is the question i hear the most often when i mention my quest for the perfect dry shampoo.
the answer, of course, is that i am often lazy, don’t always have the time or facilities to shower while spending weekends away, and, as my idol bea points out, washing hair every day is unecessary and also a waste of water.
dry shampoo is like baby powder and corn starch. it’s either a powder or a spray that doesn’t actually clean your hair but instead soaks up all the oil so you appear clean to passers-by. in fact, it’s GENIUS — the most perfect product for vain campers and backpackers (full disclosure: i am a vain backpacker), frequent roadtrippers, concerned hippies, lazy lucies, and people with bangs for whom grease becomes a problem rapidly after showering (full disclosure: my bangs get greasy like 5 hours after my hair has dried). i am convinced everyone should carry some around with them at all times in their purse, backpack, or fannypack.
so far my favorite is by oscar blandi, because it works really well and once you figure out how to work the nozzle it’s pretty easy to avoid dumping a pound of powder on your head. the only flaw is that it’s white — perfect for blondes and redheads but often gives those with darker hair the impression of grey roots. meh. i’d rather look old than greasy any day.
and what will you serve at this fabulously stylish bbq, you wonder?
this grilled tuna is really really delicious and super easy (make sure to marinate for at least an hour). this corn and tomato salad is perfect for the summertime — fresh and crisp and ideal for outdoor eating on a hot day. if grilling isn’t yo thang, this heirloom tomato pasta is one of the yummiest things ever (hopefully your farmer’s market is open for the summer and you can get some very very fresh tomatoes and basil). and also veggie kabobs (zucchini, onions, mushrooms, campari tomatoes, etc) and corn (shuck it, slather with butter, sprinkle on some cajun seasoning, put the leaves back up, wrap in aluminum foil, and grill baby grill) and applie pie of course and homemade popsicles and memorial day wouldn’t be memorial day without some delicious summery beers (we like anchor steam, harpoon ipa, and brooklyn summer ale) and maybe if you are lucky some delicious mojitos.
to continue in my recent tradition of unfinished thoughts digsuised as blog posts (sorry babies but you were just too cute for me to intelligently and clearly explain why a yurt birth in namibia is so much more appealing to me than the drugged up hospital scenes of san francisco) i give to you, dear readers, some unfinished complaints.
who the f are you, elena kagan, and why is the only thing i know about you the fact that you are unmarried and childless?
i’ve been following news less than i used to, partly because i’ve been out of town and without computers pretty frequently recently and also because, what with my parents’ tv and cable options staring me in the face every time i walk downstairs, the newspaper isn’t as tempting as it used to be. my own fault. but but but even in the midst of this separation from current events and actual facts i still know that there is a woman out there named elena who omg has no children and wtf decided to embrace a career instead of a husband?!? choices that may have been compelling and new in i dunno the 70s are no longer the salacious news stories the media wants them to be — why are we still supposed to drop everything and discuss them when all i want to discuss is what kagan actually thinks about the law. some pseudo feminist has been quoted as saying that she wishes kagan was a mother, because her current marital status sends the wrong message. well, ms feminist, what message is her childless status sending and also seriously why does it matter so much to you? wouldn’t you rather know where she stands on reproductive rights and gay marriage and other important social issues currently facing the nation that will affect you, as a woman, so much more than whether or not she has kids and a husband?
and i know that if i took the time i would be able to find out exactly where elena kagan stands on all the important issues, and why obama sees her as a good choice for the supreme court, and why i should or should not be excited that this new individual is going to have an effect on my life. what bugs me i guess is that with no effort whatsoever i already know things about this woman that i don’t give a shit about. yeah yeah it’s fuckin fantastic that another woman has been nominated, and of course i know very well that there is a long way to go before women are truly equal to men in the us (not to mention other countries but this is obviously a complaint for another day) but the more we talk about how fabulous it is that there’ll be another woman on the bench the more we undermine the equality this nomination stands for.
so let’s suck it up friends and like or hate her views but please please stop running headlines on her marital choices because holy crap i don’t care.
