'The only way to atone for being occasionally a little over-dressed

is by being always absolutely over-educated' - if you happen to be Oscar Wilde, at any rate.


I have joked about it before, but I think I genuinely should consider making the electronic taxonomic 'wardrobe flashcards.' I worked with a girl once who had done this, and it was a fine idea. In her case, it was an actual little flip-book of pictures, with outfits and accessories laid out together in various combinations for easy reference. And it was interesting, frankly, since she was the last person most of her friends would have envisioned taking this extraordinary and labor-intensive step in sartorial ecology. She was exceptionally pragmatic and consistent in her dress, a bit of a hybrid between Northeast Yankee and Northwest Sporty, not to say verging perhaps on anodyne, and for the most part her 'dressing up' consisted of leaning more toward the former than the latter. Maybe that itself is why she did it; she may have felt that visual aids would spur greater creativity, allow her to match the salmon stripes on a blue background button-down with a salmon cardigan or salmon trouser socks, something she would be unlikely to contrive impromptu?

In my case, it's not as though I can't put together an ensemble. I start either with an idea of color(s) or a particular garment. The problem is, however, that like my friend I, too, have my habitudes, and that arguably my greater wardrobe may well hinder my selection process and steer my psyche in familiar directions more often than desirable, in an unconscious effort to conserve my mental health and leave what is left of my creativity for nobler ends.

In other words, I wear a lot of sweater sets, pastel jackets, and the same pearl or tiny hoop earrings until I drive myself mad. And, because I am an impossible size for jeans, the same thing holds for the bottom half: skirts or the same kid's size 10 or '10-slim' denims until I drive them mad.

What made me think of all this is that today I am going to a picnic. Since it's not sunny or warm, my clothes can only give a symbolic nod to the concept of 'summer picnic,' rather than being in actuality light and airy. That gives me color, jewelry, purse and shoes to work with.

Well, I have two very summery beaded necklaces, one that I made and one that I bought. One is green and pink, the other just green, so I started with those and managed to convince myself to put on dangly matching beaded earrings. I added a woven silk pink shell under a green fitted button-down, a sweater that matches the shell, a green leather purse (not especially summery, but neither is the weather, and I'm not wearing sandals) and pink slingbacks, as well as a frosty pink on the lips and fingers. And the current pair of favorite (i.e., the best I can do) jeans.

Now, the problem is not that that isn't a reasonable outfit for the occasion, and nice-looking, as well. The problem is the familiarity. I wore those shoes and the cardigan a few days ago. They were in my head - probably from the moment I thought of the necklace. Sure, I matched the purse to the shirt inside, rather than the outer cardigan and the shoes, but it was just lowest-common-denominator outfit-building, inasmuch as a) the handbags are all set out where I can see them and b) my default was 'not the purse you wore the last time you wore the shoes.' That's hardly creative; it's defensive, reactionary.

So, if I had a gallery of pictures, with a taxonomy akin to that of my closet:

Kingdom: Clothes
Phyla: Hanging, Folded (and we'll bracket that one: it's boring and never gets worn)
Classes: Suits, Jackets, Trousers, Skirts, Shirts, Dresses
Orders: Jackets, Trousers, Long Skirts, Short Skirts, Summer Skirts, Knit Tops, Button-Down Shirts, Sweaters, Sweater Sets, Evening...
Families: Black, Reds, Greens...
Subfamilies: Chartreuse, Lime, Celadon, Mint...
Tribes: Black with Metallic Wefts, Blues with White Collars/Cuffs...
Genera: Prints, Solids...
Species: Second-Favorite Off-White Button-Down Silk Sweater: with Detachable Narrow-Gauge White Fur Collar: No Cuffs: Delicate Knit: and Slim Fit Stopping Just at the Hipbone

THEN I would know what I was working with, and have a broader perspective necessarily, as I would have all members of every species equally available to my consideration. I could flip from

'shoes: high: pumps: green: pointed toe: w/buckle'
to
'jackets: whites: creams: patterned weave: w/color: green: belted: oversized-houndstooth cream-lime ribbon-belted self-fabric-button w/tiny pockets.'
And then I could browse the 'solids' genera in creams and greens and blues - and even mangoes if I wished - for tops and bottoms, giving a fair shot to all members equally, rather than too often resorting to the instinctive and the familiar.

I think it's worth a try. And it's manifestly a good excuse/incentive to get that dry-cleaning pile down to an apartment-sized scale. I'd add a photo of it, but it would hurt you, just like it hurts my closet, which can scarcely afford to take on more boarders...




**By the way, has anyone noticed that my former super-double-quotativity, of italics and quotation marks, has now become deluxe-triple quotativity, since I started using pink on quotes some time back. Interesting. Do I think that quotation marks are really all that unclear?

Godard on Prozac

Here is my second-ever cinematic opus. I didn't think it worked (and that it did is arguable still, as you will know once you've seen it, if you see it, if you're brave), because it just looked like a bad photo in the folder.

Instead, it's a long string of bad photos, in a sense.

