Not Very D-I-Y

From My Old Kentucky Blog:

From Gorilla vs. Bear:

Being Single, Seeing Double, And Sleeping Triple

I couldn't think of a Halloween costume until yesterday when I decided I'm going walk around holding a full-length mirror and saying, "We're twins!" It would be a lot funnier if I was slutty-looking, in a Bud Light way, but hopefully I'll be able to find a bar where twins drink free until midnight.

How's Your News?

Mine is hilarious. I watch a really trashy nightly news show on UPN. The female newscaster has had a lot of work done on her face so she looks like a slutty lizard and she constantly and awkwardly flirts with her gay co-host. I don't learn anything about goings-on in the world or relevant California movements. It's all meth-addicted grandfathers kidnapping their own grandsons for ransom and then leaving them on the street in Vegas, not an exaggeration, that's the only story I've ever remembered that they reported on. Also, the Japanese plant that blogs. Those have stuck with me because they aren't about how shaken up a neighborhood in East LA is after a gang murder. The reason I got into "My 13 News" was because their weatherman doesn't report on anything and just dances in front of the five-day forecast screens, which, partnered with his bad hairpiece and drunk-at-wedding moves, is extremely uplifting.

The main sponsor for "My 13 News" is Worthington Ford in Long Beach. Legendary Cal Worthington showcases 10 specific cars in each commercial and then mispronounces "finance."

New Necklace

Yesterday I took the bus to a very homeless Down- town Los Angeles to get finger- printed for my visa application. The buildings downtown are extremely beautiful, marble and gold and totally intact; way closer to Gotham City than New York ever was. However, the majority of the population in the downtown area is legless and seemingly unwilling to work through it. I double-txted Owen and Tamara: "Downtown LA is like a 1920s circus." Seeing the little person who runs the elevator in the Notary-Records building was a breath of normal air. P.T. Barnum never had shit on LA's Broadway.

On LA's Broadway, dodging disease-carrying piles of garbage and people dressed in supermarket plastic bags, I found a store that sold tons of rosaries and psychic readings [which seems conflicting]. Rosaries are for rappers, but they were also selling this necklace.
It's a little iro, and I don't know who is pictured in it, which makes me a poser, but I legitimately like it and I could read in the fortune teller's eyes that she thought she was ripping me off when she charged me $5.

Some Bullshit

I bought the chicken bag from Pylons about a year ago, which I only remember off-hand because a month afterward, as Thanksgiving was approaching, Pylons filled their display window with chicken bags, suspended from the ceiling. I was in love with the little chicken the moment I saw it; it's plump shape and something about its two lifeless, wide-set eyes instantly filled my heart. My happiest memory with the chicken bag was soon after at Beacon's Closet.

Over summer 2007, which had recently passed, the employees of Beacon's Closet got into the habit of taking MDMA and painting their faces white and pouring boxes of Nilla Wafers around Death By Audio. There was a boy among them and his t-shirts were routinely longer than mine are. This raver behavior was an alarming contrast to the surly, dismissive attitudes the clerks usually cop. They don't respond when I say, "Thank you," for handing back my credit card. They make fun of people outside of the dressing room. I don't know why they decided they wanted to see Todosantos.

On my first week out with the chicken bag, I took it to Beacon's Closet. The surly boy employee was behind the counter. He was wearing a floral jumper and pretending he couldn't see Jenny, even though she was next on line. [She had worked at the store for a few days and then quit because she didn't like it, so maybe that was driving him rude.] He glanced over and saw the chicken bag.
"Oh my god," he smiled, surprisingly. "Is that a chicken? Oh that's so cute."
"Yeah, it reeks of rubber," I beamed, trying to be modest about my perfect little chicken.
"Oh," cooled down the clerk. "I thought it was leather." He turned his back on us again.

I retired the chicken bag about six months ago. I was disgusted by how excited people were to see it, just the way I was when I first saw it. Some people I had met would forget my name but remember the chicken bag. It was becoming an identity crutch when I've always walked well on my own.

