Vay-Cay!

"Sunshine all the time makes a desert."

And I like it like that . . . Off to adventure among some red rocks and dry desert heat. With spa treatments and wine. I'll be back next week. In the meantime, enjoy!

Phoned Home

Perhaps only those who are fashioned obsessed would be saddened by the news of Yves Saint Laurent's death two days ago. Still, if you are a working woman between the ages of, say, 20 and dead, you can bet his work touched your life in one shape or another.

What Halston was to the dizzy disco queen, Saint Laurent was to the working career woman. He burst onto the Paris haute couture scene at the astonishing age of 19 and two years later took over as head of the House of Dior. It was here that he began to create clothing for women that, in his words: " . . . was not only supposed to make women beautiful, but to reassure them, to give them confidence, to allow them to come to terms with themselves."

Today, we take this for granted. In the late 1960s, however, it was revolutionary. Prior to that, designers decorated women. But Saint Laurent saw fashion as a way for women to find their unique sense of self. Unlike some designers, who went out of their way to create ever more outrageous, unwearable outfits in a continual loop of the Emporer's New Clothes, Saint Laurent never once made a joke out of his work . "It pains me physically," he once said, "to see a woman victimized, rendered pathetic, by fashion."

Hence, his first collection for Dior, anchored by the trapeze-shaped shift dress, was all about freedom and ease of wear. That shift remains a working girl's fashion staple to this day. So does the evening suit, whose legacy lies in the designer's famous Smoking Suit, a looser, less angular reinterpretation of the butch-ish silhouette made famous by Marlene Dietrich that suddenly provided savvy women everywhere with an alternative to the Little Black Dress. And can you remember a time when the safari style jacket (ah-hem, Old Navy Spring 2008), peasant blouse, or Palazzo pants have NOT been in style? All Saint Laurent.

(Look – I just found this: my tres chic mother, Saint Laurent-ized! Pay no attention to the fashion disaster with the skinned knee. And we won't even go there with my brother in his Lederhosen.)

* * *

Bo Diddley's death yesterday from heart failure is no less tragic a loss. What Saint Laurent was to fashion, Diddley was to music, a bridge between the blues and rock and roll, inventor of the harder-edged, more driving rhythms that would form the backbone of this new style. Listen to "Who Do You Love," which he wrote in 1956, and you'll hear the revolution coming - not to mention some of the baddest-ass lyrics in all of rock and roll.

Diddley also lived for years right here in the Land of Enchantment. From 1971 to 1978 he was a happy denizen of Los Lunas, where he also served for nearly three years as Valencia County's Deputy Sheriff. During this time he not only continued to make music, but was instrumental in bolstering the financially strapped county's law enforcement efforts, his largest contribution being three highway patrol cars he purchased with his own funds.

RIP to you both.

Mute Monday: Beauty

The Endurance of Mutability

I know, I know. If nothing ever changed, there would be no butterflies. But look, Party People, I don't think the process is very pretty.


This is a fuzzy wuzzy caterpillar that showed up in my house two weeks ago. It attached itself to an end table leg in my living room. I thought it would be gone the next day. But no. It was still there. And it seemed, well, sorta out of it. Like it had partied way too hard the night before with all its caterpillar buddies and was now busily sleeping it off.

The next day, though, not only was the caterpillar still there, it looked different. Less caterpillar-like and more, well, you'll see.

A couple more days go by and then one morning, voila! it somehow managed, while I wasn't looking, to cocoon itself. Right there in my living room.


This always happens come, spring, I swear. Suddenly, my entire household and its environs turns into a freakin' Nature Channel program.

This morning I poked at the cocoon. It's fuzzy but not squishy, and now I'm wondering if the thing isn't a cocoon so much as a tomb. I hope not. I would like a beautiful butterfly to emerge. But with my luck, it may be something disgustingly creepy-crawly. If that's the case, it better do so in the middle of the night and then creepy-crawl it's ugly ass outta here before I wake up.

Glitter on the Front Porch, Glitter on the Hallway

I have loved the B-52's since my best high school buddy introduced me to them in my junior year. First of all, there was that innovative sound - an effervescent concoction that melded New Wave, surf punk, and rockabilly into something so irresistible, that feet everywhere, across the universe and beyond, couldn't help but get up and dance. Secondly, they looked simply fabulous.

In fact, to this day, lead singer Kate Pierson stands as one of my fashion icons, proving, along with Debbie Harry and Stevie Nicks, that instead of ravaging your looks, the rock and roll lifestyle can in some instances render you ageless.

The gal just turned sixty, y'all. Respect.

No Right

We stand at a critical philosophical crossroads in this country. If we are indeed champions of religious freedom, even if that religion seems archaic and weird and most certainly unfashionable both literally and figuratively, then we cannot start throwing our weight around and tell that particular religious sect what they can and cannot teach their children.

Do we tell the Amish they're nutty for not driving cars?

