A Forehead’s Empty Without Them
From the pages of Cosmopolitan, I bring you fashion news:
The halo brow, the brainchild of 16-year-old Hannah Lyne, took inspiration from one of this year’s brow trends on Instagram. “I was having a conversation with a friend trying to come up with a new idea for a look, and all of a sudden it came to me that I should connect my brow tails,” Hannah said in an interview with PopSugar. “This look was influenced by fishtail brows; seeing the way my brow flicked upwards inspired the idea of just carrying the brow on until it met in the middle.”
They’re “strangely beautiful,” it says here.
Via dicentra.
Looks like one of the less convincing races from star trek…. i could see kirk hitting that.
You might expect the original source, PopSugar, to be some vacuous time filler like the Advanced Boiler Repair Quarterly.
Think again.
Now even more “strangely beautiful.”
Now even more “strangely beautiful.”
A goatee gone horribly, horribly wrong.
Now even more “strangely beautiful.”
It gave me a headache and put me right off my feed. (>_<) (My coffee doesn't even taste right now... curse you Thompson!)
What is obvious is that Hannah trancends all false boundaries and obsolete categories of what constitutes gender,art, beauty, fashion, time, space, and eternity.
The unibrow transgresses and liberates every socially constructed concept of femininity and intersects politics, class, and oppressive “free market” economic structures.
The Unibrow is the new “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” in the revolutionary war of the 21sr Century.
Adam wins the Internets.
Hey, anyone remember the film Gravity? The be-all, end-all, hyper-realistic, Hollywood’s-state-of-the-art, $56 million dollar scifi film of all time? OMG, what an epic. OMG, Clooney and Bollock. OMG.
Somehow the unknown Russian film Salyut 7 is flatly superior to Gravity in every single way.
Anyone remember the WWII tank epic Fury? The be-all, end-all, hyper-realistic, Hollywood’s-state-of-the-art, $68 million dollar tank warfare film of all time? OMG, what an epic. OMG, Pitt and LaBeouf and Shermans and Tigers. OMG.
Somehow the unknown Russian film White Tiger is flatly superior to Fury in every single way.
So what’s Ten’s convoluted point, given our topic of cultural madness. Well, how does a piddling nationalized film industry from Russia – I know, huh? – pull off what would have been American style story-telling art pieces had the US not gone mad? Had the West not gone mad?
What is art, anyway? Is it deeply humanistic film? Noble, moving, uplifting narrative? As expressed in the lineage of, say, a classical composer or playwright, is it honor and humility and transcendence all at once? Is it an epic portrayal of an equally epic episode of what humanity can and should be? Must be in order to survive ourselves?
Because if that’s the case the US and much of the west is simply doomed. It cannot stand on this precarious, temporary mountain of debt while at the same time exulting its own cultural cancer.
The Communist Chinese educate their kids in the classics, typically Western. Wonder where STEM went? There. They went there. The Russians emerge from countless fatal historical wounds to produce spectacular cinema. And the US? What does the US contribute to uplift the human experience and trajectory? Topless twatter pics from narcissists? Runway fashion involving trash cans on suspenders or rubber pipe or men in girls clothes? Performing theatre in transparent plastic sweat suits? The stuff our diligent host dredges up from the – and get this – academy to compete with the very worst of our entertainment complex, the misfits and head cases in charge of furthering the arts?
As is said, what cannot last shall not last. At this point it’d be a relief to find that all we’d made were amphitheaters and bread and circuses. It’d be a relief to learn that we could only fall that far.
“(My coffee doesn’t even taste right now… curse you Thompson!)”
I wonder what David’s reply to this will be…
[ Dramatic pause. ]
No refunds. Credit note only.
Ten. The Chinese value STEM on a surface level. In practice they are not interested in STEM but in the money of STEM jobs.
To get those jobs the vast majority will cram or cheat to get grades.
What few do is learn it for its own sake.
The Westneed not fear them for a while yet. Not while a cheat is favoured over an honest worker.
