Betty Boop has been a main stay in pop culture. Ever since her debut in the 1930’s, she’s been the apple of everyone’s eye. Not only is she sexy, but she’s sweet as well. Betty would make the perfect “girl next door” type if she was human. Nowadays, she’s on every piece of merchandise. But instead of wearing her, you can become her instead. Become your own sweet and sexy icon.

Images: Google

Your Look for Less From the Fashion Guru:

GoJane.com:

Stud Ruffled Mini Dress, $27.60

Shirred Strapless Stud Dress, $28.80

Belted Colorblock Dress, $24.20

PyramidCollection.com:

Ruby Red Satin Shoes, $49.95

5000Styles.com:

Leg Garters, $4.38 each

JACNO (1957-2009)

Original ´76 punk con los Stinky Toys,  bajo el nombre de Elli & Jacno fue creador del mejor electro-pop francés en los early 80s, productor innovador (Lío y Mathématiques Modernes, entre otros) y etc.

Tout va sauter, Jacno!

When Norman Borlaug died on September 12, 2009, both his death and his life were news to me. I’m sorry for that and I’m not sure how he managed to have escaped my radar screen until he died. Sadly, I know that many others also first learned of him as he passed, like some beautiful but obscure comet, here for a moment and then only a bit of space dust to remind us of the passing.

Borglaug was a Nobel Peace Prize winner and is widely credited with being one of the founders of the Green Movement. That would be impressive enough, but his contributions to the world, in the form of an impressive body of work in agronomy, are thought to have saved over a billion lives. That one person could make such a contribution on the planet and not be a household name is a bit distressing.

Pop vocal artists die and get months of press. Politicians do illegal and/or immoral things and are the subject of dinner table conversation for an entire season or more. Stop a young person on the street and he is likely to know the local NBA star by name, and maybe by stats. How is it that Norman Borlaug traveled under the radar screen for so many of us all of his life?

The answer to that question may be important. As a culture, we Americans seem impressed with glitz and money more than contribution to humanity or planet Earth. I’m not going to harp on this, just connect it to the process of giving our gifts to the world.

When Norman Borlaug died, my mind went to a conversation I’d had a few weeks earlier with a client friend. She has some important things to say and a book that needs to be written, but she’s danced around it for at least a couple of years.

Now, I will be the first to admit that books take time (for most of us). And I have experience with needing to add a few chapters to my own learning before my book chapters could line themselves up. But I suspected that my dear friend was suffering from expert-itis. She just felt she didn’t yet have the credentials to write about what she was already teaching with great skill.

I encouraged her to get on with it and while I encouraged her, I gave myself the same pep talk. We women–more than men, I think–seem to believe that we must have our own equivalent of Norman Borlaug’s many awards (the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, the Padma Vibhushan, and the Nobel Peace Prize among them) before we are qualified to give our gifts to the world. What a waste.

I would like to think that this has nothing to do with that American cultural tendency to be enthralled by glitz and money. I don’t see it on the surface for my client friend and I can’t seem to find it in the inner recesses of my own mind when I go excavating, but I do think that my friend and I have both been subjected to enough cultural influence that we each have at least some bit of an interior three-act play going on in which we achieve modest fame and fortune. If not household names, well maybe our names will become nationally known and respected in one little subgroup of one modest category of our areas of expertise. In other words, we’re not immune.

We might not be immune, but I have met would-be writers who refuse to begin the books they have in mind until they can get a nice advance from a New York publishing house. (Never mind how fantastical that notion is these days.) And I have known other writers who have meaningful things to say but who shelac them over with what they think the public wants to read because they want to be rich and famous more than they want to say something genuine and authentic. In some quarters (fortunately not those in which I am invited often), having fifteen minutes of fame is seen as more important than giving one’s gifts to the world, even if those fifteen minutes are achieved by doing something nefarious.

If only a few more of us went about our lives doing the kind of good that Norman Borlaug did (without his awards but with a similar lack of household name recognition), if we just gave our gifts today and tomorrow and next week without wondering what the payoff would be–or if there even would be a payoff at all–how much Norman Borlaugesque good to the planet and other human beings would result?

I can’t imagine . . . but I think I’d better get on with my shamanic work, get on with that book I keep telling myself I don’t have time to write, and get on with my mentoring of other writers.

How about you?

copyright 2009 by Melanie Mulhall

That’s all the press could say when Marilyn died, you know?

And then when Diana died, all they could say was … really, Elton, you couldn’t muster up a new song? We get the allusions, the comparisons, and so forth. But really?

It is late summer, Vermont, a lazy Sunday. I am a year out of college. My parents and a few sisters and I have gathered at our summer house, a rambling, uninsulated lakeside structure built by my great-grandparents. It’s a place of escape, generation after generation. There’s no TV. No interwebs. Normally we tune out of the real world for a while, swim if the sun is out, read paperbacks on the porch. But today, because it is Sunday, my father has driven out to the general store to buy the paper. And the front-page news is this: Diana has died.

My sisters are in shock, teary. My mother, too. It just doesn’t hit me the same way. I had watched the fairytale wedding on TV in 1981, of course. Spent the intervening years drinking in pictures of the princess in People magazine, which I bought religiously for a time there in junior high and high school. But I think Diana was just enough older that she seemed like … well, a grown-up. I didn’t identify her as a peer, whereas my older sisters did. And my mother must have seen her as a daughter. So they were devastated — and of course they were not alone.

And there was Elton, also devastated. And trundling out his old song in tribute to her. A great song to begin with, one full of new heights of cheesiness, one whose chorus I revel in and warble along with each time I hear it. Perhaps it got into my head early on — I know I spent time as a kid listening to the Yellow Brick Road album with my sister, although I mostly just remember being confused about the Oz reference.

Anyhow I was thinking about all this today, and thinking is it absolute sacrilege to take on a song involving Marilyn, Diana, and Elton — three near untouchable pop icons? And thinking man, you just don’t come across a glam-overlap like that anymore.

The Rocket magazine, April 13 – 27, 1994. EMP|SFM permanent collection, 1996.414.207. Photograph by Charles Peterson.

