Friday, March 28, 2014

look downward angel, annotated

"Look downward Angel now, and melt with ruth:
And, O ye Dolphins, waft the hapless youth."
I'm making an obscure literary allusion to Thomas Wolfe's autobiographical novel, the title of which came from lines from Milton's poem Lycidas, noted above. With my edits.  I have never heard of ruth used as a non-proper noun, and have no idea what that couplet means.  But it speaks to the magical realism of these boots. 
P.S. 
Refreshed and caffeinated, I perceive that Milton,  that incorrigible imp, was merely stretching for a rhyme with youth when he grasped at ruth, though you'd think vermouth would have been right handy.  Another revelation of the a.m. is that, duh,  "with ruth" is the opposite of "without ruth" or as we more commonly see it, with francine  ruthless.  Or in a more modern interpretation,  Chris Martin is positively Gwynethless.  See, it all makes sense now!  A couple of crazy kids were playing with their My Little Manatees and let the grilled cheese sandwiches burn. 

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

boot count

I was getting up close and perverted with the riding-esque swashbuckled boots in the foreground but upon inquiry with the owner discovered I'd been once again punked by Target.  That hurts.  I start questioning the order of the universe -- how can Target sell leather boots with value-added fake spurs for $39.99 on sale?  Could the many millions they've invested in developing very realistic pleather be better spent on making the executive restrooms paperless?  How far will they go to shake my sense of self-worth? Does that mean I actually only have .5 skillz?  Paranoia and delusions of grandeur are symptoms of what mental illness?  That last is a bonus question. 

Suffice to say, this disturbing revelation soured me on the whole photo.  Until I looked at it in jazz-up-your-lame-photo mode.  And realized what we have here is a classic poorly framed Highlights For Children shot entitled How Many Boots Can You Find In This Picture?  Not being too good with numbers, this has not kept me busy and quiet for minutes.

Sunday, March 23, 2014

how to wear Queequeg-inspired hair


Call me Ishmael, but were it not for this guy's sculpted face, beautiful scarf and parka straight out of my 70s youth,  I think he may have had trouble pulling off the high ponytail.  So as not to appear unhip, I didn't ask why he's wearing his sunglasses on the back of his neck.  I'm like,  Oh yeah, I dig.

Friday, March 21, 2014

which of these really stuck out at JAX?

OR...

To the untrained eye, the differences are subtle but I had an unfair advantage in having just spent five days in north Florida.  So everyone was doing Kim-of-the-Sea but flashier.  And by the 1/2 hour.  Me-owch.  
So when I slunk into the Starbucks seating area for paying customers only and saw blue jacket and black boots and absolutely nothing that made melons spring to mind,  my eyeballs bugged out and so did my mullet, the hamster in charge started running on the wheel and, like other very simple organisms, I babbled uncontrollably.  This is my knee-jerk response to exquisite multimaterial Sandro jackets and Isabel Marant boots with anatomically correct toes. For those of you familiar with my photography skillz, I would like to say,  piss off,  she asked me to crop out her face.  This whole scenario will make a lot more sense when I tell you she tazed me she's from NYC and travels a lot for her work as queen of sales for Domaine de Canton, a French Ginger Liqueur.  domainedecanton.com. Which interests me almost as much as domaine de goodwill.
The moral of this story is: Keep your eyes open, your blood-alcohol level stable and your judgmentalism tuned to a super-elitist point.  Just don't run with it.

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

would you buy sourdough from this woman?

Not only was she the only woman in Jacksonville wearing a charming vintage day dress and button-toed shoes with a bright jemima headband,  but she makes divine sourdough in several permutations and sells it at the Riverside Art Market.  This is one competent woman.  I am in awe of her hair.

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

preferred flyer

 
You heard me -- she's wearing leather shorts. And a sparkly shirt that shines like an education in the South.  I think we know how vulnerable I am to leather sleeved jackets, but let's roll our eyeballs downward and check out her patented buckled brogues.  Now up. Now down. Now up.....
There's more bad news for air travelers -- I've decided the very best opportunities for street style photography are on the crushingly boring concourses of Terminal 49.  Travelers' main concern is comfort, thus sweatpants.  There is no other agenda. You just want to get from one place to another without crashing into the ocean and having to use your seat as a flotation device.  In this very challenging environment, the cream rises to the top very quickly.  It's laughably easy. Ha. 
Also, people are certifiably unarmed and have goshawful nuthin to do, thus playing into my horrid designs. Thus my next several posts. And weird use of thus.

