before i lose my style

“

Frankie couldn’t stay angry, though she was sure Dean was lying about not remembering her. How could she be mad when they were so completely undignified? Magnificently silly. Willing to send themselves up at the slightest opportunity, prostrate themselves, admit to frailties. Dean openly mocked himself and acted almost ashamed of his straight-A marks. Alpha wasn’t embarrassed that he’d barely made it up the easy course on the rock wall; he sweated on people and made fun of his own physique. And Matthew—well, she couldn’t have been mad at Matthew, anyway.

These guys, they were so sure of their places in life—so deeply confident of their merit and their future—they didn’t need any kind of front at all.

—

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart (via arcanities)

this book legitimately has the best insights on the way class plays out in interpersonal and small-scale social interactions and power dynamics i have ever seen, i am not exaggerating at all, it is ASTOUNDING.

(via isabelthespy)

i love this passage so much! on the surface, it seems self-contradicting in a way: it’s quite obvious that the boys do (believe they) need a front in order to maintain their ‘places in life’ and that’s precisely why, as daughter-of-psychologists trish points out, they pretty much collectively pretend not to remember frankie.

but this passage is transmitted through the lens of pre-basset hound frankie, whose understanding of the dynamics of the boys deepens throughout the novel, as she watches alpha not be able to admit to his failings and takes great pleasure in forcing him to maintain a front for months. because, of course, you can admit only to the frailties which don’t actively threaten your position.

this is why self-deprecation seems to be to be a particularly — though not exclusively — brand of upper-class front. if you can afford to admit to your own failings first & own them, it takes away the power of others to use shame/embarrassment as a tool against you. some people can’t afford to be self-deprecating, or can’t really be self-deprecating in a genuine way since they don’t have the baseline self-assurance that comes with being the right gender & class to pull it off, and it will be read as pitiable instead of as a show of strength. (frankie doesn’t have access to this: she has to work, and work hard, for what the boys take for granted, and she’s still not ultimately granted entrance to their club, both literally & figuratively). i’m reminded here of a very sharp, very funny friend of mine who regularly employs self-deprecating humour and is consequently constantly read as a dumb blonde.

on the surface, the behaviour of the bassets seems easy and enviable. but push a little further, like frankie does, & you realize that there the dogs have soft spots too, and there’s places where self-deprecation doesn’t work for them, either. what’s interesting are the failings that are too genuinely embarassing to admit to: like for instance, being upstaged by a girl.

(via battlestardidactica)

POSER
TOURIST
HARD CORE LOGO
HUGO CHAVEZ

matthewedwards:

oldtobegin:

themodernistwitch:

Who put this .gif of me snuggling on oldtobegin on Tumblr?

OMG IT’S US!

GREY PURRRRDENS

satanic-capitalist:

84 Percent of NYC Fast Food Workers Report Wage Theft in a New Survey

Friday, 17 May 2013 00:00By Josh Eidelson, The Nation | Report

At an 11 am press conference yesterday outside a Brooklyn KFC restaurant, fast food workers and activists released a new report alleging rampant wage theft in their industry, one of the fastest-growing in the United States. The report includes results from an Anzalone Liszt Grove research survey of 500 of the city’s fast food workers, in which 84 percent reported that their employer had committed some form of wage theft over the previous year.

Yesterday’s press conference follows strikes by fast food workers in five major cities within six weeks, all demanding raises to $15 an hour and the chance to form unions without intimidation. The report, “New York’s Hidden Crime Wave: Wage Theft and NYC’s Fast Food Workers,” is being published by Fast Food Forward, the campaign behind the strikes in New York. It lands on the same day as a New York Times article reporting that New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman “is investigating whether the owners of several fast-food restaurants and a fast-food parent corporation have cheated their workers out of wages, according to a person familiar with the cases.”

Reached by e-mail, a spokesperson for the National Restaurant Association told The Nation, “We fully support compliance with all state and federal wage and employment laws.” The attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Wage theft” is a term popularized by activists and advocates over the past decade to describe a wide range of ways in which companies fail to pay employees the wages they’re legally owed. The Fast Food Forward report identifies several types of violations as prevalent in the city’s fast food industry: employees working, without pay, before or after their shift; employees working overtime without being paid time-and-a-half; employees working during their breaks or not receiving breaks; and delivery employees not being reimbursed for expenses like gasoline or safety equipment.

The report quotes McDonald’s worker Elizabeth Rene, who says she loses up to $75 a month because she isn’t paid for the time she spends counting the register before and after her shift: “I feel cheated and used and like I’m not appreciated for my hard work.”A 2008 study by the National Employment Law Project estimated that the average low-wage worker loses 15 percent of his or her annual income to wage theft.

Asked about wage theft allegations, a Domino’s spokesperson told The New York Times’s Julie Turkewitz, “If anybody is paying below minimum wage or using the tipped wage credit, that would probably be independent franchisees in our system. And I can’t really speak to that.” The authors of today’s report reject such arguments. “Because the corporations design, maintain, monitor and profit from the fast food delivery system,” they write, “they should be the focus of regulatory and political action to eradicate wage theft up and down the fast food chain.”

