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I made a mixtape/Spotify playlist for the new year; it’s got Ol’ Dirty Bastard and The Bangles and Blood Brothers and CeCe Peniston and Siouxsie and the Banshees and Sleigh Bells and it’ll make you breathe fire, in a loving way.
You should all make playlists for your new year too and then give them to us (in the comments or at liz@nogoodforme.com).
(dragon pic stolen from here)
i. On Christmas Eve I drank the cutest beer! It’s called Baby Tree and it’s from a brewery named Pretty Things, which is based in my one-time home city of Somerville, Massachusetts. According to the brewery, Baby Tree “is a real tree [that's] filled with waving, happy babies, some of whom may or may not resemble Mikheil Gorbachev.” Pretty Things also has a beer called Fluffy White Rabbits, and another called Confounded Mr. Sisyphus. So yay for whimsy and alcohol.
ii. I meant to tell you this sooner, but here’s a playlist of my 7 fave songs of ’11. Also: FLASH BANG GRENADA.
iii. I’m taking a writing class at UCLA and it starts next week and my instructor is someone you just might know and love. I picked UCLA because my two California dads (him and him) both dropped out of there.
iv. Speaking of Jim Morrison, the other night I had a “Doors double feature” in which I watched When You’re Strange (that documentary narrated by Johnny Depp) and the Doors movie by Oliver Stone. This is my favorite part of the documentary:
And the Oliver Stone movie is still dumb but kinda fun. Val Kilmer’s a wow. My friend has a joke about how “That’s another Thanksgiving you’ve ruined, Jim Morrison!” (as spoken by Meg Ryan) is probably the greatest piece of dialogue in cinematic history. And there are so many pretty shots of L.A., such as these two:
(P.S. Definitely the funniest thing I’ve done so far this week is tweet the sentence “Teenage death girls want my dick not my words” with the hashtag #doorsproblems. COMEDY GOLD, dudes.)
v. The reason all I ever do is watch Doors movies and listen to Doors songs and make Doors jokes is I’m writing a short story about a girl who’s obsessed with Jim Morrison. It’s called “Baby’s in Black,” and it’s for the next installment of the zines that Laura Jane Faulds and I are making for our Beatles book project.
vi. Oh yeah: zines! Back in December our lovely friend Anabela made gorgeous post about Let It Be Beautiful, which was the best early birthday treat evs. And then Miss Moss posted about the project too, and it was so sweet to see our zines near this adorable birthday cake that looks like an owl.
vii. Rock and Roll Tedium is my new favorite Tumblr and I’ll probably submit my story about the time KRS-One was behind me in line at a Whole Foods in the Valley, buying flaxseed oil. Or the time I saw Andre 3000 at the mall.
viii. Another great Tumblr is the NOGOODFORME Tumblr. Follow us! We look like this:
ix. I had a New Year’s party and it was zebra-themed, since (according to shamanicjourney.com) zebras represent balance, agility, uniqueness, power, and sureness of path – all of which seem like good things to invite into 2012. All night long I wore zebra ears, which I bought at Party City for $3. I’d like to wear zebra ears more often, I think. Here’s me wearing zebra ears and smoking a noisemaker, plus some Actual Zebras:
x. Hi I love food!!! Exciting restaurant experiences so far this year: going to Inn of the Seventh Ray for the first time and eating a duck bacon omelette and drinking good red wine and getting waited on by a very dashing German dude with great hair and a cool scarf, all of which helped me mitigate the sadness of that beautiful Eleanor Friedberger song; sharing profiteroles and ice cream with Cathy the other night at Cafe Stella; breakfasting on wood-oven-roasted eggs and grilled bread at Little Dom’s on Sunday morning; and how last Wednesday the bartender at Barbrix put a birthday candle in a cinnamon donut as a belated bday treat for moi.
(P.S. Sage isn’t my favorite restaurant, not even close, but I think they’re brilliant for introducing me to the concept of putting coconut milk in your coffee. Try it; it’s so yum and feels wildly extravagant and wicked health-nutty at the very same time.)
xi. Now for my next birthday I would like many twisted ceramic figurines by Jessica Stoller:
xii. Finally, I love this video of Vinny from Jersey Shore and a bunch of little kids performing a tightly choreographed dance routine to “Pumped Up Kicks” by Foster the People. I wish I had found it right when he posted it, so that it could have been in my life for 142 days already.
Happy new year, guys! xoxo
Oh my god, you guys! On December 1, Figment‘s going to publish the sequel to Girl by Blake Nelson (aka the literary world’s most sartorially inspiring work of fiction, according to Kat). It’s called Dream School and it follows Andrea Marr to college and those tan lines on the cover are weird but, hey, we’re into it. We’re so excited.
Like many a woman born in the late ’70s/early ’80s, my first Girl exposure came via the excerpts that ran in Sassy magazine prior to the book’s publication – I can still see the illustration that accompanied the passage where Andrea runs into Todd Sparrow and Carla at the mall while Christmas-shopping for her brother. The book came out in September 1994 but I remember reading it in the dead of that winter – in my room, under the covers, in a dreamy/melancholic/post-Kurt kinda state of mind. My So-Called Life hit the air around the same time and as a result I always see Andrea as Angela; is that true for you too? Todd looks like this beautiful stoner boy in my gym class who was like the nice/non-aggro version of John Bender; Cybil looks like a girl at my junior-year bus stop who later joined the circus. Anyway: I’m happy Dream School will be out in winter and I look forward to hiding under the covers again, nearly two decades later.
So! Inspired by this great new Tumblr called Here We Girl Again and its Cybil mixtape post, I made a collaborative Spotify playlist that’s full of songs that remind of me of Andrea Marr (and Cybil, and Todd, and Girl in general). Now I want you all to subscribe and add lots of Girl-reminiscent songs: songs you think Andrea Marr would love or should love, songs that would form the soundtrack of the perfect Girl movie that lives only in your head. I keep trying to find a song that sonically/psychically resembles “We Are All Prostitutes” by Sins of Our Fathers but I’m still at a loss, so help me out with that. This mix could use a little more rowdiness and snarl.
I agree with Kat so much, about how Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen make for really wonderful “love icons.” But the other day I realized what I really want is for the world to be full of dudes who are just like Tom Petty. Can we make that happen, please? Can all dudes just start being exactly like Tom Petty in the late-’70s/early-’80s, unapologetically romantic in a chill kind of way, weirdly sexy and prone to wry smiling, smart-alecky and sardonic but ultimately soooooo super-earnest? I love gold-hearted stoner wise guys from Northern Florida, especially those with a penchant for jangly pop-rock. If only there were millions more of them.
Or better yet, dudes could all be a beautiful hybrid of Tom Petty and Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen and Joey Ramone and Ludacris and all the other guys I included on my “it’s cool when dudes are like this” playlist on Spotify. So, boys, if you’re listening, go ahead and subscribe and start embodying all those archetypes, and then let’s go on lots of dates.
P.S. I’d really love for a lady-loving dude to make the male equivalent of this mix, an “it’s cool when girls are like this” sort of thing. Do it and email it to me and I’ll love you forever.
It’s so good! I stole the idea from my friend Tim and his “Freshman Year [Of College]” playlist, which is also so good. My playlist has these musics and others. Sophomore/junior year lasted from 1992 to 1994.
NOGOODFORME.COM is Kat and Liz. We write about style, fashion, music, film, art, photography, pop culture, celebrities, and more: all the good stuff of life. Subscribe to our RSS newsfeed and our comments feed to keep up with our latest stuff!
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