Richard Phillips had an opening...

I got to go to the extra-fancy Gagosian gallery on Saturday for the Richard Phillips opening. The show was amazing. He uses images from porn, advertising, and pop culture for his pieces. And the women there had the best shoes I've ever seen...just saying. Spotted the Rodarte loose-knit too. I am not an art critic, I can't describe, so I'll just show some of my favorites.




While I was looking at this one an awkward nerd asked me what I thought the artist was thinking while he was painting.




This last one I didn't see at the show but it was up on the Wallpaper* website where I got the images for this post. It's hilarious.

The dashing Mr. Phillips also had an afterparty which was very very special. I'll show you that next.

You made it to the big time bro!

Congratulations to my friend Zak for becoming tabloid fodder! Hopefully everything is okay, I mean who the hell throws a cat?! This is even more retarded than when my friend Will ended up on TMZ.

Seriously, this is my news. And yes, I sit around and read DListed every day.

This shit is everywhere, and of course the posts are pretty much the same. This is completely ridiculous and sounds kind of run of the mill for a lot of the crazier couples I know out there. Seriously, what would you do if your drunken fight ended up on Page 6? Poor kitty though. The commentary is hilarious on all the sites.

TMZ
Gothamist
Extra
People
US Magazine
Best Week Ever

And of course the holy grail, the New York Post's post is the best:
Page Six

Advance Revision

So I was all set to write a second post about my 6 hours at Woodhull and how the hospital was nowhere near as crazy or scary as I thought it would be. But I just got back from Walgreens where they told me the pharmacist prescribed me a medication that will give me seizures if I take it in conjunction with the medication I am already on. A medication I told my EMT, my triage nurse, and my doctor I was on. Sweet, thanks bro. Glad I was a paranoid weirdo and googled Ultracet in advance. Now I get to hang in pain all day. Sweet!

Doored and Floored

Well fuck. And all I wanted was a donut.

One block after a delicious donut stop at Peter Pan in Greenpoint I hit the pavement, and I hit it hard. Nine years of bike riding in NYC and I had never been car doored. I'd narrowly avoided it many a time and it has happened to just about everyone I know, but I've been pretty lucky. Guess my luck ran out. Out of nowhere a car door opened directly in my path on Manhattan Avenue. I had no time to stop or swerve and hit the door full speed. Bike first then head. I fell into the middle of the thankfully traffic-free street, a twisted mess of bicycle and Beverly. And while I am on the ground, what does the concerned citizen who doored me say? "Why the hell weren't you wearing a helmet?" No, "Are you okay?" or "Oh my god, I'm sorry!" Just blame blame blame.

Listen bitch, even if I was wearing a helmet my ankle would still be fucked and so would your car. Turns out her boyfriend was a trained paramedic who insisted on calling an ambulance. As soon as she realized she couldn't close the door to her SUV (score one for me!) she called the cops to file a report. While he was on the phone with 911 an onlooker from across the street was also calling, apparently it looked as gnarly as it felt. The ambulance came and no one was sure if I should go to the hospital or not. I had the biggest bump on my head in the history of me and my foot was throbbing though not swollen. I thankfully still have COBRA from my old job so I decided peace of mind was worth the suffering of an ER trip.

They loaded me into the back of the ambulance while we waited for the cops to come. The boyfriend knocked on the window and asked if we needed them anymore and we said yes, to file the report. He said their insurance company told them it wasn't necessary so they wanted to leave and I said, hell no, a report was getting filed. You see, if you open the driver's side door onto the street in New York City you are liable for any accident it causes. Having nightmares about a broken bicycle and an insurance company refusing to pay for my hospital visit, I wasn't about to let them just drive off into the sunset. So the cops came and the woman did all she could to blame me, including yelling about how I wasn't wearing a helmet and making the cops go up to me and tell me I should wear one.

It was ridiculous and one of the EMTs laughed when he heard me mutter "fucking bitch" under my breath. The two lady cops made fun of her, one Latina, one Muslim. While the Latina one was waiting for the Muslim one to finish getting the woman's statement she hung out in the ambulance flirting with the EMT about motorcycle riding (apparently almost everyone involved from the woman who doored me to the cop to the EMTs all rode) and made fun of me for riding my bike in a dress. She also rolled her eyes at the boyfriend who was pounding fists with some passing firefighters. "White fireman, coming in from Manhattan, you know he marched in the parade." Fuck it was St. Patricks day too.