As I’ve reported, recent years have seen a rise in labor activism around wage theft, often backed by unions or “alt-labor” groups organizing non-union workers in the workplace and in local politics. In 2010, New York passed a statewide anti–wage theft law that the Progressive States Network described as the strongest in the country. In January, the Chicago City Council unanimously passed an ordinance that threatens offending companies with the loss of their business licenses. In other cases, forcing unwanted legal, political or media scrutiny on alleged wage theft by a company has proven a potent weapon in labor groups’ “comprehensive campaigns” to force concessions from management. The release of yesterday’s report could represent an additional front in campaigns by Fast Food Forward, and parallel groups elsewhere, to transform jobs that are increasingly representative of work in the modern United States.

(12:15 pm Thursday): The New York Attorney General’s office has confirmed to The Nation that it issued subpoenas to a fast food parent corporation, and is investigating several New York State franchisees (the AG’s office declined to name the corporation). Schneiderman’s office is exploring potential legal violations including sub-minimum wage pay, unpaid work, false payroll records, overtime without time-and-a-half pay, work expenses that weren’t fully reimbursed and paychecks that bounced.

In an e-mailed statement, Schneiderman spokesperson Damien LaVera called the Fast Food Forward report’s findings “deeply troubling,” and said they “shed light on potentially broad labor violations by the fast food industry.” “We take the allegations seriously,” said LaVera, “which is why our office is investigating fast food franchisees. New Yorkers expect companies doing business in our state to follow laws set up to protect working families.” LaVera urged workers who have experienced wage theft by fast food companies to contact the attorney general’s office.

Across the country, domestic workers are left unprotected from labor law. Read what you can do to help.

This story originally appeared in The Nation.
Copyright © 2012 The Nation 2013 distributed by Agence Global.

(via themodernistwitch)

ST. HELENA ISLAND, S.C.(WCIV) – It’s no secret that the Lowcountry is full of history and culture, but for one group of people, it hasn’t been an easy road to keeping alive a past rich with tradition.

Just under two hours of highway driving south of Charleston to Beaufort County, down a winding dirt road on St. Helena Island sits the Gullah Garden. There is a woman, Queen Quet,who is trying to keep the history of the sea islands alive.

“I da Queen Quet head pond a body ting like dey dey,” she said.

She is the head of the Gullah Geechee Nation, and most of her life has been spent preserving the heritage of the Gullah Geechee people and the language they speak.

“Knowing the people were brutalized because of their language, realizing that you come from a history and a legacy of people who had the strength, or as the film says ‘will to survive,’ and then realizing the very land you live on, where this unique culture comes out of, that has its own language is something that you need to hold on to because it is your birthright,” said Queen Quet.

Her connection to the past is so strong that Queen Quet recalls a time when she could not bear to walk the historic streets of downtownCharleston.

“I would feel almost every energy, and it was harsh and it was brutal,” she said. “It was painful.”

But the pain did not stop until she put pen to paper.

“I started writing and when I finished this poem, it was the last time my feet ever burned and that the poem told the story of my ancestors and what they had been through along the coast and especially in Charleston,” Queen Quet said.

It was an inhumane struggle she says that today’s youth should be reminded of an carry with pride.

“When you find a Gullah Geechee person who wants to suppress their language and their mother tongue, more oft than not, they’re in the process of assimilation, which means that if they go too many generations without that kind of interaction, eventually, they won’t have that language and many times with the language goes the land that they are living on, too,” she said.

But Queen Quet is encouraged.

Through the likes of Twitter and Facebook, the younger generation is gaining a greater appreciation of the legacy they have inherited.

“I see now younger people being glad that they have that bilingual ability where before we were told we were backwards and we would never get anywhere in life if we continued to speak that way,” Queen Quet said.

An old soul among elders

You could say Queen Quet Marquetts Goodwine is an old soul. Growing up, she would find herself more times than not in the company of her elders.

“The best of my friends are the elders, the seniors,” she said.

At the new St. Helena Senior Center, she connects to her past through laughter. Just next door to the senior center there’s another new facility that Queen Quet was instrumental in making a reality.

“My books are here in the library,” she said. “The basket was the thing that connected us back to the motherland and into here.”

But Queen Quet’s work on behalf of her culture stretches beyond her books on the shelves of the library and St. Helena Island. She has received numerous recognitions and awards from around the globe, including the Audobon/Toyota TogetherGreen fellowship for environmental stewardship.

She will also be honored later this month in Washington by ASALH, an organization started by Carter G. Woodson, who is the founder of Black History Month.

It’s an award that she’s elated to receive.

But in the quiet time yards away from the shore, Queen Quet is left to reflect on the deep-seeded connection she feels to her culture’s beginnings.

“The first I think about is serenity and a peace that’s here, but as soon as I see water, I start thinking about the motherland because I know when I look in this direction that there’s somebody in the motherland looking back at me,” Queen Quet said. “I really pray the Gullah Geechee people themselves unify all the more and recognize their human rights and their right to self-determination and that they have a nation like any other in the world. But if they want to make sure that it always exists into the future, it’s going to take all of us working together.”

