Stuff You Wear (Clothing, Textiles, etc)
January 14, 2009
Pockets of Sense
Here's an article I read with interest because it vindicates something I love: Pockets.
You might think pockets need no vindication--after all, they exist, they're useful, and some articles of clothing seem to have a surplus of them. But you'd be wrong, because there are people who HATE pockets.
I encountered one such person at that absolute bastion of absolute evil, the Missionary Training Center. One evening a week all sister missionaries had to attend some lecture on clothes, hair, makeup or some other aspect of personal grooming. With one exception--a really useful demonstration on the best way to pack a suitcase (something you really need to know before you try to cram enough clothes to last you 18 months into two bags with a 44 lb weight limit and still have room for all the books the church makes you take along on a mission)--the lectures were not only useless, but insulting.
The worst one was courtesy of some superannuated former beauty pageant winner, who showed us slides of "acceptable" outfits--lots of blouses with shoulder pads and big bows at the neck, this being 1985. She gave us all these rules for buying clothes--including the fact that we should never purchase clothes with pockets.
"Why?" I asked, mystified.
Despite the fact that she had claimed she welcomed questions, she clearly wasn't used to having to defend any of her assertions. "It's more slimming to carry a purse," she said. "Besides, you need the purse so you can carry an extra pair of pantyhose and a little spritzer bottle of mineral water, so you can lightly refresh your makeup on hot days."
"I like pockets. They're really convenient. I've got my room key, a tube of chapstick and my meal card in my pocket right now," I said, producing the items I mentioned and holding them up as proof. "I don't need a bag just for these things."
The woman paused to take a good long look at me and my outfit before shaking her head and shrugging a little. Clearly I did not pass muster, but the important thing was to resolve the issue and move on. "Well," she said grudgingly, "if you must wear pockets, make sure that you never put your entire hand all the way into the pocket; always leave your thumb out of the pocket." And she put her hand on her hip, thumb splayed away from the fingers, elbow thrust out at an angle, to demonstrate.
"But why?" I persisted.
"Because!" she exploded. "It just looks better that way!"
The problem, of course, was that the woman had no real conception of clothing as practical items; to her, it was entirely about the way they looked. But I thought she was an isolated pocket-hating extremist until a few years later when I saw some tv show about fashion and style in which the man responsible for dispensing advice to women lamented the fact that any clothing maker ever put pockets in women's clothes. "Every woman I know just cuts them out of their clothes and sews them up," he said. "They just add bulk and make you look fat."
And indeed I lamented how hard it was to buy clothes with pockets in them, though I suspected that the main reason so many clothes lacked them is because they require extra time and fabric to insert, thus raising the cost of the garment. I know this well because I put pockets in almost every garment I make--in fact, one reason I sew is so that I can make sure most of my clothes have pockets. I prefer to hide them in the side seams but I have also used decorative pockets from time to time. Before my mission I had a skirt I loved with HUGE patch pockets--like, 16 inches square--on the sides of the skirt; they ballooned away from the skirt and I thought they looked really cool.
And for the past 20+ years I have been content to be a pocket-loving freak who risks looking fat because I actually USE my pockets--there is usually a set of keys and maybe some change jingling in my pocket. But I am glad that others are recognizing the practicality if not the downright necessity of pockets. And I agree with the person who argues that one reason for the proliferation of pockets is that "we need to find an increasing number of places for all the technology we have to carry." Seriously: where do you stick an ipod if you don't have a pocket?
Posted by holly at 12:10 PM | Comments (8)
August 15, 2008
Semi-Precious Sunstone
One reason I like going to Sunstone and functions of its ilk is for the opportunity they provide to dress up. One complaint about Utah Mormons I’ve heard from people I grew up with is that the Utah Saints apparently tend to be far more casual about what actually constitutes “Sunday Best.” I can’t speak to that with any authority, as the only times I ever went to church in Utah were A) when I was at the MTC and B) my second mission president’s homecoming. But I do remember that we had to have NICE clothes for Sunday. It wasn’t enough for guys to wear white shirts and ties; they were expected to wear dress trousers if not suits. Nor was it enough for girls to wear skirts; we wore fancy dresses and heels.
Getting so spiffed up was both a gesture to the specialness of Sunday and a frivolous and vain indulgence in personal adornment, and I LOVED it. This might make me sound shallow, but one loss I genuinely mourned when I left the church was that I no longer had a reason to get really swanked up every week. Not only that, but there was no longer even a reason to buy certain kinds of dresses with the frequency I’d needed them when I had to wear fancy clothes every Sunday. It was a real bummer.
So when I go to Sunstone, I dress up--not exactly in clothes I’d wear to church--not quite that spiffy--but certainly something a little nicer than I’d wear on an average day. And one of the ways I make my outfits special is with jewelry.
I love jewelry, especially big, dramatic jewelry, something that becomes obvious to anyone who knows me at all. And one of the things I love about Sunstone is that it’s not only an opportunity to wear cool jewelry, but a chance to acquire it.
A few of my favorite pieces of jewelry were purchased while I was at Sunstone. You see the SLC Sheraton has two great jewelry stores in its lobby. One is Doug Peterson Jewelers, which is full of really cool pieces, most of them unique and hand-made on the premises. Several years ago I bought this beautiful, unusual, and very fun pendant from Mr. Peterson’s shop:
I love this piece. And I loved it all the more when, only a few dozen yards away, I found this bracelet in the hotel’s gift shop, which complimented it quite nicely:
Hotel gift shops aren’t always great places to shop: often over-priced, with limited selection of kitsch or crappy souvenirs. But I have found some great pieces at Glitz, the lobby shop that also sells M&Ms and toiletries. At my third Sunstone, I found these matching pieces, which I absolutely adore:
I wish I could remember what the stones are--I did find out when I bought them. The red stone is a jasper, I think; the sparkly one is... something sparkly.
