You Get a Timeout Time Out

I never finished the Boston story, but I'm going through receipts and I cam across the Rachel's Kitchen card. The joint got what seemed like columns in the Time Out Boston travel book. And photos - at least three.

The place holds six people. Max. And those six will already be there because they live in the neighborhood. Just so you know. Just so you don't go to Boston and walk a mile with are we there yet kids in below 10 weather and expect anything, well, bigger. Just in case.

It's a cool spot, but if visiting, treat it as a take out destination and be pleasantly surprised if it turns into anything else.

Parenthood Should Require Some Type of Test Besides Urine

It's 10 degrees outside, Farhenheit. A 15 month old bundled up like the Michelin kid is standing on the sidewalk crying. Why is he crying? Hmmm, my guess? Mittens. He wants some. Someone decided that his thick middle part needed protection, but not the tiny digits at the far end of his upper extremities.

No, no, now stop that. Don't give him a cookie. He doesn't want a cookie. He wants the pins and needles to stop. Whew. Thank goodness the light turned green.

Another One Shelved

Although Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy was the all time favorite for belly laughs, A & C Meet Frankenstein got it's share of repeat performances around here as humor training for youngsters. You can't do comedy without the physical. Timing matters. But I completely missed that its screenwriter, Robert Lees, had 1. been blacklisted thanks to McCarthy and then 2. in 2004 met with such a horrible end by a crazed murderer. Beheaded, mon dieu. And of course the naive idiot that I am used to think that such a death meant - nay required - a clean machete type swing, but no. Some recent article about a now-banned, pro-terrorist London blogger advised me that, if you want, it can be done in a slow, painful, sawing way, the way I sever turkey parts with bandaged fingers every year. My guess is, the hard way is how it's done by a crazed, Bible-n-mace carrying schizophrenic.

Gosh darn it. It's not like the talented guy'd been through enough. I am so sickened.

Another movie I'll never be able to watch again without wanting to vomit. Or any others in our collection for that matter, like when A&C think they've blasted off to Mars, but really the rocket lands in Louisianna during Mardi Gras but because of the costumes Bud andLou can't tell the difference. Think of the high concept pitch for that one.

During the red carpet for this year's Oscars, the youngest - the one who years earlier had spent a winter watching the The Mummy on continuous loop - looked at Diablo Cody and said, "I know her. She played the bad lady on that Hey Abbot Mummy show." Well, She wasn't too far off the mark. Photos of Ms. Wilson via IMBD and Diable from the LA Times.

Glamma Blitz

I posted on the Oscar red carpet here. Last night I watched E!'s Fashion Police and found out I am a bitchy gay fashionista.

Now I'll have to redo all the curtains in the house. I hate chintz.

Ray and Charles? A Little Help, Please

It's official. It's a worldwide epidemic or idea theft. Every design magazine, from home to furniture to clothes is telling me what the new classics are. How delightfully pretentious. I really expect to see some gray in the hair and some fat around the edges of these guys and gals before I'm going to agree that their chair/suit/lanai solor roof pattern creation is a classic.

"Oh, yes. Have I shown you this. It's my latest. Made it last night. Yep. It's a classic."

There's just not enough room in the room for that kind of blow. There's a slow food movement a foot I've heard (I'd know more about it if I had any tastebuds). Maybe there should be a slow taste movement. Let the product live, swell, ride the currents and survive or die. I think that's what the word classic kind of, um, means.

I'm not giving an inch on this one.

Like Cat Woman, Fer Sure

According to the LA Times,

Wintour has been under attack this week for her influence over the Milan show schedule. Top runway presentations here, once stretched over seven days, have been compressed into four days this season after Wintour wrote to Italian fashion designers asking them to group shows closer together to save editors a long, expensive stay in Milan.

The shortened schedule has left some younger designers out in the cold, unable to attract editors to their shows, and has prompted journalists and some designers to speak out against Wintour.

So, it sounds like corporate is getting ugly American cheap and pushy, but, as with everything else, there is likely to be more to it, such as five hour breaks between shows, perhaps? Milan is the closest thing one can find to a New York attitude in Italy, but it is still Italy and has it's own internal clock. The NYC Fashion Weeks run like a machine, and feature designers from nine in the morning to nine at night, both on and off site. Front rows are filled with trades people filling out their forms, along with some press and a handful of celebrities. It's mostly about moving product with the showbiz blitz only the topping.

It's probably the last thing Anna wanted to do but the first order of business she felt necessary. These semi-annual fashion shows, like film award festivals and tennis' grand slams, have all become part of a series, so get a new job it you can't figure that uniformity is right behind.

