310. Etiolated
April 28th, 2010 § 13 Comments
Minnie Wilde dress; Cynthia Rowley fan tights from Gilt; vintage yellow flats; bag & scarf worn as headband gift from India (thanks Karan)
This morning, I woke up from dreams of parasites attaching themselves to my eyeballs and a doctor saying, “We’ll take care of this in three to four months,” and realized I had a fever. I’m fine, but my long post will have to be further postponed due to these little needles that I’m pretty sure microscopic ants are shoving into my brain at regular intervals.
Sometimes, all I want to do is wear pink cupcake dresses or onesies that make me look like a kid, and there’s never a dearth of people who are willing to point out that I dress fourteen or hint at some kind of culturally accepted age appropriateness that I just don’t really give a rip about. But I do also have a lot of black dresses in my closet that maybe are a little dour and severe looking and lately I’ve been in the mood for these sour dresses. I have this dress in forest green as well and it’s from the defunct SF label I mention from time to time: Minnie Wilde. I miss them their clothing so much, and also they made this amazing jacket:
Hmmn, what’s that? Vintage photo of Meggy, Chris, & I at brunch in San Francisco (I think we are at Boogaloos and Chris’s koala bear tshirt perfectly matches the menu.)
And like the dolthead that I am, I left the jacket on a plane in Zurich because I was scrambling to make my connecting flight to St. Petersburg.
I’ve lost so many articles of clothing from traveling–a dragon skirt that I wore throughout high school, these see-through pajama bottoms that I somehow got away with wearing when I was fifteen and interning the whole summer at a securities and investment firm (how??), this amazing sheer blouse that was my first grown up blouse I ever bought from Banana Republic, a blue t-shirt from my 4th grade choir concert that I wore all the way through high school and then carelessly left under the bed of a Stanford freshman, who housed me when I was looking at colleges. I wonder where these articles of clothing are now? Is there someone in the world wearing my perfect blue, floral Minnie Wilde jacket? Is there some kid running around in my 4th grade choir concert shirt that says, P.S. 22 4th GRADE RAINBOW CONCERT with a picture of a very elementary rainbow?
Love, Jenny
309. spoon fed
April 27th, 2010 § 6 Comments
A few days ago one of my (and Jenny’s) closest friends, Anna N., who writes for Jezebel, reviewed the book Spoon Fed — a book by Kim Severson about her experience as a woman who deals with her issues through the healing power of food, cooking and friendship. From Anna’s article:
Making something good to eat may not exactly be a form of truth-telling, but it is a way to do your best while helping your fellows — in a competitive world, two things that aren’t always easy to combine. And making food with or for someone is often more helpful than the quotidian nature of the act would suggest. I’m thinking here of the friend who made me fried zucchini after a breakup, when I was too sad to eat unless someone else watched me. Or the friend I’m going to visit this weekend, with whom I’ve cooked in several different cities (I once scalded her hand in Montreal!), and hope to cook in several more.
Neither my friend nor I have ever been diagnosed with an eating disorder, but we’ve both dealt with food issues in the past. Sometimes such issues can feed (sorry) on each other, but I find that when we cook together we encourage each other to enjoy food for what it is — a source of nourishment and even excitement, not an enemy. It’s become a cliche to talk about the importance of sharing food with other people, but I think it’s true that cooking and eating with those who love us is one of the best antidotes to the toxic food messages we all get from people who don’t know us at all.
Not long before Anna flew in to Detroit, and then drove in to Ann Arbor to stay with me for the weekend, I experienced a painful ten minutes in which I stood in front of the refrigerator, struggling to decide whether or not to eat a red pepper. It was basically the only thing that I could eat in the refrigerator, as I had been living off of a haphazard diet of coffee, booze and canned soups (with the occasional restaurant-”lapse”), and I held the red pepper for what seemed like forever. I put the red pepper back in the fridge. I eventually threw it away.
On a related note, I went to the doctor last week due to symptoms that included moderate to severe abdominal pain. Again, this was related to my poor eating habits, and various food issues that had cropped up during a period of emotional stress. But I’ve had food issues off and on since I was a freshman in college and gained a significant amount of weight, and I’m not going to pretend that diets, the scale, and calorie-counting haven’t played a part in my life since that multitudinously turbulent year.
I don’t want to make my food issues, or body image issues, sound like more than they are. I also don’t want to pretend that they don’t exist. So when Anna came to see me, I wasn’t in very good shape, food-wise — and being with her was like a light slowly coming on in an otherwise dim room. She would order a crepe, and I would order a crepe. I would watch her eat the entire thing, and I would feel okay about doing the same. We made a healthy and delicious pasta together. She took seconds, “because [she was] hungry.” I took seconds as well. You could say that she was modeling good food behavior. It was a really good weekend.
