Alec Baldwin on wanderlust
I found myself appreciating (and, surprisingly,
identifying closely with) Alec Baldwin in the latest profile of him
in the New Yorker. A key outtake:
Seriously-- if you have a conversation with me for any decent amount of time, I start saying these exact same things. I want to do *so much*, but I also dream of doing absolutely nothing. I'll fantasize about 'taking my hand off the wheel' for a while and doing no work of consequence at all. At the same time, I love being a reporter-- and I'd also love to own a bed and breakfast in Bruges, or operate a lighthouse in Mendocino County, or be a jazz singer in Tokyo, or a screenwriter in Los Angeles, or a personal trainer, or a masseuse... and I genuinely believe I'd be great at any of these endeavors.
In my senior year high school yearbook, I wrote that in 10 years I'd be "Playing serious [career] hardball in New York City, dating a high-profile lawyer, a hip-hop mogul, and Prince William." It was obviously a bit tongue-in-cheek, and I still have a few years left to get such an active love life... but it's an example of a general lifestyle wanderlust to which it seems Mr. Baldwin could relate.
“I always think, What if you just took your hand off the wheel, and slowly, over time, it all went away, and your life became about, you know, ‘Is the mail here yet?’ I always think about that.” But this dream of disengagement quickly gave way: in the space of a few minutes, sitting in weak sun on a New Jersey driveway, smoking a cigarette, Baldwin imagined himself as the restaurant critic of the Times; the proprietor of an inn near Syracuse; and the presenter of a classical-music show on public radio. “I could do that,” he said, and he wasn’t exactly joking.
...“To sit there in the studio and just say”—a rich radio voice— “ ‘And now Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, with Charles Dutoit and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra.’ Click. Hit a button, and then you sit back and listen, and they pay you for that. And I can’t imagine they pay you as much as the movies, but to me it’s getting to that point where there’s just something else I want to do. I don’t know what it is.
Seriously-- if you have a conversation with me for any decent amount of time, I start saying these exact same things. I want to do *so much*, but I also dream of doing absolutely nothing. I'll fantasize about 'taking my hand off the wheel' for a while and doing no work of consequence at all. At the same time, I love being a reporter-- and I'd also love to own a bed and breakfast in Bruges, or operate a lighthouse in Mendocino County, or be a jazz singer in Tokyo, or a screenwriter in Los Angeles, or a personal trainer, or a masseuse... and I genuinely believe I'd be great at any of these endeavors.
In my senior year high school yearbook, I wrote that in 10 years I'd be "Playing serious [career] hardball in New York City, dating a high-profile lawyer, a hip-hop mogul, and Prince William." It was obviously a bit tongue-in-cheek, and I still have a few years left to get such an active love life... but it's an example of a general lifestyle wanderlust to which it seems Mr. Baldwin could relate.
In good form
The Brits have a number of excellent turns of phrase, and one of my favorites is to say a person is "in good form," as in, "Giles was in good form at the party last night."
I like the implication that people comprise different forms-- the implication that one could just as easily be "in bad form," and that somehow that's natural and an OK part of being a person. That your friends can acknowledge when you're in good form, and in bad form, and that they understand you and accept you either way.
To be "in good form" sounds far more natural than its American counterpart, being "on your best behavior," which to me connotes more effort and strain than just happening to be in good form. You know?
Today was in good form.
I like the implication that people comprise different forms-- the implication that one could just as easily be "in bad form," and that somehow that's natural and an OK part of being a person. That your friends can acknowledge when you're in good form, and in bad form, and that they understand you and accept you either way.
To be "in good form" sounds far more natural than its American counterpart, being "on your best behavior," which to me connotes more effort and strain than just happening to be in good form. You know?
Today was in good form.
On fast fashion and good buys
My Aunt Linda likes to tell a cute story of the time that she babysat my sister and me and brought us with her to a department store. We were each between 3 and 5 years old, obviously too young to really evaluate prices-- but we spent the whole trip toddling around the racks, looking at price tag after price tag disapprovingly, clicking our tongues and saying: "Too much. Too much." We were parroting the behavior we'd witnessed in our mom-- a very savvy shopper, never fazed by marketing and never accepting less than a "good buy."
