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love to the bone through and through
When women cut their hair short, they feel attractive, I think they’re saying, ‘I’m on my terms, I’m not letting typical male desires dictate my choices,’ and that’s intimidating as hell to a lot of men, because there are a lot of men out there who still are raised to think that they can tell women what to do. And then you have to think, well, if that’s why you’re afraid of cutting it, do you want a man who wants a woman who’s not confident? When it’s done best, beauty is about infusing confidence; that’s what’s beautiful to me.
Somewhere between March and April of 2013, a new Chinese word emerged over the Internet: the green tea bitch (绿茶婊). Netizens joined in a collective effort to formulate a suitable definition of what a ‘green tea bitch’ actually is. As a result, a short essay was composed – containing twenty-four different characteristics. The ‘green tea bitch’ is not the first term that categorizes young Chinese women in an overall derogatory manner. Other examples include ‘coffee bitch’, ‘black tea bitch’ or ‘milk tea bitch’.
Internets/Weibo
now imagine if i got that tattooed on the back of my neck…
Beauty is an abyss so deep that if you ever look at it directly in the face, you will be eaten by it.
I want to be
the one
you want in your
mind and your gut and
your bathroom
But I don’t want you
to fuck the whole
world to find out.Charles Bukowski
i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires
why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense
plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then to cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is to come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselves
and before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity
but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself
archy
i love this so much, it makes me cry
While the new Pope, Francis, has made a point of emphasizing simplicity—rather than wearing the usual gold ring, he has insisted on one made of silver—today he gave way to Vatican tradition and formally assumed his office following most (but not all) of the elaborate ceremonial script worked out in minute detail over more than a thousand years. Even within this deeply traditional institution, the script has changed, sometimes quite substantially…
Alexander Stille on the inauguration of Pope Francis: http://nyr.kr/WTLifE
Photograph by Spencer Platt/Getty.
two words: G WAGON
i can’t explain the raw joy of waking up and opening the blinds to find the sun blindingly shining through, with a clear blue sky,
sitting on the couch and drinking french press kona, while your friend is blasting a mishmash of spoon and dash berlin as part of her morning shower routine
if movies were ever just made of happy things, this would be mine
It’s taboo to admit that you’re lonely. You can make jokes about it, of course. You can tell people that you spend most of your time with Netflix or that you haven’t left the house today and you might not even go outside tomorrow. Ha ha, funny. But rarely do you ever tell people about the true depths of your loneliness, about how you feel more and more alienated from your friends each passing day and you’re not sure how to fix it. It seems like everyone is just better at living than you are.A part of you knew this was going to happen. Growing up, you just had this feeling that you wouldn’t transition well to adult life, that you’d fall right through the cracks. And look at you now. La di da, it’s happening.
Your mother, your father, your grandparents: they all look at you like you’re some prized jewel and they tell you over and over again just how lucky you are to be young and have your whole life ahead of you. “Getting old ain’t for sissies,” your father tells you wearily.
You wish they’d stop saying these things to you because all it does is fill you with guilt and panic. All it does is remind you of how much you’re not taking advantage of your youth.
You want to kiss all kinds of different people, you want to wake up in a stranger’s bed maybe once or twice just to see if it feels good to feel nothing, you want to have a group of friends that feels like a tribe, a bonafide family. You want to go from one place to the next constantly and have your weekends feel like one long epic day. You want to dance to stupid music in your stupid room and have a nice job that doesn’t get in the way of living your life too much. You want to be less scared, less anxious, and more willing. Because if you’re closed off now, you can only imagine what you’ll be like later.
Every day you vow to change some aspect of your life and every day you fail. At this point, you’re starting to question your own power as a human being. As of right now, your fears have you beat. They’re the ones that are holding your twenties hostage.
Stop thinking that everyone is having more sex than you, that everyone has more friends than you, that everyone out is having more fun than you. Not because it’s not true (it might be!) but because that kind of thinking leaves you frozen. You’ve already spent enough time feeling like you’re stuck, like you’re watching your life fall through you like a fast dissolve and you’re unable to hold on to anything.
