Ho tenuto questa frase appesa in camera per tantissimi anni:

“- Voialtri – diceva mio padre – vi annoiate perché non avete vita interiore”.

Natalia Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare

Ho sempre pensato che fosse così vera, forse perché non mi annoio mai? Sono anni che non mi capita di pensare “e ora che faccio?”. Ho sempre qualcosa da fare, da scrivere, da leggere, da guardare, da dire. Non esistono Domeniche tristi nella mia vita, perché riempio sempre le mie giornate con cose che mi interessano. Penso che sia dovuto al fatto che ho passato tantissimo tempo da sola, a casa, nella mia cameretta , quando mia madre mi impediva di uscire a vivere la mia adolescenza (ehm ehm rancore). Passateli 18 anni recluse in casa, poi mi dite se non vi inventate qualcosa per fare passare il tempo, ha ha.

L’altro giorno poi Erica ha postato una canzone dei Pet Shop Boys che dice qualcosa di simile:

She said: “We were never feeling bored
‘Cause we were never being boring
We had too much time to find for ourselves
And we were never being boring
We dressed up and fought, then thought: “Make amends”
And we were never holding back or worried that
Time would come to an end”

Pet Shop Boys – Being Boring

Si parla tanto di fare annoiare i bambini, perché sono troppo stimolati, troppo impegnati, troppo seguiti e anche se non ho figli, quindi non posso parlare di educazione, credo sia stato importantissimo per me avere il tempo di annoiarmi, di non fare niente, durante la mia infanzia e adolescenza, quando ho scoperto le mie passioni (libri, moda, cinema) e ho avuto tutto il tempo del mondo per svilupparle. Non avrò mai più così tante ore libere in un giorno, non leggerò mai più così tanti libri e non guarderò mai più così tanti film!
A meno che non finisca in prigione.

“Spiky o grafico, rievocativo o trasposto, il nuovo rapper-à-l’ordre per l’autunno-inverno 2011-2012 si diverte con un diverso “Système de la mode” linguistico e libero dove i “jeux-de-mots” sono all’ordine del giorno. In un vocabolario di moda evolutivo si potrebbero persino inserire citazioni inedite come “Roland Barthesology”! E’ un “re-styling” ironico-artistico con alcuni nuovi trends, spesso di ispirazione inglese,come “smart &crafts”, o “streamlined urbanism”,ma anche con più riposanti e rassicuranti accezioni, da una “quiet seduction” al ritorno stilizzato dello “charme bourgeois”, con i suoi modi “educati” che riportano una nuova frivolezza e un’evoluzione classica. Molti modi di giocare con la moda in attesa di una stagione più impegnativa e formale”

Dalla rubrica D.P by Anna Piaggi, Vogue Italia Agosto 2011

“More venery. More love; more closeness; more sex and romance. Bring it back, no matter what, no matter how old we are. This fervent cry of ours has been certified by Simone de Beauvoir and Alice Munro and Laurence Olivier and any number of remarried or recoupled ancient classmates of ours. Laurence Olivier? I’m thinking of what he says somewhere in an interview: “Inside, we’re all seventeen, with red lips.”

[…]

I believe that everyone in the world wants to be with someone else tonight, together in the dark, with the sweet warmth of a hip or a foot or a bare expanse of shoulder within reach. Those of us who have lost that, whatever our age, never lose the longing: just look at our faces. If it returns, we seize upon it avidly, stunned and altered again.”

da questo bellissimo articolo di qualche anno fa scritto dall’allora 93enne Roger Angell per il New Yorker

“I believe that any two people who disagree should really go as far as they can, and I think we do: screaming, yelling, petty acts of hostility and cruelty — but it’s all meaningless. It’s meaningless if that essential love is there. Like a rubber band that you stretch out, no matter how far you pull it — and even if it stings snapping back — it returns, the love reappears.”

