Hit the Iron Bell

Move over Dan Savage (of Savage Love). A soon to be unveiled author currently writing as 'Sugar' for The Rumpus has been providing insightful, witty and often brilliant advice in response to reader emails. His/Her identity will be unveiled next Tuesday on February 14th. One of my favourite pieces to date is #41: Like an Iron Bell. After reading this a few weeks ago i thought to myself 'Yes, yes, a hundred times yes'. I've picked out some of the highlights below but the full column is worth reading.

Dear Johnny,
The last word my mother ever said to me was love. She was so sick and weak and out of her head she couldn't muster the “I” or the “you,” but it didn't matter. That puny word has the power to stand on its own...My mother’s last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love.


I suppose you think this has nothing to do with your question, Johnny, but it has everything to do with my answer. It has everything to do with every answer I have ever given to anyone. It’s Sugar’s genesis story. And it’s the thing my mind kept swirling back to over these five weeks since you wrote to me and said you didn't know the definition of love...The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of it. 


Do you realize that your refusal to utter the word love to your lover has created a force field all its own? Withholding distorts reality. It makes the people who do the withholding ugly and small-hearted. It makes the people from whom things are withheld crazy and desperate and incapable of knowing what they actually feel.


So release yourself from that. Don’t be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word love to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.


We’re all going to die, Johnny. 
Hit the iron bell like it’s dinnertime.
Yours,
Sugar

To read the full letter and response (and to find more 'Dear Sugar') click here



Bell Image: PrindleStation

Blog Love #2

It's been a while since I've done a blog love post. The following bloggers are thought provoking, gutsy, funny, outspoken, courageous, artistic and intelligent (although not necessarily in that order).

Shoplifting in a Ghost Town

Chloe Rice is a New York based photographer who mixes music, photography, film, food and snippets from her life on her blog.

OhChloe
Chloe on Twitter

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Annie & the Little Pinch of Salt

Annie is a photographer/artist/writer who takes beautiful photographs and is one of the most eloquent bloggers around. A gifted storyteller.

"I started blogging in 2006 when I was living in Iceland and didn't have any friends. Since then I've documented two relationships, three break-ups, a journey to Everest, and one long, hot, entirely inappropriate love affair with Nashville, Tennessee. You'll have to search the archives: I cannot bring myself to speak of such things again."

Annie & the Little Pinch of Salt
Annie on Twitter

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The Anti-Room

The Anti-Room was founded in 2008 by four Irish journalists including Anna Carey, Sinead Gleeson and Edel Coffey who initially wrote under pseudonyms. After a sabbatical Carey and Gleeson returned as site managers/editors. The site has continued to expand, with an extensive list of Irish female writers covering everything from feminism, religion, pop culture, politics and personal observations.

"I once bled onto a Flintstone sock for four days in a Ballsbridge bedsit ’til it was hard enough to slash through human flesh or qualify for a Garda weapon’s seizure. Another time the man I was sleeping with just plain refused to crawl into my bed: ‘June, I can’t…there’s a phone in there and a half-eaten plate of pasta, beer cans and what looks like a piece of an ironing board.’

He was very sweet not to mention the month’s worth of dirty clothes, unread books, loose wires, odd shoes, an upturned lamp and decorative wooden salad fork set I bought as a present but was too lethargic to pass on. While not very apt descriptions of prototypical depression, these two scenarios sum up the cloisterphobic clutter and superglue awfulness of an internal mood shift that can recalibrate your customary life into a bizarre orgy of silent dislocations."

The Anti-Room

The Anti-Room on Twitter

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Molls She Wrote

Boston native Molly McAleer documents her life in L.A as a "blogger and internet personality". She is searingly honest, funny as hell and has worked for Defamer, Gawker, Thought Catalogue and The Smoking Jacket among others.

"The universe is fucking cyclical, dawg. I have been in so many situations in my career where I’m interviewing someone who’s being a life-sucking dick the entire time and I just wanted to say to them, “Hey, fuckface! I don’t give a fuck about your movie as much as you don’t give a fuck about telling me about it. I really don’t care. So why don’t you give me my quote so I can leave and you can fulfill your obligation to the studio to promote this piece of shit?”

Molls She Wrote
Molls on Twitter

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Biorequiem

"Zoetica Ebb – artist, photographer, writer, magazine editor, style technician and cosmonomad. I believe in making life extraordinary and beautiful through all means necessary. I can be hired to write, photograph or draw – simultaneously, if the price is right."

Zoetica has previously worked as a freelance makeup artist, a fashion columnist and photographer with Suicide Girls and in 2007 co-founded Coilhouse Magazine with Nadya Lev and Meredith Yayanos. Coilhouse is a web and print publication dedicated to alternative culture.

Biorequiem
Zoetica on Twitter

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Coketalk

An anonymous L.A based blogger who combines a feisty attitude and a no bullshit approach to life, love, sex and drugs. Be warned - those who seek her advice will hear the uncensored version, she doesn't sugar coat things. For example:

"At moments like these, I want to drive up to Forest Lawn, find Walt Disney’s grave, dig up whatever part of him wasn’t cryogenically frozen, and bitch-slap him for infecting generations of American women with something I like to call “Prince Charming disease.” This is a terrible affliction that causes grown-ass women to ruin perfectly good relationships by pining away for a nebulous cartoon fiction: passionate, steamy, “happily ever after” love."

Dear Coketalk
Coketalk on Tumblr
Coketalk on Twitter

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Image of Molls: Jennifer Nies

Blog Love

Although i have a selection of some sites i frequent on the right hand side, there are loads more that i read regularly and thought i'd give a heads up on a few of them.

Fighting Monsters with Rubber Swords

Fighting Monsters... captures daily observations of life with Schuyler and is an insightful read.

"When Robert Rummel-Hudson's (Author of Schuyler's Monster: A Father's Journey with His Wordless Daughter) daughter Schuyler was eighteen months old, a simple question by her pediatrician set in motion a slow transformation; from a sarcastic, befuddled dad to the very last thing any new father or mother ever expects or desires to become: a special needs parent. Armed with nothing more than his love for his tenacious little girl and his determination to defeat her rare and invisible disorder, he fought his own depression, his past family dysfunction and the nagging suspicion that he was not the right person for the job."

Jay Smooth's Ill Doctrine

Ill Doctrine is a video blog hosted by Jay Smooth, founder of New York's longest running hip-hop radio show, WBAI's Underground Railroad. Intelligent, funny and covering everything from politics (see above) to music and culture; his critical thinking with a dose of humour is well worth watching.