The ******* of embezzled glory staunchly defend their counterfeit stature by defalcating the public trust of industrious societies governed internally by compunction and sabotaged externally by the tempests of acerbic fate met with inclement aleatory convergence. To supply a society with ingenuity without being complaisant or officious with unctuous pleas to the overlords we must fashion a new vogue that taps the bustle of giants and aggrandizes the margins to oversee their own creative destinies with scaffolded arrangements of titanic promise and justifiable fluidity to conquer the blinkered dogmatism of a dissolute chastity to inveterate apocryphal tenets of factitious but unmerited perspectives. Democracy crumbles when the convenience of sensationalism supplants the resolve of those that fossick hidden wealth and promulgate validity instead of undergirding pomp with precarious prevarications of duplicitous omission guarded gingerly by the gatekeepers of a ****** sanity that whitewashes the discussion with invented hobgoblins and purblind catharsis. To defeat simplicity and enshrine byzantine elegance as the paragon for voguish commentary rather than abide by a bowdlerized decorum for appeasing simpletons with divisive balkanization through identity politics we can overcome the impediments to human progress that are engineered to persist because of the inertia of the listless and the stubbornness of doctrinaire politicization and invent vivacity and festivity anew. We need to divorce ourselves from pedestrian quibbles of hero-worship that endanger the vitality of the common discourse because of fastidious pedantic disempowerment that ravages us with debased dreams by underscoring nuisances and tolerable nightmares that emasculate the virulence of the liberated individual and subvert his ambitions to contend with a picaresque world of limitless promise and self-motivated internal wealth.
      The bane of modernity is how chary the world becomes because of fractured histories intersecting with controversial destinies and the antidote to that poisonous self-defeating self-censorship is the audacity of brazen challenges to expurgation through assiduous resourcefulness and delicate diplomacy in wrangling controversies with outspoken courage rather than whispered resentment. Temerity waged in inclement circumstance is justified and curiosity stoked by lambent flames of fulgurant individualism should be fortified to the extent necessary to conquer the feckless spoilsports of unctuous puritanism and institutional obedience. The quacksalvers that blather about inconsequence strand the imagination in a desiccated desert that is ostracized from the palettes of the artistic whim to wield efflorescence rather than squander life in pursuit of perfunctory lucre or tenuous solidarity around banal idealism promised by social justice warriors that forget the biggest war being waged on humanity is on the ingenuity of the common discourse and the liberty to opine about real issues rather than saccharine conventions of emasculation through linguistic imprisonment and epicurean slavery to fashimites who relish the buzzword but never the enlightened audience that scoffs at feeble attempts at cultural commentary like Childish Gambino’s “This is America” music video. This particular artifact is a demonstration of how childishly fickle the plebeian mentality really is, stitching together a bricolage of violence to engineer controversy and serenading it with the most banal music imaginable and exhorting people to herald it as a high artform while inundating the world with unimaginative comic book movies and Star Wars rip-offs because of the lucrative business of formulaic replication. “This is America” should be regarded as a parody of itself because of how hackneyed its design is and how cacophonous it sounds and mocks its audience with lowbrow tactics of adding tinsel to trash and marketing it as the glory of tatterdemalions rather than the refinement of true cinematic achievements that have been relegated because Warhol’s Campbells-Soup-consumerism trumps true belletrist in the public view.
        Cultural watersheds punctuate our history with salient achievements in experimentation, but the formulaic profiteering of buzzword sensationalism and yellow journalism and the ostentatious glorification of promiscuous boasting and fancy cars tantalize the mice to continue playing slot machines rather than penning a novel or doing something promethean. The world scoffs at Trump but ignores the bigger institutional caveats that endanger us much more than a pragmatic albeit unconventional pontificator who is complicit in constructing a false narrative to enslave mindless people to fret about eminence rather than delight themselves in the consequential nuances of established refinement that used to serenade the world with flourish and spectacle. The world kowtows to the crusade against flavor-of-the-week enemies of the liberal-conservative syncretism because it has been conditioned to believe that synthesis is the only logical solution for the polarized worldviews of churlish people that become parvenus not on their merits but on their marketable pitfalls and their public foibles. Peccadillos are more important to people than virtues and this makes society morally bankrupt if we loiter around Astroturf causes that have been infiltrated by corporatism and venal debauchery and acquiesce as disempowered gossip hounds that hunt in packs to find jest in aberration rather than achievement in self-created narratives that defy the stupid purblind boorishness of the mainstream media and its haughty liberalism or the persnickety condemnation of priggish conservative moralities that had an expiration date 50 years ago. Who the **** cares about transgender-touting-gender-fluidity quidnuncs and the snooty obsession with lurid personal endeavors of reputable people that made minor ****** transgressions in a world policed by wide-eyed feminazis that seek to ransack men of their vital virulence to spotlight their unjustifiable oppression. Women are oppressed but the carnal nature of their calumniation and their vindictive powers of persuasion are deployed with such vehement vigilance and such distaste for the majority that the world relegates itself to quibbles of celebrities rather than substantive issues. There is a systemic feminization of society occurring that seeks to demarcate despotic uxorious pleasantries as an incarceration of vocal dissent against supercilious women and their tamed men that slavishly grovel in repudiation of anything prickly.  