| Been a while. |
[22 Jan 2011|09:41pm] |
Hey folks! (Who are still reading - which is probably, like, three of you.) I realize I haven't posted here forever. I'm living back in Boulder and life is beautiful. Taking a hiatus from the Ice for a couple of years, possibly indefinitely, depending on what comes up in the interim.
But I just wrote this silly little blurb today and figured it belonged here. :)
Anatomy of my Coat Closet
I just realized today I own a lot of fuckin' coats. I don't think normal people own this many coats. It's got to be a habit I picked up in Antarctica.
See, on the Ice, there's the Sunny-Summer-Day Coat - that's the squishy, downy black one with the duct-tape patches and the busted zipper. Then there's the Shitty-Summer-Day Coat. That's the canvas Carhartt with the fur-lined hood. And there's the Really-Shitty-Summer-Day Coat, which is like something you might wear here skiing.
You've also got your Goin'-Out-To-the-Bar Coat. It's cute but not so warm, which means you're gonna sprint there from the Galley, and shiver when you go to smoke, but by the time you leave to hike to Hut Point with the cute girl who's been buying you drinks, you'll have enough whiskey in you not to care. You've got your Goin'-to-Work Coat, and your Goin'-to-Work-Outside Coat - that one goes down to your knees, stuffed with extra hats and gloves and a zipper that always works except, of course, exactly when the wind kicks up is the one time it decides to stick.
And then there are the Winter coats, the coats you park like cars; giant puffy sleepingbags with sleeves. Issued by the government and given back when the season ends because nobody in the World would ever wear a coat that warm unless they lived in, like, Wisconsin or the Yukon. (But in Wisconsin or the Yukon, you hope they just have the sense to stay indoors, since the goddamn zippers probably don't work there either.)
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| Dear You and You and You: |
[19 Nov 2009|02:41pm] |
I'm back on the Ice. Same job as last season. There's less of a learning curve the second time around. Much less the fifth time. There are times when I realize that I'm really good at my job, and there the times when I realize this is a stupid fucking job to be really good at. Such is the duality of the McMurdo Thing. I'm having a stellar season though, as these things go. And I'm not over Antarctica yet. I love it more quietly than I have in the past, but I'm learning things that matter every day.
I haven't started the new blog yet. Things are busy. Last season, someone whose writing experience I trust told me it's almost impossible to make progress on any kind of project while you're down here. I get that more than ever right now. I am working on it though. I realized a couple of months ago, after re-reading a lot of what I'd first written, that most of it was just me processing my breakup with Eric. That was something I needed to do, but not something that needs to be on the Internet - out of respect for his privacy as well as my own. Also because, really, stirring in fistfuls of two-dollar words doesn't make my post-relationship breakup angst any more interesting than anybody else's post-relationship breakup angst.
Meanwhile, I've rethought the scope of the project - less about me and my own personal relationships, more of a broader ethnographic look at Antarctic society. I have lots of good ideas and many terrible drafts. I'm a little distracted and a little blocked. I've got a couple of exciting interviews half-transcribed. I'm also writing more, and more regularly, than I ever have here before. I'm doing it in notebooks and .txt files and on the backs of scraps of paper stuffed into any of my seventeen pockets. (Seventeen. I just counted.) Eventually, something will see the light of day and I promise it won't be as dry as this entry.
How've you been?
Frosty Love,
- Fox
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| Writing Process Post! |
[28 Jul 2009|01:49pm] |
I'm going back to the Ice on August 20th.
I'd like to start blogging again.
This will be my fifth season though, and I don't think just writing about my daily life is going to keep me engaged enough to post regularly. It's too easy to get caught up in said daily life, in the steady Groundhog Day routine, and forget about the outside world. I need a focus.
Icebergs and Penguins have been done to death. (Plus, I still haven't seen a single one of the damn birds - at this point, it's been so long that I might just accept my fate and start actively avoiding them on principle.) The science is cool, but I'm not involved or scientifically savvy enough to write meaningfully about it. Describing the Catch-22 style hijinks of the Company is a never-ending source of morbid entertainment, but at this point it's a pretty captured niche. There isn't much I can say that Nick hasn't already said better - apart from cataloging details of the latest ludicrosities, and I'd rather just send that stuff straight to Frontierwatch. Finally, I'm no photographer, so that's right out.
What do I have to offer? Being both a sociologist and a lover of the diverse and beautiful weirdness that is humanity, I'd love to "just write about the people!" because the people in Antarctica are fucking fascinating. But there are hundreds of people being fucking fascinating in all sorts of ways on a daily basis, so that prompt's a bit too broad to be useful...
