaltern teens. Terms like “bling” come out of hip-hop culture where showy, sparkly, brash visual displays are acceptable and valued. The look and feel of MySpace resonates far better with subaltern communities than it does with the upwardly mobile hegemonic teens. This is even clear in the blogosphere where people talk about how gauche MySpace is while commending Facebook on its aesthetics. I’m sure that a visual analyst would be able to explain how classed aesthetics are, but it is pretty clear to me that aesthetics are more than simply the “eye of the beholder” – they are culturally narrated and replicated. That “clean” or “modern” look of Facebook is akin to West Elm or Pottery Barn or any poshy Scandinavian design house (that I admit I’m drawn to) while the more flashy look of MySpace resembles the Las Vegas imagery that attracts millions every year. I suspect that lifestyles have aesthetic values and that these are being reproduced on MySpace and Facebook.

i’ve heard sooo many people that fit danah’s demographic description complaining about the “sub-par aesthetics” of myspace, but it never even occurred to me (and certainly not to them) that perhaps these reactions to visual composition were not really their own, but rather determined by the aesthetics of their lifestyle/background.

even if it’s possible to justify conscious identity/lifestyle choices as deliberate, how the hell do you justify the UNCONSCIOUS ones that way? and just how many of the choices we think we’re making for ourselves are actually predetermined in this unconscious way?

i’ve found that an easy way to explain how identity marketing functions is through the example of the clothing styles people choose. there’s so many styles of clothing you COULD be rocking, and yet you choose the kind clothing you choose, and not ALL the other styles. so…why is that? because you feel that this particular style expresseses something about who you are to other people.

so clothing is a tool for expressing our identity, essentially but who we want to sleep with is determined by biology? perhaps neither of these is this cut and dry. my bioanthropology professor used to say, “everything is 100% nature. and 100% nurture.”

so what about our choices about whether or not we like hardcore drum ‘n bass or reggaeton or sex and the city or tofu?

is our “taste” 100% our own, and 100% not our own?

now…. who likes bon jovi?

    



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