I’m getting all my crap together to head out tomorrow and realized (with a bit of encouragement) that I was missing a perfectly good oversharing moment if I didn’t document the hell out of my packing experience this afternoon. So here goes:
Dr. Bones sez: “Plz don’ go!”
Ever since I stayed with my aunt in Europe [Gawd that sounds pretentious, doesn't it? Trust me, it wasn't like that.], I’ve been notorious in my circle of friends for being a Super Packer ™. My suitcase always contains everything I need, as well as a few things I suspect I might need, in perfect order and in perfect fit. I always made fun of friends and boyfriends who would bring a garment bag, suitcase, and a purse/backpack on every trip – they were packing like “sick old ladies”.
Turns out that karma’s a bitch.
Since deciding that I’m going to be a rockstar (see: blogdiva, princess, debutante), I’ve started packing…heavier. As in extra shoes, more outfits than days that I’ll be gone, six shades of eyeshadow, the lot. I’m on my way to Saint Louis [holla!] for five days and this is what I’m packing:
Know what I’m doing? Going to a funeral on Saturday night (we’re…special) and out with college friends on Sunday. THAT’S IT. The grand sum of my plans totals two nights of doing anything at all. The rest, I suspect will be spent sitting on the couch with my good friend, watching Top Gear and Iron Chef America, and eating ice cream.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m just saying I believe that I may have overpacked.
BUT! Butbutbut…I did manage to pack five days’ worth of schtuff into a tiny little, carry-on-sized suitcase – the backpack is almost entirely empty (I have a 17″ laptop and a couple books in there). So maybe I did okay. Maybe I can be a rockstar and be a Super Packer ™, too!
See? Not so bad, right guys? Guys…?
What’s your packing like (no jokes, you perverts)? How much crap do you cart around with you when you’re travelling?
I’ve been collecting magazines and cutting them up for years now; I think it started when I was bored during an Ally McBeal episode back in the day. Ever since then, the main thrust of my artistic endevours has always been collage. I love flipping through glossy pictures, breathing in the perfume of the slick pages, the sound of shearing paper from the binding, the elaborate layouts in each volume. Tearing apart anything from Cosmo to Martha Stewart to Food & Drink to Guitar Weekly is my purest form of Zen.
I’ve long been a fan of Nubby’s Typofiles series and when the lovely Amber over at Code for Something started up her Phraseology series, I was reminded of my own love for a beautiful layout and a well-turned phrase. Inspired, I ran straight for my box-o-clippings to see what I’d saved. A treasure trove! It looks like I tend to pull a lot of advertisements without even realizing.
So what I’d like to do is throw my own series into the fray. Sporadically, I’ll share something that I’ve found in magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, whathaveyou that blows my mind, fills me with glee, and/or just speaks to me somehow. It could be brand spankin’ new, it could be from the 50s. You just never know!
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Welcome to In Print!
At a recent library book sale, I found bundles and bundles of Gourmet Magazine from the 80s and was giddy when I discovered that it was filled with one- and two-page ads for luxury cars, exotic vacations, high-class booze, and, most titilating of all – cigarettes. Now, I’m from the generation that’s straddling the gap between seeing Joe Camel during cartoon commericals and “you can’t advertise that anywhere”. Finding these ads, complete with the straightforward, no-nonsense copy of the pre-PC era, made me all giggly. [I know, I'm a dork.]
So, without further ado (there’s been far too much of that already), these are a few quality selections from Gourmet, 1982.
Doesn’t that just blow you away?! Remember when this was legal? Billboards, print, TV? Granted, it was a bit like this:
But these are relics from time long gone now. I won’t get on my high horse about smoking or anything like that; it’s a personal decision and everyone is more than welcome to make their own choices. Just wanted to share the wonderous memories of advertisment and show you a little of a style that’s seemingly past its time.
Stay tuned for In Print #2! Coming to an unannounced theatre near you!
What ads do you remember fondly (or not-so-fondly)? Do you think we’ll ban any other products from being sold this way?
Shoes? Yes, please. Also that dress. And that apple. In fact, I’ll take the whole thing to go. Wrap it up.