But here's something I've noticed: There are a few things about me that are a little weird. I studied Philosophy in college, for example. ("What are you going to do with that?") I'm into nerdy shit like roleplaying games - the kind with dice. I lived in Japan as a kid. I'm five foot nuthin'. I'd rather visit St. Petersburg than the Moon before I die... But people never come up to me randomly and say, "Hey, so uh, can I ask you a personal question? Is it true you can touch your nose with your tongue?" (Yes.)
However, based on the questions I do get from strangers, two things about me are apparently very weird: I live in Antarctica and I have two boyfriends*.
My Antarctic friends, for whom spending six months out of the year in a frozen wasteland is just how they make their mortgage payments, are most curious about how polyamory works. My poly friends, for whom synching your Google Calender with your lover's, and your lover's lover's and her lovers' calenders is par for the course, want to know why the hell I spend six months out of the year in a frozen wasteland. And while I'm certainly not the only out polyamorous Antarctican with a blog on the planet, I'd say we're a small enough minority not to constitute a genre.
So, I'm thinking of starting a blog specifically about intimate relationships on the Ice. Not just my own - although I'll intersperse it with parts of my own story and with my thoughts about the subject in general. (Being a weird Philosophy student, I can't help abstract theorizing about even the most prosaic day-to-day stuff.) I also think it might be fun to interview other Antarcticans about their experiences with love, sex, relationships and the Ice - because there are a lot of interesting stories.
In the face of icebergs, penguins, glamorous science projects, breathtaking vistas, uncommon working conditions, eyeball-freezing temperatures, pioneering ingenuity, giant airplanes, environmental degradation, and an epic battle between faceless megacorp and scrappy, whimsical, misfit community...who's doing what to whom for how many cookies might seem like the most trivial thing going. And, in a certain way, it is.
At the same time, the ways that people hook up, break up, stay apart, live together, sneak around, cope with loneliness, love each other, and leave things between seasons - either on the Ice or with partners who stay at home - provide unique insight into the Antarctic experience. Into how people survive and retain their humanity (or don't) in the midst of a harsh environment that really does not care if you live or die. It's the stuff I find the most interesting, anyway. Interesting enough to write about on a regular basis, hopefully.
Of course, the trouble here is that McMurdo is a Very Small Town. One in which people read each others' blogs. And I'm really not interested in becoming the Gossip Girl of the Great White South. So the question is: How do you write about the most intimate aspects of peoples' lives, during what might be the most intense time period some have ever experienced, in a way that's ethical, respectful, authentic, interesting, doesn't feed into small town politics unduly, and doesn't get you ostracized in the Galley?
It's going to be one hell of a challenge, that's for sure.
I suspect you start by writing only about yourself and staying focused on things that happened a long time ago...and see where that takes you.
Thoughts? Suggestions? Requests? Advice?
* I don't actually have two boyfriends anymore, but I guess you'll have to read the new blog to find out what's up with that...
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| Home |
[12 Mar 2009|05:20pm] |
Home.
I used to struggle with that word a lot. I'm feeling more comfortable with it lately.
In a way Antarctica is home. I've spent more time living there than anywhere else since I graduated college and, in a weird transitory way, I feel very tied into the weird transitory USAP community. I know the folklore, I've staked out territory, developed routine and, because time there is so compressed, I'm on the verge of becoming an old-timer. I've contributed a lot of myself to McMurdo, made a palpable impact on the environment, put down 'roots' in a way - if you can count writing SOPs and posting 'Please Close the Door' signs with photos of giant snowdrifts as roots. That said, I think Antarctica is just too...well, weird and transitory to ever really feel like home to me. I was homesick - achingly, sobbingly homesick - a lot this season, even if it wasn't exactly clear where I was homesick for.
Right now, the geographical place that feels most like home is Denver. Odd, since that's the place I've spent the least time living since I graduated. But Denver's really grown on me in the past few years. Something about the city just clicks. I never would have expected it. Considering we were less than half an hour's drive away, it's surprising how little time my friends spent there as kids. The occasional rock concert or school field trip, the extremely rare excursion to some all ages goth club or hipster coffee shop, this or that indie film that wasn't screening in Boulder, and once or twice we probably went to the Zoo. Always a mission. In and out. We didn't know the place. It was a hulking, nondescript metropolitan mass on the fuzzy horizon of my adolescent consciousness. Nothing compared to the glamorous coastal cities, or to Chicago or, say, London. It sure as hell wasn't New York. It was "just Denver." The town next door.
