The Visa Diaries

For the most part, I have been trying to avoid talking about things I am buying for my wedding (4 weeks away!) on this blog, because it is such a specific niche of purchases. Furthermore, it is endless, and could fill up posts from here until death do us part. However, since wedding planning is pretty much the only thing that I am doing these days, I don’t have any other material… so, with apologies, here I go.

I don’t know when weddings became such a big industry. When my parents got married, it was in the backyard of the bride’s parents’ home, as it was for most people then. Her mother did the majority of the planning, they showed up, badda-bing badda-boom, and five hours later they were rattling back down the driveway trailing some tin cans behind their VW. Perhaps this is a simplified view with 40+ years of hindsight, but planning definitely does not seem like it was the year-long full-time job it is these days.

These days the bar feels substantially higher. Take a gander through a Martha Stewart Weddings, or peruse one of the highly specialized and highly precious wedding blogs out there, and you know you’re not in Kansas anymore. A humble backyard affair will not cut it – unless, of course, it is styled by a celebrity stylist, who could make it come off as charming and naive… instead of it actually being naive. After all, this is going to be “your big day!” as everybody keeps referring to it, with a big smile! And with 100 plus of your most favorite people traveling from all over to be there, you do not want to disappoint.

The main thing I have discovered about wedding planning is that (like coastlines) it is a fractal-like process. Every bit of it, as soon as you dive in opens a world of questions of equal complexity. You need a cake, for example, so you research and find a nice cake baker. But its not done – you need to figure out what kind of cake, what kind of filling, what kind of frosting, what kind of decoration, what combination of tiered and sheet cake, will you have a what kind of groom’s cake and what will that be, how does everybody feel about cake toppers, and if so what kind and how much do they cost and con they come in time. Then you have to figure out how the cake will be transported and when, who will provide the pedestal for it to sit on, the table to support it, and the knife with which to do the ceremonial cutting. Each one of these questions could be an equally complex operation. You agree to use the cake knife that your aunt used at her wedding, until she back-pedals because she’s afraid it’ll get taken away at security on the flight there. Back to square on with the cake knife. Every step of the way involves endless research, coordination with vendors, and vetting of the proposed solution between a committee of people, including your mother, your father, your fiance, the secretary at work, and anybody else who happens to overhear. When a vendor goes out of stock on something you wanted or messes up an order, well then, just start right over.

This process happens with every item on the wedding shopping list, from big to small. The venue, the dress (the shoes, to veil or not to veil, the hair (down or up, and if up, high or low and how to make sure the stylist doesn’t use too much hairspray??), the make-up, the jewelry, the lingerie, the alterations), the ring, the caterer, the photographer, the dj, the officiant, the invitations, the flowers, the drinks, the decorations, the cake, the bridal party gifts, the favors. I could go on with the parenthetical decisions required. Throw in a couple of unresolved family issues (which, so thankfully, we have not really encountered. My parents are being a-maaaazing.) and I can see where Bridezilla comes in.

I realize as I’m writing this that I’m making this process sound like not much fun. But the thing is, it *is* fun. Obsessive and sometimes stressful, but so fun. When else do you get to design one day so fully, to pack it so chock full of beauty and meaning and special details. When else do you get to have all the people you love in the same place at the same time, and enjoy beauty and celebrate love with them! It truly is a once-in-a-lifetime event.

The getting married part is – almost – the icing on the cake.

This article caught my eye in the NYTimes the other day. It is about how New York City’s Village is becoming a theme park to its former self. In the Old Days (whenever that was – any time from the 1800s to about 1980 it seems, depending on the revivalist), the Village was a really a bohemian village. Inhabited by all sorts of artistic and/ or gay people who did not fit into mainstream society, they found a community together in downtown New York, and later went on to become famous. Accounts claim it really was a village – things were smaller, cheaper, and less hectic, people knew their neighbors. Actors and writers without trust finds could afford to live there.

The world has obviously changed significantly since then, and one of the ways is that businesses and individuals have become more and more savvy about creating images that can be marketed. Simultaneously, consumers have become more skeptical of those images, and ravenous for something “authentic”. Like other neighborhoods that were the sites of iconic cultural happenings (Haight Ashbury, for example, or a much closer neighbor, Soho) the Village finds itself sought out by people looking for the magic for which it became famous – outsiders finding a home together and having a grand old time, unconscious of how cool they would later be seen to be.

