diary of a t-shirt

This oldass t-shirt of Kate Bush is my latest acquisition, and to me, kinda like a Hope diamond: it’s a shirt promoting Kate’s 1982 album The Dreaming, rendering its cover image in glorious 80s xeroxy silkscreen. I’ve seen this shirt only once before—in a photograph, worn by that great femme Chloë Sevigny. I’ve been dying to get my hands on the t-shirt, and a few weeks ago, thanks to that old heroin dealer/ Indian casino known as ebay, I finally snagged it for $130 (I was willing to pay more! )!

In general, when I hunt for oldass rock t-shirts, I look for at least one of three main criteria:

1) the beauty of the artwork: this includes image or font, regardless of the band. For instance, I love Little Feat t-shirts with pictures of old-school pin-uppy ladies, even though I’ve never listened to their music.

2) the texture of the t-shirt fabric: I prefer 100% cotton that has just stopped fighting—which means it has to be aged at least 15 years and heavily worn by people with abrasive skin to get to that kleenex consistency. Although I will often like a good worn down 50-50 polyester/ cotton as well.

3) the band being promoted by the t- shirt: I can’t—or at least, couldn’t, at some point in my life—live without their music.

Each of these three qualities is important to me, but when I’m on ebay, it’s hard to browse for the first criterion (what kind of a keyword search do you do for “beautiful image”?) and impossible to gauge the second (sellers often claim shirts are “buttery soft” and then you get it and it’s more like I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter that’s been in the refrigerator too long). But you can do a pretty effective search of bands you like. So in my spare or bored time, I get on ebay and type into the search box, “kate bush shirt” or “courtney love shirt” or “siouxsie shirt” or “liz phair shirt” or “fleetwood mac shirt.” You get your gamut of unacceptable reproductions and homemade crap, but once in a while, you get some real beauts, like the Kate Bush shirt I just bought.

My mother wonders why I spend so much time, energy and money on what she calls “dishrag.” Well for one, I don’t disagree with her label, because I love dishrags—they are functional, no? An oldass t-shirt is for me an appliance. Every time I put one on, my body is changed in a way that allows me to move through the world in a different body than that old familiar bag of bones staring back at me every morning in the steamy mirror. In particular, an oldass rock t-shirt is like an i-pod to me—maybe we can call it a “tee-pod.” I use my i-pod (ok, really a 2GB Creative Zen mp3 player) not only as a portable music library, but as a part of my femme armor. I stick the headset into my ear canals, tuck the pebble-sized player in my bag, and I’m ready to face any hostile (racist, homophobic, femmephobic) human element on buses, trains, and sidewalks. You feel braver and more snug in your skin when the world’s atmosphere is suddenly transformed into the comforting intimacy of your own favorite songs. This is also how I use my favorite oldass rock t-shirts.

A few days ago, on Sunday, I used my “new” Kate Bush shirt in this way to go to the San Francisco Eagle, a bar I had frequented quite often back in the day. Sunday afternoons used to mean for me shots of Tequila between swigs of Red Hook or Johnnie Walker Red Label. My ex-husband and I would trot, arm-in-arm, down to the famous Sunday Beer Bust at the Eagle, get drunk, and mingle with/ ogle the multitude of boys in various shapes, sizes, ages who were lured out by the promise of cheap beer in clear plastic cups. This was many years ago. Since my divorce two years ago, I hadn’t been back to the Eagle on a Sunday afternoon. Partly, I’ve been afraid of running into my ex-husband. But more than that, I’ve been afraid to go in there as a single femme.

The Eagle is a Levi’s-and-leather place, which means that it is usually occupied by bears and leather queens—bearded/ hairy/ leather-clad boys—or just any manner of boys whose religion is traditional masculinity. Sunday afternoons, the back patio of the Eagle is so stuffed with people (men) that it is a triumph just to be able to step outside and maintain a literal toehold without getting burned by a stray cigar or drenched in someone’s Pabst Blue Ribbon or smashed to bits by a burly fag. With a large Irish husband to serve as your battering ram/ tarp, however, you simply feel safe...not to mention un-lonely. So without him, I’d been feeling extra vulnerable about walking into the Sunday Beer Bust, even though I knew that it would probably have the highest potential, numberwise, of the kind of scuzzy-alternative boys I prefer.

