Tag: personal

Rude Boys and Reenactors

On By kittycalashIn History, Living History7 Comments

This morning, the Twitterz provided me with a link I’d missed back in November, to a piece about the Clash’s Vanilla Tapes. I listened to the cut of London Calling, and heard the ways in which it was not the final cut, and thought of authenticity. What a fabled state of grace: authenticity.

You think, if I just get this one thing right, I’ll be done.

portrait as a process test
process test poser portrait

But you won’t. And that’s okay. You’re still not a poser. (That’s an old Chicago punk term that got thrown around the way farb gets thrown around now.)

I’m pretty familiar with the album version of London Calling, but the Vanilla Tape version really reminded me: it’s not a destination, it’s a process.

It can mean taking coats apart and making them over till our eyes bleed. It can mean thinking and rethinking a character.

What matters is the process. I know, how tiresome: it’s the journey not the snow leopard.  But it’s true: what makes history in any expression fun are the questions, the new things to learn.

Yes, I have always like to dress up, and to get my friends to join me.
Yes, I have always liked to dress up, and to get my friends to join me.

I realized, too, that the joy I felt seeing the Clash at the Aragon ballroom none-of-your-business years ago was not unlike the pleasure I get from living history– and that’s not just because of the funny clothes and loud noises, though both sub-cultures share a taste for natty dressing and unusual music.

I find joy in the physicality of living history*, for although a milliners’ shop is no mosh pit, when your  clothes, shoes, and accessories are as right as they can be, you will move and feel differently than you do in your office or workout clothes.

There’s joy for me in the difficulties, too: from Saratoga to cooking, I like a problem to solve, a process to learn.

I’ll never get everything just right: I’ll get closer to right, and the fun is in figuring out how.

 

Grumpy Green Giant

On By kittycalashIn Fail4 Comments

imageWe had a busy weekend, as I suspect most people did, though we don’t do “Black Friday” shopping. There’s plenty else to do, especially when you have greatcoats on the brain, and an annual meeting to attend.  By nine o’clock Sunday night, Mr S and I were unwinding while watching the Wizard of Oz, when the Young Mr announced that he had forgotten that he needed to be a tree on Tuesday. An apple tree, actually, for the Wizard of Oz segment they’re doing in theatre class.

The three of us came up with a solution involving tan or brown trousers, a green t-shirt or sweatshirt, paper leaves, Christmas ornaments and the stapler.

Fortunately, I had to run errands last night after work, so I was already headed towards the craft store, where I found a green t-shirt and three sheets each of dark and medium green paper. We drew templates on scrap cardboard and cut the brown leaves from paper bags.

And yes, picky stitcher that I am, we stapled those leaves on, and the apples, too.

image

The apples really are Christmas tree ornaments, left over from St. Louis when we lived in big old row house with very high ceilings, and once got a tree far too large for our living room or the number of ornaments we had.

He seems pleased enough with his quick costume. Maybe next time the Young Mr will remember just a little sooner… though I doubt it.

Whimsical Wednesday

On By kittycalashIn Thanks
Hades (center), flanked by Pain and Panic

As elevating and inspiring as #dmmh was, reality is always around the corner, as predictable as a cast-iron frying pan in a Katzenjammer Kids cartoon. So on Tuesday, Mr S and I went to IKEA to re-vamp the Young Mr’s bedroom.

I know: this isn’t Martha Stewart, so what gives?

The Young Mr turns 16 on Saturday, and we wanted to mark the day in a memorable way. We had originally planned to go to Liberty Hall in NJ, where we would present the kid with his own Charleville and a Wegman’s white cake. Reality intervened in the form of AP European History, which led to dropping the swim team, which has their first  meet on Sunday. We dropped Liberty Hall, expecting to be swimming, but we’ve had to drop swimming to manage AP Euro.

So this has been a Very Tough Week chez Calash, and last Tuesday, the Young Mr slipped into the kind of Serious Funk that only teenagers can have. Reader, it was so bad, I asked him if he wanted to see his therapist and he said, “Yeah, OK. I guess.”

So, appointment on the horizon, we cast about the house looking for places in which one could do homework. Reader, there were few, and mostly they were places where I already sew or write. Something had to be done!

The Young Mr Surveys his Territory

IKEA catalog at the ready, my friend and I developed a plan: we would transform the Young Mr’s room for his birthday: He would get a desk, and place to lounge whilst reading, and I would get my table back.

We still have some tweaking to do, but he has a desk, a bench, and a watercolor of the Morgan that he loves (that once was mine) and loft bed that he seems to like.

Since the photo was taken, all free space has been claimed by textbooks and Magic cards, and I suppose the underneath spaces will soon be colonized by feral socks. Still, in the interim between this moment and Sometime Thursday Afternoon, the Young Mr has a nice room that makes him, and us, and his grandmother, feel that Things Might Be OK. I hope you have a cozy corner in your home where Things Are OK for you– and if you don’t, I hope you will  make one, soon.

The back of the top rail of Hades.

Oh, and Hades? That’s an 1813 chair we found in James Woods’s booth at the local antique mall. He’s from here, so no big. We figure the other two are his henchmen from Hercules. The names seemed appropriate to their relative comfort levels for long-term seating.

 

 

 

TBT: Stockings

On By kittycalashIn Clothing
My black TEDs. Hot stuff!
My black TEDs. Hot stuff!

And by TBT I mean Titano-Boa Thursday. Putting on the clot-preventing stockings is a lesson in patience, creative language use, and wriggling. Thankfully I can bend more this time around and can thus pull these suckers up– not that they really pull, it’s more that they suck and adhere to your leg and you coax them off your flesh–and get dressed in under an hour. I don’t fully understand the principle by which extremely constricting legwear prevents clots, and at this point, I don’t think I could. My best grasping right now is lunch time and a bottle of Tylenol.

Stockings, 1788-1793. French. MMA 26.56.124
Stockings, 1788-1793. French.
MMA 26.56.124

In lovelier legwear, I do have some of American Duchess’s silk stockings, and look forward to wearing those again in the nearish future. Still, you’d think the TED people could have a little fun, perhaps with replicas of these astonishing stockings? They’re toe-less, just like my TEDs.