Men historically have oppressed women but the solution to this quandary isn’t a reverse discrimination where the minority concern is spotlighted as a majoritarian issue that overshadows the disproportionate nature of our society where nominal accreditation is afforded in a non-meritocratic way to absolve people of their carnality and demote the vigorous defense of human liberty as secondary to compromise solutions that appease more people than they offend but simultaneously result in suboptimal conditions that reward arbitrarily coachable people while jettisoning anyone witty enough to be capable of insubordination of a hedonistic epicurean world obsessed with appearance and ravaged by the decadence of formulaic profiteering at the expense of originality and true promethean art that is herculean enough to defy hackneyed tropes and siphon the best elements from a piecemeal world variegated with complexity but stifled by fomented hatred.
The solutions to these problems is to create a watchdog group of artistic critics who become eminent and ubiquitously heard enough to offer creative consultation to the artistic endeavors that we consume and the music that is curated for fastidious ears that crave euphonic originality rather than the banality of easily dovetailed bass-heavy cookie-cutter garbage and the gaudy tactics of talentless rappers whose swagger derives from  the intersection of opportunism and the divestiture of an industry that rewards gloated supercilious epicureanism and meretricious marketability. Am I the only one jaded by second-rate superhero movies that infest the cinemas that borrow from Michael Bay while thrusting pulse-pounding but narratively bankrupt movies down the throats of consumers that might prize the cinematic originality of the heyday of filmmaking? Is it always high art to invent controversy that is witless or half-witted just because it will create buzz? Shouldn’t we condemn the laziness of society in acquiescing to the penury of the modern cultural narrative which belabors the dead horses of racism and sexism ad nauseum? Shouldn’t we fight the war of against inequity through legislation rather than hibernating about scandalous eminence and testy malfeasance?
          Liberty should be championed above all else and we are turning our backs on the future unless we muster the resolve to diminish the sway of the common narrative and aim our spotlight at consequential endeavors rather than the tropes of prosaic and pedestrian bastardization of art and culture. We need to fight artistic laziness which has ravaged our culture and castigate the tactics of wannabee celebrities that use lurid tactics to attract an audience by bedizening themselves with Pyrrhic ostentations and rampant fakery to create more melodrama in a world that needs to be less histrionic. YouTube celebrities swarm us as they get high on ******* and lean-- at our expense-- and vandalize property and convincing nine-year-old’s like Lil Tay to flex her money like it is infinitely renewable in a finite world where all our attention is wasted on artless artifice of less talented people that know how to engineer a ruckus by strutting themselves beyond all decency and selling out to a corporatist nightmare of enslaved convenience. We need to be more vocal about the dissolution of artistic merit and the formulaic repetition of successful formulas that jade us and make us yawn about another retread of a previously successful idea that is milked to the point of cruelty.                                                         ­                       
       Let’s change the narrative and focus on creating true art rather than reacting to the meretricious tinsel of the vogue consensus which is so impotent in its ability to rivet audiences because it has become so notoriously lazy. Fight laziness in art, dismiss your news feeds, be resourceful, seek true happiness rather than find yourself hoodwinked and duped by the idea that Trump is the most important issue or getting caught in thought loops and brooding about sexism and inequality. Let us strive to be egalitarian but within limits that would also appease hominists rather than just the hypertrophy of the leftist narrative that seeks to cage us with the doublespeak of complaisant conformity.  Reject the unctuous charlatans that pretend priggishness when their banausic purpose is barbaric but beguiling to be a lullaby for laggards. We need to fight for the future of civilization rather than hobnob with convenience and loiter around decrying false perpetrators rather than systemic injustices that could otherwise be rectified if enough people fought for it. We can invent a future that is a great festivity serenaded by cultivated artistic refinement and forget about the trifles that divide us. United in ambition and fueled by ingenuity we can defeat artistic laziness and be resourceful with how we decide what is newsworthy. Spurred by the argosy of proactive motivation we can change the world in a substantial way by deciphering the subtext that governs the world. The subtext is everything!