Jasen’s post yesterday got me reflecting back over the last couple weeks on Michael Jackson’s passing and how huge an event that has proven to be – not only due to Jackson’s legacy, but also because it’s hard to even imagine him gone. It makes me think about the power of popular culture and of how we as a species are more than willing to canonize our cultural heroes. This deification is rooted in the actual attributes that the figures embodied, but as time goes on, we imbue our heroes with the traits that resonate the most within ourselves. Living or dead, our cultural icons begin to lose their actual identity and take on more mythical qualities.

I see this every time I see a teen walking around Seattle wearing a Hendrix, Ramones, or a Kurt Cobain t-shirt. These figures have become something more (and less) than human. They have become specific statement, a point of view, a receptacle for what we want them to be. I was 21 years old and in the U-District in 1994 when I heard on KNDD 107.7 that Kurt Cobain had died. I wasn’t even that much of a Nirvana fan at that time, but it was perplexing and almost inconceivable that he could be gone. Even in 1994 his transition from person to saint was underway, and Cobain was already being touted as the “Voice of a Generation” and other such silly things. The memorial event at Seattle Center soon after with thousands of fans in mourning only illustrated this fascinating process. Cobain’s apotheosis was complete. Gone was Kurt the person, and long live Kurt the messiah and advocate for a generation’s hopes, dreams, angst, and disaffectedness.

It’s only natural for us to idolize and put our heroes on pedestals, and perhaps, in some deep biological way, we need that as a species. But whether it’s Michael Jackson, Kurt Cobain, John Lennon, Elvis Presley, or a myriad of others, it’s important to remember that these were real people, as are we, and their real lives, successes and foibles will always more enlightening and illustrative of the human condition.

-Jacob

Yesterday, Rolling Stone had a small piece on Britney Spears’s latest video for her rereleased song, “Radar.”  RS notes that Spears’s inexplicable equine imagery somewhat mirrors (they go ahead and call it copycatting) Madonna’s matador video for “Take a Bow” (which is a sweet song, by the by).

I mention this in the introduction for this blog, but, the longer she’s around, the more Britney Spears mirrors not Madonna, but Linda Ronstadt.

First things first, this discussion has to be about the concepts of Britney Spears and Linda Ronstadt, namely because the former has no vocal talent outside of sound engineering and the latter is not known for her slick dance moves.

But think about it.  When both performers got started, they were young and had kind of down-home sex appeal.  They both relied on the songwriting of other people to become pop icons.  (The guys over at Sound Opinions argue that Spears is not pop because she’s only selling sex, but, regardless of her music, she is undoubtedly an icon of popular culture.)

Go back to the late ‘90s and early 2000s when Britney posters were a pervasive part of teenage bedrooms.  (Are they still?  The only teenage bedroom I know of now is that of my baby sister, and she likes weird emo crap.)  She was it, right?  Now, if you’re my age, ask your fathers about Linda Ronstadt.  Take a look at (I think) Eric Forman’s room in That ‘70s Show.  In the background, you’ll see the young face of Ronstadt.

If you had asked me circa Baby One More Time, how long Spears would last, I would have been willing to give her three years, tops.  I’m actually vaguely stunned she’s been able to hold on this long.  Teen sensations aren’t supposed to have a very long shelf life.  Where is Tiffany?  Where was Paula Abdul prior to American Idol?  So far out of the imagination was Debbie Gibson that she hardly made a splash when she did her 2005 Playboy shoot.  By all things sensational, Spears should be way off the radar at this point (ha, ha, chuckle, chuckle).

But she’s not.  Even after her Ronstadt-like dip into bizzaro behavior and weight gain (that’s not to say weight gain is necessarily a problem in life, but it played out similarly for their images), Spears has somehow managed to ratchet her way back into the spotlight.  (And not get disastrously tossed from the stage as Ronstadt did in 2004 after deciding to talk politics mid-concert.)

What I wonder about is this: not unlike yesterday’s discussion about clothing, when are you too old to skimp it up and be a pop queen on stage?  When does a singer just sound ridiculous for singing the same songs she sang when she was seventeen?

Wikipedia informs me that Linda Ronstadt helped redefine adult contemporary music.  Now, I love a good Ronstadt/Aaron Neville duet, but, at this rate, I have a hard time seeing Spears making a similar leap.

Toward the end of his Comedy Central special, Nick Swardson makes a crack about how, when we’re old, old people will be listening to rap, this on the assumption that you listen to the music you grew up with.  (Best line: “Your grandmother was a ho.”)  And that’s reasonable.  We’ve all listened to our parents’ Rolling Stones albums.  My mother frequently makes us suffer to “Red Rubber Ball” when taking in a meal at Silver Diner.  But music (or, should I say, good music) grows as the musicians grow.  You don’t hawk the same concept over and over and over again.  Can Britney Spears realistically be in a circus twenty years from now?

I’d like to say no, but since I was wrong about her before, maybe we’ll all be in a nursing home while she struts about the Super Bowl halftime show, still dancing away her youthful heartbreak.  And we’ll buy into it one more time.

The King will be missed.  But haven’t you noticed the post op pictures are always displeasing?  Never have I seen a picture of “White” Michael that did him justice…until now.  Here’s a mixture (and my tribute) of artist interpretations commemorating who I consider the founder of modern music.

THANK YOU HOUSE OF PRETTY!!

Isn’t it remarkable that the recent deaths of an ancient  TV sidekick, a toothy former pin-up girl with a lot of hair,  and a bizarre face-changing pop idle who has been looking like death warmed over for years now , have knocked everything else off the page? Truly America is the most superficial of cultures. Our national literature is contained in “Star” and “People.” Aside from some interesting regional dishes our national serving plate is a Quarter-pounder with cheese. Any day now I expect that the Hubble telescope will be purchased by The Ntional Enquirer and directed to hunt for previously undetected cellulite on the thighs of Megan Fox.

