end of 2016

Yikes, what is the function of this blog anymore? Everything is basically on my Instagram, but out of habit or a need for tidiness, here's the latest...(crickets, crickets):

☆ The Crucible closed, then The Cherry Orchard opened! I played Anya, and wrote a little about that show's timeliness here, which is mostly a piece about the election, and the importance of championing humility, nuance, and complexity as antidotes to how little truth or factualness seem to matter right about now.
☆ Rookie turned five years old! Our theme that month was Infinity, and I published a series called The Infinity Diaries, about my move to New York, heartbreak, doing my first play, and how writing and acting are kind of like opposites but can become friends. I don't think I've ever been more scared to share anything but I'm very glad I did.
☆ Other recent Editor's Letters that felt especially good to write: Awakening, Cast of Characters, Soulmates.
☆ I interviewed Miuccia Prada for System, Solange for W and for Rookie, and Kenneth Lonergan for Interview--basically just secretly made them my college professors for an hour or two.
☆ I was on podcasts like This Week Had Me Like, my favorite source of bizarre celebrity news/way of coping with absurdity, and Anna Faris Is Unqualified, in which we broke down all my defenses and shared tales of love and loss and people who lie about being the children of famous filmmakers, etc.
☆ I wrote about the secret lives of objects, being a collector, and documenting your life like it's a picture book, for A Magazine Curated By Alessandro Michele of Gucci.
☆ I did an Illustrated Interview for T Magazine.
☆ I was on the cover of Teen Vogue's September issue, interviewed and styled by Grace Coddington and shot by Inez and Vinoodh, so 12 year-old me was dying. Also, here's a video we did in my apartment.
☆ Petra shot me for i-D which was deeply satisfying in the way making visual dreams come true with her always is.
☆ Patrick Demarchelier shot me for Glamour's rad portraits series of American women working in a range of fields and mediums.
☆ In Dazed, Claire Marie Healy wrote one of the profiles of myself that I felt most understood by (a seemingly sad sentence that's more just like, hey, it's nice when someone gets it!). Ethan James Green took the all-Rodarte photos.

K, see you in another 80 months!

20

Today I am 20. The Crucible, in which I play Mary Warren, opened at the Walter Kerr Theatre three weeks ago, March 31st—also the eight-year anniversary of this blog. I have a lot of trouble comprehending that writing Style Rookie led to writing for other places, then starting Rookie, then being able to audition for plays that I love and to be inside of them for long periods of time, which is an inexplicably wonderful way to live a life. But I am really really really insanely thankful for all of it, and many of you have followed for a LONG time, and that means a lot. Right now, I'm very slowly writing something that I hope will effectively articulate the strangeness of the way these all overlap—the fictions we get to try on via diary/blog-keeping, and acting, and personal style. But that's a longterm hermit project. I just wanted to mention it because in my attempt to briefly list recent stuff I've been up to, I may sound callous, but: None of this goes unexamined or unappreciated.

Since my last update:

I went on tour for Rookie Yearbook Four and got to meet Rookies across the U.S. It's always surreal and the very best heart-nutrition to see long-time readers and meet new ones! Here are some photos of it all.

Recent Editor's Letters for Rookie about stuff like: Glory, Assembly, Potential, Truth or Dare, and Cult of Personality. In my letter for the theme On Display, I also wrote about David Bowie.

Back in the fall, Bowie commissioned a series of videos set to songs from ★ by Insta Mini Series, and you will find me in some of them.

I am also hanging out with the coolest/cutest girls in the world in the video for Carly Rae Jepsen's song "Boy Problems," which Petra Collins, Rookie photographer and personal partner-in-crime, directed.

For the online magazine ILY, I wrote about how liking movies too much can cause one to dissociate from real-life events such as love. Shoutout to movies, love you movies!!!!

Some brain-expanding interviews I have conducted—
For Rookie: Adrian Tomine, Carly Rae Jepsen, Joanna Newsom, Hailee Steinfeld, and Danai Gurira.

For Interview: Winona Ryder, high priestess of my DVD shelf.

For Studio 360: Ben Whishaw, who plays John Proctor in The Crucible and is a magical person.

I also interviewed Olivia Bee for Studio 360. She is crazy talented and has taken photos for Rookie since the very beginning, and now has a stunning book out with Aperture called Kids in Love, in which I wrote a thing or two (two).

I got to be a guest on one of my favorite podcasts, Call Your Girlfriend.

I was in an episode of Scream Queens, dressed in homage to Rosemary Woodhouse and having SO MUCH FUN. Here is Jamie Lee Curtis ruining my life:

And while we're at it, here's Ben ruining my life in The Crucible:

I gave a tour of my apartment in this video for Nowness + Apartamento.

I wrote some + edited a round-up of feelings about the two-year anniversary of Beyoncé's self-titled album over at BEAT.

I was featured in CR Fashion Book and beloved Rookie illustrator Mithsuca Berry did the artwork. (Photo by Sloan Laurits.)

I was shot by empress/emperor Inez and Vinoodh for Vanity Fair while Shania Twain's "Man! I Feel Like a Woman" played on a loop inside my head.

I was on the cover of a zine Rookie illustrator and world wonder Kati Yewell started, called Noisy Kids. She interviewed me and took photos where I am swimming in my documented spirals I mean diaries.

