Fall Thoughts on a Summer Mindset Trapped in Spring

Sometimes the greatest gems of life happen to be e-mails from Neiman Marcus.


This dress just took all of my summer thoughts and chucked them out the window. It cannot be challenged within me; I am always going to be a fall girl. Fall has always signified the beginning of school, the new wardrobe, the new winds coming in. The turtleneck is made of cashmere so it can keep you nice and warm while still looking chic.


I have a penchant for getting skirts of this style quite often.

Simple and elegant, with the neck emphasized for a necklace or a great pair of earrings. Even better is the solid coloring.

These earrings deserve an honorable mention all on their own. Available at The Sea Change at etsy.com, they are completely gorgeous and alarmingly affordable. Once upon a time, I had a pair of Eiffel Tower earrings but I lost them somehow...these are the perfect subsitute.

I love how everything at this store looks so rich in history, like somebody could have owned it hundreds of years ago.

Hehe.

Timeless I say.

Oh goodness, I can hear the site beckoning me now....

Love to you all,

Heather

Of Girlfriends and 500 Days, The Best Abandoned Building Ever and Sleeping in Cylinders

There is nothing quite like a good time with your closest girlfriends. You only have to get to the laughing point. From there on, you can say anything and they will laugh with you. Raise your eyebrows and they get it.
I love the girls in my life. There are many of them and they are all glitter like you would not believe.


We're getting closer to that time of season....


This is the best abandoned building ever.
Once upon a time, in the heart of Clayton was a bookstore named Library Limited. It was two stories of magic. Stairwells and author signings all the time, a bar, and goldfish swimming in ponds outside of the children's section, designed to look like a castle. Where a young Miss Heather (a VLG at the time) would ride with her Daddy in their car with the top down and would stay reading for hours until the store closed at midnight.
Before the internet was around, before cell phones, before texting, before technology was so dominant.
Then one day something happened. Young Miss Heather was 15. She got older and with that age, came her stupid rage at everything. Library Limited went out of business and no bookstore in the world could ever be a better subsitute, not even the Borders in Brentwood.
For her senior movie, Heather and her Daddy would go back to Clayton and to the Library Limited. She wanted to film it and went inside where construction men were whitewashing the walls and it was all empty and book less.
Heather wanted to scream when she was in there but did not. Instead she talked about what the abandoned bookstore meant to her for three and a half minutes on the camera.
It was my forever treasure.


When I was a kid, I wanted to run away from home to the nearby park Francis. There I would sleep in the slide which would protect me from cold winds and rain. There is something about sleeping in a cylinder that has always looked incredibly appealing to me.

Listening to:
-Madonna Hollywood
-The Crystal Method London
-Wang Chung Dance Hall Days

Love to you all,
Heather

New Lust

I NEED THIS SOUNDTRACK NOW.
I've been having an '80's influenced weekend. This soundtrack is loaded with all sorts of goodies. Need it now.

Love to you all,
Heather

Death of the Memories

My memory is terrible. I'm glad I write these little posts but I bet you anything that one day, I'm not going to remember these.
I'm working on my paper for Comm and one of the paragraphs is about my senior year of high school. I remember approximately four classes. I can't remember the rest of my schedule. I don't remember the room numbers or even half the rooms I was in. I have a vague idea of where my locker was.
Here's what I do remember...the green room at the theater, the handbag I carried, the cover of my assignment book, a handful of people at best, Finnegan's beard, getting a criticism on a paper I wrote, curly fries, and the invasion of the blazers.
See, it's not so bad. Just fuzzy in some parts. Blurry in others. "Scene Missing" in many.
If high school had been this amazing time in my life, I would be disappointed. But it wasn't. School has never been an amazing time for me. It's always been something I had to accomplish to get to the next space on the game of life board. Right now, it's very good but talk to me next year when senioritis strikes again.
The really bad thing is lately I've been forgetting the past as well as the present. I've been zoning in and out of speeches/conversations like crazy. Even when I'm talking, I'm not listening to myself. I'm stepping outside of myself and watching from a distance. Even then I forget to watch myself.
It's extremely bizarre. Don't think I'm not aware of that.
For a short while now, I've been looking at myself as a person and wondering What are you doing? Everyday I have at least ten thousand things to do, filling my days and nights up full until we get to The End, the sleeping point.
Everyday I look at these ten thousand things and know they are unavoidable. They are my life. They have to be done.
In some cases, I just go through the motions which makes me feel robotic and dull. I don't get a whole lot of free time which frustrates me and makes me happy in an odd way. Sometimes I don't like to go out because I have to perform. Gotta be on, all the time. Most of the time, I love being with my stories and the words. It appears lonely to some but I am never lonely. Agatha Christie had people in her head that she visited when she was bored. Likewise for me.
So...what am I doing?
I don't know. And even the most put-together on track person in the world probably has no idea what they're doing either.