(For Anna’s pasta recipe, see the article.)
I feel incredibly fortunate to have a friend like Anna. Tonight I’m supposed to be cooking a tart with Amy B., and I think I’m going to throw out my scale. And no, this is not a tidy issue that can be solved in one weekend, but I thought I’d dip my toe into the water with this post. Kind of like restarting a better food life with one pan of asparagus-mushroom pasta.
xo, mw
308. Although it’s lovely to exist in a state of deshabille, thank you Meggy & Dorothy Height for reminding us to fight for the right to dress up and not be put down
April 26th, 2010 § 9 Comments
I have a long post in the works related a little bit to Meggy’s moving tribute to Dorothy Height, and related to my Shanghai trip earlier this month, and related to the politics of dressing up and being a site and a sight to see, and related to the recent fucked up legislation passed in Arizona, and related to Threadbared’s last post on epidermilized clothing, and very very much related to this brilliant lecture by Chimamanda Adichie that speaks directly to every single thing that is dear and important to me as a writer and as a person of color struggling to be as expansive and weird and banal and surprising and contradictory and unappealing and familiar and unapologetic as I can’t help but be, without having to resist someone else’s narrow vision of who I am and should be.
It’s all unformed and abstract and annoyingly vague right, and I’m also sorry to do another uninspired outfit post. These photos were taken after I found out that Michael got a research Fulbright to Slovenia and I called him (he’s in France right now) and felt like I needed him to be back in Iowa City so we could dance (him like Ian Curtis and me like a Peanuts character) in every room of the house and make a big Vietnamese salad with a Chinese egg, tomato, scallion, and cilantro soup on the side and at least three different choices of hot sauce.
Vintage white dress, vintage tooled purse, purple bow booties from Shanghai, drugstore tights, & vintage bracelets from Meggy & from under my bed
Love, Jenny
307. Dorothy Height and a tangential thing about hats
April 23rd, 2010 § 10 Comments
I am so heart-warmed and happy to read the comments regarding my thesis, which was indeed turned in on Tuesday; and to find that Jenny is still keeping up here at FFW; that we are getting more Bloglovin’ followers than ever (if you’re not one, consider clicking at left!) — and that no one has hunted me down here in Ann Arbor to throw eggs at my house for being a bad blogger. I don’t know if I’ve talked about this before here, and the older I get, the more wary I am about talking about medical issues in public arenas, but the last month has been hard for me, culminating in a series of days in which I had to go to the doctor, who prescribed bed rest and eating from a very small list of foods.
Another thing that I do feel compelled to write about at times here is the issue of body image and whether or not bloggers should be “allowed” to write about body image, for fear of triggering readers. In this space I wrote about my mother putting me on a diet last spring, but I think that’s all I’ve said about my relationship to food and the way that I feel about my body, which is so much more complicated than numbers on a scale, and also has to do with experiences with violence, etc., but what do you think? What is OK and not OK to say about body image in a blog predominately focused on fashion?
DOROTHY HEIGHT, REST IN PEACE
Anyway, I want to talk today about Dorothy Height, whom you may have heard about this week. She was a leader of the African-American and women’s rights movements, and died on Tuesday at 98 years of age. As Margalit Fox from the NYT writes:
One of the last living links to the social activism of the New Deal era, Ms. Height had a career in civil rights that spanned nearly 80 years, from anti-lynching protests in the early 1930s to the inauguration of President Obama in 2009. That the American social landscape looks as it does today owes in no small part to her work.
The enormity of Height’s activism is more appropriate for a book and not a blog post, but in reading her obituaries, I noticed a common thread in almost all of her photographs — her hats! And indeed, when I Googled “Dorothy Height hats,” I found that Height was often associated with her hats, from the Facebook group “Hats Off for Dr. Dorothy I. Height,” to the many obits that mentioned hats — including a quote from Height herself:
I came up at a time when young women wore hats, and they wore gloves. Too many people in my generation fought for the right for us to be dressed up and not put down. (italics mine)
And here’s a quote from blogger Robert Pierre that I found moving:
And then there were the hats, the formality of them, even in situtations that didn’t seem to call for them. If you want to be somebody, you can hear her saying, act like it. Sure, that’s not the salve to all of our problems, but who am I and who are we to dismiss those who implore us with their words and deeds to be whatever we can, whenever we can. Her hats may have been too formal but from the outside, her spirit and motive appeared clean: family is important, holding your head high is important, particularly when you’re wearing a to-die-for hat. My grandmother had too many to count and she wore them every Sunday when she went to church. Putting your best foot, or hat, forward was a part of the generations that went before us. They wore their hats–and their demeanors and our hopes and dreams– well.
image from http://blackpaprreport.wordpress.com/2009/03/page/2/
image from http://www.thehistorymakers.com/
image from http://www.blackgivesback.com/2008_05_01_archive.html
NOTE TO JENNY: I want to talk to you about race and the politics of dressing up and how this is different or not different for people of color, and also the politics of how black hair care plays into this (see INTENSE FINGER-WAVED HAIR ABOVE), and whether this is the same today or similar, etc.
