it’s almost august and i’m trying — really, genuinely trying — to enjoy the rest of summer, but right now i really just want things to go back to normal and get out of this weird limbo, end-of-summer-meets-new-semester transitional funk i’m in.
i started making a birthday list and so far the only thing on it is “bulk packages of sugarfree peppermint gum.” is this what being an adult feels like?
this may be a bit overkill since i’m posting this on like every media outlet i can get my hands on, but out magazine profile on sandra lee? so. ridiculous. so flamboyant. so great.
most memorable quotes (believe me, i’m restraining myself. there are so many more worth mentioning.)
okay i’ll stop now.
jen went to europe for two months and brought me back european granola bars. my favorites are called ‘corny big.’ they’re made in germany but are ‘all the rage’ in switzerland, says jen.
i love this. well, let me rephrase that. i love the idea of it (deborah madison doesn’t have me fooled — this was published two years ago and already serves every function her book seeks to accomplish.) plus, i’m way bummed the statesman beat me to writing about it here.
i eat at home alone. a lot. i love it. it’s when i read blogs with tbs reruns on in the background; it’s when i can eat a bowl of popcorn with nutritional yeast or an entire container of fage 2% and call it dinner. don’t even get me started on my bizarro food combinations that are just embarrassing when consumed in public (saltines dipped in cottage cheese).
thesis statement: i should have written that article. i’m already averaging like five articles/week, just because i keep hoarding all the cool assignments for myself.
edited to add (07/24): jj kindly pointed out to me that although the article is published in austin360 (statesman sponsored), it was actually written by an l.a. times writer! totally fair game for me! i love how lazy the statesman is sometimes.
in other news, today i went to buffalo exchange and bought a great pair of ankle boots. i know. b.e. is kind of universally terrible, but the judgmental salesgirl bought a pair of my jeans and this really wretched orange and purple vintage shirt i had so the shoes were mine for $.68. not a bad day. i also bought a jumper this week. i don’t even know!
got a hit to this blog after someone searched “ray ban tortoise shell”
life goal = achieved.
i transcribed this from a book, i loved it so much:
Q: And what is your routine for actually writing?
Gay Talese: I start with a yellow lined pad and a pencil. The fist thing I do is try to print a sentence. Note that I say try to print a sentence, and print, not write. I use big, block letters. Then I look it over, change it, rewrite, and try to do another. It sometimes takes me a couple of days before I have five to six sentences in large block letters. This is the beginning of my piece.
When I have about four to five pages of block-lettered sentences I type them up, triple-space, on an electric typewriter. Then I edit and rewrite those sentences again and again, until I have a single typed page I’m happy with.
I then take the typed page and pin it to the wall with dressmaker pins. I have panels of Styrofoam on the wall that hold the pages. Then I go through the whole process again and write another page, and pin it to the wall next to the first one. It’s like the laundry on a clothesline. I have four to five feet of Styrofoam, so I can pin up as many as thirty-five pages in three rows.
Q: Why pin them to the wall?
Gay Talese: It helps me get a different perspective: I can see how the scenes move, how the language works, how the sentences flow. I get lost when I rewrite and I want to have another look at it. I want to look at it fresh, as if somebody else wrote it. I used to pin the pages up on the wall and then sit on a chair across the room looking at them through binoculars. But the office I have now is too narrow for that.
source: the new new journalism by robert s. boynton.
tgif for realz. it’s very nice to be home again (n.b. shoutout!) after a long and pretty tiring week. when this wasn’t happening at the ol’ texas monthly, i was writing this about bloggers (i’ll be happy if i never have to say the word ‘blog’ again. oh, the irony!), this (which david henry and the copy desk called ‘pretentious’ ; w/e), and the article in the post below.
for the next two days i’m going to sit in my bed and watch twin peaks. oh leland!
since my annie ray story got cut (pulling my hair out. right. now.), here is the text in it’s entirety, and the shortened version can be viewed in the newspaper here.
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Annie Ray is kind of a big deal. Or, at least that’s what her Web site claims.
