Well I've had a bunch of synchronicitous events happen recently that perhaps demand it being noted, assuming that anything must be noted here at all. Because they're all sort of circular, I'll start in one spot and gather the round corral, noting that these recollections are all recent, but not chronological.
I was walking out of the sporting goods store and ran into a law school colleague. For some reason or another, for much of my life, I've always been the youngest person in a group as a rule, even when I really shouldn't have been. Anyhow, this fellow, like two other of my law school friends, was an older law student, in law school, although I'm not sure how old he really was then, Two of my other friends, both Vietnam War era veterans, were in their 40s, so they're in their mid 70s now. I think this fellow was probably in his mid to late 30s. He remained remarkably the same looking all that time.
He kind of bounced around at first as a lawyer before landing in a firm where he practiced for maybe 20 years. He's retired now, and has been for awhile. He asked me if I was getting ready to retire, which I indicated I wasn't, but I did ask him about the process, and he gave me some details of how he'd gone about it.
Good to know from somebody who has done it.
He doesn't miss practicing at all.
In contrast to this, a close friend of mine, well really a relative, who is a lawyer who must be crowding 70 told me the other day he's not going to. He'd miss the collegiality of being a lawyer.
That answer shocked me. Not that he wasn't going to retire, but the collegiality.
Eh?
It may be just me, but only a handful of my friends are lawyers. I do have some lawyer friends. But most of my friends aren't lawyers and never have been. I wouldn't miss most lawyers whatsoever. Indeed, I miss a lot of my genuinely close friends due to the practice of law.
This, frankly, is probably an exception to the rule. Law is a unique profession, litigation with in the law even more so, and by and large the onliy people who have a grasp on what it is like are other lawyers. It is, I suppose, kind of like being a combat veteran that way. Lawyers hang out with other lawyers as they're lawyers.
Indeed, being heavily introverted, I've often noted how much lawyers enjoy professional gatherings. They really do. There are organizations that we're all part of and we'll go to a conference and there will be a big dinner or something, everyone goes.
Unless my spouse is with me, or one of the few lawyers I really know well and like, I tend to avoid those gatherings.
Anyhow this takes me to a second point.
I know a couple of lawyers who have lost their souls.
I don't mean in a metaphysical sense. That is, I'm not saying they're condemned to Hell. What I'm saying is that their personalities are gone and been absorbed by false ones in the pursuit of nothing more than money.
It happens to people. It's not a pleasant thing to see.
I was never friends with either of the ones I have in mind. Interestingly, however, one seems to be trying to emerge. One, who sank into this a long time ago actually started talking to me the other day about what he was going to do "next", something he's never said before.
A really good lawyer friend of mine is mostly retired. Like the fellow I mentioned above, while he had his doubts, he hasn't missed the practice at all.
Another good lawyer friend of mine, a woman, is trying to transition from one practice to another.
Two women I know otherwise recently lost their jobs. They weren't lawyers.
I note that as I think women in particular are subject to the Capitalist lie that careers are existentially defining, a completely modern notion.
St Paul was a tent maker. St. Peter a fisherman. I don't know if there are any classic Medieval or Renaissance paintings of St. Paul making a tent, but there should be.
Why do I note that?
Well, for this reason. You don't think much about St. Paul being a tent maker as his occupation didn't define him. His sainthood did.
But a lot of us moderns sure have made our occupations define us. And women are very much doing so now.
That's more than I really need for my point here, but it ties in, this way.
Most careers are just jobs. They're an industrial way of separating you from your homes to make money for somebody else, in exchange for which you make some money too. This was done to men first, and then with the "women's liberation" movement of the 1960s, women drank the KookAide and have been wondering when the good feels will arrive.
They won't.
Most jobs have no greater existential meaning than that. If you define yourself by them, you are defining yourself as a fiction.
Which is why I worry about the lawyers who collapse into the cartoonish litigation personality. It makes you a cartoon, and not a very interesting one.
It's also why lawyers who become deep dive into the Whaling For Justice personality, or something like it, sort of boil off the people they were and become somebody nobody is interested in.
And I also think that's why old lawyers have a hard time retiring. After selling your life away, is this it? It must be. This must be it. I must love this as otherwise. . . .
I will note, and strongly, that I'm not advocating here for something that seems to be a current rage. Don't get any post high school education and hope for the best.
