The Hope of Spring

This past weekend on a whim, Emily and I decided to skip town and head for the coast.

We didn't really have a plan and the weather wasn't great – it snowed on us all the way through Olympia, Montesano, and Aberdeen.

No matter – the ocean is still nice when it's gray out, and there were signs it was going to clear up.

The Washington Coast is not that far away from Seattle (it took us maybe two hours to get to Grays Harbor) but feels really big and remote. It's yet another totally breathtaking feature of the Northwest.

We ended up staying in Astoria, Oregon (this is the view from our motel, looking North across the Columbia River to Washington).

First up, we stopped in at the Fort George Brewery for a beer (I recommend the IPA). The guy who renovated this 1924 building sat next to us at the bar and drunkenly gave us all the details. He also told us that adjusted for inflation, John Jacob Astor (for whom Astoria is named) would still be the third richest American of all time.

Mary Todd's Workers Bar & Grill was right across the street from where we stayed (The Dunes) and while their beer selection was shite, it's still a cozy little spot. I found a bunch of records next door last time I was in town, maybe 12 years ago or more.

That section of Astoria is called Uniontown and is or was apparently populated largely by Finns. This is their union hall.

On Sunday, with the weather a little improved, we drove around and explored Astoria a little more.

Certain occasional readers of this blog will be interested to know that The Goonies was set here. There are a ton of cool old houses, some perfectly restored and some boarded up, like this one.

Atop the tallest hill there's this big spiral engraved with the story of Lewis and Clark's journey.

There's a nice view of the river and there were a bunch of big bald eagles chasing each other around in the wind (you can't see them in this picture though).

After that we headed back to Washington and drove through Ilwaco on our way to check out Cape Disappointment, where Lewis and Clark ended their journey.

The beach at the Cape is huge and spectacular. It was windy and the waves there are some of the biggest on the West Coast. Tons of boats have sunk trying to navigate that area.

We walked out on a long jetty and sat there for at least an hour in the sun, looking out at the water.

There were a bunch of sea otters and some porpoises hanging around.

It was one of the cooler things I've experienced since we moved back to the West. We never did make it to the lighthouses but I'm sure we'll be back this summer.

‘‘To be thrifty is clever . . . the crime is to look it’’

Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, ca.1930's,
from the Vince Aletti Collection

Former long-time Village Voice fashion critic Lynn Yaeger (laid off a few years ago at the same time as Nat Hentoff...shows you what direction that paper was headed) had a good piece in The New York Times recently on depression-era fashion advice from magazines such as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, and this past weekend Kurt Anderson at Studio 360 spoke with her about the article. Click to listen:



More images and the full story here.

Also: Lynn Yaeger wrote about her own very unique personal style ("The world's oldest French orphan, circa 1930") in this fascinating 2005 article for T: The New York Times Style Magazine.

Lynn Yaeger photo by Elinor Carucci for The New York Times

Into the Mystic

[Stephen Shore's photograph of a billboard in Oregon.]

The New York Times' Ken Johnson has a review today of a new show I'm dying to see at MoMA: Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West. He notes that

The time during which white European civilization expanded into and eventually occupied North America coincides with the invention and development of photography. This is not just incidental. The idea of the West would be informed by machine-made images. That the medium itself can be used both for empirical documentation and visionary expression nicely mirrors the exhibition’s subject: the American West is real, but it is also a set of fantasies.

Johnson observes essentially that early photographs in the exhibition portray the hope and openness of the West, but that after World War II, things turn darker as those initial themes become "cliché for the tourism and real estate industries." The contemporary work in the show seems to reflect that with sometimes ironic cynicism. In conclusion he asks

Why does the exhibition project such a dim vision? Is it impossible for serious contemporary photography to see something better? Is failure and disappointment the real, unavoidable story? Or is it another myth, a paradoxically reassuring narrative to which many high-minded people now unthinkingly accede? If so, what would be the alternative?

[To which I answer: Have you not followed this very blog, sir?! For I am living it, somewhere between success and the skid road!]

And also that of course it's another myth, and worse, a predictable narrative for an exhibition such as this one to portray, if that is in fact what it does. But without having seen the show, I don't want to speculate too much – I'll have to re-visit after making the reverse journey to New York before Into the Sunset closes on June 8th.

