Friday, February 9, 2018

Emily Ratajkowski Just Won Best Street Style Beauty

BEAUTY > CELEBRITY BEAUTY

Emily Ratajkowski Just Won Best Street Style Beauty

OCTOBER 4, 2017 9:34 PM

by JENNA RENNERT

7/7

Photo: Shutterstock

Emily Ratajkowski has had quite a month. Since Labor Day, the leggy model of the moment has been on a jetsetting tour across the globe, turning heads in both the front row and on the streets. While her show-stopping features, replete with pillowy lips and jaw-dropping abs, are nothing new, this fashion month, the model proved that she is no basic beauty, switching up her brunette hair and makeup daily to reveal a repertoire of ever-changing looks.

To attend the Marc Jacobs Spring 2018 fashion show, the So-Cal beauty fastened Jane Birkin-esque fringe onto her brushed out curls, only to change it up a mere 24 hours later. Sporting a faux center-parted bob, Ratajkowski looked every bit the part arriving at Rihanna’s Diamond Ball--in a plunging black LBD, no less. Next, the actress and social media star was off to Paris. In between croissants at cafés and VIP viewings at Miu Miu and Valentino, the 26-year-old managed to serve up many a contrasting, paparazzi-flashing look by way of sleek lengths, glossy waves and pulled-back ponytail polish.

And while Ratajkowski is partial to a face full of tawny nude and taupe shades, she isn’t afraid to take a colorful risk. There were red lips, dark kohl-rimmed eyes and steal-worthy bronzed copper moments, thanks to traveling pro makeup artist Hung Vanngo. Let the model's daily transformations, revisited here, act as a playful reminder: Beauty is meant to be fun.

https://www.vogue.com/tag/model/emily-ratajkowski

Kant’s advice to the lovelorn

Humour

Kant’s advice to the lovelorn

Mike Harding on philosophers who could answer real questions.

Philosophy is a poorly-paid undertaking with few career prospects. At best, you get to write a postmodern novel that’s a runaway best seller, at worst you get a job in a university teaching eighteen year olds that there’s more to life than Sham Bam-Bam and exotic cigarettes. (Is there? Discuss). In the old days you could at least walk round town whilst people set their clocks by you. Nowadays, there’s not even that. Thus it’s hardly surprising that many of the world’s most famous philosophers did part-time work. Advice agencies were a popular source of revenue, and you’d be surprised how many people might pop in on a Monday to check up whether a particular proposition that occurred to them over the weekend was synthetic or analytic. Writing for newspaper and magazines was even more lucrative. Martin Heidegger, for example, wrote regularly for the Black Forest Gazette and was for many years their resident Angst Uberleutnant. An example of his work on the magazine is as follows:

Dear Marty,

A young man I met at a party said I had the most beautiful eyes in the world and that he wanted to interact meaningfully with me for the duration of the current period of darkness, but not necessarily to have any temporally-extended emotional dependency issues of an on-going nature. Naturally, I said Yes. Well, you do, don’t you? Now. according to a device I purchased from Boots, and used to the detriment of the lounge carpet, I discovered that not only do I exist in relationship, but something else does too. I can’t tell my mum, what should I do? (Signed) Worried.

Dear Worried,

This is an example of what I call Being-ln-The-Club. There has clearly been a releasement-towards-things without the use of the other. I suspect that if you go round to the young man’s lodgings you will find he has moved and not left a forwarding address. As the poet Holderlin said: where his word breaks off, no man shall be.

Wittgenstein was another forced to seek alternative employment after he gave away a fortune that would have bought Vienna ten times over. Consequently he worked as a part tim monk, a school teacher and, during the summe holidays, hunted rhinoceroses with a russel terrier. He was in charge of the agony page of girls’ magazine that was devoted to horse-riding publicising the lives of pre-pubescent pop star and exploring if Boolean truth functions could b applied linguistically to create a system for statin; all that could be said. The followin; correspondence is typical:

Dear Ludwig,

Please help, my mum and dad are always arguing. Dad spends all his nights down at the Working Man’s Philosophy Club and comes home reeking of language. Before we know it he’s arguing with mum about whether thoughts are something like objects in our mind that we use to describe our experience of the world, or whether the world is in fact constructed by our mind and identical with it. My mum will have none of it and says there must be an objective reality because that’s how it’s always been. I don’t know which way to turn any more and dread the long winter evenings. (Signed) Bertrand

Dear Bertrand,

Both your parents are fools and have utterly missed the point. How they can be so daft is beyond me. I have to sit here day after day listening to such un-thinking drivel: I could scream. You seem working class to me. so why study philosophy at all? Manual work is elevating and noble. We should all work with our hands, learn to be humble and respect simplicity. Sadly your parents are too stupid to recognise this fact. Your handwriting is dreadful. If you were in my class I’d soon knock some sense into you. Never write to me again.

