gone native

How far will i go for a shot? about a block beyond creepy, it seems. like any self-respecting stalker, i was coming from the Institute of Art cruising in my semi-rusted 1995 villager van when i spotted a powwow going on (i warn you, there will be a little big horn of sensitivity ensuing) on the sidewalk as i whizzed by. i said curse word, waited until i judged the oncoming driver was not armed to execute a six-point 180, went back a block and bombed into a driveway where i left the villager swaying and smoking slightly. which might account for her expression. or my fly was open. little of column A, little of column B probly.

what i first took to be an indian blanket-inspired coat was in fact a blanket, belted on for safe keeping. having just left the north american textiles room at the Institute, i was really seeing tribal patterns so my blood pressure was through the roof. (like when vulnerable people are shown violent images and they proceed to kill and eat their 4th grade classmates, i'm easily influenced by art -- fringe drives me to act out). the big black bag, freak flag flying, with the hair still on it? (insert primal wolf howl here).

what i first took to be cute boots were in fact Clarks.

no but really, we shared a moment of puzzlement because, isn't Clarks' motto We go great with hot flashes? i think they're cute, bordering on badass, but since my fly was open and i do have hot flashes, this only served to deepen her profound misgivings. this is the sort of thing that causes you to question everything -- lifestyle, career, colors that look good on you. color her questioning. i drove home and painted half my face red, tied a shell in my hair and made a pork roast with fennel and potatoes.

cap'n marvelous

     I don't know about you, but i like to contrast gorgeous textures
and beautiful people with a wall of raw meat, 
pink and glistening. mmmmmm. some day
i will take a photography class but 
until then, let's wonder at how mom's scarf has
about the same marbling as a brisket.
lady gaga, sit down. her hand knit irish
wool sweater with wooden buttons was
scored at a thrift store for $10. and the
plaid cap was custom distressed
by the dog. (i don't even want to think
about how jcrew would interpret
this -- they're somewhat vulnerable
when it comes to textile finishes.)
her friend made (as in, doing crazy
chopstick stuff with needles and yarn)
the young one's strawberry beannet. 
ps. i was forced into hard returns because
fucking Blogger decided to do something
janky with the margins. fucking Blogger.
fucking technology.

claudette on clogs

Which is brighter -- claudette's smile or that streetlight? hard to say, but claudette's smile comes with added benefits such as claudette herself who is a winning combination of worldly + cool + adorable and her schoolboy blazer-n-buttondown story and her handmade clogs. and now, THIS POST IS GOING TO THE CLOGS (sue me).

man, claudette had the 411 (i always have stop and think about the whole 411/911 confusement -- there is just every chance, in the event of a fire or tragic accident involving my fingers and a sewing machine, i would reach an operator asking me what city please) on clogs. these handmade swedish clogs with a scottish brogue and liberal sandal leanings are sold in New York City at a hip shop called No. 6 for $275 but she drove up to east buttwhistle chisago, mn to Sven's clogged-up workshop where little elf-like cobblers sit at tiny benches hammering in those staples with hammers the size of a cocktail fork and bought these No. 6 clogs for $125 which is still a lot but any third grader can figure, is about.... a LOT less than $275. also, remote as it is, chisago is somewhat closer than nyc. 

the connection, claudette tells me, is that some hip designers-without-hammers from nyc were either taking a vacation at hazelden or thought the sign said Chicago, and found themselves at Svens. charmed by the tiny workforce but horrified by a design that was not influenced by the hormonal and pharmaceutical rollercoaster of an over-caffeinated artistic director/tyrant, the No. 6ers pulled Sven aside and made him an offer he couldn't refuse, namely their brand of vogue-ity vogue topside stapled to the same jajaja wooden sole that would turn no. 2-do shoes for nurses and other people who enjoy a little fentanyl with their tuna salad into hip No. 6 footwear anchoring the brittle legs of russian models. Sven bit and now can be seen cruising around Taylors Falls in a pimped out volvo with blackout windows and license plate that reads S-Munee. but Sven, that sly dog, doesn't send all of the happening wooden kicks to nyc -- some he sells to people in the know from a back room at the chisago  sweatworkshop. you have to know the password, which is Whereislakeshoredrive. then out with the benjamins and a little smoked herring for the elves and, bobs your uncle, you're clogging it up like claudette. 

p.s. 'roided out clogs are having a moment and that is for sure, but me and gerald ford are going to issue a warning right here and now about the dangers of clogs + snow and ice.

pretty in produce

I was weighing my fruit options -- commercial strawberries with extra pesticides for $3.99 or a tote of very shiny apples offered by an aged crone in a pilled out shawl with a big wart on her big nose and gnarled stick-like fingers. oh wait. that was a mirror, and a pimple not a wart. whew.