And just as the association between me and the rubber chicken had waned, this trashy, rockstar daughter gets into NYMag's Party Lines with it, thus stealing the association I thought I didn't want, and then tells a pretty awful story about the chicken bag:
"I bought it for a friend who had actually lost a chicken. It was a family chicken they'd raised, and it died. She didn't want it, so now it's my handbag."
With a friend like Theodora Richards, who needs inner-city high school Halloween pranks? [The meanest pranks of them all.] You don't know what you like to wear 'til it's gone.

I totally know how to make this!

You Took The Part That Once Was My Chicken Heart

Chicken hearts were once only available at C-Town, but now you can usually find them in Key Foods, Associated, and Food Bazaar. They're sold in the chilled raw meats section, between the turkey throats and camel humps. Sometimes, when I'm really in love, I consider buying a styrofoam plate of chicken hearts and presenting it to my cheri amour as a metaphor for how many times I'd like to give him my heart [12 times]. But then, when I think about receiving a dozen dead chickens' tickers, covered with little veins and splattered with blood and wrapped tightly in plastic, from a hyper boyfriend with a kooky sense of humor, it really creeps me out.

"on some Shamu shit" -Jenny

Original America [Ferrara]

I did a Google Image Search for "Alaina" because I want to change my Facebook picture again. Now that I live in a city where I don't have any friends and subsequently don't have drunk-fun times, no one takes my picture. And now that I've completely changed up my style, none of the most recent photographs of me are current.

This guy was on the 31st page of Google Images containing the word "Alaina."



It makes me proud [as bull].

More shirts:


First In Flight


Don't Stop BUFFALO BILL-IEVING


A TALONted Country


These Colors Don't Run

and my personal favorite:


The Original Founding Fathers

[I didn't make up/steal a football fan-slogan for this last one. That shirt exists! Denim and XXXL!]

Laurel Wreath

I went to the Getty Villa the other week with my dad's girlfriend Mia and her friends. The Getty Villa is a tremendous estate on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. It was built by J.P. Getty, an oil tycoon who made a lifelong attempt at collecting art that he kept in his home and, for a time, charged admission to the public to see. The majority of his collection are ill-chosen artifacts, which are obviously authentic and in turn historical while clearly not made by the greats of their time period but still incredibly expensive. Still, people came to his house to check it out, and even though he kept the visitors to a roped path, it eventually began to creep him out. He built the Getty Villa to act as a museum for his boring things. It is an exact replica of some wealthy Italian's summer home that was covered in lava about 70 years after Jesus died. J.P. Getty stayed in the UK for the entirety of the construction time and died without ever having seen it.

To remain authentic, historians made sure that the replica statues that line his wade pool were painted on their faces and eyes, which is always a poor decision.

At the gift shop I bought this foam wreath that I'm extremely excited to wear.



I just have to wait til Halloween is completely over so people don't take it the wrong way.

FASHION NEWZ!

Jeremy Scott saw W. on opening night at Arclight!



He was wearing this hat with overalls. I was on the phone with Jenny when he first walked past me in the movie theater and, after telling me to pull his ponytail, she theorized that he was going to see Max Payne. My only co-witness that Jeremy Scott did indeed see W. was Charlie's college friend Brett, who, after living with Charlie for four years, is indistinguishable from Charlie. And, as Charlie wouldn't, Brett didn't know who I was talking about.
"Are you going to shout something out to him?" Brett asked.
"Nah," I said, staring into the row behind me where Jeremy Scott was. "I think he's on a date."
"Oh, is he here with his wife?"
Wife? Very funny, Brett.

