Jenna’s Model Life

Which exotic locale is this puffy-eyed, underslept vision in green off to? My plane neighbour was an 11-year-old Korean girl — part of a tour group visiting top U.S. universities — and she was as excited at the prospect of her first visit to this particular world city as she was thrilled by the thought of doing extension programmes at its resident Ivy institution. Guessing yet? Oh here, I’ll just tell you.

You could say I’ve come to take my bite of the Big Apple, to work out my insomnia in the City that Never Sleeps, to capitalise on my assets in the Capitol of the World, to step out of the shadows in Gotham, to make a name for myself in the City So Nice They Named It Twice. To prick my ego in the Greatest City On Earth, and to extend my reign in the Empire City. I’ve arrived where Chip Lambert doesn’t work at the Wall Street Journal, where Lily Bart kills herself with chloral hydrate, and where Holly Golightly breakfasts at a certain jewelry store. I’ve been here just over a week now, and so far I’ve settled in to a new agency, learned the subway (and the infinite merits of Hopstop.com), and repeatedly patronised the best falafel cart in town (which I’m happy to report is run by a friendly Egyptian on 8th Ave. between 15th and 16th Sts. He’s putting his daughter through NYU with the proceeds of his delicious, homemade falafel and soups). This is the ubiquitous self-taken Times Square shot:

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Also worthy of note: This guy, in the subway station — breakdancing with four other dudes in a routine they perform in a constant 15-minute loop.

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Look at him go.

Lastly, bulldogs. Seen in SoHo.

More updates to come — life is busy here, as it’s the run-up to show week, so excuse me if I’m occasionally short on words and long on snapshots.

Look at all the stuff I’ve made since I’ve been home from Paris.

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Grey houndstooth check silk self-lined cap sleeve blouse, indigo cashmere scarf with periwinkle lacework ends, men’s saddle-stitched wallet in recycled black leather, periwinkle cashmere kilt-stitch scarf, black suede band for vintage Elgin watch, all by Jenna. Not pictured: Indigo-and-periwinkle cashmere fan-and-feather scarf, given to aunt for Christmas. Tools used: Hammer, awl, gym-buffed guns, straight pins, linen thread, bookbinder’s needles, tailor’s chalk, rotary cutter, iron, knitting needles (sizes US 6 and 8), beeswax, many hours of NPR podcasts.

This is what happens when you have too many ill-fitting cashmere sweaters, an ugly black leather skirt you bought for 3 Euro in a friperie, a watch without a band, and a lot of free time.

My senior year of college, I started holding Friday craft sessions in my and Peter’s tiny apartment. I called the event Crafternoon!, invited all my friends, and we would sit around knitting, felting, sewing and patternmaking. Uncertain crafters would bring thrift-store finds with missing buttons or torn linings. Experienced folk would make entire garments. And we’d all drink tea (or Bloody Marys). It was a good excuse to clean the apartment at least once a week, and I enjoyed prioritising time during college for a form of expression that was manual instead of intellectual.

Mostly Crafternoon! reminded me of sewing and talking about sewing back in New Zealand with my best friend, Sophie, and wearing our dueling home-made jeans to school mufti days. (I remember I was very proud of a pair I’d made was edged with a metric shit tonne of white piping, and featured red accent fabric that striped down the sides and morphed into shin-height pockets, while my favourite of hers was a pair with a lazy fluoro green wiggle of trim that curlicued up one leg and then cleverly edged the corresponding hip pocket. Our jeans were as a rule wide-legged, busily trimmed, and constructed of inky dark denim. God we wore such ugly, complicated, pants.)

I miss Crafternoon! because crafting with only a (n incredibly wonderful, patient, cuddly, easygoing) cat for company feels a little spinsterish. When I start making cat-themed projects, or actually incorporating Truman’s copious quantities of loosed fluff into my wares (cat-hair felt? cat-hair batting? cat-hair as raw product for homespun yarn? these are the things I think about), then it’ll be time for an intervention.

Until then, please excuse me, I have to make some jeans.

Sometimes you have to do unfortunate things to your cat. Like bathe him.

