This is what I do for a living

Saturday was gorgeous here in New York City. I woke at 2 p.m., and went to Central Park with my friend the Croat. We hadn’t seen one another since last November, in Paris, when we’d met at a nightclub. A friend-of-a-friend, I’d grabbed the Croat’s hand and marched her to the bathroom when she proved no match for the unwanted attentions of a very dogged and creepy 27-year-old antiques dealer. I forget what we chatted about just then in front of the stalls, but I liked her, she liked me, and later that night we went for ice cream and wandered around the 4th arrondissement talking about gun control (people from Balkan states do not generally speak of loose firearms with the same indulgent rhetoric of “rights” that you hear so often in the United States).

Our wanderings yesterday paused on a lawn near E. 79th St. I pulled out my camera and started taking pictures of ducks, radio-controlled sailboats, and the Croat, as we sat together in the sunshine. “I took your advice and got a Lumix,” she said, waving a smaller cousin of my camera. “Mine takes great video.”

“Video?” I said. “I’ve never tried taking video. Is it hard?”

She looked at me pityingly and toggled a button on her camera’s playback. She showed me a movie of Paris, a movie of the guy she’s interested in, a movie of Amsterdam. “Wow,” I said.

“You wanna take a movie, you just push the button. And you watch it later like any picture. See? Yours is the same as mine.”

Never have I been so happy to be so totally pwned. Because now I can get across the wacky clothes, the behind-the-scenes banter, the passive-aggressive dance of stylist and photographer, the pretty anomie of the fashionista class, the teeming stripes-and-florals so-bad-its-great wickedness and nagging feelings of self-objectification that are my personal experience of fashion IN LIVING COLOUR.

Behold, this, my first video for public consumption. It looks fantastic on my computer, but alas what you see is fuzzy and full of compression artifacts picked up during its long export journey from iMovie.

I took the clip at my job today in Brooklyn.

Check the hair and makeup. I had some footage of the hairstylist visiting some crazy jheri curl nonsense upon my crown during one of the many liminal stages of the Day In Jenna’s Hair, but I didn’t realise when I was taking it that there was a strong light behind me, so it turned out to be too blown out to use. Apologies.

The song I used was “Dig Me Out” by Sleater-Kinney.

Blinding light

I stayed up for 36 hours the day I left San Francisco. Friday dawned with all the wild possibility in the world, and, accordingly, Bec and I opted for shopping over the Lee Friedlander exhibit at the SFMOMA.

Bec tried on beautiful things.

I tried on hideous things.

(This photo by Rebecca Norris.)

Although I intended the Zebra Jumpsuit Experience as a total shopping prophylactic, I somehow ended up being let out of Loehmann’s by the security guard at 8:15 p.m. having apparently purchased a white asymmetrical Helmut Lang blazer. Earlier this week, Bec helped me lug 5 massive bags of clothing to Haight St., where Wasteland was kind enough to give me a cheque for the endeavour. I would’ve almost done it for the sensation of lightness that followed me as I walked down the hill afterwards. So wonderful to get rid of the skirt that didn’t fit, the synthetic sweater someone gave me, and which I never liked, the top I’d had since high school, the various thrift-store finds that never quite made their way into regular circulation. I think there’s a reason why cleaning out your closet has taken on the aspect of metaphor. It means something to return home to something cleaner, tidier, literally more fitting, in times of strife.

And it also means something to buy a beautiful piece with your best friend that will never, ever remind you of your ex-boyfriend because it is firmly dated post-relationship.

