Today’s best headline: “‘Cougar’ Trend of Women Chasing Younger Men a Myth.”
You don’t say.
August 2010
You are browsing the archive for August 2010.
The glut of 90’s-centric fashion has finally led the Times to an obvious source of influence: Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes, wearing all those poufy floral patterned dresses, often paired with jackets and boots. Writer William Van Meter thinks her look incorporated a range of styles, including “early American settler, gypsy, business casual, pious zealot.” Of course, in it’s latest incarnation, “the layered floral/tough girl Elaine look is nostalgic.”
What’s weirder is how Van Meter explains the current embrace of this style as an amalgam of “this season’s trends of the early ’90s and the working woman” (love how those are both analogous “trends”). He claims many hipsters decked out in Elaine-inspired outfits “are too young to realize whom they are referencing”–dubious, since Seinfeld is in constant syndication–and quotes one stylist who attributes it to a backlash against the tight, short clothes women embraced not long ago: “This is a more covered-up look and looking like you have a brain. Elaine had a job. She worked at J. Peterman. She was a go-getter.” A career girl role model in blousy calico! Next up, Murphy Brown (or did I just miss that one?).
Elsewhere in Thursday Styles, Jon Caramanica plays Critical Shopper at Scout Vintage T-Shirts, a store full of “questionable pasts…a small warehouse of rejected memories.” He writes:
I pondered what made some shirts, once vessels of memory, acceptable detritus. Did people no longer wish to advertise that they had survived the 1989 Bay Area earthquake ($38) or the Wisconsin blizzard of 1982 ($28)? (True survivors — which is to say, true victims — probably didn’t buy commemorative T-shirts.) Did the Pulaski Academy Jogathon ($18) not merit a memento?
Good questions. And in the end, I have to respect the fact that Caramanica goes into places like this with clear boundaries: “I won’t buy something I, or my imagined self, wouldn’t have worn in its original time period. Clothes send messages, and I have no interest in looking like someone else’s yesteryear.”
Look, I love Mad Men. LOVE. And I’m willing to buy that Matthew Weiner is some kind of genius. But I’m getting kind of sick of reading interviews with the cast that repeatedly invoke the show’s creator like he is some kind of oracle, you know? It starts to seem like they are all brainwashed.
scratch and sniff
A few days ago, I went through a stack of back issues of The New Yorker, pulling out articles I wanted to read and tossing the rest of the issue (this is really the only way to deal with the relentless arrival of that magazine; sometimes I feel like it breeds in my mailbox…). Somehow I’d missed David Owen’s essay from the January 25th issue, “The Dime Store Floor,” about he and his sister very deliberately visiting their childhood haunts to see if they still smelled the same: the building where their dentist’s office used to be, an art museum where they went on many field trips, the titular dime store (“which had once been flavored mainly by dust, plus a sort of comforting over-scent that was related to mildew in the same way that cognac is related to wine” and was now “dominated by scented candles”). Visiting his childhood home in the midst of a renovation by the new owners, he notes the many things that had been changed along with the startling number of things that had not: “Each surviving detail was a pushpin holding the past to its easel.” And along the way, he looks back on things that aren’t places he can simply drive to and drink in for comparison’s sake—the smells that got snarled in his mind and formed the actual seed of his memories.
The essay ends with Owen reflecting on the indelible associations of things like shampoos and deodorants, how the smell of someone’s hair in high school can be the baseline of what you find attractive for the rest of your life, and how if you realized that time would inevitably move a particular product off the market, “you could have bought a few bottles and placed them on a shelf somewhere, for later sampling and contemplation—once each spring, perhaps, or during the final moments of life.” He buys, accidentally-on purpose, his father’s brand of deodorant, and “was almost knocked over by what I can only describe as a physical memory of my father.”
Owen (whose books include one about going undercover as a high school student, and one about the invention of the Xerox machine) is wallowing in the kind of naked nostalgia that’s usually seen as embarrassing and indulgent, old or aging men lost in the fog of their pasts. But it’s really different than Garrison Keillor’s arrogant, half-imagined approach to “the good old days.” Owen isn’t apologizing for lavishing time and words on the specific content of his memories; his approach is both forensic and romantic, largely (if unconventionally) evidence-based. His directness is sort of unnerving, and feels entirely earned.