I really really want a shirt that reads

[smaller size preferred]

Good/Bad News

If you consider Google the dictionary, and I do, then you could say that my friends and I are such fucking hipsters that if you looked up "Hipsters" in the Dictionary [Google Image Search], our picture would come up [because it was taken from MyOpenBar.com and used on a (popular?) Park Slope blog in which the writer was trying to grapple with how "Brooklyn" had become "synonymous with 'Hipster.'" I wouldn't understand the association if I was a yuppy and everybody in my neighborhood was straight, wealthy and 45+. What's hip about that? No offense my dad].

A schoolmate had noticed this [while looking for pictures of hipsters?] and then Jenny and I became "hip" to it. Since then, it's gone from the results page, having decreased in popularity. But good/bad news - it's on the second results page, first row! Unfortunately/hopefully posting it here will bring it back to page 1.

Great Lakes

I met Claudio through Atiya because they had been best friends in high school. [This is Atiya's traveling pants blog with her roommates.] It was freshman year and I had just started a MySpace account but Claudio was already famous on MySpace. He told us that once when he was at Disney World, a girl saw him in line for a ride and recognized him from MySpace and yelled out his alias. On MySpace he goes by C. Maddox, which I always took to be a reference to one of Angelina Jolie's babies.



Recently Claudio has been making music videos and putting them on YouTube under the name CMaddoxBiitch [because another user had taken CMaddoxBitch]. They're really different from the other videos I watch on YouTube.



This one is my second favorite:

Voilà!

I had marzipan for the first time this year from the Grand Central Market, after buying cheese for Cheese Club, in the form of Ritter Sport truffles. It had never come up before because I only knew the almond paste in its fake fruit form, which walks that retarded line. My boyfriend/ex-boyfriend Colby, who's spent a lot of time with foreigners, loves marzipan and consistently defended it. The truffles were good, but Colby also eats the fake fruit marzipan.

There is a legend that soon after being broken up with, I was once asked by a newly ex-boyfriend about what he should get for his new girlfriend. The story goes that my response, in an attempted to call his new girlfriend trashy, was that he should get her a taco made of marzipan, at which point I supposedly signed off AIM. I don't know if any of that's true. This is sort of what that would look like [it's a tostada]:



"Marzipan Taco" is also the name of a Monday morning comedy podcast show. According to their website, they once had a skit wherein they prank called a pharmacy to check on the status of their prescription for pills to cure their retardation, which definitely crosses that retarded line.

Right before I left New York, I contracted an aggressive cold for which I took a lot of Tylenol Sinus and then drank through the malady, putting me in a state of spirited derangement. On the way to my friend Jason's house under this spell, I sauntered into a classy deli and bought a blueberry B monster, cigarettes for everyone to share, and a box of fruit-shaped marzipan. According to Jason and his friends, seasoned marzipan buyers and eaters [maybe foreigners], the batch was stale. Unfortunately, I thought it was pretty good. Probably would've tasted better if I had gotten it from a chocolatier, and in turn had been crafted to the form of something unique, like tacos [or infants].

Livin' XXXL

It probably seemed mean when earlier I wrote that I would make a XXXL America Ferrara shirt because I had just been calling her fat. And even though I thought Real Women Have Curves was hilarious ["You have a pretty face." "WHAT ABOUT THE REST OF ME???"] I do believe that women look better with some ass on them and I don't consider America Ferrara overweight. The reason I wrote that I would make a XXXL A.F. shirt was because I prefer to wear XXXL shirts [as dresses, not because I'm fat, even though I have a lot of ass on me].

Here are some shirts that I have in XXXL:











Oh, here, I found a pix of me wearing it.






[made for me, of me, from the most unflattering MySpace picture he could find, by Alan Resnick]





XXXL shirts I want to make:


and the one about America Ferrara

Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2

A month or so ago I went to Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 with one of the Mike Vs I know. It was terrible, and it took place in Greece which slightly embarrassed me, but the worst part was that America Ferrara never put on the pants. I didn't see the first movie and I obviously wouldn't read those books, but from what I've understood the entire point of the series is that there's a pair of ugly jeans that fits four girls even though one of the girls is fat. So for me, seeing the fat girl slip into something too small was what I was paying $12 for.