Spent the other day splashing in the tub with Truman Capote (first thing Peter said in the shelter: “That cat looks exactly like Truman Capote!”), his special danger yowl tearing at my eardrums and plying my heartstrings. Most cats are self-cleaning, but Persians — which we think Truman is, at least partly, given the nose, eyes, and coat — have so much fur that they periodically need help.

Washing and grooming it while it’s wet lets you comb out acres of hairy muck. And Truman is such a good kitty he actually doesn’t mind the hairdryer at all (tip I picked up from a Persian breeder — better than letting him track water all over the apartment and giving his coat the chance to matt when wet and then set into a helmet of knots as it air-dries).

But give me one look at those big, sad eyes and I’m melting.

Yes, grooming is so much more fun when you do it, you big cream-puff. As you were.

At some point during my dad’s birthday dinner (at Pizza Orgasmica, which he’s been going to with his brother since they first moved to San Francisco together in the late ’70s), I took a step away from the table and felt a familiar pinching.

My bronze embroidered Jil Sander flats, size 40, eagerly purchased used this Spring on eBay for $40, never really fit. Nevertheless, in some triumph of fashionability and suppressed buyer’s remorse over practicality, I wore my flats to my graduation barbecue, to dinner with my grandparents, to class, to the radio station where I worked — anywhere I knew I’d be mostly sitting. I recall vividly wearing you, dear Jils, to the library one day in May. My feet were swollen by the Iowa heat, and even though you forced me to give up the game and walk barefoot from the Pentacrest on, I still had blisters for a week. That wrecked my confidence in you — except I still kept you around because I held some glimmer of hope for your suitability as footwear for cooler, tights-wearing climes.

I took you to Paris for autumn and I wore you once. That was really it.

So I caught you up in my end-of-year closet edit, and didn’t look back. You went in the bag with the sweater with the too-short arms, the skirt that doesn’t fit anymore, the shirt I last wore at Christmas 2004, the 1940s jacket I always meant to alter, the bootleg jeans and the slightly scuffed $7.99 eBay Gucci pumps (an alleged size 10) that hurt my feet so badly I wore them outside the house precisely once, and that was to get the mail. I put you all in four Trader Joe’s bags, and I hauled you to Haight St. The remaining 9/10 of my closet, including my more successful eBay operations, breathed a little easier, and my closet rail sprang back a little from its permanently burdened sag.

In line at one of the stores I was hitting, I sized up my fellow waiters: A middle-aged woman holding a sequined 1980s cocktail dress on a hanger. A girl in her twenties wearing a hoodie and carrying a knapsack. Two Latino guys with a giant tote bag. A girl my age, reading Housekeeping to pass the time.

The sequined dress lady and the hoodie woman started talking. “Well, he’s in the hospital,” whispered the woman in the hoodie. “A motorcycle accident.”

“Oh my God,” replied the sequined dress lady.

“He’s in a really good union, but he wasn’t hurt on the job. He has pins all in his leg.”

They turned away and I couldn’t hear the sequined dress lady’s reply.

“It’s just hard to go from him earning $6,000 a month to nothing, just like that, you know?” The hoodie woman snapped her fingers.

The buyer called me up just then. While she was silently going through my clothes, checking labels and examining my pants for evidence of period blood, I glanced over at the doorway as the sequined dress lady and the hoodie woman were leaving. Her outfit was so loose it took until she shouldered her knapsack and her hoodie shifted a little for me to notice she was pregnant.

If you want the Jil Sander flats, they’re on sale at Wasteland for $70.

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This awesome dude, whom I found busking opera-style with a boombox on Maiden Lane in San Francisco, wishes you happy holidays. As do I.

December is a festive time for my family, what with my mother’s birthday, my dad’s birthday, my birthday, and that small matter of Christmas and New Year all crowding the month. (My September-born brother is the only trendbreaker in the family.) The discipline of so much celebration leads us to practice a sort of end-of-the-year of extremes: we vomit in mall trash cans during 5 a.m. Boxing Day sales, we cook stuffing recipes which call for 4 lbs of sausage and 10 diced apples, we have screaming fights on December 25th while wearing fur coats, we serve dinner hours late for uncertain reasons, and we veg out in front of Myth Busters for the rest of the day. The whirl of sequential holidays becomes a vortex of accretion, and then New Year wipes the slate clean.