Now, I have lots of jewelry, some of it old costume jewelry--I have and still wear a necklace I got when I was eight years old--but some of it contains actual gem stones, though almost all of them are semi-precious rather than precious. And having collected jewelry, with some seriousness, for over two decades, I’ve realized that I sometimes tend to buy similar pieces, and that there are sometimes holes in my collection.
For instance, I had over half a dozen pair of red earrings, but no red necklace. I had three green pendants and two green chokers, but no green earrings. So I set about correcting this problem.
It was easy to find green earrings, but not so easy to find a red necklace. I looked EVERYWHERE. And two years ago at Sunstone, I hoped the stores in the hotel could help me solve the problem.
Turns out there was nothing on hand for me to buy ready-made, so I commissioned a piece of jewelry from Doug Peterson, and this is what he made for me:
This stone is a ruby crystal, a genuine crystal but not one that occurred naturally--in other words, it was grown, which I guess technically makes it synthetic but that just sounds icky, and it's a real stone--"cultured" is a better term, perhaps, like pearls. I don't claim to be an expert--it my next life, I hope to be a geologist, but I forgot to study stones and minerals and so forth in this life. Still, from what I understand, it’s easy to grow crystals, and not that expensive. In fact, grown crystals are the only version of precious stones that someone like me is really able to afford. I love this stone; it looks like a tiny mountain range, all jagged and pointy, with depth and texture as well as color and shine.
Doug designed the setting, which I think shows the stone off beautifully. He was really pleasant and professional to work with, and I would recommend his services any day.
I managed not to buy anything this year, at either shop; given the state of the economy, I thought I shouldn’t splurge. But I hope to pick something up next year to add to my collection.
Posted by holly at 3:58 PM | Comments (3)
September 4, 2007
Naked Guys at the Johnson Museum
A couple weeks ago I took my last trip of the summer: I went to Ithaca, NY, to visit dear friends.
Ithaca, in case you didn't know, is in a singularly beautiful part of the world. It's part of the finger lakes region of New York and has both rolling hills and steep valleys. At the Wegman's in Ithaca you can buy t-shirts proclaiming that it's "gorges." It's worth going just to survey the scenery, but there's also stuff to do. There are state parks, for hiking and swimming and boating. It's the home of the Moosewood Restaurant. The downtown is decent for hanging out. There's also the art gallery at Cornell university: the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art.
Admission is free, and the top floor of the museum (which houses a decent collection of Asian art) is a great place to get a panoramic view of the entire city, including Ithaca's own personal lake (the name of which I forget). But what will really stick with me are the statues of two naked guys that are the first piece of art you encounter when you walk in the door.
They're these life-sized bronze figures arranged to illustrate the name of the sculpture, which is "Conflict." To be frank, it's not an especially remarkable piece of art, but for some (OK, well, a fairly obvious) reason it has become the mascot of the museum, and the coffee cart and pastry case in the lobby of the museum have been dignified by the name of "2 Naked Guys Cafe," because they're only feet away from the naked guys.
The museum sells t-shirts for the cafe, and of course I bought one--I owed a birthday present to a gay man, and what gay man wouldn't want to walk around West Hollywood in a t-shirt like this?
Posted by holly at 9:23 AM | Comments (1)
December 18, 2006
Broaching the Subject of Brooches
Although I really love jewelry and often wear a lot of it, I never used to like pins. In fact, I actively disliked them. I thought they were silly, and I disdained people who wore them, because A) they were jewelry for clothes, not people; and B) they couldn't be worn on more delicate garments, without risk of ripping them; and C) they just seemed out of style; and, most importantly D) only old ladies wore them. Every so often someone would give me a pin or brooch, and I would exclaim, "Oh, how nice!" before putting dragging out a trunk I kept at the back of a closet, where I stored all my ugly, rejected jewelry.
Then, one day this summer, while browsing at a jewelry store while I had my watch repaired, I found this guy:
Now, he doesn't photograph all that well, but trust me: he's really cute. And I have always had a thing for turtles--they're so prehistoric-looking and eccentric and stand-offish--I find it impossible not to love them. And I looked at this guy and thought, "I could stand to pin him to the lapel of a coat," so I bought him, took him home, and wore him a time or two.
And I decided I'd given pins a short shrift.
So I told my mother that if she had any pins she didn't wear any more, I'd take them. And she sent me several, one of which was this large pin, a wreath of holly with a big gold bow, that belonged to my grandmother and that she wore every winter pinned to a bright red suit:
Last week, on my final day of teaching, I went holiday festive: I wore a red skirt, a white shirt, and a tweedy green jacket--the very one you see the brooch afixed to. I stood before my mirror and thought, "This would be the perfect outfit to wear that pin with." And I pinned it to the jacket and surveyed myself, all ready to walk out the door, and thought, "I look like an old lady. Actually, I don't just look like any old lady: I look like my grandmother."
And I continued to look at myself, trying to decide how I felt about that.
And what I decided was that I didn't feel bad. In fact, I decided that one of the nice things about, uh, maturing, is that you can get away with dressing like an old lady.
I really sort of liked it, and I plan to do it again.
