Beatific Vibes

I’m rounding out the last day of pictures o my San Francisco escapade, and the time has come for over-indulgence. Since there is no hope of affording rent there anytime soon (if you are unsure, this quiz is sure to get you down), I had to pack as many of the Victorian-gone-groovy vibes. This included a stop to the epic City Lights Bookstore, my choice historical book source after the Library of Alexandria, started by none other than Lawrence Ferlinghetti (of Beat fame) and possibly most famous for publishing and selling Howl in the 1950s (despite its status as a banned book).

Word to the wise: horizontal stripes after brunch are not picture perfect.

Coit Tower

San Francisco Harbor- Doesn’t this just look like a beacon promising fresh new hope for the future?

You didn’t realize another feet picture was just what you needed, did you?

This might be my favorite building in San Francisco. A living reminder of the Bohemia in the midst of business giants.

Outfit Details: Hat: Vintage | Shirt: Primark | Skirt: Next | Flats: Jeffrey Campbell

April is poetry month, and as Easter just passed, I’ll share my favorite Ferlinghetti poem here. I couldn’t include the zaniness of the original formatting, so it’s worth looking up for a second look if you like it.

Sometime During Eternity
By: Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Sometime during eternity
some guys show up
and one of them
who shows up real late
is a kind of carpenter
from some square-type place
like Galilee
and he starts wailing
and claiming he is hep
to who made heaven
and earth
and that the cat
who really laid it on us
is his Dad

And moreover
he adds
It’s all writ down
on some scroll-type parchments
which some henchmen
leave lying around the Dead Sea somewheres
a long time ago
and which you won’t even find
for a coupla thousand years or so
or at least for
ninteen hundred and fortyseven
of them
to be exact
and even then
nobody really believes them
or me
for that matter

You’re hot
they tell him

And they cool him

They stretch him on the Tree to cool
And everybody after that
is always making models
of this Tree
with Him hung up
and always crooning His name
and calling Him to come down
and sit in
on their combo
as if he is THE king cat
who’s got to blow
or they can’t quite make it

Only he don’t come down
from His Tree

Him just hang there
on His Tree
looking real Petered out
and real cool
and also
according to a roundup
of late world news
from the usual unreliable sources
real dead

Gender By Us

Today NPR published a piece entitled, “For These Millennials Gender Norms Have Gone Out of Style.” To get to the point, these days men wear nail polish, women wear suits, and some Urban Outfitter’s employees wear whatever they pull out of the family dryer.

To me, it comes as no surprise that the author, Lidia Kott, could round up three gender-benders from New York, San Fran, and D.C., respectively. I expect that people chilling around Haight Asbury might delve a little deeper to create a unique image. But for your everyday 14-to-34-year-old millennial is this really how we perceive reality? As Exhibit A, “normcore” seems to promote a more androgynous look is widely accepted. Also, we can’t forget the man bun — a possible move in the feminine direction? On the other hand, growing up in a Georgia suburb, while girls openly embraced camo, men weren’t really rushing towards nail polish, kilts, or, well, anything associated with a more traditionally feminine identity. Maybe my peers were the missing third in the Intelligence Group’s survey (or they thought people weren’t defined by their gender so much, they just didn’t know where those people were).

As sorority shirts look increasingly like the-shirt-you-wore-home-this-morning (complete with frocket) and frat daddies grow ever more colorful the later you venture into football season, maybe I am being generally unfair. But I fail to see how modern millennial gender norms (or abolishment thereof) seriously rival those of the flappers, the beatniks, or the hippie movement. Men’s hair was certainly more “feminine” in the 1960s and 1970s. And androgyny hardly beats bobbed hair and a straight frock. Ms. Kott does concede, “Mostly, you’ll see millennial women dressed femininely, and millennial men dressed masculinely. But many even conventionally dressed millennials are considering the ways in which gender might be flexible.”

What do you think? Do we dress and act differently? And if we don’t dress differently, do we feel fundamentally different about gender?