Local designer Vanessa Froehling has denim on the brain. Stonewashed, herringbone print, chambray, stretch and black denim, to be sure.

In her home studio, Froehling flips through hangers of designs, including sailor-style high-waisted women’s shorts, a men’s blazer and a women’s jumpsuit.

“It’s something that’s in everyone’s closet and it will never go out of style,” says Froehling of the French-born fabric (denim’s etymology comes from “de Nîmes,” the French town where Levis Strauss first procured the tough cotton twill for your 501s). But, she adds, “people are stuck on what denim can do.”

The line is called Carpe Denim and it’s Froehling’s entry into FashioNXT (self-described as “Portland’s Official Fashion Week”) — not to be confused with Portland Fashion Week — three days and nights of runway shows in early October. She will present Carpe Denim in the UpNXT competition, the “emerging designers accelerator,” alongside four other Pacific Northwest designers the evening of Oct. 5.

The fashion week has a cozy relationship with Project Runway, the fashion-designer reality show running since 2004, and, in fact, two of the judges assessing the competition are Seth Aaron (winner of Project Runway season 7) and Michelle Lesniak (winner of season 11).

In 2015, Froehling applied to both Portland Fashion Week and FashioNXT, but was only accepted by the former that time. She says auditioning in front of the FashioNXT judges was intimidating.

“My nerves were like, ‘What do I do with my hands?’” Froehling says, shaking her hands by her sides and laughing. The judges were tough, she recalls, and they recommended that she develop the marketability and cohesion of her line.

Over the past year, she took their advice to heart and decided she would try out again, this time with a denim ready-to-wear line, a departure from the couture gowns that have distinguished her style. She took inspiration from the city — recalling watching the denizens of Portland walk by, falling in love with their street-wear style — and the layers of people, buildings and traffic.

Eight jean looks — five for women and three for men — will walk the runway, but rest assured, this will be no **** of Canadian tuxedos. Although denim is the common thread, the designs feature smart juxtapositions against black leather and a colorful textile that looks like a cross between gas puddles and graffiti.

The self-taught designer has also developed several innovative details: a woman’s denim peplum jacket that unzips at the waist, transforming it into a more casual cropped jacket; women’s stretch leather pants that zip open at the knee, a nod to ripped jeans; and a men’s chambray shirt with the illusion of a double collar creating a fresh origami effect.

This summer, the judges welcomed Froehling on the FashioNXT train.

Froehling says one judge told her that she’s the first designer to return the following year to try out again after being rejected.

“It’s the highest fashion production in Oregon,” she says.

The winner will be announced at the after-party Oct. 5, and the prize package secures a spot for the designer in the main runway show in 2017 and includes business mentorships, feature stories inPortland Monthly and Portland Mercury, and a strategic marketing course at Portland Fashion Institute.Read more at:http://www.marieaustralia.com/short-formal-dresses | www.marieaustralia.com/red-carpet-celebrity-dresses

I am a certified expert in the sequential pushing of buttons,
this pushing performed, on a good day, in concert with the
expensively purchased, somewhat rare mental model of
the workings of a recently commonplace variety of machine
dependent at its core on the minuscule presence of increasingly-rare
earth metals allowing for the conditional flow of groups of electrons.
These machines, like their precursors, are further dependent on
the supply of slightly less increasingly rare combustible material
for which armed conflicts are routinely fought and many have died.

My interest in the machines began at an early age,
enticed by the illusion of control, and on the whole,
I think, motivated by the idea that these machines
processing information, the core mechanism of reality,
might be used to create understanding.

In the interceding years, it is increasingly apparent to me
that while some are used for this purpose, most,
like most things around me, are controlled and engaged by
multi-personed organisms concerned primarily with:
1) self-preservation AND
2) the collection of, and limited divestment of,
unit notions of rarefied value, insured by the
existence of another similar organism valued for its
1) self- and nearby-environs preservation AND
2) recent track record of insuring continued relatively easy access
to the aforementioned important combustible materials.
—it is generally considered to people's credit that this notion
of value is thus-derived and no longer as frequently derived by virtue
of possessing a metal which, while of certain non-combustible use,
is basically just pretty rare and really, really shiny.

I find myself again shortly in a need of convincing such an organism
that my button pushing is of sufficient quality,
on sufficiently frequent good days,
that it should consider me a temporary part thereof and divest,
of itself to me, sufficient units of value that I might happily
continue to push buttons on its behalf in the pursuit of further units.

I am, for some reason, somewhat less than thrilled with this prospect
finding it, despite its marketability, a maybe less than important enterprise.
I am existentially concerned by the idea that my whole value may derive
from my button pushing, and is thus further dependent on
the availability of rare-earth metal and also-rare combustibles.

In some delusion of importance amongst 7 billion plus similar primates
and a unfathomably vast universe,
I thought you might be interested to know

I don't know what to do from here.
It just seems as if the entire world is fixated on some infinite screen.
So all encompassing, yet images flicker in fantastic frivolity.