And Xi has signalled strongly that he wants a system open to corruption and not one ruled by law or honesty.
To get those jobs the vast majority will cram or cheat to get grades.
You do realize how tempting it is to play off that, CD?
Even if there were parity, how’s the west justify running its books hundreds of trillions into the red to maintain its bogus status quo?
Turn that into a question: Other than by patriotic platitude, they being vestiges of variable self-image, what exactly recommends the West these days?
If anyone has trouble with comments not appearing, email me and I’ll rattle the spam filter.
Whilst reading Ten’s rant, I was all, “Amen, Preach Brother!” Until he drew much broader conclusions. For which I thank Chester for addressing. That said…
Turn that into a question: Other than by patriotic platitude, they being vestiges of variable self-image, what exactly recommends the West these days?
China has vast resources, much like Russia, and to be honest, much like the US and the West. This will permit bad ideas to perpetuate until the inevitable crash. Unlike China and Russia, however, the West for all its faults still permits considerable freedom, still allows its individuals to achieve without too much concern with them threatening the power structure. An aside, I partly believe this is true because we generally have kept the footprint of our governments relatively small. Relatively….but back to the point…How long do you suppose an Elon Musk or Mark Cuban or Steve Woz, etc. etc. etc. would be able to indulge in their resource sucking enterprises without the much more intrusive, paranoid, etc. government structures of C & R taking them out? Much of what these entrepreneurs spend their money on goes to shit. But because it is their money, they learn from their mistakes and go on to do other daring things that do eventually pan out. Government centered/mafioso style countries will not produce such wonders because they cogs in their machines dare not to dare.
That said as well, much of your focus, Ten, is on the arts and an education system, both of which in C & R’s context are rote and generally uninformed by real world experience. Partly due to what I just said above. People from those countries who really wish to pursue their own dreams will not remain there. Though I might add to your point about the superiority (taking your word for it) of Russian movies to Hollywood…This is, I think, a very recent matter. And the arts rarely are informed by reality. However I am of the persuasion that repression is actually quite good for the arts. It introduces a dose of reality to the process such that the artist has to put much more thought into his next move. Not that seeing someone take a shit on a stage in some backwater Russian bar would surprise me much, but what would surprise me would be to see anyone there dare call it “art”. Or to see Putin and his cosa nostra pay for it.
I’ll bring my comment into sharper focus, WTP.
When going misty-eyed over great western nobility and valor, many of our compatriots automatically appeal to the vagueness of our collected nationalistic sensibilities that are actually quite unexamined. Our sense of what we call “free markets”, the king dollar, our purported liberties, our appeals to our own productivity – we root this last one in some even vaguer notions about “Judeo-Christian” values and rising early and apple pie – and the whole assumption that heredity created an unassailable, undiminished, undeniable character and that that character could always and would always prevail.
It’s the same subtext that powers scores of our traditional but obsolete narratives, and conversely, it’s that narrative that the psychotic left tears at as madly as it can. Both sides of the cultural appeal amp up their appeals to the same thing. It’s everywhere. It is our remaining morality, this senseless culture war over nonsense and image.
It’s crap. Anthems in football stadiums are the new American bellwether of virtue and goodness yet this display is the most obvious and the most obviously idiotic barometer we could have chosen – in this senseless rite are our proxied opponents arranged for us in ranks for our amphitheater entertainment; white knights and black knights and city versus city and culture versus culture and like that. That’s the cartooned version of American virtue and we adore it. It’s even newsworthy, night after night.
But then there’s the stuff the right is simply ignorant about and evidently proudly so. This is no “free market”; it’s infinitely far from one, actually. It’s a full-on corporatocracy. “Liberty” is buying lobbyists from that vast industry and calling it free speech, and that’s before we examine the highly Orwellian state of affairs where the individual and his home and property and rights are concerned.