Friday night Bec and I put the matter of Bloody Mary v. Caesar primacy to rigorous testing (verdict: Though Canadians and their snappy portmanteau clamato are very cute, my Bloody Mary is always a winner), and watched Something Wild with my friend Rachel. I sat paralysed in front of my laptop for an inappropriate length of time, worrying about what to do with my books, and then Bec went to sleep and I packed, haltingly. Soon I found myself watching the whitewashed fence that borders the little patio off the bedroom Peter and I shared turn dove grey, and I was still packing, and continuing seemed like the thing to do. By 6 a.m., Bec had cooked breakfast out of a selection of brown seedy things bought in bulk from Rainbow Grocery, and we ate her porridge with yoghurt and banana and then she left to catch her train and I kept packing. I watched the bedroom fill with sunlight that spilled over my apocalyptic mess of stuff, arranged into some arcane off-the-cuff taxonomy of piles that, by afternoon, took on all the tabus and prohibitions of the most long-standing ritual. I watched the sun swing around and begin shining full bore down my little street, lighting the living room, and then I knew it was time to begin putting the piles in my suitcases, and so of course I went to the living room to face the books instead. (Peter had already made his to-keep selections — in fact, earlier, when Bec mined his rejected-by-Aardvark-Books stack for potential reading material, she unearthed the copy of Requiem for a Dream I gave him for Valentine’s Day, 2005.)

I do not regret moving to San Francisco, even though my months in this city seem to me now in many ways fruitless. All told, I’ve spent a mere 92 days in my apartment since I started modeling. Plenty of things always marked me as in some irreducible way an outsider here. I was a person who leased but never would own. I never went to enough readings, or galleries; my investment in the local was such that no Chronicle even came to my doorstep. Every time I came into town for a week or ten days, I’d concentrate on seeing the same four or five people — most of whom I’d known since before moving into the city — rather than on making new friends. I never even got over that newcomer’s delight in being asked directions by tourists on the bus. But still. I’ll miss the wind. I’ll miss the ethereal, theremin whine of the electric buses. I’ll miss drinking through the Christmas beer list at the Toronado. Most of all I’ll miss the mood of post-collegiate hope in which I decided to cast my lot in with the bay area’s. Although in retrospect the move might seem ill-advised, I can’t imagine working up that amount of daring again anytime soon. Far easier to meander the globe, never staying anywhere long enough to have to pay a gas bill or make a commitment. But perhaps far shallower, too, to forever be passing through.

I hope that when I’m next in a position to do choose a home, I will do no worse than San Francisco, because it really does offer a multitude of blessings to those willing to cleave unto it.

Currently, I’m in Lahaska, Pennsylvania, a place in which it is very easy to go tanning or worship Jesus Christ or get electrolysis (COMPLIMENTARY CONSULTATION AND FREE 15-MINUTE TREATMENT!), but very hard to find a restaurant open after 9 p.m. Lahaska seems like the kind of town that, wising up to its potential for pokey, brick-facaded Northeastern cuteness, is just beginning to swap the drive-thru banks and outlet malls and fast food generalities for antique stores and B&Bs. Needless to say, its charms are somewhat less obvious than San Francisco’s. And yet, I am having the most wonderful time here, shooting a story on an island in the Delaware river, accessible only by a barge piloted by a dour custodian named Mark and his rescued puppy Midge.

I think things are going to be all right.

Only love can break your heart

I am fairly sure that if a permit had been filed in sufficient time with the Ventura County authorities registering an intention to shoot on a stretch of rocky Malibu coast on Monday, the 28th of April, as originally foreseen by my last client — a particularly talented young designer who rewarded me with several beautiful dresses and a blouse with cameo horsehead buttons — I would still be in a relationship with Peter today. But the permit was not in order, the job was pushed back to May 5; it was the only work I’d booked in some time and I needed the money and I had a place to stay and there was no question of backing out; so I bought groceries, and Burnett’s, and I unpacked my suitcase, never suspecting the extra week spent in Los Angeles would prove long enough for us to have one last fight, long enough for certain realisations to harden into certainty.

We have dated since my 19th birthday party; been in love since January 9th, 2005. Officially cohabitated for one year, nine months; unofficially, our separate leases became a technicality sometime in the late summer of 2005. He knows my surviving set of grandparents, and I once went to Racine, Wisconsin, to meet his U.S.-based grandma and maternal relatives. He gave advice to my brother, and I told Peter’s sister how lovely I thought her selected prom dress was, before spending long hours talking with his father about feminism and mathematics and books, in front of a raging fire in a farmhouse in the snowy months. I went to his graduation, and he to mine, and we had terrific, awful, vicious fights, the fights you feel between you like the edge of a knife for days after, the night and morning before both ceremonies. His B.A. completed, he lived one extra year in Iowa, for me. We adopted a cat. And we loved each other very much.