For many years Nietzsche was the editor of gardening magazine, and in this capacity he deal with reader’s questions, a typical one being:

Dear Friedrich,

I’d like to be more successful in growing vegetables for jam making, but nothing I grow seems to look like the picture on the seed packet. Where do I go wrong?
(Signed) Cosima

Dear Cosima,

What makes you believe that the picture on the seed pack refers to anything real? This is Platonic nonsense! We are corrupted by the image of an ideal vegetable to which our gardens should aspire. It is an arrogant fiction which we use to declare that ours is the plot that deserves the prize. All such haughty culture serves this myth. In reality, there is nothing outside the garden. Even the gourds are dead! We must face the fact that nothing we can do can alter the remorseless repetition of nature. Have you thought of growing eternal red currants?

Jean-Paul Sartre was another who regularly contributed to magazines. His ‘spot the collaborator’ column was essential reading during the war years, and his whimsical ‘Irony in the Soul’ articles made him a hit during the postwar years. As existentialism really took off, following the invention of students, his views on the philosophically correct way to exist became essential reading for bohemians everywhere. Not surprisingly, he soon had advice to offer in every circumstance:

Dear Jean-Paul

I’m in a rather difficult situation. My best friend at work suffers from Bad Faith, which makes it very unpleasant for those of us who have to work near her. I really don’t know how to let her know this without offending her. What can I do? (Signed) S.

Dear Simone,

Bad Faith, or BF as we philosophers often call it, can happen to anyone who isn’t scrupulous with their moral hygiene. Obviously this is very important if your work brings you into contact with Others - waiters are frequent offenders here - but we are all at risk. When you’re alone together gently let her know that she is skimping on the introspection of her personal values. BF is often caused by a failure to tackle really stubborn, deep down excuses, so let her know that you make a point of examining your position at least twice a day – more in hot weather, especially if you’re walking by the beach. Using soft soap isn’t good enough, although newformula Camus may be useful. Simply using scepticism regularly works for most people, so does seeing the world as ultimately futile and meaningless. In really severe cases it may be necessary to abandon all forms of belief entirely and recognise your fundamental absurdity. As a last resort, suicide is invariably effective.

Our next philosopher is also French and has the name Jacques. This may, or may not be either Derrida or Lacan. Indeed, it may be neither, or both. Alternatively, it may neither be both. The difference between Jacques and Jacques is not detected in the writing of (n)either, and thus their persistence as a signifier of the phonetic exchange of transient cultural beliefs should not be assumed. Either (or none) of them worked on a well-known woman’s magazine. Fortunately, the following correspondence is all that now survives:

Dear Jacques,

I found a letter in the pocket of my husband’s suit when I was taking it to the cleaners. I know I shouldn’t have read it, but I did. It seemed very clear from its contents that he was having an affair. When I challenged him he denied any knowledge of it. What should I do? (Signed) A. Reader

Dear Reader,

While your husband is correct in denying exclusive authorship of the letter, as your reading of a text in which he is the nominal subject itself re-frames the nature of its exchange value within the symbolic system, it should not be entirely ignored. Thus we should start by questioning the signification of the letter itself. Insofar as it represents both the (imagined) desire of the husband, but also the fear of the wife the famous formula applies: Name of the (Imagined) Mistress / Fear of the Wife = Fear of the Wife / Denial of the Husband. There is a clear transposition of desire along the chain of signification, with the (imagined) mistress becoming the fear (of) the wife by the (real) husband. The denial of the husband is both a denial of (assumed) authorship, as well as - from the wife’s point of view her (transposed) desire - itself denied by her - of her desire for the (imagined) adultery if it were transposed to her and a symbolic Other. The (imagined) mistress is thus the ex-centric Other of the subjectivity of the wife, and the denial of the Husband becomes her denial of him as Name-of-the-Husband. In other words, throw the cheating bastard out.