However, the Kate Bush shirt having finally arrived safely from Canada via standard air mail (about 6 days) I was ready to enter the Eagle. Here are some BlackBerry camera self-portraits of me among the bears:

Actually, the chain shoulder strap of my Lanvin bag is pretty S/M leather queeny. But I love seeing the various horrified facial contortions produced on “Kate” through my wearing the shirt and squeezing through the wall of males. I think about my wading through the bears that afternoon as Kate in bear-land: a lone femme plonked down in a fun snake pit of faggy testosterone.

Of course I got a couple of the reactions I anticipated and have long been used to: while some guy was trying to buy me a drink at the bar, another guy walks by and sneers, “Is that your girlfriend?” But the most surprising reaction was my own. I remembered feeling a lot more sexed up at the Eagle than I did this past Sunday—which was basically not at all. There was a time when I could scan around and find a good ten or so boys that got me all hot and bothered, but this time, none. Yes, there were some objective cuties with sweet faces and bodies, but this is not the same as feeling sexually inspired. The metallic stench of male pheromones, combined with booze, sweat, and my all-time-hated smell of cigars, did nothing for my sex drive; it only made me vaguely blanked out. I did have a good time, enjoyed watching bearded boys suck on beards, but I felt definitely out of place, alienated. But that alienation did not feel bad, it felt self-affirming of who I am--a girl (a lesbian?)--which is part of, but not defined by, who I desire sexually. The phone-camera pics tells the story: I AM A BUSH AMONG BEARS.

Wearing the Kate Bush t-shirt, I feel not like Kate Bush but a thing that Kate Bush made. I feel like the record that Kate Bush made. The Dreaming—the album—is a Virgo (September 13) like me (August 28). It is the first album that Kate produced alone, and one that moved her into harder territory—sonically and in terms of feminine persona. Goodbye to the late 70s rock-ballad ethereality of “Wuthering Heights” and hello spacewoman in a corset boned from respiratory tubing (worn in the video for the title track, an outfit which was subsequently knocked off by Nicolas Ghesquiere for Balenciaga some six years ago). Many Kate obsessives love The Dreaming for different reasons—DJ El Toro wrote an especially beautiful review of it for the KEXP Blog using an old album covered with a provenance of DJ commentary (http://blog.kexp.org/blog/2008/01/10/review-revue-kate-bush-the-dreaming/) and rock journalist Ann Powers will be writing a great “33 ½” book about it. I love The Dreaming because it combines a slasher-film aesthetics of sound with a dreamy intimacy of lyric to produce a new, hard kind of material romanticism. Yes, the songs have references and inspirations as specific as Harry Houdini, Australian aborigines, the Vietnam War, Kubrick’s The Shining. But when you run all the track titles together from beginning to end—Sat In Your Lap There Goes a Tenner Pull Out the Pin Suspended in Gaffa Leave It Open The Dreaming Night Of the Swallow All the Love Houdini Get Out of My House—you get a portrait of a marriage...my marriage.

The album begins with “Sat In Your Lap” and ends with “Get Out of My House.” This narrative arc marks for me the movement from the surprise of love—finding that unexpected sense of safety and comfort in the fat lap of your husband—to the inspiring-liberating anger of post-divorce independence. On the last track, that I think of as a Dario Argento-directed cover of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive”—Kate keeps a man out of her “House” by mimicking a braying mule, and singing over and over “GET OUT OF MY HOUSE...With my key I LOCK IT!” But The Dreaming is not a bitter divorcee’s album, either; it’s about a woman who’s known love, lost love, and now knows to be as vigilant as an herbalist about the conditions needed for love’s survival.

My favorite song on the album, “Houdini,” the second-to-last track, inspired the album’s cover image: Kate, in a houndstooth suit, opens her mouth for a kiss which will pass a key to her Houdini husband. I know from reading about the album that the thing cushioned on her pre-kiss tongue is a key, but when I first saw the image as a teenager, the thing on her tongue looked, in its potassium-rich-urine gold tinting, like a wedding band.