Posted by holly at 4:01 PM | Comments (5)
September 9, 2006
My Glasses
There are so many things I would really like to blog about: I want to respond to Major Steel's entry about the music he loved in college and discuss this review I read on Salon of this book I really want to read, This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin. I have written nothing about Sunstone except an intro to the synposis I plan eventually to write. I reallly do intend to blog about knitting some day, though knitting is for me like being in love in that I find it so rewarding that I'd rather do it than write about it. Anyway, those are among the many topics I hope to find time to write about soon, but in the meantime you're getting a picture of my new glasses (which I am wearing this very moment, having picked them up yesterday--they are less cat-eye-ish than I remembered but at least the rhinestones are really truly there) perched on the book I'm currently reading in front of the basket where I store my knitting, which is currently a sweater I'm almost finished knitting.
Posted by holly at 12:25 PM | Comments (4)
July 2, 2006
Itty Bitty Scraps of Fabric
My last two weekends have sucked, especially both Sundays. Some miasmatic malaise has come upon me while I slept Saturday night, bringing with it troubled and unsettling dreams, so that I awoke in a truly vile mood.
Today I dealt with it by being dutiful; I went into my "screw it; I might as well do stuff I don't want to do if I'm already cranky" mode and attended to some chores I've long been neglecting. But last Sunday I took a completely different approach to my bad mood.
Around noon I was sort of reading The Great Transformation, Karen Armstrong's new book, out on my back porch, and sort of thinking about how much I'd like to piece a quilt top but really shouldn't because it's so labor intensive and I just shouldn't take that much time off from uh, WRITING (like I ever really write anything significant) until I get tenure. I'd wander down to my basement as I do from time to time, and, just as a diversion, look through the half a dozen bins and footlookers I have stuffed with unused fabric. I also delved into the big crate where I keep the scraps I will one day piece into quilt tops. And I thought again about how I really shouldn't start such a major project when I have all this writing to do. And I went back out on the porch with my book.
And then I shut the book and went back to the basement and hauled my ironing board, my iron, my rotary cutter, my cutting board and armfuls of fabric up to my living room, and I got busy cutting and piecing, because why the hell not be creative when it's what you really want to do.
So there I was, kneeling on the floor, surrounded by mounds and mounds of fabric scraps. I knew one way to make the piecing pass more quickly was to dispense with a pattern and just START, so that's what I did. The result is this huge dramatic random thing with no pattern whatsoever, but lots of nice sharp shapes and interesting lines and juxtapositions of prints. There are great big rhomboidish pieces and triangles of various sizes and little two-inch squares. The unifying feature is that all the fabric has a black background. The second most common color is red, though every other color is represented too, with the exception of purple. All the fabric I used is left over from clothes I've made for myself.
I managed to finish the top in only two days, because I did almost nothing else. I find it hard to let go of projects like that; once I start, I want to finish them. I stayed up until 4 a.m. Sunday night, because I just couldn't stop. I told a friend this and he commended me on my discipline, but it wasn't discipline that kept me up, just compulsion.... not only did I stay up too late, but I also neglected things like personal hygiene and proper nutrition. Oh, and blogging. I don't know if you noticed, but I didn't post or read a single blog entry last weekend.
Anyway. Piecing the top was only the first step; I also had to decide what I'd back it with. I have six yards of something suitable--gray background with a black and white vine twining up it--that I bought on sale for a buck a yard, but I still had to iron it, sew it together (cotton calico, which is the best fabric for quilting comes in widths of 44 inches, which is obviously not wide enough to back a queen-sized quilt) and size it lengthwise. I'll use plain black for the binding. I won't be quilting it myself, because it's too big a project for me: I don't have a huge quilting frame I can set up in my house or the time to quilt it--that's the REAL investment of labor--so I'll just send it to my mother and let her quilt it on her machine.
And I sort of feel that project sated my need to deal with textiles and I sort of don't. I will probably whip up some more clothes this summer–I already made two dresses, one for me and one for my sister--but the thing about making clothes is that when I'm done, I've got MORE SCRAPS. As much as anything, I'm glad to have decreased by a little the huge mess of leftover fabric in my basement. I could make a dozen quilts before I got rid of all the scraps I've got right this very second, and when I think about that, it's all I can do not to start another quilt right this very second. I could gladly piece another quilt today, making up a pattern this time, because it's cool to see a coherent design take shape. Or maybe I won't. I just heard about a new yarn shop in town--maybe I'll go see what they have to offer and take up knitting again.
Posted by holly at 6:50 PM | Comments (7)
January 27, 2006
Holy Underwear
The Happy Feminist posted an entry about words and phrases she doesn't like, one of which is panties. I also hate that word, but I quit using it when I quit wearing conventional underwear and started wearing the temple garment, or Mormon sacred underwear.
This is a strange thing a lot of non-Mormons don't know anything about, and I've been accused of making this up. I swear to God, I am not. Anyway, below is the explanation of garments I provide in my book, which is forthcoming god-only-knows when. (Supposedly my agent has it at a couple of presses now.)
***
Because of the Fall of Adam and Eve, I had to begin wearing special long white underwear known as the temple garment before I could go on a mission. The temple garment symbolizes the status of Adam and Eve before God after they ate of the Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Upon discovering their nakedness, Adam and Eve cover themselves with fig leaves, then hide from God when he visits the garden. When they finally come forward and confess, God first curses Adam and Eve, then replaces their flimsy fig leaf aprons with coats made from animal skins--which, as someone pointed out to me once, means that God had already introduced death into the garden, since he had the hides of dead animals to give Adam and Eve. It's those skins that the temple garment represent: a shield against primordial nakedness, a reminder of what can happen when you deceive or disobey God.