The inevitable truth of course is that the genie is long gone from the bottle – magic exists only as long as it doesn’t quite realize it is magic. As soon as it has self-consciousness of its it-ness, well then, hello tourists and fashion boutiques, hello high rent. Good-bye to that faint, ineffable, je ne sais quoi. Good-bye to the innocence that, by definition, cannot be tried for.

Perhaps the magic of the Village really existed as storied, or perhaps it is only a post-fabricated nostalgic revision – most of us will never know. At the very least, it has been amplified post-facto, like all myths, and the restaurants described in the article are are reinforcing that myth so as to cash in on it. They are more sophisticated and upscale than the Pirates of the Caribbean at Disney Land, or even a place like New Orleans Latin Quarter, but the function is the same: create an exotic experience that people will pay to feel a part of.

The Wonder Wheel at Coney Island

All of this came back to me when I went to Coney Island last weekend for the first time. My brother and his family, including Mr. Ben (age 7) and Miss Rowan (age 5) were visiting, and I thought Coney Island would be fun. It did end up being fun, but only after I got over how run-down it is, how trashy are the clientele and the food, how I was afraid to walk barefoot on the beach for fear of what might be in the sand. After I got over all of that, we had a good old time, and I was struck that Coney Island, which is actually supposed to be a theme park, is not. It is authentically, non-self-consciously what it is, and what it always has been.

This may not always be the case – there are various development plans underway for Coney Island. I say run over there as fast as you can, and live the magic… before it is revived as Magic!(TM).

I am not usually on the bleeding edge of trends. An early adopter maybe, but there’s always a bunch of funky ‘kids’ in Williamsburg or Shoreditch or wherever doing anything before me. Which incidentally reminds me of a joke I heard recently about those Williamsburg hipsters:

Q: How many hipsters does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: You don’t know???

Ha!

Anyway, back to our story. In light of all this, I was completely thrilled when my friend Christy invited me to go see a hot up and coming band last thursday. Not only are hot and up and coming (and my resident hispter-at-work Noah had not even heard of them yet) but they are locals from my new home-sweet-some Brooklyn. For all those reasons I was disposed to like them, but then on top of all that, they have about the best band name I have heard in a long time: Yeasayer.

It may not sound like much, but I think the world is in need of a little saying yes these days. A little more ’sure, we can work that out’ and a little less ‘not my problem, mate.’ A little more of, “yes I care, yes I am engaged, yes I want to take action and make even a small difference.” “No, I am not too cool for school!” (see, that double negative there, is like a yes

Yes is more than a word, it is a very powerful attitude that influences how we are in the world. I recently spent 2 days at a corporate offsite for a client, which was perhaps a bit corporate for my taste, but was facilitated by some very cool improv actors who had all sorts of pearls of improv wisdom. One of the groud rules of improv, apparently, is to take everything done by other actors as ‘offerings’ and go, ‘yes, and…’ as opposed to ‘that’s stupid!’ or just ignoring it, which are called ‘blocks.’ We all know blockers, don’t we, and boy who wants to hang out with them? ‘Yes’ allows creative flow, ‘no’ cuts it right off. The more we say ‘yes’ to the offers already on the table in our lives, the more will come into our life in unpredicatable ways. Equally, the more we refuse offers, the safer and more predictable, along with stuck and boring, it becomes. They called accepting offers ‘allowing yourself to be changed by others’, which I also think the world could use a little more of these days.

There is also that famous story about how John Lennon and Yoko Ono met in a show of hers in a gallery in London. She had a piece that required visitors to climb a ladder to read something on the ceiling. It was a framed piece of paper that said, “Yes.” Lennon recalled later, “So it was positive. I felt relieved.”

