kontextmaschine:

The Johnny Depp–Amber Heard Verdict Is Chilling

During closing arguments in the defamation trial between Johnny Depp and his ex-wife Amber Heard, one of Heard’s attorneys, Benjamin Rottenborn, described a series of Catch-22s that often ensnare women who, like Heard, accuse their partners of domestic violence. “If you didn’t take pictures, it didn’t happen; if you did take pictures, they’re fake,” he said. “If you didn’t tell your friends, you’re lying; and if you did tell your friends, they’re part of the hoax. If you didn’t seek medical treatment, you weren’t injured; if you did seek medical treatment, you’re crazy.”

I mean it strikes me that people’s issues with Heard aren’t so much that, put in a no-win situation, she didn’t win, but that she was even trying to win, that as she continued in the relationship she acted in ways that weren’t even attempts to get what she wanted in the relationship, but set herself up in a better position to portray the relationship to others afterwards – including but not limited to in court – in a way that won their sympathy and advanced her overall position in life to which the relationship was just one aspect (presumably, in expectation of it ending – it’s unclear what she could do with documentation of abuse in a world where the semipublic relationship continued)

It strikes me that this – conducting your life for the sake of winning public sympathy battles after the fact – might be the real of-the-moment thing the culture is publicly condemning here.

Also like, if Tim Burton’s muse and Marilyn Manson turn out to be critical to the courtroom theatre of the culture war I’m gonna have to re-evaluate mallgoths some

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kontextmaschine:

90s high school fashion would be what, grunge, the dELiA*s catalog, spaghetti-strap tops, Abercrombie/American Eagle/Aeropostale, Hot Topic mallgoth, Old Navy, bellbottom revival into wide-leg raver pants, clove cigarettes, wicca vogue, navel, tongue, and nostril piercings?

…country music going mainstream (“Country Morning” on VH1, this weird Paula Cole/Shawn Colvin/Meredith Brooks/Lilith Fair processing of like, MichFest, 90210 then Melrose Place then Party of Five, Dawson’s Creek, Felicity (Felicity!), layered girls’ haircuts, wine-red dye (but not yet unnatural colors)…

antiheroes, that and dead-baby jokes got flattened together as “edgy”

National speed limits were just uncapped from 55 mph, minivans (Stephenson’s “bimbo boxes”) were a thing, pickups hadn’t gotten fuck-huge yet, the concept of the Hummer was it was fuck-huge…

band t-shirts. People forgot that’s what Hot Topic first made its name on, merch you didn’t have to go to a concert for or order out of a pulp catalog you found in the indie record store

Remember Abercrombie & Fitch? Like in the ‘90s doing big sexy Leni Riefenstahl teenager campaigns, specifically hiring the most attractive kids in your high school to push this mass-market neo-preppy thing? That Was Weird.

Like, is Hollister even still a thing? Aeropostale? If we’re gonna look back and go in over youth pastors and gymnastics coaches and the guy you interned with when you were already out of college, like, what about those guys who had it together enough to manage a mall store but hadn’t gone for a career other than mall retail taking control of these high schoolers’ life schedules and income and making them wear sexy beachwear as a way to make that place seem like a chill 16yo’s paradise?

Remember how Hot Topic started as the place besides concert merch tables to get band t-shirts and years before anyone coined “BBW” or wore problem glasses they dominated the hip-clothes-for-fat-girls market and spun it off as Torrid?

I hope Dov gets American Apparel back, thing’s his baby by any rights. Never met the guy but in LA I lived down the street from the original store and there were always a bunch of Echo Park fucks who worked with him down at the factory.

If not, hell, hope he comes up here and starts Cascadian Apparel, between the “locally made with skilled labor at good wages”, “hipster as fuck”, “chill casual work culture where everyone has sex with each other”, and “vaguely Canadianish” tones that place was more Portland than LA all along.

Keep in mind that his management style was always to circumvent the Peter Principle by taking people he found interesting, promoting them and putting them in charge of things but then busting them back down or out the door if they didn’t prove competent at it, so the real underlying beef you hear from all these girls filing complaints was that they thought they were sleeping their way to the top only to discover the boss was still judging them on actual job performance.

If you’re young like Tumblr young you might not realize that the t-shirt as everyday clothing staple didn’t exist until the 1990s and was before that more a novelty souvenir item. Some of the credit goes to the beachwear upscaling of ‘80s Miami fashion, but the two big forces behind that development were American Apparel on the wholesale/manufacturing side and Hot Topic on the retail side.

Like, Hot Topic is legitimately more important to the development of American fashion than any and all New York designers, grok that.

Their original angle was being the place you could buy band t-shirts. Like back in maybe ’96 when I was getting the classic Garbage “Hollywood Star” shirt (which I can’t even find a picture of on Google, fuck I’m getting old), our mall didn’t have a Hot Topic yet so since I hadn’t been to an actual concert on that tour to hit up the merch table I had to order from one of the cheap newsprint resellers’ catalogs I picked up at the local record store.

Every so often there’s some post going around Tumblr where some artist is breathlessly reporting that Hot Topic (or Urban Outfitters, sometimes) is selling some product with their art on it, like, without paying or even asking, like ha ha ha Hot Topic has always sold bootleg shit, bands were complaining about this from day one. (The t-shirt industry has never been all that picky about IP, check out the “bootleg Bart” tag.)

If someone makes enough fuss they might pull the product but hey, cost of doing business, it’s basically not worth it to pursue legal action because in any case you wouldn’t be suing the deep-pocketed Hot Topic, Inc. but the fly-by-night company they ordered from. (Just like if someone did a bootleg run of your book you’d be going after the printer, not the bookstores it appeared in.)

Honestly that distinction wouldn’t be an insuperable problem with enough political capital to throw at the issue, but while Hollywood studios contribute enough to trade balance, jobs numbers, and most importantly lobbyist salaries to get pampered on this shit, Deviantart users don’t really have the pull to get the OC Do Not Trace Act of 2014 out of committee.

the more things change…