Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: go saints, hip places to go, new orleans, tourism, who dat, young person's guide to new orleans
In tribute to the Saints’ victory over the Colts on Sunday, this post is devoted to some of my favorite places in and around New Orleans; I often receive requests for this very type of list, so I thought I’d post it here.
- Rue de la Course, Oak St. A coffeeshop in what used to be a big ol’ bank.
- Retro Active. I wrote a blog post about it (http://fashionforwriters.com/2008/07/22/a-visit-to-retro-active/): Chris bought me some fantastic earrings this time for Christmas and his sister bought me a vintage belt from Paris with gold elephants on it. Joe, the owner, is the buyer for everything in the store. Fantastic & my favorite vintage in the country. (i bought my rehearsal dinner dress here.) It’s closing soon, so check it out before it’s gone!
- Balcony Bar and Cafe, 1104 Harmony St. (off of Magazine St., near Retro Active): I wrote a short story about this bar, called, fittingly, “At the Balcony Bar.” I don’t know if there’s anything particularly spectacular about this bar, but I love it anyway and I love the balcony and I love the crazy tiny stairs that are hard to walk up and down.
- The Delachaise, 3442 St. Charles Ave.: Wine bar. I really like the ambiance there — it’s kind of like a long train car? And I just go with friends and drink lots of champagne and talk and I hear their snack foods are delicious.
- Ignatius on Magazine. Great food, good prices. Food so good Chris’s dad broke a tooth there and still goes back.
- Camellia Grille: Greasy spoon, so famous, AMAZING waiters, line out the door during mealtimes.
- Palace Cafe: Best brunch I have ever had in my life. I like a lot of brunch places, but I am in love with this place.
- Commander’s Palace. Super famous restaurant. I’ve only been here once, but the ambiance is pretty stellar.
- Lilli Vintage. This is where I got the white chiffon dress with the draped neck. Smaller and pricier than Retro Active, but the clothes are all in impeccable condition.
Of course, there are so many more awesome places to go, see, browse, eat and drink — feel free to leave your own favorites in the comments!
xo, mw
Filed under: I Wore This, You Like?
I’m reading Barthelme late into the night and I forgot how he depressing is, especially when he’s writing about the devastation of adult life. I have an adult life: yes or no? Not necessarily. In other news, I might be my own shine blocka and I can’t wait for Big Boi’s album to finally drop, whenever that happens.
I’m trying to get several big projects together this week and also get things in order for Michael to return. He comes back from Portugal this Wednesday.
In a restaurant in Lisbon. (Hi.)
I don’t know why but I’ve been wearing ill-fitting clothes all weekend. Like this tiered, ruffle skirt from Minnie Wilde (amazing but defunct San Francisco label,) and this Triple Five Soul jacket, which ought to have pockets but doesn’t, and this way too baggy American Apparel sweatshirt. I apologize for the wretched photo quality and for being a not-so-good blogger lately. I promise I’ll be back up to speed once these looming deadlines finish looming over me. On me. Over me. Remember how Will Ferrell said ‘I want to be on you,’ to Christina Applegate in Anchorman?
Love, Jenny
PS–Meggy & I are curious: is it better to reply to your comments here or reply directly via email/on your blog?
Filed under: I Wore This, You Like? | Tags: new orleans saints, super bowl, who dat
Shoes from Taiwan, Tabio ribbed mustard tights, Who Dat t-shirt from Dominique, J. Crew pencil skirt
As you can probably tell, Jenny and I are on a new schedule. We don’t post on weekends, we alternate on weekdays, and we collaborate on Fridays. It seems to be working pretty well so far. But I had to post today, because it’s bloody Super Bowl Sunday — consider this an emotional testament to my adopted home and my willingness to actually (gasp) watch football for hours at a time while wearing Saints gear. Who the hell have I become?