Without a subscription, The New Yorker’s website only lets you access an abstract of the essay, which sort of hilariously reduces all its sensitivity and depth to what must be an automated (or intern-generated) summary: “Writer recalls the fragrances of his paternal grandmother, known as Gaga…Writer recalls the smell of cigarette smoke and the parties his parents threw when he was a child…”
Jezebel flips through Time Out New York’s sex issue from 1996—a year “when business was booming and ‘hookup culture’ hadn’t been invented yet”—and finds that things were sorta-kinda different then, but not really.
Meanwhile, The Awl takes a pretty ambivalent look back at Kids, on the fifteenth anniversary of that movie’s release.
The Times reports on an annual reunion of people who posed for Norman Rockwell—those still around are mostly elderly folks who modeled for Rockwell as kids. I do wonder what they have to talk about…how much mileage can they really have gotten out of that experience? The paper also recently offered a dispatch from the Chinatown Fair video arcade—”one of the last of the traditional arcades left in the city”—and a piece pointing out how, despite it being difficult and sort of useless, psychological researchers are determined to find a basis for generalizing about generations:
Generation Y’s collective personality, if such a thing exists, is not likely to be much different from other generations’. Still, small differences may matter…[one psychologist] has found a slight decrease in trust over the generations and a slight increase in a something called “ascendancy,” or “competence” — a self-professed confidence in getting things done.
At Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, an elegy for the “cluttered little beauty” of a Union Square newsstand that was recently replaced by one of the slick new glass and steel designs.
e.p.t. brand pregnancy tests are offering a special pouch you can send in for, in which to preserve your peed-on pregnancy test and by extension, “the moment you knew.”
Anticipating a time when “[b]ooks will…suffer the fate that has already befallen letters sent by mail: preciousness,” Mark Oppenheimer writes in Slate about what we lose when electronic devices take the place of books, whose covers we’ve come to count on to tell us something about the person reading them: “[W]hat will you do, Kindle generation, when you cannot tell which of the quiet boys holding the e-reader on the subway is engrossed by the latest, predictable legal thriller, and which one by a cheery, long-forgotten Laurie Colwin novel?”
At Salon, Matt Zoller Seitz commemorates Kodachrome film, the very last frames of which were produced last month:
Kodachrome photos were luminous and warm but not garish; in some inexpressible way, they seemed to capture the sensation of remembering the past, fixing nostalgia along with people and places….Its official end as a commercial format — one that you could just drop off and pick up at the local pharmacy — is yet another notable marker in an ongoing story: society’s total conversion from analog to digital media….That’s ultimately what the end of Kodachrome is really about: the end of a small but significant kind of poetry that was bound up with analog image-making.
Right, Katie Roiphe’s piece about Mad Men from a couple weeks back: “In the early ’60s they smoldered against the repression of the ’50s; and it may be that we smolder a little against the wilier and subtler repression of our own undoubtedly healthier, more upstanding times,” she writes by way of explaining our obsession with the show, and suggesting that we might learn to embrace some of the oh-so-sexy “messiness” that shapes the lives of its characters. “Juxtaposed against all this flamboyance, the tameness of contemporary sins can be a little disheartening.” Maybe it’s the attempt at juxtaposition that’s the problem?
In a smart response at The Awl, Peter Birkenhead wonders, “Where has she gotten the positively Mad Men-era idea that ‘embracing the responsibility’ of marriage precludes a messy, exciting—sometimes even transcendentally so—life? Does Roiphe not get that, in her creaky old (and exceedingly bougie) critique of ‘bourgeois culture,’ she sounds like one of the be-goateed trust-funders Don meets during the first season of the show?”
Speaking of Mad Men (and really, when aren’t we?), Ruth La Ferla considers the relentless cycle of nostalgic fashion, most recently inspired by the ubiquitous show: “Lately though, such revivals seem shopworn — not to say mindlessly literal. Where, after all, is the irony in pushing replicas of grandma’s twin sets, camel’s hair coats and crinolines on a generation bred on loose-fitting T-shirts, denim and cyberworld tints?”