(Source: so-treu, via themodernistwitch)

purepopfornowpeople:

If your culture is threatened by someone’s fashion choice then maybe your culture was shit to begin with.

I gotta push back against this. I agree that “punx” who are angry about Kanye are ridiculous children but that’s because the “history” of punk “fashion” is “we stole it from black people,” not because of any culture. Actual cultures matter regardless of what ain’t-shit people think about them, and I’m super uncomfortable with how easily this argument as phrased could be used to defend hipster headdresses.

(via oldtobegin)

(Source: woodelvish, via brandos)

babylonfalling:

brat-tat-tat-tat

nitanahkohe:

The 1928-29 girls’ basketball team at Flandreau Indian School; Bertha Wooden Knife (kneeling, center) was a renowned horsewoman. Nellie Star Boy is standing behind her—Nellie would go on to become a well-respected artist:

Nellie Star Boy Menard was born in 1910 on the Rosebud Reservation of South Dakota. While still a teenager studying at Flandreau Indian School, she was awarded a Pendleton robe for the blanket design that she had submitted to Pendleton Woolen Mills in Pendleton, Oregon. After graduating in 1929, she was invited back to the school as a teacher of Indian arts.

Although Menard was never officially credited, she is widely known as the collector of most of the Sioux designs in the historic 1935 book Quill and Beadwork of the Western Sioux by Carrie Lyford. In 1937, Menard started the Arts and Crafts Shop in Rosebud out of a concern for the vitality of Lakota arts and for the economic well-being of Lakota artists. In 1941, she was one of four Indian representatives selected from across the nation as delegates to the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of the American Indian in New York City.

Menard operated the Arts and Crafts Shop in Rosebud until 1942, when she moved to Browning, Montana, to manage Northern Plains Arts and Crafts. After World War II, she returned to South Dakota, where she was employed by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs in Rapid City. She kept this position for the next 30 years, and attracted considerable attention for her mastery in quiltmaking.

Her other artistic skills included featherwork, tanning, quillwork, beading, crochet, and the making of handwoven shawls. In addition, she worked as a manager of craft sales and as a curator, with the responsibility of purchasing items from other craftspeople for resale and for selecting objects for museum display. In this capacity, she was highly regarded, demonstrating a deep knowledge of Native American values and traditional artistic standards.

robertreich:

As global capital becomes ever more powerful, giant corporations are holding governments and citizens up for ransom — eliciting subsidies and tax breaks from countries concerned about their nation’s “competitiveness” — while sheltering their profits in the lowest-tax jurisdictions they can find. Major advanced countries — and their citizens — need a comprehensive tax agreement that won’t allow global corporations to get away with this.

Google, Amazon, Starbucks, every other major corporation, and every big Wall Street bank, are sheltering as much of their U.S. profits abroad as they can, while telling Washington that lower corporate taxes are necessary in order to keep the U.S. “competitive.”

Baloney. The fact is, global corporations have no allegiance to any country; their only objective is to make as much money as possible — and play off one country against another to keep their taxes down and subsidies up, thereby shifting more of the tax burden to ordinary people whose wages are already shrinking because companies are playing workers off against each other.

I’m in London for a few days, and all the talk here is about how Goldman Sachs just negotiated a sweetheart deal to settle a tax dispute with the British government; Google is manipulating its British sales to pay almost no taxes here by using its low-tax Ireland subsidiary (the chair of the Parliamentary committee investigating this has just called the do-no-evil firm “devious, calculating, and unethical”); Amazon has been found to route its British sales through a subsidiary in low-tax Luxembourg, and now receives more in subsidies from the British government than it pays here in taxes; Starbucks’ tax-avoidance strategy was so blatant British consumers began boycotting the firm until it reversed course.

Meanwhile, At a time when you’d expect nations to band together to gain bargaining power against global capital, the opposite is occurring: Xenophobia is breaking out all over.

Here in Britain, the UK Independence Party — which wants to get out of the European Union — is rapidly gaining ground, becoming the third most popular party in the country, according to a new poll for The Independent on Sunday. Almost one in five people plan to vote for it in the next general election. Ukip’s overall ratings have risen four points to 19 per cent in the past month, despite Prime Minister David Cameron’s efforts to wrest back control of the crucial debate over Britain’s relationship with the European Union.

Right-wing nationalist parties are gaining ground elsewhere in Europe as well. In the U.S., not only are Republicans sounding more nationalistic of late (anti-immigrant, anti-trade), but they continue to push “states rights” — as states increasingly battle against one another to give global companies ever larger tax breaks and subsidies.

Nothing could strengthen the hand of global capital more than such breakups.

before i lose my style

Genius Ideas for T-Shirts with Text in Black Metal Font That I Don’t Have Time to Get Made Before Maryland Deathfest on Thursday

84 Percent of NYC Fast Food Workers Report Wage Theft in a New Survey

Reclaiming Gullah culture: One woman’s fight to keep history alive →

Global Capital and the Nation State