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Nancy has a wonderful post up about her daughter's 60-second New York modeling career (Tavie is a 4-6, and would have had to be a 2-4 for the tall, skinny gates to open). Be sure to read the comments, in which Nancy says, among other things, "I adore Kate Winslet. To me she is the most beautiful and interesting contemporary actress, a woman who looks as though she eats and laughs and farts and thinks."
Amy asked for more pictures of my Portland house, so here they are. I bought the place in November, because I love Portland and want to live here someday. My timing was good, as the market has gone nuts since then, and today I wouldn't have been able to do it. I furnished the house remotely, from California, buying everything from teaspoons to headboards off of eBay and craigslist. My previous homes (before I took to living on boats) had always been furnished in thrift store kitsch.
But eBay is like the Salvation Army on
steroids. If you can think of it, you can find it. So I indulged myself in Rya rugs, spaghetti lamps, a Werner Panton chandelier, even a fur bedspread. I did it all in a hurry, knowing I was going to quit my job soon and might never have another one. And freelancers just don't buy furniture. Because the house is tiny (around 700 square feet), it was easy to do it up top to bottom for a couple thousand dollars total--spread over the course of six months.
My favorite room is the master bedroom, which is a deep maroon. It's a color that I've always been conflicted about, as it isn't one I particularly "like," though it's probably the color that looks best on me. Go figure. Nothing in the room refers to the maroon--I have black, red, gold and hot pink going on there. In the second bedroom, the walls are a deep purple, and everything else is bright. The beds are out of the old Roosevelt Hotel, as are the black lampshades lined with gold.
I mentioned earlier that Portland's light and weather is intolerant of heavy makeup and bright colors. But the opposite is true for decor--the overcast gloom outside actually enhances that vibrant David Lynch palette.
Here is Jill, who has one of those haircuts that so perfectly suits her face that it doesn't read as being a style--it's just part of her. The best sign of a good haircut is when you can't imagine the person in a different cut. Also, Jill could wear this hair any time in this century or the last with perfect aplomb. Jill is a television writer and LA transplant, and I went to a clothing exchange party at her house in the Northwest hills a few nights ago. A dozen stylish Portland women brought their high-end cast-offs to Jill's house, where a frolicsome yet civilized sample sale ensued. I came away with several Portland-friendly shirts and trousers, which I've been wearing ever since.
Once upon a time I used to write beauty stories for InStyle--you know, those "what's in your makeup bag" celbrity interviews. After one of them about a certain black actress who shall remain nameless appeared, her publicist called to berate me on her behalf. Why? "You referred to her hair as being "colored." She considers that a racial slur."
Welcome to life in journalism.
On my trip to Portland, I have landed in the midst of what my sister-in-law, Nancy Rommelmann, has dubbed "a tempest in a saucebox." Nancy, an award-winning food writer, moved to my hometown recently, where she began reviewing restaurants for the Willamette Week, the city's venerable alternative newspaper (where I interned once around 25 years ago). Nancy recently reviewed "Saucebox," owned by Portland's top restauranteurs, one of whose previous joints, Zefiro, was my favorite restaurant for years (I learned about preserved lemon from a New Year's Eve Moroccan tagine I can still taste). Anyway, Nancy, like Goldilocks, found Saucebox too salty and too sweet. Only the alcoholic beverages were just right.
Well, the owners of Saucebox responded with epic vitriol, browbeating the newspaper, threatening Nancy, and generally behaving atrociously. As a former editor of an alternative weekly, I felt for the Willamette Week editors. But I was apalled by their lack of support for Nancy. They didn't publish the nasty letters by the restauranteurs--but did publish nasty letters from "readers" who were clearly friends of theirs, berating Nancy and accusing her of being a drunk, among other things. (Don't the editors there know that libel laws apply to letters as well as stories.)
Now, however, the justice is waxing poetic--had WW published the letters, all this might have died down. Instead, the letters have now made their way into the hands of bloggers, and the tempest is now in full brew. It's worth checking out even if you don't know Portland from Peoria, for the sheer drama of it. You can read excerpts from the letters here at PDX Food Dude's zesty blog, which has been getting 5,000 hits a day since the backstory broke.