This woman looks great, suspiciously well turned out. She does not have a single Old Dutch product in her cart. Nor a big stack of coupons, nor three children with pink-eye(s), nor a motorized wheelchair that she's soon going to drive to the Grand Canyon or Walmart. So what the hell, you may ask, is she doing at Cub? I don't know. I have a pimple that is diverting all my brain fluid.

This much I know: her tweed jacket was purchased from Nordstrom's in the pioneer days when department stores tailored jackets for free, pants are JCrew with zippers at the bottom, she is tall and her feet are small
there was no mall
to appall
y'all
instead, she crawled,
trawled,
what's it called...
Shu on Grand for these Josef Seibel boots.

 

 Excuse me homey, but would you like a very shiny apple that is probly not poisoned?

just say no to ugly scans

 

My beef with full body scanners is they're not very flattering. for example, does the alien above really have no nose and close-set eyes? Standing in line at LAX for what would undoubtedly be another scarring experience with a camera, the woman in front of me announced she was opting out of the scan and going for the pat down. partly because i like to be a pain in the ass whenever possible and partly because i was a little low on physical nurturing, i decided i too would opt for a pat down. the woman who had the honor was so respectful and businesslike and explained exactly how she was going to be up in my business. it was not bad, indeed pleasurable. i asked her to go over some parts again but she declined, and i looked back to see her shaking her hands and doing the icky dance. i went on my way, whistling.

a busy moment at the LACMA

 

I don't want to put her on a pedestal (you've been great, i'll be in the velvet room all week folks), but wearing a sheer pleated skirt that's sort of Egyptian with a rockabilly chambray midriff shirt, a ring that may or may not hatch and Rihanna (or Run Lola Run -- did you see that movie?) ruby hair and reading and balancing on a pillar seems a lot to manage, doesn't it? what i like best of all is that she's reading a book (paper! pages!) and holding a pencil (vintage!), almost as if she was going to write with it or turn the pages using the eraser.

Now it's going to seem like i've had another small stroke and when things got reconnected, i spoke french and could curl my tongue, but it's going to come together. really. i was just on my favorite food blog, the italian dish, italiandish.squarespace.com, adding a splash of german irish laziness along with the heapin helping of love and i noticed how about 357 people had made the zucchini lasagna and left comments.  more than just a very strong case against over-age drinking, think of this here blog as a recipe, an inspiration to try this at home kids. go ahead, wear sheer clothing! dye your hair to match your bell bottoms! hold a pencil! see what happens! 

cook long enough to frighten the salmonella and let me know how that goes.

 

josephine plus...

 

jasmine =

am i right or what?

new and improved hippie

 

Californians, and by that i mean women, cannot let go of the hippie aesthetic, example #413,786 above. Like all retro looks, hippie has been tweaked and tidied up, the good parts enlarged and the grotty stuff... eh. Excuse me, but i'm an eye-wear-tness to history here, harumph. Most of the improvements have come in hygiene and foundations. See above: yes, she's got a funky braid in her michele philips hair but it's recently washed. real hippies were liberated from the self-made prison of regular shampooing. the tie dye is obviously the work of bourgeois artisans rather than the vomitous renderings of someone who's sole sustenance for the past 30 hours has been the pungent exhaust of nonstop fatties. real hippies eschewed foundations, choosing to breathe from all orifices freely. and noisily. she would have bartered for the jesus sandals at a hostel in venice beach. and what kind of boyfriend is that? he's wearing shoes and apparently vertical. no, smells of disney hippie.

alex goose tells nice stories

 

So nice, this young man. he's a music producer and his name is alex goose and i made him spell it because of course i didn't believe him. i mean, the gray cells are like lonely raisins floating in a gelatinous mass of runny porridge but even i know a fake name when i hear it. poor dear, i thought, he's 12 and undoubtedly the product of a broken home (never hear much about father goose, do you?) and he's getting the holy crap beat out of him at school because he's not very big (and yet, i couldn't manage to get the very tippy top of his head in the picture) so he has to fabricate these pathetic lies. but just because he's a lying bastard is no reason to be unfriendly so i prattled on about his Sebago dock shoe-boots with tribal aspirations as manifested in the removable moccasin-inspired ankle fringe (thus re-moc-ables) that are just so damn category busting. gotta love that. and then i revealed my minnesota origins which scared surprised the living daylights out of him and he shared that he had spent three months in minnesota on an internship with Target. a graphic design internship. oh what tangled webs we weave when we seek to deceive....  my goodness, the awful back-pedaling. well, he was a graphic designer and a freelance music producer.... and i am lady di.

alexgoose.com, myspace.com/goosebeats, theblueprint3outtakes.com.

alex bro, g-man, you natural gangsta, how's every little thing?