In light of this positive spirit, I said “yes” to a lovely Yeasayer tee-shirt, which I am happily wearing as I write this. Oh, and the music was great too. Check it out at http://www.myspace.com/yeasayer

The summer music festival is a big deal in the UK. People spend weeks talking about Glastonbury, and if you’re going to Glastonbury, and how many people are going to Glastonbury, and what the locals think of Gastonbury, and how muddy it got at Glastonbury, and what Kate Moss wore at Glastonbury, etc etc. It is almost a bigger news event than Big Brother. Besides Glastonbury, there is a whole roster of other festivals, none nearly as iconic, but each tailored to a carefully targeted market demographic. In total they are a big part of the popular marking of the British summertime.

With all the hoop-la, I’ve always been interested in going to one. But I forgot to pack my tent and sleeping bag when I came over on the plane, amongst other obstacles, and so in four summers of living in London had never actually been to a festival. Until last weekend, that is. I am happy to report that I am no longer a festival virgin. When my friend Juliet not only invited me to go along with her group, but also offered a tent and a ride, it seemed that God had finally decided it was time for me to experience The Festival. The one He chose for me is the Big Chill, targeted, as Jules explained, for aging clubbers, who maybe used to rave in fields, but now are starting to have kids. It takes place in the lovely (formerly lovely, that is, before the invasion of 20,000 “chillers”) deer park of Eastnor Castle in the Malvern Hills.

For the Americans in the crowd, British festivals are a slightly different genre than ours. They are more intense than your Lollapaloozas, because they run over several days and involve camping out, but not quite as hardcore as something like Burning Man, because, well, its not the desert and you can buy things you forgot to bring. Its like a massive sleep-over at a country fair. No livestock or carnival games (not a Mole to Whack, sadly), and more music, but the same sort of feeling of a big field that might have recently hosted corn or grass or some other vegetable thing, now mainly a mud-flat for throngs of people milling between stalls, soundstages, generators, and port-a-potties. The field-cum-mud-flat quickly begins to sprout ends of sausages, cigarette butts, and other assorted litter to replace its former crop. The people eat and drink and mill and sit, then do it all again, and occasionally notice that they’re in what would be an idyllic field if it weren’t for all the other people. In my book “camping” involves fewer people and more nature, so this is something different. Maybe “festing”… if not “festering.”

At first I did not understand the point of the extra days. I mean, being at a fair for one afternoon is usually enough – you see all the sights, sample enough food to remind you that things prepared in trailers usually do not taste good, and rub shoulders with enough sweaty people wearing cowboy hats to sort of suffice until the next fair comes along. If you are lucky enough to need the port-a-loo during the afternoon, then you’ve really feel you’ve done country living, and enough is enough. We arrived Friday evening, had a great night of dancing to Kruder & Dorfmeister under the stars (only one of them was there – I don’t know if it was Kruder or Dorfmeister…), and by the middle of Saturday afternoon, this was how I was feeling – I’d had enough. Was no longer enchanted with the British middle classes and this ritualized hedonistic escape to the country. £125 (that’s over $250 earth dollars these days) to maybe imagine that you’re Janis Joplin at Woodstock or something, when really you’re Harriet who works as a PA in Slough. See, I was getting catty.

But you see, my problem on that first day was that I had gotten separated from my group. I had slept in, then wandered out and never found them. So I was looking at it all with the critical eye of a vaguely hung-over, dehydrated outsider. The beauty of the festival, I discovered, is the group dynamic, and that takes a couple of days to gel. Here I have to give a shout out to the best camp-mates ever, who totally welcomed me and feel like my-new-best-friends: Juliet, Dennis, Ceri, Sam, Giles, Manoj, Louise, Will, and our team leader, 18 month old Isabel (Dennis and Jules’ daughter, and the reason we camped in the Family area, where at least nobody pees on your tent). As soon as I rejoined them on Saturday evening, the festival just got better and better. By Saturday night, we and all the Big Chillers seemed to actually have chilled out, and were ready for a heaving outdoor party. I love a good dance under almost circumstance, so what can be better than brilliant music on a warm night in the open air with a delirious mood all around. The Idjut Boys started it off right at the SoCo Fat Tuesday stage then Hexstatic took over on the main stage. As the sky eased from indigo to black, people released those floating candle lanterns in the sky and all was magic. Instead of being nasty about PAs from Slough, I was starting to actually fancy myself more of a Janis Joplin. Ok, maybe not Janis, but like somebody all about being and feeling, rather than judging. That’s magic too.