Indeed, the advocates of that, don't mean that. They mean don't forget to look at occupations where you work with your hands.
Now listen to me, all of you. You are all condemned men. We keep you alive to serve this ship. So row well, and live.
Quintus Arrius, Ben Hur.
The truth of the matter is that we sell our lives for a living, but we shouldn't sell our souls. A lot of career propaganda emphasis the nifty life you are supposed to have, but not the risk of losing your soul, and here I mean in both senses. Being able to sell the minutes of your life away for a decent return means that you need to have skills of some sort that are valuable. People should try to acquire those if for nothing else their own protection.
Women, I'd note, are particularly vulnerable here. A woman with a professional degree, such as law, is armed against loss of employer. A woman who doesn't have some sort of valuable skill is at the mercy of her employer. They're the ones who lose their jobs readily, and who are subject to all sorts of risks.
The trick, I guess, is to get those skills and remember that we shouldn't lose who we are.
One group of people who tend to make that career choice are people who work for the government. They're often grossly underpaid, but they also tend to have weighted the options and elected towards "quality of life". Lawyers who work for the AG's office, or biologists who work for state and Federal agencies provide such examples.
Interestingly, people on the outside in the same fields tend to hold these people in contempt. I guess people working 80 hours a week to make a go of it are naturally resentful towards those who do not. But those people are often very dedicated to their professions and even more purist than those who sell their labor in the private market. A dear cousin of mine who recently died was one such example. She was a research biologist at a university.
We're about to head into a Federal administration here that seems to contain a contempt to government employees. Indeed one recent campaign featured somebody who wants to limit the amount of time you can work for the Federal government. The same campaign repeatedly noted the candidates rural roots.
The rural roots are real, but what an irony. Descending from homesteaders means that you descent from the biggest American welfare program ever, one that used the U.S. Army to violently expel land occupants due to their race, to hand it out to European Americans. Don't mistake my point, I love agriculture and regard it as an existential occupation, and if I'd been alive when you could have homesteaded, I would have. But people who loved the land so much they fought for it, and lost, had the moral high ground on that, and those who came in behind them benefitted from the Federal largess and murder.
If you work for a living, why do you kill yourself working?
Tuco, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
Genesis tells us that since we sinned in the Garden, we've condemned ourselves to work. But it's also obvious that work was always part of the plan. It's interesting how well this comports to how evolution and societal development worked. We were likely a very happy group as aboriginals, and we know now that depression and modern angst is unknown in hunter gatherer societies. But we ate from the tree of knowledge and acquired it,
The top half of the March 1967 centerfold depicting the 19 year old "Fran Gerard". This photo was taken from Cynthia Blanton's webpage, where it appears in this fashion (i.e., you can't see her nude) and is put up here under the fair use exception. No doubt if the full centerfold was spread out, Camuglia's happy smile would not be what attention was drawn to.
Sort of going down the rabbit hole, I suppose, on this one, but the story is so illustrative of certain things, most of them pretty sad, so it's worth an additional, illustrative, look.
Cynthia Blanton replied to the post here, which was extremely nice of her to do, on her being a doppelganger for Francis Anna Camuglia, the March 1967 Playboy "Playmate", who appeared in that role as Fran Gerard. It turns out that my comment that they were close in age was not only correct, but there's an added freakish element of. The two young women were just eight months apart in age and, while Blanton had not met Camuglia, they had even been schoolmates in the same California high school, Granada Hills High School, prior to Blanton's family moving only shortly before March 1967.
Camuglia's obituary simply notes that she "attended" the school, which causes me to suspect, with nothing to back it up, that she might not have graduated. Her life would likewise suggest she didn't graduate.
The high school still exists, but is a charter school now. It was nearly new then, having opened in 1960. It seems to have consistently been a well regarded high school.
Camuglia was just a teenager when she appeared in Playboy and only barely out of high school. And not only was she only 19 when the photos ran, give the nature of production, she was 18 when they were taken.
One year younger would have made this child pornography.
Not that this would prove to be a deterrent for Playboy. At least two of the Playboy "Playmates" were 17 years old when their photographs were taken, and the magazine knew that at least one of the girls had that young age. They waited to run that girls' 17 year old nude photographs until she turned 18, which would not have made it legal, but rather likely to be undiscovered. Another seems to have lied about her age, although seemingly this could have been checked up on. One girl was specifically run as a recent high school grad who was the "youngest" playmate and getting her high school wish to be a centerfold, when in fact she was 17.