Afterward I realized that I really want to make a XXXL t-shirt:

I Support America!


It would be entirely iro though because Ugly Betty is really hard to watch.

Hope You Don't Mind LOUD Music

One of the archdukes of the Brooklyn D-I-Y scene is Charlie Looker, who used to be in Zs but now is the driving force behind Extra Life. Me and everyone I know have the hots for him because he looks like David Byrne driving a convertible through Texas, so when he passes we sigh, "What a Looker!"

My friend/ex-friend Josh Brown [we have a v tumultuous relationship] took guitar lessons from Charlie Looker last year. Apparently Dave Longstreth had also taken lessons from Charlie Looker and according to Josh Brown, because of his improv jazz background, Charlie Looker models his note progressions on instruments like guitar and vocals after that of the jazz flute. So this, presumably, is why the vocals of Dirty Projectors, and also Extra Life, jump high and low from note to note.

I was at a wedding last year and Charlie Looker was talking to my date, so kind of talking to me, and he was talking about something he legitimately liked. "No iro," he assured my date/us.

And since then I've been using that term [v sparingly since it's stealing], as I legitimately like or have an interest in things when it is socially acceptable to be horrified by them. For instance, no one wanted to see Mamma Mia the movie with me, but I really wanted to go [no iro] because I really love ABBA [no iro].

I just wrote a horoscope for Showpaper about something I legitimately want:
[for Capricorn]
You read a 33 1/3 book on a band you have always liked and know a lot about and it was a great disappointment for you; maybe it was poorly written with corny jokes, maybe you didn't learn enough secrets about Stephen Merritt, but either way you swore the whole series off. Problem is, you've gone about those books the wrong way - choose them for the writer, not the subject. Sure you like Unknown Pleasures, but who the fuck is author Chris Ott [christopherott.com]? Get the 33 1/3 book John Darnielle wrote about Black Sabbath [from the view of an institutionalized 15 year old]; it'll be 99.9% enriching.

Poseur

Prarie and I ran a Cheese Club when we went to college together and then continued it at a bar when we moved to Brooklyn together. Most of the people who ended up at real-world Cheese Club were our close friends from the city who had always heard us talk about college Cheese Club and wanted to finally see it in person. The only other type of attendees were people who had accidentally found themselves in our bar during our time and were drunk enough [on a Sunday] to be open to our ideas.

The bar we used for Cheese Club [and would happily use again!] was Sound Fix [attached to the record store on Bedford Ave] because I'm friendly with a good portion of the staff and because they serve pickletinis - a vodka martini, dirty with pickle juice and sometimes garnished with a spicy pickle. Some people are disgusted by them and my friend Todd called them a chastity belt, so I only really recommend pickletinis to people who grew up on Long Island [or any other region with a strong deli culture].

At one Cheese Club meeting, after most of the cheese was gone and I was three pickletinis in, one of my friends from one walk of life cornered two of my friends from a different social circle. The former vented heavily to the two latter, which is something that happens when you drink during the day, and the latter told me the half of it. Apparently, the former recalls being called a, "poser," in elementary school, and it had apparently been painful enough to make it into the future. I know the word was thrown around a lot when I was in fifth grade, but only really by people who wore JNCOs, and it was usually more of a tease than a spike.

In the 11 years since fifth grade, I have developed "poser" as a point of fashion. In the world after irony, wherein it's still too soon to shop at Abercrombie & Fitch as a joke [and usually too expensive to ever be funny], the mocking of full-on lifestyles - so seemlessly that it seems you're legitimately of that ilk - is the new Do. The effect is that sometimes I even think I'm very well dressed.

Even though I don't wear jeans, I really want to get a pair of JNCOs and have them tailored so they're straight leg.

I don't know how to sew but making legs skinny only costs $10.