Finally we were off and I had a great conversation with my EMT about drunk driving. I realized I hadn't specified a hospital and they were taking me to the nearest one...Woodhull aka Deathkill aka The Death Star aka the hospital I never ever wanted to go to...

I'm going to take a break and continue this post in a second part...

You know what?

I post shit like the post below and then realize that what it's really about is giving a fuck about what you look like. I thought for a long time that people who said they didn't care what they looked like were full of shit, but I realized that's wrong. It's just hard to realize that it's not important to some when you've been embedded in the fashion industry in this damn city for too long.

As far as fashion and fantasy go, price points aren't the point, it's style. But true style can't be purchased and I think that's what really got my goat when I worked at Barneys. People would purchase pre-determinded head-to-toe looks. They'd wear whatever we told them to wear, and if it wasn't us telling them it was the runway or a photoshoot or our catalogue. Meeting the reps from each line and seeing them wearing a full look from their bosses line made me admire their professionalism but balk at how boring it must be for them to get dressed for work. Then again, when I managed The Good, The Bad & The Ugly I wore Judi's clothes daily and never minded, though I did overconsume at the shop (do I really need three snap-front denim skirts or five pairs of the spring denim? or two pairs of each style of short?) because they fit me like a dream. Still, stepping out in, say, a bustier, a pair of shorts, and pollys all designed by one person made me feel like an uncreative douchebag, completely reliant on someone else's vision of what style should be. Even if that vision is reasonably genius like Judi Rosen's, it still felt wrong. I just gotta be me, I guess.

But maybe that's problematic. I've learned to represent myself via my outfits. In a city where visual stimulation is constant, it's hard to stand out. Being single for years definitely made it necessary to do so, half of dressing for me was for men, the other half for women whose style and opinions I respected. It was slightly competitive for a period but that lessened as I got older and more confident. Everyone I knew came into her own around the same time and it was a graceful transition from peacocks to swans, equally lovely but the latter far more refined.

Or maybe I am just becoming an old fart. Now I dress up when I see my boyfriend and look like a wall flower when he's not around. Funny, but I get a different type of attention from men than I did before, probably because I don't give a fuck, but possibly because I'm not putting myself on display. A girl in jeans and a tshirt (though it's tight jeans and a cool tshirt, I'll never be a total shlub) is far more approachable than one in a mini dress. I see no reason to go out looking like a total babe without him. I settle for a comfortable sorta-babe status. Call me old fashioned but I'm a one man gal, and I don't welcome come-ons because rejecting dudes takes effort and is frankly kind of a drag. Of course I don't just dress for my man. I mean hell, I always want to look good, that's natural, and since I see him almost every day my habits haven't changed that much. I just don't necessarily believe when people say that women dress for other women. It's a straight combo, we dress for ourselves and for those we want to attract.

I hope I actually do look good most days, since I am one of those people who does genuinely care and probably who cares more than she should. But if you think I look like an asshole, do me a favor and keep it to yourself. Fashion is a fantasy, and I like my little vanity bubble.

I give up

Why do people listen to Karl Lagerfeld? Seriously. I will never get that man's allure. Sure, he's a German robot skeletor who has the ability to devastate anyone in the fashion world with a snide remark, but as far as I can tell all he does is sit around all day and call people fat while taking sole credit for everything his design team does. Chanel and most other high fashion branding is nothing but iconography for something I never aspired to be a part of; its the logo for the international WASP conspiracy. I see the crossed C's on grandmother's hairclips and jacket buttons more frequently than on a young fashionista's handbag. It's all a ruse, and Chanel is the most visable and powerful perpetrator.

My friends and I had a joke crew a long while ago call Closet Crust. And I created a logo for us riffing on the crossed Chanel C's, writing them in metal script instead of the prudish easily symmetrical font. It was for those of us who had grown up punk rock and had discovered a love of fashion and style that was actualized when we moved to New York. Even though we didn't look the part anymore, we still cherished our old 7"s and LPs. And yeah, I went to see DSB at ABC No Rio wearing vintage Dior and no one was the wiser. What of it? This was a time period where everything I owned was second hand from working as a buyer at Beacons Closet. So I could pull off some astounding looks on a scumbag's budget. I followed every collection on Style.com and my LiveJournal (ah yes, I blogged before there were blogs to blog on) was peppered with wish lists and dream looks from current runway collections. I dreamed of high fashion, but was content with it being unattainable.

