Street Style Weblogs

As I was re-organizing some files on my computer, I came across an article on blogs that I wrote for my English 138 course (Internet Culture and the Information Society).


A recent genre of blogs that has established itself on thousands of browser’s “Bookmarked List” is Street Style Blogs. When talking about this type of blogs, one must mention: thesartorialist.blogspot.com. The Sartorialist is like the Napster of street style blogging, it started it all. A few months ago, when looking at a Time Magazine Article on the Top-25 Blogs on the Internet, I learned about the Sartorialist Blog. This weblog ignited my interest in the blogging world and became the first blog I regularly checked.

The concept of The Sartorialist and other Street-Style-Blogs is simple: the weblog operator (For the Sartorialist, a retired fashion industry executive with the hobby of photography) roams through the streets of their city (New York, Milan, and Paris) taking pictures of complete strangers they encounter that they believe exude a strong and colorful sense of personal style. The weblogger will post a few of these photos each day, with a small caption stating the location and some description or insight like: “Yves Saint Laurent Trench Coat” or “Vintage Floral.” [As you read, open up The Sartorialist in your browser for a better understanding of the nature of these Street Style Blogs.]

Amazingly, this simple blogging concept of The Sartorialist has had a profound influence on the fashion world, Internet blogging, and many individual’s personal style.

Fashion World: these “street-style” images of [a complete stranger pausing in the motion of their everyday life to be photographed displaying solely their daily persona] has found their way to many “inspiration boards” [for brainstorming the brand’s next line] of many prominent designers all over the world. In addition, capturing fashion in the time and space of a random moment in a person’s “everyday” life on a random urban street, introduced a new form of Media. This contrasts with the previous portal of fashion in the Public Eye: Pre-Oscar Red Carpet Shows, E-Fashion News, Vogue Fashion Magazines, etc. The Sartorialist images feature everyday people [not celebrities or models], on the streets [no red carpets, Greek isles, or costly backdrops], in every-day clothing [department store clothing, thrift store items, and high-fashion pieces]. These were images of “clothes in action,” gently embracing our skin while we experience life. These images reminded us that fashion is not solely about pristine faces and physiques graced in wearable works of art that cost enough to feed an entire African village for 1 year. Couture began to be viewed outside of the glass cases and off the mannequins.
Fashion, more particularly personal style, is the way we approach and present ourselves to the outside world. It is the shells that we put on to protect ourselves from the natural elements. Our personal style and image (like it or not) shapes the way we and the people around us think of ourselves as unique individuals.

Blogs: revolutionized the Media-type expressions of many fields. In this field, it presented a piece of art [photograph of the art of clothing (fashion)] on a weblog for people to reflect, comment, learn and/or be inspired by. Also, it proved to major fashion corporations that the street style blogs that are significantly transforming the public expression and conception of fashion (the fashion media) are here to stay. Both Gucci and Absolute Vodka have paid The Sartorialist weblog operator for ad-space on the blog. Numerous street style blogs have now arisen out of this wave: look into the “Cool Hunter Blog’s” list of each of these city’s street style blogs: Helsinki, Finland New York City London Berlin Stockholm Moscow Australia Tokyo Shanghai Paris Sao Paulo Toronto Barcelona Zurich Vancouver Reykjavik Oslo Milan Mexico San Francisco Lisbon Munich.

Personal Style: The Sartorialist and other street style blogs feature the diverse pallet of the human race. Capturing people with various ethnicities, ages, backgrounds, values, tastes, environments, financial statuses, etc. One image might feature a NYC Painter taking a cigarette break while the next image shows a store-manager of Bergdorf Goodman. The value of These blogs have reminded us that being fashionable is not possessing a Louis Vuitton Hand Bag or wearing a particular pricy-emblem to conform to the “fashionable bunch.” Fashion is important, and should be unique to all of us; it is the distinct representation of our unique place in the world. Looking beyond the superficiality of fashion and fashion media, these street style blogs express and reflect on the task we each have every morning: constructing our personal image. As we match colors, textures, materials, and purposes to suit the weather and our plans for the day, we are the artists and our body becomes the canvas. Although it may appear tawdry, these personal blogs have helped many people become aware of the potential and significance of their own style.