Such absolutely aimless anomie
erodes the mind, heart, and soul of everything.
To the point of true societal insanity.

Where we'd rather chemically synthesize the taste of an apple,
than to plant an apple tree.
Nations wage wars in the name of peace while
Corporations, not people, enjoy freedom of speech.

Is this what it means to be a human being?
Are we encoded with DNA or with binary?
What of your beating heart? if it still pumps.
Or have your cells of blood all become zeroes and ones?

Do you look out upon the shimmering sea to be humbled and awed?
Or do your eyes map out it's marketability, growth index, and overhead costs!?

Oh, what of a metaphor for societal insanity.
To depict society as an orchestral piece;
They are all strings vibrating in the very wrong key,
resonating on a global scale in such horrific harmonies.
Yet they'll incorporate,
they'll advertise,
they'll trade the stock publicly!
They'll call it a symphony.

For Anne Case & Christina Paxson

“Several epidemiological studies have shown a weak but statistically significant positive correlation between height and intelligence in human populations.”
   ~ Wikipedia article on height and intelligence

If God gave you a good brain
And with it you dare think what you will
You won’t be very acceptable
In this world
Being what you are

She wasn’t yet six months old
Long & slim when
The recommendations started coming
That she should be a model
That she’s beautiful
That if we didn’t love her enough to acknowledge it
That they would
Gladly take her
A sentiment they might never have shared
With the mother at the beach whose five-year-old
Boy had to ***
Wasn’t allowed
Wasn’t this such beauty
Wasn’t the wind- & water-swept sand glad
To miss a few drops of nourishment
In fulfillment of ****** & emotional needs
Prevented & punishable
Of someone fated for a life of frustration
Being what he is
What’s more useful
To smile for the camera
To sell this baby smile
To income she could earn for nothing
Commended & rewarded
Being what she is

How convenient for industry
In its veneer of decency & thoughtfulness
The opportunities provided by marketability
Of just enough of her flesh
Being what she is
The denial of just enough of his
To keep her smiling for the customer
Throughout business hours for pay
While he works overtime at the screen
Solving business problems for relief
In compounded frustration of forlorn existence
Being what he is

She’s a tall slender vision in Spandex and
Translucent wisp of gossamer that could’ve heated
A bedroom like mine had it ever adorned there
Such a shape that instead stands
Statuesque in this supplement aisle
Being what she is
Where someone who’d spent the hours of study
Enough to discuss how this B complex might
Suit me more than that one might’ve been helpful
I’m instead rendered ****** not to embrace and love
But imagine during *******
For the sake of a bottom
Line for this chain that uses her kind to net more
From white American guys like me
Than they could had they employed the knowledgable
Being what they are

Indeed she’s a tall slender shrew no longer tamable
Wed to the man
Not flesh & blood so hard to please
Should there be such a creature
As a female nerd
The term’s too limiting
Surely as we need her to not be a bore
To get techie with us when techie’s needed
We can’t call it home without her intuition
Her special way with a crying infant
A ruffled colleague a nosy neighbor an aggravating in-law
Or a case of frazzled nerves we bring home
The surety that behind every great nerd’s a great woman
Greater than ourselves
A role too big for us to ask that she fill
What’s so much easier
In the name of feminine progress & freedom
Selling her body glimpse by glimpse
Earning her position customer by customer
As she frustrates the studious from whom it’s been cheated
As the master condemns the slave whose effort’s been stolen
As I’m magnetically drawn like the moth to the flame
For like the moth’s impulse mine’s evolved for a reason
Turned on its head for such convenience
The sake of the market
That’s all just the same
What could draw me but
All the potential she never needed

This is the way the world ends
The nerd with his choice of expressed reaction observes
A society of sophistication & contraption
Though it well may have been
Assembled with decency & thoughtfulness
Becomes little by little their veneer
Until not one of his kind’s left
Minding the store
Whose photogenic collapse a compound frustration
And forlorn existence can welcome
As I’ll need no longer struggle
To figure out what to say
Once she gets enough past six months to ask
Why someone dressed this way should be
So smilingly quick to volunteer help
To supply what remedy I seek
Yet so slow to answer any further questions

Send me back to nature
I am not something you can grow and harvest to supply demand
Surplus to requirements I cannot fulfil on what I have been fed
I will reclaim the lands I lost to you and your machines
Mechanical masters of marketability
This was wasteland once then nourished now overproducing, overfarmed
Too much from too little spread apart so far the ground is screaming the food is beautiful but -
Aesthetic attacking the process made to let soil grieve for its offspring allow itself to drown the earth with what will make new again
And without
We are surplus