Garments are not to be discussed. They're underwear, they're a daily fact of life, but they're forbidden as a topic of conversation. It would be easier not to talk about them if they functioned better as underwear, but they're neither very practical nor comfortable. They also look funny: they have small geometric symbols embroidered at the navel, each breast, and the knee. They cover enough of you to limit the clothes you can wear over them. It's easier for men; their version has sleeves about like those of a t-shirt. But the women's version has short cap sleeves, which means you can't wear sleeveless shirts. Nor can you wear mini-skirts or low-cut blouses. The worst feature is that women's garments are made to fit a single body type: a woman with full but not huge breasts. I am not especially bosomy, and I never had a single pair of garments that fit me properly.
Anyone who has been in the Church for any length of time knows about garments: it's hard not to notice what your parents' underwear looks like when it comes out of the laundry. You develop an eye for certain details and often can tell when someone is wearing garments, which conveys instantly the fact that this person is a practicing Mormon in good-standing who has been through the temple. You get the garment just prior to a ceremony called the endowment, which Brigham Young, the second prophet of the Church, explained this way:
Your endowment is, to receive all those ordinances in the House of the Lord, which are necessary for you, after you have departed this life, to enable you to walk back to the presence of the Father, passing the angels who stand as sentinels, being enabled to give them the key words, the signs and tokens, pertaining to the Holy Priesthood, and gain your exaltation in spite of earth and hell. (Journal of Discourses 2:31 1853)
In other words, heaven is a very exclusive club, which God has guarded by a gauntlet of angels. And no matter how righteous you might have been as a mortal, you can't get in if you don't know all the passwords and the secret handshakes as revealed in the temple. It's because you get the garment in the temple that you aren't supposed to discuss it; the temple isn't discussed, the rhetoric goes, not because what happens there is "secret," but because it's too "sacred" to be the topic of small-talk. You come to understand the meaning of the temple garment and endowment more by absorption than by instruction.
***
If you want to read more about the temple garment and what it represents, I recommend the chapter, "Mormon Garments: Sacred Clothing and the Body," (198-221) in Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) by Colleen McDannell. A passage from it:
To wear garments is to assent to the "secrets" of the ancestors and elders. By placing a cloth over the most intimate parts of the body and embroidering on it sacred signs, Mormons acknowledge the claim that their religion has over them. At the same time, they interpret the limits and meanings of that claim. That reflection brings tensions and ambiguities that are never easily resolved.
McDannell also points out that "Mormons who decide to stop wearing garments make a strong statement to themselves, their family, and their community. Mormons may challenge doctrine, drink a beer or two, or stop going to services but when they stop wearing garments those around them know they have left the faith."
Which was true in my case: it was the symbolic act by which I told my family I was leaving the church.
It was really hard.
Posted by holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (4)
December 10, 2005
Women Lousy at Designing Clothes for Women?
Ugh.
I've been taking a break from dealing with certain issues because well, because I need a break. I've been trying to work on a couple of posts, one on the whole nasty debate about a "man's right to choose" sparked by Dalton Conley's December 1st NY Times editorial on the topic, and another on the sexsomnia defense a guy in Canada used to beat a rape charge, but I don't get very far before I get too upset to continue.
Here's something I would dismiss as silly if it weren't for the fact that I really dig textiles and clothing. But the clothes I own are typically things I made myself or bought on sale, and I am of the opinion that haute couture is overpriced, wasteful and misogynist. This article made me think about WHY high fashion might be something the average woman doesn't want, need or have the money for. It's from the NY Times, about why women don't succeed as fashion designers. Among the arguments for why men, either straight or gay, are better than women at designing clothes for women, are these:
In some quarters, the perception exists that fashion's main consumers, women, are more comfortable taking advice about how they should look from a man. "Men are often better designers for women than other women," said Tom Ford, the former creative director of Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, who more than anyone in the past decade built a brand on his own persona, that of a man whose sensual appeal is to both men and women. Whereas Bill Blass, Valentino and Oscar de la Renta founded their empires on the strength of a nonthreatening, nonsexual charisma, Mr. Ford aggressively promoted his sexually charged designs. "Of course there are many more gay male designers," Mr. Ford said. "I think we are more objective. We don't come with the baggage of hating certain parts of our bodies."Some designers embrace an extreme version of this position. Michael Vollbracht, the current designer of Bill Blass, said he believes that gay men are demonstrably superior at design, their aesthetic formed by a perception of a woman as an idealized fantasy. "I come from a time when gay men dressed women," Mr. Vollbracht said. "We didn't bed them. Or at least I didn't. I am someone who is really pro-homosexual. I am an elitist. I am better than straight people. Women are confused about who they want to be. I believe that male designers have the fantasy level that women do not."
When women design for other women, Mr. Ford said, they proceed from a standpoint of practicality - not fantasy. "Sometimes women are trapped by their own views of themselves, but some have built careers around that," he said. "Donna Karan was obsessed with her hips and used her own idiosyncrasies to define her brand."
The Times' article purports to be an expose on the topic, but it doesn't include many women's voices on the matter. It does, however, let a designer named Dana Buchman respond to these arguments. Ms. Buchman "sees little value in such arguments. If men are more objective, she countered, then women are empathetic, which can be useful in understanding the consumer. 'I wear my own clothes,' she said. 'I have lived the life of my customer.'" Yeah, but that's precisely the problem, as Tom Ford kindly points out: she's too caught up in the practical issues of how clothes fit the real bodies and real lives of real women! And since she never wants to f*ck herself the way a straight man would and never sees clearly the aesthetic ideal women should strive to embody the way a certain type of elitist gay man would, she will never know as well as either class of man how to dress herself, or other women.