The usual things went wrong, to do with worldview, and money, and alcohol, and sex, and insecurity and projection and transference and the fact that I now spend eccentric periods in distant, seemingly glamourous, locales. We moved in when all we had was each other; even then, I think we suspected that it wouldn’t be enough.

It is not always pleasant or even satisfying in the abstract to be proven correct.

My dear friend Bec is visiting, by purest, most blessed coincidence, and it is the first time we have seen each other since the southern hemisphere summer we both turned 18. We are doing a San Francisco blitzkrieg tour to try and take my mind off the fact that, left to my own devices, it takes me two hours to finish a cup of ginger carrot soup, an hour to read an article in a newspaper, and that when my booker calls me on the phone with a money job, I burst into tears. Today we did Chinatown, exorcised my beloved House of Nanking, and spent two hours browsing City Lights’ shelves, during which time I managed to read exclusively parts of various of the books I’ve been pretending to have digested for some time now.

Yesterday, we went to the Conservatory of Flowers. Nothing like a toasty, bright greenhouse in the sanative high Victorian spirit, filled with bursting, dripping colour pour changer ses idées. Flowers as mental sanitation, as sedative, as alternative to the valium eiderdown.

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The self-played trick was almost working. And then I remembered that all flowers are beautiful because they are having sex, and that depressed me.

Then we decided to visit the special butterflies exhibit. Before we could be wowed by the beautiful pollinator hordes, we passed through the information section, a bare room full of kids absorbing diagrams of the proboscis, pistil, and stamen, and learning that bees see flowers in blue, and yellow, as well as colours in the UV spectrum that humans cannot, and found this:

After the information room, even this didn’t cheer me up.

At least, not enough.

I head East shortly. I do not know when I will be back to San Francisco. If you want a variety of tables, chairs, several wonderful bookshelves, a gorgeous solid oak-framed mirror that once belonged to the brilliant author Nam Le, and many, many books, it’ll all be on Craigslist soon enough.

8-bit flame

Problems:

1) Finding herself faced with the task of recounting experiences that, at best, only serve to illuminate the grinding tedium of everyday life (a task for which some writers [cf. Zola] have talent, but for which she has naught), the blogger has difficulties extracting the ore of true mineral writing from the slag of boring fights with friends, trips to drab chain coffee shops, predictable jobs in predictable dresses, and overpriced-drink nightclub conversations with tremendously silly people.

2) Finding herself blessed with too many sudden new friendships with interesting individuals, dramatic developments in old relationships, stunning coincidences of international travel, work-related excitements, and various museums and Cultural Experiences Worthy of Note, the blogger is similarly unable to process the hypersensory glut due to time constraints (and the fact that the many new friendships, etc, have left the blogger with a dire and urgent and total-Internet-attention-span-sucking need to Wiki herself up some information on Johannes Kepler, the viola da gamba, Henry E. Huntington, and the plants that support entire ecosystems in the rainwater pools they store in their centres, including fishes that never swim outside their leafy bounds).

The blogging paradox: Too little to do gives one too little to say. Too much going on at once removes all possibility of contemporary explanation.

Some scenes from the tail end of my Los Angeles trip:

This happened. (Photo by Bonnie Harrison.)

I ate Zankou Chicken with the man who made me first read Joan Didion.

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I saw Justice live one night at a club called Cinespace. My bruises came in very nicely.

I hiked. Several times. In borrowed shoes.

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The Griffith Observatory finds a very nice allegorical explanation of the universe’s progression from the Big Bang in various pieces of celestial-themed costume jewelry, pinned to board in a long, meandering line.

Everyone got excellent massages that night.

Obviously furious at the late-afternoon unavailability of the Sunday Los Angeles Times, a Pasadenan peppered his local dispensory with Chick tracts. Said my companion: “Abortion Stops a Beating Heart. Isn’t that kinda the point?”

Who knew the Los Angeles subway could be so telegenic? (Photo by Leo Tolkin.)

Apparently, when the observatory was built, light pollution was a non-issue. Also: Griffith J. Griffith shot his wife.

She survived.