The first time I went to New Orleans was within the first year of my almost nine-year relationship with my husband, who’s from New Orleans and has been chronicling the saga of his Saints love in his brilliant Old Norse blog, The Worm-stung God. Over the last eight years, we’ve done many of the things that visitors to New Orleans do: eaten beignets (I prefer Morning Call over Cafe du Monde), walked up and down Magazine Street a million times, visited the Riverwalk, went back and forth across Lake Ponchartrain, spent New Year’s Eve on Bourbon Street. But it wasn’t until this past year that I really started to feel as though New Orleans was becoming a part of me.
Most of this is due to my relationship to Chris, and my relationship to my incredible in-laws (Dominique, my sister-in-law, is the one who mailed me this shirt this week, along with a note that said: “You can’t be a Fleitas without having a Saints shirt! Hope you like it!”) The rest of it is due to the fact that New Orleans is an incredible city.
So I’m going to be watching the Super Bowl tonight for the first time in my life. Who fucking dat.
xo, mw
Me trying valiantly to use the remote, with no success.
After all the hoopla about digital camera remotes lately, I thought that buying an Opteka remote for my Canon would be a very smart idea. And it was. Kind of. Taking outfit shot after outfit shot without having to run back and forth to the camera? A dream! But after I got it in the mail, I realized (with sadness) that I’d made a terrible mistake — the Opteka remote isn’t compatible with my camera, which I should’ve known from examining the product description. So I’m selling it for $12 (free shipping) to whomever wants it.
Here are the cameras for which the Opteka remote is compatible:
XT, XTi, XSi, T1i, Digital Rebel, 5D Mark II, 7D, 300D, 350D, 400D, 450D, 500D, Elan 7/7E, Elan 7N, Rebel K2, Rebel T2, Rebel Ti, G6, G5, G3, S1 IS, Pro 1, G2, G1, Pro 90IS
Comment below if you are interested!
xo, mw
Hi everyone!
Jenny & Meggy here. Here are the things that are captivating us on this glorious, gluttonous Friday.
Liu Bolin’s “Hiding in the City,” photo series (from here and here.)
“Some people call me the invisible man, but for me it’s what is not seen in a picture which is really what tells the story. I experienced the dark side of society, without social relations, and had a feeling that no one cared about me, I felt myself unnecessary in this world.” – Liu Bolin, Telegraph UK.
As far as ‘what is not seen in a picture,’ I wonder if Liu is referring to to the ten hours he spends applying paint and make-up, perhaps by himself, maybe in a room where he spends a lot of his time, and what about the moments and stories and experiences that form the edifice upon which we shakily stand? What about Liu’s particular lifestory, which may not be apparent in these photos, but has everything to do with how these photos came to be.
Aren’t our clothing choices partially a performance–an expression of how we want to be seen as much as they are a mask over what cannot be seen? I might be in a dress and heels and you might think I’m a sloppy person because my nails are chipped and I never bother to put on make up or dry my hair before leaving the house (icicle hair in the winter!) or maybe you think I’m extraordinarily vain/put together/obsessed with my appearance because I’m always wearing a dress or skirt, even in the dead of winter, and I never wear jeans or whatever, but my story and the little I perform of it, and the uncompromising desire to show others my personhood by dressing a certain way is always confusing, contradictory, and elusive. By painting himself as part of the background, Liu becomes the center of attention, by being the center of attention, Liu becomes strange, by becoming strange, Liu’s emotional, spiritual, political and artistic journey becomes eclipsed by the centrality of his ‘invisibility’ in these photos.
In 9th grade, I wore my friend’s mom’s long black cape to school and dumped sugar water in my hair to make it spiky (and so that I could be chased by a band of bees!) In 10th grade, I wore the same red shirt and green wide legged pants every week. In 11th grade, I clomped around in platform combat boots and wore a skirt every day. In 12th grade, I spoke to no one and was voted ‘Most Individual,’ which I think was code for ‘Weirdest Person.’ Last summer, I wore nothing but little Bavarian belly shirts and short shorts, even though the hooligans in my hometown are formidable at being hooligans, and once I ran up to a random house and pretended it was mine just so I could get away. I’ve always wanted to be seen and I’ve always wanted to be alone. These photos are the perfect visual representation of the simultaneous desire to appear and disappear, dont ya think?