Posted by holly at 11:32 AM | Comments (4)
October 27, 2005
Taunt the Gremlins and They'll Taunt You Back Part I
I finished a long day of teaching Tuesday at 5:15 p.m. I was tired and hungry but I still had work to do: I had to prepare to meet a colleague at 6:30 to discuss a panel on work and sex in Buffy the Vampire Slayer we're putting together for a Halloween horror conference. I sighed hard, sat down, and rolled my chair forward to my computer, rolling over and catching the hem of my skirt in the process. I disentangled myself, stood up to smooth my skirt, and noticed that my fingers came away from the back of it damp and tinged with red.
"Shit," I said aloud, though what was on my fingers wasn't shit; it was something else. I dragged my skirt forward and craned my neck back to inspect the damage and sure enough, smack-dab center on the back of my skirt, was a great big soggy blood stain.
I sat down for a moment, my face red as the back of my skirt, while I thought about the fact that the class I'd just finished contained a dozen freshmen boys and one freshman girl; if there was a group to whom I didn't care to announce my fertility, it was that one. "Let it go, Holly," I said, reminding myself that I'd been seated for most of the class, reading them instructions for a writing exercise, and that they never seemed to pay that much attention to me anyway.
Of course I keep appropriate supplies in my desk for just such emergencies, so I found what I needed and headed to the ladies' room. I addressed the problem, discovered that I'd acquired a second big stain in the moments I'd been seated at my desk, carefully swept up part of my skirt so the stains didn't show, and, carrying the extra fabric in my hand like a train I wanted to keep off the floor, took a deep breath and headed back to my office.
At this point I should mention that this was one of my favorite skirts, an ankle-length three-tiered skirt I had made myself. The background of the fabric is pale blue; the predominant pattern consists of blue and green paisleys coupled like yin/yang symbols; the whole thing is scattered with a small print of blue, green and rust-red roses. The skirt also has nice deep pockets concealed in the side seams. One reason I like making my own clothes is so I can put pockets in them--I hate the fact that women's clothing almost never has pockets. I don't like carrying a purse, and I don't like worrying about losing my keys. I like to put them in my pocket and leave them there, knowing they're safe.
Back at my office, I reached into a pocket for my keys, then reached into the other pocket. No keys. I tried the door, hoping either I or the gremlins had unlocked it; no such luck.
"Shit," I said again, and this time it was shit I was in--not deep shit, maybe, but shit nonetheless. A master key was kept in the main office as a remedy for precisely such situations, but as 5 p.m. had come and gone, the staff in the main office had gone as well. I went to find a colleague who was still in his/her office and could call campus security for me.
I tried Sweet Baby Jesus first, but ever-popular professor that he is, a string of students stood outside his door, and judging by the expressions on their faces, they were starting to get annoyed at the student who was sitting in his office and talking for so damn long. It wasn't a scene I wanted to interrupt, so I kept looking. Mercifully I soon found someone else willing to let me use his phone.
And that should have been the end of it; I should have called campus security and someone with a master key should have been dispatched to unlock my door. Unfortunately one of the campus cops had not come in to work that day and the other was not answering his pager--the poor receptionist absolutely could not reach him. Nor could she reach anyone in maintenance--the entire office seemed to be shut down, or maybe they were all out attending to leaky ceilings or overflowing culverts, since all day we'd had torrential rain left over from one tropical storm or another.
To be continued.
Posted by holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (0)
October 19, 2005
China Crisis
OK, so I didn't come up with that title myself: It's the title of an article in today's Independent UK, about China's environmental problems. (And for those of you who don't remember or don't care to remember, China Crisis is also the name of an 80s British pop band who achieved modest success with a single called "Arizona Sky," which, now that I read the lyrics, is kind of lame, but I always liked the lines praising the vast, brilliant blue sky of Arizona.)
Anyway, this article makes some truly dire predictions, which I have no problem believing are very, very likely. For instance:
deforestation is only one of the threats to the planet posed by an economy of 1.3 billion people that has now overtaken the United States as the world's leading consumer of four out of the five basic food, energy and industrial commodities - grain, meat, oil, coal and steel. China now lags behind the US only in consumption of oil - and it is rapidly catching up.Because of their increasing reliance on coal-fired power stations to provide their energy, the Chinese are firmly on course to overtake the Americans as the world's biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, and thus become the biggest contributors to global warming and the destabilisation of the climate. If they remain uncontrolled, the growth of China's carbon dioxide emissions over the next 20 years will dwarf any cuts in CO2 that the rest of the world can make.
The article then discusses population growth in China and other parts of Asia, and quotes an expert who offers this opinion:
The bottom line of this analysis is that we're going to have to develop a new economic model. Instead of a fossil-fuel based, automobile-centred, throw-away economy we will have to have a renewable-energy based, diversified transport system, and comprehensive reuse and recycle economies. If we want civilisation to survive, we will have to have that. Otherwise civilisation will collapse.
I lived in Shanghai for several months in 1991. It was the most polluted place I had ever been, though Kaohsiung, a filthy port city in southern Taiwan, ran a close second. I can only imagine how much worse it it is now, with more cars and more people and even more people who can actually afford to heat their homes in the winter. (It was also very poor.) And supposedly Shanghai isn't nearly as bad as Beijing, which becomes particularly polluted each winter.
In Taiwan, we had actual washing machines (though they were little and strange and hard on clothes and had to be monitored, with all these steps where you turned the water on and turned it off and set the cycle to spin or agitate or whatever) but in Shanghai, we just put our clothes in the bathtub and stomped on them to get them clean. Then we'd hang them on the balcony to dry. I never got used to wearing clothes that smelled like car exhaust even before I put them on. I never got used to the horrible black stuff that came from my nose whenever I blew it. I never got used to how filthy my face was at the end of the day. I never got used to the dismal sky or the smell. And it's worse now, apparently--much worse.
