Wardrobe: What to Wear to See Tomahawk at the 9:30 Club

Gman and I have been pining to see a concert at the 9:30 Club since we moved to DC but due to laziness in checking the schedule, we hadn’t. So when we found out that one of Gman’s absolute favorite bands, Tomahawk, was playing there, we jumped at the chance to finally check it out. I really liked the venue. Pretty much any place you stood seemed like a good spot and it was rather intimate. I’m not sure that I have to say this, but obviously they didn’t have a wine list. I was very glad to see one of my favorite beers from our Dogfish Head exploration, Raison D’Etre, on tap - a little too timely, no?

Gman has a thing for Mike Patton. He’s the talented front man of Tomahawk and also lead other groups you might be familiar with: Faith No More and Mr. Bungle. I became well acquainted with his work through Gman. What I like about Mr. Patton is that he isn’t afraid to explore new sounds or ways of composing a song. Over the years he has developed as an artist without losing himself. For instance, his album Mundo Cane sounds lounge-y and is mostly in Italian. He sings Deep Deep Down with a live orchestra, too. I think Mr. Patton would get a kick out of John Cage’s 4’33” (hooray for art history!).

I wasn’t sure what exactly to wear, as choosing something for a rock concert was completely out of my usual ensemble selection purview. However, I do have two pairs of Vans and thought this the perfect occasion to put one of them to good use. I ended up wearing skinny jeans and one of Gman’s button-up shirts to try and channel his enthusiasm. I had a lot of fun at the show and it reminded me that I really like going to live shows and need to go more often.

Here are a few observations from the evening, for your enjoyment:

My favorite Tomahawk song was played second.

As every song started Gman would say with a twinkle in his eye, “This is my favorite song!” with one exception later in the set when he shouted to me, “this one’s called Rape This Day.” I think this one might actually be his favorite.

The guy next to me was in the zone rockin’ out as if no one else was around. I assumed he was on something and I had fun trying to follow his rhythm vs the band’s.

Most people there were in their mid-thirties and the crowd was really relaxed, just listening to the music. The two men standing in front of us put earplugs in as the music started. They were about the dorkiest twosome I’ve seen and yet I could hear them making fun of everyone else there.

There were a lot of interesting tattoos and variations on the mullet hidden beneath ball caps.

Washington, D.C. Monuments at Night

My favorite organized tour of Washington, D.C. is the Old Town Trolley tour of the monuments at night. Advertised as a three hour tour, it sounds frightening (Gilligan's Island anyone?) and terribly long, but I assure you the time flies by. When you are visiting DC in the middle of the hot and humid summer (with temperatures reaching 100 degrees on some afternoons), which most tourists prefer, then you will want to save lugging yourself from monument to monument across the National Mall for the cooler evenings. Trust me.

The tour starts and ends at Union Station. I recommend showing up at least an hour early so you can get a good look around the station. The powerful classical architecture, grand colonnades and interior spaces shouldn't be missed. You might even recognize a few spots from issue one of The Magazine. While inside grab a sandwich and a drink for the trip (you can't eat, drink, or smoke on the trolley but if you want something along the way, options are very limited as are restrooms). Also bring a sweater as it can get cold driving around with the windows down.

Once on board you will be whisked away past the Capitol Building and National Mall on your way to see the Lincoln Memorial, Vietnam War Memorial, Korean War Memorial, Iwo Jima Memorial, FDR Memorial, MLK Memorial, and last but not least, the White House. The monuments seem even more grand with dramatic lighting in the evening. They look like they are glowing. While driving from place to place the drive acts as your guide, giving you useful historical facts and stories. I've been on the tour twice and each time the order we stopped was different, which is especially nice for the local going multiple times with out of town guests.

After the tour it's fun to talk about which monument you like best, mine is the Korean War Memorial. What's yours?

Wardrobe: Cherry Blossoms and Springtime

With the arrival of 80 degree weather and the blooming of the Cherry Blossoms, DC finally welcomed spring this week. Although it felt like we skipped spring and went right on into summer (grumbles). Everyone was out to see the blossoms yesterday, and Gman and I got right in there with the mix of tourists and working professionals. It was fun to people watch and see how each person chose to capture their pictures. There is something captivating about the pillowy puff balls of flowers on the strong, dark branches. Walking through them feels like you are walking through a secret magical garden in the clouds - except that everyone else is in on the secret and wearing tourist costumes. 

I wore the JCrew stripe shirttail dress (sold out but here is a similar one by Lilly Pulitzer) with my favorite Madewell sandals and handbag (old but I like this one and this one too). My necklace is from the Oxford Exchange in Tampa, Florida and my lipstick is NARS Funny Face. I love this dress because it transitions easily from indoor working to outdoor happy hour. I also loved the contrast of the bright blue stripes against the pretty flowers.