Productivity? Legions of swarthy, workers riding around in $75,000 pickups with gigantic flags rippling in slow motion on the way to the plant while patriotic, block-lettered appeals to some undefined greatness embellish these televised fantasies of ours? That’s about the extent of our great, noble productivity. We’re awash in welfare and bankrupt pension programs and disability claims and prescription drug plans and socialized medicine and sheer unmitigated debt to the tune of about a two hundred trillion dollars. The dollar? A quarter quadrillion dollars deep in bank derivatives itself.
So what then? The arts? Academics? What exactly?
I think your view is a little incomplete, WTP. The appeal to coming to the US to be free and make money is disproved on its face – just look at the wealth in the world. Whether Putin is whatever NATO says he is is as irrelevant as the rest of our evening news is false. Our great captains of industry? Lunching on K Street as likely as not.
We’re a fraud.
I don’t give a darn about the Russian film guys per se; that was a contrast of cultures, the point of which being meaning in popular narrative. The west simply invents meaning in the text, canon, dogma, and rite of the religion of progressivism, which is a psychosis. This dynamic and tension permeates film (and everything else) yet if you dig around enough you can still find genuine meaning in obscure places, meaning of the likes I haven’t seen out of Hollywood that I can recall even once in twenty years.
While we’re talking about edumacation, it turns out that getting a degree in gender studies is a waste of time and money:
http://twitter.com/DMillardHaskell/status/971430544515960833
” All but one of the top 10 degrees ranked by mid-career salary are in an engineering discipline, with petroleum engineering coming out on top thanks to a median salary of $172,000 10 years after graduation.”
Women’s Studies comes 311th out of 336.
Where do Women’s Studies grads get jobs, aside from teaching Women’s Studies?
Where do Women’s Studies grads get jobs, aside from teaching Women’s Studies?
Maybe HR for a while; then they marry a rich lesbian and settle down.
Ten, The short answer (all I have time for tonight) is I think you’ve spent too much time in or around academia. I get much of what you’re saying in context of specific countries in the West, be it the US or Canada or Oz as we’ve seen quite disappointingly lately. But frauds? No. C & R, there’s your frauds. C is basically what Japan was in the 80’s. Just on a bigger scale. While C has made considerable improvements since the days of Mao (once the boot heel was let up a little, how could they not) but is still for the most part, a shithole country. And based on recent news, looks like Xi and cronies can’t keep their hands off the people’s wallets (or whatever you put renminbis in). Sigh…droning long for a short answer sooo even shorter…screw the arts. Screw academics. We go out in the real world and build things. What we don’t build, we design the things that C builds. We create the wealth that R craves but cannot create, thus they steal. C and R deep down inside still fear our military and industrial power. We just need to stop burning money in the academic, legal, and regulatory domains. And get control of our borders. Without that last part, nothing will matter.
Am I too late to point out that this look has been stolen from the Sci-fi show Star Gate? Christopher Judge rocked a golden version.
I’m afraid that view is unfounded, WTP. We live on debt – I trust you didn’t miss the specifics I listed. That view is in no way whatsoever influenced by academia.
I’m not saying the debt isn’t a problem. A big problem. But to say we live on it is an exaggeration. We waste money on frivolous BS as you point out, which if eliminated would bring the excessive damage of the debt down to a reasonable level. Debt, while I’m definitely not in favor of it per se, is not necessarily a bad thing so long as you get more out of the borrowing than you pay to borrow. C & R have considerable debt as well. It’s just not as transparent as ours. How did China build all those empty cities? There’s no return coming from all that wasted “investment”. That huge damn, which could become a huge disaster, was built with money they have yet to recoup. Those things weren’t built with investors’ moneys.
WTP, to repay all the US has borrowed, left unfunded against future receipts, or crosslinked on air would take everything it produces for the next third of a century or so.
Those righteous tax cuts that just saved the world? The rate of debt simply accelerated. You may want to investigate how we’re living on it before opining.
At this point I’d rather we had built some Potemkin cities and had something to show for it.
At 9% inflation, they can cut the liabilities in half in 8 years.
You know that’s how they’ll do it, too. Hell, they’ll run for re-election by boasting how they’ve turned us all into millionaires!
Halo brows: better than foot-binding.