This morning it is quite cold in my house. I am all bundled up in thermal underwear, socks, slippers and an extra heavy bathrobe, because I refuse to turn on my heat until it's really truly WINTER, not just AUTUMN, and even then I never set the thermostat above 65 because I am A) cheap and B) anxious to reduce the amount of fossil fuel I use. I paid my gas company almost $1200 last year; I'm not looking forward to the coming year, with heating costs that will be even higher because of the various hurricanes.
I admit my hands get quite cold no matter how many layers are on the rest of me, and I guess I will deal with that by acquiring some of those gloves that have no fingertips, so you can still do things like type. But overall I don't mind this business of coping with the cold by wearing lots and lots of clothes. That was what my Chinese roommates always said to me when I complained about being cold on my mission: "Chwan dwo yifu!" or "put on more clothes! " That was about all you could do in Taiwan, because most homes did not have heat since it was only needed two or three months out of the year--that and close the windows when it was 40 degrees outside, which a couple of my roommates refused to do. (They had this idea that freshly polluted cold air wafting through our apartment was healthier than warm air that had been in our apartment for a while.)
But piling on layers of padded clothing (there is evidence that the Chinese invented quilting--quilted clothing is remarkably efficient in preserving body heat) seems to be going out of fashion in Asia, where the growing population aspires to use as much gas and oil as we do. I wish, that instead of prompting us to eat all our food by admonishing us to think of starving peasants in China, adults had admonished us to use less whatever so that there would be more whatever left over for others in the world: use less fuel, less timber, less water, less food so there will be more fuel, more timber, more water, more food for everyone else. I wish we'd really truly been taught to share.
p.s. Just for the heck of it, here's an article on Mao.
Posted by holly at 9:26 AM | Comments (0)
October 17, 2005
Chocolat
This is a review of the movie Chocolat that I wrote in 2001 for a class on, well, on writing reviews. The teacher liked it but suggested that it was a bit too idiosyncratic to be appropriate for most publications, so I never bothered to do anything with it, but it seems it might find a home here, especially since I posted all this stuff about movies.
****
Once at a party a friend of mine who had been sitting near my television said to me, "I can't believe your movie collection. It's so...brazen."
"You mean ‘cause they're almost all chick movies?" I asked.
"It's not just that," she said. "It's that you have them out, where people can see them. I mean, some of my friends own a lot of these same movies, but they put them away before people come over. But you're not even embarrassed."
It's true: I like chick movies, I watch chick movies, I buy chick movies; I don't care who knows. I might add that my collection is alphabetized, ranging from Annie Hall, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Chasing Amy, Clueless to Sense and Sensibility, Singin' in the Rain, Sixteen Candles, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Truth or Dare. I feel entitled to add that I like other kinds of movies as well--I love Lawrence of Arabia and The Pride of the Yankees, and I don't think those qualify as chick movies. But then, I haven't gotten around to buying those movies. Maybe I should. Nothing in my collection starts with L or P.
Chocolat, directed by Lasse Hallstrom and up for Best Picture in the 2001 Academy Awards, is the best chick movie I have seen in a good long time. First of all, the clothes are terrific. Juliette Binoche and Victoire Thivosol (who plays Binoche's daughter) arrive in a tiny French village at the end of the 1950s dressed in matching red cloaks that would make Little Red Riding Hood jealous. They carry two medium-sized suitcases, but you'd need at least two suitcases more to hold the entirety of Juliette Binoche's marvelous collection of straight skirts, full skirts, cute sweater sets and colorful high heels. I especially loved her bias-cut circle plaid skirts, one of which has really cool patch pockets. When Binoche sets about painting the dingy walls of the patisserie she intends to turn into a chocolaterie, she does so in a fabulous fitted off-the-shoulder purple blouse, and not one drop of paint is spattered on that blouse, which is good because it's really flattering and shows up again and again. I imagine she also has a decent collection of push-up bras in one of those suitcases--at least, I'm guessing she wears one under that purple blouse.
Carrie-Anne Moss, who was so drop-dead cool in black leather and vinyl as Trinity in The Matrix, is here a prim widow who wears elegant suits and pillbox hats a la Jackie Kennedy. Her mother is played by Judi Dench, and while not all of Dench's costumes are particularly remarkable, she is provided with a very flattering haircut and wide-brimmed hat just in time for her birthday party. Even the mayor's absent wife has a closet full of fabulous clothes--and when the mayor, played by Alfred Molina, takes garden shears to a flowered chiffon party dress because he's angry at his wife for running off and leaving him, I had to suppress a gasp of horror.
Nor are men's fashions ignored. The hair and make-up crew did a wonderful job of adding striking blond highlights to Johnny Depp's dark hair, which he wears pulled back in a severe, straight ponytail. Depp plays a vagabond whose presence threatens the towns tranquility, and he is suitably vagabondish in a ratty leather blazer, fraying sweaters and tattered pants. Alfred Molina looks quite dignified in a series of well-cut suits, and the priest, a curly-headed, doe-eyed, callow actor whose name I forgot to note, gets to wear exceptionally lovely and elaborately embroidered vestments.
The movie is set in France, and while no one actually speaks French in the movie, at least most of the actors--only three of whom are French--speak with French accents. An exception is Johnny Depp, who acquired a fairly awful and unconvincing Irish accent for this film. The French setting means that we get many nice shots of quaint homes and large trees along a slow green river.