While perusing the weekly download of links from Ms. Nubby, I wandered over to a post at Paper Mode, a fashion editorialist blog. Here is the blurb about the beautiful spread that follows, as written on their site:
Amazing 64-page editorial in the August issue of Vogue Paris shot by Inez & Vinoodh and curated by the magazine’s editor-in-chief Carine Roitfeld, Emmanuelle Alt and Joe McKenna. 64 looks, 64 brands, from Calvin Klein to Yohji Yamamoto to YSL to Balmain, each look creates an iconic image that embodies each brand, definitely a who’s who guide in the industry and if that weren’t enough it features some of the greatest faces around, including favorites like Raquel Zimmermann, Isabeli Fontana, Natasha Poly, Anja Rubik, Sessilee Lopez, Lily Donaldson, Lara Stone and Daria Werbowy, who’s also on the cover.
I won’t repost the entire thing here, primarily because that’s not my intention in writing today. I’d just like to focus on some of the highlights of the spread. First, the awesome:
Lovelovelove all four of these shots. Each one has a classic style and perfectly sums up the brand (yes, Vivienne and Karl are brands, too). The CK ad, in particular evokes weird teeny-bopper feelings for me. Must be all those illicit Cosmos I read when I was still 16. And man, that Karl Lagerfield shot! Sexy sexiness.
That last time I checked, it was 2009, a year far out of the racist grasp of the vaudevillian era when it was common practice to do such things for entertainment. I’m not a prude or PC-advocate by any stretch of the imagination, but THIS?! Who thought this was okay? What out-of-touch suburbanite sat down at the sketch pad one day and said, “You know, I think I’ll take a white girl, dress her up in western-style clothing, giver her a beehive-afro, and paint her face black.”
(deep breath) Okay. Whew. Honestly, though. Really? The entire rest of the spread was just amazing – tasteful, stylish, beautiful. Then there’s that one. Does anyone else have a problem with this? Or is it just me? Granted I don’t know anything about this particular brand/stylist but…come on. Okay, time to sign off before I explode. I’d love to hear your feedback about this, if you feel like sharing. Conversational shit, people!
xxxooo,
Disclaimer! I am not, nor have I ever been, a fashion critic. I’m largely unfamiliar with the “styles” of many of the biggest labels. The ones I do know are those that permeated my existance before I ever gave a rat’s ass about what I wore. So please, bear with me. Comments are appreciated, flaming is not.
Yar and avast! Prepare to be (mentally) boarded! Jaka’s Tea Party is now live! I know I’ve already had two posts since my cute little site’s launch on Monday, but I felt a little…empty…without doing a “here I am!” type post. So here it is!
While I’ve always been fairly literate (as in I can read and write with some measure of competency) and enjoyed writing for fun, I didn’t get the urge to start doing proper articles in earnest until very early this year. Sure, I’d kept a Livejournal for what seemed like forever, but I’d slacked off and stopped using it. Eventually, I stopped writing and just read other people’s posts. Then I stopped even doing that. The medium had started to feel cramped, although I didn’t realize it at the time. I needed a bigger space to swim in.
Enter Doe Deere and the ever-popular Gala Darling. Cliche by now, I know. I stumbled on these lovely ladies completely by accident and it opened up a whole new wing of the internet for me. So colourful! So positive! So hip! So sassy! I was totally agog. And so I dove deeper and deeper, discovering so many fashionable nooks and explosive crannies (my, but that sounds dirty, doesn’t it) that my head nearly imploded. What a wonderful section of blogsphere I’d stumbled upon! I fell in love.
Then the pieces matched up and I thought, “Hey…I should do this!”
It’s been a hell of a ride trying to get here. I’m a notorious perfectionist and self-deprecator (sometimes to the point of dispair), but with the help of a few good friends and my husband, now dubbed Mr. Man, I struggled through the doubts, (barely) learned CSS, pulled up my big-girl pants, and voila! Jaka’s Tea Party was born.
That’s not to say that I’ve got it all together by any means. Jaka’s Tea Party is a work in progress. I’m still searching for a solid theme to follow and a gajillion other things too boring or terrifying (for me) to mention.I have no set posting schedule, no backlog of articles, no lists of topics, no general plan whatsoever as of yet. But it’ll come. The best advice I’ve read so far has been from the inspiring Ms. Nubby Twiglet – “While preparation is great, perfection is impossible. Waiting isn’t doing you any favors.” It’s hard for me to swallow, I’ll admit, but I’m taking baby steps toward changing my neurotic need for everything to be justright before I unveil it.
Come aboard, matey, and join me on my voyage through the high seas of the blogsphere! I promise lots of adventure and maybe even a little (read: a lot) of glitter!