By Sunday, the most beautiful day of the British summer so far, the festival had ripened and mellowed to a warm and fuzzy going and flowing. We ate, drank, chatted, joked, danced, sat around, wandered, split up, and rejoined. The arch of the weekend was like a good dj set: bringing a crowd up and getting it together may take some work, but then you get there, go a little crazy, and then come down long and luscious. At the tail end of the experience you feel open, emotional, spent and rejuvenated all at the same time.

In the hazy afterglow, I am festival convert. I’d do it all again in a heartbeat, buy my ticket now for next year. But only if Isabel is team leader, and if I can chill with the same campers.

Commuting from home in West London all the way down to work in South London at prime rush hour is not exactly my first choice of how to spend an hour and a half of each one of my days. The London Underground is unpredictable, dirty, and crowded at the best of times, and catching three different lines en route means I pick up just about every delay on the system. However, there is one bright spot: I am practically forced to read the “news”papers that are distributed for free on the Tube. A guilt free hit of crack-media – bring it on! In the mornings I actually have enough energy to concentrate on the quality reading that I bring with me, so I usually skip the Metro. But by the evening, fake news and gossip seem just the thing, so I’ll pick up a copy of the London Lite, or TheLondonPaper, or sometimes both to compare their varied “reporting” of the important celebrity issues of the day. The Beckhams in Los Angeles, Lindsay out of rehab, the ups and downs of Kate and Pete… these paper-thin personas feel like old friends.

Whenever there is a bit on the young royals (are Kate and Wills on again?? I would be on the edge of my seat if I had one during rush hour), it always seems to take place at “Picadilly hot-spot Mahiki.” So when my friend B suggested that we get off our lazy butts and actually venture out of our neighborhood for a fancy drink, and go to Mahiki, how could I resist? Would we get in? Would it be too terribly chic if we did? Full of rich and handsome aristocrats??

Let me just cut to the punchline. B said it best when, after sailing in and finding ourselves in a completely unremarkable Polynesian-themed tiki-bar, she concluded, “Same idiots as everywhere.” There was a faint smell of off milk and/or fruit when we first walked in. That faded soon enough, but the bartenders in hawaiian shirts and the drinks in coconuts and ceramic cups with Polynesian mask-faces on them all created an enthusiastically kitsch, far from cool, environment. I couldn’t help comparing it unfavorably to the Tonga Room at the Fairmont in San Francisco, which has been around for years, but at least has a pool in the middle that starts to rain and thunder every half hour and a boat with music comes out and performs a bit. Here the only thing to watch were young Sloanies with too much of daddy’s money. Which I guess, on second thought, is a show of sorts.

The night was not a total bore. We met some nice enough French Moroccans. Bankers of course. One of them who lived in Dubai did a lively job of trying to convince me that the vapid life is where its at. He failed, but was quite entertaining along the way, and I now have an invitation to Dubai.

Here it is: rich people can never be cool. They are inherently conservative because they want to preserve their status, and since they can buy whatever they want, they never develop any creativity. Also, the higher up on the economic ladder you go, the better looking the women get (high maintenance budgets) and the worse looking the guys get (too much time spent in the office, eating expensively, and patting themselves on the back). Next time, B and I are going to pull some builders.

The purchase I’m about to tell you about was actually made by my mother, probably over 30 years ago now. It is this fabulous, floral-issimo, polyester-issimo, pantsuit that I found in the attic. My mother called it a “hostess suit.”

I was frantically looking for a Halloween costume on Saturday, and was overjoyed to open a box in the back of a closet and have its bold lime and orange pattern jump out of the darkness at me. I am terrible at Halloween costumes. I mean they have to be so high-concept these days, like going as “The Walk of Shame” or a “Bachelorette Party.” It is totally not acceptable anymore to go as a “cowgirl” – minimum it would have the be a “Cowgirl-Killer Zombie”or “Paris Hilton on the Simple Life.” We are all so post-modern.

