The exact date at which I became a pearls-only kind of gal is arguable, but Jennifer Perkins’ naughty guide to jewelry – The Naughty Secretary Club: The Working Girl’s Guide to Handmade Jewelry, North Light Books, 144 pp., $16.99) – makes one thing perfectly clear: I’m not nearly as fun as I used to be. Not to worry, though; Perkins’ kitschy craft book is an excellent antidote to boring accessory habits. The introduction openly admits that if “tackaliscious” isn’t your style, this may not be the book for you. Which has some truth to it, as I would hate to see some of its designs on anyone older than the age of 8. More important, though, is her claim that even if your style isn’t quite as loud as hers, you can use the projects in her book for inspiration and the techniques as groundwork for your own cutesy inventions.
A founding member of the Austin Craft Mafia, Perkins includes a few heavy-duty projects in Naughty Secretary Club that are clearly for the seasoned crafter, but the book covers projects for skill levels from “first day on the job” to “you deserve a raise” to “running the show.” In addition to office-themed skill levels, the book includes memos with info ranging from office statistics (42% of people surveyed have had an office romance) to office-supply-based beauty tips (use a Sharpie and Wite-Out to make “domino nails”).
Craftsters will recognize Jennifer as a member of the Austin Craft Mafia, a group of local craft mavens who sew, hot glue, knit, and crochet fun and funky arts and crafts for the modern guy and gal. If you're a crafter and you don't know Craft-o-Rama, well, what have you been waiting for? The bright and airy shop is designed for the inner seamstress in you, but have just enough yarn and embroidery threads to keep fiber fanatics happy too. Whether it's a book release party or an occasional swap meet, Hayley Pannone (and mommy in waiting) does a swell job of making the event festive and full of casual, crafty fun.
I like my institutional brands to be unaware. Aloof. Like a teenage stone fox who hasn't figured it out yet. Or at least have an ad agency that's good at making them look that way. Coyly, Ingalls, Quinn & Johnson's 1991 TV spot for Converse's "It's What's Inside That Counts" campaign features a boy-guy voice-over insisting,"There are a lot more whatchucall ugly people in this world than beautiful people, and there's a growing sense of strength in our collective ugliness … We don't want to live in a beer commercial. The point is not to be beautiful. The point is to be yourself."
WTF happened? According to The Converse Century, Fall 2008 Footwear Look Book, the point is now apparently not simply to be your own rock star, but to be a specific, Converse-approved, dead rock star. I don't know about you, but I really don't remember seeing many Chucks at Grateful Dead shows. For the less pedantic, there are also designs from John Varvatos, the menswear designer who one assumes spent the night in line for a bald-faced grab at whatever credibility still hangs in the air in the old CBGB space. Apparently feeling expansive in his new digs, Varvatos & Co. introduce the new Converse collection, "The next chapter in the Converse history book aligns the deviants with the affluents … Unabashed irreverence never looked so good." If that makes you cringe, it's probably because it conjures images of Wall Street types in John Lennon neckties. They are the cavemen in neckties that say, mimicking the mullet, "I was cool once, but don't worry, I am now a sheep like you. I have taken the Pledge of Predictability."
This story from the NYT Sunday Styles section got me thinking about what will happen when the trend of "sensory cocktails" finally hits the States.
According to the article, the whole process is supposed to "heighten the link between the drink and the experience," and it mentions an obvious drink like "The Tiki," in which you are sprayed with a mist of suntan oil and listen to tropical music while drinking a daiquiri, in order to "transport" you to the beach.
While there's something a bit sad about drinking blindfolded while someone spritzes you with an unknown substance, it also got me thinking about how you could "transport" yourself to various Austin institutions without actually being there. A few suggestions came via fellow Chroniclers..
The Emo's: Sparkleberry (Sparks, vodka, cranberry juice), with a light mist of Camel Light and men's restroom aroma.
The ACL-tini: Patchouli, Widespread Panic, vodka, a heat lamp.