In college I made new friends, several of whom were Denverites, and many of my old friends also moved Denverwards - it being more affordable and less heterogenously bubble-like than Boulder. I started spending more time there, getting to know the place, discovering restaurants I liked, navigating bus routes, sleeping on couches, visiting the Library, taking long meandering inebriated rambles through downtown streets, making memories. Then I spend most of last summer living within walking distance of the city center.
I don't know when the shift happened. It was gradual. But I started to notice if I went out of town, even just to Boulder for a few days, that upon my return seeing the shiny Capitol dome, or the concert marquees lining Colfax, or the stupid Qwest building florescing blue over everything...would make me feel inexplicably elated. As if a bad day here must be better than a good day anywhere else. I don't get that feeling about many places - and it's never snuck up on me like that before. Sure the city has its drawbacks and its problems; it's a city. But it's a city that I managed to fall in love with while I was busy making other plans. It hurt to leave last Fall.
The only other serious geographical contender for 'home' is New York. I have a lot of family and family history in the City; I've always felt more "at home" there than I do in other places, but I've never actually lived there. I've thought about moving back East throughout most of my life. After high school, I applied and was accepted to the undergraduate program at The New School and turned it down. Don't ask me why. I was 18 and naive and in love and didn't know what the hell I was doing. I don't regret it. Still, sometimes when I'm in the more studenty parts of the city, I'll feel like I'm looking into a kind of alternate funhouse mirror version of my life, wondering where I'd be and who I'd be if I'd said yes.
I used to believe it was inevitable that I'd end up in New York eventually. But at this point, it seems logistically infeasible any time in the forseeable future. Not to mention both my partners haa-aate the place. Plus, I really like Denver, and there are other things that tie me to Colorado at large. So, when it comes to New York, I'll just have to settle for visiting as often as possible and dealing with that strange, dull ache of phantom homesickness upon leaving.
And then, of course, there's Boulder - the town where I lived for ten years, the longest I've ever spent in once place. I'd say I have a love/hate relationship with Boulder, but I don't. What I have is a like/hate relationship. Boulder, for those who aren't familiar, is a very affluent, educated, well kempt, ecoliberal-progressive college town nestled adorably at the foot of the Rockies. It's hard for me to talk about the town without sounding bitter, and I'm not entirely sure what that's about, so I try not to do it too often. I understand that, for many reasons, my brother and I were extremely privileged to grow up in that kind of environment - along with all the consequences, positive and negative, that kind of sheltering entails...
No matter what else Boulder is or sometimes does to people, I can't regret living there because it's where I met most of my closest friends. And it's unquestionably the one place I know best. But Boulder was never home. It was just the last in a long string of random locales to which my brother and I were dragged - increasingly kicking and screaming - by our "upwardly mobile" parents. Again, I'm conscious of the immense privilege involved in having the opportunity to travel and live all over the world as a child, voluntarily as expats rather than as refugees. Still, by the time I got to Boulder, I had long ago learned not to get comfortable. I knew that as soon as you let a place in, believed the latest promises that "this was it", started to feel at home, that's the moment you'd be ripped up by your roots and stuffed back into boxes. Boulder was a pretty good place to be a (middle class, white) teenager. I had a pretty good time growing up there. And perhaps more relevantly, even when I was having a very bad time I was never at risk of getting into serious trouble. But I never got comfortable.
I consciously cut my ties to the town of Boulder when I first left for Antarctica and, emotionally, I've never gone back. But I go back physically all the time. It's the place I know best. It's the place where I'm known best. If I need a place to live or a job, it's the path of least resistance. If I have limited time to spend with my loved ones, it's the easiest way to see most of them (although lately that's changing as they also migrate elsewhere). But it never feels like I'm coming home. It feels like slinking back to sleep on my parents' couch because I don't know what else to do with myself. And the older I get, the more grating that feeling gets.
There are a lot of people in Boulder who I care about. And hey, there are a lot of restaurants in Boulder where I like to eat, bookstores where I like to browse, lectures and film series I like to attend, bike trails I like to walk along, coffee shops I like to sit around and be pretentious in. I have a million fond, fuzzy, sweet, awkward, adolescent memories that pop-up around me no matter what part of town I'm in. I do like the fact that - for whatever strange reason, despite the numerous rapes and assaults on campus - I can feel totally confident about walking from one end of Boulder to the other alone, in the middle of the night, drunk if need be, without fearing for my safety. I don't feel that way anywhere else besides McMurdo. I also get that, for some other people, Boulder is authentically a healthy and healing place for them to be. For example, I've talked with other queer kids who grew up in very conservative parts of the state and for whom Boulder has been a safe(r) haven. I know people who've searched their whole lives to find a place they felt safe and centered and, for whatever reasons, Boulder is what they were looking for. And that's awesome. I may not get it, but it's awesome.