Early on, Playboy was under a serious European threat for advancing pedophilia, although oddly enough from its cartoons. It turns out, however, that it did in fact go as low as it could go, age wise, for nudes, and even lower than legally allowed.
To add to the sadness of this, Camuglia's first husband had divorced her, or vice versa, just a month prior to these running. When he married her he was 37 years old. She was 18.
I don't know the reasons for the divorce, or the marriage. What did an 18 year old see in a 37 year old. I don't know what he saw in her, but her physical attributes were no doubt undeniable. The marriage lasted only seven months and he disappears from the record. A person has to wonder if the Playboy spread brought about the divorce, although that's pure speculation. The odds wouldn't have been good for its survival at any rate, given the odd age disparity.
Her next marriage was in 1970. She would have been 22 years old at that time. Her second husband doesn't seem to be mentioned on her headstone, however, which suggests that she was not married at the time of her death.
Her father died in 2010, and her mother in 2016. Their devotion to each other, and their children, is noted on their headstones.
Undoubtedly another Playboy photograph, but as she more likely actually appeared. Fran Camuglia didn't actually wear glasses. This was taken from an entry on Find A Grave and is likewise put up under the fair use exception.
I don't know where this all goes, but its a sort of morality play on bad decisions, combined with a lack of societal safe guards, and declining public morality. It's perfectly legal for a 37 year old to marry an 18 year old, but it's almost never a good idea. I'd guess her parents opposed it, and we don't know the story behind it. Really short marriages of much older men to teenagers have historically tended to be explained by pregnancy or mistaken belief in pregnancy, and the 18 year old Camuglia could fairly easily pass for an older young woman. Male interest in her can easily be explained by her obvious, apparently, physical assets, something which has apparently caused her to retain a fan base forty years after her tragic death.
It's hard to believe that this story wouldn't have worked out better if Playboy hadn't been around to exploit young women. I'll spare repeating all the details that were given in the documentary on the magazine, but they're horrific. Suicide wasn't limited to Camuglia. Murder was visited on at least one Playmate and visited upon a person by one. According to the documentary one young woman associated with the magazine died at a party and her body simply disappeared. One suicide scrawled her opinion on Hugh Hefner graphically on a wall in the apartment where she killed herself. A host of "bunnies" was used by men at an event physically in a way that traumatized them.
What, if anything, Camuglia endured we don't know. Maybe only having her 18 year old body be the object of, well, for forty decades, which would be odd enough, and which would also contribute to psychic loss.
In 1967 when Camuglia appeared in the magazine, in middle class society the magazine was both accepted and regarded as dirty. It claimed for itself that it managed to become the Stars and Stripes of the Vietnam War, and as grossly exaggerated in Apocalypse Now, it was so accepted by that time that Playmates appearing in the way that movie stars had in World War Two and Korea in the combat theater occurred. Pinup girls didn't appear overseas in the earlier wars, even though they existed.
At the same time, however, the magazine remained a "dirty" magazine and there were legal efforts as late as the 1970s to try to address its obscenity, although they failed. Being n the magazine branded those who did it in ways they could not escape. Whatever happened to Camuglia, she apparently couldn't escape it.
Well, may God rest her soul and may the perpetual light shine upon her, and all who endured such tragedy..
I ran into this item in a really roundabout way, that being a random link to a 1967 newspaper article. That isn't mentioned in either of the two sources noted here, that being Ms. Blanton's blog (which is quite good, I might add) or Reddit. I unfortunately can't find the link to the article.
Anyhow, let's start with an upload of the photograph on Ms. Blanton's blog:
Blanton with the top part of the "Miss March" centerfold. This is directly linked to her blog. I'm using the fair use and commentary exception to copyright, but I don't own the rights to post this and will immediately take it down if asked.
Miss March holding her own centerfold?
No, Miss Blanton, then a high school student, holding the centerfold of "Fran" "Gerard", who was actually one Francis Anna Camuglia, who is apparently a legendary centerfold.
