Francesca Lia Block knows the TRUE ME

I used to read a lot more than I do these days. In fact, I was a member of Bellingham's Teen Library Committee, which meant that I and other members (incl. Cedric, of course) got first dibs on new young adult books, ate snacks, played games and hung out with our cool group leader, Jen. I still see Jen when I occasionally stop at the library, and we both feel pretty old when we catch up, because now I've graduated college and she's getting ready to have another baby. MAN.

Back when I lived at the library, though, I was really into one author who opened me up to a World of Wonderment that I had not previously known. Francesca Lia Block was her name, and she liked to make everything about teen life into a magical mess. I started off with the Dangerous Angels series and ate up every other book that was almost completely similar to these stories, including Echo, Violet and Claire, Girl Goddess #9, The Hanged Man, I Was a Teenage Fairy, Blah Blah Blah Another Book About Whimsical Young Ladies, and so on. I also got my hands on her rarer fantasy novels (Ecstasia and Primavera) and a volume of embarrassingly bad erotica (Nymph). I don't think I ever finished it, because even if it might have been an amusing way to learn about sex, she just wrote the word "cock" way too much and I liked my FLB to be a little more innocent and, well, whimsical. The girls in her stories had so much fun and didn't seem to be tied down by parents or rules or reality in any way, and of course I wished I could live like them, even if Weetzie Bat and Co. were a lot more emotionally disturbed than I could have imagined ever becoming at age 15. I sure tried, though!

It wasn't only Ms Block's fiction that I got into; I also read and was ~highly inspired~ by her book Zine Scene, which her official site describes as having "funky, fun, fertile ideas" for how to make yr own zines. From what I remember of it, this is a Tru Enough description. I churned out six (6) issues of a zine that have since been destroyed because I grew to become highly ashamed of each one's contents. I did distribute them to some folks, but I hope that they've lost their copies, because while there may have been some funky or fun or fertile bits in each, this is also where the bulk of my angst and immaturity showed, and even a year after I stopped making them, looking back on what I had done made me feel pretty darn stupid. Thanks a lot, Francesca.

Maybe I was more like the heroines in the books I absorbed than I would like to admit, even now. I read so many of them that I must have been influenced in some way, just like every kid these days wants to be a damn vampire after they've read the Twilight books. It might be fun to re-read all those books and also catch up with what FLB has written since then. Perhaps I will remember what made me like them, and be able to reconcile with any emo side-effects that may have occurred along the way.

Scene Hair: The Ultimate Thing That I Don't Understand

I have a special gift for my reader(s) this evening: a really long slide show of pictures of scene kids and their hair, in order that us old folks might have a better idea of who/what they are, so that we won't mistake them for lost circus clowns when we see them standing around downtown smoking cigarettes. I would suggest pausing the video/keeping the sound off and just dragging along the progress bar to move more quickly through the photos, because this vid is over five minutes long.

BONUS CHALLENGE! Can U spot Jeffree Star and another person who looks exceptionally draglicious?



Thanks go out to whatever 17-year-old wannabe put this tripe together.

Notebook Tidbits: Pop Star Overload

Okay, DON'T GET ME WRONG, Cedric and I were -not- serious fans of Christina or Britney, and by 8th grade our love for Madonna had turned into somewhat of a mockery, but there is plenty of material in one volume of our notebooks to show that we paid attention to what these chicks had going on at the time. I wish I had a scanner to provide more high-quality images, but as always, you can click to enlarge the photos below in order to view them in greater detail. First, I give you BATTLE ROYALE - Madonna vs. Britney. This genius concept was developed by Cedric to determine who of two celebrities were cooler, based on various aspects of their work and famousity (I made that up, WHATEVER). The text isn't all visible but the point is that Madge wins by a landslide.



Ceddog really kept up with what was going on with each popstar at the time, and really, nothing has changed since then, and it's been what, 9 years since he wrote this? PROPHETIC.



Detail of the Battle table, including lifelike drawings of Mad and Brit.