Even after knowing the facts, I still think of Kate holding a wedding ring on her tongue. This is the nature of a woman’s aggressive romanticism: Kate grips the head of her Houdini-husband, the pomaded slickness of his hair broken up by her locking fingers, as tight as the chains and padlock that adorn his tuxedo. Romance is a struggle in which the man forever plays Houdini, trying to perform a trick of freedom, when in reality, it is Houdini’s wife who holds the literal key, and thus, sweet bondage. In the first chorus, Kate sings:

With a kiss
I'd pass the key
And feel your tongue
Teasing and receiving.
With your spit
Still on my lip,
You hit the water.

Doesn't the Houdini husband realize that that symbol of marital/ monogamous bondage, the wedding ring, is the key to his liberation? Kate sings the first four lines in her coquettish, romantically feminine voice. But when she gets to the seminal line, “WITH YOUR SPIT STILL ON MY LIP, YOU HIT THE WATER” she sings straight from the throat, an exaggeratedly growly rasp, as if she’s imitating a horror-film monster—or forehearing the voice of Courtney Love.

When I returned to the site of those drunken romantic married Sunday afternoons this past Sunday afternoon, wearing the cover of The Dreaming between my titties, I became the album itself. The rasp of “Houdini” becomes full-out slasher-film screams and satanic whinnying and braying in “Get Out Of My House.” The key that she’s ready to french kiss to her husband now becomes the key with which she locks him out of her hurt heart. In the song’s final lines, Kate duets with a male voice, and the image of the Houdini-husband hitting the water takes on a different meaning: hit the water, get out of my house, but I have your spit still on my lip: “I WILL NOT LET YOU IN/ DON’T YOU BRING BACK THE REVERIES!!”

joony’s economic stimulus plan

Like a war wife, my solution to the recession and shitty economy is to spend pennies while feeling like spending millions: self-delusion through handicraft.

As I wrote here a couple months ago, I’ve had this long-term project of knitting myself a version of the beautiful cobwebby cardigan from Rodarte’s Spring 2008 collection. As shameful as it is to admit, I hadn’t done a single click of the needles since then...until last week, when I started and finished the damn thing in about 8 days.

In between, I actually had a couple chances to touch the cardigan in person, once in New York at Opening Ceremony back in April, and then again at the Barneys in San Francisco a few weeks ago. Each time, of course, I was filled with a desire to just take the thing off the rack and run, because the price tag is roughly $1200. I began the project of knitting up a version of the cardigan because of simple sad economic reality: I’d have to go without rent one month to buy this sweater.

When I first saw the price tag for the sweater, I was filled with a predictable sense of indignation. For $1200, you’d expect the sweater to mitosis itself into a pair of pants, double as an MP3 player, or at least have, as Thelma Ritter says in “All About Eve,” “diamond collars, gold sleeves.” But this sweater has no such tricks. From a knitter’s point of view, it is a simple babe: of standard stockinette stitch, no ribbing or complicated cable work, and a basic stripe pattern. To get the huge hole-y effect, you just have to use very thin yarn with very fat needles. A sweater that looked like it could be pretty easily hand-knit that costs over a thousand dollars? Is this cardigan a symbol of what is totally fucked up with capitalism?

Well, yes and no. The experience of knitting this sweater has actually given me a full appreciation of the original. My feeling now is: to charge $1200 for a mohair cardigan that looks like it was hand-knit by a giant spider on acid is indeed very sensible.

When I finally cast on the first row of the piece, it was activity for the bedbound: I caught a nasty summer cold. Laid up in bed, my throat filled with phlegm and delirious, I popped in the first tape of a Korean drama called “Jogang-Jichuh Club” (roughly: “First [as in concubinage rank] Wives’ Club,” about mismatched marriages that were falling apart because of socio-economic reasons), and began knitting this overdue sweater. Knitting and purling, I began to think about the fantastical and bizarre translation that happens between human labor and money. I started to think, was it really so crazy to tag as $1200 a sweater that was probably hand-crafted by a gang of Asian ladies, who hopefully did not go blind(er) in the process of knitting? In this day and age when $20/ barrel gasoline feeds cars the size of small apartment units, does the phrase “impractical spending”—or “splurge”—even have a sensible meaning anymore?