Just in case you are wondering, the flowers aren't particularly fragrant. :)

Style Outtakes from The Magazine

I had a lot of fun shooting my first editorial for High Heeled Traveler, The Magazine. The inaugural issue explores the concept of "home" and I wanted to talk about home in the context of travel. Besides referring to my hotel room as "home" while I'm away, that last leg of the voyage - when you get off the plane but you still have to drive to your house or hop in a taxi - is the most exhausting and always seems to last forever. As soon as I walk in the door I throw down my bags and take off all my makeup. Then I strip down, shower (to get the stale plane feeling off), then put my pajamas on. Gman unpacks his bags immediately then starts the laundry. Another one of my friends does her laundry while on vacation and when she get's home she unpacks clean clothes that are already folded and ready to be put away.

Here are some outtakes from the story in the mag, a little peek inside just for you. What do you do when you get home after a long day of travel?

Purchase a copy of High Heeled Traveler, The Magazine here to see the full story.

and last but not least...

A World Apart: Anna Ancher and the Skagen Art Colony

Anna Ancher (Danish, 1859 - 1935), Interior, ca. 1916-17
oil on panel, 17 1/2 x 14 7/8 in ( 44.4 x 37.9 cm), Skagens Museum

The National Museum of Women in the Arts highlights one of Denmark’s national treasures, Anna Ancher, and the colony of artists in the remote Jutland peninsula town of Skagen in the late 19th century in an upcoming exhibition, A World Apart: Anna Ancher and the Skagen Art Colony.

Anna Ancher lived her entire life at the tippy top of Denmark in the small remote town of Skagen. Many artists (including her eventual husband Michael Ancher) came to Skagen to paint. Her parents, Ane and Erik Brøndum, owned the only local hotel and it became the artist hangout. Because of this Ancher was exposed to many of these painters at an early age.

During this time, 1870s-ish, many artists were moving away from crowded industrial cities to find idyllic landscapes and rural towns to paint in (remember Monet moving to Giverny? Where he painted the waterlilies? Yes?) Artists going to these remote locals started forming groups, which we art historians call ‘colonies.’ In Denmark, a few of the artists attending the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Copenhagen started traveling to Skagen to get away from it all and to paint the fisherman. They formed a colony and Anna Ancher, the only local, was one of their leading painters.

This is unusual for the time as women weren’t allowed to do much outside the home and they certainly weren’t encouraged to continue working after they were married and had children. Not only did Anna continue but she enjoyed a fruitful partnership with her husband, Michael. Since the day they met he encouraged her to paint and they even completed a significant canvas together in 1883, Judgment of a day’s work. Notable Danish artists came to the colony including Carl Locher, Viggo Johansen, Christian Krogh, Laurits Tuxen, and P.S. Krøyer, whose work is also featured in the exhibition.

The Skagen colony of artists was part of the “Modern Breakthrough” movement in Denmark, which sought to break with traditional painting of religious and royal painting and paint what was real, what was going on around them. Their painting looked back at Dutch Old Master painting and looked forward at their contemporaries painting Naturalism, Realism and the loose expressive brushwork of Impressionism.

What set the colony in Skagen “A World Apart” was their depiction of light. These artists just didn’t randomly end up in Skagen, they came here because of the specific type of light occurring in this place. The light in the summer lasted sometimes for 24 hours and permeated everything it touched illuminating the banal and daily goings-on of life in the small fishing town. To expand on above, in painting style, you can see references to Dutch still life, portraiture, and domestic interiors (Vermeer and Rembrandt come to mind). The Dutch Masters were arguably obsessed with the way each material reflected and absorbed the light. Impressionist painters were also interested light. They were showing how light and time can change a subject, like Monet’s Haystack paintings, but the colony in Skagen was interested in the light itself.

This can be seen in Ancher’s work as NMWA’s Associate Curator Virginia Treanor points out, “when Anna Ancher paints light, it’s contained, geometric.” My favorite painting in the exhibit, Evening sun the artist’s studio, after 1912, best demonstrates what the colony at Skagen was exploring and how Ancher was making innovating and interesting paintings. This painting depicts a blue colored room with minimal furnishings – two frames leaning against the wall towards the bottom-center of the painting, a thin wooden side table with a few books resting on top. In the bottom right hand corner, along with the side table, another brown colored object is cut off from view. Much of the painting shows the blue walls (one almost perpendicular to the picture plane) but the main subject here is the golden evening light reflected on the wall. It is central to the composition and Ancher builds the paint up on the canvas until the light “becomes a tactile object” as Treanor puts it. A detail of the painting is seen below.

