adventures in vintage shoes.

french vintage, rene mancini heels from 10ft single by stella dallas

it’s apparently that time again. a couple of times during the year, i inadvertently wander out of thrift/vintage stores having purchased a new pair of shoes. i tend to go into the store thinking i’ll look for clothes, but most days, i lack the patience it takes to wade through the racks, and i end up scanning the shoes for the few tiny pairs on the shelf. it’s the easy way out when i want to go home with something new in hand. this compulsive shopping has led to an excess of shoes in my closet and in giant tupperware containers under the bed, which i may rarely wear, but never want to part with. i did try to sell a few pairs today to buffalo exchange in williamsburg, but apparently, they don’t buy shoes in my size, so they only bought a pair of heinous diesel boots that were a size too big for me.  

after a decent brunch at harefield road last sunday, i drifted into atlantis attic, a thrift store next door. i told my dude i was “just going to run in,” but the place was so enormous, i wasted no less than 45 minutes sifting through the racks. the prices are pretty good ($7-$40 for the things i looked at) and they have a huge selection, but you’d really have to look in order to find any first-rate items. feeling fairly noncommittal, i moved onto shoes and found a pair of  80’s blue suede booties with a o-ring straps (made by santa barbara leather) for $10. the cruisy boy behind the counter was all smiles ’til my man came back in the store at which point he stopped talking to me and tossed the boots across the counter at me. oh- the plight of a jilted salesclerk.

vintage blue suede booties by santa barbara leather

this weekend, insisting that shopping would rouse me from my crabby stupor, my boo dragged me into 10ft single by stella dallas, a gigantic vintage store run by disinterested japanese kids (i think it’s also called doggy’s clothing). the store is massive and they have a very intentional selection, which is not your typical american vintage. a lot of their stuff is european, which i found to be more interesting than the usual used clothes fare. there were a couple of pieces i liked, but the nihonjins know what they have and price accordingly. the good stuff is expensive and i’m not about to pay $80 for a t-shirt. i bought an amazing pair of rene mancini two-toned slingbacks from the 70’s for $25, reluctantly put a jessica mcclintock 90’s prom dress back on a rack and left, slightly happier than when i came in. the quesadilla i had at la superior after shopping was the ticket. once my blood sugar was on the rise, so was my mood.

a few days later, i can’t stop thinking about that silly black prom frock. maybe i’ll brave the japanese hipsters and head back to stella dallas…

my labor of love- nani iro duvet.

 

the answer to less daylight. bed frame from retrospect. heywood wakefield nightstand (i refinished a decade ago), calvin klein decorative pillows.

i wanted something happy. after weeks of exhausting searching, i finally found a duvet cover i actually liked. and it was $400. fail. i decided that i would go on and make my own, which led me to another exhausting search. i ended up buying a hotel collection white duvet from ebay because it was so much more cost effective than buying fabric to make my own. plus, we already had hotel collection sheets and pillow cases, which are incredibly luxurious and soft. my quest for playful, bright fabric led me to nani iro fabric, a line from japanese designer, naomi ito.  

ebi breaking in the new bed.

i bought 3 yards of the yellow pocho dots  and 3 yards of fuccra in eggplant from superbuzzy.com. both fabrics are a double gauze cotton that are soft but not exactly soft enough to want to put my face in every night, so i only made 2 pillow shams. the double gauze was way more difficult that i thought it was going to be to work with because it changed shape every time i pulled it, so it took me a long, long time to iron it and applique it to the duvet. once it was done though, i could not have been happier with the way it turned out. the bedding is exactly what i wanted- something bright and happy for the darker winter months. plus the variety of color allowed me to keep the same calvin klein bedskirt and decorative pillows. new bedding and the new tempurpedic mattress? heaven on earth.

coming up for air.

i finally sent in my final paper for my class last night, which means i can re-immerse myself into a world outside of academia. it also means that i actually have the time to finish up all sorts of little projects i’ve been either working on or dreaming of, which i will be more than happy to share with you… starting tomorrow. for the rest of today, i’m going to defamiliarize myself with this computer screen, become one with my couch and reward myself for my hard work with some mind numbing television programs. 