OK, so I can’t right now spend $1200 on a cardigan, but if I were an heiress, I would, because the handiwork of the knitting ladies are worth it. Knitting the pieces and seaming them together takes actually a lot of more thought than it appears. You have to handle the pieces delicately, and it takes a bit for your fingers to get used to maneuvering spiderweb-thin yarn on needles the size of flag posts. If it took me—a mediocre knitter—a week to finish this, how long would it take a skilled knittress to do it? Let’s say, maybe a couple days? Who are we to say that her two day’s worth of ladyfinger work is not worth at least half the retail price?

Make no mistake though, when I say “worth” I do so in a kind of hypothetical, fictional realm, because I’m sure that the knittresses were not paid $600 a garment (I hope they were). But come on, $1200 is not bad if you think about the cardigan as a gallery piece. The finished cardigan falls and puffs out just so around the body so that you feel like a little moth, hyperaware of the fragility of your own flesh. In this, the experience is similar in a weird way to wearing a corset, but the difference is that wearing the cardigan, you are comfortable. The piece is a powder puff, so mass-wise, it doesn't even feel like you are wearing anything. But you become so sensitized to your limbs because a wrong move can shred the sweater like wet toilet paper. You feel as loosely knitted as the cardigan next to your skin. The Mulleavy sisters of Rodarte cite Japanese horror films as a reference for the collection that housed the cardigan. I have to squint my imagination a bit to get that reference, but I love it that they challenge my brain to do that. That is art to me.

So even though I ended up spending about $40 for the yarn, it makes me feel good to think that my days of fingering yarn and plastic is worth $1160. Having knitted through, I no longer feel resentful of the price tag on that gorgeous original cardigan. In fact, the next time I’m in Barney’s, maybe I will, in the style of 19^th Century salon-goers—or actually, more like Rindy Sam, the Cy Twombly-loving fan (who is also Asian!) who left her red lipstick stain on his painting last year—go up to the rack and give the price tag of that Rodarte cardigan a good, long, wet kiss.

In the spirit of DIY femininity, I now give you the lipstickvomit pattern of the hurl-couture spiderwoman cardigan. Enjoy!

This particular pattern is for someone who is a size 10 above the waist and size 0 below...

Also, be prepared to inhale a lot of mohair. You will be covered with loving, pawing traces of knitting.

The YARN should be very thin gauge, basically tapestry-thread thickness that would regularly be worked on needles US 3 to 7. I used: Alchemy “Haiku” (silk-mohair; Blue/ purple), one ball, $21; Karabella “Gossamer” (mohair; white-gray-glitter) one ball, $8; Twinkle “Kid Mohair” (wool-mohair; peach), one ball, $6.30.

The NEEDLES should be very large, US 17. I like the look and feel of the Japanese “Clover” needles that are made of bamboo, but actually the yarn usually likes them too and the stitches have a tendency to stick. So with this project, I think it’s better to go with slip-&-slide plastic needles.

BACK PANEL: 18” top, 20” bottom, 28” length from top to bottom : Cast on 60 sts of the white/glittery yarn. This will be the bottom of the cardigan. Knit some rows (no ribbing) until you feel like changing color. For me, this was around 6 inches.

Switch to the peach yarn, knit a few inches, about half the amount of the white.

Then switch to the blue/ purple yarn, for another few inches. The width of the striping is up to you. I did about 6” (12) rows of the blue/purple then switched to about 2” of peach then 4” of white, then back to a few of blue. But the striping pattern should be intuitive...you should stripe as wide or thin, regular or irregular as it feels right to you.

When the piece gets to be about 18” (36 rows), begin decreasing: decrease one stitch at the beginning of the row (by knitting the first two stitches together)and another at the end (knit last two stitches together. This is a total two stitches decreased per row. Do not decrease for another 2” (about 4 rows); decrease again on 5^th row. We’re only decreasing 2 inches, which is 6 stitches, which means we only have to decrease twice more.

During the decreasing, you may want to do some striping between the peach and white-glitter yarn. I did about two rows of the peach with the first decrease, then switched to the white-glitter till the end. I thought about the peach as a kind of transition yarn between the blue and the white-glitter.

Stop decreasing at 54 St. Knit until the entire piece is around 28” (56 rows). If you go a bit over, or if you’re tired and stop a bit earlier, no biggie.