Love to you all,
Heather

5 Favorite Movies

Igby Goes Down
I happened to catch this on Showtime when I was a junior in high school. Ever since then, it has been my favorite film. There's about 500 million things right about this film, with a plot that centers around the life of Igby, a young man in a wealthy family. He is intelligent but consistently fucks up in school and is constantly attempting to escape life by going on the lam and staying at his godfather DH's loft, meeting a host of incredible characters along the way.
The dialogue is damn good, sharp as a steak knife. Too many good quotes fall from this movie; my favorite one being when Igby laments "I'm drowning in assholes." We have all had that moment, I'm certain.
The characters are all vibrant with personality, the scenery in New York is shot during fall so you get all those autumn nostalgia, and the soundtrack is phenomenal. Anything with The Dandy Warhols is golden.
I have always been drawn to movies about families and it is often reflected in my writing. I just love to see family dynamics portrayed on the screen. Most of the time, I can't stand them though because families in film are seldom realistic and most of the time demand we martyr them and feel bad for their pity parties.
Because I grew up in a family that did not sugar coat life for you or decided that we will persevere on with a smile, I find that I always look for a family on the big screen that reminds me of my refreshingly candid, life's a bitch toting philosophy laden family.
And Igby, while not exactly on par, does this for the most part.

Edward Scissorhands
I grew up on Tim Burton and still continue to idolize his works but the story of the most gentle, compassionately innocent man with scissors for hands has been with me the longest. Everytime I watch this movie, I still wonder why Winona Ryder's character Kim never went back to visit Edward. It breaks my heart but at the same time, it's a clean break. They could never make a sequel of this movie. It just wouldn't be right.
Plus I adored the score by Danny Elfman. I find that in movies music plays a huge factor in whether I'll like it or not.


Love Me If You Dare
This little French gem I also found on Showtime in high school. I am not usually a girl who flocks to the romantic films but I love this one for it's simplicity. The love between Julian and Sophie is based solely upon being game; a show of oneupmanship by completing dares. Each dare sets the bar higher and puts hearts on the line. Everyone gives a passionate performance and I just really adored this film.


Dazed and Confused
This movie is two hours of eternal summer and I find I am infatuated with movies about summertime because summer can change you as a person. We all remember the best summer of our lives and the events that came out of it. Dazed chronicles the last day of high school and the 24 hours afterwards that change the lives of a group of seniors. I have '70's lust after watching it and I wasn't even born during that time period.
It feels old to say it but I know that my generation is absolutely appalling in comparison. We are the most spoiled, irritating, self-centered group of brats in generations and the worst part is, we just don't care. I know it doesn't apply to everyone but in our age of information, we know more and are jaded for it. There is so much of an innocence and youth here in this movie that I don't see outside anymore.
And the soundtrack is amazing. Peter Frampton, Aerosmith, Foghat at the ending. Oh yes!


The Royal Tenenbaums
More family dynamics brought by the way of Wes Anderson, in which the family is obscenely wealthy, quirky in ensemble, and lifeless when speaking their dialogue.
But still, didn't you ever want to be a Tenenbaum? I always did. A family of geniuses whose setbacks have put them in seclusion for years and only by the announcement of their father Royal's cancer do they all come together. Of course the cancer is a lie but that's the fun of the film.
Anderson has great use of color and camera angles and Alec Baldwin is a great narrator. The soundtrack is, once again, another marvelous component of the film.

Love to you all,
Heather

Embrace Your Moral Hypocrisy DH, Go For It

Josh Olins uses such vibrant shades in his photography.