To find out more about Dorothy Height and her amazing accomplishments, see her biography at the National Association of Social Workers here.
xo, mw
306. Supposedly the older we get, the more frequently our brains slip into daydream mode (I guess I’m older!)
April 21st, 2010 § 10 Comments
These are just some scattered pictures I wanted to show you from the past few weeks because I’m also scattered. In fact, I was feeling bad about my brain and its lack of quality thinking, but listening to the radio and hearing a lady from the New York Times tell me that as we approach middle age our brains are more likely to slip into daydream mode, helped me to feel lovely and I wondered how this lady was using the term ‘daydreaming,’ if it was technical and scientific, or if there’s some interpretative leeway there? If I understand her correctly, (doubtful!) another thing that happens to our mental faculties when we reach middle age is if, for example, say you forget Brad Pitt’s name and it bothers you all day. Then later in the day, you see a rotting apple pit and your brain suddenly remembers: It was Brad Pitt!
So does that mean if I daydream while other people are talking to me and I can’t remember the time I lived on Ash Avenue in Flushing and then I buy some cherries to eat in the sun and someone ashes their cigarette a few feet away and suddenly I can recall my friend Joy, who never let me finish puzzles, lived on Delaware Street, just one street after Cherry, which was after Beach, which was after Ash Avenue, the street I lived on until I was 12? By the way, the smell of leaving strawberries out for a long time is a nice smell, and it vaguely reminds me of going to Sizzlers and getting the all you can eat buffet and eating so much that I had to take off my pants in the car, and the reason I think of Sizzlers is because I would always get the fruit punch soda, which always smelled and tasted like strawberry bubble yum bubble gum.
Also, Meggy finished her MFA thesis and turned it in yesterday! Girl, I can’t wait to read your novel, and also: treat yourself to a vacay already.
1-Vintage white slip + blue slip underneath + Miss Selfridge jacket; 2- Vintage sailor romper + socks I bargained for in Shanghai + Swedish Hasbeens; 3: 50′s dress + socks I bargained for in Shanghai + French sole ballet flats.
Love, Jenny
305. Holy dances, holy cow I have bad allergies, holy hole things too
April 19th, 2010 § 8 Comments
(Secondhand tent dress, bow socks from Shanghai, vintage Mondrian peeptoes, Sally Hansen nail polish.)
In Shanghai, it’s pretty difficult to find socks that aren’t super duper cute. It’s like trying to eat at a McDonald’s without letting a drop of ketchup touch your lips (although I’ve seen some do it.) I don’t mind tweeness in clothing and even cloying, inappropriate cuteness is okay with me, which is why I have so many of these knee socks with little ribbons on the side, accumulated over several years. You can’t see it so well in the photo, but these black knee socks have little polka dotted blue ribbons on the side and I got them on Huahai Lu in Shanghai, back in the days when people would follow you for blocks asking if you were interested in ‘purses and watches’ and if you said yes, they’d lead you into a hidden alley and suddenly two big burly dudes would appear with a trunk full of knockoff purses and watches. I bargained for these particular socks pretty fiercely. I think the transaction ended with the sock vendor chasing me down the street and berating me for ‘not hearing’ that he had accepted my lowest offer, which something like 10 RMB for 5 pairs (I think at the time, that worked out to be $1.75 for 5 pairs of knee socks…) I also bargained for inappropriately cute knee socks when I was in St. Petersburg a few years ago, so I guess I have developed a bit of confidence when it comes to bargaining for socks.
By the way, I basically styled my outfit in blatant imitation of these photos Rhiannon posted a while ago of Jane Birkin. I’m especially digging the one of her and creepster Serge in what looks like 1970s China.
When I was younger, every spring, teachers would ask me if everything was okay at home and I’d have to be like, ‘Oh yeah, my eyes and face just look like they’ve been punched repeatedly because I have horrible allergies.’ It’s that time again and it makes me feel unappreciative of Spring and also embarrassed to be seen in public. The lovely thing about Springtime is the smell of hyacinths in the air. In Shanghai, gypsies often sell them on the street for 1 RMB in the spring and summer. My mom told me when she was a girl, she would sometimes treat herself to a hyacinth in the morning (back then, they only cost 1 cent) and pin it to her school uniform so that she would feel sweet all day. Hyacinths are the only flower I can be near without sneezing. Somehow that makes me feel closer to my mom as a teenager, someone I will never know, except in my thoughts.
Love, Jenny
