Summer day trips

Two friends and I traveled to Williamstown and North Adams, MA to visit the Clark Art Institute   and the Mass MOCA.


At the Clark, they have shawls for people who might be cold from the air conditioning, rather an unusual offering for a museum. At Mass MOCA we were treated to quite the maze of exhibits, including three floors of Sol LeWitt, and two gigantic birds made out of industrial waste.

It wasn't until I got home and downloaded this photo on my computer, taken in Wilmington, Vermont, on our way to Marlboro for the music festival, that I realized that I was wearing consignment clothing. I tried to dress comfortably, and once again consignment clothing came in quite handy. The shirt is from a consignment shop in Angoulême France, and is a "Comptoir des Cotonniers" brand. The linen skirt is from a new consignment shop on West Broadway in Soho, New York City. The sweater I bought on sale at the Gap years ago. I like the way it brightens up an otherwise darkish outfit.

Normally I would have worn my new bad assed Doc Martens sandals that I had brought back from Portland, Oregon. But somehow, they're like boa constrictors because they seem to progressively tighten up around the front of the foot. So I opted for sneakers instead.

We ended up having a light supper in Wilmington, Vermont, before finishing the day at the Marlboro Music Festival. While watching people file into the auditorium, I caught a glimpse of a tall older woman whom I had spotted back at the Clark earlier that day. I want to make a blog entry that consists of older women who know how to pull together an outfit that makes age look elegant. Her silver hair was cropped at the neck, she wore a loose linen blouse and white pants if I remember correctly. I think she also had a shawl. Bill Cunningham  remarks that air conditioning is dictating fashion. Hence my red sweater...

Phone étiquette

I want to take a moment and publically apologize to the caller who identified himself as the “dishwasher installer” and who had misdialed and ended up with me on the other end of the line. I have caller id, and this phone call was labeled “cell user” or something of that sort. I was expecting a call from a friend and thought that it might be her. Instead it was a man who very politely identified himself immediately, and was not familiar to me. I asked him whom he was trying to reach, and he gave me my exact phone number except that it was off by one digit. Which I told him and then proceeded to hang up while he was still apologizing for the mix up.

That’s when I realized that I had just hung up on him. In the ensuing silence, I did some soul searching. Why was I in such a hurry to get off the phone with this man? Was something burning on the stove or in the toaster? No! I’m becoming exasperated with phone calls coming from people who want to sell me something, and phone calls coming from recordings. I am becoming very frustrated with my life being interrupted by a device that used to serve a social purpose and now seems to serve almost exclusively a commercial one.

I was also exasperated because coincidentally my cell phone – a device I seldom use – which had previously arrived by mail from our cell company with the requirement that we use it and dispose of the older one, this very cell phone which had been imposed upon me with no consultation from me, was refusing to charge because the USB plug was damaged from overuse. The USB plug was damaged from overuse because this new replacement phone, imposed on me by the cell phone company,  required constant charging since it wouldn’t hold its charge for very long. The phone it had replaced could hold a nice long charge, and had other nice advantages as well.

My overall exasperation with phones might explain why I am losing the very phone etiquette the dishwasher installer had when he apologized for dialing the wrong number. The old land line serves no purpose but to annoy me with phone calls from people I don’t want to talk to or can’t talk to because they're on a recording. The rare times that a real human that I do want to talk to ends up on the other end of the line, I am almost surprised that they are actually there.

Pretty soon we will all have abandoned our land lines and switched over entirely to cell phones. I can consider myself one of the fortunate ones, having lived to see the rotary phone -- the index finger working the dial, the ear hearing the long and short sounds depending on the number--  replaced by the push button phone -- oh what fun and what speed! “Speed” is a relative concept, especially for someone who felt the excitement of replacing a rotary phone with a push button one.  

Sadly, I have capitulated to the smart phone marketing giants, since I needed to replace the flip phone that wouldn’t charge. I could have resisted the urge, and behaved like a Twenty First Century Luddite by asking for another flip phone. But it seems that everybody has a smart phone now, and the smart phone does present advantages. For instance, while traveling in the middle of Vermont, I borrowed my daughter’s iPhone and was able to respond to an email from my husband who was stranded at a European Airport because of an air traffic controller’s strike. Furthermore, my fellow Luddites might face the day in the not too distant future when they too will be forced to switch to a Smart phone, and flip phones will be added to the ever growing mountain of discarded rotary, push button and cordless phones.