hasta pronto.

right after this post…

manhattan skyline sunset during a storm.

back in town finally without imminent plans to jump ship (save a nearby camping expedition next weekend, if all works as i hope.) and i just can’t seem to get moving on my ever expanding list of things to do. i’ve been eating almonds and staring at the same chapter of a text book from 1989 for the past hour, struggling to shake off the fine dust of fury i’ve worked up over this correspondence course i’m taking from the university of minnesota. it’s a class on gender and global feminism and the most recent text assigned to the primary course work was published in 2001. i’m gonna go ahead and quote johnny mac here- “you cannot be serious.” i cannot believe that every single professor who has taught this course during the past 7 years was too lazy to change the curriculum even just a little bit. reading a book that was published 6 years prior to the existence of the world trade organization and trying to talk about global feminism without acknowledging that this conversation is simply historical referencing feels undeniably problematic, not to mention totally irresponsible. i haven’t even begun to unleash my anger regarding the absence of the last 8 years of changes in “gender.” half of my girls that became boys are now ladymen and butches, conversations that had only just begun back when this shit was written. 

so that picture i tacked onto this post? i could stretch here and pontificate about how it’s the beauty of a storm (or some metaphorically related bullshit), but it’s not. i just liked the shot. nonetheless, outta every thing that sets me off, i eventually find a place of peace. and by october 15th, when i’ve turned in that last paper, hopefully i’ll have brushed off the whore dust and found a happy place.

ha. whore dust is still hilarious.

pay money to make your own education: http://www1.umn.edu/twincities/index.php

buy a john mcenroe hoodie expressing your disbelief to the whole world:  http://www.nomas-nyc.com/

do not flash the octopus.

 

truer words have rarely made signs.

one of my many joys in life comes from laughing at botched attempts at formulating a sentence in a foreign language. granted, my english grasp is questionable, my spanish- tedious and my japanese- practically useless, so really it’s just english that i have the privilege of laughing at. don’t get me wrong, i have a deep, deep respect for anyone willing to make an ass of themselves in another tongue. i’m well aware of my linguistic shortcomings. due to my insecurity, i tend to only use the present tense in spanish. it’s not that i don’t know how to conjugate a verb, it’s that i panic. i reach for the low hanging fruit. i assume, like most americans, that my point will somehow carry across the borders of language and i’ll be magically understood. i pretty much only use the honorific in japanese, which means that even if i’m talking to my friend’s 4 year old son, i will treat him as if he were the president of my untitled state. over the years, this has garnered a lot of laughter and i have not been shy or hesitant in returning the favor.

once my boss at a sub shop where i delivered sandwiches told me that all men that ate avocados were gay. he insisted that naked gay men used to come into his corner store in the west village and buy avocados. “the womens that look like the mens too!” he proclaimed. after a thorough round of questioning, he finally pointed to a piece of sliced ham and revealed that these nude, avocado hunting homos were wearing spandex unitards of the same shade. hilarious.

as kids we used to pester our japanese foreign exchange student friend by constantly, and casually, asking him “what’s that day called again when we vote to decide who will be on the city council?” 

“oh, i think that’s called erection day,” he’d say every time, already blushing because he knew we were going to laugh. 

for the past two days i’ve poked through every post on engrishfunny.com, a website devoted to pictures that have captured bad translations, ridiculous appropriations of english words around the world, and riotously funny product packaging. i appreciate this because it’s much more extensive than my personal collection of items and photos collected over my travels, but mostly because anything that makes me giggle with every page load is worth talking about. 

whore dust is hilarious.

if you and i ever go to a restaurant where the white waitress from the midwest asks you “soup or salad” and you respond yes, don’t worry, when i’m done laughing, i’ll explain to you that she’s not asking you if you like super salad. and when we catch our breath, we can trade stories about our past linguistic mishaps and peruse more websites like engrishfunny.com.

she wants the sun instead of the moon.