Getting hitched to this ensemble for sure.


Summer's only starting and already I'm craving fall. Fall has the corner on amazing clothes; jackets, coats, hats, skirts, stockings, it's such a good list!

Thanks Interview for your bomb covers.

And happy 10th birthday Nylon, my dream machine of a magazine!

It has been 95 and up for the last few days here, crazy hot but so so wonderful. My skin is totally flipping out though. Pale me is not used to super sun.

Start homework? Watch Igby Goes Down again? Read? Go outside again? Admire my cute new flats?

Infinite options in an infinite society.

Love to you all,

Heather

Brought to You by the Letter A

I'm running on a life high right now where little things like ladybugs on the sidewalk and calla lilies in our school stream make me feel really glad and grateful. Must be all this fine weather around me and the fact that I saw some guy's car today with a Lebowski Fest bumper sticker on it.
No life high can take away my ability to have annoyances at obviously stupid things. And when I get annoyed at things like these, I mock them relentlessly, sometimes blatantly in your face and other times with some subtle pokes.
So I present...a list of annoyances:

1) Pretentious Writing
The kind that doesn’t convey emotions insomuch as it falls in love with itself and the various adjectives and ways to sound like lyrical prose. It attempts so hard to be meaningful when it’s really just you saying you have a stomachache. Just be up front with the way you say it. Once you stop tripping over yourself and trying to sound pseudo-intelligent, you'll get the real deal outta it; feelings. Real authentic ones!

2) Screamy Whiny Bullshit Singers.
For example the guys from Simple Plan/The Offspring/Good Charlotte (is this band even together anymore?) who bitch about how tough their lives are in a two story house with their own car and oppressive parents who don’t like it when they gel their hair out to the extreme. They all sound the exact same with an occasional guitar chord difference. Ask me to do any impression anytime.

3) B. H. Hipsters
Like the B.C. era, B. H. is Beyond Hipster. When you are beyond hipster, you try to make obscure bands like Lovely Allen supercool and try to get people to notice that are trying to rock the comeback of the Electric Company and butterfly hair clips. But you know. Ironically worn with messy hair and skinny jeans of course. And goddamn boots all year round.

4) This Kind of Person
People who speelll everythinggg outtttt wittttth likkke fffffive eeexxxtra sylllllables. Sooo sickkk, rigggghtt?
Lame. Are you attempting to look like you’re drunk texting at 9am on Facebook? Lame.

Man, I enjoyed getting that out!

Love to you all,
Heather

Nightdreams of the Past and Daydreams of the Future

A little something I wrote for The Echo...I'm very proud of it because I put a lot of feeling in. It's for my column and this week, I was having East meets West ideas, polar opposites, and modern versus old fashioned.

The Fashion Plate
A Well-Balanced Serving Each Week

Welcome to the Vending Machine
I’ve always envisioned the future as filled with flying hover cars, outfitted with Jane Jetson’s space age wardrobe and coupled with Conan O’Brien’s humorous ideals of what looking all the way into the year 2000 would be like.
The future is now since the conception of U*tique.
U*tique takes the ordinary Chex Mix and M&M inhabiting vending machine and spins it on its head. Filled with over 50 cosmetics including Bliss hand cream and Smashbox lip glosses, U*tique is the ideal treasure chest for the woman on the run.
Dubbed “the new way to shop” by U*tique’s web site, all you have to do is touch the window of the product you want. From there, you get the option to watch a short video on the product and swipe your credit card to make your purchase. The machine has a network that secures the purchases made on all of the credit cards.
Best of all, you never need to worry about your make up getting jammed in the machine spirals and trying to pull it out. A tiny robot carries your product to the slot.
Currently U*tique has a singular location inside of Studio Beautymix at Fred Segal in Santa Monica. This is all set to change according to company consultant Mara Segal who plans to distribute U*tique to hotels, airports, and malls nationwide.
Time is a luxury as U*tique’s motto states and with this machine, you’ve definitely got time on your side.