Cut to the present day: I've just become a wage-earning adult in the media-saturated, post-Sex and the City world, where womanhood and femininity are ostensibly defined by buying $150 designer jeans, "investing" in a $12,000 Hermes handbag, and wearing ridiculously overpriced Victoria's Secret "lingerie." Thanks to my mom, for the most part, I'm just not buying it.
And I'm not alone: Last week, England's House of Lords published a report criticizing the environmental and societal effects of the present "culture of 'fast fashion" in which consumers "dispose of clothes which have only been worn a few times in favour of new, cheap garments which themselves will also go out of fashion and be discarded within a matter of months."
It's terrific that the Lords are confronting this issue-- but I'd disagree with the interpretation that patronizing stores like H&M and Forever 21 should as a rule be eschewed in favor of buying from more "quality" fashion houses. The reality is that today, fast fashion happens equally at the highest and lowest ends of the market.
The majority of stuff sold in mainstream stores is fleetingly trendy rubbish, at all price ranges. Frankly, if I'm going to buy a cheaply-made imported garment, I'd rather spend $20 at H&M instead of $400 at Barney's. I know the workers are treated poorly and paid very low wages, so I'd prefer to line the pockets of the executives overseeing it all as little as possible, you know?
But that is only a lesser-of-two-evils approach. More and more, I'm trying to get away from buying new clothes at all, just because it's such a flawed system and the products are such crap. I like the concept of always shopping, but rarely buying-- continuously being on the lookout for nice pieces so that I don't have to buy fast fashion out of desperation. This idea seems very French to me-- in the aforementioned Elegance book, Madame Dariaux cautions the reader to "never be seduced by anything that isn't first-rate."
It's not easy, but Jezebel.com writer Sadie Stein is now "three weeks clean" from fast fashion, and I like her logic: "The small after-work of pleasure of a cheap top... is something we've become accustomed to very quickly -—such a thing would have been unheard-of a few generations ago -—and I'm guessing that, together, we can weather the withdrawal." Anyone else in?
Cut to the present day: I've just become a wage-earning adult in the media-saturated, post-Sex and the City world, where womanhood and femininity are ostensibly defined by buying $150 designer jeans, "investing" in a $12,000 Hermes handbag, and wearing ridiculously overpriced Victoria's Secret "lingerie." Thanks to my mom, for the most part, I'm just not buying it.
And I'm not alone: Last week, England's House of Lords published a report criticizing the environmental and societal effects of the present "culture of 'fast fashion" in which consumers "dispose of clothes which have only been worn a few times in favour of new, cheap garments which themselves will also go out of fashion and be discarded within a matter of months."
It's terrific that the Lords are confronting this issue-- but I'd disagree with the interpretation that patronizing stores like H&M and Forever 21 should as a rule be eschewed in favor of buying from more "quality" fashion houses. The reality is that today, fast fashion happens equally at the highest and lowest ends of the market.
The majority of stuff sold in mainstream stores is fleetingly trendy rubbish, at all price ranges. Frankly, if I'm going to buy a cheaply-made imported garment, I'd rather spend $20 at H&M instead of $400 at Barney's. I know the workers are treated poorly and paid very low wages, so I'd prefer to line the pockets of the executives overseeing it all as little as possible, you know?
But that is only a lesser-of-two-evils approach. More and more, I'm trying to get away from buying new clothes at all, just because it's such a flawed system and the products are such crap. I like the concept of always shopping, but rarely buying-- continuously being on the lookout for nice pieces so that I don't have to buy fast fashion out of desperation. This idea seems very French to me-- in the aforementioned Elegance book, Madame Dariaux cautions the reader to "never be seduced by anything that isn't first-rate."
It's not easy, but Jezebel.com writer Sadie Stein is now "three weeks clean" from fast fashion, and I like her logic: "The small after-work of pleasure of a cheap top... is something we've become accustomed to very quickly -—such a thing would have been unheard-of a few generations ago -—and I'm guessing that, together, we can weather the withdrawal." Anyone else in?