-John Cassavetes

“The fashion system has been busy keeping up with blogging/social networking. It is not always for the best, but it did give fashion a global audience. The unfortunate outcome might be the obsession and collusion between the celebrity culture and high fashion. It is just a big global mess of random endorsement. Nothing looks worse than a dress or a suit on a red carpet. It is an ongoing tragedy of cheap fashion on cheap celebrities, followed by ubercheap comments. I only like designers’ clothes on models. Good models have an inner understanding of the clothes and design.”

Hedi Slimane

“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd–The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”
— Fernando Pessoa

“I don’t do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision.”
— Allen Ginsberg, The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice

You are skeptical of the way people protest through social media, of so-called “armchair activism,” and say that the internet is dumbing us down with cheap entertainment. So would you say that the social networks are the new opium of the people?

” The question of identity has changed from being something you are born with to a task: you have to create your own community. But communities aren’t created, and you either have one or you don’t. What the social networks can create is a substitute. The difference between a community and a network is that you belong to a community, but a network belongs to you. You feel in control. You can add friends if you wish, you can delete them if you wish. You are in control of the important people to whom you relate. People feel a little better as a result, because loneliness, abandonment, is the great fear in our individualist age. But it’s so easy to add or remove friends on the internet that people fail to learn the real social skills, which you need when you go to the street, when you go to your workplace, where you find lots of people who you need to enter into sensible interaction with. Pope Francis, who is a great man, gave his first interview after being elected to Eugenio Scalfari, an Italian journalist who is also a self-proclaimed atheist. It was a sign: real dialogue isn’t about talking to people who believe the same things as you. Social media don’t teach us to dialogue because it is so easy to avoid controversy… But most people use social media not to unite, not to open their horizons wider, but on the contrary, to cut themselves a comfort zone where the only sounds they hear are the echoes of their own voice, where the only things they see are the reflections of their own face. Social media are very useful, they provide pleasure, but they are a trap.”

— Dall’intervista di Ricardo de Querol a Zygmunt Bauman per El Pais —-

My career has been about jumping on things and being thrown into them. It’s a millennial thing to have this sweeping vision of your future and your career. No wonder you all have anxiety disorders! It must be horrendous to live with that. For my generation we were all like, ‘Oh, that could be groovy and fun…’ It was about low expectation, good work ethic, and a willingness to throw yourself at anything, basically. The real focus was what you were going to do on Friday night! I think it’s the opposite now.

People care very little about what you’re wearing. I think it’s self-indulgent to stress about how you look—just throw it on! No one really cares, so just have fun with it.”

-Simon Doonan  per IntotheGloss

Ho scoperto recentemente questo saggio di Gloria Steinem, decisamente da leggere!

Reading Freud made me just as skeptical about penis envy. The power of giving birth makes “womb envy” more logical, and an organ as external and unprotected as the penis makes men very vulnerable indeed.

But listening recently to a woman describe the unexpected arrival of her menstrual period (a red stain had spread on her dress as she argued heatedly on the public stage) still made me cringe with embarrassment. That is, until she explained that, when finally informed in whispers of the obvious event, she said to the all-male audience, “and you should be proud to have a menstruating woman on your stage. It’s probably the first real thing that’s happened to this group in years.”

Laughter. Relief. She had turned a negative into a positive. Somehow her story merged with India and Freud to make me finally understand the power of positive thinking. Whatever a “superior” group has will be used to justify its superiority, and whatever and “inferior” group has will be used to justify its plight. Black me were given poorly paid jobs because they were said to be “stronger” than white men, while all women were relegated to poorly paid jobs because they were said to be “weaker.” As the little boy said when asked if he wanted to be a lawyer like his mother, “Oh no, that’s women’s work.” Logic has nothing to do with oppression.

So what would happen if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate and women could not?

Clearly, menstruation would become an enviable, worthy, masculine event:

Men would brag about how long and how much.

Young boys would talk about it as the envied beginning of manhood. Gifts, religious ceremonies, family dinners, and stag parties would mark the day.