Love, Jenny
My pick for this particular FFW Loves is VIEVVVS. I find that a lot of young and female photographers on flickr fit interchangeably into a box of dreamy, hazy photographs of beautiful girls (self-portraits, models, or friends); not that there’s anything wrong with that, but when I do come across a collection of stark images of WINTER WINTER WINTER, which is all I’ve been craving lately, I fall fast, and I fall hard. I don’t know anything about VIEVVVS and all that she says on her flickr profile is that she’s from Stockholm and single.
But let’s gape at some pictures, why don’t we:
I hate winter; I mean, I hate hate hate winter, but Christine captures the cold beauty of this season perfectly. For me, looking at her photographs aligns with my feeling that winter isn’t all about warming up by the fire in a big woolly blanket, or drinking hot chocolate piled high with homemade whipped cream, but about being aloof and strong and covered in snow.
xo, mw
Filed under: Podcasts | Tags: creativity, film, photography, podcast, writer's block
Today’s post is in the form of a podcast, recorded by me. If you are unable to hear the podcast for whatever reason, and would like to, please email me and I will send you a transcript via email. (See sidebar for my email address.) Right-click to save to your computer, or click to listen.
Writer’s Block & Creativity (Insomnia) Podcast
I don’t smoke often, but it’s 4:02 AM and I’m on the porch in a faux fur coat and a skimpy dress in February, Michigan.
xo, mw
Filed under: Uncategorized
Striped cardigan from Shanghai, old H&M dress, old Topshop over-the-knee boots, vintage belt & heart necklace.
Just a reminder to all you yellow-rumped warblers, please enter our giveaway below!
Time has become a little scarce, although not in the sense that dignity or twinkle-toed philistines are scarce, but maybe in that sense. All the same, I apologize for the lack of substantial posts from my end. There’s a whole cabinet of wonders that I would like to share with you, but I keep waiting for a moment when I have some time to properly write about it all.
Until all my hopes and dreams come true, (hi: the end of time, also hi: never) I sheepishly offer you outfit post after outfit post. I found these over-the-knee boots in a box stashed deep in my mines of Moira closet. I got them almost five years ago on a trip to London with my family where I’m pretty sure my brother peed on a double-decker bus while it was raining. Or maybe that was an earlier trip, the one where we bought matching t-shirts and ate ice cream on the plane.
On the trip where I bought these boots, I visited the Tate Modern with my friend Nick, where we saw giant slides (three-stories high!) by the amazing Carsten Höller, who believes all transportation in the future will consist of sliding from place to place. (How will girls in skirts keep decent?) I made my family visit the Reading Room in the British Museum, and of course, I dreamed of getting my name engraved between Marx and Virginia Woolf and Dickens, even though I know that the sanctity of alphabetical order mustn’t be upset, not even for dreams.
Photo taken from tate.org, where you can also find a little video about Carsten Höller and his gargantuan slide.
Love, Jenny
Filed under: Uncategorized
I took this photograph years ago.
On the CalTrain to South San Francisco from San Jose, California, if you look out the left window a short distance from the hillside words SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO: THE INDUSTRIAL CITY, there exists, on a smallish sign attached to the side of a trailer near the train tracks, a safety message that doubles as a motto for my life:
I WILL NOT GET HURT!
I WILL NOT HURT OTHERS!