(I do worry though that, during prolonged power outages, our cell phones will cease to work because they will have lost their charge, and with land lines a thing of the past, the old land line phone which used to work beautifully during power outages will no longer provide that much needed connection to the rest of the world). 

What is astonishing is that not only is my phone etiquette being eroded by the new association I make between the ringing of the phone and the likely uselessness of the call, but my faith in the “wonderfulness “ of the market place is being eroded as well, as the “free” market is slowly shifting into a dictatorship of goods whose built in obsolescence has increased exponentially.

Oops, excuse me, I need to get this call…I hope it’s my friend. In any case, I’ll try to be extremely polite. 

Nouveaux Peasants

I purchased the July British edition of "Harper's Bazaar" during a trip to New York City back in June. One of their articles was about the "Nouveau Peasant," an upper-middle class person who prefers to go back to the land during their spare time, or who lives there part to full-time. That would be me. I moved from the city to the country over twenty five years ago, making me more of an "Old Nouveau Peasant." We're called flatlanders by the locals, even if our kids were born and raised in New Hampshire. 

But what does that have to do with vintage clothing? Well, rural living is a matter of style for some, that borrows from old images, like that of English aristocrats in tweeds and Wellies. 

While rolling and stacking tree segments in the woods behind my house on a very hot and humid day, feeling nauseous and dizzy, I tried imagining that what I was doing might actually be chic and glamorous, dressed in an American version of Nouveau Peasant garb (rubber boots, shorts, tee-shirt and baseball cap). Strangely, the idea that what I was doing might actually be "glamorous"  suddenly supplied me with the much needed psychological edge that pushed me to finish the task at hand.  While I stack firewood as a sustainable source of energy, that is all I do that might be considered farming. I have a job that allows me to live comfortably, and buy other people’s meat, cheese, fruit and vegetables. Real farming, as in farming for a living, is very hard work, which requires long days of hard labor, all kinds of equipment and most importantly, the ability to use and maintain it. It is not for the faint of heart, as slaughtering animals or operating dangerous machine are an integral part of real farming. I am grateful for the image of the “nouveau peasant,” but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the people who toil away at getting quality food to our table.

 The much needed chipper showed up early one morning last summer to finally turn a huge pile of branches into mulch. That machine can suck in tree trunks, and, if you're not careful, a human limb or two. 

Clara and her friend Jasmine visit WRJ

Clara is home from NYC for a couple of days. "Home" is not really accurate anymore since she prefers to call NYC home. But oh well. Her sister's graduation was enough of a reason to leave the city for a couple of days. She is here with her artist friend Jasmine, and both prefer to wear vintage clothes, so naturally, I drove them to the vintage capital for the world, White River Junction, Vermont.

After lunch at the Tucker Box Café, 

we headed to the newly opened Schultz Library, associated with the Center for Cartoon Studies. 

                                                                                                                  

Then a little visit to Revolution where Clara found this Issey Miyake knock off...

Her friend Jasmine also picked up a couple of dresses. I found a pair of linen shorts, oversized and super comfy. What a great way to spend the day!

Musings on negative consumption during a weekend in Portland Oregon

I was in Portland Oregon for a conference on comics. Took an afternoon off to explore the city. The sunny weather was too inviting. Walked around the food and “craft” stalls at the Saturday market by the river. The merchandise looked all too familiar. We have the same crap on the East Coast and on the banks of the Saone in Lyon, and every other city that opens its sidewalks to merchandise on the weekends.

Wandered into a vintage store on Stark Street,  Decades Vintage. The two guys running it explained that their clothes spanned a couple of centuries, including a dress from the 1850s, which was hanging along with some other clothes, high up away from the destructive grasps of the “mall girls.” Mall girls. They walk in, look at all the merchandise, try on a couple of outfits, have their picture taken so they can put it on Facebook, and they’re gone.

I picked out a pair of clip on earrings for my mother. I find that vintage shops are a great source for those. But I had no interest in acquiring a new garment, so I looked with disinterest.