Sew in Love
In these uncertain times, one can’t help but get scrappy.
At http://www.gibbousfashions.com/, there is a world of lost beauty stitched together with other cast off fabrics to create wholly whimsical clothing pieces like skirts and vests.
Each piece is carefully and lovingly handcrafted out of the most unusual of materials. The newest addition to the site, the Un-Birthday Skirt, is made of eyelets, lace, and table linens. Love letters from the 1920’s are silk screened on and the skirt even contains pieces from a wedding dress over a hundred years old.
The wonderfully dusty Victorian sensations come from the designers who hunt down the lost buttons and bits of silk of the world and put them together using no patterns. The fanciful creations look as though they would be right at home in a Tim Burton picture, worn lovingly by Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas. Even Beetlejuice’s Lydia Deetz who declared her her whole life as a dark room would step outside to attend a very Un-Birthday party in the stained skirt.
“Modern culture has lost all scent of a soul. Mass production and the disposability of fashion and style have ripped away the purity of clothing. Sweatshop labor infuses garments with the stench of slavery. We are fighting against this epidemic with needles and thread.”
As stated in the mission statement by Gibbous, the designers believe that clothes are like people, with souls that desire nothing more than to be worn and appreciated and carefully attended to when a stitch pops loose. They want to be passed down and treated like old friends to the future generations.
Truer words were never spoken.

Listening to:
-Lights The Last Thing on Your Mind
-Junkie XL Cities in Dust

Love to you all,
Heather

In the sunshine smoking cigarettes to pass the time/Who wakes up to a bottle of wine on the nightstand

That would be lyrics to "So Rich, So Pretty" by Mickey Avalon, who has such a relaxed urbane vibe to his music. It's what you listen to when you're sitting in your room with the window open, putting on some lipstick and struttin' in a pair of old heels.


It is so time for the end of the year. I am beyond ready for it. One of my friends said she doesn't even care; she wants to bring cocktails to class. Haha, I hear that!


Question: Why, why, why don't women dress like this anymore?
We need a Great Gatsby night. Everyone should dress in silks and top hats and we should all just listen to ah-mazing music, dance in a water fountain, and have lots of martinis.
Oh my God, I think I found the new holiday I'm going to celebrate.


Alisa don't mind when I call her Leslie she's gotta dress with class
And Jean Paul Gaultier and a Hermes bag and four inch tips made of ostrich
Sharp enough to slit your wrists her lips spread gossip
Won't say sorry when she offends
She comes over to my place in her old man's Benz
In gold and silver and jewels of all colors
And she doesn't take them off when we're tearing up the covers

Oh man, I need summer really, really soon.

Love to you all,
Heather

BEST DRESSED IN ANY ROOM ANYWHERE. PERIOD.

I say this with complete and absolute conviction and will not be swayed against my opinion. Dita von Teese is the best dressed woman in the public eye today.


Wearing the Spring Dolce and Gabbana...I muffled a shriek when I saw this picture.


Old school golden Hollywood Marlene Dietrich worthiness being channeled in full force here.


The sexy Mad Hatter.

Merry old English.
I adore that her real name was Heather Sweet...either way, it sounds good! Plus, you know, I feel a great affinity to anybody named Heather.

Her book Burlesque and the Art of the Teese is quite good. Part one is Burlesque, all pinks and feathers and the giggling smirking innocence of the stylish act. Part two is Fetish, the darker, more S&M, whip, slave me basement ball and chains side.

Consider it a good summertime read.

She always looks so completely tailored and pulled together. You will never find her walking around in a mini skirt with a trucker cap. Dita belongs to another era but I am glad she is a part of my era as she constantly inspires me.

Listening to:

-Duran Duran Girls on Film

*This was one of my favorite songs in high school. For my senior year of Spanish class, we had to keep a journal where we were supposed to write a couple of pages completely en Espanol. I had a bad (make that terrible) case of senioritis. I sat there and translated my favorite song lyrics. At that moment in time, Duran Duran's Girls on Film was one of my favorites. That, and a song by Bauhaus (She's in Parties) and I think David Bowie was on that list too.

Love to you all,

Heather

2AM Deep Thoughts

Taking a break from homework to type out some thoughts.

Question: Would it be bad form to e-mail my religion professor at this hour?
I'm going with yes but only because most everyone is asleep or heading there right now. Not a whole lot of people consider 2am to be their peak hour work time. I do, working on my script with some Thomas Newman playing in the background.

