Nail Pro

Even when your Jetblue flight is delayed at JFK while you're wrapping up your daughter's College Tour which is nothing short of determining the future of her entire life -- there are always fashion moments that are very important to document and you hope will have some meaning or merit two months or two years later. again, that pesky balance between the substantive and the superficial. and where to Draw the Line.
i just know when i have to shoot something. and thank god, these days, it's just a camera. yet, it also feels absurd but somehow blogworthy that i'm spending the better part of this morning trying to Nail down an illustration gig with Nail Pro Magazine who polished up at the Maggie Awards friday night. i never knew they existed. never even saw the mag at the beauty salon. me--an artist who paints and photographs nails on a regular basis, just a few miles from the San Fernando Valley publishing firm called Creative Age Publications that publishes Nail Pro and DaySpa.
so here's my shot of the lovely elderly Holocaust Survivor with acrylic nails and fake cheeta handbag.
and here i am, WLA Jewish artist who paints fashion figures with painted nails looking for work from Nail Pro magazine.
there is a war in Iraq. there was a mass murder at a college two weeks ago (just after shopping for colleges for my daughter) and my current photographic subject survived a genocide and for some weird reason i snapped a photo of this 3 weeks ago.
i guess because, any way you buff it, we're all blessed survivors and some of us are Nail Pros.

Choco-Mellow-Yellow Sloth

well, it's clearly genetic. on so many levels. colors, what you're wearing (even if you're just a sloth) and how that impacts self protection, survival of the next generation and...perhaps dating, if there's any time left over.
here is a picture drawn by my son jonah. his biology assignment was to create a fictional species that had evolved to survive its environment. no wonder, with my deeply superficial guidance as his mother all these years...my son chose to look at what the sloth wears. jonah and his friend "spyder" invented a sloth who survives and tricks its predators by looking like a giant yellow banana. and i'm proud to note that the heterosexual (so far) boys embraced nuance and "accessorizing" along the way...no mere broad strokes for these guys (and this sloth). a key part of the Choco-Mellow-Yellow Sloth's ensemble is a short brown arm so that when it's "playing dead" it tricks its predator by looking like the harmless stem of the banana. yet..if the predator comes too close, the long yellow arm is ready and able to Slash and protect upon attack.
makes me wish i could draw as well and as authentically and with as much purpose and cleverness as my son.
i'll keep trying.

today nancy is listening...

to a reggae version of the Beatles "she was just 17, you know what i mean" that she downloaded for her daughter maddy who just turned 17 and somehow the joy is spilling back in for everyone. the bouyancy in her step today (and the conspicuous lack of pajamas) is due to Nancy conquering Quicken and today's reprieve from Jury Duty. to celebrate, nancy is wearing maddy's tank top from the overpriced store Scoop on madison ave in NYC. the top doesn't really belong to nancy, but she's wearing it anyway--another fashion fatality she's conquered today--because nancy used to be the recipient of many beautiful cashmere sweaters, jewelry items and her share of overpriced tees gifted to her on a regular basis by her ex mother in law sandi with an i. important to note however that sandi is still very loving toward nancy and sends her fancy face creams for her age spots which she appreciates but now maddy gets all the clothing stash and that hurts. so...with regard to this particular "gift" nancy made an executive decision to keep everything for herself because maddy's doing fine. besides maddy never wore the shirt because she felt it was cheesy which it is. at 50yo nancy likes cheesy on occasion. or doesn't care one way or the other as long as something is New.

besides, neither maddy nor nancy got it together to return it to Scoop when they were in NYC a couple weeks ago for the College Tour. they were presumably busy with more substantive matters but truth be told, they fit in H&M, Marc Jacobs and a Huka bar...so they probably could've gotten over to Scoop to cash in the LIFE/NATURE/LOVE wife-beaters for something nicer but they were off to Bard college and had blown their wad of shopping time elsewhere. nancy wears the brown ribbed tee with the splash of chartruese with hand-me-down cropped abercrombie jeans that belonged to Jenny Graham of the Velvet dynasty. last night nancy wore the same tee to a Klezmer concert under a sophisticated black blouse from Club Monaco that is still nice but a bit short and would potentially show nancy's midriff which would be gross at her age. so the cheesy tank actually served to make nancy look more age appropriate since it went longer than the blouse and gave her that current Layered Look without showing too much skin. she bottoms off the outfit with dark argyle sox from her golfing excursion yesterday (the driving range with her 15yo son, her friend Mark--the only one she knows who really golfs and actually owns clubs... and tough little sports guy neighbor Pat Mcqueen, who out-drove everyone). she slept in the argyles and accompanies them today with iconic checkered Vans that she shared with her son till he grew out of em. she wears a lime green pixie band around her neck which found on the kitchen table this morning in a pile of bills next to the computer with Quicken--she threw it around her neck as a form organizing things by putting them back in the vicinity where they will be used... a tip she learned in the book Organized from the Inside Out (ie. the pixie band belongs near or on her head because that's where it'll be used eventually). to add to the kismet....when nancy shot the latest pic for this entry she was overjoyed to discover that serendipitously the green pixie matches the splash of green on the slutty tank. nancy loves happy accidents like that--which reminds her of how important color-matching has always been in her life...as she recalls the third drawer down of the Rococo dresser she inherited from her parents after the Austin Powers addition to their ranch style tract home in mar vista - how every morning nancy would compose her outfit..then open that deep third drawer down, filled to the brim like a paint box with every color pixie band imaginable (from Sav-on Drug store..her Rite Aid of that decade)...and find just the right one to match her dress and her tights.

