Kimbra

The Words We Wear

You know the scene. You’re trying something on in a shop, and as you look in the mirror you notice that it hangs better on one side than the other. One seam—usually the one on your left—sits slightly awkwardly, with a little pucker, so that the smooth line of the garment is broken. And you know before you even look: it’s because a label, or sometimes a whole sheaf of them, has been sewn into the seam.

When you get home, you might be able to remove the label. Might. It will rarely be clear whether the stitching on it is also holding the seam together. But if it is, the whole seam is likely to come undone, and you’ll be repairing your purchase before you’ve even worn it. Sometimes there’s a helpful dotted line and a pair of scissors printed on the label, indicating that you should cut it off. But this, you know from experience, leaves a scratchy little stump, which still spoils the hang. You might be able to pluck out the remains of the label, fibre by fibre, with tweezers, but by now this piece of clothing is starting to feel like a full-time job. And sometimes—if you’ve bought a swimsuit, say—the seam has been densely overlocked, and the truncated label is destined to remain trapped there for ever, unsightly and uncomfortable.

It’s the same story with labels at the back of the neck, which can irritate like a mosquito bite and which children routinely beg to have cut out. These usually display the brand name and they often have a little, extra-scratchy size tag attached to them. We should be grateful to those companies that have wised up and print information directly onto their products. Because a label can make the difference between whether you live in a garment, or whether it lives at the back of a cupboard.

Why do we need so much writing on our clothes? The relationship between words and what we wear must, once upon a time, have been so simple. It seems reasonable to assume, for instance, that the loincloth existed before the word “loincloth” did, and that it was centuries, or possibly millennia, before it was necessary to say anything else on the subject. But as soon as clothes began to be described—for literary, advertising or journalistic reasons—this relationship became more complex. And with the mass-production that grew from the Industrial Revolution, clothes needed words attached simply in order to, er, keep tabs on them.

The gap between the signifier and the signified is today a yawning chasm, filled to the brim with excess verbiage. Exhibit A is a pair of grey jeans I bought recently from Zara, so bristling with labels that it looks like the result of a high-speed collision between a wardrobe and a filing cabinet. There were two cardboard tags on a string plus one stitched through the waistband, all quite easy to remove; inside were five further labels of fabric, firmly sewn in. Between them they carried more than 700 words, not counting washing symbols, barcodes and numbers. (For comparison’s sake, this column is about 800 words.) That seems like a lot of words for a pair of trousers to need.

It is a consequence of globali­sation that one of these labels informs me, in 31 different languages, that “this garment may fade and stain surfaces and/or other garments in lighter colours”. You have been warned. I bought the jeans for one sort of arse-covering, but got both kinds: a two-for-one deal. Washing instructions are another symptom of blame culture. They’re helpful up to a point, but when a jumper that costs £19.99 says “dry clean only”, you know it’s just so the shop can say “I told you so” if you put it in the wash and it comes out the right size for Barbie.

by Rebecca Willis, More Intelligent Life |  Read more:

Image: Bill Brown

Alexey Kondakov
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Sonny Chillingworth - Needle and Thread

In Paris, Love Lost for Bridge Padlocks

The weight of love is becoming unbearable for this city’s bridges.

Concerned for its safety, Paris city hall workers will begin on Monday to cut off the thousands of padlocks adorning the Pont des Arts, a pedestrian bridge over the Seine, in a bid to draw a line under a popular trend that has led to tourists blanketing many of the city’s bridges with apparent symbols of love.

“It is a catastrophe for the bridge,” said city hall spokeswoman Barbara Atlan. “We need to preserve the heritage”.

Paris’s picturesque bridges are heaving with padlocks, bike locks, handcuffs and other talismans of amour. Enamored visitors write their names on a lock, attach it to a bridge and throw the key into the river. The trend took hold first on the Pont des Arts, but it has quickly spread to any bridge tourists can get a lock on.

The habit has become part of the Paris tourist trail, along with climbing the Eiffel Tower, taking a picture of the “Mona Lisa” and walking down the Champs Élysées. But it has sparked rancor among many locals, dismayed at the defacing of the city’s treasured bridges and evolved from being a charming way for couples to show their love to a nuisance for the city’s authorities, who have threatened in the past to outlaw the locks.

On the Pont des Arts, the city hall estimates the weight of a three-meter grate panel with its padlocks at 500 kilograms and there are 112 such fences on the bridge, said Ms. Atlan. The weight represents four times the load limit allowed on the bridge. (...)