How to successfully recreate a "gray-haired hippie in a tie-dyed Grateful Dead shirt, riding a recumbent bicycle with a hemp-based bag of granola swinging from the handlebars" is still being debated.
Gender in and of itself carries enough expectation baggage. But when gender skew has a matching suitcase, you know you gotta do some unpacking: even if it means shaving your armpits.
If one more person asked if I were going to wear a tux, I was going to scream.
Some belated blogging housekeeping: As with any major gathering, Netroots Nation had its fair share of unmissable parties. The absolutely mostest A-list event was the GQ/Huffington Post Party at Lamberts Downtown Barbecue on Friday night. The well-attended and well-coiffured event has since been covered by the GQ Blog at Men.Style.Com
In attendence was much of the politerati and the blogocracy (including at least on regular guest on Countdown with Keith Olbermann.) But who are these mysteriously well-dressed young coves shown in this photograph, setting trends for the nation? Could it possibly be the Chronicle's Wells Dunbar, Richard Whittaker and Mike Bartnett (accompanied by our esteemed multimedia associate, Angel Schatz? It seems that free food is 'in' this season.
Getting To It Later: Putting Off That Bad Habit Yet Again
Procrastination's a style, right? A style of living, certainly. A bona fide lifestyle, a relentless thing, to those of us who never seem to get done even half the shit we tell ourselves we want to do.
Instead, we spend some of that time – too fucking much of that time – on our bad habits. Smoking yet another cancerstick. Chewing in the manner of rabid marmots at our already-bleeding cuticles. Vegging out for hours in front of a TV screen flooded with commercial pimpery and talentless famewhores.
We're gonna stop doing this, we tell ourselves. Enough already, we vow. We're going to, finally, through sheer force of will, get some worthwhile shit done with our lives, hallelujah!
Yeah, well, Sheer Force Of Will has always crapped out in the past, hasn't it? Sheer Force Of Will is such the overrated gambit, in our case. Better to rely on something tried and true: Our Inner Scheming Nature and Our Propensity For Procrastination.
Here's how:
First, convince yourself that your bad habits are things you really need to do, that you'd be better off doing those bad-habity things. That they'll make your life soooooo much better and you'll reap the rewards of meaning and joy and societal popularity and so forth. C'mon, now: You can wheedle and con with the best of 'em, can't you? Make yourself believe it. Let the truth of the lie sink deep into your neocortex, into your brain's Gullibility Area, all the way to where your limbic system spins its idiot web of power and response.
Get it? Got it?
Good.
Now let your urge toward procrastination kick in. Let your Never-Got-A-Round-Tuit lifestyle grind into full gear. Soon enough, the usual modus operandi that's kept you from achieving the fame, fortune, and general feelings of fulfillment that you've always kinda sorta wanted ... soon enough, that same M. O. will now thwart your attempts at indulging in whatever bad habits come blithely a-knocking at the doors of your ennui.
Want a cigarette? Ah, too much trouble. Feel like chomping on a hangnail? Maybe later, after you take a jog around the block. Thinking about catching some American Idol? Fuck it, that can wait: You'd really rather volunteer down at the food bank right now.
If there's anything we know about Kanye West, it's that dude knows what he wants: for starters, the MTVawards and glowing (in the dark, perchance?) concert reviews he feels are his due. So it shouldn't be surprising Yeezy's also got some rather particular – and rather expensive – taste in fashion, clothing, art, and design. I mean, he did get pop artist and one-man industry Takashi Murakami to design his last album cover, right? They don't call him the Louis Vuitton Don for nothing, right?
And so to that end: Kanye's blog. It's a consistently updated tour of things largely awesome in the world of design. Occupying the front page right now are a funny/terrifying series of models with animals styled into their hair by Nagi Noda (another Japanese popster), an exceedingly clean-lined mid-century modern (right, Cindy?) house by Mexican architechts K&A Diseño, and the upholsted fiberglasss Eudora chair. So you haters can rest easy that Mr. West's contribution to design didn't begin and end with those damn Stronger glasses. (Although you might be able to afford a pair of those.)
