kitten solution

Sooooo...our kitten, Napoleon, is, unfortunately, growing into a very ugly little boy. His ears are growing as rapidly as he is. And his eyeball...it's bugging out of his head in the most atrocious way. It may be attributable to this guy:
Robert, my neighbor and a fabulous local carpenter, kind of dropped the kitten one day.
I was tiring of having to apologize to new friends about my ugly kitten, so I decided to make lemonade out 'o' this sour, ugly kitten. I am now the proud owner of a rockin pirate-kitten. Arrrrmeow!

i love this place part 2

doesn't quite fit. so what? who cares? good'nuff.

i love this place

yes they are.

Refreshing!

I haven't posted in a long long time. And there is a very good reason for it. I've been stuck.
Very very stuck.
It's not that I haven't been prolifically designing. I've actually been holed up inside for the past two weeks, not sleeping, barely eating...just making. I was going a little crazy and I was not inspired by my collection. In fact, I kind of hated what I was doing.

I had no wind in my sails.

Which confused me because I have been simultaneously designing for the local Green Project's "Worn Again" recycled fashion show. And it's been great. I'm going with a WWII era Shanghai look and it's fabulous and I'm inspired and I'm in love with what I'm making.

So why was I dreading the moment when I would have to go back to designing for Blues'n'Bruises? The answer came last night, at about 4am (my best thinking time): I had veered too far away from this:

This is the image that originally inspired me. This is the PERSON that I wanted to dress. I went too far into analyzing the many varied meanings of The Blues, and The South and What that Means in a Greater Perspective. And I forgot that all I really wanted to do was dress up the character of Rae.

You see, when I'm designing, I'm designing for a heroine. I need a girl in my head with whom I can consult with: "Would you wear this, darling?" "You wouldn't be caught dead in that, huh?" And my heroines are always strong, powerful women. They are heroines who I admire, who I want in my corner, and, most of all, who I want to be...at least who I could pretend to be for a little while by literally walking in their shoes (and dresses, and pants, and underthings). These women are my muses that inspire the firestorm of creativity that results in my best work.

I had misdirected my perception of Rae. In my head, I had made her a victim instead of a heroine; and victims, frankly, are not people I can really get excited about. And, hell, if I'm not excited about my own work, who else will be? An artist, of any medium, is only successful if they are their own biggest fan. Moreover, I can't send sad models down a runway to down-tempo blues music and expect to get a winning response. I've got to get the audience's adrenaline pumping if I want a memorable, exciting, and, hopefully, profitable show.

So I'm hitting refresh and scrapping the melancholy and listless, Blues-riddled, abused Rae for her more appealing side: the writhing, sweaty, starvingly-maneating, succubus, siren Rae. The rural bombshell that struts down a red-dirt road like it's her catwalk. The rare and wild cat in heat that claws and hisses and spits at her captor. The superheroine that uses sex as her weapon of choice. The predator that sport-hunts with a lust-hungry, crazed look in her eye...who chooses victims indiscriminately.

The All American Sex Zombie.

Ok, so it's a little bit crass, but at least it's got some life to it! My collection, thankfully, has become undead!

p.s. I've decided not to post pics of the things I'm working on. Sorry, guys! I want a grand reveal when showtime comes around...plus it stresses me out to have to take crappy pics of my half-finished pieces and post them.

Happy Abandoned Orphanage Day!

Ok, so, as a Memorial Day treat, I've decided to post TWO blogs today. I've been doing so much and blogging so little. I've got to catch up.

Charlsie and I explored an abandoned orphanage (which had most recently been used as a boys reformatory type of school prior to its complete abandonment after Katrina) today. She photographs abandoned buildings (and is documenting entropy therein), so I decided to tag along. Here are some pics of the place we broke into..I mean visited...today.

It looks like they just picked up and walked out. Nothing had changed, really, in the four years since the hurricane.

or maybe it has, a bit...

olllld typewriter in the hall....

Mold eaten classrooms....

Mold-engulfed orphan beds in the attic!

Abandoned library.....

Teeheehee.....

haunting attic window.....

mysterious cabinet full of keys....

rad-tastic old sewing machine (jealous).....

creepy nativity scene...

TERRIFYING dentist chair....wtf?

possible hobo sign?

We stayed for about an hour, leaving hastily for fear of arrest/mold poisoning/zombie attack.

"Roughing It" in Shreveport

This weekend my roommate, Charlsie, drove me five hours up to Shreveport, LA, (her hometown) to see her people and her culture. And what a fascinating anthropological adventure it was!

This was an Exxon station. This is what they sell in gas stations in Louisiana. I wanted to try 'em all! Unfortunately, they had just run out of everything listed above. Very popular eatin' spot.

Charlsie had a gig assisting a photographer friend (Charlsie's a photographer!) at the film/music/art house, Minicine. The totally rad guy who runs the place has a collection of hundreds of old film projectors that he wanted documented in pictures. That was cool and all, but take a look at the description of one of their past shows...if you can't decipher it, it reads:

"What if the Velvet Underground were blues cowboys from hell? What if Stereolab drove motorcycles and pick-ups and played shady bars on the Texas border?...Propulsive urban dirges for modern ghost towns."

I can't say it better myself. This is exactly the direction/mood/lifeblood that I want to evoke with Autonomous Clothing Co. I wish I had been here to catch that undoubtedly remarkable show!

*******

We "camped" that night at Charlsie's MeMe's (Cajun French grandma) lake house. In the morning, Charlsie showed me the lake...that had trees growing out of it. Magic water-dwelling trees.

I know that swamps have trees growing out of them, but really...out of a lake? This place is so alive that shit will grow anywhere!

We went fishing with worms. And it was gross.

But I caught a fish! A catfish to be exact. And I was more terrified than it was.

We had a bit of time to kill before the show we were going to, so Charlsie took me down her favorite country road.

How perfect is this place?!

Here's a (rare) photo of Charlsie, taking a much better photo of the above than I could ever dream of taking. That Charlsie, she's always gotta one-up me. Doesn't she just look like the perfect little Dorothy, innocently admiring the cornfields? Hope a (very possible) tornado doesn't pick her up and carry her away!

Also, unbeknownst to me, there's oil in these here fields! That's one of thousands of oil rigs in Louisiana. This is seriously one of the lushest, resource-rich states that I've ever visited. It's like Eden or something...am I gushing a bit? Is my Louisiana lust showing? I like it here, ok?

*****************

The show that we saw that night was pretty rad. The band was a local bootstomping Shreveport band, called Dirtfoot, and the venue was the town's Mudbug Madness festival. I felt like I was mainlining Louisiana. And then this guy showed up:

And now I could end this trip satiated. I could chase this dragon no higher, tonight. But tomorrow is another day....

I forgot to mention

I picked up this little monster from a local painter who had a box full of em. He was going to eat them, so I decided to take one off his hands. His name's Napoleon. And I hope he grows into those ears.