I don't want to make it sound like clothes, hair, accents and a picturesque setting are all this movie has to offer. Keep in mind, it's about chocolate. I suggest you bring some with you while you watch this movie. There are lots of scenes of melted chocolate being stirred around in big bowls, and you can get pretty hungry. At one point Lena Olin licks the knife she is using to stir such a pot of chocolate, and while I winced at the unsanitariness of that act--after all, this chocolate is going to be for sale--I couldn't help wishing for a chocolate-covered knife to lick myself.
The movie also has a plot, which I found compelling and moving. It's a story about the cost of self-deprivation and petty intolerance, and the rewards of generosity. One of the things I liked best about this movie was its generous attitude towards its characters. None of them are whole-heartedly bad; all are offered redemption. The fact that redemption arrives in the form of chocolate might seem cloyingly sweet to some viewers, but there was enough darkness and bitterness in this chocolate for me. I'm going to buy it when it comes out on video, even though I already own a couple of movies starting with C.
****
Just for the record, I never got around to buying a copy of Chocolat. Several of the other movies I mentioned are no longer in my collection, because I sold most of my VHS cassettes after I got a dvd player. I now own Lawrence of Arabia on dvd, and watch it regularly.
Posted by holly at 8:09 AM | Comments (2)
October 6, 2005
It's Out
Yesterday I met a friend for coffee at Barnes & Noble. (Yeah, I know: how terribly corporate of me. But my little home in the Rust Belt doesn't offer much else. I have tried and rejected as thoroughly inadequate the various non-corporate alternatives for book acquisition, with the exception of my university library--that rocks. And even non-corporate coffee is hard to come by. The one entry in the corporate coffee delocator for this area was provided by me, and that place is a million miles away, with mediocre mochas.)
My friend was late, so I browsed the books. On the "New Arrivals" table, I saw several copies of Best American Short Stories 2005, but couldn't find the other titles in the series. Finally I located a sales clerk. "Where's the Best American Essays?" I asked.
"What do you want?" he asked.
"The same thing as this," I said, holding up the collection of short stories, "except with essays."
He led me to a display, and there it was. I picked it up and scanned the table of contents: twenty-five essays, by the likes of Jonathan Franzen, Edward Hoagland, Oliver Sacks, David Sedaris, David Foster Wallace--and me.
That's right: me. The last essay in the collection is something I wrote about my love of textiles and some of the homemaking skills I acquired as part of the training for wife-hood all Mormon girls get in early adolescence.
It's jarring to see my name at the end of that list--not bad, definitely not bad. But though I fully intend to get used to it at some point in the next 52 weeks (just in time for the issue without my name at the end of the table of contents to appear), right now the fact that it's really cool is still competing with the fact that it's jarring and unfamiliar, much as it was to run my tongue across smooth teeth unemcumbered by metal wires one magic afternoon after three traumatic years of intense orthodontia.
It's very strange. I'm 41, I've been writing since I was 15, I've produced two books though neither is in print, but I garnered this very cool honor. Part of me hopes this is an omen of good things to come, and part of me fears this is about as good as it's going to get.
The essay was rejected by any number of prestigious journals, and printed in a small, yearly journal of women's writing called PMS, for Poem Memoir Story. I turned to the list of Notable Essays and saw that my little offering was considered superior to (among other things) something by E.L. Doctorow printed in The Kenyon Review.
Yesterday afternoon at B&N, my friend insisted on buying a copy so I could autograph it, and since we were on our way out the door, she gave it to me to take home, so I could write a note instead of just signing my name. This meant I got to peruse the book at my leisure. (I'm supposed to get a clothbound copy, but so far it hasn't shown up--I'm guessing they sent it to my agent, and perhaps she hasn't gotten around to sending it on.)
I went to campus after that and ran into Tom. "It's out," I said, and handed him the book.
"Wow," he said. "Were you surprised to see it?"
"Nah, I knew it came out today," I replied. "I've been checking the release date on Amazon every so often."
"You're the anchor," he said, looking at the table of contents. "The very last one."
"I'm the end of the alphabet," I corrected.
"Yours has the best title," he said. I admit I agree: the title is great, borrowed though it might be from a shirt Tori Amos wore on one of the four different covers of her album Strange Little Girls, which I briefly owned.
"This is huge," he said.
"I hope so," I said. "I hope it does some work for me. But I can't help imagining these reviews where someone says, ‘All the essays are really good, except for that last one, about fabric! What's up with that?'"
"That won't happen," he said. "I can tell by the first few paragraphs that it's really good." He read for a moment, then said, "Wow! You've got a semi-colon right after the close of a parentheses! That's so adventurous!"
"Yeah, my flamboyant facility with punctuation gets all the editors hot and bothered," I said. "It's what everyone likes best about my work."
The collection, I should mention, was edited by Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief--that's right, someone interesting enough to be played in a movie by Meryl Streep likes my work. I am intensely flattered and gratified and thrilled that she does--there is NOTHING about that fact that sucks. But I confess I read the essay and think, "OK, I like this and I'm proud of it, but I don't even think it's the best thing I've written. So why is this getting attention when my book, which I think is great, isn't even in print?" I can only figure that either I'm a lousy judge of my own work, or angst-filled stories about religious despair just don't strike the publishing world as big-time money makers.
I wish I could say that I have other exciting publications in the pipes, but I don't. The issue of Sunstone currently at the printer's has an essay by me on "Why I Go to Sunstone" and I have a few poems forthcoming in various respectable journals. But I haven't been very good about submitting my work lately, and there's also the fact that aside from a few pieces I have purposely tried to make really short, most of my prose is long enough that it exceeds the word limit imposed by many journals. You can get an idea of that from this blog, where pieces are often so long they have to be split up into two or three posts.