This year, my parents came to me (and to my SF-based aunt, uncle and cousins): let me take this opportunity to thank you, Mum and Dad, for not obliging me to travel to Minnesota. I just checked and it’s -16º C there. My brother and father seem to have spent the week before Xmas arguing about snow and driveway snow-shoveling. I’m pleased to have been spared that.

My aunt cooked a tremendous dinner, which involved a flock of dead Cornish game hens and half a lamb, as well as a squash soup with a cranberry reduction which was furnished by a guest. The meal for 13 was served in Peter’s and my living room, with our scaredy cat, Truman Capote, confined to the bedroom for the evening. There were two kinds of stuffing, and we didn’t even take the foil off the final dish of leftovers until Friday afternoon.

Let’s summarise in pictures.

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We visited the Japanese fashion exhibition at the Asian Art Museum. Highlights: Seeing a Yohji Yamamoto twisted silk wedding dress I remember from a Paris Vogue editorial. Seeing the dress above (also by Yamamoto). Seeing plenty of iconic Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo, Junya Watanabe, and Yamamoto.

Lowlights: Seeing only Miyake, Kawakubo, Watanabe, and Yamamoto. They’re all immensely talented, but they’re all names you’d come up with in the first thirty seconds of a brainstorm on post-1950 Japanese fashion. Boring curation (bunch of dresses in near-darkness, on mannequins lined up in front of a wall, organised by designer — snore), even non-flash photography not permitted (shot the above boiled wool frock surreptitiously; the suited docent pacing the back of the room had me so freaked all my shots of Kawakubo’s glorious aluminium-rod dresses were blurry. Bastard!)

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Look at my mum and little bro, all museum’d out! There were Korean monks making religious paintings and prints in this atrium. We sat and watched a woman in saffron and maroon robes score the outlines of waves in black paint.

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This was the line outside House of Nanking, clearly the Bay Area’s best Chinese restaurant, on a Saturday at 3 o’clock. I let Mum, Peter, and little bro run along to City Lights to browse and called them back 20 minutes later when I had scaled the queue. Actually I took this photo when Peter was being my temporary place-holder: he’s the one wearing a navy jacket, red hoodie, and brown hat, and giving me the What The Hell Are You Taking A Picture Of This For? look. Bless him.

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Little bro, who started college this autumn, enjoyed the house blend jasmine flower tea very much. Other recommendations: The salt-and-pepper mushrooms, the crispy garlic fish, the pork dumplings, and the shrimp pancakes with house peanut sauce.

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This looks self-taken, but actually Peter was kind enough to frame and focus the shot. My eyes are, however, not green.

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Later that afternoon, we met up with my aunt and, at her urging, made the final seating at a spot called Lovejoy Tearooms. Look at the spread: crumpets with Devonshire cream and lemon curd, petit fours, salad, tiny crustless sandwiches, scones, and sliced fruit. Peter had a delicious Shepherd’s pie. We shared two pots of tea — Lovejoy’s gumboot blend and a Yorkshire Gold — and it was divine. The place looks like Dolores Umbridge’s office, with every available space bedoilied and becoseyed and covered in floral motifs and lacework crochet, only there’s nothing sinister about great tea served properly. The severed hands bracketing the picture are Peter’s (left) and my aunt’s (right).

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Mum and Auntie share a scone with a quickness too fast for this Pentax Optio W10’s image stabilising algorithms. I think I’m going to put the kettle on. This post has already motivated me to reheat leftovers from House of Nanking. God how can anyone make mere mushrooms, salt, pepper, Thai basil, and onion taste so superplusdelicious?

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Dad’s birthday doubles as New Year’s Eve. Last night he was spoiled with ties, a chocolate cake, a cherry/pear pie, gelato, a Dilbert book, and a perspex reading lectern to latch onto the handlebars of his stationary bike.

Then Peter and I watched Paris, Je T’aime with my aunt and uncle, and drank champagne. Happy New Year, everyone.