FRONT RIGHT PANEL: 8” top, 10” bottom, 28” top to bottom: Cast on 30 st. Knit, using the same intuitive (LAZY?) striping pattern until the piece is about 18” (36 rows).

Begin decrease: decrease one stitch by knitting the first two stitches together, knit row. Again, only a 2” (6 st) decrease so spread decrease out reasonably. But remember to only decrease at the BEGINNING of the kt row. The decreased end of the row will constitute the “draped” collar of the cardigan. Stop decrease when row is 24 st.

Knit until piece is around the same length as the back piece.

FRONT LEFT PANEL: same dimensions as right panel: Repeat the same knitting for FRONT RIGHT PANEL. When ready to decrease, decrease at the END of the row: knit the LAST two stitches together, so that the draped collar is on the correct side of the panel.

SLEEVE: 20” at the shoulder, 11” at cuff (to be halved, because the sleeve piece will be folded and joined when completed): In blue/purple, cast on 60 st. This will be the shoulder seam-joint of the sleeve. Knit first row, then purl the next row. On the third row, begin decreasing one stitch on each side (knit together first and last pairs of the row, subtracting a total of two stitches per row). Purl next row without decrease. Decrease two stitches every other row (so, on each knit row).

Knit until the piece is about 16” (48 rows). Switch to peach for two rows, then switch again to white/glitter till the end. The white/glitter part should be around 8” (24 rows). Stop decreasing when the row is about 11” (33 st). Continue knitting until the entire sleeve is 24” (72 rows).

GET IT TOGETHER: The process of putting the sweater together is much like its final look—it will feel like sewing together cobwebs, but hopefully you are black widowy enough like me! Even though it is tricky, I suggest NOT wet-blocking the pieces, because wetting the mohair will take the float out of the yarn, and take away its signature pussyfurshedding quality. (If you don’t want the sweater to shed on you, you can certainly “kill” it by wet-blocking it) Instead, stretch out the seams to be joined so you can get a clear view. I used the white-glitter yarn for seaming because it is of a slightly heavier gauge than the blue/ purple. Without blocking, it is nearly impossible to matress-stitch the thing so I simply use a whip-stitch (sometimes called “African stitch”). It is not as sturdy, but it is more sturdy than you’d think. Plus, the whole weave of the piece is vulnerable anyway, so it actually gives the piece continuity to use a “weaker” stapling technique.

The sleeves: fold the piece in half lengthwise and seam up the length, lay them aside. Seam the front panels to the back piece first by joining the tops of the three pieces. The seam should be about 5”, leaving a few inches for the flap-away collar.

Lay the sleeve against the joined torso of the sweater. The sleeve’s whipstitched side should be facing south. When you lay the thing out, the sleeve should just lay perpendicular to the shoulder-line of the torso. This is the way that kimono sleeves are joined; when the sweater sits on your body, it will limp down and give you chicly sloped shoulders. The first stitch should be the triple-cross point where the outer edges of the front and back panel meets the FOLDED edge/ corner of the sleeve (the side of the sleeve that was not whip-stitched). Safety-pin the bottom hem together so that the once the sleeve is joined, you don’t accidently end up with either front or back panel longer than the other. Join the sleeve to the back, and then the front of the torso.

Once one sleeve is joined to the torso, seam the sides of the sweater. Repeat for the other side, and then you’re done, ready to put on the thing over a ragged-out concert t-shirt and go have some drama!

lipstick on your cock

A little picture-puzzle for you all: What is wrong with this picture?

Before you say, lose the Macy’s Bag (full of sushi and chicken karaage--it's a picnic after all)and dumb gang-signy fingerings, comb your bangs, and mend your stockings, I ask you to follow my 90s t-shirt and read my lips:

...moisturized, but unlipsticked. Of course, this is not so unusual; just because I have an everyday lipstick doesn’t mean I wear my lipstick every day. But think about the context: here I am, a lipstick lesbo, in San Francisco, in Dolores Park, surrounded by lesbians before the annual Dyke March. And I’m not wearing my femme-signifying lipstick?