today i saw babies and holy shit holy shit it was so good, me and my mom spent all 80 minutes of it saying “awww” and laughing and also worrying that the much-abused and ever-present cats and various farm animals would rebel against their baby abusers and i dunno scratch them or something. thank goodness, everyone was safe.
ponijao from namibia; she enjoys eating dirt and breastfeeding
bayar from mongolia; my second favorite baby, he likes to pet goats and play with toilet paper
after the movie we agreed that ponijao and bayar, two babies raised in yurts in pretty isolated areas, were much more likeable than the two city babies, hattie (san francisco) and mari (tokyo), who both cried all the time and were constantly surrounded by brightly colored (and phthalate-ridden) plastic toys. there’s nothing like watching western excess consumption being thrust upon a baby to make you wish you lived in a yurt, too. largely self-sufficient, these yurt babies hardly ever cried, explored the world independently of their parents, and found their own toys in the rocks and dirts and buckets of water around them. by the end of the movie (at age 1) ponijao was running around and balancing metal pots on her head, while hattie was subjected to the weirdest baby yoga class i’ve ever seen. western culture is so all-encompassing and over-stimulating, and while i pride myself on the lack of video games in my childhood it was still incredibly uncreative. while definitely the cutest movie you’ll ever see, babies is also a very fascinating look at cultural differences and similarities etc etc gooo see it you’ll love it i promise.
this is an especially pretty music video (in hd!!!) for their song tin man:
their music feels like pastel afternoons at a build-a-bear workshop, and also like wearing neon leggings while eating ice cream cake on cape cod, and maybe even a little bit like what it would’ve felt like if molly ringwald came to my bat mitzvah.
if you do come to the show and you see a short girl with brown hair dancing around like a huge dork you should come say hi; either it will be me or you will have just made a super cool new friend.
this recording reviewed paper cone stories, an event i’ve never heard of but may or may not be hosted by a present-or-past girlfriend of a boy i used to know. anyway the synopses of readings seem both apt and witty and worth listening to. someone named akiva gottlieb was talking about the man who grabbed the backside of one of abramovic’s performers and this is what he said:
For certain liberal arts school graduates, the Abramovic retrospective is our Woodstock, the cultural happening that enables us to stare meaningfully into the eyes of strangers, brush against body parts, watch women run through a muddy field while stripping off layers of clothing, and generally revel in the various possibilities of naked flesh under the guise of an artistic experience. It’s a lot like ChatRoulette, actually, and it’s making New York very comfortable.
also while visiting the college graduation of some friends this past weekend i was lucky enough to meet a former housemate’s 16-year-old brother, a young man sporting an eyebrow ring and jeggings. he had recently seen the retrospective and an interesting conversation about nudity and voyeurism in art ensued until all of a sudden he remembered he was only 16 and was all “yeah dude it was so weird squeezing between naked people especially cuz one of them was a dude heh heh heh it was kinda hot though”. then i wondered if all of my cultural and sociological musings are for real or if i’m merely trying to prove to myself that i’m not, in fact, a 16-year-old boy laughing about naked people and covering up these oh-so-base instincts with lofty vocabulary and concepts borrowed from an art history textbook.
art is weird man especially when it has no clothes.
Dumdeedum, lazy Saturday spent watering plants, cleaning, doing other tasks I’ve otherwise put off… including watching some Say Yes to the Dress, the TLC show that follows brides as they shop for their wedding gear at Kleinfeld in Manhattan. As reality TV goes, it’s not a particularly brilliant show (The Real Housewives of NY has really stepped it up this season… especially that last episode with Kelly-gone-psycho and Bethenny’s high-larious “46 pinot grigios” comment), but I still get hooked. It reminded me of this one Gatsby-esque wedding dress that I liked at J. Crew, which sadly is no longer for sale. In an attempt to find something similar, I google-imaged “Great Gatsby wedding” and stumbled upon Once Wed, a photograph-rich blog chronicling, among other things, hipster theme weddings. It has to be seen to be believed.
