Glotisserie

natashavc:

I first noticed the bird motif on the pro-ana sites. Girls described wanting to have bird bones, to be feather thin, ‘become frail’, to be light as air, be delicate, small, like a shimmering, (starving) sparrow.

The bird lust has seeped into other facets of culture, fashion…

We’re going to bring the bull/monkey back in style.

champagnecandy:

So I’ve obliquely referred to this, and if you’re on our email list you already know, but today is my last day with GRITtv. Yesterday was our last show. 

I talk a lot about class war, about the economy, about labor and solidarity and class consciousness. But over the last two weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about what Walter Mosley said here. 

Relevant part: 

The idea is that in order to be middle class, if you lose your job, everything stays the same for a year. If you haven’t gotten another job, you give to the same charities, go to the same restaurants, kids are in the same school. If you’re working class or less, if you lose your job within two weeks everything changes. Kids are going to city college, you move out of your mortgage into an apartment, can no longer go to the same restaurant. 80% of America—at least—is working class. If you don’t understand your class, how can you identify with it?

This isn’t the first time in my life that I find myself suddenly not sure what the next step is, with no job and bills and rent to pay. Still, his words echoed in my head over and over as I broke the news to friends of mine and of the show, to my family, to people I do freelance work for. “Everything changes.” 

Mai’a just mentioned the “class queer” line again and to some degree I identify with that—in the way I’ve willfully walked away from a certain level of privilege to do the work that I do, which is necessarily more precarious and low-paying. 

But also? I see my parents differently these days. Because even when we had a big house and my mother didn’t have to work, it only took a twitch or three in the economy and suddenly they were underwater on their mortgage and my mother was cleaning houses for other people. I don’t know if it was a year—we were certainly middle class—but oh, things definitely, definitely changed utterly. 

How many people in this country are really, truly economically secure? How many people who have Nice Things paid for them on credit and are one paycheck from disaster as soon as they can’t make minimum payments anymore? How much of this is now and has been a shell game? 

I’m not trying to ask for pity or sympathy. Being laid off sucks, but I’ll make it. 

But the economic crisis and the ongoing, grinding recession have taught so many people a lesson about class. At first the only organized reaction was coming from the Tea Party. But I’m growing more and more hopeful about the reactions I’m seeing now. 

I’ll miss this job, where we got to see and talk to different people daily about these issues, and I’ll keep covering them. And yeah, my life is going to look different now. Changes are coming. They’re already here.