I don’t know if you ever get better. I don’t know if a person can just wake up one day and decide to be an active participant in their life. I’d like to think so. I’d like to think that people get better each and every day but that’s not really true. People get worse and it’s their stories that end up getting forgotten because we can’t stand an unhappy ending. The sick have to get better. Our normalcy depends upon it.
You have to value yourself. You have to want great things for your life. This sort of shit doesn’t happen overnight but it can and will happen if you want it.
Do you want it bad enough? Does the fear of being filled with regret in your thirties trump your fear of living today?
We shall see.
when i have my own grand, gorgeous house/apartment, i think i will have just a vast collection of white candles in one corner of a room, just filled with voluspa, diptyque, et cetera et cetera, so i can just burn them all at once like a weird, seance-y, but bringing back good spirits, vibe
i don’t trust finance girls though; it’s like…short men, people who don’t drink, girls in finance etc. there’s just something about them
It is difficult to pinpoint the precise moment when Los Angeles stopped giving a damn what you or we or anyone else had to say — it was a slow but important finding of self, taking place quietly over the past decade. A decade that saw the city grow in all sorts of exciting and impressive ways. A decade of building real transit. (For the first time in generations, you will soon be able to travel by rail between Downtown and the Santa Monica; soon after, expect a subway stop on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.) Of creating truly walkable neighborhoods. The melting pot actually began melting, bubbling over messily and rather beautifully all over every aspect of city life. (Not coincidentally, suddenly here in the land of salad and iced tea, people truly learned how to eat. And to love eating.) Oh, and just for fun? A few more people squeezed into the city, now overall the most densely packed in the country. Los Angeles, quite simply, is ready to challenge anyone. New York, watch your back. Here are four LA places to get up to speed.
DOWNTOWN
To see what we mean, you have to start Downtown. It’s a generic umbrella term for a wildly diverse group of neighborhoods that comprise the city’s core; in these pedestrian-friendly streets with their incredible Art Deco architecture and ample transit and tons of people-watching, you can spend a week experiencing a Los Angeles that many outsiders assumed didn’t even exist. Many locals didn’t either, until about 10 years ago, so don’t feel bad.
These days, the core is in overdrive trying to find its rightful place as the city center of a metropolitan region of nearly 18 million people. (That’s right – just four million fewer than in the Tri-State Area.) That’s how you end up having a thing like the glittering LA Live complex with the Staples Center (where the Lakers play), luxury hotels (JW Marriott, Ritz-Carlton), destination restaurants (including a Kerry Simon eatery, of course), daily celebrity sightings, a Times Square-like entertainment district and more just a few blocks down from the Mercado Olympic, an unofficial Sunday street festival of the city’s dominant culture (Mexican, in case you forgot) in the wonderfully named Piñata District (named because of all the people who sell piñatas there, of course), where vendors who speak no English sell food that’s more Mexican than places we’ve been in Mexico. Squash blossom quesadillas, pleasantly chewy Guadalajara-style churros, Mexico City-style fried fish and other intensely good and inexpensive finds.
Then there is the Warehouse District, that vast swath of low-rise industrial complexes, where once barren streets are now punctuated by artist lofts and good restaurants and people biking to places like Handsome Coffee, a local roaster and café that has a pop-up farmers market and occasional taco nights. It’s one of many cafés across the Los Angeles Basin that is becoming a true community center in a city everyone said wasn’t interested in community.
Nearby is the Arts District, next to Little Tokyo — the two share a gleaming light-rail station on the Gold Line, which takes little old ladies from Pasadena into the bustling Union Station intermodal transit hub, or beyond into East Los Angeles for tacos, if they feel like it.
The heart of old Downtown, too, is booming — the Old Bank District with its cocktail bars and yoga studios and the incredible monthly Art Walk, a street party/night market that revolves loosely around the area’s galleries.
Over on Broadway, with its sea of intact theaters and their garish, old-school marquees that lend the whole faded strip a Times Square in the 1970s feel, there’s room for luxury lofts, for the giant Umamicatessen, a sort of hipster Eataly meatery affair from the Umami Burger folk.
And then, down on Seventh Street, which sews all of this together, from the bland glossiness of Figueroa Street on down to the appalling, otherworldly depths of Skid Row, you have one of Downtown’s most promising streets, the perfect spot to stroll on a sunny afternoon.