I'm in Portland, visiting my house--and my family. I bought the place last year, spooked at the rising real estate prices, though I can't, for a number of reasons, move here full-time. So I just come up and play house when I can.
Yesterday I woke up to typical Portland rainy weather, got dressed and left the house--and was appalled at the clown face I saw looking back at me in the rear-view mirror of my rented Hyundai. I was wearing the same Tony & Tina cheek color, Rocket City lip gloss in Zap (it's a berry) and seafoam green Pout eyeshadow that I'd been wearing quite casually in Southern California for the past week, but under the white Oregon daylight I suddenly looked like a bloated, aging drag queen. A drag queen with no taste, that is. I rubbed as much of it off as I could, and have been wearing no makeup since then but clear lip gloss, as nothing I brought with me is suitable. My brother later confirmed that "people don't wear as much makeup here." And not because they have some kind of back-to-nature anti-makeup ethic, but because it doesn't look good.
The quality of light is so different here that it dictates an entirely different way of being, aesthetically. I've noticed that this is true for makeup, clothing, and even housepaint. I would have thought, for instance, that really bright, almost caribbean colors would mitigate against the gloom when it came to houses--but quite the opposite is true. Without the buttery wash of sunlight to soften them, bright colors look ridiculous. What works here are deep, saturated colors. Here's a picture of the master bedroom in my Portland house. You'd think this dim, jewel-toned room would be dark and depressing here in the northern gloom, but it's at once cozy and uplifting. In Southern California, I think this maroon chinoiserie look would be depressing as all get out.
What stylish women in Portland do instead of makeup, I've noticed, is get themselves fantastic haircuts. The hair here is amazing. I'll try to snap some pictures of some of the great cuts I see every day over the next week.
Arrived in Portland yesterday and was whisked away to Pharmica by my sister-in-law, Nancy. Pharmica is a neighborhood pharmacy, but like every store in Portland, it's got more in common with a zen temple than a Rite Aid. Warm colors, blond wood shelving, ambient lighting, the scent of lavender wafting in the air.... The retail bar is set very, very high in this town. Tacky linoleum and fluorescent lighting will put you out of business. Nancy has been haunting Pharmica lately, waiting for KRich cream from a skincare line called Sanitas to arrive. She and I both have dermatitis (similar to Rosacea, but not quite the same), and she says this stuff works (as do the Sanitas Natural Moisture Factor and Hydrating Toner). Living in Portland is also good for the skin: the sun seldom shines and the air is extremely, um, hydrating. My dog came along on this trip, and right now he's sitting by the back door barking at the rain, which disconcerts him almost as much as do fireworks. Arf! Why is the sky leaking?
While other makeup bloggers are trying to give up foundation experimentation, the fun for me is just beginning. The bottle of Trish McEvoy Even Skin foundation that I bought in LA in December has finally started to run out; for the last few months, I've been wondering when that would happen. I've been happy with that product, but I'm not paying London prices for it.
I've got combination skin - shiny but also dry - and want something that will give me good coverage without looking chalky or mask-y. Any suggestions?
To add to my recent diatribes against totalitarian makeup and the destructive pessimism of "taste" (as opposed to "style"). To those of you who decry any color but brown and taupe as being "unnatural," I give you the pots of flowers I planted on the back patio this weekend, in a bid to introduce some of nature's more lurid notes to the expanse of concrete.
I've never been a coffee or tea drinker, so I've never been caffeine-dependent (my Diet Pepsi affection notwithstanding). That may change now that the world has its first ever caffeinated lip balm. And it comes in toffee vanilla flavour, not waxy Chapstick cherry. Not sure how I feel about the product name, though...
In an example of blogger chain mail, I've just been tagged by writer Nancy Rommelmann to answer these five questions about books:
The total number of books I own:
I live on a 27 foot sailboat where, when I needed new wall-to-wall carpeting, I went out and bought a bath mat, so in relative terms, I have a lot of books—at least 500, maybe as many as 800. Given the unfriendly marine environment, most of them live at my former place of employment, where my friend Stephanie (who has my old job) puts up with them.