And check out these gorgeous color photos taken between 1939 and 1943…It’s amazing how your whole sense of that time can change when you see it captured in something other than black-and-white. Call it The Wizard of Oz effect?
sugar headache
If you look closely, you’ll see that there are “nostalgic candy mixes” for each decade. Amazon, which also sells them, describes the 1950’s mix thusly:
This swell medley of sweets is guaranteed to bring you back to an unforgettable decade where Moms stayed home, girls wore poodle skirts and the boys revved the engines of their Chevys and T-birds. The milkman delivered the milk in glass bottles right to your door, and all your favorite music was played on 78’s and 45’s. Saturday morning cartoons were incentive enough not sleep in, even in black and white. You might’ve done the Bunny Hop, worn saddle shoes or spilled Kool-Aid on your dungarees. But it was all done in the 50’s and you wouldn’t change it if you could.
Yum.
corner store
Can’t see what that says? Let’s zoom in:
So, a high-end clothing retailer moves into the space a neighborhood Brazilian joint occupied for fifteen years—which it had to leave because of an unaffordable rent increase—and decides to pay tribute to its beloved predecessor. I’m pretty sure this is what guilt-ridden gentrification looks like. I guess it’s better than the other kind…?
Before we left for Maine I was looking at a bunch of local tourism and Chamber of Commerce sites, trying to find places to stay and just generally looking at what would be going on while we were there. Aside from sections about accommodations and restaurants and weddings, there was almost always one called something like “Relocate.” Camden’s site featured this little blurb:
Remember the days when neighbors were friends, and your friends ran the local shops and banks? Remember a place where traffic came to a halt for the Soap Box Derby rather than the rush-hour derby? Here where the mountains meet the sea, it’s even better than you remember.
I don’t remember those specific days, to the extent that they ever existed—but I think often about other, more recent ones, and I guess I have equally romantic notions about them. When John and I were walking around that town one afternoon, after salivating over old books and prints and photos and magazines in my favorite kind of rare book shop (where I couldn’t stop myself from buying one amazing issue each of Ladies Home Journal and Better Homes and Gardens from 1954), I was thinking how it’s sort of strange that we ended up on vacation here, and that we even love this place at all. Lots of these coastal towns feel like places for families with young kids, beacons for middle-aged and retired couples (and the occasional young one decked out in pastels) who just want to put their feet up and eat chowder. They’re idyllic in the most obvious and self-conscious ways, even if those ways are genuine ones. The cuteness and kitsch makes me smile, but neither of us would ever think to come here if we didn’t each have a connection with Maine as an idea, a place full of memories that have very little to do with logo sweatshirts, lighthouses, or lobster.
This tea towel was hanging on the wall of our room at a B&B in Belfast (tea towels as wall decorations, enough said). I couldn’t stop staring at it. The first fifteen years of wedding anniversaries are all spelled out with their own symbols, and then there are five year leaps between significant numbers. Who decided on these things, and what was the logic? Why does silk and linen come after steel? Coral after pearl? Wood after leather? Why lump together wool and copper, sugar and iron, pottery and willow, and pottery and bronze? How did they get from lace to ivory in only one move? What is it supposed to mean? There’s probably a charmingly old-fashioned explanation, but hanging at the foot of the bed it felt like a puzzle, and maybe also a taunt.
In Rockport I was fighting the feeling that I needed to make some kind of pilgrimage to the house I lived in for two months, nine summers ago. It seemed possible that I wouldn’t be back to the area any time soon, and it felt sort of necessary to visit that place, the way I did three years ago—just to drive by and notice it, I guess so I’d be able to tell myself I’d been back. I don’t really know why I always think this kind of thing will be reassuring, or even illuminating. Ultimately I decided that driving through town was enough, and that I needed to be okay with not paying a specific visit—that there was nothing there to witness or memorialize that I hadn’t already. That felt like some kind of progress.