 

Raise your hand if you love sassy people. 

Melrose

The young one and i were on our way to the wasteland on melrose when she (being my navigator) pointed out a sale at fred segal by saying stop the car now. which i did. luckily we were at an intersection, so we left the suzuki running in the left turn lane and stumbled out. when in LA...(here i would insert a smiley face icon if i was a fucking idiot).  little red riding pants was a little scared  doubtful until i assured her we abandon suzukis running in the middle of the street in st. paul too. her shoes are jeffrey campbell but since they're friends she calls them jeff. i call them she who stands tall like pine tree until she hits (literally) uneven sidewalk.  anyhoo she was very nice and i loved her indian queen-sized scarf but the car could only idle for so long on one tank of gas so we toddled off to fred segal where i saw a pair of sweatpants for $3,427 but i didn't get them because they were 15 minutes old, thus last season's sweatpants.

in a completely separate incident, i did not have my camera with me because i was running up the sullivan fire road singing the happy wanderer (vall der ahahahahahaaaa) when i met reese witherspoon coming down the trail with a friend. she said i thought they didn't let people out of those institutions hi and i said hhhhh (i was a little winded) and she went back to jake gyllenhal or whoever and i went to the nike missile site.

cat like

Look. i'm in LA! Surprisingly like minnesota, right? well you know what they say about LA  -- the st. paul of the west coast. i wore a long-sleeve ankle length tube of b.o. inducing Qiana nylon/poly knit from the 70s in a print that spoke strongly of a tragic skin condition, wedged in the middle seat between two arm rest  aggressors for 3-1/2 hours, stood in a 57-person line at the rental care agency behind a chinese couple who spoke no english and rented a big american-style suv til i got the keys to my chevy aveo or similar (check here if you'd like us to whiz by and wave after you're stalled on the 405) that i did not realize was manual until one transmission later. bing bang, i say la cieNAga and sepulVEDa in quick succession (to the delight of locals as they have not yet had their slurry of xanax and coffee) and a few near-death moments later i'm at the goodwill on beverly scaring  chatting up nice people wearing shades of blue (her pants are actually navy even if they look black) and super stealth leopard slippers. i got some bright yellow heels and a rash here! success!

red leather artist tea

Any questions? 

Like for example, are those bullets in her belt? (no, it's sunday and the banks are closed).

Here's another one that comes to mind: Why didn't i wake up this morning and decide to put on boots that don't go all the way up to equestrian (thus, pony), graphic tights, sailor buttoned shorts, a desperado-in-a-celebratory mood belt and a racy red leather jacket? (because i am not a portrait artist like she is and i don't have a pony. yet).

and finally, what are those blueberry-like dark things at the bottom of the drink? (blueberries).

boarding school

Long boards are long boards, whether it's Hilo or St. Paul, and girls + boards are just cool. so much cooler than, say, girls + a 1994 honda civic. not too cool for school though -- these two are concordia scholars. here's a novel approach -- i'm going to let the photo speak for itself (read: it's a perfectly gorgeous day, in limited supply, and i'm on my deck with a nearly unlimited supply of cheap likker. i'm kinda busy).

peak color

This is exactly the right ensemble for a trip to the farmer's market -- the chunky knit hat, woven leather belt, the cotton dress falled up with tights and fully secured houdini boots (the trick is the instep zipper). i'm always surprised, and impressed, by very young dressers with such an advanced and natural sense of style. she nailed color and textures and proportion, and she makes it look easy, like this was the first and only draft of today's sartorial story. not a whiff of teenage angst, and she didn't lean on jeans, a hooded sweatshirt or Uggs. amazing. uhoh, i jerked my own chain when i wrote Uggs just then so i must go on a mini-rant: one upside to climate change and a moist and irradiated world is that, while we will likely be rocking three feet due to holes in the ozone and six kinds of genetic mutation,  our many many little piggies will not be stinking up salt-stained spreading tuber-like growths. Uggs will be extinct. i feel like emptying a can of Aqua Net Super Extra CFC in my backyard just to hurry their demise. there, i said it.