go back in time with louis vuitton

Marc Jacobs and Steven Meisel have created something that truly transports you back in time with the 2012 fall/winter campaign for Louis Vuitton. i love the stiff elegance and the contrast with the colours and the wild hats. Sometimes I wish wearing crazy hats and fascinators were still the norm, instead of something reserved only for the British aristocracy. Then again, it’s probably not practical considering the tropical heat i have to deal with on a daily basis.

Game of Thrones fever

Someone got the brilliant idea of making Game of Thrones spoof ads, but centered on the idea of what the ads would look like if Game of Thrones had super-PACs like the U.S. So this is what you get, if you cross dragons, iron thrones, incest alliances magic mystery with Washington DC. One thing’s for sure, politics is dirty everywhere, mystical realms or plain old United States.

SPOILER ALERT- you really don’t want to click play if you haven’t watched season 2.

Head over here for more videos.

Besides that, this video of a Game of Thrones rom com trailer is hilarious.

This isn’t a sex scam/spam post

So there’s a brothel in Prague, which offers patrons free sex on the condition that they allow the act to be filmed and broadcasted on the interwebs. Most people’s reactions would be a mixture of amusement/horror/disdain. This is a stretch, but in a way the concept is similar to facebook’s, or other social networking sties. In exchange for free services like uploading photos etc, users have to “surrender” the privacy of their data, details of personal lives.

Now this Czech brothel, aptly named Big Sister, opened in May 2004 and closed in November 2010. Facebook was founded in 2004 as well, but only opened its membership to the wider public (anyone above 13) in 2006. I say this brothel is pretty ahead of its time in exploiting ways to make money off the Internet.

Photographer Hana Jakrlova documented the brothel from 2006-2007, which has been published into a book.

Surf’s up

Here’s an awesome video of Garrett McNamara, who broke the world record for largest wave surfed- a 90-foot wall of watery death in Nazaré, Portugal. Epic craziness. Makes me want to move out of this concrete jungle now to a place near the beach where I can surf  whenever i feel like it. I miss the feeling of the incredible rush you get when you catch a wave, it’s pretty close to what freedom tastes like.

Guys, before you walk down the aisle

GQ put together a list for the men- 35 truths about marriage. There are some gems in there, for example:

No. 4- Say this in a love note “the moon lives in the lining of your skin- pablo neruda”

No. 5- Don’t say this in a love note “I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in  your lovely body- Neruda too”

I guess say that if you want to sound like one of those people who’ve been abusing bath salts recently and becoming all cannibalistic, eating people’s faces and whatnot. But i digress.

No 34- you’ll be tempted to get a little too dependent. you may become one of those that cant operate outside your marriage, stopped playing soccer with your friends on Saturday morning, and slowly, can’t remember how your friends look like, or how to use the washing machine. Giving up on your old self completely is tempting. Don’t do it.

On the other hand, No. 35- the dependency is beautiful and important. “And yes, terrifying. But what’s more terrifying: giving yourself over to someone so completely, or never letting go at all?”

Very wise words, but very hard to draw the line between 34 and 35, and I believe it’s a very thin line. Some people slowly slip into the over-dependency camp without realising it, and one day wake up to realise they no longer recognise the person in the mirror. At the same time, what’s the point of being with a partner if you can’t rely/depend on them- But how do you really evaluate where you stand, and how often do we have to check on ourselves? I don’t have the answers so if you do, drop me a line.

Finally, this is one of the most important truths of all: No 23- you’ll learn that her feelings are real! (with an exclamation point)

You’re going to think, from time to time, that your wife is crazy. The only reason we don’t realize that most people are crazy is that we’re not married to most people. But here’s the key: Don’t tell her she’s crazy. Not only that: Stop thinking she’s crazy. Treat her irrational feelings as rational, because that’s how they feel to her. It’s called compassion. And marriage is one of the few ways we ever really learn it.

Now, i say amen to that. I love GQ, this is one of the many reasons why.

“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster”

Henry Hill, the man Scorsese based his mafia classic Goodfellas on, has passed away, of natural causes.  A real larger-than-life character whose life was riddled by crime, drugs, betrayal- he snitched on his mob pals to help the Fed, was put on witness protection but then blew it because he  got into drug-related problems again.