The lovelock phenomenon has been tracked to an Italian teen novel titled “I Want You” published in 2006, featuring two Roman lovers who immortalized their bond on a bridge and threw the key in the Tiber. Padlocks have since sprouted in other cities around the world, but nowhere appears to have embraced the trend as much as Paris, a town rich in romantic symbolism.

by Inti Landauro, WSJ |  Read more:

Image: Wikimedia

Skillet Pizza

Envy is not a good look for you. So quit lusting over the expensive pizza stone your sister got at her bridal shower and the fancy outdoor wood-burning pizza oven your neighbor just splurged on. (Who does she think she is, Gwyneth Paltrow?) All you need to make your own pizza is a tried-and-true cast-iron skillet. Its surface gets extremely hot, which is the key to general success as well as a crispy crust. Because a skillet pizza is on the small side, you can make several, each with different toppings.

INGREDIENTS

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 pound store-bought pizza dough
½ cup tomato sauce
1 teaspoon dried oregano
½ teaspoon red-pepper flakes
2 uncooked Italian sausages, casings removed
½ red onion, thinly sliced
1½ cups shredded mozzarella cheese
¼ cup grated Parmesan cheese

DIRECTIONS

1. Preheat the oven to 450°F. Grease the bottom and side of a 12-inch cast-iron skillet with the olive oil.

2. Gently stretch the pizza dough with your hands until it is a little larger than the cavity of the skillet. Place the dough into the greased skillet, allowing the edge to come slightly up the side of the pan.

3. Pour the tomato sauce on top of the dough and use the back of a spoon to spread it evenly. Season with oregano and red-pepper flakes.

4. Using your hands, crumble the sausage into bite-size pieces. Spread the sausage evenly over the pizza, then do the same with the onion slices. Cover the pizza with the mozzarella and Parmesan cheeses. Put the skillet in the oven and bake until the cheeses are golden and bubbly and the crust has browned, 9 to 11 minutes.

5. Remove the skillet from the oven, using a pot holder. Let cool for 10 minutes. To remove the pizza from the pan, use tongs to grab the edge of the crust and slide it onto a cutting board. Slice the pizza with a knife or pizza cutter, then serve.

by Pure Wow |  Read more:

Image: Erin McDowell

Two Kids in a Car

[ed. Now and then I think of all the times you screwed me over, always having me believing it was always something that I'd done. But I don't wanna live that way. Reading into every word you say. You said that you could let it go. And I wouldn't catch you hung up on somebody that you used to know... But you didn't have to cut me off. Make out like it never happened and that we were nothing. And I don't even need your love. But you treat me like a stranger and that feels so rough.]

A Tax Break and a Side of Lobster and Beef

In Japan, You Get a Tax Break and a Side of Lobster and Beef
Image: Ko Sasaki

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Vipp

[ed. Pretty much my dream home. You'd have to find the right lot, though.]
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Young Women Say No to Thongs

[ed. Oh, no. End times. Belfies?]

A young generation of women is discovering a new brand of sexy in the most unlikely of places: their grandmothers’ underwear drawers.

“When I walk into a lingerie store, I’m always like, ‘O.K., which drawer in here is for the grannies?’ ” Daphne Javitch, 35, said of her predilection for ample-bottomed undies. That preference led Ms. Javitch, back in 2010, to found Ten Undies, a line with a cult following that sells cotton full-bottom bikinis, boy shorts and high-waist briefs not unlike the kind immortalized in “Bridget Jones’s Diary.” (“Hello, mommy.”) Ten’s wares are comfortable and practical, to be sure, but that’s hardly the only draw.

“Within millennial and Generation Y consumer groups, it’s considered cool to be wearing full-bottom underwear,” said Bernadette Kissane, an apparel analyst at the market intelligence firm Euromonitor. “Thongs have had their moment.”

Data provided by the research company NPD Group back her up. Sales of thongs decreased 7 percent over the last year, while sales of fuller styles — briefs, boy shorts and high-waist briefs — have grown a collective 17 percent.

Erica Russo, the fashion director for accessories, cosmetics and intimate apparel at Bloomingdale’s, said that indeed there has been a “shift in the business.” She noted that the trend is in line with the higher-waist and roomier pants styles that have dominated fashion this season. Perhaps motivated by the same kind of contrarianism that helped elevate Birkenstocks and fanny packs, young women are embracing “granny panties” — and not just for laundry day. (...)