The homework is threatening to overpower me, the FAFSA sits quietly half-filled on my hard drive. My days are littered with so much to do that even though I secretly love to complain about it, I've been having a couple of days where I'm ready to start bringing a mini white flag to class and waving it.

There are so many deadlines coming up. Some are more intermediate like papers and scripts due for class and the FAFSA on Wednesday. Others are graduation which is a little over a year away. Then there are the "life goals" like having a career and a family and things like that to fulfill within a certain frame of years.

I don't know what will happen to me when I graduate. I assume that a year from now I will be a different girl and will have an answer or two about this. And to that end, I can't sit here in the present and say, "Well I'm going to live in Paris for a year" or "I know I'm definitely not going home, that's for sure."

My future has no definite clear answer. It isn't for me to try to make one up here and stick with it. I have some goals for the future and ideals for how I would like it to turn out but I know better now. I'm going to be as open to different situations as possible because it's how we grow as people. By not having a definite plan, there is room for spontaneity. I've always said "I have a plan" or "I'll find a way."

So many people around me and strangers on the street are obsessed with becoming famous. They are so into "me, me, me" and trampling on others to get to the top. I get so frustrated at their behavior sometimes. It's very selfish and egotistical. And this is coming from a girl who used to be extremely selfish growing up and for a long time, was pretty unhappy.

I feel different now. Older with some wisdom. The only thing left is to keep traveling, see more people, hear what they have to say.
And get off that damn Facebook. I can't tell my brother's future children that I remember Superpoking someone for three weeks straight as part of my college experience.
Just an example.

Love to you all,
Heather

A Brave New World Needs A New Gold Dream

New Gold Dream
She is the one in front of me, the siren and the ecstasy
New Gold Dream
Crashing beats and fantasy, setting sun in front of me
New Gold Dream
And the world goes hot
And the cities take
And the beat goes crashing
All along the way

She is your friend until the ocean breaks
And when you dream, dream in the dream with me
And when you dream, dream in the dream with me
81 - 82 - 83 - 84
81 - 82 - 83 - 84

New Gold Dream
Sun is set in front of me, worldwide on the widest screen
New Gold Dream
Burning bridge and ecstasy, crashing beats and fantasy
Dream in the dream with
And the world goes hot
And the cities take
And the beat goes crashing
All along the way

She is your only friend until the ocean breaks

And when you dream, dream in the dream with me
And when we dream, dream in the dream with me
81 - 82 - 83 - 84
81 - 82 - 83 - 84

New Gold Dream
The siren and the ecstasy, she's the one in front of me
New Gold Dream...

-New Gold Dream Simple Minds

Thank you The Informers trailer, you just gave me another way to avoid the tower of homework, the nights of sleep and the .99 cents out of my pocket.

This song is too perfect, it's like listening to the best weekend ever.

Love to you all,
Heather

Old Times, Younger Me

I found this file of pictures on my computer that I haven't done anything with for awhile so I picked a handful out and decided to focus on them today.

The dresses from Anthropologie in Fall 2006 that got away...that whole catalog was absolutely fantastic.


Into blue diamonds ever since that dream I had last year about a blue diamond and pearl necklace. It creeps into my stories every now and then.


Found this in May 2008 during my last semester at Meramec when I was writing a Capstone paper about the history of the horror film. You know I love ghosts and Bacardi already and the two together is just way too good!


The children of the night are supposed to make beautiful music.


Dita von Teese's gorgeous wedding dress back during her marriage to Marilyn Manson. I loved the Vogue spread but felt it was just, hmm what's the word, conforming to society? Everybody wants to see the stars private moments and feel like they were a part of the big day.


I loved A Much Married Man by Nicholas Coleridge and was so into the cover photo taken by Willie Maldonado. I searched all over Getty Images for it and didn't find the exact photo but a similar one...I am the best at online searching, I find pretty much anything if I look long enough for it.


These tights are absolutely lovely.


This is how I spent my Easter a few years ago. Good times with Grindhouse in a theater filled with nothing but guys.


The cover star of my very first owned copy of Nylon Magazine, the most holy of all the magazines to me.


John Galliano never fails to deliver on beauty.


Bobo's Not in Paradise.

Love to you all,
Heather