Jenna’s Model Life

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Did I really eat all these Riesens? Why, yes I did. Clearly listening to an hour of This American Life alone in my apartment with nothing to occupy my hands was a poor life decision. And a delicious one.

Peter’s parents escaped the Midwestern icefuck that is December and spent a weekend here on the left coast. Given Peter and I are both overeducated, underpaid downwardly-mobile youngsters contending with the coming recession and the joke of a dollar and the “credit crunch,” I can say that this weekend’s visit felt just like when your parents come to your scuzzy college town and buy you food, in that his folks paid for everything. (I for one cannot wait to get under the nice, cushy wing of a deep-pocketed agency again, and not have to worry about finding money to spring for new light bulbs. And I keep on suggesting Peter just cast his lot in with some rich old lady with a bunch of cute dogs, but he loves me, so you know.)

Our other solution is to only shop here from now on:

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I swear I paid Target at least $4.99 for that lime-green hanger bundle when I went off to university. I should’ve waited three years and hangered my wardrobe for a buck.

The dollar store on Mission St. sells all kinds of awesome loot. There are scented candles, big bags of beef jerky, socks, soap cakes with oats in them, and pet chew toys. As well as these:

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And enough styling gel to coiff every overly tanned, khaki-wearing, overpaid, Dave-Matthews-Band-listening frat boy in the Marina. And make them funky.

One thing we definitely will have to cut out of the budget is pimp gear. Unless I can felt it, knit it, sew it, or leatherwork it with my awl and mallet, there will be no shiny, extended-vamp shoes and co-ordinating feathered headwear in our future.

I snapped a picture of the door to some kind of a halfway house on 16th near Valencia. The sign above reads “These premises are under court order not to be used for the sale, giving away, use, or manufacture of illegal drugs.”

News yesterday that Karen Elson switched London agencies from Models 1 to Independent got me thinking. Elson has always been one of my favourite contemporary models — she and Shalom Harlow are pretty much neck-and-neck. I could never settle on an absolute because they’re so different I almost don’t register any competition: superficially you could say they have a similar freaky, tough aesthetic (my favourite Harlow editorial is one for Vogue Paris where she dresses in black silk dresses, combat boots, and studded leather belts, her pin-straight hair flying, and Elson became known in 1997 when Steven Meisel shaved her eyebrows and put her on the cover of Vogue Italia). But whereas Elson, in her best photos, radiates a kind of edgy, almost damaged beauty (Helena Bonham Carter in Fight Club), Harlow, one senses, is all steel. And while there’s charm in consistency and uncomplicated strength, that whiff of danger that Elson carries is, on certain days, enough to sway me to her side.

I have a soft spot for models who are not beautiful so much as aesthetically compelling. Witness that first Vogue Italia cover:

The trademark Titian hair is dyed (another Meisel modification). But this girl is real: She grew up in public housing in Manchester, spent her first year in fashion bouncing from market to market, not always with representation, and not always in work, flubbed her first trip to Milan because her hips were judged too big for shows (oh, how I identify!), walked for Marc Jacobs while pregnant, and married Jack White in a canoe in the Amazon River. A shaman officiated.

Here she is for Louis Vuitton.

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I think this was a Dior ad.

Mert Alas and Marcus Piggot shot Elson in an editorial I sigh over in Pop, issue 10. I love the dismembered mannequins and the acid-bright colours, the whole awful, plastic, doll-parts gorgeousness of it all.

Wow.

Elson also made a short film with Zooey Deschanel and Sarah Sophie Flicker called “Lay Down Lean.” Shot in a whimsical herky-jerky style, it illustrates an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem.

You may remember her from the video for the White Stripes’ “Blue Orchid”, where she totters around in outrageous white fetish heels, a wild-eyed cross between a deranged ballerina, a twisted-up marionette, and Miss Havisham.

And her musical contributions don’t end there. She is currently a performer and creative director of the Citizens Band, a New York-based political cabaret troupe. The New Yorker likes her voice.

And, after hearing this cover of Glenn Danzig’s “Devil’s Plaything,” which Elson sings with Melissa Auf Der Maur, so do I.

Your people own too many firearms, too many of which are handguns and/or automatics and semi-automatics. This is why you have so many shootings, and why they are so deadly. If at any time you would like to cease experiencing shootings approximately as frequently as Charlton Heston takes his acetylcholinesterase inhibitors, you could let those members of your people who pass background checks and sign a national registry own plain old one-shot-at-a-time, bolt-action hunting rifles. You will find these prove astonishingly difficult to use in mass murders.

