Sandals ... so stylish! So wonderful! So painfully difficult to wear!
Well fret no more, fabulous foot fetishists. Recognizing that women shouldn't have to risk life and limb to show off their pedicures, at least one company is working to make the foot-display season (approximately May through September) a bit less dangerous and, well, icky.
Introducing Summer Soles, removable insoles that absorb all that hot summer foot sweat that make certain types of shoes a little slippery.
My book "Instant Weddings" (written under my first and middle name) was just featured in a terrific article on the very same subject by Pat Burson of Newsday.
To San Francisco writer Jennifer Shawne, more than a ticking clock is at play here. "People are fed up with the wedding-industrial complex and being told how to get married, and how long it should take, and what everyone should wear, and what flowers everyone should have," she says. Shawne wrote a book - 2004's "Instant Weddings: From 'Will You?' to 'I Do!' in Four Months or Less" (Chronicle Books, $14.95) - during the year and a half it took to plan her own wedding. "It was really unnecessary to take that long," she says. "I said I can't save myself, but I can save others." Who knows? Had Georgia bride-to-be Jennifer Wilbanks opted for a quickie wedding, she might not have skipped out before her big day, leaving behind her groom and the wedding she'd planned, complete with more than a dozen bridesmaids and as many as 600 guests. "The longer it takes, the more expensive and crazy it gets," says Shawne.
Step aside, Kinkade! There's a new Thomas in town and the light he's promoting isn't dabbed on by interns. "Soldiers of Christ: Inside America's most powerful megachurch," a must-read piece by Jeff Sharlet in the May 2005 Harper's, is illustrated with the works of Thomas Blackshear II, whom the story describes as "a major figure in the evangelical-art world." Blackshear's work is on display inside the 11,000-member Colorado Springs megachurch on which the story focuses.
Sharlet writes: My favorite is The Vessel ... a tall, vertical panel of two nude, aple-breasted white female angels team-pouring an urn of honey onto the shaved head of a naked, olive-skinned man below. The honey drips down over his slab-like pecs and his six-pack abs into the eponymous vessel, which he holds in fron to fhis crotch. But the vessel can't handle that much honey, so the sweetness oozes over the edges and sipills down yet another level, presumably onto our heads drenching us in golden, godly love. Part of what makes Blackshear's work so compelling is precisely its unabashed eroticism; it aims to turn you on, and then turn that passion toward Jesus.
Fascinated by Blackshear's odd blending of sophisticated propogandistic visual vocabulary with chintzy truck-stop iconography, to say nothing of the uncomfortable mixing of blatant eroticism and evangelical messaging, I looked the artist up and found this Web site which is maintained by an avid collector and says Blackshear makes "Timeless art with an eternal purpose, created to reclaim the arts for Christ." There's also this short biography. In addition to his paintings, Blackshear makes a line of collectible figurines called Ebony Visions. Read: Precious Moments with smaller eyes, dark skin, and African-American themes and garb.
The figurines are easy to dismiss as overpriced trinkets marketed to a niche consumer group. Less so the paintings. In the context of the article, which outlines the growing movement of militaristic fundamentalist Christianity--Sharlet quotes well-known born-again leaders mocking soup kitchens and metaphorically referring to pierced, sex-loving city dwellers as "critters" from the "underworld" (band name anyone?)--and documents its astonishingly close ties to the Bush Administration, the propogandistic note struck by these images launched not visions of salvation and redemption but fascism, totalitarianism, hell on earth.
If you happen to catch the exhibition "The Universe Within," which features plastinated corpses in various states of dissection without the overbearing narrative of artistic interpretation (although eerily similar in some cases), then you may want to put some suitable tunes on your iPod and turn the volume to high. This is to block out the classical music which gives the whole experience a kind of cheesy, we-are-learning-something feeling.
Then again, you may miss some of the excellent utterances of the other visitors, some of whom seemed downright giddy at the prospect of looking at dead, filleted Chinese guys. Here are a few my husband and I caught when we went on Friday:
"This guy looks just like the other one." "Spongy." "That's tight. They totally snapped all his tendons." "Those are huge. They don't look like they could even fit in a body." "My friend lost all three of his. Ear infection ... and that's how he died."
Sandals ... so stylish! So wonderful! So painfully difficult to wear!
