FPM: I'm in Love with Chunky Green Heels and Halloween--IN PROGRESS

This first image is not from Halloween night, but a few days after. I thought I'd collect images of unusual items people were wearing for no reason. Here is the first. Other things I've been doing since the close of October 31 (my favorite day of the year, I believe):

1. Writing: On November 1st, I started a novel for National Novel Writing Month. To be on target, i should have 25,000 words at this moment. Instead, I have a mere 19,447. I guess I'm a bit afraid of being "Craptastic!" which is the operative word of Nanowrimo.

2: Losing: Items like my camera and then finding them again.

3. Weeding: The mammoth collection of children's books we keep in this tiny apartment.

4. Job applying: I sent out an application package the other day for a teaching job at a community college, which is my response to the dearth of available library jobs right now. I'm trying not to get too depressed about this. Failing.

5. Excavating and organizing my tights: Every day I wear a skirt, boots and tights. Sometimes the same combo for days.

6. Reading: Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys about a writing professor and famous writer whose novel is long overdue, his wife has left him, his student has just killed his lover's dog, and he's in love with one of his students. I'm reading this because my NaNoWriMo novel features a writer and academics and quasi-bohemians, plus Mormons and post-Mormons.

7. Thinking about Thankgiving: Where shall we eat?

8. Assessing Halloween 2009: I was Abraham Lincoln. My friend, Sean, from Chicago--a lover of puns--appeared as Lucy-fur. We took the kids trick or treating in the East Village. Halloween was curiously subdued this year. The energy on the streets was rather low. Was this due to the fact it was Saturday and I was out on the early side with children? Still haven't figured this out. How was your night? Do you remember?

FPM: I Wanted to Show You This Sleeve of Mine

Yes, it's another architectural sleeve and I can't get enough of them. THey make me feel instantly fashion forward, and I know you said, rjt, that this '80s thing would be over by January. Do you still think so?

I had meant to post my Halloween photos here, but find myself stuck at 11:47 pm on a Sunday night 3,000 words behind on the novel I'm generating for National Novel Writing Month. Yes, I'm a machine-like text generator, who is actually committing the sin of deleting. Why? Because I really don't want this one to be the pile of crap the one I wrote in November of 2005 was. I probably got one good sentence out of the 50,000 words.

But what do you think of my sleeve?

I also meant to list the top fall trends that L magazine articulated in September. I mean to do that every week.

Motorcycle jackets were on the list, but I haven't seen any on actual humans. I've seen vinyl ones in stores. I've seen denim iterations. (I have a character in my novel who enjoys using the word "iteration.")

I have one that I purchased in 1990 at Grunts and Postures in Salt Lake City. It's even a Harley-Davidson one with big meaty shoulders and a couple of spikes screwed in for good measure. It weighs about 75 pounds, and even when I purchased it I remember wishing it were more shrunken, more in the spirit of Joey Ramone. Still, it's downstairs, and I've been thinking of hauling it out like an old lawnmower and trying it on for size.

Have you revived any clothes from a previous era?

FPM: To the Three of You Who Are Still Reading

Thank you. And will you check in tonight for photos? I was up a good chunk of the night with an ill child, who vomited in many of the apartment's key spots. I also started National Novel Writing Month last night, and I'm 1700 words in!

FPM: Untitled

I sat next to this person who I at A.'s weekend work, and finally worked up the courage to ask her if I could photograph her. (It was particularly when I noticed her brown boots.) She was on her way to the WFMU record fair, and so it was fitting (pun kind of intended) that she was wearing this fabulous vintage coat. Or at least a coat with vintage styling. She's been in NYC 14 years by way of Dublin, and had her accent still clung to the edges of her words--I always enjoy the Irish accent. Anyway, my main regret is not asking her about what she wears. Next time. (AND I hope to do more of this kind of "up close and personal" street fashion reporting.)

I'm late this morning, so really quickly, the next photo I took on Saturday night while sitting in a dress rehearsal of Richard Foreman's new inscrutable play "starring" Willem Dafoe (at the Public Theater). Can you see him all tiny in my photo? Don't you just love him? Did anyone see that apparently excruciating Lars Von Trier film he's currently in? Do you consider Dafae an unwitting style icon? I know I think so.