The story is related on the Blanton blog, and it is really amusing. Her resemblance was immediately noted in March 1967 by the boys in her high school, which I don't doubt. She's almost a dead ringer for Gerard, save that, if anything, she was actually prettier in this photograph. Their nose structure and generally their facial features are amazingly similar. Blanton relates that she used this to play a joke on her mother, holding the centerfold like depicted and briefly fooling her mother into thinking that she'd posed for Playboy. Apparently Ms. Gerard was extremely top heavy, and when folded out it becomes apparent that Gerard and Blanton are not the same person.
So why am I posting this here? Cute story?
I suppose it is a cute story, and Blanton really had a sense of humor and still does. But we're posting this for other reasons.
Gerard is apparently a famous playboy centerfold, for the very reason noted. The 1960s was before silicone and she was very top heavy, in an era when Playboy centerfolds were all pretty top heavy. That she still has a following is remarkable, particularly since she died in 1985.
And that's the reason we're noting her.
She was born, as noted, Francis Camuglia, and as her find a grave entry shows, she was from a large, almost certainly Italian, and almost certainly Catholic, family. By the time she was photographed in 1966 or 1967, she'd already been married and maybe divorced, and was off to a rocky start in life. If she wasn't yet divorced, she soon would be. She'd marry one more time, and go on to a life in California, working for an astrologer.
In 1985 she killed herself at age 37.
Blanton, in contrast, when on to high education, a successful life, and retired to Mexico. She's travelled all over the world, as her blog demonstrates.
At the time of the photo, Blanton and Gerard really weren't very far apart in age. Camuglia was born in May 1948, in which case she was a mere 19 years old when she appeared in Playboy, and only barely 19 years old at that. Blanton was younger, but not by much, probably only one or two years at the very most.
Blanton went on to success. Gerard was reduced in the public mind to her naked visage, a cute girl with (apparently) large assets.
The 1960s, while there was still open, and sometime legal, opposition to it, was right at the height of public acceptance of Playboy. In the 1970s you'd still go into grocery stores and it was available the way other magazines are now, on your way to the checker. It retained an image of "dirty" and glamourous all at the same time.
What the public didn't know was the long lasting effects pornography would have on the American public and psyche and how damaging it would be. Nor did it know about the horrific abuse so many of these young women went through. Not only did it basically brand them, to a degree, for life, making them something like harem slaves in a way of prior eras, valued for their physical assets and little else, they were often subject to horrific physical abuse.
I don't know about Gerard and I'm not going to look it up either. Entering her name would no doubt provide piles of pornographic links. That she was somebody who killed herself I already knew. There's a really good documentary, Secrets of Playboy, that really dives into what happened to so many of these people. Playboy left a pool of drugs and blood on the floor that we're still trying to mop up.
Her headstone is marked "Our Bubbie - Beloved Daughter and Sister".
Politics, as they say, makes for strange bedfellows.
New Senate Whip John Barrasso with President Elect Donald Trump and President John F. Kennedy with his nephew Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Politics is, we also know, the art of compromise, but to what extent is a politician to blame for compromising with the truth?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been chosen by Donald Trump to be the new head of Health and Human Services.
He is, frankly, a nutter on health topics, who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near such a post.
John Barrasso is, by training, an orthopedic surgeon.
I've long suspected, well I'm pretty much certain, that Dr. Barrasso doesn't actually believe even half of what he's saying..He's doing it to 1) keep his Senatorial seat; and 2) advance himself in the Senate, even though at his age he could easily retire and be done with it.
Without getting too deep into it, I also believe that once you start compromising on fundamental things, you keep doing it, including with the truth. You don't start off deep into it, but you end up there.
Dr. Barrasso was known, at one time, as "Wyoming's Doctor" and had spots on local television with health minutes, and hosted the Labor Day Marathon. He continued to do this after he became Senator, a spot he was appointed to by the legislature to fill a vacancy before he was elected.
I've met him, as a physician, but can't claim to know him. I've been with him on commercial aircraft numerous times. I've always left him alone, as I figure that while traveling, people don't like to be bothered. I don't. Not everyone was like that, however, and I'd see people who recognized him treat him sort of like fans treated Elvis Presley.