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, 1937 – 2005, had perhaps the most interesting, strange, terrifying, and inspiring career of any American journalist of his time. His catalogue runs the gamut from straight stories on travel in Latin America to venomous political coverage to emotional observations on cultural icons to completely fabricated drugs-visions. He invented the now-notorious Gonzo style of journalism by throwing himself carelessly and ruthlessly into whatever new, lurid topic he’d been assigned to cover, giving rise to a handful of pseudonyms, each with a more freakish personality than the last. He ran with Ken Kesey, George McGovern, Sonny Barger, Mike Tyson, Allen Ginsberg; he abused Ralph Steadman; he had three strange marriages. He ran for sheriff on the Freak Ticket in Aspen, Colorado in an attempt to overthrow The Man and strike a blow for all the wimps, simps, gimps, dropouts, dropins, dropbys, losers, assholes, fuckarounds, and burnouts. And rather than give in to the grind of a “normal” job, he lived in relative poverty for nearly all the years he wrote. He’s largely considered insane, confused, addicted, dangerous, and brillant. And I love him.
One of my favorite quotes, which never fails to spring to mind whenever I feel like I’m over my head:
“One night in the winter of 1965 I took my own bike–and a passenger–over the high side on a rain-slick road just north of Oakland. I went into an obviously dangerous curve at about seventy, the top of my second gear. The wet road prevented leaning it over enough to compensate for the tremendous inertia, and somewhere in the middle of the curve I realized that the rear wheel was no longer following the front one. The bike was going sideways toward a bank of railroad tracks and there was nothing I could do except hang on. For an instant it was very peaceful…and then it was like being shot off the road by a bazooka, but with no noise. Neither a deer on a hillside nor a man on a battlefield ever hears the shot that kills him, and a man going over the high side on a motorcycle hears the same kind of high-speed silence. There are sparks, as the chromed steel grinds down on the road, an awful jerk when your body starts cartwheeling on the first impact…and after that, if you’re lucky, there is nothing at all until you wake up in some hospital emergency ward with your scalp hanging down in your eyes while official-looking people stare down at you and assure each other that ‘these crazy bastards won’t learn.’” – HST, Hell’s Angels (1966)
It all started with my dad’s battered paperback copies of “Hell’s Angels” and “The Great Shark Hunt” – the former his first book and a precursor to Gonzo, the latter the first collection of his articles for various publications. I tumbled into a world filled with righteous indignation at the decay of our (then 1960s-1970s) American identity, the deep love of both the written word and the grandeur of the lonely mountains,and dizzying adventures (both real and imagined) in altered states of conciousness. His straightforward approach and ringing voice pulled me under the waves and forced me to take in a lungful of bittersweet bile. It sounds like a love/hate relationship, but it truly is all love. The beauty of the common man’s voice that intensifies rather than hides a fiery passion for life and a free society yanks on heartstrings, stirring up a roiling need to be part of something, even if it does make me wish I lived in the tense eras he covered.
Get a cigarette holder and smoke in inappropriate places
Eat an enormous breakfast over three hours on your front porch
Learn to shoot a handgun (bonus points for shotgun)
Buy a ticket to Puerto Rico
Make up a fantastical story and pass it off as true
Write about a wrong you see in your community and publish it
Stay up all night schmoozing on a boat
Drive the Rocky Mountains in Colorado
Ride a motorcycle alone at night along the beach
Most people are only familiar with this crazy fucker through the 1998 movie “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”, starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Torro. It’s a shame for the most part, but it’s not a bad start:
“There was only one road back to L.A. US Interstate 15, just a flat-out high speed burn through Baker and Barstow and Berdoo. Then on to the Hollywood Freeway straight into frantic oblivion: safety, obscurity. Just another freak in the Freak Kingdom. We’d gone in search of the American Dream. It had been a lame fuck around, a waste of time. There was no point in looking back. Fuck no, not today thank you kindly. My heart was filled with joy. I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger: a man on the move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.” — Johnny Depp as Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)
Hunter: You came into my life too late and left the world too early. It breaks my heart that I will never get to meet the man most responsible for my reinvigorated love of personal journalism and who gave a name to the most fascinating genre.
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Extra Credit: If you’re interested in reading HST’s work but don’t know where to start, I suggest “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved”. It’s largely considered the first true Gonzo story and is a freaking rollercoaster of insanity. You can read it for free, courtesy of The Biovouac.
Dr. Bones sez: “Plz don’ go!”
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