After all, I can't explain why the places I love clicked; they just speak to me. I believe that Boulder, like all places, can speak to people. I'm just not one of them. For me, B-Town is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.
That said, after years of skepticism about whether I'd ever really have (or even want) a home, followed by tentative budding hope that I might someday find one, then lots of searching for the one that I felt sure must be out there, and the eventual realization that homes are built not sought, I've finally come to understand that, for me, home grows wherever my family is. That includes both my biological and my "chosen" families, most especially Eric and August. This, unfortunately, will always pose problems, because my loved ones are spread all over the country and sometimes all over the globe. It'd be easier if I could convince them all to move to one place... But since that seems unlikely, I probably have to get used to being 'poly-homal.'
(Although half the people I know seem to be moving to San Francisco, so who knows? Granted, I think the likelihood of my ever affording to live in the Bay Area is about as low as the likelihood of affording New York...and SF doesn't even have the additional pull of being New York.)
Ultimately, though, home is just somewhere familiar, somewhere I feel safe, among people I love and trust. Right now my brother's house feels very much like home because it's the closest I've been in a while. I'm glad to be here. But I'm equally excited about going back to Colorado. I can't wait to see the Flatirons, spring snow on the ground, and that stupid Qwest building.
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| What Now? |
[12 Mar 2009|02:36pm] |
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Hi Folks!
Well, the Whirlwind Season of Doom is over. I have some time to myself again and I'd like to start updating more regularly. I've had kind of a love-hate relationship with this journal over the past couple of years, but mostly it's been a positive part of my life, I enjoy writing here and I miss doing it. But I'm faced with a problem: Given that ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) frozenfoxtale is largely a travel-oriented blog and, I would bet, people mostly read it because they themselves are travelers or interested in traveling...what do I write about now that I'm off the road?
I've had a few ideas, but they're vague ones. I have a stack of paper travel journals and accumulated scribblings that could grow into various kinds of vignettes. I have a bit of logistical information about alternative ways to travel the world cheaply. I have four seasons worth of knowledge about the US Antarctic Program; how one gets involved in it, what it's like when you get there, things that happen after you leave - as well as plenty of abstract sociological musings about the place and the people who work there. I have some thoughts about going back. I might have a handful or two of photos that never got posted. I have a few other bits and stories that are mostly unrelated. (And, of course, I also have a normal day-to-day life, but this summer I expect it to consist mostly of: "Went to work. Sat at at the computer. Typed some stuff. Played on Facebook. Went home. Rinse. Repeat.")
But these are just ingredients. I'm not sure how to transmogrify them into posts that would be interesting to read. Then it dawned on me. Duh. Ask the people who'd be reading them.
So I'm asking! I'd love your input and suggestions.
Since I'm currently not traveling, what would you be interested in reading about here?
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| Update |
[10 Mar 2009|04:39pm] |
Left the Ice on Feb 20th. Eric and I spent about a week decompressing in Christchurch and then went to Tasmania for ten days. For some reason, I'd always wanted to go there ever since I was a little kid. We spent most of our time in Hobart. Very sweet little town. Got to visit some friends of my grandparents. Then had a long weekend in Melbourne with an old high school friend of Eric's and his Australian fiancee.
Now I'm at my brother's house in Pasadena. I'll be here for about a month - during which time I'm also planning to roadtrip up the West Coast and back with a friend. Then I'm going back to Colorado for the summer. Planning to work for my old research group and hopefully pick up some additional part time work with another non-profit org. Hope to see lots of my family and friends this summer.
August and I are planning to return to the Ice together next season but, of course, nothing with USAP is ever set in stone.
It'll be nice to be home for a while.
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| Hey look, sometimes I do still use that Sociology degree for something... |
[02 Feb 2009|05:09am] |
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One of my closest Ice friends was fired last week.
I won't go into the specifics here; management has supposedly also threatened to fire anyone blogging about the incident (not that there's been any official word on this, just rumor mill). If you follow other Ice blogs you probably know what happened anyway. Suffice to say he broke some rules which the community considered trivial but which management decided constituted a fireable offense. A week ago, he was getting ready to Winter. Now he's gone.
