Testing with Shampoo

Link to Horatio

FPM: Fashion's Night Out When It's No Longer Newsy

I've been the lamest blogger ever in the relatively short history of blogging.

Will be back later to contextualize these, most of them from Fashion's Night Out, which took place September 10 of THIS YEAR! I spent most of my time on Bond Street, with a brief detour over to Tompkins Square Park to catch the kick-off of the Howl Festival (an East Village arts festival dedicated to the spirit of Allen Ginsberg. See my photo of Anne Waldman wearing the scarf he brought back from . . . Morocco??)

Also, the first photo here is of a woman dressed amazingly doing something to the front of the Ben Sherman store in Soho.

More later! I can't ever remember being this busy and it's not really busy in a good way.

FPM: GRADING PAPERS!! CHECK BACK TONIGHT!!

Lots and lots of pics from Fashion's Night Out, etc. etc.

Still reading: Let the Dog Drive. More on this, too!

FPM: Festival Fashion

1. I have nothing here that foreshadows the upcoming NY Fashion Week, which for the first time is at Lincoln Center. I will, however, patronize Fashion's Night Out here and try and borrow my kid's camera again.

2. Yesterday, we were headed up for a tranquil afternoon at Central Park and ran into a parent from Kid #2's school who was accompanying the artist Gene Pool (as the Can Man( uptown to the Unicycle Festival at Grant's Tomb. (I had my photo taken with the Gene in my new dress, but I looked so terrible, I am not posting it here.

3. I need a dress covered with dangling aluminum cans.

4. The Can Man makes a considerable amount of noise when merely walking. You should hear him on a unicycle. It's an aluminum storm.

5. On 125th Street, women came out of church to get their photos taken with the Can Man. One of them said, "I love Jesus, but I'm staying with the Can Man."

6. Midweek, I discovered a new/old artist, Lee Bontecou. A woman, too, with a solo show. (The Guerilla Girls would be somewhat appeased.)

6. The weekend before, we were at the annual Charlie Parker Jazz Festival. Parker would have been 90 last Sunday. The 80-something vocal legend Jimmy Scott sang from a wheelchair. I danced with my children. I took photos of striking older women. I saw a woman wearing a black spangled snood before I discovered I had my camera.

7. The weather is changing. It was blazingly hot, and now it's breezy and chilly. I still don't know what to wear.

FPM: Last Gasp Summer Dresses, West German Shoes, and a Visit from a Portland Artist

1. These shoes are for sale at a Russian shoe repair shop on East 7th Street. They are labeled as "Made in West Germany," so they are vintage!

2. I had a lovely visit this week from Portland artist Hayley Barker, who makes ethereal, poetic and surreptiously disturbing paintings, and who wore dresses I felt compelled to photograph.

3. I say some lovely dresses at the Farmer's Market and in the blocks leading up to the Farmer's Market.

4. My kids is mad I keep using her camera.

FPM: Asphalt Shakespeare and The Lovely Fullness of Skirts

Seeing these lovely full skirts around that seem to foreshadow fall. Not that I want the summer to be over. I'm not going to mention the heat. I don't want the summer to be over, although I don't relate to what many people are wearing this season: like strapless knickered rompers. Do you know them?

Summers there is free Shakespeare all over the city. My favorite is The Drilling Company, whose productions in a municipal parking lot on the lower east side are called Shakespeare in the Parking Lot. This past week, I saw their Julius Ceasar in which Ceasar was reconfigured as a Bloombergian bureaucratic dictator, and many of the key roles, like Marc Antony's are played by women. Lots of photos below. (Doesn't this play have the best speeches ever?_

I am writing in a public/private space in an unusual neighborhood. I'll tell you where next week.

I need a camera.

I don't like what I'm wearing.

This week, I read Ann Beattie's novella Walks With Men, which is set in NYC in the very early '80s, back when AIDS was referred to as the "gay cancer." A young woman--a rebellious Harvard grad--makes it big with her writing but is emotionally inhibited and controlled by a variety of men, one, in particular twice her age, becomes her husband and svengali and then mysteriously disappears. Subtle and spare, unlike most of Beattie, who I think is a rather messy writer. I recommend.