Anyway, it's from the arboretum at the University of Washington, way too early in the morning, from the same batch of photos as the one with the William Blake quote. I would have taken some stellar photos, I'm sure, however lamentable my filmmaking skills might be, but the camera still had all the old photos in it, so I ran out of space before I got to the exciting parts of the arboretum.

On the upside, apparently Nilla Wafers have a soft-cookie sandwich with filling, and I met some ducks and geese who enjoyed my gas-station impulse buy rather more than I was in the midst of my technological misadventure. Anyway, had I known I was going to run out of space I would have spared myself the artistic outpouring. Since I didn't, it's yours to savor!

Be glad I am not subjecting you to my first movie, which was from my phone and consisted of the toes of my pointy aubergine boots walking down First Avenue in Belltown. You might think it potentially difficult to pull of pointy aubergine boots; what's actually difficult is managing to walk down the street filming them with a phone and not being disturbed in the slightest by looking completely idiotic by walking while pointing a telephone at one's feet!

Anyway, it comes to a fairly shocking finale. You won't see it coming; you won't expect it in the slightest.

A Little Less Conversation

Some of you will recall my earlier jeremiads about drug ads for potions to stop brittle bones and stave off penile-implant surgery. Those of you who don't, and those of you who for your own unfathomable reasons wish to relive the horror, can click on 'Sally Field' or 'flaccidity' in my Labels list to the right and share in my pain of many months ago.

Let me begin by saying I don't watch television all that much. I have a very small set, and it is hard to see from where I usually am, which is at my computer desk, ordering antique perfume bottles off Ebay or once again struggling to come up with ideas for a seasonal dish in the cold and stormy heart of winter that does not involve turnips or kale. And since I generally turn the sound off when it is on, I seldom have any idea what anyone is saying, since I can't read the subtitles at all from thirty feet away. Still, occasionally, I have both the television and the television audio on simultaneously, and when this baleful combination of phenomena occurs, it is rare that I do not regret it subsequently.

Recently I was foolhardy enough to press 'power' without 'mute' before walking over to the vanity to select the day's fragrance, whereupon I was wrested from my tranquil toilette to stand agape and aghast at the horror that flickered before my widening eyes. For it seems that now Viagra has a new campaign, worse than all the rest, and while I hold no particular affection for any Elvis song or film from the 1960s, it does seem that using Viva Las Vegas to hawk erection pills diminishes substantively whatever charm or cachet that song can be said to have once possessed.

Not that it wasn't full of macho swagger, boastful virility, and the desire for unbridled hedonism -- if, admittedly, less than artfully put by the crack songwriting team of Messrs. Pomus and Shuman. But that's just it (well, part of it): the ad is using the universally-recognized song to evoke that libertinous 'I'm just a devil with love to spare' strut in the back of the viewer's mind, while the new lyrics, by contrast, kick the unsuspecting rogue in his pants. Not to mention his cerebellum.

Firstly, let me say that I understand Cialis is doing well, and has done well marketing itself as the flaccidity fixer for men who already have women to have sex with. It has advantages Viagra does not, including more rapid and longer-lasting effects. That's hard to battle, and simply whining, 'Heeey, remember us? We've got one, too. And it's kinda the same' is clearly insufficient. If New Coke had done well, its competitor would have had to strive to position some new product of its own as being similar, and similarly delicious. So Viagra finds itself wanting to declare that even married men who want to have sex with their wives will find it useful.

Of course, Pfizer (or their ad agency) could have said that. Explicitly, and in uncloying language. Instead, we are given the image of a group of early-middle-aged men in the widest assortment possible of casual wear (so that you, whoever you are, will surely be able to find one to 'identify' with: is it the plaid-shirt guy? the rakishly-untucked one? or are you really the bandanna'ed motorbike rider in your heart?) who got together in a bartenderless roadside tavern in the middle of the day to turn Elvis Presley songs into paeans to Erectile Dysfunction drugs and sex within the bonds of marriage.

How do I know they're married? Could I not just be leaping to conclusions for the sake of being able to hate all these ads equally (and by the way, I have never yet seen a single ad for Levitra, and for all I know they could be as bad or worse, but if we fall in love, you and me, and you find you're having a bit of a problem, and I still haven't seen any, please do the right thing and support Bayer/GlaxoSmithKline)? No, I know they are married because I was subjected to first-year-film-school clunky closeups of wedding bands on left hands playing various instruments, and because my brain was fried by having the following lines imprinted on it, forever:

• This lonesome toad is sick of the road/Can't wait, can't wait to get home
• At the end of the day/I'm not a guy who'll stray/'Cause she's my heart's desire

'Lonesome toad,' I guess, is supposed somehow to make them seem like normal men who say manly, cowboyish self-deprecating things in bars, rather than go to them to sing about drugs and impotence and monogamy and how they are inexplicably stuck in the bar, when really all they want to do is go home and have drug-enhanced sex with the wives they miss so much. And, since they have been trapped there who knows how long, and have been thinking of little besides their wives and the great married sex they are going to have with their 'hearts' desires,' I can presume that they, unlike Elvis, are not wishing that there were more than twenty-four hours in a day -- unless their Honey I'm Home package includes a Cialis tab or two.