_______________________________________

Related: Now this heavy gravity from the New Yorker of all places: “Michael died today [sickeningly paraphrasing French novelist Albrt Camus' opening in The Stranger: 'Mother died yesterday'] I am here in Los Angeles…but from the moment Michael Jackson died, I’ve been unable to talk or think about anything else. Professionally and environmentally, the world is saying: react, react, react…” Oh I don’t know, it seems these words would be more appropriate, say for the horror going on in Iran (you know, slaughter and torture, the wrenching death video of a young Iranian woman)  than for the albeit sad demise of a disturbed and broken entertainer. BTW, what does this idiot mean by envionmentally? And listen to this: “Twitter, not for the first time, served as the fastest, thickest, and most unruly news feed…once Jackson’s death became a miserable, concrete fact, Twitter became the gates to a palace, and people laid their digital bouquets against the rails…” Give this guy a rose for purple prose, wouldya. I may just have to cancel my digital subscription to that magazine.

________________________________________

Update: Voices of sanity emerging in a slithering sea of mental carcasses:

Give me a break!

Within minutes of the first reports, it was clear the world was going mad.

_________________________________________

Update: Brainless Michael.

We lost two Pop icons yesterday.  One a beauty and the other the King of Pop.  I doubt that most who read this will have known either personally.  So, why then, do we mourn, watch news casts, listen to old interviews or soundbites, and view tributes of all sorts?    The fact is that Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson remind us.  They remind us of better times, or tougher times that we survived.  They remind us of youth.  They remind us that beauty exists but is only fleeting.  That stardom doesn’t save anyone from the reality of death.  That genius can seem like magic, and that genius may be alive in only one part of a person. That some things do carry on “forever” in the soundbites of our lives.  That sometimes we believe what we see but never really look for the truth of a person. I hope you create some great soundbites and truths in the coming days.  Create a piece of art that your children will cherish.  Let great moments happen spontaneously as they’ll be told as family stories for years.  Share a lesson that someone in need will remember and pass on to others.  Demonstrate love so that it creates a small glow in the world.  You might never be a Pop icon, but you can make all the difference to someone who will pass on the truth and actions of You.  Let the beauty and talent of these people, these Pop icons inspire you!

Michael Joseph Jackson (1958–2009) (Credit: The New York Times.com)

Michael Jackson is dead at age of 50.  On the morning of June 25, 2009, Jackson reportedly collapsed at a home he was renting in west Los Angeles.

Los Angeles Fire Department’s paramedics responded to a 911 call at 12:21 pm local time. He reportedly was not breathing at the time the paramedics arrived, and CPR was quickly performed. He fell into a coma and died shortly after being rushed to the UCLA hospital. The cause of death is suspected to be cardiac arrest.  Jackson was pronounced dead at 2:26 p.m Pacific Time.

The circumstances surrounding Michael Jackson’s death are not entirely clear. But appearing before the news media Thursday, Jackson’s brother Jermaine said it’s believed Michael Jackson had cardiac arrest, though the cause of death won’t be known until an autopsy is performed by the Los Angeles Coroner’s Office.

The moonwalking pop star drove the growth of music videos, vaulting cable channel MTV into the popular mainstream after its launch in 1981. His 1982 hit “Thriller,” still the second best-selling U.S. album of all time, spawned a John Landis-directed music video that MTV played every hour on the hour.

John Landis, who directed Mr. Jackson’s most memorable music video, “Thriller,” said in a statement to the Los Angeles Times that Mr. Jackson “was an extraordinary talent and a truly great international star.”  “He had a troubled and complicated life and despite his gifts, remains a tragic figure,” Mr. Landis said.

Mr. Steven Spielberg told Entertainment Weekly: “Just as there will never be another Fred Astaire or Chuck Berry or Elvis Presley, there will never be anyone comparable to Michael Jackson. His talent, his wonderment and his mystery make him legend.”

For his legions of fans, he was the Peter Pan of pop music: the little boy who refused to grow up.

Michael Jackson is survived by three children: Michael Joseph Jackson, Jr., Paris Michael Katherine Jackson and Prince “Blanket” Michael Jackson II.

This is sad day for music lover all over the world; a bright star stopped twinkling yesterday.  Good Day!

Goodbye

Dos imágenes icónicas. El ángel rubio de los seventies más televisivos y el todavía, en ese entonces, cantante negro más famoso de los ochenta de MTV.

Fui fan de ambos. Lo demás, como siempre se dice, está de más.

In one day two icons are gone

I tell my son – the king of pop

and the queen of the pinup.

We stop for gas and I talk

to a lady filling up and

almost make her cry by reminding

her of song titles and

the single sequined glove.

I give her my copy of a “Best of” CD

I have in my car and tell her to play

#5 on her way home.

I promise her it will become her favorite

song from when he was really little

and beat James Brown at being James Brown –

before the moonwalk or the fun house mirrors –

when his voice was full of the same

fear and hunger that we all feel

in being little and wanting desperately

to understand love.

As we drive away my son asks me why I spoke

to a stranger and why I’d give her my disc.

I tell him I can get another copy, but that the lady

really needed to hear a good thing from her past

and that I’d show him my Farrah poster later.

Copyright © henry toromoreno, 2009. All rights reserved.

Unlike the soft, pouting, etherealized sexuality of her astrological neighbor, Cancer, there is nothing ethereal about a Leo woman. Unlike her subtler, wetter counterparts, Leo is obvious, almost obtusely so. She isn’t particularly intellectual or superiorly beautiful, nor is she terribly caring or nurturing. As a fixed fire sign with a masculine polarity, she isn’t a paragon of natural poise nor a possessor of that magical, subtle feminine mystique that we all salivate over. The trait that singularly puts Leo woman in a separate, elevated category from her female counterparts is her intense creative spark and her invisible bloated testicles, it is her moxie.

Unlike Scorpio, who is emotionally intense (fixed/water), Leo (fixed/fire) possesses the intense creative energy of free will. Being internally motivated by something more elusive and powerful than emotion or intelligence, Leo is intrinsically motivated by an invisible, inextricable spark of sunshine which pours out of her like molten hot lava. She pursues life with an inspired exactitude that leaves the sloppy, half-baked efforts of others depressingly inferior. When Leo woman is gyrating to her own music on stage, she does so maniacally. When she loves you, she does so violently. When she writes about herself in her blog, she does so with such a powerfully impassioned self-love that it becomes endearing. When she loves you, she loves you to the depths of your soul. When she scrubs a toilet, she fucking scrubs a toilet. Leo woman may not appreciate and admire you like a Libra, or nurture you like a Cancer, but Leo is heart, she is love, she is hot pink sunshine, and who doesn’t want to be enveloped in that?