I need a place to write down this fascinating phrase, Super Sofas. That's how stupid my life is.

I just wrote a whole piece spelling "couch" as "coach." I am a retard, although my brother - who called me that incessantly when we were kids, told me not to use that phrase any more. He's right, so I'm going with metard instead - it's something about the long "e" and the "t" sound and the "ar" that makes it work so as a bad word. Some words just swing that way. Simply irresistible to the lips, tongue and jaw. I'm not sure if that change saves it. I'm not a mean person at all; just terminally stuck in my childhood 70's.

Anyway, there is an entire series of sofas with metal legs surfacing. They cost a fortune, and they come on spindly metal, cheap looking legs that look as if they'd run away if Pee Wee owned 'em. Or crack your toes open in the middle of the night. Super Sofas need Super Bases - whatever happened to symmetry and balance. And they're up so high off the ground and so exposed that dust bunnies will show for miles. I'll have to clean. Now I'm just crabby. Back to work.

There'll Be Stahs in Your Pahk

That's right. Every sound uttered by a Bostonian was repeated with aplomb and a hand gesture by the 7 year old. "I know he's from Boston 'cause he said 'heah' instead of 'here'."

"I'm sure he did honey. Now stop that. You're gonna get us hurt."

"Heah, heah, heah, Bawston, Bawston Bawston."
"Stop that right now."
"Heah, heah. Bawston, Bawston. Motha, can we go to a pahk?"

It's a testament to the good nature of the city folk that we made it home in one piece. And it was such a great place to visit. I had been there once before but that was two decades ago when visiting my student brother and the entire memory is one of dark basement bars. I didn't say it was a bad memory, but anyone who has ever survived a pub crawl would understand that now that I have entered damnable, respectable tourista age, this absolutely qualifies as a first visit.

I fell in love with Boston when I fell in love with Johnny Tremain. It's a simple as that. Now that my chances of scoring more likely fit within the catagory of a toothless and tenacious John Adams, the city still holds its sway.

I walked about violating my most sacred of travel rules, displaying a crumpled up map at all times. (I didn't care. The streets got confusing. I kept getting lost. I didn't care looking like a tourist. With one in five individuals being students or connected with the universities in and around the city - I can't remember what the tour guide said - I figured that another 10% had to be visiting next of kin and almost fogotten lovers and then another 5% cheap tourists, what with it being the discount month of February.) So I was open season for a well intentioned local who saw me fumbling. I had already passed the Omni Parker, the haunted hotel where Dickens was to have placed A Christmas Carol and was looking for the Old South Meeting House. I could have hit it with a stick, and kind of knew it, when the man said to my daughter and me, "Can I help you ladies?"

(con't after I get some work done)

Notes

Seems Cintra Wilson from the Times agrees with me on Victoria's Secret. I'll upload the link when I retrieve my computer with my dumb ol' bookmarks. "Victoria’s Secret has not made its money by being subtle. Its apparent formula for mass-marketing fantasies is to turn the erotic into the banal."

As for Westminster, is it my imagination, or did all the toy and non-sporting breeds have wooley mammoth sized handlers, while the wooley mammoth size working dog breeds have airily-attired tiny handlers. Must be my imagination ... I'd go through all the films (the video that the site offers is amazingly complete), but after a while the dogs within each breed seem to look identical and the video stuck in a continuous loop.

Clothing: explore J Brand for a plain and elegant thin-legged jean. But then Fashion Week news suggested that raggedy, barely holding on jeans (such as from Maison Martin Margiela) are the new look. I could have sworn massively distressed was two years ago, but I think what is new is the "barely holding on" part, which is supposed to be killer sexy. Well, yeah. (Just avoid thinking of cobwebs and that gown worn by a Marilyn Manson date a few years back.) Except how can I recreate the look? One rip I can do, but the shredding seems complicated and suggests that what I will end up with is a closet full of Daisy Duke cutoffs, which really isn't what I had in mind (or the butt cheeks to pull it off). I'll find a way. Now, when I wear dress pants, the kids say things like, "Are you a court clerk today?" Really, most dress pants give the suggestion that one's bottom stretches from the thoracic to the hamstring. One solution is a slightly lower and very wide waist band. Seriously, it creates a much better look, and And Alice + Olivia carries such a style.

Victoria's Sad Secret and Other Notes

Walk into Victoria Secrets lately, and the place looks more like pajama party-land than sexy runway or Super Bowl Party hubba-hubba. All those sweatpants, all the "PINK" plastered across the ass of everything. Bubble gum, bright stripes, and polka dots, oh my. I've noticed. My girlfriends have noticed. I don't know if guys have noticed. They have a tendency to be an inanimate lot once amidst the racks. Of clothes.