How about the Jews for not eating pork?

The Catholics for the whole Trinity business?

The Mormons for la, la, la, la, la-ing through some of the silliest bedtime stories known to man?

Astrologists for not leaving the house without first consulting their daily chart?

Adherents to Chinese medicine who believe everything from ground bear tooth to obscure and rare plant life can cure whatever ails you, regardless of the harm harvesting said "therapies" causes to the natural environment?

And when was the last time you heard a bona fide court give an atheist shit for teaching their kids about the Big Bang?

That doesn't mean, of course, that anyone, religious or not, has the right to physically and/or sexually abuse their children. Reports of that kind should be investigated and pursued to the full extent of the law. But 460 children were removed from the FLDS compound in Texas last month based on nothing so much as a single allegation. There is no way all 460 of those kids suffered abuse. So one has to wonder: how much of this is about actual law and concern for a child's welfare, and how much of it is suppression of a religion that pushes all our buttons when it comes to the teeter/tooter relationship we have with religion in our so-called "enlightened" era?

I'm not a parent, but I have been a child and I can well imagine how utterly traumatic it must be for these parents and children to be separated like this. All because the Gub'ment of Texas thinks it knows what's best. Go ahead, investigate. But don't bust up hundreds of families just because you don't like how they define the concept.

If it were up to me? I'd remove every child from every parent who sticks their offspring in front of the television for more than a couple hours a day. Who indulges their child's every whim, so as not to play the bad guy. Whose level of maturity is so low, they have lost all ability to establish themselves as counselors, guides, and disciplinarians and morph instead into these warped best friend figures to the point of sporting similar hairstyles and belly-grazing crop tops (cough, Dinah Lohan, cough, cough).

But I don't have the right.

The Black Hole Ate Moi's Homework

I read a statistic once that postulated that before we die, each of us spends on average, like, 1.5 bazillion hours of our lives either standing in line or waiting for service. Which is fine with me, because, hell, when else would I catch up on my crap magazine reading?

Some places, though, are better than others. At the top of my list: the Jiffy Lube on the corner of Menaul and Wyoming in Albuquerque's Northeast Heights. For a place run entirely by dudes, they nonetheless know their market and thus stock a wide variety of the best evah magazines ranging from the most up-to-date Peoples in existence (no six month lag for these guys, oh no) to Time, Newsweek, O, and even Vogue. Not a snooze-a-mooze parenting magazine in sight. No offense to parents, but really, if you're childless or empty-nested, not even the ads are interesting. And if you're a parent, I suspect the last thing you want to read about is even MORE parenting stuff. Admit it: You'd rather read about Jessica Simpson's botched boob job.

At the bottom of my list: my gyno. Whose magazine selection is all about the OB and never about the GYN. And if you're 5.7 minutes away from having yourself poked and prodded in that particular manner, you want aspirational magazines out in the waiting room. Not ones that remind you of why you're here. Listen, you OB/GYN magazine Nazis: we all know how we got here. So now, take us far, far away. Architectural Digest would be good. And heck, forget Vogue, if that's too much for you. Mademoiselle will do in a pinch. Can't go that girly? How about Golf magazine, fer crying out loud. But my gyno, despite my most gentle encouragements, never catches on. He just smiles and nods in that way that tells me when I open my mouth, all he hears is Charlie Brown's parents. Men.

Anyway, yesterday was doc appointment time por Moi and while in my dermo, I was happily heartened to spot this:



Nah, it wasn't Dwayne Johnson that caught my eye. Although I guess you could make a case for his sex appeal in that shiny-suited, head-to-toe reconstructed way today's porn stars are considered sexy, only minus the highlights and tacky-ass French manicure. I likewise spent only a couple seconds perusing Laird Hamilton's "Surf God Workout." Sweet jeebus, I thought only women were susceptible to fairytale bullshit about our bodies. The workout? Puhleeze. AB could eat Laird for lunch.

Nope, the article that caught my really real attention was on Garrett Lisi, a surf bum physicist who has come up with a totally new unifying theory of the universe that he calls E8, which basically says, String Theory, Schming Theory, where it's at is this: fitting together the four forces of physics — electromagnetic, strong nuclear, weak nuclear, and gravity — into an incredibly intricate shape that looks like something you might have created with your Advanced Spirograph kit in the fourth grade.

Another thing about Moi: I'm obsessed with the Big Picture. Every time one of those PBS specials on the universe comes on, I'm glued to the set. But this, ugh, I'm going to need years to grok to this particular bit of information. Go check it out for yourself and maybe together we can process all this into some cohesive understanding.

And while you're at it; riddle me this: Ever since S.B. installed satellite radio in the Mini Coop, it seems I hear Tori Amos's "Cornflake Girl", like, sixty bazillion times a day. So if you can get a finger's grasp on what Lisi is on to, can you perhaps explain to Moi just what in the hell the woman is talking about in this song?