We kind of really loathed/morbidly loved Christina Aguilera. She was in her "Dirrty" phase circa 1999, which we found both sickening and hilarious. In my adolescent development class this past summer quarter, we watched the "Dirrty" music video as an example of what is being marketed towards teens as "cool" and "sexy," and even though the example is a little dated and I'm a little older, I was truly shocked at how disgusting I find the video now. And I was watching that at age 13 as entertainment? I never took the sexual overtones seriously or tried to emulate X-Tina in any way, but I'm sure a lot of girls even younger than me really did. Have a look for yourself and tell me this is not hideously inappropriate:



I really have no words. When I watched that video with my class, everyone's mouths were just agape. We're all in our twenties, we should have been able to laugh at it, it should have seemed "tame" to us after we've matured a bit, but really, it seemed worse than it ever did in 8th grade. Shame, Christina!



A tiny catsuited X-Tina in platforms Color-by-Number by Cedric. These things never got fully colored in.



Christina wasn't the only one slutting it up at the time--Britney Spears had to keep up and break away from her benign "I'm Not a Girl/Not Yet a Woman" image by wearing bejeweled, fleshtoned body suits onstage and crop tops and torn up booty shorts from day to day. Really, those of us barging into teenagehood in this era were the first to experience the onslaught of whorishness that continues to this day. Now, it's hardly ever given a second thought--that's just what pop stars do. "Genie" Christina and "...Baby" Britney are dead. Now they're mothers, but thank Goodness they both have sons, otherwise they'd be toting little girls around in infantile tank tops and hotpants. Um, I have to go now. That last image makes me feel like hurling. Oops! ...I did it to myself.

the Madonna invasion of 5th grade

Ya know, it wasn't all about the boys when it came to my musical tastes growing up. In fact, the first CD I ever owned was Madonna's Ray of Light, which I think my mom got for me to go along with my birthday boom box. Ever since then, I have tried to maintain interest in Her Madgesty's music, but nothing has really measured up to RoL. This was pre-Kabbalah Madonna, who was deciding whether she wanted to be Indian ( by recording "Shanti/Ashtangi") , Japanese ( by creating "Nothing Really Matters" video and ensuing Geishic hairstyle), or English (by marrying Guy Ritchie), and I loved all of it. I even used a clip from the album's title track in my class's modernized version of Cinderella. There were no obnoxious Justin Timberlake or Timbaland or Tim-anything collaborations on this disc, just Madonna. Even at age 10, I could appreciate a simple, well-made album, and I still count it among my favorites, although I really cannot say the same for anything that Madonna has put out in recent years. American Life (NOT the title track) is almost up there, but it doesn't hold the same nostalgic value, and that may actually be what gives me such a rosy view of Ray of Light. Isn't that what I'm trying to make this blog about, though? It's all good, looking back on it. Reality doesn't matter. I'm not going to go off and read any critical reviews of Madonna's albums to decide what I should be listening to. I just know it AIN'T gonna be "4 Minutes" or whatever her latest ""hit"" is. I don't even know.

Bonus notebook post: Prom Tom!

I was pretty darn obsessed with blink-182 in 8th grade. So much so, that I created a color-by-number (a notebook tradition of mine and Cedric's since 6th grade) of Tom DeLonge's prom photo that I had nabbed from YM magazine. Behold the collaborative artistic abilities of the two of us--Cedric added a bottom half that rivaled Christina Aguilera's VMA getup that year. Please note that you can click on these images to see the finer details of what we created so many years ago.



My cover collage homage to the band, including the photo that inspired my art piece.



Number 1 never got colored because neither of us had a brown pen. I think Cedric's giant set of Pentel markers had long since dried up from countless coloring assignments in 6th and 7th grades.



Tom is singing "All the Prom Things," which is a lot like his other song, "All the Small Things."