I understand how this trend can be considered dull and inane. There is logic in the thought “Fashion is dumb, individuals that focus on fashion or style are superficial, and people should be concerned with the greater content of an individual over their personal exterior style.

However, many consider fashion a significant art-form. There are countless people working in and around the fashion industry. In addition, millions pay a lot of their money for their love fashion. In turn, the fashion media plays a major role in the media-world and our culture at large (both artful and consumeristic). Regardless of one’s own beliefs, with such a mass of people, this transformation and influence, originating from Internet-Weblogging must be recognized. Street Style blogs are moving fashion into a new direction, expressing it in a more pure and relevant form.

Perspective on the Economy

“We are witnessing a momentous event--the great deflation of Wall Street--and it is far from over. The crash of IndyMac is just the beginning. More banks will fail, so will many more debtors. The crisis has the potential to transform American politics because, first it destroys a generation of ideological bromides about free markets, and, second, because it makes visible the ugly power realities of our deformed democracy. Democrats and Republicans are bipartisan in this crisis because they have colluded all along over thirty years in creating the unregulated financial system and mammoth mega-banks that produced the phony valuations and deceitful assurances. The federal government protects the most powerful interests from the consequences of their plundering. It prescribes 'market justice' for everyone else.”

-Journalist William Greider writing in THE NATION

From BILL MOYERS JOURNAL BLOG (start looking at it, it is fantastic).

Radiohead - All I Need

Good Music, Good Video, and an Important Message.

Insight into weblogging: (start a blog; even if no one reads it [like this one])

Rebecca Blood explains in her article "Weblogs: A History and Perspective": I suggest reading the entire article but here is a good snippet about the influx of weblogs and their role in the new nature of media and our partipatory culture. ..

"Weblogs, once filters of the web, suddenly became so numerous they were as confusing as the web itself. A few more articles appeared touting weblogs as the next big thing. But the average reader, hopefully clicking through to the Eatonweb portal, found herself faced with an alphabetical list of a thousand weblogs. Not knowing where to begin, she quickly retreated back to ABCnews.com.

I don't have an answer. In our age the single page website of an obscure Turk named Mahir can sweep the web in days. But the unassailable truth is that corporate media and commercial and governmental entities own most of the real estate. Dell manages more webpages than all of the weblogs put together. Sprite's PR machine can point more man-hours to the promotion of one message--"Obey Your Thirst"--than the combined man-hours of every weblogger alive. Our strength--that each of us speaks in an individual voice of an individual vision--is, in the high-stakes world of carefully orchestrated messages designed to distract and manipulate, a liability. We are, very simply, outnumbered.

And what, really, will change if we get weblogs into every bookmark list? As we are increasingly bombarded with information from our computers, handhelds, in-store kiosks, and now our clothes, the need for reliable filters will become more pressing. As corporate interests exert tighter and tighter control over information and even art, critical evaluation is more essential than ever. As advertisements creep onto banana peels, attach themselves to paper cup sleeves, and interrupt our ATM transactions, we urgently need to cultivate forms of self-expression in order to counteract our self-defensive numbness and remember what it is to be human.

We are being pummeled by a deluge of data and unless we create time and spaces in which to reflect, we will be left with only our reactions. I strongly believe in the power of weblogs to transform both writers and readers from "audience" to "public" and from "consumer" to "creator." Weblogs are no panacea for the crippling effects of a media-saturated culture, but I believe they are one antidote."

www.factcheck.org

This is the most significant and astonishing website I have found in a long time.  Checking it can be addicting::

The Annenberg Political Fact Check, a project the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, is an independent, nonpartisan effort to cut through spin and disassembling of politicians and other figures.  Staff writers check, speeches, TV ads,  news releases and other public statements for accuracy, and provide clarification and context.

