Once the home of the
Weckquaesgeek tribe, and more recently,
William Shatner, Hastings-on-Hudson might sound like the next village over from Downton Abbey, but according to the New York Times, it's "
a village, in a Wittgensteinian sort of way" seeing an influx of ex-Brooklynites fleeing to the suburbs in the face of creeping real estate prices. Sure, these new hipsturbanites may miss the creative density of urban New York, but at least the river setting matches their
Filson/woolrich heritage-brand aesthetic.
Read on if you set your cultural compass to the Brooklyn Flea, or your NYT Style section appreciation to ironic twee.
posted by deludingmyself
on Feb 18, 2013 -
28 comments
Tweedland has some interesting stories and characters. Here's two to get you started:
Robert de Montesquiou - "Tall, black-haired, rouged, Kaiser-moustached, he cackled and screamed in weird attitudes, giggling in high soprano, hiding his little black teeth behind an exquisitely gloved hand – the poseur absolute. He was said to have slept with Sarah Bernhardt and vomited for a week afterwards."
Lord Berners - "As a child, having heard that if you throw a dog into water it will learn how to swim, he threw his mother's canine companion out of the window on the grounds that if one applies the same logic it should learn how to fly. (The dog was unharmed, and he was "thrashed" by his mother.)"
posted by unliteral
on Dec 13, 2012 -
7 comments
Style Blaster is a motion-activated camera situated a block from the Bedford L in Williamsburg. It takes photos of people passing by and asks you to rate their style. Do your civic duty, and
troll it.
posted by outlandishmarxist
on Oct 24, 2012 -
92 comments
Literary Style: 15 Writers' Bedrooms: Truman Capote,
Virginia Woolf,
Ernest Hemingway,
Flannery O'Connor,
Alexander Masters,
William S. Burroughs,
Slyvia Plath,
Henry David Thoreau,
Victor Hugo,
Emily Dickinson,
Miranda Seymour,
Mary Roach,
Marcel Proust,
Michael Morpurgo,
William Faulkner.
posted by Fizz
on Apr 4, 2012 -
29 comments
If you use
Americanisms just to show you know them, people may find you a tad tiresome, so be discriminating.
You may have to think harder if you are not to use
jargon, but you can still be precise.
Use all
metaphors, dead or alive, sparingly, otherwise you will make trouble for yourself.
Some words add
nothing but length to your prose.
(Notes from
The Economist's
style guide.)
posted by Joey Bagels
on Feb 24, 2012 -
126 comments
"It was Alan Flusser who pointed out, a whole generation of men in the '70s stopped getting dressed, so they didn't teach their children how to get dressed. More and more people have found, 'Oh, I can go read about this stuff.' "
The Oral History of Menswear Blogging. With
Michael Bastian,
Scott Schuman,
Michael Williams,
Lawrence Schlossman,
Jesse Thorn, and others.
posted by villanelles at dawn
on Dec 14, 2011 -
58 comments
Everything feels old. There have been no radical changes in style, culture, art, and fashion over the last 20 years—a stark contrast to every other two decade period going all the way back into the 19th-century,
Kurt Anderson argues in
Vanity Fair. Every 20 year period marked a drastic and unmistakable shift in cultural appearance with the exception of our current quarter century.
[more inside]
posted by stbalbach
on Dec 8, 2011 -
258 comments
It's not breakdancing. Not really, although it's associated with breakdancing nowadays; breakin' was originally seen as being very east coast, while these dances originated on the west coast. What was this dancing?Well, many of the most famous 70s-80s street moves are actually called
funk styles, which were performed, at first, to funk and disco, and later to early electronic and industrial dance music. And the big daddy of them all was a dance called the Electric Boogaloo, and demonstrated by the
Electric Boogaloos.
Here they are in their zoot-suited glory, showing off their signature moves.
[more inside]
posted by Bunny Ultramod
on Dec 4, 2011 -
5 comments
The French romantic thriller “Diva” dashes along with a pellmell gracefulness, and it doesn’t take long to see that the images and visual gags and homages all fit together and reverberate back and forth. It’s a glittering toy of a movie... This one is by a new director, Jean-Jacques Beineix... who understands the pleasures to be had from a picture that doesn’t take itself very seriously. Every shot seems designed to delight the audience. - Pauline Kael, 1982
[more inside]
posted by Trurl
on Sep 16, 2011 -
33 comments
"When legal teams need to prove or disprove the authorship of key texts, they call in the forensic linguists. Scholars in the field have tackled the disputed origins of some prestigious works, from Shakespearean sonnets to the Federalist Papers."
Decoding Your E-Mail Personality
Ben Zimmer, of Language Log discusses the Facebook case and
forensic linguistics in the NY Times.
[more inside]
posted by iamkimiam
on Aug 2, 2011 -
13 comments
From bouffants du jour and shampoo secrets of the stars to yesteryear's 'dos and you-know-you-want-it accessories, if it's about hair, you'll find it at the always entertaining
Hair Hall of Fame.
posted by madamjujujive
on Jun 19, 2011 -
6 comments
The miniskirts, hotpants, bellbottoms, boots, sunglasses, and hairdos of the
Sixties Seventies as worn by the famous and anonymous beauties of the time.
(some images NSFW)
posted by Joe Beese
on Jan 2, 2011 -
60 comments
January 1,
1985: Earfuls of earrings out, armful of bangles in.
January 1,
1993: Pellegrino out, Crystal Pepsi in
January 1,
2004: Viagra out, Levitra in
(MetaFilter previously in)
January 1,
2011: Trolling out, Hacktivism in.
The List: a middlebrow, Beltway elite, mildly insufferable, perennially baffling Washington Post tradition since
1978 (Concave chests out, bosoms in)
posted by silby
on Jan 1, 2011 -
52 comments