There you have it--more proof of how unbearably cool and bored we were in 8th grade. I don't even remember what went on in any of my classes that year, except that we watched that Miracle of Life movie in science class. I'll have to see if I have any notes from then. If not, I must have been highly intrigued.

those Bop centerfolds have to come down sometime

Teens 'n' tweens are super into music. Like, duh. I know I had my obsessions. It actually started pretty early on for me, when Hanson burst onto the scene in 4th grade. I had their album Middle of Nowhere on tape and listened to it constantly. I didn't need any other album; this was really it. And they were like, a real band. They played their own instruments and, presumably, wrote their own songs.Something changed around 5th or 6th grade though. The infestation of the boy bands began, and each girl had to pick which one was her fave. I decided on Backstreet Boys. I think they came out a little bit before NSync, and they were just... better. More sophisticated. Better voices. Better hair. A.J. McLean was my favorite BSB. He was the bad boy. He had that mischevious streak that drove the girls wild. No wonder he became a porn addict and alcoholic after the demise of the band. I kinda still love him though.

Since Backstreet Boys and NSync--along with the poor man's versions of the two (I'm thinking LFO, 98 Degrees, or any other group that didn't have the necessary 5 members)--lost their swagger sometime around Y2K, who has replaced them in the hearts and lockers of teens everywhere? Is pop music still really what's hott? This blogger reports that the bedsheet-wearing Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift-dating Jonas Brothers are insanely popular with the tween set, so maybe pop acts still have an audience for those 12 and under, but these seem too babyish for teens. By the time I was 15, I was on the hunt for "real" music and started listening to bands like Modest Mouse. So indie. Nevermind that my real motivation behind downloading their stuff was because the jerk I had a crush on at the time listened to them. They were okay. I also got into grrl bands like Le Tigre and Sleater-Kinney (still so good), started making zines, keeping an angsty LiveJournal, and it goes from there. Is this the natural shift that happens for every kid at this time in life? Is there always this drastic switch from Jesse McCartney to My Chemical Romance? I think it's just the simple fact that adolescents are susceptible to the changing tides of trends. Their love for Tokio Hotel will fade soon, but if they're anything like me, they will come back to this music in a few years and remember what they loved about it. Or maybe they'll realize how truly awful their favorite bands really are.

aren't JNCO jeans still cool???

This blog is already making me feel hideously old. I wanted to write a post about fashion in the 12-18 set, but I realized that I don't even know what kids wear anymore. I just read this article obviously written by and for moms about emo fashion, which didn't exist in the capacity it does today when I was in high school. I think I was vaguely emo because I wore shit from Goodwill and put buttons on my bag etc etc but now it's an official "style" of its own. Oh and there's a how-to guide for teens with no identity who would like to adopt this style for themselves. Get it right, losers! Don't be like this desperate 13-year-old who's gonna show up on the first day of 7th grade wearing bracelets from the 25-cent machine. Plzzz.

In the same vein as emo is "scene" fashion, which I do not understand in the slightest. I don't know what the scene is, where it is located, or how these girls got invited, but to be a part of it you have to look like a cartoon character, pretty much. This insanity definitely did not exist when I was in high school. The chick at the forefront of this plague is Kiki Kannibal, who is 16 or something, and "designs" her own "kouture" necklaces shaped like bats and diamonds and strawberries, and apparently Jeffree Starr is a fan. Hott. If you want to get yrself a scene hairstyle, which appears to be the most important part of this look, here's a page where you can go to get a lil' inspiration. Just envision a dead racoon on your head and you're halfway there.


At the High End, um, end of the spectrum, we have Tavi, the prepubescent fashionista with a penchant for things that don't fit her because she is twelve years old. Her fashion blog is full of photos of her posing in Mommy's discarded house dresses from the 70s and American Apparel tights. So chic. This child has some sort of following of 20-somethings who think she is ""so articulated"" and ""so witty and edgy"" for her age, and it does appear that she is, and is actually the person maintaining her blog, but that is what boggles my mind even more. When I was 12 years old, I wore whatever my grandma bought for me and dolled it up with butterfly clips from the dollar store. That was okay, because I was a child. I wasn't expected to look chic. I didn't even know what "chic" meant. Not that Tavi actually looks like anything but a kid playing dress-up, but she seems to take herself very seriously, which disturbs me. She should probably be watching Hannah Montana. Or is that for younger girls?? Ugh, I don't even KNOW.

It appears that I need to look into this fashion stuff a bit more, because I feel like a straight up granny right now. There is so much that I just missed by finishing school when I did. For those who don't know, though, I am but 21 years of age... 21 very ancient years. This is terrible.