Josh Goleman behind the lens for Great Gatsby wedding
their wedding is in a forest?!
circus wedding!
…really? really? I love that these people have avoided the cheese of 99.99% of all weddings. It’s so artsy fartsy and dreamy and in the countryside and blah blah. Fantastical.
some highlights (all photos from style.com) from the met’s costume institute gala (american woman: fashioning a national identity) for you to enjoy:
chloe sevigny in proenza schouler
karolina kurkova in joseph altazurra
lauren santo domingo in proenza schouler
naomi watts in stella mccartney
rachel bilson in louis vuitton
riley keough in thakoon
zoe kazan in peter som
grace coddington in all of her saggy black awesomeness (the september issue is worth watching for many reasons, especially the chance to see grace coddington revel in her steadfast creativity and refusal to wear anything besides a black potato sack and frizzy red queen elizabeth hair, ever)
i haven’t been the biggest fan of john cage since i was in high school, when the boy i was dating performed 4’33” at our senior solo recital and i was so embarassed to have been dating the kid who stood on stage in silence for almost five minutes that i thereby rejected all avant-garde composers.
high school biases notwithstanding, it turns out john cage is, in fact, a worthwhile figure to acquaint oneself with. i love this reaction he had to opinions of 4’33”:
They missed the point. There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began patterning the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.
One of Mies Van der Rohe’s pupils, a girl, came to him and said, “I have difficulty studying with you because you don’t leave any room for self-expression.” He asked her whether she had a pen with her. She did. He said, “Sign your name.” She did. He said, “That’s what I call self-expression.”
When Colin McPhee found out that I was interested in mushrooms, he said, “If you find the morel next spring, call me up, even if you only find one. I’ll drop everything, come out, and cook it.” Spring came. I found two morels. I called Colin McPhee. He said, “You don’t expect me, do you, to come all that way for two little mushrooms?”
Five years later, when Schoenberg asked me whether I would devote my life to music, I said, “Of course.” After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, “In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.” I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, “In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.”
when i was a freshman in college i took a course on the history of modern dance taught by a woman who had danced with merce cunningham, john cage’s lovah and creative collaborator. i wish i could remember my professor’s name — louise, maybe — but far more vivid in my memory is her adamant refusal to wear a bra, ever, and her sorta icky smell. anyway, she was old and fairly crazy, often telling us to “float like seaweed” and leading us through the hallways with ribbons and sheets of chiffon. one day, we were all sitting in the room waiting for her to arrive, talking and being pretty loud probably, when she appeared in the doorway. she walked to the front of the room, silent all the while, and watched us calmly until we quieted down. then she walked back to the door, turned the lights off, and left. after what felt like forever — the darkness had been punctured by occasional nervous laughter but no one had dared to speak — she reentered the room, turned the lights back on, and, with no further explanation, told us that today we would be learning about john cage.
the dark classroom was a vehicle, just like the silence of 4’33”, to hear and notice background noise. that was john cage’s music: giggling, squirming, breathing were just as momentous as chord progressions and intricately placed harmonies. very very zen.
in the end, how can you not love someone who, in addition to being one of the most influential creative figures of the 20th century, was also an amateur mushroom collector?
you’ll remember that, some time ago, i declared ugly wooden soled shoes to be a priority for this summer (you do remember, don’t you?) under the assumption that i shop seasonally, of course, and have limitless swedish krona to throw about (233.349 dollars’ worth of krona, to be exact), these are the shoes whose ugly wooden soles i want to run around on.
hey diane remember that time we each spent like a million dollars in stockholm in three days?
anyhoo, swedish hasbeens introduces their company by way of this charming anecdote,
Her name was Anita and she was the hottest mum in all of southern Sweden in the 1970’s. While smoking Camel she screamed at her kids until her curlers fell out and just looked fabulous in her white high-heeled clogs.
and, monetary restrictions notwithstanding, we encourage you to think of anita, sweden’s hottest mum, and the 1970s in general (just not the disco parts), as you shop or don’t shop for this summer and next fall. think wide-legged pants, earth tones, and a very young anjelica huston.
festo 