I don't know. I guess I just have to write more, then put it all in envelopes and mail it to editors.
Anyway, I would ask you all to rush out and buy the anthology, but I don't get royalties, just a small honorarium, so it doesn't make any difference to me if you buy it or just read the essay in the coffee shop. (It's a mere eight pages, one of those things I tried to keep short.) But if you do read it and like it, I would be grateful for praise and congratulations--it's the most prestigious publication I've ever had.
Posted by holly at 7:51 AM
August 26, 2005
Celebrated Saturday
Last Saturday afternoon, SBJ and our new friend Anesthesia and I went downtown to Celebrate! the city we live in. It was your typical street fair, with jugglers and really cool chalk drawings on the pavement and a couple dozen tiny girls (three, four, five years old) doing fierce tumbling routines along the main thoroughfare of town.
We walked around, looked at crafts, searched without success for a stand selling funnel cakes with tomato sauce (SBJ claims they're all the rage in Connecticut), drank beer in the park. We talked about important things, like emoticons. We agreed that the only acceptable emoticons are the plain old print ones, like :-), and that the cartoonish ones you sometimes see online should be banned from use forever more. We spent some time figuring out what Anesthesia should be called in this blog–we were happy enough with the nickname we came up with. At first she said, "Yeah, but it puts you to sleep!" I said, "That's not my main association with it. I think about getting general anesthesia before surgery, and how it feels really good, but it's dangerous--too much can kill you." Which didn't reassure her all that much, but then SBJ pointed out that the word would make a great album title for some metal band, and then we couldn't think of anything better, and this word sounds like another name that is meaningful to her, so we went with it.
SBJ asked about really bad haircut stories. This is a competition I always win because I almost died from a bad haircut. Seriously: I cried so much my intestines exploded and I nearly hemorrhaged to death. (That's the short version--the long version is truly fascinating, provided you're not afraid of being grossed out. I'll tell it someday.)
We found a stall where girls were selling samosas and painting on temporary henna tattoos. SBJ wanted something to complement his three questions, so the girl gave him a straightforward geometric pattern an inch or so below them--she said she had never hennaed a man before and wasn't sure what would be appropriate, so she went for something simple. It looked fine, but SBJ was not overcome with pleasure at the finished product. In fact, he said he felt gypped.
Then it was my turn. I got a paisley (one of my favorite designs) on my shoulder, which looked pretty awesome, and felt very celebratory. All in all, a very satisfactory day.
Posted by holly at 8:43 PM | Comments (1)
August 15, 2005
Moving Day
In addition to my friend and colleague Tom, I also have a friend and colleague, Sweet Baby Jesus. That's not the name his parents gave him; that's the name he gave himself. It rather fits. Sometimes we call him SBJ, and sometimes we call him Dr. Sweet Baby Jesus, because he has a PhD in one of those silly, useless areas of the humanities.
Sweet Baby Jesus just moved out of a horrid apartment complex full of old ladies who hang wreaths of dried flowers on their doors, changing the wreath to match the season. He never fit in because his door remained unadorned, no matter what the time of year. But now he's living in a cool semi-detached house across from a park.
SBJ does not have a lot of stuff--people who name themselves after wandering mendicant faith healers often don't--but he still has more stuff than he could move on his own. So he asked me, Tom, a new colleague ML, and her husband HC, to help him load up a truck and shlep everything across town. He said that if we did, he would reward us with pizza and beer, and as an added treat, we could watch him eat an entire large pizza on his own.
It took only an hour to get everything in the truck from the old place and out of the truck at the new place.
And then it was time for pizza. Since we are a lively bunch of cynical academics, and since we began drinking around noon, the conversation centered on meaningful concerns, such as when SBJ would host his first party in his new place. "I was thinking I'd have a craft night some time soon," he said. He says things like this all the time, and it always makes me giggle. "We're going to go back to my apartment to make collages," he told me a few weeks ago, when I asked him how he planned to entertain a friend who was visiting from out of town. He would have made such a great Mormon girl. We were always crafts nights: tie-dying t-shirts, stringing beads, practicing embroidery. Don't get me wrong, I dig that stuff--it just seems funny to have someone organizing an evening where a bunch of PhDs sit around a dining room table and decorate t-shirts.
"Collages again at this crafts night?" I asked.
"Maybe," he said.
"Candles?" asked HC.
"Door wreaths?" asked ML.
"Door wreaths would be good," I said.
Then we started talking about lame superpowers. ML had a good lame superpower (very oxymoronic statement, I realize, but hopefully you know what I mean): she is related to so many people through families that have split through divorce, then extended themselves through remarriage, that she can probably manage a way to make YOU related to her. She offered to set me up, for instance, with an uncle of hers--she says he's the right age for me, a die-hard ex-Catholic (which should complement my die-hard post-Mormon status well), has liberal politics and a job that involves helping the under-privileged. He lives a couple of states away from all of us, but still in the same time zone, which is closer than anyone else I'm interested in. So we'll see how powerful this lame superpower of hers is.
Then it was 2 p.m. and any remaining pizza had grown cold (we were all pretty sure SBJ did not manage to eat an entire pizza on his own, but hey, it was his house, so we weren't going to insist) and we all had stuff we ought to go do (I really need to write a couple of syllabi) so we left SBJ to his unpacking.
And that is the thrilling story of my thrilling Monday. Check back for more on SBJ, who gave me permission to write about his very cool new tattoos.
Posted by holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (1)