Odds are, if you live in Austin you’ve seen an Annie Ray photograph. Maybe it’s your friend’s Facebook picture, a group shot of laughing partygoers at Beauty Bar. Maybe it’s the latest issue of local glossy Rare, where Ray’s portraits of well-known Austin individuals line the pages. Regardless of where you’ve seen her, Annie Ray’s name and photos have quickly become notorious around Austin.
“[She’ll take your photo], and magically, everyone looks hip and cool and lively in the end product. Or maybe everyone looks totally ridiculous, but it doesn’t matter, because all your friends look that way in their shots, too,” said Michelle Cheng, an Austinite who visited Ray’s photo booth at an event at Copa Bar & Grill in January.
Ray has become best known in Austin for the photo booths she sets up at whatever venue happens to be hosting her, typically downtown nightclubs like Beauty Bar and Mohawk but recently at more high-brow events such as business conventions and weddings. Complete with bright, looming spotlights and an assortment of props, Ray’s makeshift photo booths have been called “part-performance art, part-photography.” Post-photo booth, Ray hands out a business card with her Web site address, where her photos can be downloaded for free.
“Usually, people start out being really resistant,” Ray says, sipping an iced coffee and sitting crosslegged on a bar stool. Ray is tall and slender with a dark bob and big, inquisitive eyes. Her confidence is apparent from the way she wears her short, flouncy denim dress to the way she laughingly brushes off the Spiderhouse bartender who practically accosts her for forgetting to pick up her garden bagel from the bar.
“I’ll approach people and ask if I can take their picture, and they’re like, ‘Um, okay,’” she says. “Then, when I start taking their picture I’ll be really cheesy, and [tell them], ‘Give me more! Give me more!’ Those photos after I say that? When you can see — do they open up? Are they embarrassed? Those are the best ones. Those show you who these people really are.”
Ray doesn’t just photograph people; she sees them. And that’s what’s made her so successful. She’s remarkably receptive, and she knows it.
“My true passion is people,” she says. “Growing up, [as an only child] I was really quiet, and would just study people.” Now, when they come into her photo booth, she’ll start conversations to warm them up, to make them feel more comfortable with the palpable uneasiness that comes with getting photographed.
The bright lighting Ray uses in her shoots adds a surreal touch to her photos that make them undeniably distinct. In one image, two 20-somethings embrace. The photo is blurry except for the couple’s faces; their eyes shut tight, mouths open in laughter. In another, a petite girl is biting into a giant slice of Home Slice pizza, an orange cardboard mustache taped to her mouth. In the background, a Home Slice employee who looks like the homeless version of Santa Claus sticks his tongue out at the camera, propping open a pizza box littered with leftover crusts.
Ray’s interest in photography began on a lark her senior year of high school. After taking a photojournalism class, she entered a photography contest for high schoolers where contestants took street shots on the UT campus. She placed first. Ray studied fine art photography at the University of North Texas and moved to the Austin area after graduation for an internship in Round Rock with commercial photographer Gary Russ.
Ray’s photo booths began in fall 2007, when one of her friends pitched Ray’s idea to Allen Chen, editor of the events Web site The Austinist.
“It sounded like a fun idea,” Chen said. “We wanted to give her a chance.”
Shoved in the dark, back corner of the Mohawk, Ray admits she was nervous.
“I just started randomly shooting,” she says.
Fortunately, it worked.
“Annie Ray is some kind of photographic genius. Everybody wants some of what she’s got,” Cheng said.
She’s bubbly and loquacious, going off on wild tangents that initially appear pointless yet consistently manage to spin into relevant points; how a guy chewing tobacco turned her off from commercial photography; how she wore a red dress in all her college self-portraits to draw a sort of parallel to little orphan Annie. As she talks about her development as a photographer, Ray namedrops an array of artists, photographers and writers she cites as influences: New Yorker illustrator Chris Ware. The “American West” series by Richard Avedon. The portraits by Diane Arbus. The evolving scene of trendy “party photographers” spearheaded by blogs like LastNightsParty and The Cobrasnake.