The stakes are perhaps even higher at art school. We throw the best party on campus for Halloween, in this fantastic huge old industrial space where the sculptors work. Some people go all out on amazing costumes – my favorite last year was a perfect Edward Scissorhands, and this year there was some sort of zork-creature straight out of Lord of the Rings. Oh, and my friend Rebecca who went as Nicole Richie. A girl who regularly wears no make-up, she was so utterly transformed, she was disguised in plain site – nobody recognized her.

So back to me and my hostess suit, thanks to Mom, I went as a Desperate Housewife, circa 1970. I figure Eva Longoria and co. have no monopoly on that role. I accessorized with a martini glass, a bottle of prescription pills, ironed hair and a middle part, and was more Sigourney Weaver in Ice Storm. The best thing was that the hostess suit was made for dancing, so I was comfy comfy comfy as I boogied the night away.

I got accused by one of my classmates for “not living the student life” when I told him about my time in New York last weekend. Amongst the general New York-ish activities like going to a show (the now-closed Absinthe “sexy circus” down at Pier 17), stopping by the MOMA (the current exhibition “Out of Time: A Contemporary View” is pretty flippin-fantastic), brunch at Balthazar, etc, we also spent a fair amount of time at Soho House New York. Arvind is a member in London, and gets entry to the entire family of clubs.

I used to be anti- the members club. Why bother when there are bars and restaurants aplenty? Why go back to the same venue over and over when there are so many new places to try? Why hang out with a bunch of twats who need their co-bar-inhabitants to be vetted? Members clubs are an urban uncle to the beer-guzzling fraternity member rampaging over college campuses across america, and I never liked fraternities for the same reasons.

However, it was our lovely friend Indira’s birthday (she is filming a pilot of an exciting new tv show in town), and what with none of us being exactly local, Soho House seemed like a good bet. And it was just that – a good, safe, bet, where we didn’t have to wait in line or waste time equivocating, where there were contemporary cocktail mixes with cucumbers and such, and where there were enough people but not too many. It was comfortable and well-executed media-yuppy lounge. Apart from the fake tin panels tacked on the ceiling (”Soho” House feeling it had to live up to its name, despite being in the meat-packing district?) it was all a comfortable, benign blend of contemporary/ old-boys-club – somewhat the same tone of decor as a Banana Republic.

Well, we had such a nice time, or have become so lazy, the we returned Sunday afternoon. The roof deck with the pool, overlooking the Hudson River at sunset, was what got me accused of not living the student life. Fair enough. And now I see the benefits of the members club. Compared to the airless confines of the average New York apartment, where you are lucky if you have a view across a shaft, this roof deck complete with wifi and bar service was absolute nirvana. Even sans roof deck, the members club is a comfortable public space to hang out, chat, work, occasionally eat or drink, whatever. A place where the chairs are cushy and reconfigurable, to take you from coffee to cocktails, and where you do not feel like there is a stopwatch ticking for your table. Kind of like an upmarket version of Starbucks, actually. Yeah… Starbucks House. Sohobucks…

I went to go hear some live music the other night. Tuesday night to be exact. The only reason I went was because Arvind was in town – otherwise I would have felt far too busy and/ or tired to go out and hear music on a Tuesday. Lame! I am so lame. It is amazing how small we can let our world become through routine and laziness, and how refreshing and invigorating it is to break out of that.

Cafe 9 is a small bar & live music venue, literally less than a 10 minute walk from my house. It is the type of place where the musicians are sitting in the audience until just before their set, and where the locals who to the singers in between songs. Tuesday as a girl-with-guitar night, three of them, really great singers and songwriters each. The show was free (!), so I bought CDs form each of them to help subsidize their gas.

Rebecca Pronsky, Jennifer Greer, and Lys Guillorn took me a land of lullaby and bittersweet harmony. I swear, I swear I will be going back to Cafe 9 soon.

This weekend I went to the Durham Fair, in Durham CT.

