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.
9 responses so far ↓
Albatross // May 19, 2008 at 8:54 am
Cool! How long do each of those looks take? Seems like it must be hours between each…
photojenna // May 19, 2008 at 9:44 am
Yesterday I worked from 11 a.m. to nearly 8. We did four photos. Such is life! Such is fashion.
Dad // May 19, 2008 at 10:50 am
Jenna
Jenna
Moving pictures - what a novel idea! Still photos capture a moment and give it permanence when none exists. Video captures how fleeting the moments truly were. I love it! Give me more, faster.
Cheers
Dad
P.S. I love your choice of music for the sound track too!
Adam // May 19, 2008 at 1:15 pm
What model camera did you use to take this? And which one was the Croat talking about…?
Tim C // May 19, 2008 at 2:30 pm
This video is strangely entrancing. It’s like something pulled from the trailer of a Blade Runner-esque film.
Oh, and did you notice that the “Related Videos” listed by YouTube include several Jenna Jameson clips? Weird.
photojenna // May 19, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Adam: I have a Lumix DMC-LX2. In a post a long time ago
http://photojenna.wordpress.com/2007/10/16/bidbad-news/
I agonised over the choice of a new camera; I couldn’t have been happier with this. It’s fucking brilliant.
I believe my Croatian friend has the FX35 or the FX500. I’m not sure which.
Tim: Thanks. The cyberpunk-Rockabilly-of-the-1980s-future hairstyle totally made me think of Blade Runner, too. Specifically, the Rachael character.
Neo // May 21, 2008 at 10:54 am
The sort of Biba-esque purple one is my favorite.
Shelley // May 21, 2008 at 10:25 pm
Programmers/engineers, the diametric opposite of fashion folk (not models, the rest of them) have lots of fun, condescending terms for the real limitation on their elegant software/hardware creations… one of them is “wetware” (the user).
You can design a cool feature, but you can’t make them read the manual. The lore still spreads via tribal wisdom. You’re practically a witch doctor now.
Tim C // May 27, 2008 at 2:44 pm
A movie based on Neuromancer–William Gibson’s novel that is essentially Blade Runner + cyberspace + greater attentiveness to drugs and fashion–is now in the works. In a stroke of sadistic genius on the part of the producers (who must be former jocks who never got their fill of razzing geeks), Hayden Christensen will play the lead character and Joseph Kahn, the auteur behind 2004’s Torque and the Britney Spears’ video ‘Toxic,’ will direct. Send in your headshot now!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1037220/
In all seriousness, Neuromancer would make an amazing film if done properly. (Doesn’t look like that’s going to happen, however.) The filmmakers should maintain the 80s stamp of the book and resist the urge to ‘update’ it. Keep the big hair and the payphones and the “high-tech” cartridges, for example.
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