guess nothing much has changed except nancy was clearly a bit more organized at 10yo than she is now (her proclivity for organizing the pixie bands was several decades before reading Organized from the Inside Out!!). hmm. maybe this means, somewhere deep down (time release genes?) she's actually got it IN her to conquer her current fashion and financial mess which actually gives her hope that she's on her way to consistently using Quicken so she'll know how much money she has to spend on over priced tee shirts and she won't have to steal from her daughter. with no guilt whatsoever, she'll finally get her finances (and pixie bands) off the kitchen table into their tidy places where she can know what she has and enjoy her money and her colors without so much anxiety and familial theft/dependence.

Belvedere Vodka: Nothing but the best for my kids

When Dr. Wendy Mogel became disillusioned with her private practice bubbling over like a martini with the spiritual bankruptcy of all the babyboomers' spoiled hothouse flowers who get great test scores but can't tie their shoe and never say Thank You for anything...she came out with her wonderful book called: The Blessing of a Skinned Knee. A plea to get back to the conventional wisdom and time honored lessons of the old testament and some old fashioned good manners. I applauded her philosophy--and i'd like to affirm her good work with a little field experience of my own. Or let's just say, perhaps my contribution might have ended up on the cutting room floor of her book due to its aesthetically challenging motif....but since this blog is all about the questionable "appearance" of things and what REALLY lies underneath (yes THAT's what it's about)...i upload this entry in support of Dr Mogel's excellent work. (PS I later met her pesonally when my marriage was exploding (The Blessing of a Cheating Spouse) -- she was conderably less helpful then, i recommend her work with kids more than couples. but to be fair to her, there was clearly less hope for me and my ex than there was for our kids. we had become numb to the Pain of life. they still felt things.)

Speaking of pain...Dr Mogel says: Let the kids ride a bike and run too fast...and EXPERIENCE their own fall. Let them *feel* their own little injury and this will teach them to be more careful the next time. Such experiential teaching will be far more efffective precisely because you are neither protecting them from the fall nor simply "telling" them how dangerous everything is.

Bravo Dr Mogel....and I say, let's take it a step further: Go out of town, keep your cell phone on "most" of the time and let your recovering potsmoker ex husband (a guy) "watch" the kids - next thing you'll know they'll have the "lived experience" of alcohol poisoning and hurling in your very own living room on your very own green velvet club chair. And no matter how much Febreze your 15yo applies to the mess, it will never kill the stench of his buddy's barf and will remain forever in your home as an educable (and visible!) parenting aid. Just like a skinned knee--the matted Lysoled portion of the formerly beautiful living room furniture will forever remind the whole family of the consequences of alcohol poisoning and the skyrocketing costs of reupholstering.
If you and your kids gain nothing else from this type of suburban Outward Bound journey--if they're STILL not able to extrapolate this event to other areas of their lives and take the lessons with them---at least you'll never again have to tell those kids to watch their liquor. I call this The Blessing of a Good Barf.

best of luck and....and finally, when you come home from that much needed adult weekend away and you find a futon outside and the house smells like you own too many animals and the siblings keep winking at each other and are getting along a little "too well" ...just look for the Bevedere in the freezer and rest assured that you've given your kids the Best.

my new assistant

Dear Sir/Madame,
My name in Ciprian C. Irimia and I'm a fashion/accessories designer and fashion illustrater from Romania.
I finished first the Fashion College from Romania in 2004 and I had a schoolyearschip Socrates-Erasmus in Vigo-Spain in 2002.
I have a experience by 9 years in the fashion industry.
I worked with distincs fashion companys from my country and London since 1997, like fashion and accessories designer for women/men and also like fashion illustrater .
I worked for fashion shows and for comercial side too.
I'we been in the principals fashion centers in Europe for taking contact and selection of the latest tendencies in the fashion industry for women and accesories .I have also technical knoweledgenes and I have experience in the fashon illustracion too.
I'm wery interest obtaining a interview and work with you like fashion illustrater in such a exciting studio like your's.
Thanks for taking the time and if you need any more information or examples, please don't hesitate to contact me.
Also even if there are no positions available at the moment, I would still like to know what you think of my work as the opinion of someone in your position is very valued to me.
Thank you wery much once again,
Sincerly
Ciprian C. Irimia