Click here to read the New York Times review and see a slideshow of images from Into the Sunset, and click here to learn more about the exhibition at MoMA's brand new website.

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Elsewhere in photography, James Danziger has been covering the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) show at his blog The Year In Pictures – always worth a look.

Daughter of Migrant Tennessee Coal Miner,
Sacramento, California, 1936, by Dorothea Lange

Your Weekly Mr. Littlejeans

Jeans and his mama, chilling in the living room.

International Zone Coaster

Some highlights from a collection of coasters my dad acquired when he was in the air force, stationed in Pakistan and across Europe in the '60s…


My dad in Peshawar, 1963:

The sandals he's wearing were made out of old airplane tires.

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Could not be more unrelated:
Leaders of the New School The International Zone Coaster mp3

Fashion Fatigue

Paris Fashion Week was a marathon this year, with 60-odd shows over eight days. Word has it that even some of the editors ran out of energy and skipped town early. Wading belatedly through my picks from the week, I could sympathize – and I followed the action from my desk or couch, not upright in a pair of YSL Tributes or Louboutins.

What it takes. Photo of French Vogue staff via Jak & Jil.

The Paris collections are always exciting to me because they often unveil a fresh idea or new silhouette that changes everything and inspires a new turn in the direction of fashion as a whole. I didn't really see that this season (and maybe given the times and designers' need to justify their bottom lines – no pun intended – that was asking far too much). Still, although from that perspective some designers who have consistently hit home runs in the past (Nicolas Ghesquiere at Balenciaga and Alber Elbaz at Lanvin, to name two big ones) had offerings that disappointed me to a greater or lesser degree, there was plenty to love. Here's a sampling of looks that I thought had that je ne sais quoi (click to enlarge):

Wunderkind, Isabel Marant, Veronique Branquinho, Lacroix,
Collette Dinnigan

Vanessa Bruno, Sophia Kokosalaki, Haider Ackermann, Hussein Chalayan

Miu Miu, Limi Feu, Louis Vuitton, Kenzo

YSL

... And finally, for those who haven't seen it already, here are a few of Cathy Horyn's favorite things. Her taste sometimes runs a little toward the matronly for my liking, but she knows her history, has a singular point of view, and always has interesting things to say about fashion. If you weren't following her highly addictive blog during the shows this season, be sure to check it out regularly come September, when everything new will be old again.

style.com

People are strange.

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The New York Times ran a piece last week on Millard Kaufman, an accomplished writer who died recently at the age of 92. Among many other things, Kaufman was a newspaper reporter, a decorated Marine, a screenwriter with credits such as the dark western Bad Day at Black Rock, a co-creator of the Mr. Magoo cartoons, and late in life, a novelist published by McSweeney's.

Here's the opening sequence for Mr. Magoo, designed by none other than legendary Los Angeles designer Alvin Lustig:



Click here to read more about the interesting life of Millard Kaufman.

More Mr. Magoo here.

A History Of Lovers

Today sees the first-ever American issue of Serge Gainsbourg's best record, the classic Histoire de Melody Nelson – a must-have if it's not in your collection already. Light in the Attic has really gone the distance to make this one the definitive re-release, with a 40-page CD booklet, full lyrics, an extended 1971 interview with Gainsbourg, and, of course, re-mastered sound from the original tapes. Vinyl is limited to 2000 copies and I'm sure it will go quickly.

I was lucky enough to stumble upon the original several years ago, but one should never pass up an opportunity to celebrate Serge and Jane, so last Friday night Emily and I popped Slogan into the DVD player and subsequently had our minds blown. Birkin and Gainsbourg met and fell in love during the filming of the movie in 1969, and their chemistry onscreen is irrepressible. The styling and color are things of great beauty; the music is, to borrow a word from James Lipton, sublime. Have a look:



The soundtrack is now firmly implanted at the top of my want list, and a smartly re-issued DVD is available immediately from Cinema Retro.

I have nothing to say and I'm saying it

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[Books from Spine & Crown on Pine Street @ Bellevue Ave, Seattle]