Mike Harding is an existential psychotherapist and Secretary of the Society for Existential Analysis. He teachers psychotherapy at Regent’s College, London, and is also a post-graduate philosophy student at City University, where he is completing a doctorate on something obscure but meaningful.

Voluntary Sex

Humour

Voluntary Sex

Peter Cave stumbles on some slippery slope arguments.

The ethics of voluntary euthanasia is ever being discussed in the press. The screening of Death on Request, showing a doctor killing his suffering patient at the patient’s request, stimulated further coverage. Many pundits were eager to condemn, nodding sagely and muttering about slippery slopes. Peter Cave has been allowed to listen in to a new order, the Order of the Non-Copulatory, which takes the argument where it leads. Here is his exclusive report.

Voluntary sexual intercourse, we can reveal, is now conclusively demonstrated to be mistaken. Staring at a mirror early in the morning has provided some of us with inklings of the act’s wrongness for some time; but haunting screen images have recently brought the issue to a wider audience. No longer need we rely upon such transient contingency from the world empirical to cast doubt upon copulatory acts; the new Order of the Non-Copulatory offers irrefutable a priori reasoning, reasoning which establishes the conclusion that sexual intercourse is morally wrong. Members of the Order – shunners of indeterminacy and greyness to a man and to a woman – advance a black and white case with compassion and understanding. I have been permitted to listen in.

Novice: Formerly I delighted in fornication, but now I realise the folly of my vice. Remind me, Sister, of the reasons why sexual intercourse – voluntary sexual intercourse, for I did nothing against anyone’s wishes – is so evil.

Sister Leonora: It is as clear as the propositions that two plus two equals four and that the square on the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides of a rightangled euclidean triangle, though arguably and happily it does not possess the same degree of clarity as the truth of Fermat’s Last Theorem or Sister Ethel’s potato and elderberry home-made wine. The reasoning may be summed up in the words “slippery slope”. Voluntary intercourse must not be permitted for otherwise society would slip into the ruination of enforced fornication.

Novice: Ah, yes, I remember. You are following the teachings of many – particularly precious papery pundits such as Sister Melanie Phillips – who deal with related ethical issues of similar gravity. They are of the Order of To Order To Keep Going Come What May, are they not?

Sister Leonora: Indeed they are, though their order to keep going does not, of course, apply to the sexual act. But yes, ‘Keep Going’ fairly sums up their position, just as ‘Stop Coming’ is an abbreviation for ours. Sister Melanie’s teachings for example – frequently to be found in the Gospel of the Guardian and Observer – show us the evils of voluntary euthanasia. We apply her teachings, following exactly the same irresistible reasoning, to voluntary sexual intercourse.

Novice: Please remind me how the teachings lead us to the truth on this matter.

Sister Leonora: Nothing could be simpler. One basic problem is that voluntary sex (to use the colloquial abbreviation) may not be truly voluntary just as, indeed, voluntary euthanasia may not be truly voluntary.

Novice: So, we might get the two confused sometimes. Therefore voluntary sex is wrong even when we have not confused it with the involuntary..?

Sister Leonora: Quite so and…

Sister Severe: This deep difficulty of not knowing what is truly so, indeed an epistemic difficulty, pervades our life. As you know, you cannot be sure that low fat spread is not butter, nor yet that it is butter, nor yet that you can’t believe it’s not butter. Well, that’s why you won’t find me eating anything like that. And as for those other things you’re not sure about - meat filled sausages, French cheeses from Somerset, Virginia Bottomley and holidays of a lifetime…

Sister Leonora: Now, now, that is sufficient buttering and butting in, Sister Severe. You don’t want to become like Sister Silly who, because she once mistook her brother for a hat, thinks it best to treat all hats as her brothers and all the Brothers as her hats.

Novice: Ah, so this is just a general epistemic problem about when and whether we know certain things. But on some occasions do we not know that sexual consent is, indeed, consent? And on those occasions…

Sister Leonora: Never mind all that, Sister Melanie has another knock-down consideration, namely, that voluntary euthanasia leads inexorably to involuntary euthanasia. Now, this consideration applies all the more to sexual engagements in life’s carnal carnival.