Leo’s luminary ruler is the sun. The alchemical symbol for the sun (as well as the self) is represented by a mandala, a circle with a dot in its center. The circle represents the path of self discovery; the dot represents the mysteries of the individual self… that is, the true self, or what Buddhism refers to as the Diamond Self (Hinduism refers to it as the Atman). The sun, like the self, represents autonomy and individuation. All monotheistic religions share a common origin in the heliocentric Kurgan culture, suggesting the solar principle is both personal and patriarchal, as all monotheistic religions are based on the individual’s relationship with deity, rather than the society’s relationship with deity writ large. Hence, solar-based religion is fundamentally about understanding the true self. In the monotheistic ethos, The Diamond or True Self is the alchemical Tartarus Mundi, the central salt-point of the universe into which all things collapse. Just as all spatial lines ultimately vanish at a single identifiable point in our spherical universe, all of reality disappears with the individual. Thus, the Leo glyph represents the most elemental enigma we all must confront in life: who am I really, and what is my purpose, my place in the universe?

Mandalas and acts of circumambulatory meditation have been used as spiritual tools in Hindu, Abrahamic, Buddhist, and Cabbalistic spiritual traditions since time immemorial. At its core, the solar archetype is what Jung refers to as “the circumambulation of the self,” as we meditatively concentrate on the centripetal force of the sun or mandala’s center, all other realities dissolve, and for a brief moment, we are absolutely nothing but emptiness. This is our true self- what we experience as children when we repeat our names over and over and over again, until our identity loses its significance.

Leos envision themselves as having all the explosive potential of an atom. By exploring and probing the depths of their individual psyche, they expect to release equivalent sums of energy. Leos are existential, self-exploration junkies. Carl Jung and Aldous Huxley, the kings of self-involved psychological exploration, are perhaps two of the most influential Leos of all time. While Gemini’s dynamism is a result of varied experience, Leo’s is driven by an irascible need to know their “true” self. Like Madonna and Dorothy of Oz fame, their journey is an internal one, elaborated on in their dreams. Unlike the Wanderer archetype, they do not search outside of themselves for their spiritual abode; they simply peel back another layer of skin, forever the onion searching its various peels for its soul.

Leo’s goal in life is to know themselves, their REAL SELVES, that golden delicious nugget of pristine truth hidden deep within the auricle of their hearts. While most see Madonna as being mercurial or even schizophrenic in her search for self, trying on new identities and lives like a shapeshifting chimera, its obvious to me that she is simply on a path to becoming a closer approximation of her true self: a spiritual, self-obsessed, perfectionistic, physically strong, disco-sunshine-animal skin clad-kitten who loves kids, clothes, and dancing. In a sentence, that is Leo woman- a fluorescent colored, overly-tan (an imprint of their mid-summer birth and solar archetype), naturally buff (an imprint of their feline heritage), almost always half naked- in particular- topless (a shout-out to their “many breasted” Artemis archetype) slinky lady that is as magnetically irresistible as she is irritatingly big mouthed and destructively hot. That is the hazard of being part sunshine, part wild animal.

The fifth astrological house of Leo encompasses all things revolving around the heart- the pin-dot core of human reality. In Cabala, the number five represents creativity, protection, and sex, the Roman numeral for five (V) has historically been used as a protective marker on shields. Leo reigns over the zodiacal house of passion, love, self-expression, self-actualization, romance, pride, drama, amusement, children, fame, art, dance, games, holidays, imagination, creativity, and renown. In medical astrology, Leo rules over the biological heart. Leo’s home in the human nervous system mirrors her astrological glyph. Leo is the central point in her social circle, often pushing her way into the center of available attention. She operates from the centermost area of her heart, and can be found smack in the center of her protective circle of fire, which simultaneously repels with fear and attracts with lightness, presenting any would-be friend or lover with an almost impassable obstacle: can you cross her personal boundaries without being engulfed in flames; and most importantly, can you love her as much as she loves herself?

Solar ladies are unaware that they are being taboo or violating social norms in their overt self-exposure, they are simply being their obnoxious selves. Leos crave attention, if not harsh scrutiny, obviously a result of her unstable sense of self. Like any attention whore, Leo’s instability is spawned from being ignored as a child. Just as Cancer compensates for her unstable childhood by becoming a gold-digging, Vicodin popping mess, Leo compensates for her latchkey, alienated childhood by foisting herself into the scope of others. She is the neglected kitten, peeing all over your possessions and clawing at your Horchow rug just to remind you that she is important. Leo will whore herself just to feel some false sense of being worshiped, basking in the fleeting glory of being someone’s new favorite thing. The easiest way to identify a Lioness in a crowded room is to select the ruddy lady with the wildest mane, whose laughing a little too loudly while revealing too much about herself. Leo woman is embarrassingly self-revealing, almost pathologically incapable of restraint or self-editing. She is a fire kitten who needs to be known… she has molten hot pink lava boiling over inside of her that she desperately needs to show you. Just accept the hot pink lava spewing out of her like kitty vomit as a gift, a token of her expansive, almost grotesquely over-sized heart. A volcano can’t help but erupt all over you.