Sincerely,

The Rest of the Developed World

• • •

After hearing the latest depressing, frightening, (and close-to-home!) news in this country, I decided to turn my attention to news from a farther-away home. Believe it or not, this is how an account about arresting the leadership of a major gang reads in New Zealand:

Dawn raids see 28 arrested

It’s safe to say we’re fond of dawn raids in the antipodes. These particular raids involved 36 properties located all around the North Island, and linked to a gang named the Mongrel Mob. New Zealand gangs tend to have colourful monikers, and full members still wear leather jackets with official “patches” on the back, but they do the usual illegal stuff — mostly produce and supply marijuana, as well as Kiwi drug du jour methamphetamine. The prostitution racket has cooled somewhat since we legalised it in 2003.

Officer in charge of the operation Detective Senior Sergeant Mike Whitehead said over 700 pieces of evidence were collected.

“The laborious task of collating is now under way. This necessitates quite an involved process of cataloguing vast amounts of material to be used as evidence in court,” he said.

What did they find, you ask? $20,000 in cash, for starters. Computers, radio scanners, fancy television sets and something the article mysteriously refers to as “animal health products.”

The 100 officers involved also found one gun. This merits an entire paragraph:

The discovery of one military style semi-automatic assault rifle reinforced earlier police warnings of the correlation between the drug trade and the illegal trade in firearms, he said.

Oh, if only the gangs in my neighbourhood had one gun apiece. I’m gonna shoot you, man, just as soon as I get back to my leader’s house, ask him nicely to give me his piece, find the ammo carton, and get back here! Gang-related disagreements in NZ are fought with baseball bats and knives — dangerous enough for the gang members, comparatively un-dangerous for innocent bystanders. Americans need to understand what the rest of the first world knows: that private gun ownership is nothing more than a ridiculous Hobbesian race-to-the-bottom. In purchasing a gun, you may marginally improve your own security, but having one more gun at large significantly decreases the security enjoyed by your neighbours, which pushes them in turn to arm up, until the unsafety snowballs and the neighbourhood starts to look like Richmond. That and Americans need to learn to read, because most of you seem to think the Second Amendment protects private gun ownership, when it does nothing of the sort.

If only the electorate here were willing to act to prevent U.S. gangs from amassing their typical small armouries. Then there might be less reason for me to fear my local Safeway.

I came back to San Francisco on the last Tuesday of November. Through careful plotting of timestamped Paris-related postings, supercilious IM communications, and diligent editing of my Facebook wall, I was able to prevent news of my homecoming reaching Peter in advance of the event. In fact, we spoke via gchat while I was unpacking my suitcase in our apartment. He was working his day job, at an independent bookstore.

4:59 PMPeter: how was the louvre?I guess I could just read your blog to find out5:00 PM me: hahahyes, you couldthe louvre was really greati wish i hadn’t waited so long to goi was really intimidated by itit’s just so bigi think i’m going to edit the blog though5:01 PMi think i jump from being serious to being flippant too quicklyalso i’m never sure if I’m funny in writing5:03 PM Peter: oh, I couldn’t even tell you. I read two paragraphs before you got on-line.5:04 PM I recalled you calling a painter a douche, which I thought was classically you.5:05 PM me: no i called mark antony a douchehe was the subject of the paintingPeter: ahme: well, it was of cleopatra committing suicide when they bring in his bodyi mean, the way the story is told he seems like a douche5:06 PM ok well if you think the joke is appropriate it staysPeter: I’m surprised one’s allowed to take photos in the louvre.me: what about the used-condom oysters? i think the resemblance is strikingPeter: I haven’t seen the rest of your blog yet.5:07 PMme: i think the louvre has given up on stopping the photographic train they post all kinds of signs saying don’t photograph the mona lisa, and then the docents just rope it off and look kind of bored while everybody flashes away5:08 PM me: sweetie i gotta sleep nowand i have a 9 a;.m. casting, blech5:09 PM which is why i should’ve been asleep an hour ago :(Peter: good night.me: looking forward to talking to you5:10 PM like, looking forward to talking to you voice-to-voice:)byePeter: byeme: for now

About a half hour and one ride on the 6 Parnassus later, he found me browsing new fiction. It took him at least thirty seconds of abortive syllables to get a whole word out.

Best. Practical joke. Ever!