 

sunrise in a michigan cornfield

again, i know, there’s devastating silence in my absence. feel free to take solace in the fact that i have something like 9 papers that are due in about 5 weeks, and you’ll likely be hearing from me on a pretty constant basis, what with my need to procrastinate and all.

i never want to drive again. since we got the car in july, i have gone 7,600 miles. obscene. even more obscene is the butt print i’ve worked into the leather of the driver’s seat. i’ve logged over 50 hours of books on tape. and i’ve been lost exactly zero times. did i mention how much i love my gps? these last three weeks took me back to the midwest to: kick it with my family, do a quick drive-by at the michigan womyn’s music festival (which is my super happy place, the best gift i give myself every year, and i’ll definitely write an entry about it… maybe tomorrow…), serve as maid-of-honor in a friend’s wedding, catch up with old friends in minneapolis, and put in a little more family time.

i ate a lot of jimmy john’s.

but there’s really no place like home, even if i have to suffer through the holland tunnel to get here.  

i have to pay attention to my boys now (the pup came with me) and play this cake song until i can’t stand it anymore. catch ya later.

got a parking violation and a maggot on your sleeve.

actually, i got 3 parking violations and an infestation of house gnats. 

now i just have to shave my face with some mace in the dark.

i came out to the new car this morning and discovered a stack of orange parking violations shoved under my windshield wiper. $345 worth of tickets for parking too close to a fire hydrant… a hydrant that hasn’t been operational since 1970.

i consider myself to be a fairly logical person and in this case, i suppose i should have worked my logic in the opposite direction. i thought that since the fire hydrant clearly did not work, had not worked in a long time, that i could park there. there wasn’t any yellow paint on the curb or those steel pipes that the city puts on either side of operational hydrants, which led me to believe that it was okay. absolutely not okay. the real logic, the one i failed to consider, was that they city will do everything in it’s power to extort money from us. while researching how to fight my tickets, i found out that in park slope a man was arrested for painting the curbs yellow to warn potential parkers. they reasoned that his markings weren’t accurate enough. in new york, they intentionally do not post no parking signs by fire hydrants and they leave defunct ones in place so that they can issue citations. hindsight being what it always is, i really wish i would have just parked on the empty side of the street that was slated for cleaning this morning and either moved the car or taken the $45 ticket. 

maybe this is the punishment i get for enlarging my carbon footprint… well, the citations and global warming. anyway, i needed to rant a bit and am doing so under the guise of informing you not to park near fire hydrants in brooklyn.

don’t get got, find out what you can and cannot do in your car          www.nyc.gov/dot

can your grandpa do this?

 

bill ohrmann's polar bear.

around mile marker 1300 of our trip, we diverted from interstate 90 and tried our luck with highway 1. originally we set out with romantic notions of a dilapidated ghost town, but the vague and altogether shitty directions local business owners gave us never afforded us the experience. instead, i waved my arms frantically and hopped up and down in the passengers seat, flailing about trying to get my boo to stop at the ohrmann museum & gallery, whose sign read something like “almost always open,” barn side. as we powered down the bugmobile, an older woman popped out of her house, bee-lined through a herd of metal animals  and led us into the gallery, a converted, corrugated steel walled barn. she quietly took her place behind the counter and left us to wander around the space. given the giant steel sculptures spread far and wide across the lawn, i wasn’t expecting to see the hundred or so paintings hung in unending rows around the rooms.  

bill orhmann

bill ohrmann, a 90-year-old retiree, gave up ranching in 1995 and began pursuing his art full time. over the span of three decades, he has moved from wood carving to bronze casting and steel sculptural work, exploring painting with increasing passion in recent years. inspired by a biography on vincent van gogh, ohrmann’s work began to reflect his views on environmentalism and animal rights. his current show is titled “something to offend everyone,” and takes stabs at everything from nuclear arms to mayan sacrifices. the paintings are not generally beautiful. they aren’t necessarily creative. but they’re somehow incredibly shocking, in part because it’s not what one expects to see when they pull off the road, but mostly because of who created them- an ancient man living in nowhere montana. while his paintings feel something like high school art, his sculptural work is practiced and magnificent. set against the picturesque backdrop of low, dusty mountains and dramatic brewing storm clouds, there seems no better home for a wooly mammoth forged from steel.