Besides sales, the “feminist underwear” has inspired countless Instagram “belfies” (that’s a selfie for the behind) from Me and You customers eager to show off their feminist convictions as well as their pert posteriors.

by Haley Phelan, NY Times |  Read more:

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Jean Suquet- Cadastre Photomontage Large Glass (Marcel Duchamp) and Photography Given by the author, 1960s
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What To Do If You See A Bear

[ed. Actually, brown and grizzly bears are one and the same, except brown bears are found in coastal habitats and grizzlies further inland. So, don't try to psych-out either of them. Also (to be pedantic) black bears are black, but also cinnamon-colored, and even blue (glacier bears). So yeah, other than that, all of this seems like good advice.]

You may have received conflicting advice on how to act when you encounter a bear. Finally, the U.S. Forestry Department has put together a definitive guide, based on the latest research. Once and for all, this is what you’re supposed to do when you see a bear.

If You See a Black Bear

Black bears are black. They have black fur, which looks black, when you see it. If you encounter a black bear, do not make eye contact. If you make eye contact, black bears will take this as an act of aggression. They will put two and two together and go nuts on you and ruin your life. But also don’t look away. Just look to the side, or act as if you spotted something over the black bear’s shoulder. Like, “Oh, that leaf? That’s good stuff.” Then stick your arms out to make yourself look bigger and back away slowly. But not too slowly. If you back away too slowly, black bears will think you are simply delicious. The last thing you want is for a black bear to think that. If you happen to have a neon traffic cone, go ahead and put it between you and the bear. Not because black bears understand traffic signals, but because it’s a well known fact that they hate neon shit. (...)

If You See a Brown Bear

Brown bears are brown, with fur that can be qualified as “standard brown.” Brown bears tend to be peaceful and to keep to themselves, going along with their daily business, until someone comes up to them and starts playing the devil’s advocate. The last thing you want to do around a brown bear is jauntily take a contrarian stance in order to challenge its preconceived notions. If you do this, the bear will feel as if he is being razzed within an inch of his life, and might decide to take you, and everyone you’re with, “to town” in the sense of killing you. Also, there is a common misconception that brown bears appreciate the art of a good psych-out. We cannot stress enough how untrue this is. Do not attempt to psych-out a brown bear by showing him a photo of what looks like a computer chip but turns out to be an aerial view of a city. This will cause him to turn into his most conflicted self.

If You See a Grizzly Bear

If you see a grizzly bear, the most important thing to remember is to not ride its nuts about anything. Like whether it’s foraged enough today. Or stuck its head out and growled in a terrifying manner. Or had a salmon jump into its mouth from a stream in a picturesque way. If it senses you’re riding its nuts about any of this stuff, it might just get up in arms and have a snack-attack with your body. We can’t stress this enough: if you see a Grizzly Bear, just give it the sense that it’s doing a great job, that it’s generally done “enough,” and that every decision it’s ever made has been the right one.

by Emma Rathbone, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: UIG via Getty

Off Diamond Head

Hawaii, 1966: Nobody bothered me. Nobody vibed me. It was the opposite of my life at school.

[ed. Pretty much my life growing up in Honolulu in the 60s. Intermediate school was brutal back then, with an undercurrent of violence that could erupt seemingly at any moment. I'm Hapa (half) haole, and remember quite clearly Kill a Haole Day. But it wasn't just school, it was anywhere that kids congregated - on waves, or playgrounds, beaches or parking lots. Everyone had their tribe (which adhered closely to race or community), and it took an acute sense of local awareness to avoid getting crosswise with any particular individual or group. It still does to some extent.]

The budget for moving our family to Honolulu was tight, judging from the tiny cottage we rented and the rusted-out Ford Fairlane we bought to get around. My brother Kevin and I took turns sleeping on the couch. I was thirteen; he was nine. But the cottage was near the beach—just up a driveway lined with other cottages, on a street called Kulamanu—and the weather, which was warm even in January, when we arrived, felt like wanton luxury.

I ran to the beach for a first, frantic survey of the local waters. The setup was confusing. Waves broke here and there along the outer edge of a mossy, exposed reef. All that coral worried me. It was infamously sharp. Then I spotted, well off to the west, and rather far out at sea, a familiar minuet of stick figures, rising and falling, backlit by the afternoon sun. Surfers! I ran back up the lane. Everyone at the house was busy unpacking and fighting over beds. I threw on a pair of trunks, grabbed my surfboard, and left without a word. (...)