Leos make excellent, if not overly-exposed, performers, models, writers, and actors. Lioness Tori Amos is known for furiously masturbating herself on stage while Madonna’s performances can be as disturbingly exhibitionist as a videotaped childbirth. Leos will happily parade around in the most scant bespattering of fabric in the most public of places: Kim Catrall (aka The Slutty One), Natasha Henstridge, Jennifer Lopez, Iman, Halle Berry, Emmanuelle Beart, Vivica A. Fox, Melanie Griffith, Charlize Theron, Jackie Warner, and Geri Halliwell are all lionesses who seem to fundamentally abhor wearing clothing… while other solar maidens reveal themselves through their writing, music, and displays of public pageantry (usually debacles and scandals) which are often engineered by Leo with an overt sense of ego, as if people were DEMANDING to inspect their dirty laundry and they’re simply dishing out what the people have requested: Monica Lewinsky, Sloan Crosley (she writes like a drunk chick incapable of foreshadowing the embarrassment awaiting her the morning after, she has Leo Volcano Syndrome), Dorothy Parker, Sally Struthers, Connie Chung, Loni Anderson, Whitney Houston, Clara Bow, Kate Bush, Martha Stewart, Emily Bronte, Iris Love, Lucille Ball, Coco Chanel, Annie Oakley, Delta Burke, J.K. Rowling, Beatrix Potter, etc. Leos are also excellent politicians; many lionesses thrive off of derivative political power. Leo is one of two power signs, the other being Scorpio. Scorpios and Leos are attracted to one another’s corrupt sense of entitlement to socio-political power. Some of the most famous power couples in the world are scorpion/lion duos: Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Joe Biden and Barack Obama, Bill and Hilary Clinton, Alain and Rosalie Delon, Puff Daddy and J. Lo. Leos also make excellent presidential mates. Take one female Leo, give her a regal sense of above-reprieve exceptionalness and a passionately opinionated political belief, and you have the Annoyingly Self-Righteous Political Wife, some of the most peevish examples being Tipper Gore, Elizabeth Dole, Lynne Cheney, Jackie O, Rossalynn Smith Carter, and Bill Clinton (well, he’s almost a wife, and was almost a First Lady).

The feminine mystique hides under dissimulation, and Leo is just too obnoxious to provide enough omissions, enough ellipses to indicate there’s something more. She’s a cat, and cats only come to you when they have something to purr into your ear. As the consummate cat-fighting, hot blooded bitch of the zodiac, Leo is capable of fending for herself (and inevitably, she must, as anyone who has “put themselves out there” as much as the uncontrollably volcanic Leo can certainly understand). She can be a predatory, staunchly independent, emasculating, calculating, overachieving, overly-competitive workaholic, all depending on how unstable in her sense of place she is. Stable or unstable, Leo is hot strength personified.

In the traditional Marseilles tarot deck, Leo is represented by the eleventh trump card, the Strength or La Force card. This is a transitional card, marking a juncture point in our archetypal journey, as it is the first instance that we encounter a woman in the tarot deck. This maiden is neither an embellished princess nor a stiffly seated, cadaverous priestess; she is an accessible, slightly silly looking Plain Jane (nice hat, Jane). However, she is obviously not an ordinary woman, because ordinary women do not stick their hands (or in later decks, their heads and entire bodies) into the mouths of ferocious lions. Unlike her masculine counterpart, the Magi (represented in the zodiac by Aquarius, Leo’s opposite sign), she uses no tools, no baton or scepter, no potions or electrical conductors to protect her from the animal threat. Her raw audacity doesn’t come from some disposable alien technology- it is indelibly and inalienably a part of herself, her mysterious power is no mystery, it simply comes from her eagerness to make personal contact with something untamed and violent, her willingness to confront the instinctual, pre-cultural aspects of herself.

The Leo archetype has taken on many incarnations in myth and popular culture: Dorothy of the Wizard of Oz, the Greek “virgin-hunter” goddess Artemis/Hestia, the Egyptian Bast or Sekhmet, and the comic book character Cat Woman (played in film and television by, not surprisingly, Leos Julie Newmar and Halle Berry). Like the principle of the Strength tarot card, Artemis/Hestia is virginal and inviolate, untouched by culture. She is a huntress connected with her animal-side, often having a difficult time incorporating herself into the reality of other’s (read: men) due to her feline fixedness and independence.

Not coincidentally, Cat Woman (Leo) has been casted as Batman’s (Aquarius) unrequited, “one true love,” their tumultuously romantic relationship based on both mutual antipathy and deep understanding. Cat Woman is the villainous, anti-heroic side of the vinyl unitard clad couple, while Aquarius is her selfless, humanitarian conspecific. Cat Woman is motivated by personal ends (jewelry, money, self-preservation), while Batman is motivated by social ends (justice, social-order, reformation). Both are vanguard and independent, and as opposite signs in the zodiac, are pulled to each other by a magnetic force.

Aquarius and Leo are opposite signs on the zodiacal wheel, meaning that they represent two sides of the same coin, so to speak. The Strength card presents us with the meaning of the Aquarius and Leo coin: while one performs magic in public, the other performs magic privately, intimately. This is at the essence of what separates Aquarius, the social reformer, from Leo, the existential psychoanalysis junky. While an Aquarius may feel so unhappy in their own life that they find their dissatisfaction spilling out into the public and political domain of unhappiness, Leo will obsess over their personal problems without feeling the least bit compelled to involve themselves with the pain of others. While both are transformative and creative, one is personal, the other impersonal. One is political, the other artistic. One touches many through radio waves and inspired soapbox speeches in the center of public life (like, for example, Aquarians Franklin D. Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln), the other contacts you personally via e-mail and MTV (like Leos Bill Clinton and Barack Obama). You blog politics, I blog astrology.

Leo woman is a control freak intolerant of erraticism, the most defining characteristic of her Uranus and Chiron ruled opposite sign, Aquarius. Leo is liable to smack the weirdness out you, histrionically storming out of her relationships when she detects the least bit of resistance or non-conformity like the royal pain in the ass that she is. As the heart of the zodiac, Leo claws her way into the executive center of any enterprise she’s involved in, appointing herself as the sauciest and most brazen, bossiest bitch of her family, co-workers, home, and partners. Her behavior, more often than not, results in her attracting only the weakest, most passive posse (Pisces, Libra, Cancer, Virgo, Gemini, and Sag) while disaffecting anyone with a backbone (Taurus, Capricorn, Aquarius, Aries, Scorpio, other Leos). Solar ladies, like the sun, embody the male or father principle, and can thus be daddy-like. She is controlling and ritualistic to the extreme. A Leo mother will force her son to wear make-up and a teal sweater set for his school pictures, stomping out any resistance like a matriarchal Gestapo. She’ll take her boyfriend or girlfriend shopping, pick out their clothes, supervise their haircuts, throw out their gummy bears and beer, piss all over their friends and family, clean their room, and, unlike a Scorpio or Virgo, will do so without one iota of subterfuge or kindness. The Leo star invented the celebrity rider, from J Lo’s demands of being surrounded by “all white furnishings,” at all times, to Madonna’s insistance that she exclusively consume only blessed Cabbala water, Leo seeks stability in the silliest of places. The more “off-center” she feels in her sense of selfhood, the more she seeks that stability through asserting her control, moderating her life with an obsessive compulsion that may lead to anorexia, phobias, and an addiction to work- exercise, career, cleaning, and “improvement” -of herself and anything she identifies as being an extension of herself.