Here’s my shameful confession: I haven’t been wearing my red lipstick very much since I arrived in San Francisco a little over a month ago because I’ve been trying to snag and shag some boys. Because the inconvenient truth is, boys who like boys tend to like boys who look like boys. Ever since my divorce a few years ago, I’d been feeling a bit insecure about the homosexual desirability of my femmeness—which is why I immediately chopped my hair off when my ex husband dumped me. But my hair’s grown back, and along with my Mary-Kate Olsen-meets-Barbara Stanwyck wardrobe logic, my lipstick’s come back too...with a vengeance. And it all feels lovely...until the summer months hit and I remember that I need to have sex once in a while.

So a few weeks ago, I met up with an internet-procured hook-up, for which I used a picture from that fateful aforementioned summer of 2006, mainly because I haven’t taken a shirtless picture of me since then (nipple baring feels indecent to me now!), and my body has not changed since then. What is different, however, in that photo, is that my hair is boy (or young dyke--what's the diff) short, and my mouth is lipstick-free. So this guy and I bounce emails with attachments back and forth a few times, and he’s like, “Oh yeah, I like your look,” and I, feeling sexually ethical, say, “Well, my hair is a lot longer now...down past my shoulders.” No big deal, he says, so we meet.

I could feel the disappointment in the air almost instantly the moment I stepped in the door of this guy's apartment. The actual encounter was...uneventful (my highlight: licking his appendectomy scar...which, by the way, was quite nice). But the radical indifference that marked the erotic energy of the afternoon was capped off when, hanging out limply naked next to each other, the guy says out loud what I suspected he wanted to say an hour or so earlier: “Wow, your hair is really long, isn’t it?” It was not an admiration. The wistful way he said it carried the tone of: “Wow, your penis is really not as big as it was in the picture, is it?”

I guess I deserved it. One of the most impossible tasks in the world is to shape your body around the guessed-anticipated desires of another. And I’d been doing just that for the past few weeks, figuring, probably correctly, that boys who like boys would find me attractive if I de-femme a bit. And showing up for this “date,” I had even dressed down, I thought. I wore my usual cleave-baring but simple black v-neck t-shirt (not a ragged Hole or Satan-promoting Danzig shirt), a plain cardigan (also black—no embroidered pansies), and my ultimate sacrifice, "loose" tsubi jeans in size 8 instead of 6 (those are Australian sizes, by the way) for a less stockinged and butthugging look. Imagine if I had showed up wearing my usual Madame Mao-red lipstick.

Later that evening, as she picked me up from the BART station, I recounted this sad tale of femme-failure to my little sister. Her reliably hard-boiled reply: “Well, you could always cut your hair short and buy clothes from Diesel.” To which I could only answer with a hard-boiled laugh: of course I couldn’t do either of those things.

So what’s a girl to do? At this point, trying to “butch up” for the boys is like trying to become white because some racist boys are physically cute. So, I march on with my red lipstick while waiting for that special boy who can correctly read my lipstick. To clarify: this is not a boy who fetishizes lipstick. Because there are plenty of fags out there who advertise for “pussyboys,” but these are not the boys for me. For me, red lipstick is the glowing invitation to the gates of delicious hell that is sexuality, and NOT sexuality itself. Red lipstick makes me feel sexy for sure, but “sexy” is not the same as “horny.” In the film “Notes On a Scandal,” when Cate Blanchett’s schoolteacher character feels utter isolation and depression from her sexual misconduct of seducing a teenager student, she plies on red lipstick, along with purposefully sloppy black eyeliner. She returns her body to the Siouxsie Sioux clone of her teenage years.

She does this so that she can wipe clean, however momentarily, the squeaky-clean “good wife and mother” persona she’d accumulated over the years, to distill the source of her unethical sexuality—which is not horniness, but feminine fury. Wearing the lipstick, Blanchett does a rifling through of Judi Dench’s apartment that is, in its primal physicality, a thrashful dance deserving of a punk soundtrack.

This is the kind of sexy I feel in red lipstick. It leads me to emotions, not positions. I will not let my sexual-romantic destiny be backed into a corner alley, settling for some guy for whom lipstick on boys is purely a sexual thing, tantamount to prancing around in mommy’s underwear. No, I’m an eternal romantic, and I will have to wait for that perfect boy who will fall in love with this femme and only then DISCOVER that he likes having the circumference of his fellated penis lipstick-ringed in red.