Sweater weather and staged authenticity

Late summer means cooler temperatures. I welcome the change, no matter how sudden. At least that change is fairly predictable. 

Finally I can wear that blouse I call my Chiara Mastroianni blouse because the actress wore something like that in a movie about the Bruni sisters. The sweater is from Folk which was a great little store in Hanover, NH for many many years. 

This sweater is from Revolution in White River Junction. 

With summer coming to an end, a quick day ("daycation") trip down to Northampton MA included used bookstores and vintage clothing. 

The city has an "authentic"  vibe, the young, the old, the rich, the poor. It doesn't look too polished and gentrified. Although, truthfully, it's another college town that has attracted its fair share of well-intentioned rich people who want to live in a culturally rich, close to nature, community minded place. 

I spotted this woman outside of the cafe "Iconica" which is quite the secret destination. It's a must go to if you ever visit NoHo.  The owners have literally turned a small building into a work of art in which they serve artfully crafted food and drinks. 

Back in White River Junction, VT, another town hanging on to that balance between gritty authenticity and pleasure destination,  Kim of Revolution decided to hold a small outdoor sale. This woman was rocking her outfit and let me photograph her. 

 One more sweater to close, another Revolution find. I'm into mixing shades of green these days. Sorry for the grainy photo which was taken with the computer as I had forgotten my phone that day. 

A few days in New York City

 

When I am in New York, I am in a constant blur mainly because I never really sleep all that soundly, and I am walking around like a zombie. This visit is no exception. 

After a long hiatus, because we are now living in a time of the hiatus, the hiatus seems like a fitting word to describe our current state of being. After a long hiatus, I a. went to Brooklyn on the SUBWAY and b. saw my good friend Kate. 

Kate knows Brooklyn like the back of her hand. She is also a fellow reader who remains deeply appreciative of books, bookstores and the print culture that is alive but struggling pretty much everywhere. She took me around Greenpoint after a pilgrimage to the mecca of used clothing, namely Beacon's Closet. 

Why the psychedelic colors? Because I continue to discover all the little bells and whistles in the photos app. The "white point"? The "grey point"? The "black point"? But also, seeing the here with the there, and trying not to pay too much attention to the real. 

Finally, one of my "classic" snapshots of a subway subject whose attire was summery, casual, urban, relaxed. 

Did I find anything at aforementioned mecca? Yes. I realize that in my blog posts so often I mention a "find" without showing it. Here is the latest one. I was helping Kate look for a fall jacket. I showed her this one, she said no, so I said yes. Hence, this heretofore will be my "Kate" jacket. 

Late summer

 

Today I wore a sweater for the first time in a long time. It's an old one, Free People, bought at a store that doesn't exist anymore. Worn over the Agnes B. dress that I found at Revolution in White River Junction, VT. and that I mentioned in the previous blog. 

I am also playing around with the timer on my phone, which yields interesting results, especially if you then play around with the "Layout" App. I am not into apps, nor into the latest online tool with which one can spend hours tweaking  photos and drawings. I am simply having fun. Trying to relax. Trying to find ways to stay sane and mindful while the world that I am familiar with keeps disappearing. 

Take the retail stores for instance. 

Main Street is having a lot of trouble surviving the pandemic. The store where I bought the sweater closed its doors long before the pandemic. The owner retired. But nothing came to replace it. It was called "Folk" and it sold not only clothes, but also objects from all over the world, tapestries, pillow covers. It was a capharnaum. The space was small, but you could spend hours going through piles and piles of stuff. 

Meanwhile. Meanwhile I keep discovering new gardens thanks to friends who have them. 

Nothing helps the mind settle and travel at the same time like a garden. This one feels so intimate and inviting. Luckily, I was invited in. I was even offered a glass of wine. 

Other friends have this window. I was stuck on the phone during dinner at their house, a call I had to take. I kept looking at that window, hoping that I would be able to photograph it while it was still light out. It looks like it could be in a manor house somewhere in Northern Europe. 

And this book. I have been discovering Isherwood this summer. On a quick trip to Maine, I stopped in a used bookstore and found this biography of his parents. I love the cover. 