What I liked about this exhibit is that it is broken up into thematic spaces based on the interests of the Skagen artist colony and not chronologically. Ancher’s work is mixed in with her male contemporaries, putting her work in context and showing that she is not only equally as talented but an important contributor to the movement. She is working in relation to her peers and in and out of doors to follow the light. They are all depicting their family, neighbors, domestic interiors, and beach scenes; first with heroic large-scale depictions of local fisherman then with the leisurely activity of the afternoon stroll.

One section of the exhibit is dedicated solely to the idea that Ancher was innovative in her own right, exploring light as form and color, completely detaching it from context. She goes as far as to “make a composition with light [as] color and form” in Light on the wall in the blue room, ca. 1890. You can see her brushstrokes and exploration, the subject getting her full attention. While her male counterparts are busy depicting monumental paintings of fishermen and portraits of their wives, I can see Anna in her studio obsessing over what she sees and what is unseen - the evidence of molecular life only noticeable by the detection of brightness in a room, how emptiness is full of color. She takes the interior scene and strips it of human interaction, then of its structural components, thus liberating her subject and setting her beloved light a world apart.

A World Apart: Anna Ancher and the Skagen Art Colony is on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts from February 15 through May 12. If you are interested in learning more about Anna Ancher and the Skagen art colony, there are several opportunities to attend insightful gallery talks. Check out the NMWA’s website for details.

2013 Presidential Inauguration

I had the honor of attending the Presidential Inauguration yesterday. I had every intention to live tweet my experiences and observations of my surroundings. My plan was to link to the twitter feed of my in-the-moment feelings today and encourage a conversation about your comments on the event.

But as life seems to go sometimes, I had no cell service the entire time. I couldn’t even send a text message. It forced me to be in the moment and observe my fellow Americans on a truly historical day.

My friends and I arrived to our gate at the appointed time and came to find that they were not letting anyone in. Huge crowds got even bigger as people stacked up waiting to get in. Finally after an hour of patiently waiting, we entered the first holding pin. Another 20 minutes and we are up at the security line, where each person is screened, one at a time. People in the crowd weren’t as aggressive or pushy as I was expecting. And not as rude either. Most waited with excitement, talking to each other about what they were expecting to see, how cold it was, and how we might end up missing it because of the delay. We finally made it to a reasonable spot just in time to see Vice President Joe Biden swearing in.

The crowd tried to listen. They wanted to hear President Obama’s speech and they wanted to take their picture, proving they witnessed it. During the speech, Mr. Obama’s voice echoed on the loud speakers, all the way down the Mall back towards the White House. Each word seemed to be spoken three or four times. The man next to me had his headphones in and was recording the speech on his ipad. Presumably hundreds of others, who had their phones in the air, were doing the same thing. Many people were very focused on capturing the experience instead of experiencing it, which was also my plan originally. The child next to me was sitting on the ground playing Angry Birds while her parents split their attention between each other and the President. People were proud to be there, wearing hats, pins, scarves, bags all plastered with “OBAMA” and “I was there Inaugural 2013.”

It’s funny because when you go to events like this, or sporting events, you can usually get a better view of the game or presenter from the comfort of your TV at home. We couldn’t see the President from where we stood. But when you go to the game its about camaraderie. It’s about being with people and experiencing life together. I got so caught up in it all that I almost bought a souvenir Washington D.C. snow globe!

Later, the news noted how this was the speech that Obama’s liberal followers were waiting for and couldn’t wait to start picking it apart. But that’s not what I got out of it. I didn’t hear a bunch of liberal ideals and agendas. I saw hope and joy on the faces of my fellow Americans as they got to stand together peacefully on the lawn of the Capitol Building witnessing our democratic system actually work. They were proud to be part of a country where we can peacefully transition leadership (even though in this instance the same man was re-elected). We were all there for the same reason, in the same gated off area, taking pictures for each other.

As we walked back home, I watched as people celebrated in the streets and found their way to their parade seats. I couldn’t help but think about what I had just witnessed. I thought about the words at the beginning of the speech, quoting from the Declaration of Independence:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

I think Mr. Obama was calling us to make this statement real now. Don’t give up on the system, don’t throw in the towel and stop trying because “only people with money get things done” or “I’m just one voice.” History has proved that we can ignite passion in each other and accomplish great things together. For several hours I stood amongst a crowd of people that, as completely different as they all were individually, I believe could do just that.

Special thanks to my friend Nick for generously giving me his extra ticket and taking some of these great pictures!