Hungry? Some of the city’s best restaurants are Downtown these days — anyone will tell you that. Here’s Ricardo Zarate repping Peru at his newly relocated Mo-Chica in the Seventh Street corridor, making diners flip out with his stellar lomo saltado and pan con tuna, serving up ceviches and tiradito that are all ocean and acid and heat and happiness. (What started as one tiny Mo-Chica stall in Southeast LA has turned into a growing Zarate empire that also includes West LA’s Picca, where Peru meets Japan for family-style madness.)
Here’s Bryant Ng at the Spice Table, repping Southeast Asia at his Little Tokyo joint, blanketing tables with satays, Hainanese chicken over rice, laksa and other first-class renditions of hawker-stand staples.
Here’s Josef Centeno at Baco Mercat in the Old Bank section, repping his baco “sandwich/taco/pizza hybrid,” a creation so multi-cultural and over-the-top that you should just describe it as American. And although Centeno might be best known for specialties like his oxtail-hash baco, you shouldn’t overlook his mastery of vegetables (Caesar brussel sprouts!) and fruit (sautéed peaches with goat cheese and honey!).
It all might be rough around the edges, and sometimes you have to dig to get to the greatness — that’s LA in a nutshell — but if you want to see and taste the diverse and unique world-class city that Los Angeles is becoming, Downtown is where you start.
VENICE
If you’re one of those people who show up from New York complaining that all you want to really do is go to the beach, congratulations, you win. Outside of Downtown, LA’s most fascinating area these days is Venice, which has gone from being a funky and fun dead end to being front and center in the city’s complete revamp. (Sorry, anyone who was thinking of buying a ridiculously cheap place in its ever declining catalog of seedy side streets — those days are essentially over.) What Venice has become is, quite simply, one of the most inspiring urban settings in North America, a major leap from a few short years ago.
Beach? Check. Crazy people-watching? That’ll never change. Seedy boardwalk action? Oh yeah. Creepy muscle dudes, people trying to get you in for your free medical consult to get your pot card, street performers, sleaze, stroller moms, skaters — your head could explode.
But the real revolution is in the neighborhood’s back streets, which, like the iconic Canals section, can all be explored on foot or by bike. Start at formerly moribund Abbot Kinney Boulevard — with its boutique, farm-to-table pizza places, non-divey “dive bars,” indie-rock jukeboxes, food trucks and surf shops — which was recently knighted by one glossy magazine as the “coolest block in America” and we’re really not going to argue (pop in for coffee at Intelligentsia one morning, or any time, and see what it’s all about). Locals seem to be all about Rose Avenue these days; walk it from the beach on up to the Whole Foods (one of the most architecturally impressive in the country, and certainly one of the busiest) and you’ll see why; along the way, pop into the patio at Superba Snack Bar for charred figs, black kale salad, a dab of pheasant rillettes, perhaps, or maybe just the fried chicken.
But the best place to eat in the neighborhood, if you’re asking us, is Sunny Spot, over on Venice Boulevard. What is it? Oh, no big deal, just some really great Caribbean food from an Angeleno of the Korean persuasion, Roy Choi, who became famous for making some of the city’s raddest tacos and serving them from his Kogi food truck. How Los Angeles is that?
MID-CITY WEST
People who say that the Los Angeles sprawl cannot be tamed have obviously never been to London. Or maybe they have, and refuse to see the parallels between the two cities, both essentially a chain of villages that grew enough to bump into one another. All you have to do is knit the villages together with a proper transit system, and voila, everyone shuts up about sprawl.
It will take Los Angeles, oh, like, forever, to get all the way there, but in places like Mid-City West, a low-rise, vaguely suburban in-between spot, you can see it all coming together in what has become, rather by accident, one of the most vibrant parts of town.