And now, the catalog, entitled "What is Sexy," confirms my fears. If you have to tell us you're sexy, dear VS, well, then maybe you're just not sexy enough.

The Slow Chair. Go to "Projects" and pan down.

The history of black as the outfit color of choice, from Suzy Menkes' Cross Currents (NY Times): Japanese designers rebelling against floral formality. Coco Chanel and the little black dress. Black surfaces as a color of choice as the rituals of mourning-wear wans. I can't get my eldest, who works in Midtown Manhattan during her studies, out of black. Black is sexy, black is strong, black allows the head and arms to take command - all good things. But it also suggests a hide-away comfort zone and conformist mentality which I never want to see, although I certainly can empathize. I came back from a brief work time in So. Cal., wearing tangerine sweaters and off-white pants, or yellow shifts with grass green belts, or baby-blue jeans with dark pink blouses. And darn if those shades didn't disappear from my wear list as quickly as a governor can butcher the name of his adopted state. I felt like an idiot in Upstate New York, where the color of choice is neither black nor bright, but beige and denim and none of those other who-do-you-think-you-are-missy hues. I long for my time of color, and so applaud the neon pink Raf Simons (for Jil Sander), YSL (burned orange), Gaultier (vintage red/maroon), Prada (bile green, a favorite on the name alone), Valentino (red carpet red), and all shades by Marc Jacobs - a true color hero.

Urban Outfitters beget Free People, Anthropologie, Leifsdottir, and Terrain. My spellchecker (already always screaming at me in red, and ignored) is going to go nuts if UO keeps reproducing.

White House Weddings for All

"Oh, gosh - I have to vote in the primary," I said to myself out loud this morning.

Right after trying to answer the "What's a primary?" question of the second grader in the car with me, I had to field the next question.

"Do you get to vote for yourself?"
No.
Why not?
I'm not running for president.
Why not?
Because I have stories to read at night and other things I want to do, things I couldn't do if I were president because I would be too busy.
But if you were president, we could live in the White House and you could do anything you wanted.

Let's see. She is seven years old. I guess that's the only kind of presidency that she has ever known.

NYC Notes

We crawled up out of the R Train stop at 36th Street in Astoria, Queens, to be greeted by cool air, weak sunshine, and industrial park emptiness. A tumbleweed could have blown by, had we not been in Queens, or it could have been a setting for an old black and white WWII movie, except for the Queens part.

"This doesn't feel so good," said my FIT student, with a rare display of survival instinct.

It was eerie, and there was no sign for the Museum of the Moving Image, but I had an address. "We have to find 35th Ave., and straight ahead of us was 37th Ave., so it's either that way further down into that abyss or 36th St. picks up on the other side of this, this monolith, and we have to find a way around it."

"I vote that 36th St. starts here and there's only one way to go," the eldest decided.

Because a blind vote seemed as solid a choice as any, abyss it was. Besides, the deadness was probably only because it was a Sunday. Mid-week, the place was likely to be loaded up with commerce and trucks and fast moving cars without mufflers and taxis trying to beat some jam on some airport-link highway. So we shuffled, my old self, my poshy college girl, my pretty 'n brilliant exchange student ward, and the seven year old. "I'll have to die, you understand, if there is a problem," I sighed in resignation, as a pit bull terrier tried to jump over his chain link encasement. "That's the game plan; I'll take the hit, you guys run for help. Or blackberry someone. No run, then blackberry." I imagined the jaws of that beast around my throat and a lot of blood. Yes, it's good to have a contingency plan, especially when you don't have enough sense to come in out of the rain or stay out of a deserted, body-dumping kind of hood.

But as we walked 36th St. and crossed 36th Ave. so obviously going in the right direction, the area seemed to go from black and white to color. People were building this up into living space, with a hip looking restaurant, condos in what was some old government building with columns, and an expansive 50's type diner that pulled in lots of local folks. And there it was, right on the corner: one of the coolest, hands-on museums I have ever been to, where we learned about how moving pictures were discovered, how television works (which still makes me insane thinking about how fast the image information travels), sound editing, and special effects. There was also plenty of movie and tv memorabelia. I loaded up the camera with tons of stock images. We did not participate in any demonstrations or sit through any of the kids or adult movies that were airing that day, but we could have.

As we walked back down lonely 36th St. towards the subway entrance, again past the troubled terrier, the seven-year-old said between hops and skips, "This has been the best day."