I am now going through a phase that I will call “wearing down my clothes.” I just want to get rid of stuff. I want to deplete my inventory. 

I bought a few tee-shirts to give as gifts, and tried on shoes, knowing that, again, I really could get rid of some at this point. Not another pair of comfortable but funky walking shoes! The one good thing that came out of the indifferent quest for shoes was that a saleswoman in a downtown store pointed me to a more residential neighborhood on the other side of the interstate that was within walking distance. It’s called the Alphabet district, because the streets are ordered alphabetically (the sister shoe store was located between Hoyt and Irving). It was a beautiful neighborhood, with Queen Anne houses painted in all kinds of colors, and rhododendra bushes that were just done blooming. The only thing missing was the garden cat lying on a walkway or sitting on a wall.

After trying on many pairs of Danskos, Naturalistas and all their comfy cohorts, I walked out with nothing, except the satisfaction that I didn’t feel the need to buy another pair of shoes.

On the walk back to my hotel, however, I passed the Doc Martens store, and thought, why not? I tried on a pair of patent leather black sandals, and for some reason, they were satisfying an inner urge to own a bad assed pair of shoes for a change. The sales staff, young, coiffed with the locks of hair brushed over his eyes or, as in the case of a woman originally from Nova Scotia, bright pink dyed hair, tattooed, bejeweled with piercings, ogled me as I walked around the shop with those sandals. I asked them whether they were going to have a good hard laugh once I had left the store. The man with the hair over his eyes replied, “why would we do that?” And I explained about the age difference, and how perhaps a woman my age looked ridiculous in Doc Martens. They reassured me that I looked great in them, which of course, they have to say to all their customers.

I recall that Doc Martens came of age in the 1980s, when I was their age. I wanted to tell them about laughter and hegemony, that he who laughs at another person is exercising power over that person. But I’m not sure who has the power in a Doc Martens store. The young set the style, but the old have the money.

The next morning, while waiting for the light rail to the airport that never showed up, it finally occurred to me that one of the passenger categories when selecting your fare at the ticket machine is “honored citizens.”

Hum. I wonder how they came up with that? Instead of seniors of course. But that right there encapsulates Portland utopian mentality. A Youtube clip of the tv show “Portlandia ” has the male protagonist sing that Portland is stuck in the ‘90s. Walking around you really get a sense that people here are living in a time warp. I’m thinking any decade that you’re nostalgic for. It’s all good. You can even choose to live in the 1850s, and wear that dress from the vintage store on Alder, Washington or Stark, I can’t remember which.

A young couple waiting for the light rail to the airport that never showed informed me that it was running really late. The young woman was rotund, he smallish with the ubiquitous baseball cap. As I walked away, back to the hotel where I was going to hop into a taxi, because time was pressing even in this timeless place, it occurred to me that rotund women were plentiful out here, along with the super fit on their bikes. Your body type doesn’t matter. So, pick your decade, pick your body type, and live slowly. That’s how it goes out here in the Pacific Northwest.

Vintage color palette for spring

The fits and starts of spring here in Northern New England necessitate a search for it elsewhere in space and time. I found it in a photo from last year, when Clara and I were together in Paris for a couple of days. Needless to say, I LOVE that jacket! Vintage store was on or near the rue de Turenne.

ode to old cashmere

Source: retrovintagemodstyle

A few weeks ago, a British friend invited me to dinner. She is really truly English, as in calm yet assertive, absolutely not fussy yet classy. She always wears an old wool scarf around her neck, which for some reason makes her look really put together and ready to face anything.

   
I feel as though I can only mimic other people's styles in order to present myself to the world. So, during these unusually cold early spring weeks, I've been throwing my old cashmere scarf around my neck before leaving the house so that maybe I too can face anything.

This is not an original thought. Here is a quote from another blogger: "Scarves are a must-wear in my opinion during Fall/Winter, not only because they are ideal for the cool temperatures, but also because they can 'spice up' any outfit. Available in different colors, patterns, and materials, scarves are an item that never goes out of style within the passing of time." 

I can only add that cashmere scarves can be worn in any season. They protect your neck from the cold and the wind, and they protect your mind from everything else.