The last book I bought:
A copy of Catch-22 for my thirteen year old son to read on the plane to Hawaii, where he’s gone with his dad this week. I didn’t tell him that while it’s one of my favorite books, I’ve never actually finished it.
The last book I read:
Last weekend I spent a day I should have been working reading Harlan Coben’s Just One Look, a trashy mystery in the glorious sense. I love the efficiencies of good suspense plotting, how dangerously lean the writing in a taut mystery can be—the older I get the less tolerant I am of the stylistic. Have I outgrown literature? Maybe so. There wasn’t a single gladiola or sunset in this book, thank God.
I am also reading Thomas L. Friedman’s The World Is Flat on CD, in my car, but since my car only gets around 12 mpg, I can only afford to read so many chapters at a time. I should get through the 18 CDs of the book by summer’s end. Which is alright, really, as it’s the kind of book that gets me het up and enervated after an hour or two and makes me want to stop reading and pace—hard to do in the car.
Five books that mean a lot to me:
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray. I recently re-read this book that I’ve been including in my “top five” since 1979. It’s still there. Becky Sharp is my favorite character in all of literature. The closest any character has come to her operatic complexity is Al Swearengen on HBO’s Deadwood. I think contemporary TV series are better than most contemporary novels—the highest art form of any era seems to always turn out to be the one nobody bothers to label “art” at the time.
Progress by Fran Lebowitz. Okay, so this book isn’t out yet, and may never be, but it still means a lot to me. The excerpt in Vanity Fair I read last year, “Is Everything Sacred?” was good enough to stand on its own (Quote: “’Love the sinner, hate the sin.'... to which the only and long-overdue response is certainly ‘Love the virtue, hate the virtuous.’”) I’ll take 3000 of her words over 300,000 of anyone else's any day. Why can’t a book be just three pages long if it’s good enough, I ask?
The Practical Encyclopedia of Good Decorating and Home Improvement. I happened upon this 18 volume encyclopedia from the early seventies in a thrift store. In it, I found the key to understanding my childhood. My brother and I grew up in a ramshackle Victorian whose interior had been “MOD-ernized by our hippie mother into an environment where great big purple stripes zig-zagged around giant orange suns (she called them “supergraphics”). It was glorious--until around 1978, when my mother developed “taste” and turned our world ecru and mauve. This set led me to revisit Robert Venturi’s Learning From Los Vegas, in which he explains how Coco’s Restaurants ruined our brazen aesthetic culture with their hanging ferns and wood grain formica. The rooms in the encyclopedia are full of color, imagination, whimsy—there’s nothing like them anymore. We live in an austere, cautious world where cookie-cutter mall-rat punks grow up to favor Calvin Klein and Toyota Camrys—having “taste” is now a substitute for having “style.” Where’s the fun in that, I ask?
Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham. The most exciting non-fiction book I’ve read since Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. Accurately subtitled “Big Ideas from the Computer Age,” Graham refuses to submit to categorization. His explanation of the high school socialization process that produces nerds is brilliant, as is his explanation of what a programming language is and does. Graham has begun to digest the phenomenon of Silicon Valley in terms of culture—the first to really do so at such a sophisticated level. Somewhere in the world right now, a 15 year-old who will change the way the world looks and feels ten years from now is reading this book.
Running the Amazon by Joe Kane. Simply one of the most glorious waterborne epic ever written, this non-fiction account of an unlikely voyage down a river is every bit as memorable as Heart of Darkness or Moby Dick. I’ve yet to meet anyone who has read it and didn’t react with awe. A modern-day Odyssey.
Tag five people to answer these questions on their blogs:
Maia Lazar, one of those 15 year olds who will change the world (and she's already answered these questions). And Ilya Vedrashko of MIT Advertising Lab. Philip Littell has a blog he never uses, and Franklin Cudjoe of Imani Ghana has a website, but no blog (yet). And I'd like to hear what Elvis the Chihuahua is reading over at Chiwowwow.biz.
Jack--who tagged Nancy in the first place--answered here.