And I...am dealing with it less well than I'd expect. I mean, this person is fine; in fact, he has a pretty good sense of humor about the whole thing. It's not like I'll never see him again, either. I expect to hang out with him this summer. Yet, over the past few days, I've noticed myself grieving as if I'd experienced a real loss. And I'm not the only one. The community at large has reacted with anger, guilt, bargaining behavior, blame, weird disassociative depression and the sort of spontaneous emotional popping of social taboos that you expect when somebody dies.
It's at a low level, of course, depending on how close peoples' interactions with him were. I'm probably hyper-sensitive because this person was such a big part of my season and, honestly, because he reminds me of a friend who actually did die a couple years back. Still, people have been eulogizing him constantly, people I'd never expect saying glowing things about him, raising toasts to him in the bar, randomly mentioning that he should be here or how weird things are without him. (It's almost too bad he's not around to see it - he'd love all the attention.)
People often ask me if there's any law enforcement in Antarctica. I tell them there isn't really; management is responsible for enforcing company policy and the firefighters respond to noise complaints but the community mostly polices itself because, aside from docking your bonus pay, the only real way to punish people here would be banishment. I've usually said this as a joke, but I realize now how true it is. It's not as simple as voting someone off the island.
Firing someone isn't a simple termination of their employment. It's exile. And what is it, historically, to exile someone from a community? Symbolic death. Often preceeding a quick and brutish actual death. Obviously my friend isn't in danger of being eaten by wild forest animals; he's probably at a strip club in Christchurch drinking a beer right now. But within the insular and isolated context of Antarctic life, firing him impacts the community to some degree the same way that executing him would. It will likely have similar psychological and practical repercussions.
I wonder if the high-level Stateside managers who make these decisions grasp that. I wonder, if they did, whether they'd care...
In any case, whatever happens next should be fun to watch. Because, knowing my friend, I bet he haunts the fuckin' place.
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[01 Jan 2009|02:01am] |
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HAPPY NEW YEAR!
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| BLORG POST! |
[20 Dec 2008|11:44am] |
August and me at the Supply Department Christmas Party. Check out the awesome frosted capuccino brownies made by Roxanne. She and her cronies scrounged eggs and flour for two weeks in order to have enough ingredients to bake these and some other treats.
Last night, we went on a tour of the Pressure Ridges, where the sea ice crashes up against the permanent ice shelf in very, very slow motion. The sea ice moves roughly 2 feet a day.
And right about now Aug should be on a plane to South Pole. He's headed out to a field camp after that and will probably have some killer photos. I'll try to post some here, but if you'd like to follow along with his Antarctic adventures, check out his Flickr page:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/augustallen/
(c) August Allen, 2008
In more entertaining news than yesterday's, somebody appears to have stolen Christmas Dinner. 160 lbs of prime rib disappeared from the Galley yesterday. Nobody can figure out what happened to it or where in town you would hide that much beef...
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| This is Not Normal |
[19 Dec 2008|05:16pm] |
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Three Medevacs in a week. Second time this season someone has gotten run over. What the fuck is this?!
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| Meme! |
[12 Dec 2008|07:17am] |
Stolen from sakuratea
Year in Review... Post the first part of the first entry of each month for the entire year.
( Under the Cut )
Huh. When you look at it that way, my past year seems like a pretty straight shot... Not sure if it feels that way or not.
In other news: August is here! He got offered a job as a Field Coordintor for some little field camps way out in East Antarctica - and he didn't freaking tell me! He told Eric, though, and they managed to keep it a total secret from me for about two weeks. The night he arrived, I ran into him in the hallway on my way to dinner and freaked out. :D
He's in town for about 10 days doing some intensive safety and meteorological training, then flying to Pole and then out to AGO-5. He'll be working with a small group of 3 or 4 meteorologsts studying solar wind, and he'll be their mountain guide/EMT/all-round-safety-guy. So, that's awesome.
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| Today... |
[28 Nov 2008|05:02pm] |
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...I'm thankful for my huge and loving families, all four of them. I'm especially thankful for my brother.
...I'm thankful for new loves and new lives dawning.
...I'm thankful to have both evidence and faith that building community is possible, practical, and fundamentally worthwhile.
...I'm thankful for all the beautiful, powerful, compassionate, politically conscious women in my life who challenge and inspire me.
