En Vogue, OUT Vogue.

I went to CVS to get some last minute wrapping paper, and decided to check out some magazines for haircut ideas. As I grabbed the nearest wrapping paper with little skiing snowmen, and a Vogue, I was pleasantly surprised to see a Venice local who's face I knew well on page 98--the cook/co-owner of Gjelina. I had seen him almost every day for years when the restaurant was in its earliest stages, and there he was chopping fish in the form of electric blue hues of a Vogue photograph. Applause applause! I don't know him personally, but I mentally slapped him a high five as a Venice resident myself.

This unexpected spotting kept my fingers turning through the magazine. In this spread, the same model poses with other people rising to stardum-- a classical musician, a pilot, an athlete along with our chef from above, so that Vogue can present their impossibly fancy dresses eight inch stilletoes with real-people doing their thang. Okay, I like this concept. Even though the model looked like a fan/groupie/gold-digger in all of the photos, the spread celebrates fashion while showing a sense of awareness of people that are working hard to get to where they are today ... and it did get me to buy the magazine after all.

However, then I got to the page entitled, "Already Famous," in which a model poses with different bands on the up and up. "Eight music headliners play backup to Sasha Pivovarova." The model smiles and grabs each guy's arm while clutching a million dollar purse. Okay, I understand that this is Vogue Magazine, whose content is all about the A-list of fashion and makeup. However, why couldn't they include a female musician as their model? Music and fashion (worlds that unavoidably rely on or relate to image and presentation) very often go hand-in-hand, and this spread seems to be trying to address that. By adding a sexy female model with all of these boyish musicians just perpetuates the stereotype that music is a male-dominated art, and that women are merely the pretty fashionable fans that help admire it. Of course, I might be equally offended if the magazine added the latest American Idol wanna-be "musician" to represent all female musicians, but either way, keep it real, vogue.

Vogue, mix and match fashion and music, but you don't need to separate the fashion from the music to do so. If you are going to use music to amp up your fashion, keep it real and use some female musicians, who would rock that haut couture fashion just as well, if not better. C'mon. Images of token fans and trophy wives are just out of style.

New Yawk Ciddy

New York City.
I love living in Los Angeles. My quickly turning white fingers and toes love the steadfast 70 degree weather in Los Angeles. But as I gave up my seat for a handicapped lady on the nyc subway (and watched a teen slip into it before the lady), pursed my lips as the wind slapped around the high rise buildings, and drank beers at a bachee ball bar/lounge in Broolyn, I couldn't help but sigh. New York. The hustle, bustle and standoffishness that I missed so much was surprisingly refreshing, and the biting cold the tough love I needed.

There are always going to be "me people"--those that most horrifically consider themselves above intuitive understandings of manners and courtesy. These include folks on airplanes who pack two suitcases in the overhead bin while her neighbors fight for the last small nook and cranny. Those that take up two spaces on the subway while an older woman stands shivering from fatigue. But somehow, it seems dare-I-say allowable in New York City.

I'm a down to earth person. I have helped others far more times than i have myself been helped. But here in New York City somehow the buzz of survival-of-the-fittest is itself artistic. Whether it is squeezing into a two-thousand-dollar-a-month closet space for an apartment, cramming tired feet in stilletoes, or starting a fight with the woman in line for taking too long to order her bagel, perhaps it is all just part of New York City folklore. We create our own culture based on what we think it is supposed to be, or the way we imagine it to be. The feedback loop that is snippy, fast-paced new yawk siddy badassness is created, recreated, and copied and pretty soon we are all part of it, and then we actually miss it.

Still, like ice skaters clad in identical blue boots in Bryant Park, we'll constantly slip, slide, giggle, curse, and glide gracefully with our own individual flavor, altogether creating an image of excitement and the unexpected, however harsh we may seem.

Green pastures on the same side.

I admit it. My romantic heart is accessable by writing fingers only when on an adventure. And that adventure is often away from home. Cape Verde, Brazil, Senegal... what about my own driveway? What about the things I know?

I'm sorry green pasture. I will do my best to stop seeing, staring, and obsessing over the pasture on the other side of the fence.

A poem for my driveway:

Black, sturdy, repaved hundredfold
conversed with toes from two-year-olds
withstanding the heat of family ski trips,
sun-baked chalk games and skipping hips,
Driving lessons and stalled goodbyes,
Years alone. I turn home. we greet. I sigh.
Thank you driveway.