Dr. Barrasso is originally from Pennsylvania. With a solid Italian American parentage, and an early Catholic education, I'd guess, but don't know, that he was a Catholic up until some point. He list himself as a Presbyterian now, and has been divorced, and later remarried. He's in his early 70s. Early on, his positions were clearly moderate Republican, but starting at least as early as 2016 they began to rapidly head towards Trumpism. He had a right wing challenger in the GOP primary last go around, and while I think the chances of him every losing were small, he went hardcore to the right.
Now he's the whip. Trump is going to expect him to whip up support for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, holds some of the nuttiest ideas on healthcare, and particularly vaccines, imaginable. He shouldn't be anywhere near the Department of Health and Human Services.
Will Barrasso choke those down and support them.
Again, people don't get to supporting anything overnight. Some do rapidly, some over decades.
RFK, Jr. has no business in this office.
Kennedys
Before moving on, hasn't the country had enough of the Kennedys?
I certainly have.
The over tattooed and expropriation.
Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, is taking a lot of flak. Some of it is for things he's said or believes
Some of it for his tattoos, which are interpreted to mean things which they might not.
One of those tattoos is of a Jerusalem Cross.
The Jerusalem cross consists of a large cross potent surrounded by four smaller Greek crosses representing the spread of the gospel to the four corners of the earth. It was used as the emblem and coat of arms of the Kingdom of Jerusalem after 1099.
Hegeth is a member of a church which is part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. Therefore, he's appropriating a Catholic symbol, while he's not a Catholic. Indeed, he's not even close, as he's on his third spouse, something no adherent Catholic would have done.
He also has a tattoo on a bicep that states Deus vult, "God wills", a phrase that dates back to the First Crusade, but which has been appropriated by many groups over the years. And it doesn't stop there.
“Israel, Christianity and my faith are things I care deeply about,” he's stated.
Perhaps he should learn more about the faith espoused by the symbols that he's had inked on himself. Indeed, quite frankly, the men who cried Deus vult in the 11th Century and those who fought to defend the Kingdom of Jerusalem would have regarded him as a heretic.
Anyhow, one thing that I've worried about since the rise of Christian Nationalist is that Catholics are the ones who are going to take a beating in the end, even though its really a Protestant movement. I can already see it starting to happen. Former Senator Adam Kinzinger, who comments heavily on Blue Sky and Twitter, had a post noting that "the Crusades weren't Christian". Oh yes they were, the thing they weren't is the edited version that English Protestants came up with to attempt to tar and feather the Church. Others have been running around claiming that the Jerusalem Cross, which Catholics use a lot, is a Nazi symbol, which it isn't, or a camouflaged swastika, which it isn't.
The United States remains a Protestant nation, including in the way it reacts to symbols and in its misunderstanding of history.
All this serves, I'd note, to bury a deeper item that should be of actual concern, which is the American Evangelical view towards Israel. This is not universal, by any means, but there's a branch of American Evangelicalism which sees itself as having a direct role in bringing about the Second Coming through its interaction with Israel. According to somebody who knew him and commented on it recently (therefore at least making it somewhat suspect) former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who has been nominated by Trump to be Ambassador to Israel, and who is a Baptist minister, has those views.
Really, people with the apparent views of Huckabee and Kinzinger really have no business in the offices they've been nominated to serve in.
Hairless wonders.
This is sort of an odd aside, but the huge increase in male tattoos, including chest tattoos, has caused me to wonder, has there been a reduction in male chest hair in recent years?
Chest hair is a secondary male characteristic which is caused by a variety of genetic factors. One of those is a high testosterone level, and for that reason, hairy chests have gone, at any one time, from being regarded as "brutish" to sexy. Because of the conditions of the Second World War, Americans were acclimated for a time to seeing men shirtless, which was unusual, and for a good several decades after the war, hairy chested men, or just flat out hairy men in general, were in vogue. Indeed I can recall seeing some 1960s vintage war movie with Fabian in it which was ridiculously hairy.
This is clearly really out now, but it still raises the question, what's going on. Personally, I couldn't have a giant chest tattoo like Hegseth for the same reason that Tom Selleck couldn't. I doubt that I really could have a tattoo anywhere safe for the the generally non visible part of my arms either.
It's interesting to note that there has been a substantial reduction in detected testosterone levels in the US since the 1980s.**
Maybe RFK, Jr. can look into that.