Except, perhaps if I were being more accurate, I would append a final line, that being: “I WILL NOT ALLOW OTHERS TO GET HURT, EITHER!”, which would not fit on the sign, but would definitely mean that I would have to either steal the sign or take up residence in the trailer.
xo, mw
Filed under: Giveaway time!, I Wore This, You Like? | Tags: Alasdair Gray, Betsey Johnson, creepiness, giveaway, shambles, sorry
Hi friends, don’t forget to enter our GIVEAWAY! We’re giving away a $25 gift certificate to spend at either Meggy’s For the Love of Brunch Etsy shop or my Etsy store (Unhappybarber Vintage.) And we’re loading up our respective shops with lots of vintage goodies in the coming weeks.
There’s been a lot of shaking lately, internal and external, as well as lot of shakedowns, internal+external. I read a little tiny bit of my novel at a group reading on Friday and I couldn’t tell if the entire basement room was moving or just my leg and my heart and my arm and my voice. The best thing anyone has ever said to me after a reading is now officially, “my vagina quivered every time you mentioned a type of poo,” (more or less verbatim.) I honestly don’t think anything will top it, not even if the world turns topsy turvy and they start handing out MacArthur Genius grants to dunces and get the amazing, genius George Saunders to personally hand me a check for $500,000.
By the way, have you read Alasdair Gray? If you haven’t, you’re only missing out on the best living author from Scotland or from anywhere. He illustrates his own books, and you can read his story, “Big Pockets With Buttoned Flaps,” online at the Barcelona Review if you want to be a learned woman or man or thing. My students have told me in the past they find this story disturbing or plain weird, but I’m often disturbed when I venture out downtown on a Friday or Saturday night, and what’s weirder than packs of roving drunk boys walking behind girls in open toed shoes and tank tops that hit mid-thigh on nights when I’m wearing a down parka and three sweaters? Different measures for different pleasures, I guess.
(90’s Betsey Johnson babydoll dress & lace-up boots from Revivals; old red coat from lux; pin & necklace, gifted.)
I went to a fake but real luau Saturday night and came home with a feather. I didn’t wear this velvet Betsey Johnson dress to the group reading or the luau, but I did make four boiling hot meals in this dress and was so warm that I had to take off my tights in the middle of dinner (it was 5 degrees outside.) If only I had been a cup of milk, then my post-boiled state would have tasted so much better than my pre-boiled state, or if I could have been a pot of water meant to be poured on tea. Maybe then, this sorry state I’m in now would be not as sorry.
love, Jenny
Hello morning glories, we are having a GIVEAWAY! The prize is a $25 gift certificate to spend on the vintage dresses, shoes, and accessories in either Meggy’s Etsy store (For the Love of Brunch) or Jenny’s Etsy store (Unhappybarber Vintage.)
My favorite dresses in the store right now are the above pictured 1960’s polka dot dress and the 1970’s velvet burnout dress with big flare sleeves. (The Cinderella rhinestone bracelet is from Meggy’s store.) I’ll be adding a few spring jackets, 50’s sundresses, as well as some 40’s silk dresses to the store next week. Please visit Unhappybarber Vintage and For the Love of Brunch Etsy for more vintage clothing!
RULES TO ENTER:
-You ought to be a follower of our blog. (We love using Bloglovin’ to follow all of our favorite fashion and style blogs but you can follow our blog any way you want!)
-Please leave a comment with the following: 1) name 2) best way to reach you (email or blog address) 3) the last book you read and what did you think of it?
-Oh, and we ask that you read a poem out loud to a loved one before bed tonight. Only kidding. Except we’ll totally give you an extra giveaway entry if you do this. (Let us know what poem you read in a separate comment.)
Giveaway ends a week from now, February 5th. We’ll put all the entries into a big hat to pick the winner!
love,
Jenny & Meggy
PS — It’s been a sad week to lose both Howard Zinn and J.D. Salinger. Both of these men have had a tremendous impact on my life–Salinger on my writing life and my decision to pursue writing seriously, and Zinn on my political life and my first forays into activism and radical thinking. Thank you both.