But then something changed. I graduated from college, quit my job at Beacons, and started working at Barneys. Suddenly the labels and the price points were within reach. Spending several hundred dollars on a pair of Ann Demeulemeester boots seemed like a totally okay idea and finally a few of those Dries Van Noten knits could be mine, first hand. When you are surrounded by three hundred dollar jeans every day at work, you concept of reasonable price points becomes perverted and suddenly you've spent nearly 1/6 of your annual income buying clothes at your workplace. And when I say 1/6 of my income, understand that during that period I made more money than you probably do, and more money than I probably will again, at least for quite a long time. Commission retail is a heady profitable game, although ultimately soul-crushing. So I quit.

After I walked away I realized how hard I'd fallen for it. Fell for the hype, the manufactured sense of specialness and rarity. But it also was irreparably tarnished for me. For every beautiful overlooked piece that would go on sale, there would be 20 items ruined for me by sixteen-year-old trophy wives in training begging mommy to buy them for them. Nothing was special. After seeing the mindless upper class mindlessly spend money on beautiful pieces they didn't appreciate in the same gesture as countless overpriced disposable pieces of crap, it made me realize that it was all targeted toward the same consumer base.

$1200 dresses are not made for people like me, whether they are cheesy Versace monstrosities or glorious Proenza pieces. In both I look and feel terribly out of place. I feel too young, too constrained, and too self-conscious. And I've learned to be okay with that. I get dirty, I spill food, I get snagged, I ruin things, and I don't mind holes in my dresses or grease stains on my jeans. Delicate artifacts that can only be worn with caution by pampered misses are not for me. Silk makes me sweat and a bias cut puckers around my prominent ass. The only things worth spending real money on seem to be good lingerie, a serious coat, and few pairs of well-made gorgeous shoes. But as for that other stuff, please keep producing is so when it's threadbare and charming the next generation can buy it 20 years later.

What sucks is that I'm finding it hard and harder to avoid becoming one of those curmudgeonly "vintage is better" snobs the older I get. Blah blah blah, it's all been done before, there is no more real innovation, just theme and variation. The only thing that keeps progressing is textiles. Everything else is just a riff on something else. It's all "inspiration pieces" from closets that I'll never get to raid. Plus I'll always be more comfortable in a lycra blend than silk. Faded black cotton 90s mall dresses make me feel at home. Cheap and easy, built for damage and speed, that's what the true Closet Crust afficiando feel most comfortable in. But I'll still happily pair them with a pair of expensive boots, because what's more punk rock than black leather? It's the only thing available at Barneys that goes with my motto for fashion and life: better once slightly damaged.

Back in partial effect

We knew it was time to leave Barbados when we saw a dead monkey on the side of the road on our way back to the apartment where we were staying to pack up.

It took me 27 years to leave North America. Shameful, I know, but I have the bad habit of spending all my money on food and clothing and never saving a dime for any substantial travel. My trip to Alaska last summer was a big deal, but before that most travel was limited to the lower 48. I went to Canada once and thanks to Tino I was so drunk I don't remember getting on the plane and just found out that apparently I went to Lit after Max Fish that night, something I also have no memory of...probably for the better. They almost didn't let me into the country, but that's a story I've already told. When I was twelve I went to Mexico with my mom and another friend and her mother. It was my first experience ever getting cat-called on the street. It was creepy and awesome for a chubby preteen Nebraska girl. We also rode a bus that was playing Over the Top. My memories are pretty limited because it was a rather touristy and tame trip. And I probably blocked out the drive, Nebraska to Monterrey, pretty hellish.

As far Barbados, I don't even know where to begin. It was amazing. We originally planned on staying for six days, being back in time for the Pentagram show, but after careful consideration (and a wicked sunburn covering the entire back side of my body) we decided to put in a few more days in paradise. I took hundreds of pictures and have nearly as many stories I'll post in the days to come. I'm still recovering being back in the city. My body and mind aren't quite ready to unrelax, I don't want to get out of the island grove. 82 degrees every day, sunny as hell, clean air, white sand, emerald water, I mean come on. Some places are tourist destinations for a reason. But strangely there were almost no Americans. Almost all the visitors were British and if not from the UK then from Canada.

So here I am, back in the real world: no job, my pants fit a little tighter and my chest is still peeling. I think I gave myself diabetes with all the blended drinks and exotic shandies and sodas I consumed while there. Somehow knowing I missed a late-season blizzard in New York City while I was there makes everything a little bit better. That and I know spring is just around the corner but its hard to go back to hoodies when you were walking around in sundresses.



I mean come on, bikini, sand, pyramid sunglasses, and a ginger shandy next to my beach chair.

Stay tuned, there is so much more to come.