Despite all of her selfish, almost infantile sense of egoic importance, Leo lights up those around her like Hestia’s hearth, radiating harsh, yet unconditional love onto those in her inner circle just like the sun. She is a love monster, lighting up the vim around her with her bloated heart… and perhaps at times, unnerving those around her by accidentally loving herself a little too much.

]]> http://ebonytamu.wordpress.com/2008/12/08/betty-page-pin-up-icon-with-the-raven-haired-bangs-the-banging-body/ Mon, 08 Dec 2008 09:33:00 +0000 ebonytamu http://ebonytamu.wordpress.com/2008/12/08/betty-page-pin-up-icon-with-the-raven-haired-bangs-the-banging-body/

Merry XXX-MAS!

Hot diggeddy damn, she is erotica personified. How could someone look so chaste in pictures that were considered wholly  indecent at the time. Betty Page represented corporeal feminism in the 1950s. She was completely comfortable with her body & showing it off. This raven haired beauty was known for her bangs  & her risque, nude bondage photos.There was a so-so movie about her life called “The Notorious Betty Page“. The best thing about that film was the uncanny resemblance between Gretchen Mol & Betty Page. And there was a girl on this past season of “Project Runaway” that hijacked Betty Page’s raven hairstyle ,right down to the bangs. For those retro chicks, she is just as relevant now as she ever was. Here’s more on this pinup icon:

“Scandalous at the height of her career, and almost innocently retro now, Bettie Page remains an icon of glamour and sexuality — even today, as she turns 85.

Bettie began her pin-up career in 1950, posing for private camera clubs that were essentially legal erotica rings in an era when nude photography was heavily restricted. Her friendly smile and uninhibited poses made her a hit with both photographers and the readers of men’s magazines. When photographer Bunny Yeager shot Bettie in animal-print lingerie amid a variety of wild animals, she quickly became a softcore supermodel, and the “Jungle Bettie” series became some of her most iconic work, leading to her January 1955 Playboy centerfold.
But Playboy was wholesome compared to Bettie’s “Dark Angel” work with photographer Irving Klaw. Klaw specialized in fetishistic content for his mail-order erotica business, and Bettie’s bondage and sado-masochism photo shoots led to her appearance before a Senate hearing on juvenile delinquency.

Bettie retired from modeling in 1957 and fled the public eye. She found religion and worked as a missionary. Later, still in anonymity, Bettie battled mental illness, and struggled through a series of failed marriages.”(End of Excerpt) Read the entire article here:(http://dir.yahoo.com/thespark/category/Pin-Ups

Unfortunately, Betty Page suffered a heart attack this past week and is in a coma. At this time, it is not known what her chances of survival are. I hope she makes it!

The Gemini man is the zodiac’s little mariposa, a fluttering social butterfly and nervous buzzing bee forever undergoing transformation. From egg, to larva, to pupa, to full blown verminal dung beetle, he is constantly permuting from one incarnation to the next.

No other sign in the zodiac is as dynamic as the zodiac’s little golden butterfly. Slightly serpentine and slimy, the Gemini archetype represents the forever oscillating duality of the human condition. Like Prospero of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Gemini man is capable of manipulating his environment as an emancipator and innovator, as well as an exploiter and conman. Gemini is the most morally relativistic sign of the zodiac; they are truly the devil’s advocate. Despite any accomplished achievements, the Gemini legacy is always diaphanous and morally vague. Famous Geminis, such as Allen Ginsberg: The Poet, Jean-Paul Sartre: The Philosopher, Salman Rushdie: The Novelist, Errol Flynn: The Actor, JFK: The Reformer, Donald Trump: The Entrepreneur, etc. always carry a disguised underbelly to their lives that eventually, when revealed, leaves a sickly sour taste in our mouths: Allen Ginsberg: Bearded Pedophilic Sexual Predator, Jean-Paul Sartre: Self-Important Egotist, Salman Rushdie: Modelizer, Errol Flynn: Alcoholic Statutory Rapist Bisexual Slut, JFK: Philanderer, Donald Trump: Exploitive Capitalist with Glued on Hair Piece, etc. Both of my now deceased grandfathers were Geminis. It wasn’t until decades after my paternal grandfather’s death that it was revealed he had a second family, a wife and a son. Appropriately, his remaining family members regard him with an ambiguous confusion befitting a riddling, mercurial man.

If mythic images implicitly govern a culture, then it is no coincidence that, according to birth records, there are more cunning and nervous Geminis fluttering about the earth than any other sign. If there are but a few pan-cultural human traits that distinguish us as a species, they must be our obsession with communication, our penchant for face to face fucking, our innovation, and our incessant gathering and dispersal of information, all of which come under the domain of the Twins archetype. As the enormous list of chatty, intellectually ambitious famous Gemini men would suggest, the Twins introduce a verbal and cerebral sophistication to any field they are involved in. Gemini men are the greatest lyricists, poets, composers, screen actors, and orators of all time: Bob Dylan, W.B. Yeats, Clint Eastwood, Laurence Olivier, Walt Whitman, R.W. Emerson, Johnny Depp, John Wayne, Ginsberg, Sartre, Rushdie, Morgan Freeman, Vincent Price, Michael J. Fox, Morrissey, Cole Porter, Tom Jones, James Brown, Tupac Shakur, Paul McCartney, Prince, Barry Manilow, Spalding Gray, Miles Davis, Kanye West, Andre 3000, Gene Wilder, Monteverdi, Bob Hope, and Tony Curtis are just a few Mercury ruled jugglers that have imprinted their cerebral and vocal talents onto their respective fields.