Despite our inability to travel, despite all the horrible repercussions of this pandemic, I was able to find ways to associate what was HERE with what could be THERE. In the end, here and there are not all that far apart, it just takes a little imagination. 

Summertime in the garden

We Americans cannot travel abroad this summer because of our abominable COVID numbers, and, in some states, we can't travel unless we quarantine for two weeks. As a result, those of us with gardens have been spending a great deal of time in them. Just a good a place to spend the summer as any, with a good book and a nice variety of flowers and vegetables to tend.

We also have the ability to allow our minds to travel. With the temperatures in the 90s, I put on this Agnès B. dress that I found at Revolution, with a tank top underneath from Muji (the hat is from a local store, I bought it a long time ago to wear to one of my daughters' graduation).

The floral cotton dress paired with the tank top reminded me of light summer dresses from the 90s, the 1990s this time, so I went looking for photo spreads that showed models hanging out in a garden. I still have some old French "Marie Claire" hanging around -- I had a subscription for about a decade, and wrote a chapter about working mothers in French fashion magazines from the 1980s and 90s (the book is titled The Francophone Women's Magazine Inside and Outside of France). I found a few images that corresponded somewhat to that memory of loose floral cotton dresses paired with a body fitting undergarment.

                                    

 I think this look is timeless, and the images evoke that delightful summertime feeling of lounging around on a hot day and doing nothing. 

Okay, actually, in that photo I am picking peas.

"Great Family Photo"

This, obviously, is a photo of my immediate family: my father, my mother, my brother and me in France in 1972. We are sitting in one of the windows of my grandparents' country house.

The dry-mounted photo, an 8 X 10 taken with the timer on an analog camera (obviously), leaned against the wall above my parents' bed for a good twenty years, and before that, was also on display (where, I can't remember exactly) in their larger apartment before they downsized to their place downtown (I am referring to New York City).

When my father died a few days ago, after a long and steady decline, my mother, normally very stoic and strong, broke down as she gathered framed photos resting on a bureau that my father had been able to stare at from his bed. She handed them to the undertakers so that they would place them in the casket. Once my father's body had been taken away, I took a photo of this photo, which was left in its place behind the bed, thinking that posting it on social media would be my gentle way of alerting my friends about my father's passing.

Reactions were positive, of course, including the one that I used as a title to this blog entry: "Great family photo." Other comments included "extraordinary family," "what a great picture" and "wonderful evocative photo." My "favorite" comment came from a colleague who wrote, "I hope you have beautiful memories of those family times" to which I responded, "it depends on the photograph."

Anyone who has studied family portraits knows that they tell an idealized story, one that is often different from the real story. 

The real story. What is the real story of a family? As memories came pouring in about my father, I wondered who this man was that they are describing and what kind of family we were. Tolstoi wrote famously, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" (thank you Google). Why wouldn't that be true for ours?

The "real" story behind this photograph. I can only tell the one I remember. My clothes date the photograph well. As archival material, it is telling of an era when clothes became noticeably ugly and weird. I was definitely entering an awkward age, the expression on my face might reveal that somewhat. As for the story it tells about my family. Clearly, my parents make a handsome couple. My brother seems at ease and happy, but one can't really tell for sure. 

What that photo does accomplish is a portrait of the perfect family. 

********

We had to assemble another story when my father died, namely the story of his life for the obituary. It turns out that one can turn out several obituaries, depending on where it will be published. For the New York Times, though, we needed the "official" one. Without going into much detail, survivors really need an outside person to weigh in on that story. Luckily, we had a friend and colleague of my dad's to play that role. It's amazing how the death of an important family member (important? aren't all family members important?) brings out individual versions of what we felt about them, and those versions do not overlap neatly. 

I googled, "why families squabble when..." and the Google gods finished the line with "someone dies." Ah, yes, the squabble over the family estate. That seems to get the most hits. But there are others reasons why family members begin to yell at each other over the wording of an obituary. Mainly the stress associated with the loss, but also, and this is me (with backup from much psychological babble I'm sure), the release one feels once that person is gone that ensues in a more genuine, less mediated and suppressed, impression of that person. Meanwhile, the survivors are pressured to perform the perfect, unified family that loved and venerated its deceased member, at least until the last sympathy card has been opened. 