Creeps
It's a real irony that the man so many Christian Evangelicals saw as the Christian candidate has such a horrible personal tract record at least in the sexual ethics category, but perhaps that fact should cause us to be less than surprised that he nominated Matt Gaetz to be Attorney General of the United States.
There seem to be no doubt that Gaetz dabbled down in this category to a 17 year old. Yes, he wasn't prosecuted, but he may have had a credible defense based on scienter. According to at least one report, once he learned she was 17, he abstained from her favors until she was 18.
The thing here, however, is that this conduct is completely immoral. Not only is it sex outside of marriage, which Christianity, but Gaetz is a creep who is fishing in the bottom of the well. Frankly, this deserves further investigation as most 17 year olds or 18 year olds would have had no interest in Gaetz, so something should be done to figure out why they did and what's behind that.
This guy has no significant legal experience and shouldn't be anywhere near the AG's office.
Scenes from the American dumpster fire.
Strange bedfellows indeed.
At this point, however, if Matt Gaetz invited Mike Johnson over to the Playboy Grotto, if it still existed, I'd expect him to go.
Something about this photo just shows how trashy American culture has become.
Trashy.
I think there is sort of a faction in the Republican Party that has a strange kind of... sort of homoerotic fascination for Putin.
Boris Johnson recently stated this.
The fascination for Putin (who has a hairless chest, I'd note) is pretty weird.
Trad Rant
The recent election seems to have bubbled some stuff up from the bottom of the cultural dutch oven, and not just stuff like the weird things noted in the two above entries. Some of this is interesting to ponder, including pondering whether its a serious trend or something else.
One of them is the emergence of secular (and religious) trad women, holding a romantic, it seems, view of the not so distant path.
Here's an example. Interesting trad rant starting at 21:00.
I don't want to go to far in criticizing this, really, as it has a real appeal, as does a lot of sort of agrarian conservatism and Chesteronian distributism I see creeping into the culture, sort of sideways. These people are sincere, and there's a real appeal to it. Shoot, I'd live an agrarian life if people around me would allow it, or so I tell myself.
Others tell themselves that too, and also mock themselves, as for example, here:
More specifically, radical refusal to consent to the spirit of the times. It's part of what I admire in them, but it didn't strike me until recently.
John Pondoro Taylor, in his memoirs, recalled having seen Maasai walking through Nairobi as if it simply wasn't there, as they had always done, dressed in their traditional fashion, and carrying spears. On their way from one place to another, refusing to consent that the development of the city meant anything in real terms.
I was recently waiting in the Church for the confession line to form. One of the Mantilla Girls walked in. I've seen this one once or twice before, but not at this Church. She not only wears the mantilla, and is very pretty, but she carries herself with pride.
They don't all do that. Some of the younger women who wear chapel veils do so very naturally. Some sort of timidly, or uncomfortably. With at least one, and I could be massively off the mark, it's almost sort of an affectation. But here, you see something quite different.
Or so it seems.
I don't know her. I could be wrong. But it's clear she isn't timid and it's not an affectation.
It is, it seems to me, a radical rejection of the modern secular world in favor of existential nature.
For those who believe in the modern world, in modernism, or the spirit of the times, or who are hostile to religion, that may seem like a shocking statement. But the essence of our modern lives (or post-modern, if you insist) is a radical rejection of nature, most particularly our own natures. Wearing a chapel veil indicates that the person deeply believes in a set of beliefs that are enormously grounded in nature. The wearer is a woman, in radical alignment with biology in every sense, and accepting everything that means, including what the modern world, left and right, detest. I nolunt. She's accepting of the derision, and ironically, or in actuality not ironically, probably vastly happier than those who have accommodated modernity.
Moreover, those who think they're reaching out for a radical inclusion of the natural, who don't take the same approach, never can quite reach authenticity. There can always be a slight feeling that something isn't authentic, and there isn't. Reserving an element of modernity defeats it.
On Saturday, March 30, Pro Hamas protestors interrupted the Easter Vigil Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City.
Why St. Patrick's?
For the same reason, most likely, that LGBTQ+ figures had a protesting funeral there recently. People are drawn to Catholic places, as they're real, and therefore attention is paid to them.
Why her?
Courtney Love, in an interview with Standard, stated; "Taylor is not important. She might be a safe space for girls, and she's probably the Madonna of now, but she's not interesting as an artist."
