My cousin Ari, aka Archie Zimmer when the mood strikes, is a writer and artist living in LA. Knowing that as a relatively new Brooklynite I recently tore through a couple Jonathan Lethem novels (my brain buzzed for days with Lethem's descriptions as I walked across Atlantic Ave or down Dean or Bergen Streets), Archie recommended I read a slim volume of essays, The Disappointment Artist. The first piece, Defending The Searchers, picks up a thread familiar to readers of Fortress of Solitude—the awkward, urban outsider acting arty at Bennington. In that first paragraph there's a line about wearing glasses. About the hows and whys of wearing glasses:
...I chose my heavy black-rimmed glasses, the ones I wore when I wanted to appear nerdishly remote and intense, as though to decorate my outer self with a confession of inner reality.
I'm particularly drawn to this quote because a few weeks ago I became a proud owner of my first pair of l.a. Eyeworks Fiction frames. They are big and chunky, bigger and chunkier than anything I wore in the eighties. And they are the color of raspberry sorbet, kinda striped in red and dark pink. I've been wearing them to events in the same way Lethem wears his Elvis Costellos: part fashion accessory, part defensive barrier. I wore them to the launch party in May for the second edition of Pin Up, where through them I oggled shirtless bartenders, but couldn't get an issue because Editor-at-Large Alex, aka Pierre-Alexandre de Looz, had ran out of comp copies. Thankfully, the vodka was still in supply. And to the much-blogged Postopolis, where I was spotted adjacent to Bldgblog's balabusta, Geoff Manaugh. Lots of verbage, but sadly, no free cocktails or hardhated hardbodies at Storefront.
Cool glasses!
Posted by: Jennifer | July 15, 2007 at 10:00 PM