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

it looked Greek to me


Who likes solid colors?   Raise your hand.  See, no one.  And yet, you go into any shop, Goodwill for example,  and what do you get?  Shirts,  pants,  trusses, whatnot, in which the overriding design directive was to use up the 147 shipping containers of frosting blue poly/cotton on which the buyer got a super deal.  And the tyrant very nice businessman in charge of the factory was like,  It's cheaper to just set our ten-year-olds to auto-frosting blue and let em go to town.  Strictly a manner of speaking. They never actually leave this building. 
But actual people, consumers,  like their rods and cones to skip merrily from red to pink to mauve and, whoa what's this, yellow! At crazy unpredictable intervals.  As above.  What I took to be an elaborately embroidered Greek fisherman's vest actually belonged to this woman.  She bought it at a Free People store.  So there was no Greek fisherman anywhere on the supply chain.  But I was able to get over that fact because the complicated curlycue design A) made me happy, which is all that counts and B) assured me that should she have a terrible printer cartridge accident, she could confidently head right off to the opera and no one would be the wiser.  And it works in rare instances too, where your chestal region comes in contact with coffee, chocolate or a nosebleed.  I feel like you should be able to butcher and field dress a goat and go directly to a job interview -- that's the beauty of patterns. 

Monday, March 10, 2014

happy without the hat

So many things to be happy about.  Graphic leggings, color,  no hat on her noggin and yet her body temp has not dropped to 45 degrees and, this is Important, the freedom to use the word Happy without the corresponding (I refuse to use the word meme because it's on such heavy rotation in Brooklyn and restaurants that have small plates) photo of Pharrell and his hat. 

Having just spent a couple hours at Randolph Heights Elementary listening to kindergarteners and first-graders read, an image occurred...
Prediction:  Pharrell's next hit will be called Curious.

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

this post is going to be about liquid leggings and Allen Ginsberg

This is going to be a windy, twisty road Grasshopper, so try to stick with me.  Still unirrigated after my hands-and-knees ascent and world record descent of Magnolia Road outside of Boulder, I spied this woman on the Pearl Street mall and was drawn by her Thelma and Louise sunglasses, Mr. Rogers cardigan,  Miley Cyrus liquid leggings and Amish mafia boots.  Then she said she was a student at Naropa University and it all made sense.  They're gentle Buddhist folk who create art and poetry, some of it pretty damn graphic, and try to be conscious and hardly ever bash people for not bathing. But I thought she said the whole shebang was established by Allen Ginsberg,  famous beat poet and author of Howl, which is absolutely not correct my luded out friend. Naropa was started as an Institute by a Tibetan dude,  Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Infidels, don't even try to say that. Ginsberg was one of the hangerson who came for some free sex and a summer session in Boulder in the mid-1970s.  Wait, let's drop some acid and get hold of some of that dirty Howl shit right now.
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology, who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish, who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom, who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg, who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade, who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried, who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regi- ments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertis- ing & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality, who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer, - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15308#sthash.yaqXNH9T.dpuf
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology, who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish, who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom, who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg, who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade, who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried, who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regi- ments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertis- ing & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality, who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer, - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15308#sthash.yaqXNH9T.dpuf

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.....blah blah... who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in police cars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication, who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts...

I was not so sure about the whole thing until I got to "dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts," which is something we can all relate to.  Mr. Ginsberg first went to work for a Madison Avenue advertising agency. After five years, he once recalled, he found himself taking part in a consumer-research project trying to determine whether Americans preferred the word ''sparkling'' or ''glamorous'' to describe ideal teeth. ''We already knew people associate diamonds with 'sparkling' and furs with 'glamorous,' '' he said. ''We spent $150,000 to learn most people didn't want furry teeth.'' 
I actually like that story about Ginsberg better than his poem but I can see where he got the idea for biting detectives in the neck, forgetting punctuation and using body orifices for so many creative purposes. 

Anyhoo, back to Buddhists and Trungpa, the founder of Naropa: Apparently when he set foot on US soil, he shouted, "Take me to your poets!" I personally would have wanted to find the restroom first -- I'm fussy that way.  Once he found the poets, he asked them to establish a poetics department. They misunderstood and founded a poetry department.
Ginsberg recalled the intent: "It would be a way of teaching meditators about the golden mouth and educating poets about the golden mind."  He and Ann Waldman, who roomed together that summer, stayed up late one night howling on their knees in the subway discussing what they finally came to name "The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics." It woulda looked bad if they'd called it Ann and Allen's Excellent Summer Who Copulated Ecstatic and Insatiate With A Bottle of Beer a Sweetheart a Package of Cigarettes a Candle."  Ow.  Also that did not fit on a business size envelope label.
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology, who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish, who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom, who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg, who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade, who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried, who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regi- ments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertis- ing & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality, who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer, - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15308#sthash.yaqXNH9T.dpuf
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology, who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish, who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom, who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg, who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade, who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried, who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regi- ments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertis- ing & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality, who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer, - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15308#sthash.yaqXNH9T.dpuf