Novice: Ah, I understand. In lands where sexual intercourse voluntary is permitted, you can witness inexorable sexual leadings, taking us from “yes” meaning “yes” to “yes” meaning “yes, but” and then “eh, well, all right” meaning “must you?” to a dozy sigh meaning sometimes “maybe, yes” and sometimes “maybe, no” and sometimes “go away – oh, if you must!” And yet each change is so small that if sexual intercourse is permitted in the one case, it should be equally permitted in the other. Perils of plied alcohol, persuasive words (“oh, just this once”), of job offers, casting couches and dinner dates lead us through a whole range of date rapes and acquaintance rapes; and these could all be morally justified courtesy of the slope.

Sister Leonora: Quite! And it is just the possibility of all of this…

Novice: It is, indeed, truly astonishing that society believes it can draw the voluntary/involuntary sexual distinction when it’s all so fuzzy.

Sister Leonora: Perfectly correct. Our Order firmly believes that if it is at all possible for A not to be clearly discerned from B, then if B is discredited, then so must be A. Rape is discredited and so therefore must be all sexual voluntary intercourse.

Sister Severe: And more! When I look at the colour spectrum, greens merge into blues. I see night merging into day, wakefulness into sleepingness, beginnings into ends and the M1 into the M6. So much the worse, I declare, for colours, for day, for…

Novice: But, thinking about it, if you’re right, then you’ve just turned the slope round and are sliding in the other direction and so if one slide is unjustified then so is… Sister Leonora: Now, now, that’s enough, all of you – especially you, Sister Severe! A new member of our Order must be taught how not to run before she’s taught how not to walk – let alone how not to…

Sister Severe: Just my point again! For running cannot be clearly distinguished from walking, nor walking from…

Novice: But do not people talk of their right to engage in voluntary sex? Do they not speak of personal autonomy?

Sister Leonora: True, but personal autonomy is not the sole determining factor here. After all, no one should complain that they are prevented from acting in ways which would harm others.

Novice: Yet if a couple engages in voluntary sex, they may be harming no one and…

Sister Leonora: You are forgetting about the slippery effects on society, as Sister Melanie has shown so well with regard to euthanasia. If people engage in sex, they are making a judgement about the quality of life, about what is valuable in life, and so they may affect others, causing the frail and vulnerable to give way to their passions or even causing them to think they possess lusts when, truly, they are lustless and listless.

Novice: Ah, yes, I forgot that in such actions, I am also responsible for what others do. I must remember that. Even if someone is strongly opposed to involuntary intercourse and herself engages only in the voluntary, none the less, indeed by that very engagement, she bears some responsibility for the rapists and persuasion rapists and date rapists and “have another drink” rapists and “wouldn’t you like promotion” rapists and so on. But tell me, how do we expect our Order ultimately to have any members at all, if all sex is wrong?

Sister Leonora: Oh, dear me, you are about to confuse having sex with procreating. Sister Melanie clearly explained how people sometimes confused killing with seeking to relieve a patient’s distress by a means which you know will happen to hasten death. Killing involves an intention to bring about death; relieving patients’ distress involves no such intention. So, we may intend to procreate and even know that it will involve using those funny bits of our bodies, but the intercourse of those funny bodily bits is not something that we intend to have.

Novice: Ah, yes, I had forgotten about the subtlety of the intention/knowledge distinction here – in what, I believe, you call the doctrine of double effect. But can we ever be sure that someone truly is only knowing and not intending? After all, you raised such a worry earlier on with the voluntary/involuntary distinction.

Sister Leonora: Now, now, I hope that you are not going to become a logic-chopper like all those so-called philosophers and analysts and…

Novice: Indeed not, I acknowledge your wisdom. Tell me, though, why is that member – the one over there – so quiet?

Sister Leonora: You’ve spotted Sister Silent. She has true enlightenment, fully grasping the greyness of the world. She sees how all good things can lead to bad, how all truth can lead to falsity, how the whole world is one big slope, yet even how slope-ness itself is sloppy and slippery, sliding from the horizontal to the vertical. As a result, she thinks nothing and says nothing and does nothing.

All: She must be truly blessed.

Although Peter Cave lectures in philosophy, he denies teaching any of the Sisters of the Order of the Non-Copulatory

VANTAG galeria

Friday, February 9, 2018