I was beside myself with excitement just to be in Hawaii. All surfers, all readers of surf magazines—and I had memorized nearly every line, every photo caption, in every surf magazine I owned—spent the bulk of their fantasy lives, like it or not, in Hawaii. Now I was there, walking on actual Hawaiian sand (coarse, strange-smelling), tasting Hawaiian seawater (warm, strange-smelling), and paddling toward Hawaiian waves (small, dark-faced, windblown).

Nothing was what I’d expected. In the mags, Hawaiian waves were always big and, in the color shots, ranged from a deep, mid-ocean blue to a pale, impossible turquoise. The wind was always offshore (blowing from land to sea, ideal for surfing), and the breaks themselves were the Olympian playgrounds of the gods: Sunset Beach, the Banzai Pipeline, Makaha, Ala Moana, Waimea Bay.

All that seemed worlds away from the sea in front of our new house. Even Waikiki, known for its beginner breaks and tourist crowds, was over on the far side of Diamond Head—the glamorous western side—along with every other part of Honolulu anybody had heard of. We were on the mountain’s southeast side, down in a little saddle of sloping, shady beachfront west of Black Point. The beach was just a patch of damp sand, narrow and empty.

I paddled west along a shallow lagoon, staying close to the shore, for half a mile. The beach houses ended, and the steep, brushy base of Diamond Head itself took their place across the sand. Then the reef on my left fell away, revealing a wide channel—deeper water, where no waves broke—and, beyond the channel, ten or twelve surfers riding a scatter of dark, chest-high peaks in a moderate onshore wind. I paddled slowly toward the lineup—the wave-catching zone—taking a roundabout route, studying every ride.

The surfers were good. They had smooth, ungimmicky styles. Nobody fell off. And nobody, blessedly, seemed to notice me. I circled around, then edged into an unpopulated stretch of the lineup. There were plenty of waves. The takeoffs were crumbling but easy. Letting muscle memory take over, I caught and rode a couple of small, mushy rights. The waves were different—but not too different—from the ones I’d known in California. They were shifty but not intimidating. I could see coral on the bottom but nothing too shallow.

There was a lot of talk and laughter among the other surfers. Eavesdropping, I couldn’t understand a word. They were probably speaking pidgin. I had read about pidgin in James Michener’s “Hawaii,” but I hadn’t actually heard any yet. Or maybe it was some foreign language. I was the only haole (white person—another word from Michener) in the water. At one point, an older guy paddling past me gestured seaward and said, “Outside.” It was the only word spoken to me that day. And he was right: an outside set was approaching, the biggest of the afternoon, and I was grateful to have been warned. (...)

I had never thought of myself as a sheltered child. Still, Kaimuki Intermediate School was a shock. I was in the eighth grade, and most of my new schoolmates were “drug addicts, glue sniffers, and hoods”—or so I wrote to a friend back in Los Angeles. That wasn’t true. What was true was that haoles were a tiny and unpopular minority at Kaimuki. The “natives,” as I called them, seemed to dislike us particularly. This was unnerving, because many of the Hawaiians were, for junior-high kids, quite large, and the word was that they liked to fight. Asians were the school’s most sizable ethnic group, though in those first weeks I didn’t know enough to distinguish among Japanese and Chinese and Korean kids, let alone the stereotypes through which each group viewed the others. Nor did I note the existence of other important tribes, such as the Filipinos, the Samoans, or the Portuguese (not considered haole), nor all the kids of mixed ethnic background. I probably even thought the big guy in wood shop who immediately took a sadistic interest in me was Hawaiian.

He wore shiny black shoes with long, sharp toes, tight pants, and bright flowered shirts. His kinky hair was cut in a pompadour, and he looked as if he had been shaving since birth. He rarely spoke, and then only in a pidgin that was unintelligible to me. He was some kind of junior mobster, clearly years behind his original class, just biding his time until he could drop out. His name was Freitas—I never heard a first name—but he didn’t seem to be related to the Freitas clan, a vast family with several rambunctious boys at Kaimuki Intermediate. The stiletto-toed Freitas studied me frankly for a few days, making me increasingly nervous, and then began to conduct little assaults on my self-possession, softly bumping my elbow, for example, while I concentrated over a saw cut on my half-built shoeshine box.