The Granger House, built in 1952 as the architect's personal residence
All photos by Stephanie Jones
Like many who have lived through its incarnations and mutations, I have a complicated relationship with mid-century modernism. One on end is a spare purity that makes me feel as if I've wandered, terribly miscast, into some Antonioni film. On the other is what the visions of Frank Lloyd Wright, Eero Saarinen, and the Eameses had transformed (some might say devolved) into by the 1970s – tract caves darkened by endless paneling, stain-resistant shag, and mustard linoleum, with the occasional kitschy bright spot (lava lamps and rocket-shaped sugar bowls) – and led eventually, one supposes, to IKEA.
In the middle is the bliss: the elision of the indoor/outdoor divide, the light and the beautiful wood, the clean lines and glass and cool, soothing terrazzo floors. How is it possible not to feel ambivalent? Add in the economic ironies – a style that at least in part was developed in response to the post-WWII housing boom and an attempt to produce pleasurable, affordable homes for the masses (see, most notably, the Case Study Houses) is by now primarily available only to upper-income brackets – and one can whip oneself into quite the Marxian dither.
And yet: It's a style that makes one want to transcend pragmatic worldliness ... so airy ... so peaceful ... so very, very pretty ...
The Heritage Society of Austin (motto: "This isn't your grandmother's heritage society") understands this roller coaster of excitement and anxiety, and on May 17, their Atomic Austin: Mid-Century Modern Heritage Homes Tour delved boldly into the contradictions and eccentricities, not to mention the considerable charms, of Austin mid-century. The supporting literature was substantive; the docents were decked as Fifties housewives (apron fetish alert); and the focus was highly local, with an emphasis on the "low-slung, mid-century blend of a machine-age aesthetic and Hill Country style," as Sydney Rubin (also one of the homeowners) put it in the crib notes, by such ATX architectural notables as Charles Granger, Arthur Fehr, and A.D. Stenger.
The simple wildflower-print dresses worn by the ladies of the Texas polygamist cult (hasn't anybody discovered their real name, or at least created a media moniker?) may indicate innocence, submission, and lack of vanity, but their updos stand for anything but. Cosmetics are apparently forbidden, but hair products can get you closer to salvation. God likes Extra Hold.
These hairdos are at once stern, righteous, forbidding, and deliberate. They stand in contrast to the iconic hair of other rural women in, say, the American South – where most any Sunday morning service will find once fashion-forward hairstyles, on certain individuals mutating with every pass of the poison crop-duster into more and more elaborate parodies of the original. (Maybe pesticides gradually cloud up the mirrors around town.) Said permutations are not, in other words, necessarily deliberate.
The polygamists' updos, however, seem somehow more, well, pointed. Since their lives are centered mainly around each other (at least that's how it is on HBO's Big Love), for whom exactly are these high and mighty hair messages meant? I think they're meant for each other. It's easy to imagine hair-height and projection of the unicorn-curl signifying some kind of station among the gals. Since male attention is coveted, one must assume that wave-width engineering has something to do with that.
I'd be a lesbian polygamist and smuggle contraband around in mine. Murine for the alpha sister's coffee, perhaps, when Mr. Big Breeches' evening visitation schedule doesn't suit. Or flammable cans of travel-sized hairspray for those tricky days. Condoms ordered online, fluttering into the soup tureen. Definitely condoms.
Janice Abrams came off the bench to win Best Design.
Yes, I'm completely late for the trend. Trouble with the video feed.
But in case you didn't know: Design Within Reach has been sponsoring some damn cool, totally local events lately. Their recent Moder+Design+Function 2008 competition, a showcase of eco-conscious (but stylish) furniture, was crawling with giddy design freaks. Of interest are welder-architect Ann Armstrong on her material-saving lamps and Carrie Donovan-ish Best Design winner Janice Abrams, celebrating her triumphant, multifunctional bench.