The rest of the photos I think are from the Tompkins Square Park annual Dog Halloween Parade. My photos aren't great, but give you an idea of the spectacle. The little dog dressed as a scarecrow was surrounded by a bevy of photographers, all with big expensive cameras. I couldn't get her/him to turn my way.

I'm wearing something now that I'm going to change out of. But I will put back on my old/new refurbished boots. More on this next week.

Oh, also--I've been noticing people around the city wearing head-to-toe black. What about you?

FPM: Well-Intentioned Book Review--New Boots, Book from Bluestockings

These are the nicest pair of boots I've ever owned in my life. I just bought them with birthday money. I'm still breaking them in. They're lined in leather, made in Portugal (don't know why that's especially significant), and I bought them on the way home at the Fluevog shop which I was merely passing by. I bought them in 15 minutes. Maybe ten, and with insouciance. Well, there was some anxiety. The right boot still needs to be stretched through the instep. The exuberant salesboy with the the Popeye arms said he'd help me do this, but I'm not sure how he would. So far, neither friends nor strangers has remarked on them.

No pressure, though.

This Tao Lin book--Shoplifting from American Apparel--is a novella that I'd been wanting to read for awhile. On a whim, I walked into Bluestockings with A., hoping it would be there, but not expecting it to be. But much to my delight, a short stack of Lin's book was on the table closest to the door. Novellas are thin, don't forget. My copy is signed by Tao Lin. It's the story of a fiction writer, Sam, who shoplifts a shirt from American Apparel. He hopes to wear to a reading he will give in a few hours, but is apprehended and arrested, and has to spend the night in jail, missing his reading, of course. Later in the narrative, Sam will shoplift $40 headphones from the NYU bookstore and is arrested again. The character absorbs this all rather neutrally. In fact, every character (vegans, all) absorbs the events in a neutral fashion, with neutral facial expressions, even when faced with a cameo appearance by Moby, a fellow vegan. But the book's about more than about neutrally shoplifting. Or is it? It's about malaise and short sentences. The characters open up Microsoft Word documents. They reference Facebook and Gawker. They drink bottles of Odwalla. It's an episodic narrative told with non-hierarchically structured sentences. I've been reading Brett Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero at the same time. Both narratives appear to be autobiographical, at least semi so. The prose styles are similar, but Ellis lacks irony. And humor. The characters aren't vegans. They do lines of coke. His novel doesn't have the self-conscious sophisticated of Lin's. It's Gen X at it's worst, and it was published when Tao Lin was two years old. So maybe I should give it a break.

FPM: Well Intentioned Book Reviews

FPM has gotten away from me lately. I wanted to fill today with a bunch of book reviews--to let you know that I actually read the books I carry around as fashion accessories. And I thought you might actually really want to know what I'm reading, instead of wearing, and that the title of the blog is not only for show.

But today's will be sloppy.

At the end of August, I finished Paul Trynka's biography of Iggy Pop Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed (Broadway Books, 2007). A writer for the super smart music magazine Mojo (which I'll never be able to afford a subscription to), Trynka unfolds Iggy's story with great care, structuring Iggy's narrative of (mostly) egregious self-destruction chronologically, and providing well researched detail so copious, the biography feels scholarly. This tone is ruptured the few times Trynka enters the narrative to become a character in Iggy's story, recounting what he went through himself to tell it. Indeed, Trynka, with great care, tracked down Iggy's old girlfriends and their mothers, record producers, admiring teachers and rejected bandmates. David Bowie plays a key role here, scooping up a defeated, often deranged Iggy seemingly numerous times and placing him back on his long, often circuitous path to greatness. Trynka's thesis was two-fold: one, that Iggy both as a songwriter and performer was ahead of his time, and two, while it's no surprise that Iggy's influence on contemporary rock music is legendary, it's startling to realize that the now 60-something Iggy, who continues to write and perform, ended up living as long as he has.

Check back here later for Tao Lin's Shoplifting from American Apparel, and Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs!

FPM: Brown Boots, a Book (particularly a hardcover sans dust jacket) as Fashion Accessory, and Discombobulation

Look at her! Look how great her book looks, gripped by its spine, slung about a few feet from the dirty subway floor and stripped bare and old. Is she reading it? I'm sure she is. Why would she trouble with it otherwise. She no doubt had to shut it fast. It was her stop. It wasn't called. She almost missed it. Where does she work? In a dying publishing house? Doesn't it look great--that book--as it descends up the escalator. The stop I saw her at is a deep, deep stop. It takes a lot of effort to get to the surface, many levels of escalation. I followed her up. I watched the book.