if you ever happen to be driving i-90, take the extra hour, veer off the beaten path and head to highway 1 to see the ohrmann museum. chances are they’ll be open. they almost always are.                www.ohrmannmuseum.com

it’s not that easy.

 

the acquisition: in montana, where i stopped to take pictures of sheep.

just to quell your fears, as i’m sure you’re just horrified that i haven’t been around in awhile, i’m still here. i don’t go away so easily. i’ve been on a 4,000 mile road trip from san francisco back to brooklyn picking up a new-to-me vw beetle.  

i told a friend in sf that i was pretty sure people would assume that i chose the beetle because it fit my personality, but i see myself as more of a matte black, shelby fastback. she started laughing hysterically and said, “no, i think people probably do see you more as a mustang, but this is your emo bug. your periwinkle, emotional, little bug.” and she’s probably right. i’m pretty sure that in 1998 when volkswagon was reintroducing the beetle, i wanted one. and i probably wanted to put wildflowers in the in-dash flower vase.

so i’d like you to know that i’m back (for a week or so and then i’m off again) and that i love my gps. i have no sense of direction and a new sense of freedom driving in metropolitan areas. woo.

make your yuppie dreams come true:   www.volkswagon.com

pomp, circumstance and the snork.

 

our little french bulldog, mars, aka the snork.

 i love fuzzy creatures and i have a tendency to stack my household full of them. the last addition to my fur family was a french bulldog puppy, mars, who is now a year and a few months old. she’s a sweet and loving critter who adores sunbeams and cuddling. in turn, we adore her. but somewhere around one year, mars took an unruly turn, a period of true adolescence that left me searching for a solution. we enrolled in a 6 week dog obedience school at empire of the dog in williamsburg to find out if structure was the answer we’d been looking for.

the first week, we all left our puppies at home and showed up for a lecture by denise herman, the owner of empire of the dog and lead trainer. she instructed us on what we were going to be working on for the next month and a half and my partner and i left feeling surprisingly excited. the information that she presented us with was a bit different than my previous experience with dog training. the second week, mars honked and barked at class, things she never does at home, as she vied for the attention of the other dogs, with whom she was not allowed to play. by week four i was trying to come to terms with my ego and mars’ total inability to repeat in class what we worked on at home. week five was more of the same and denise only used mars at the class example of what not to do. by graduation night, i had come to a place of acceptance and was ready for mars to spin herself in circles trying to jump on the other dogs. i don’t know what magical transformation took place, but mars was on point. she paid attention, followed directions, and was even the good dog example for 3 different exercises. ha.

sporting the sweden hoodie i made this winter.

the basic dog obedience class was completely worth the $230. we are now the proud parents of an 18 lb frenchie who sits, stays, lies down, comes when called, waits at most doors and curbs, waits patiently for her food and walks considerably well on a leash. she’s remarkably better behaved than when we began and we’re committed to continuing to work with her. i think in the end the most valuable thing we learned was how to effectively interact with her. money well spent.

p.s. one of the easiest tips that helped us was to “get rid of the food bowl.” denise enlightened us on the benefits of making our dog work for her food, which is a much more natural process (even for a dog like ours who has no instincts whatsoever) and it keeps her busy. we now put her food inside hollow marrow bones (we feed her free-range lamb countrypet, which is perfect to squish inside the bone) to passively tire her out.

test the limits of your ego and your puppy’s capacity for new knowledge:   http://www.empireofthedog.com/nyc/index.html

don’t have the discipline to go raw yourself? start feeding fido a raw diet instead. countrypet.com