-Quoted from TIME "25 cites we can't live without"

Find the Time Magazine Article here.

Brett Hunter : The Messiah

Please let me know if you would like to have the new Brett Hunter

CD...  It is soo good.   I really think you all will love it.  e-mail me you're

address.   and i will send you the address and

the music of brett.

Scent of a Woman - Al Pacino's speech

This is one of my favorite movie monologues.  

Al Pacino won an oscar for his role in this film. 

For those who have not seen the movie:
Fellow students have played a prank on the school principal, and only Charlie (Chris O'Donnel) and George Willis, Jr. (Philip Seymour Hoffman) know the identity of the culprits. After getting no information from the witnesses (neither George nor Charlie Snitch), Principal Trask threatens both students with expulsion. Knowing that George Willis can hide behind the legacy and financial assets of his family, Headmaster Trask tries to single out and bribe Charlie (the poor scholarship student) by assuring him admission to Harvard, if he names those who committed the prank. Charlie gives no additional information. Trask then schedules a hearing in front of the entire school (a week later after thanksgiving break) for the testimonies of George Willis and Charlie Simms. 

Pacino's speech at the hearing is remarkably relevant in our life and world today. We all must face choices of what is right and what is easy.

Langston Hughes: Letter to the Academy

Letter to the Academy

The gentlemen who have got to be classics and are now old

with beards (or dead and in their graves) will kindly

come forward and speak upon the subject.

Of the Revolution.  I mean the gentlemen who wrote lovely

books about the defeat of the flesh and triumph of 

the spirit that sold in the hundreds of thousands and

are studied in the high schools and read by the best

people will kindly come forward and

Speak about the Revolution- where the flesh triumphs (as

well as the spirit) and the hungry belly eats, and there 

are no best people, and the poor are mighty and no 

longer poor, an the young by the hundreds of 

thousands are free from hunger to grow and study and

love and propagate, bodies and souls unchained

without My Lord saying a commoner shall never marry my 

daughter or the Rabbi crying cursed be the mating of Jews

and Gentiles or Kipling writing never

the twain shall meet--

For the Twain have met.  But please- all you gentlemen with 

beards who are so wise and old and who write better 

than we do and whose souls have triumphed (in spite 

of hungers and wars and the evils about you) and 

whose books have soared in the calmness and beauty aloof

from the struggle to the library shelves and the desks

of students and who are now classics- come forward 

  and speak upon

The subject of Revolution.

We want to know what the Fuck you'd say?

Langston Hughes- Moscow. 1933.

The Immaculate Conception

The Internet, the rogue wave that crashed on the beach of our time.  The water breached the boundaries of the tide line.  It hit our thirsty society (dry from the last revolutionary 'splash') and restructured the motions of our species.  Alright, screw this intro-to-internet and this tawdry metaphor.  Simply put, the Internet connects humanity.  It allows information to be available to anyone, despite their location.  This is special and profound.

Good News, I am creating a BLOG.  Add one more to the slew of thousands:

• I am creating this blog primarily for myself.  I believe it is going to be an effective medium to share and archive the content of my mind and life. a
• I have a lot to share.  I get excited about the things I see and even more excited about the shit in my head.  If you like my stuff, I am interested.  If you do not like my stuff, I am also interested (although I might not change anything, considering the blog is for me and that you have millions of other choices).
• In time, we all find people whose ideas, observations, and perceptions enlighten us and our world.  Perhaps I might be a resource of insight that one might respect and value.
• My bloggering skills will improve as time passes.  In addition, my blog will become more dynamic and complete.  Possible fields of posts: literature, philosophy, society, politics, economics, art, music, film, fashion, technology, architecture, etc.