...I'm thankful that, in the face of the current economic and sociocultural turmoil, even those of my loved ones who are having the roughest time of it are still mostly safe from the storm; I'm more than sad that the same can't be said for all peoples' loved ones.
...I'm grateful for every moment of my life that I spend writing.
...I'm thankful for the upcoming two-day weekend and the opportunity to sleeeep.
...I'm thankful for audiobooks.
...I'm thankful for the Internet.
...I'm thankful for good, warm socks.
...I'm thankful that I got to come back to Antarctica this season...
...And I am so. fucking. thankful. that it is halfway over:
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| The Bumblebee |
[23 Nov 2008|04:36pm] |
And for those of you who are more interested in the vehicular side of things (psst...prexious): Ski-plane landing at Willy Field. I'm not sure who took this one either.
Pretty neat.
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| Something Pretty |
[23 Nov 2008|04:19pm] |
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Little bit o' time lapse for you. A cloudy day in MacTown. I didn't take this; I'm not sure who did - it was on the I:Drive. Taken from the Power Plant and looks like about 24 hours or a little less.
In the distance: Hut Point (on the right, with the cross), the Royal Society range (covered in clouds in the background), and McMurdo Sound. If you watch closely at about 0:09, you can see a couple of vehicles crossing the Sea Ice.
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| Icebound Daydreaming of Roadtrips |
[17 Nov 2008|11:00am] |
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I wanna go to Stewart Island ("The Furthest South You Will EVER Go!"), just spend two weeks writing and drinking rainwater.
I want a month in LA reading Bukowski. Late night rambles with my brother.
Take a Greyhound to Texas and hang around Brad's country bunker while Eric learns about defusing landmines.
Return to Durango maybe just to read the newspaper.
Snuggle back in at Kevin's burrow, kick a soccerball around City Park and eat cupcakes at midnight.
Russia is still somewhere on the horizon...
(New York City always goes without saying.)
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| The LiveJournal Entries That Never Were |
[12 Nov 2008|08:22am] |
You know when it is cold out, and you try to start your car, and you think it's about to go and then it just doesn't...and you try again, and the same thing happens...repeatedly?
Yeah, that's what my brain is doing.
I want to write, but clearly what I should be doing is sleep.
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[11 Nov 2008|10:01pm] |
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The bird flapped past me on dirty brown wings and settled on top of the Shop. Skua, went my brain... Then I stopped dead in my tracks.
"SKUA!" I shouted aloud.
Skwonk, replied the skua.
"SKUAS!!" There were two of them. "Skuas!! There are birds on the roof!!"
Life has returned to McMurdo, folks. Keep an eye on your sandwiches.
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[08 Nov 2008|03:10pm] |
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Mud season has come to McMurdo. Everything is melting and dripping and running. I weep for the Janitors.
Just finished bartending my busiest shift ever - Daybar's open longer/later on Saturday which, combined with my real job, means I worked roughly 18 hours today. Made good tips. Totally beat. Would kill for a backrub.
Got a bunch of mail - including a care package with cheese!! Thanks Katelyn, you are awesome. Also moisturizer and snackfood from my Mom. Sweet. And a Marshall McLuhan book I ordered myself months ago and am probably excited about to an inappropriate degree of nerditude.
Day off tomorrow. Thank god.
Still haven't seen any skuas.
Over and out.
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| PLUG! |
[07 Nov 2008|03:10am] |
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Phoenix was probably the first girl I ever had a real crush on and she was a hell of an artist for a fifteen year old. When we were in the 10th grade, she'd ink these enormous and startling illustrations in black Sharpie on the bathroom walls of Fairview Highschool. She dyed her hair electric blue and made her own clothes. Everything about her was vivid. After graduation, she dropped off my radar for many years. Then, last summer, she reappeared suddenly - in my living room. Turned out she was back in town and friends with my roommates.
And now she's living in San Francisco where she's started her own indie clothing line:
pixiebird
Throughout high school, I collected friends' doodles and scribblings in a series of decorative inside-joke-riddled notebooks. Phoenix's were always stand-outs. Still, when I came across her website earlier this year, my eyes practically popped out of my head. So the fact that I can now order her designs on a t-shirt (or panties!) is pretty exciting. One of the best things about being a grown-up in the Era of the Internet is getting to see how those talented kids you knew back when have evolved creatively since.
And then plugging their awesome shit on your blog. (From Antarctica...Wacky.)
Pixiebird is also being featured on Indie Fixx Galleria this month. If you like stuff that rocks, check 'em out.
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earlier |
] |
|
|
|
|