Gemini is ruled by Mercury. The mercury archetype has influenced a nexus of mythic “messenger” images: the Greek Hermes (or Logios, the Orator), the Egyptian Thoth, the Roman Mercurius, and the American superhero Flash, all of which were psychopomps, the only deities of their respective pantheons that possessed the ability to cross the threshold between life and death. Mercury ruled Geminis are not only drawn to traveling between geographical bodies, but are often drawn to metaphorical states of traveling “in between.” They can be found in somewhat incomplete, nebulous (and at times, dubious) stations in their lives, usually juxtaposed between opposites… between marriages, between jobs, between complete and utter financial collapse and shitting out thousands of dollars worth of black caviar on gold gilded toilets, ala overindulgent 1980’s style. They are perpetually “just visiting,” neither here nor there, in the words of Victor Turner, they are “betwixt and between,” straddling the demarcation between light and dark, good and bad, or what was referred to in the ancient Hymn to Hermes as “wolf light,” that strange period between dawn and light that transcends our standard dichotomies, and for a brief moment, inspires us to the think outside of our binary dualities.

Just as the woven webs of bees and butterflies, two Paleolithic images of the Mercury archetype, relate to the interconnectedness of all life, Gemini man embodies the interconnected principle of the butterfly effect more so than any other. As a mutable air sign (changeable, intellectual) Gemini is chaos theory: let’s just say that if a Gemini farts into the wind, the impact is much more cataclysmic than that of someone else’s anal expulsions. Gemini’s woven webs of relationships, affairs, and transactions extend far and beyond the provincial world of most of us terrestrial types, and because of this, their (typically) morally dubious activities not only affect their immediate family, but also their “hidden” families. Not only do Geminis suffer from severe ADD, they are also very, very cunning, a recipe for a favorite Gemini hobby: “juggling” relationships (and thoughts and careers and oranges). As the consummate multitasker, Geminis are artful philanderers and cheaters, many living double lives.

Gemini rules the third house of the zodiac, the house of rapid change, inconsistency, trickery, commotion, curiosity, eloquence, speech, cognition, cunning, contradiction, gossip, riddles, and mental stimulation. Gemini is that cunning-linguist who talked you out of your panties and into the freakiest sex of your life, only to find him gone when you awake, and yourself naked and embarrassed. Gemini is the natural born conman Hermes, who, in complete cradle-ridden infantilism, managed to smooth talk his way out of being charged with theft. Gemini is the absentee parent that abandoned you as a child for a frivolous, irresponsible life of travel and exploration. Gemini is unfinished scaffolding that unexpectedly leads you to your sudden death. Gemini is that elusive element of change and unpredictability in our lives that keeps us jumpy and expectant, that keeps us on the edge of our seat. If you find Geminis difficult to digest, perhaps it’s not so much the person that is giving you dyspepsia, but the quality of shock and surprise, for better or for worse, that they represent. The more you are comfortable with change and a bit of trickery, the more comfortable you are in the presence of a Gemini.

In traditional Jungian archetypes, Gemini is represented by The Wanderer or The Fool. The Fool card is depicted as a traveler, and in tarot, is considered the most powerful of all the trump cards. As he is the only unnumbered card, he is free to travel at will; confounding the established order of anything he is involved with (like The Joker in modern playing cards, who has no real purpose other than to cause the occasional misdeal).

The Fool is usually pictured blindfolded with his canine companion nipping at his heals, warning him of his impending death unless he takes notice of the precipice he is about to wander off of.

Like The Twins, he is never alone; despite his handicapped appearance, he is not misguided, his path being directed by something more animalistic, more deep seated than vision and conscious thought. The Twins archetype, like The Fool, represents the dual nature of humans: spiritual and profane, instinctual and intellectual, thoughtful and ignorant, naughty and nice. The Gemini glyph also represents this dual nature, one bar representing the physical, mortal half, the other bar representing the instinctual, psychospiritual half of ourselves that inherently understands archetypes, primordial concepts, and is tapped into what Jung referred to as the collective unconscious.

Similarly, it is no coincidence that Hermes’ scepter was depicted as a caduceus of entwined snakes, hearkening back to his own bicephalic (that is, two headed or two faced) nature.

When we read tarot, we are tapping into the madcap wisdom of The Fool and The Twins. Part dumb ass, part wise man, Gemini is The Riddler, connecting the wisdom of the future with the playful innocence of childhood, urging us on in our journey through life, handing us ambiguous clues, challenging us to reveal his true meaning. His kaleidoscopic, paradoxical appearance surprises us with profound revelations in much the same way fairies and elemental characters reveal profound insights into the nature of reality via DxM and other psychotropic drug experiences. The Fool reminds us that life is fun, a paradoxical ride through heaven and hell, a series of unfortunate events. Life is silly, life is easily destroyed, life is profoundly beautiful, and it is not to be taken too seriously.

Gemini is the quintessential insider and man about town, devouring experiences and information like that curious scamp, Leroy “Encyclopedia” Brown. Just as Encyclopedia Brown will forever be trapped on paper as being stuck in that interim stage of witty, deviant, exploratory boyhood, all Gemini men are similarly entrapped in that naughty boyish state of stunted adolescence, forever the petite explorer. Gemini man invented the “Peter Pan complex.” I’ve never met a Gemini man that doesn’t, to some degree, rely on his parents for financial support- a result of their inability to consign themselves to lasting responsibilities.

The Gemini mantra is “I communicate,” and Geminis are constantly gathering a wellspring of information to cleverly sprinkle onto their endless address book of friends and playmates. The Gemini archetypal image is that of the Twins, not a two-faced individual, as most have mistakenly interpreted this image to represent. The twins are depicted as being in a perpetual conversation with each other, representing the ongoing dialectic process of communication. Geminis intuitively understand the subtle equilibrium preserved by the constant confrontation of a thesis with its antithesis, each conversation an opportunity for new revelations. The Gemini pursuit is truly the pursuit of trivia. Their mental circuits are always pulsating to the “beep bop boop” of the media’s dissemination of what’s current in mental innovation.