But perhaps most notable was the eloquence of mod mavens free-associating on the term "Austin design":
photo by William Wright, from Stylish Sheds (Debra Prinzing)
Loretta Fischer is totally famous. Her landscaping and her garden "shed" – really a fine mod bauble of a greenhouse/entertainment pagoda – have been featured on HGTV, Central Texas Gardener, in a certain Austin daily newspaper, and all over magazines and websites too numerous to mention (though who can resist mentioning the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times?).
But no amount of media exposure can blunt the feeling of walking into the oasis Fischer and her brother, Harrison Bates, have created around the (relatively) modest Tarrytown home Loretta shares with husband/real estate broker/comedian Terrill Fischer. (Click on the photo gallery (right) to see what I'm talking about.)
Another excuse to navigate the McMansion debris and bewildering streets of West Austin (the better to appreciate the Fischers' classic gem) came last weekend in the form of a book release party for Debra Prinzing's Stylish Sheds and Elegant Hideways, an addictive tome that features William Wright's pretty much perfect photographs of fetching outbuildings, including Fischer's greenhouse and two other sheds from Central Texas (though hailing from Cali, the nutty Norwegian-wood pavilion with grass roof might be my second favorite).
Four solid hours out of Superdome City, doin' it to it and cookin' good down the superslab, dodging alligators and dead pedals, this wooly bear was startin' to nod off and decided to take a 10-100. So I pulled a short for some motion lotion and a mud ball. Well, my goodness gracious, look what I found.
Now, these aren't your typical quasars. Nor are they concrete blondes or dress for sales. Not even San Quentin jailbait. No sir, these are some darlin' eager beavers and foxes with a hankerin' to get promoted to First Sargent. Even to old hands like yrself. Send away for the book and the tape, sign up with their system, and in a short-short, you'll be eyeball-to-eyeball with your future O.L., fer sure fer sure.
Good to know somebody's looking out for the workin' man: Eighty-eights around the house, good buddy. We gone, we down and we like it.
Awwwwwww. Well, it should come as no surprise to find him moonlighting as a poster boy for a New Orleans' designer, GoGo Jewelry. (I just about fell over when I saw this card in the window of the Magazine Street shop, and just had to share.)
Oh, wait, that's not Craig; the model in the ad is wearing his telltale wedding band on his right hand… Besides, Craig is a discriminating fella. He'd never tap feet with a guy in white socks and Skechers.
In honor of No Pants Day (four hours of daylight left!), I present you with the following image: Ann Richards in her underwear.
Go ahead. Think about it. You know you want to. Aero-engineered brassiere (the word "bra" does not suffice). Full-length paneled girdle (here worn over pantyhose). Sensible black shoes and an early-stage, low-flying bouffant.
If that's not floating your boat, how about Barbara Jordan? Tailored navy slip, very Ralph, matching 1.5-inch, peep-toe pumps and, yes, glasses, what appears to be a watch, and strangely hammy hands.
Fine: Jayne Mansfield (white Mirabeau bikini), Selena (black bra with white lace appliqué, tights, cap), George Strait (tighty whities, Stetson), and/or Jack Johnson (knit boxing shorts with blue sash belt) more to your liking? Tom Tierney does 'em all up and more in Famous Texas Women andFamous Texas Men Paper Dolls.
They'll make you squeal (though maybe only on the inside). If the carefully styled and perfectly chosen skivvies don't get you, the random assortment of Texas characters will (Hello Beyoncé and Sam Houston, where's Lady Bird?).
And for style-obsessed natives who grew up toddling to Neiman's (is there any other kind?), it's a heavenly confluence, indeed. Who didn't dream of playing with paper dolls of Ima Hogg, Quanah Parker, and Larry Hagman, all with three meticulously researched costumes?