This followed Billie Eilish criticizing, sort of anonymously, "wasteful artists" who put out multiple vinyl editions, an apparent softball for sustainability. She later said her comments weren't directed at Swift.
Hmmm. . .
Why are these chanteuses dissing Taylor?
I don't really know, but I will note that Love commenting on who is important and interesting in laughable. Is Love "important" or "interesting"? If she is, she might be interesting as she's the late wife of the tragic Curt Cobane, whom I don't find to have been particularly important, but certainly tragic. And for Eilish, she's sort of a teenage train wreck who probably needs to get over her weird diet and flipping between hiding her form and flaunting it.
Taylor is interesting because she's a musical success. I don't like her music, which I find to be juvenile, but I will note that appearance wise she's a throwback almost to the 1940s, and appears to have gained success while being basically normal in every fashion.
Culturally, therefore, she might be sort of important in a way.
Love, and Eilish, on the other hand, might be fairly unimportant in every sense. Musically, right now, it's hard to see what actually is important. Whoever they are, they aren't in pop music.
Indeed, much of society seems to be grasping for the authentic and important right now, without much out there in the culture offering it.
Since that time, this trend locally has noticeably increased. It's really remarkable.
For whatever reason, I'm a student of people, so I take notice of what they wear. I'm probably in a minority of sorts that way. What people wear at Mass is a common topic in Cyber Catholic circles, but the recent turn towards the conservative amongst young, white, female Catholic parishioners is really remarkable. It's a real rejection of the cultural norm of our era.
Indeed, very recently, even amongst those young women who were part of this group, there's suddenly a change. One young woman who is routinely at Mass with her family on Sundays, and who typically showed a lot of shoulder (no, there's no problem with that) is now covering up hugely. Something's changed. It doesn't, however, carry over to Hispanic or Native American young women, both of whom continue to dress the way they have. Hispanics have always dressed very conservatively at Mass, but not in a trad fashion. They're keeping on keeping on with that.
News, real news but in a rumor fashion, leaked out recently that the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Byzantine Church is looking at putting in a mission in Casper, which would be a mission of a mission. I don't know how many Ukrainian Catholics there may be in town, but I'll bet it's a tiny number. I also bet that the mission church that's thinking of establishing a mission here, which is out of Cody, serves a mostly non-Eastern Rite community.
Something is going on there too. At a time at which some in the Latin Rite seem focused on a topic that's frankly jumped the shark, by and large, and which is really a matter of European culture, not biology, the young and rank and file in the pews seem to be moving on.
Becoming a parody of yourself
One of the risks of taking the long reach for something is that you can end up actually becoming unauthentic in your quest for authenticity.
I'm reminded of Courtney Love again.
On her Wikipedia page, there's a picture of Love wearing a kokoshnik, a stiff hat associated with Russian women. Russian women don't wear them anymore, and I'm sure they haven't for eons. She's wearing it with a miniskirt. It looked absurd, but was probably meant to make a statement. Or here's another example:
I don't know who Japanese Breakfast is (or for that matter what an actual Japanese breakfast is) but they've showed up on this Twitter headline:
Japanese Breakfast is too busy returning to Coachella and making 'music for bottoms' to care about your 'basic' fashion sense
Oh, bull. That's the exact thing you say when you've tuned your fashion sense to look like you don't have a fashion sense, so you can appear to stay edgy for Coachella.
M'eh.
Exactly.
I note this as in the pews are a young couple, they're not married but perhaps engaged, whose family I somewhat know. From a very conservative background, they're trying to affect the disaffected but conservative look to the max. Unwashed hair and, for the young man, probably third or fourth hand overcoats from the 1970s with huge hounds tooth pattern. The young woman wears, of course, a chapel veil but also is affecting plain to the maximum extent possible, which is detracting a bit from her appearance. I do love her very round, plain glasses, however.
Anyhow, when going for something crosses over into sort of a parody, you've gone too far.
Lost
Anyhow, I think this trend has been going on for a while. It explains the entire Hipster look that's still with us, and was much in force several years ago.
Some days, when I leave the office, there's a young woman coming in. She's either a Native American or a Hispanic from somewhere south of the border. She's always dressed very conservatively, with dresses that remind me of what Latin American women traditionally wear. She always has a big smile when you see and acknowledge her.