The Twins always have their finger on the pulse of what is cool, urbane, new, and exciting. Whether it be as low brow as Britney Spears’ pussy peaking through her panties or as high brow as an insightful academic review of Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic, Gemini is the ultimate hodgepodge collage of low-brow meets high-brow, a post-post-modernist philosophical zietgiest that has permuted the world in the last ten years and is manifest in such cultural phenomena as the elevation of the filthiest, lowliest cuisine on earth (like, say, Indian street food or macaroni and cheese) to the highest reaches of society, or the fact that you can receive a degree in pop cultural studies from accredited universities, where Madonna and Britney are treated with Heideggerean Phenomenology. This is at the heart of the Gemini man’s spirit- to assess all things with no regard to their provenance, whether it be a fatty pile of carnitas he picked up from a hot, sweaty lunch trunk or duck confit served to him on a white table cloth at a five star Michelin Mecca, he’s able to fluidly vacillate from the heights and lowly depths of culture in a single 24 hour period. His style of dress is equally as high/low, Sex and the City character Carrie Bradshaw exhibiting the female Gemini style perfectly. As sure as he owns a well tailored designer suit, Gemini man owns a pair of hot pink and neon green board shorts that he may pair with Miu Miu slippers and a puff paint T-shirt he made at summer camp in 1984. And chances are, his slight, adolescent physic hasn’t changed a bit since 1984 (although everything else about him has, x100).

Sex with a Gemini man is a marathon and a surprise. The surprise is often his buck naked form appearing out of nowhere. Gemini men are lovable scamps at heart, and because of this, their own “little rascal” brand of sexuality always smacks of being premature, overly forceful, and not quite tempered by the slowing inertia of adulthood- an affect that never dawns on them. No Gemini men exhibit mercurial sexual energy with more gusto than Benjamin Andre 3000 and Prince. First, both dress and look like very slight, very young teenagers, their aerodynamic faces and bodies reminding us of their quick traveling archetype. Second, they love “marathon” style sex (please see Andre 3000’s “Spread,” and Prince’s “Get Off”). A brief list of Gemini mansluts reveals not only a preoccupation with sex, but a preoccupation with having a lot of sex with a lot of different partners, often dipping into both gender pools: Prince, Andre 3000, Collin Farrel, Errol Flynn, Boy George, Johnny Depp, and Rupert Everett (an ex-prostitute).

No one has been possessed by that playful, boyish Juggler archetype more so than Gemini Gene Wilder (or Gemini Johnny Depp) in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Willy Wonka is a cunning dealmaker and merchant, a whimsical poet, and a vicious trickster if there ever was one. He is a flashy magician of a man, straddling the boundary between nefarious villain and sanctimonious humanitarian. He, like all Mercury ruled men, is a riddle in human form.

Like Hermes, Geminis are light, and they travel light (and they do love a play on words). Free of all encumbrances of society, Gemini man is a free floating mariposa, eternally dodging the tragic entwinements of life’s responsibilities. Like a cultural zeitgeist that seemingly appears out of no where, teaches us all a new way of viewing the world, and is gone as quickly as it appeared, Gemini man too possesses an expiration date. There is never a consolation in mourning a missing Gemini man, whether he was your flagrantly absentee father or temperamental child-like boyfriend, Geminis are as ephemeral as life itself, and like life, they are to be experienced, not possessed. Besides, there’s always a new winged tourist waiting at the next bus stop looking for an interesting character to pick him up and show him the innards of the city he just landed in. That is, until after weeks of frenetic gallivanting from one tripe serving Singaporian pit latrine to the next, you awake to find that your Gemini man-boy has left, jet setting to the next life altering experience, leaving in his wake a book of riddles scribbled over the collected works of Rumi, a paper thin vintage T-shirt from the 1986 Montreal state fair… and a puff of glittery fantastical purple smoke that when settled, is just a pile of unanswered question marks.

Michael Jackson’s recent death reminded me of the shifting power and meaning of artifacts.

Eight years ago, Experience Music Project purchased two items formerly owned by Jackson; the black sequin jacket he wore when he unveiled his signature “moonwalk” during the Motown 25th Anniversary Television Special and one of his silver sequin right gloves. We later put them on display in Sky Church for more than a year as part of a free exhibit called Costumes from the Vault , featuring a wild array of 30 outfits, many of them from our permanent collection.

Visitors could check out a floral jacket and gold pants worn by Jimi Hendrix; Superman’s original blue and red wool (!)  jumpsuit and red suede boots; and a three-piece suit and white leather shoes worn by Notorious B.I.G. I often heard visitors speculating about the scale of various featured artists: how much Hendrix weighed based on how small his pant legs were, or the size of Biggie’s feet (14).

As for MJ’s jacket and glove, they didn’t appear to be any more powerful or meaningful to our visitors than, say, the towering wigs worn by Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson of the B-52’s.

Until Jackson died. The next day, after several years of resting in our vault, the sequin jacket and glove again went on display in Sky Church, this time alone. On the room’s giant video screen played footage of Jackson in performance, including an excerpt of the Motown 25th Anniversary Television Special.

Overnight the jacket and glove took on a new weight and significance, not only symbols of Jackson’s singular style and showmanship but, when paired with the “moonwalk” footage, a thrilling and moving reminder of Jackson’s artistry and appeal.

In the last three weeks, the two artifacts on display have become a way for visitors and fans to remember and honor one of pop music’s last global superstars, a way to feel connected to him. People of all ages and nationalities crowd in to get closer; they touch the vitrine, they hug it, they ask family or friends to take their picture.

As the curatorial director, I confess that I occasionally question the importance of artifacts in our exhibits. How much do they really resonate with visitors, particularly anyone under 21? But seeing the overwhelming response to Jackson’s jacket and glove–and not just adults, but kids–has renewed my faith in the value of preserving and displaying key artifacts. We have more than 125,000 objects in our permament collection–guitars, drum kits, pianos, mixing boards, magazines–many of which would mean very little to our visitors on their own, but given the right time and context, they may one day serve as powerful and historical touchstones. So here’s to artifacts. Long may they survive.

-Jasen