I've also noticed this week brown boots in every shade, but most often in a kind of clay color. I actually love the ones the sax player in The Woes is wearing (and look at the lead singer's jumpsuit!), playing in front of Housing Works Bookstore and Cafe on Crosby Street. I think the sax player has on classic Frye books. Doggone company makes them too narrow for my wide, boxy feet. I have resigned myself to the fact that I will live out my life without Fryes. But why brown this season? Brown boots with all black outfits is what I've been seeing.

This is me in the last photo, looking tired, overwhelmed, defeated, but in one of my favorite dresses, strapless and in red corduroy. I have a preponderance of red corduroy in my wardrobe, lots of hardcover books, but no brown boots.

What have you been wearing this week?

FPM: The Pant You Have Been Reading About

Or are you wearing a pair? I hope not. I loathe these pants--or this "pant," as they say in a certain fashion makeover show. It's an '80s refugee--this "pant"--and has resurfaced now (along with the power suit), and there was a long article about the "pant" in . . . Elle? Bazaar?--oh, one of the dying publications. The writer loathed them, too, until she put on a pair with a towering pair of heels, and that's how she says they MUST be worn. See the woman getting her cab here? She's kicking it like the author advised: in high heels with her ankle-length, pleated front and roomy crotch pant. I actually think she looks fine--I had said at the outset of fashion blogging that I would never post a look I hated here. Do I hate this? No. Would I wear these? Please don't make me.

Other things:

1. The farmer's market is at the height of fashion now with produce in abundance and in every imaginable color.

2. The Williamsburg rag (L Magazine) said slashed clothing was big this fall, and that's what I saw after gazing at beans.

3. NYC has the best unwitting installations of sidewalk trash. Here, you have record covers fashionably askew on the sidewalk. (I've never gotten over feeling astounded that I get to live here.)

4. One photo from the over-hyped Fashion's Night Out, where stores stayed open late in festive fashion in order to get more buyers buying, but apparently they gawked and did not shop.

5. For my friends who love bikes, look at this one. We talked to the owner, an old dude from the neighborhood. It took him a year and a half to trick his bike out this way.

6. I visited the Anna Sui for Target pop-up shop. Gawked at her Gossip Girl inspired line for Target. Did not purchase.

7. I wear this blue dress almost every single day. Here it is after I cut out the shoulder pads (also big this fall) in Tompkins Square Park. Get a good look, cuz this photo's coming down fast.

8. Amish incongruously appeared during the Howl Festival. The women wear the most beautiful bonnets. You won't see them in "the pant."

9. You know what I'm wearing. What about you?

FPM: Mortification

I'm rather mortified that I haven't found the time to put up a fashion post. What is going on with me? Am I busier than I was this summer and last year? I don't think so. It's illogical! Here are some things:

1. Jim Carroll died this past September 11th, and is pictured here with Patti Smith, in his junky basketball body, and I love the long lank hair he sported in the early '70s. While I never loved his poetry, I have to acknowledge that Carroll got a lot of alienated and sullen kids reading and writing (including former University of Utah students of mine) and gave them a literary identity. Carroll makes up the mosaic of reasons I gravitated to the neighborhood I live in now, and in recent years he had been the go-to guy for marathon reading tributes to beat writers at St. Mark's Church. (I recommend his memoir, The Basketball Diaries, btw.) Also, he has the best classic New York accent you will ever hear.

2. I haven't quite started my job hunt in earnest yet and hope to this week. There isn't much to apply for, and that's depressing.

3. I've been spending probably too much time on Facebook. Also, kind of depressing.

4. I'm wearing a disco outfit without the glitter. That's depressing.

5. It is a beautiful day out, however.

6. While I'm going to attempt to put up a fashion post later, don't feel obligated to check back. How much can I ask of you, really?

7. I love you.

FPM: I haven't forgotten about you, readers of FPM!!

I'm hopefully getting my computer back this week. Until then, muse upon the fact that I bought a dress with shoulder pads in it and wore it on the streets for most of one balmy late summer day. Finally, my daughters convinced me to clip them out, which I did on the grass of Tompkins Square Park. I have before and after pics. Much to post. Please check back!