I was too scared to say anything, and he never said a word to me. That seemed to be part of the fun. Then he settled on a crude but ingenious amusement for passing those periods when we had to sit in chairs in the classroom section of the shop. He would sit behind me and, whenever the teacher had his back turned, hit me on the head with a two-by-four. Bonk . . . bonk . . . bonk, a nice steady rhythm, always with enough of a pause between blows to allow me brief hope that there might not be another. I couldn’t understand why the teacher didn’t hear all these unauthorized, resonating clonks. They were loud enough to attract the attention of our classmates, who seemed to find Freitas’s little ritual fascinating. Inside my head the blows were, of course, bone-rattling explosions. Freitas used a fairly long board—five or six feet—and he never hit too hard, which permitted him to pound away without leaving marks, and to do it from a certain rarefied, even meditative distance, which added, I imagine, to the fascination of the performance.

I wonder if, had some other kid been targeted, I would have been as passive as my classmates were. Probably. The teacher was off in his own world, worried only about his table saws. I did nothing in my own defense. While I eventually understood that Freitas wasn’t Hawaiian, I must have figured that I just had to take the abuse. I was, after all, skinny and haole and had no friends. (...)

My parents had sent me to Kaimuki Intermediate, I later decided, under a misconception. This was 1966, before the Proposition 13 tax revolt, and the California public-school system, particularly in the middle-class suburbs where we had lived, was among the nation’s best. The families we knew never considered private schools for their kids. Hawaii’s public schools were another matter—impoverished, mired in colonial, plantation, and mission traditions, miles below the American average academically.

Ignorant of all this, my parents sent two of my younger siblings (I have three) to the nearest elementary school, which happened to be in a middle-class area, and me to the nearest junior high, up in working-class Kaimuki, on the inland side of Diamond Head crater, where they assumed I was getting on with the business of the eighth grade but where I was occupied almost entirely by the rigors of bullies, loneliness, fights, and finding my way, after a lifetime of unconscious privileged whiteness in the segregated suburbs of California, in a racialized world. Even my classes felt racially constructed. For academic subjects, at least, students were assigned, on the basis of test scores, to a group that moved together from teacher to teacher. I was put in a high-end group, where nearly all my classmates were Japanese girls. The classes, which were prim and undemanding, bored me in a way that school never had before. To my classmates, I seemed not to exist socially. And so I passed the class hours slouched in back rows, keeping an eye on the trees outside for signs of wind direction and strength, drawing page after page of surfboards and waves.

My orientation program at school included a series of fistfights, some of them formally scheduled. There was a cemetery next to the school grounds, with a well-hidden patch of grass down in one corner where kids went to settle their differences. I found myself facing off there with a number of boys named Freitas—none of them, again, apparently related to my hairy tormentor from wood shop. My first opponent was so small and young that I doubted that he even attended our school. The Freitas clan’s method for training its members in battle, it seemed, was to find some fool without allies or the brains to avoid a challenge, then send their youngest fighter with any chance at all into the ring. If he lost, the next biggest Freitas would be sent in. This went on until the non-kinsman was defeated. It was all quite dispassionate, the bouts arranged and refereed by older Freitases, and more or less fairly conducted.

My first match was sparsely attended—really of no interest to anyone—but I was still scared sick, having no seconds in my corner and no idea what the rules were. My opponent turned out to be shockingly strong for his size, and ferocious, but his arms were too short to land punches, and I eventually subdued him without much damage to either of us. His cousin, who stepped up immediately, was more my size, and our sparring was more consequential. I held my own, but we both had shiners before a senior Freitas stepped in, declaring a draw. There would be a rematch, he said, and, if I won that, somebody named Tino would come and kick my ass, no questions asked. Team Freitas departed. I remember watching them jog, laughing and loose, a happy family militia, up the long slope of the graveyard. They were evidently late for another appointment. My face hurt, my knuckles hurt, but I was giddy with relief. Then I noticed a couple of haole guys my age standing in the bushes at the edge of the clearing, looking squirrelly. I half recognized them from school, but they left without saying a word.

I won the rematch, I think. Then Tino kicked my ass, no questions asked.

by William Finnegan, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: William Finnegan

Walter Peterhans
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Shodo Kawarazaki 1889-1973
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