The Durham Fair is one of the biggest in the area, and apparently the largest agricultural fair in the country totally run by volunteers. Arvind is visiting from London, and I thought I’d take him to see an authentic, Americana experience. I have great memories of going to the country fall fairs when I was growing up – marveling at the year’s biggest turnip, the Junior League’s best pumpkin pie, the most perfect goat, etc etc. The horse pulls were always a favorite, when they brawny horse teams would stamp and snort and foam as they strained to pull the great blocks of concrete. Fairs meant conady apples, carnival games you never win (for big stuffed animals you don’t really want), and those frisbees that spun around as you poured paint on them to and made psychedelic splatters. So it was with great anticipation that I planned to go to the Durham fair this year, and show all the quaint joys of simple country life to my sophisticated Anglo-partner.

Well. Maybe some things are better left nostalgic memories. The experience started in a parking lot that had been until very recently a corn field – a beautiful bumpy, rutty, once-a-year justification for all the SUV drivers. The lot was right next to a cow-filled barn, the odor of which got us into “country” mood right away. From the lot, we piled into a bright yellow school bus, directed by Dunkin’ Donuts-fed volunteers. In fact, everybody at the fair looked rather Dunkin Donuts-fed, not quite the exemplars of the healthy outdoor life that us urban dwellers might fantasize about as we pound the treadmills at our indoor gyms. And if it wasn’t Dunkin Donuts, it was fried dough, or pulled pork sandwiches or corn dogs, or hot fudge sundays… let’s just say the prize pigs weren’t the only well-fed livestock at the event.

There were some highlights: we saw a pig race, five little porkers sprinting around a track, which was quite sweet; some charming llamas with snaggy teeth shorn like poodles; and a lady hand-cutting those old-fashioned black paper silhouette/ cameo/ whatevers. I think my favorite thing was the baby goats in the petting zoo, adorable as they piled on top of each other on the barrels in their pen, legs that wouldn’t quite fit dangling off.

It all started to go a bit wrong when we made the mistake of patronizing the Durham Republicans food booth not just once (for the Lime Ricky) but twice (on the way back for a pulled-pork sandwich) – before we noticed their subtle political identification and solicitous behavior to the Marine in full dress uniform. Having been out of the country, and for Arvind not being from here, the heaviness of the barn-sized American flag, the stall selling “Baghdad Bracelets” and the country girl group singing about “God Bless the American Housewife” all became a bit overbearing.

Sadly, I realized that my romantic notions of pastoral autumnal bliss are much better served by overpriced farmers markets that come into the urban centers and trips to apple orchards in chi-chi towns like Guilford. I find this is sad on several counts – for urban sylistocrats such as myself who can only take a gentrified pastiche of a rural or foreign other, for the conservative strain gripping much of non-urban America, and for the widening cultural gulf between us.

I have been buying a lot of books recently, which I guess is apt for the beginning of a new school year and a thesis topic to come to terms with. It may also have something to do, however, with Amazon.com, their FREE! SuperSaver shipping, and one-click purchasing.

In the last couple of weeks I have bought:
Design Noir, by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
Celebration Park, about the work of artist Pierre Huyghe
Typography, by type maestro Wolfgang Weingart
Pornotopia, by Rick Poynor
The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell
The Writers Journey, by Christoher Vogler
Consumer Behavior, by Michael Solomon
and, belatedly, the last issue of Emigre magazine, called The End

What is it about the purchase of a book? It is like acquiring a whole world in a small paper packet. Whether it is a fictional narrative that invites you into a character’s life, or an explication of an idea or process that explains the world from a whole new vantage point, books pack an amazing amount of experience into a sublimely economical form. Browsing a bookstore is like going to a travel agent, and buying a new tome is almost as good as going on a trip – each book is a ticket for the mind to escape from its usual rut and and take flight above the small world of our daily habits.

It is somewhat shameful to admit, but I often to prefer browsing and buying books – acquiring bits if the world like parcels of land – to actually reading them once I have gotten them home. I am sure it means I am a shallow person, and I justify it by reading the reviews on Amazon or asking somebody who actually did read it to summarize it for me. I have always been a slow reader, so maybe that is my excuse. But somehow the promise, the advertisement if you will, for the trip to Tahiti or Freakonomics-ville, or wherever, is often more tantalizing than actually plodding through the text.

Anyway, buckling down for school, I am determined to actually read these books – at least enough of them to get the gist. Since I am a designer, and they have lots of pictures, that should help too.