Of course, it helped to have the historic farmers market at the corner of Third and Fairfax, next to the CBS Television City studio (“Price Is Right” taping anyone?); over time, everything seems to have evolved around it — the revived Fairfax District to the north, the gigantic Grove shopping center, the booming Third Street corridor, Beverly running parallel. This nabe is where you’ll find some of the country’s best sneaker/street-wear shopping (holla, Undefeated, Flight Club, Sportie LA) and, at the southern end of things, behind the imposing Park La Brea residential development, is the cultural magnet and gathering place that is LACMA; the Purple Line subway extension, which will link Downtown, Koreatown, Mid-City West and Beverly Hills with Century City, Brentwood, Westwood and, hopefully someday, the beach in Santa Monica, will have a station right at the museum entrance, at Wilshire and Fairfax.
You don’t have to wait until then to come here — Ray’s and the adjacent Stark Bar, facing the museum’s often busy plaza, are two of the most pleasant places to while away a warm Los Angeles evening. Not that you aren’t spoiled for choice around here. Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo’s Animal and Son of a Gun restaurants are located within walking distance of the farmers market, for example.
Then there’s Karen and Quinn Hatfield, the married chef duo behind the rightfully praised Hatfield’s in Hollywood. The Hatfields know their way around a seasonal menu and understand what it means to create a civilized, white-tablecloth dining environment. But with Sycamore Kitchen, their new order-at-the-counter bakery and cafe on stubbornly unlovely La Brea Avenue, they have a much more casual-cool but equally important goal: creating a ridiculously good salted caramel pecan babka roll. That gooey magic – part of a salted-caramel movement that’s sweeping sweets shops all over the country – is just one of dozens of different baked items (including wonderful chocolate-chip rye cookies and brown butter/date mini bundt cakes) at the new hot spot, but there are more than sweets to accompany your Stumptown coffee at Sycamore Kitchen. The lunch menu has refreshing salads and a crispy and braised pork belly double BLT, for starters. And if you can’t decide between savory and sweet, split the difference and order the toast with house-made ricotta, stewed citrus, fennel and hazelnut.
On Third Street, you’ll find Fonuts, a donut and ice-cream shop from Waylynn Lucas. She’s the former pastry chef at the Bazaar by Jose Andres and Patina, four-star restaurants both. Now she’s baking — yes, baking — donuts with standout flavors including maple bacon, blueberry earl grey and strawberry buttermilk. Lucas is also churning out great ice cream. And yes, the salted caramel soft-serve is habit-forming. Kind of like this part of town.
HOLLYWOOD
For the visiting New Yorker, Hollywood has long been low on the list of Los Angeles musts, unless you wanted a West Coast version of New York’s old-school 42nd Street filth. Slowly, awkwardly, a new kind of Hollywood is taking shape, where chic hotels and grand nightclubs (alongside horrible nightlife, admittedly) sit side by side next to beautiful historic theaters and new residential buildings. In the mix are great new restaurants and awesome old dive bars, a hugely popular farmers market and two very busy subway stations. Best of all? This is only the beginning. To the chagrin of homeowners in the hills, a recent rezoning looks to be upping the height restrictions on development in the area — expect Hollywood the neighborhood to be a major force in Los Angeles life over the next century.
But what of today? Check out Hollywood and Vine, with its hotels like the Redbury. The Redbury’s all about old-world, boho-chic cool mixed with modern-day glam. With its bordello-red rooms, purposefully faded carpet and sexy Library bar, and a location near many of Hollywood’s overflowing nightclubs, it’s a spot for discerning VIPs and a surprisingly pleasant and restful boutique hotel in spite of the partying crowds in and around the property.
It’s also just a couple blocks from the bountiful Sunday farmers’ market, one of the city’s best spots for an impromptu lunch. Yes, you can make a picnic with the finest meats, cheeses, bread and vegetables, but you’re on vacation, so let the locals cook for you: Salvadoran pupusas, Thai sticky-rice desserts, artisanal breakfast sausages served over mounds of French fries. The variety is worthy of Portland food-cart pods.
And Hollywood has mass transit that takes you right to, say, the W Hotel with its Drai’s nightclub up top. Further down the boulevard, there are local, down-and-dirty dining mainstays like Aziz Ansari and Jonathan Gold favorite Jitlada, which some argue is the best Thai restaurant in the country. There’s the Sayers Club, a fab nightspot for rock and hip-hop fans, accessed via a Papaya King. Yeah, Hollywood, the secret’s out. We like you.