In later years, he was a guest on Howard Stern’s radio show, opened a restaurant called Wiseguys, hosted mob-movie marathons, and hawked his own line of marinara sauce.

It seems like he really went away scot-free and even opened up his own business ventures post-mafia world. Makes you wonder why didn’t some mobster just lop off his head and be done with it? After all, his turncoat act landed 50 convictions of other mobsters. So why was he never taken down by other gangs, mafia movie-revenge style? 

Syria, Vogue and the PR Machine

NYTimes has a good piece about how Syria’s Assad family used public relations in a really sophisticated way to create a glamourous, progressive and modern image of them in the West. Vogue even published this controversial profile of Syria’s first lady in March 2011, just as Assad laid a brutal crackdown and over 10,000 Syrians died for opposing him. Vogue has since taken down its profile and apologised for it, but the reporter of the story Joan Juliet Buck said in an interview that the first lady was “extremely thin and very well-dressed, and therefore qualified to be in Vogue.” I guess this means if you put an Alexander McQueen outfit on a starving African child, she would be qualified to be featured in the magazine as well.

hi there,

i’m back, kind of, sort of. things have been rocky. but i just want to say, in the mean time, i love this bag and i think it may be my bag soul mate.

watch this space

reinventing the financial wheel

After JPMorgan’s $2 billion loss that’s likely related to the London whale (love that nickname), Jamie Dimon’s rants against the evils of  Wall Street regulation and the Volcker rule look shakier than ever. Now i’m not usually one for heavy regulation- I do think governments hardly have the expertise to tell businesses/banks how to run themselves, but at the same time, the size of the finance industry in today’s day and age is getting somewhat out of hand.

To put things into perspective, research done by a NYU finance economist showed that even though the internet age has brought leaps and bounds in financial technology and innovation, the costs of have actually increased more than the benefits, implying that the finance sector today is actually more inefficient than a century ago.

Phillippon, the economist, takes into account the output of finance e.g. matching savers with borrowers, pooling risks, and producing information through price changes, and the costs, total compensation for providing such services. He then estimated the unit cost of the financial middleman, which was 1.3 percent of all financial assets percent in the early 1900s and amounts to some 2.3 percent currently, with much of the rise having occurred since the 1970s.

Now i know it’s just one research paper by an academic, but if the way he’s calculated the costs and benefits is reliable, then this really an interesting bit of information to consider when weighing the pros and cons of regulating Wall Street.

The Business Week story has more details.

a world made just for two

In December of 1983, when Barack Obama was 22, he met Genevieve Cook, one of his first loves. It was at a Christmas party at the East Village in New York. And Obama wrote of her in his memoirs:

“There was a woman in New York that I loved,” he wrote. “She was white. She had dark hair, and specks of green in her eyes. Her voice sounded like a wind chime. We saw each other for almost a year. On the weekends, mostly. Sometimes in her apartment, sometimes in mine. You know how you can fall into your own private world? Just two people, hidden and warm. Your own language. Your own customs. That’s how it was.”

Yet, Genevieve’s diaries spoke of a man whose warmth was still cold, distant at times. He harboured dreams, wanted to effect change, yet hid so much about his past, and erected walls. When Genevieve told him he loved her, his reply was “thank you”.

The sexual warmth is definitely there—but the rest of it has sharp edges and I’m finding it all unsettling and finding myself wanting to withdraw from it all. I have to admit that I am feeling anger at him for some reason, multi-stranded reasons. His warmth can be deceptive. Tho he speaks sweet words and can be open and trusting, there is also that coolness—and I begin to have an inkling of some things about him that could get to me. – Genevieve’s diary

And in the end, their love and connection wasn’t enough. He was in pursuit of something entirely different, searching still for himself, only at the beginning of crafting his identity. Obama was still coming to terms with who he was- black or white, american or international, but Genevieve, hailing from distinguished, white and upper-class families, no longer fit in his path. In his memoirs, he describes it,

“I pushed her away. We started to fight. We started thinking about the future, and it pressed in on our warm little world.”

The future, pressing in on warm little worlds no longer big enough for two.

Source: Vanity Fair