“I watched the lastnightsparty guy [when he was shooting at SXSW] and figured out how he shoots, how he’ll single one girl out and get her to open up to him so he can take her picture,” Ray says. “After awhile, I walked up to him and said, ‘I know how you do it! I’ve got you all figured out!’” Ray wags her finger, laughing as she recollects the encounter.
As she talks about these people, it’s easy to see how Ray has pulled a bit from everyone she’s observed. As Chuck Palaniuk put it in his novel Invisible Man, “I am the combined effort of everybody I’ve ever known.” Clearly, Ray’s style is a fusion of everything she has astutely observed in her 25 years. Still, she doesn’t come off as a copycat. On the contrary, Annie Ray is doing work that’s completely unique. She’s not an imitation of these other artists. Rather, she has a continual, controlled awareness of what is going on around her, sensing when something works.
Perhaps what has made Ray so successful is this remarkable transparency that accompanies everything she does, her way of spotting and shamelessly pointing out reality.
“Annie has this way of bringing out hidden expression and qualities of a person that a lot of people don’t have,” Chen said.
And whatever she’s doing, it’s working.
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like i said, the story got cut, my favorite parts were taken out and i feel like the printed version is really choppy. but c’est la vie; life goes on.
more information on annie ray can be found here. she’s truly a gem.
after having a horribly stressful week where trying to write a news story almost did me in (read: i hate news), i’m relieved to be doing things i constitute as “thesis research” (you can never start too early!) by watching slacker and reading biographies of edie sedgwick. also, i’m trying to find this documentary called viva les amis but i cannot find it anywhere. help mee.
finally, smashed avocado toast with lime and crushed red pepper. consider that.
links of the week:
1. ruth madoff (in ‘81) kind of looks like paris hilton.
2. spoon got nuffin’. see you there tomorrow!
3. this is only funny because i went to religious school (but #1 and #2? so good.!!!)
a cooking update:
i am really lazy. for the past five (i think?) nights, my dinner has consisted of a dish that is kind of reincarnation of mother’s peasant’s meal, but is more explicitly, as bread and honey defines it, hippie food. basically, it’s a lot of random stuff in a bowl topped with some kind of sauce. way hippie, i’m just spreading the love. man.
recipe: yield 1 serving
ingredients:
1 cup quinoa, cooked (from about 1/3 cup dry. i usually make a big batch at the beginning of the week.)
random assortment of raw vegetables (i usually use kale, sweet onion, yellow summer squash, carrots, maybe a sweet potato)
protein of choice: chickpeas, tofu, etc.
for sauce: agave nectar (light), bragg’s liquid aminos, toasted sesame oil, pinch of salt.
directions:
prepare veggies/protein individually as desired. i usually steam the vegetables and heat some chickpeas in the microwave. like i said, lazy.
whisk together sauce ingredients. i have no measurements for this, but it should taste kind of teriyaki-esque when you’re done.
mix everything together in a bowl: quinoa (warmed), vegetables, protein, and sauce.
in other epicurean news, i’m making my way slowly through the orangette archives and randomly testing out the appealing parts of the newest 101 suggestions from bittman (so far i’ve made #22, 35 [only because i felt like eating with chopsticks], and a modified 50 [no cheese, substitued balsamic vinegar, and served it over couscous.])
a breakdown of what i do at my internship:
9:00 – 9:30 a.m. coffee break. utilize trial-sized mouthwash samples in the bathroom.
9:30- 11:00 a.m. type some stuff, covertly check e-mails.
11:00 – 11:30 a.m. another coffee break, sometimes tea.
11:30 – 12:00 p.m. wander around the building.
go america go! i think i’m seeing this later today. join me!
new blog feature (BIG day.)
links of the week – some old, some new. cleaning out my bookmarks (sung to tune of ’cleanin out my closet’). this blog just keeps on giving.
1. illustrated missed connections (new york). i love how these drawings are so completely eerie. fitting.
2. don’t look down: i don’t know why i like this so much.
3. monofonus press. can’t wait to write an article on this. (via austin eavesdropper)
4. hmmm.
all for now. have a nice weekend.
product review of the day: good earth original tea bags- sweet & spicy tea & herb blend.
this is the best tea ever.