*********

The inscription on the tombstone that my father had wished for needed to be located. My mother's attempts to locate that wording failed, so I had to call my partner back home, ask him to look for a file labeled with my parents' initials (my father was meticulously organized), which he did, and in which he did indeed find the words that my father had noted for his tombstone. 

I want my father to know that I did look after his dying wishes, in a small but significant way. I am not nearly as organized as he is, but at least I try to be, at least for the important stuff. 

******

We are not perfect, not even close, but we do manage to pull off the important stuff. 
I am with my mother for a few more days. Her housekeeper for thirty years, Vicky, my mother and I toasted to my father and to good health (much needed right now) with a glass of wine. Wine was an important part of my father's life. In the kitchen drawer, there are three types of corkscrews. All three have always given me trouble. My mother started opening the bottle, got the spirally thing all the way down into the cork, and then handed me the bottle because she didn't have the strength to do the pulling. Luckily I did. 

Time to think

Mask wearing is now de rigueur if you want to be inside a place with other people besides your own home or private office (I now wear a mask inside the building where I work).

Luckily, neighbors down my street have been making and donating cloth masks, by leaving them on a table on their front porch. I always make sure to leave some money, because these people are not only thoughtful and community minded, but also because they probably could use some handy cash. 

Meanwhile, people want things to go back to normal, not accepting the fact that we need to build a new kind of "normal" that must take into consideration mistakes that we made that led to where we are now. And there are many mistakes. I don't mean for this blog to become some kind of moralizing pulpit, but we have all been given gobs of time to think. So let's think, let's think hard, and when we step outside, let's accept that we are not stepping back in time, but forward, to what, I don't know. 

Time to take a walk with a friend, mask at the ready. 

imitation is the greatest form of flattery?

 Lately, people stuck at home have been doing some pretty amazing reenactments of real paintings. It's been a huge source of amusement for many, amusement being something we badly need right now. It's also been lovely to see the attention being paid to paintings, as museums, among many arts institutions, are closed to the public.

Ah the public. We have been hearing a great deal about what the public wants and doesn't want. It seems that, keeping things on track with museums, before the Covid outbreak, museums were doing okay. But, judging from the lack of knowledge displayed by my students about museum visits (the lack of memory? The lack of deep exposure?), a true understanding of and appreciation for art seems to be on the decline in our everyday practice. Until now, perhaps, with those reenactments.

What I have done here is not art, but it is a sort of reenactment. It's just that I finally dug out from my closet an outfit I have been meaning to wear as soon as the temperatures allowed it. I spotted this woman (top photo) as I came out of my parents' building last August (2019). I snapped a photo, knowing that the assemblage was one I could do with 1. old Gap jacket 2. Eileen Fisher tunic bought used at a consignment store and 3. J.Jill tan linen pants bought at a consignment store. (The buff around my neck is now a permanent fixture as it is ready to be pulled up over my face for instances of proximity to others).

I look nothing like that TriBeCa apparition. What was she carrying in that enormous bag? I could have put on my black booties to really seal the deal, but, come April, boots are put away with the exception of one pair of rain boots. Come May, those must also be put away.

We do have six months of winter here. It snowed last weekend. We call spring something that looks like winter. We call spring something that feels more like summer. We have perhaps a grand total of two weeks of something that feels like spring.

Unlike many who are stuck in apartments and looking for ways to pass the time as we await the passing of Covid, I have freedom of movement, in my garden, in my neighborhood and in my region. I am fortunate to have this freedom, a freedom that many who do not have it are perhaps considering as they contemplate a post-Covid future. Time for a more rural existence?

Will everything go back to the way it was before? Very doubtful. Will droves of young people spearhead yet another back to the land movement? That would be lovely. Please come and till the land. And, at the end of the day, come on over. Play some music, talk about art, and, once in a while, go to the city and visit and exhibit or two. As the bumper sticker on my car says, "Earth without Art is just Eh."