To prevent monthly work loss among the powerful, Congress would fund a National Institute of Dysmenorrhea. Doctors would research little about heart attacks, from which men would be hormonally protected, but everything about cramps.

Sanitary supplies would be federally funded and free. Of course, some men would still pay for the prestige of such commercial brands as Paul Newman Tampons, Muhammad Ali’s Rope-a-Dope Pads, John Wayne Maxi Pads, and Joe Namath Jock Shields- “For Those Light Bachelor Days.”

Statistical surveys would show that men did better in sports and won more Olympic medals during their periods.

Generals, right-wing politicians, and religious fundamentalists would cite menstruation (“men-struation”) as proof that only men could serve God and country in combat (“You have to give blood to take blood”), occupy high political office (“Can women be properly fierce without a monthly cycle governed by the planet Mars?”), be priests, ministers, God Himself (“He gave this blood for our sins”), or rabbis (“Without a monthly purge of impurities, women are unclean”).

Male liberals and radicals, however, would insist that women are equal, just different; and that any woman could join their ranks if only she were willing to recognize the primacy of menstrual rights (“Everything else is a single issue”) or self-inflict a major wound every month (“You must give blood for the revolution”).

Street guys would invent slang (“He’s a three-pad man”) and “give fives” on the corner with some exchenge like, “Man you lookin’ good!”

“Yeah, man, I’m on the rag!”

TV shows would treat the subject openly. (Happy Days: Richie and Potsie try to convince Fonzie that he is still “The Fonz,” though he has missed two periods in a row. Hill Street Blues: The whole precinct hits the same cycle.) So would newspapers. (Summer Shark Scare Threatens Menstruating Men. Judge Cites Monthlies In Pardoning Rapist.) And so would movies. (Newman and Redford in Blood Brothers!)

Men would convince women that sex was more pleasurable at “that time of the month.” Lesbians would be said to fear blood and therefore life itself, though all they needed was a good menstruating man.

Medical schools would limit women’s entry (“they might faint at the sight of blood”).

Of course, intellectuals would offer the most moral and logical arguements. Without the biological gift for measuring the cycles of the moon and planets, how could a woman master any discipline that demanded a sense of time, space, mathematics– or the ability to measure anything at all? In philosophy and religion, how could women compensate for being disconnected from the rhythm of the universe? Or for their lack of symbolic death and resurrection every month?

Menopause would be celebrated as a positive event, the symbol that men had accumulated enough years of cyclical wisdom to need no more.

Liberal males in every field would try to be kind. The fact that “these people” have no gift for measuring life, the liberals would explain, should be punishment enough.

And how would women be trained to react? One can imagine right-wing women agreeing to all these arguements with a staunch and smiling masochism. (“The ERA would force housewives to wound themselves every month”: Phyllis Schlafly)

In short, we would discover, as we should already, that logic is in the eye of the logician. (For instance, here’s an idea for theorists and logicians: if women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn’t it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long? I leave further improvisation up to you.)

The truth is that, if men could menstruate, the power justifications would go on and on.

If we let them.

“I wonder if 2015 will go down in history as contemporary fashion’s annus horribilis – or if it’s merely a portent of things to come? Although something’s wrong in high fashion right now, it’s been bubbling under the surface for years and began to break through earlier this decade. Designers are unhappy, retailers are fidgety and uncertain about the clothes they’re buying, international markets are volatile, and brands’ profits and losses fluctuate alarmingly.

What’s the remedy? I’m not sure I know. Certainly it’s not making yet more clothes for an already saturated market; probably not making them faster, although maybe that will combat a new-fangled marketing notion of “consumer fatigue”.

But what about designer fatigue? Or maybe fashion fatigue – of clothes in stores, images on screens, magazines, everything? Maybe we’re all – designers, customers, journalists – just tired of so much stuff being relentlessly rammed down our throats? And perhaps we all need breathing space, before the whole damn industry comes apart at the seams, like a badly-made, quickly-sold handbag”

Alexander Fury, da questo articolo su The Independent