I was also on the cover of Polyester Zine, interviewed by the brilliant Ione Gamble and shot by Eleanor Hardwick, who I interviewed eons ago on this blog and who's also been at Rookie since day one. It was SO SPECIAL to finally meet her and work together; the internet to IRL is amazing!!!

If you've read my blog or Rookie for a few years you know how much I love Seth Bogart or even that my friends and I weaseled our way into his 18+ shows in high school. I got to sing on the song "Barely Legal" from his new self-titled album, which is a huge treat all-around; here is a tiny clip of it.


I was photographed by Annie Leibovitz for the 2016 Pirelli calendar in the company of my every living hero, and I wrote some about it here:
For the 2016 Pirelli Calendar, Annie Leibovitz chose to photograph women whose achievements demonstrate a different kind of beauty from what the calendar has traditionally showcased. I'm still shocked to be included among so many people who've long influenced not just my work, but how I see the world, and try to see myself. Annie photographed me one year earlier in the pink velvet dress I'd originally bought for prom, in my parents' backyard. At that time, it was still my backyard, too, and had functioned since I was a little kid as a personal photo studio, study, and consistent reminder that I was bigger than I had been the year before, and the year before that, and that this would only keep happening. (I'm still v short, but: relatively speaking.) It was where I learned that as your childhood shrinks around you, so will your sense of wonder, unless you choose to pay close attention to what surrounds you at new heights. When Annie shot me for Pirelli, we were just a few blocks from my new home in NYC. A lot happens in that first year, and not knowing the geography of the city makes every encounter feel totally isolated from the rest of the world, like a castle on a cloud. At the time of this shoot, I was parsing what in this year had seemed significant just because it was new, and then what was enriching. I was exhausted by the sheen, and desperate to develop a kind of discernment which would make me so healthy, so OK with myself, that genuine wonder would return--gravitation towards stuff that isn't just shiny, but illuminates the same sorts of truths I'd learned as a fan of Patti, Yoko, and other women who happen to be in this calendar, too. I decided to cut my hair on the shoot, rid myself of any excess. Annie made me feel completely comfortable, like I was the same person as the year before, but indeed older. Again, still very physically short. My foot is peeking out of that shoe. I urge you to look at the other portraits, all so stunning, bold & nearly impossible to turn away from. They are strongest as a group, but I wanted to share what mine means to me and thank you for following what I do in such a way that has allowed for this to happen.

It feels wrong to write about a play—one of the last things in this MODERN TIME which can't be captured or effectively described to anyone who wasn't there in person—but I am so so proud of The Crucible, and of everyone involved in the production. I talked about that here.

HEY THANKS FOR EVERYTHING!!! See you at the stage door, or at a Rookie event, or if you're ever on the streets of the Big Apple and you're like "who's that girl squinting at directions on her phone and inconveniencing everyone around her?" I just want you to know that the answer, always, is me.
204 comments

2015

Hi! I guess this is now just a place for updates. Most of my work now is on Rookie and I update my Twitter & Instagram with other stuff I've been up to.


Rookie Yearbook Four, the print edition of our fourth year, comes out October 20: 352 pages of beautiful writing and art by young people, plus print-only contributions from people like Amandla Stenberg, Kiernan Shipka, Jazz Jennings, Dev Hynes of Blood Orange, Emma Roberts, Sarah Paulson, Charli XCX, DeJ Loaf, Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend, Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine, Donna Tartt, Shamir, Chloe of Kitten, Rashida Jones, Tracee Ellis Ross, Joy Williams, Hayley Williams of Paramore, Lorde, Tyler Ford, Ariana Grande, Edward Droste of Grizzly Bear, Solange, and Willow Smith. WHEW. See also: stickers, posters, a cut-out diorama and banner, ET CETERA FOREVER. I've never been able to choose a favorite Rookie Yearbook until now. It is our final one (senior year!) and I can't wait for Rookies THE WORLD OVER to see it. (Mr. Burns laugh, but in the name of good things like self-esteem and creativity.)

I'm also doing a tour for the book, reading from the book with local Rookies and signing copies. You! should! come!


More exciting Rookie news: After four years, we have our own office. We also launched a redesign of the site that makes me feel warm and fuzzy.


Acting-wise: This Is Our Youth closed in January. Starting in February, I will play Mary Warren in a 20-week run of The Crucible on Broadway. I was also in an episode of Scream Queens that airs this fall.

Writing: I interviewed Taylor Swift for the cover of ELLE, guest-edited a section of the July/August issue of Poetry Magazine, and guest-edited a Rookie section of the October issue of Nylon. So many talented people of all kinds are featured in both, so take a look! I also wrote the introduction to Petra Collins' book, Babe, which showcases the work of many of my favorite artists.

Here are some recent Rookie editor's letters I am proud of: Acting Out, Trust, Both Sides Now, Give + Take. This is a list of some of my favorite longreads (and long-listens, and long-watches) on the internet.

Podcasts: I talked about my favorite episode of Freaks and Geeks on Rerun, and discussed teenage loneliness on Dear Sugar.

I'm also in a campaign for Clinique in which I talk about confidence and creativity, my two favorite things/biggest sources of anxiety ♡♡♡

The 2016 Pirelli calendar is of clothed women with a variety of achievements, and I am stoked to be one of them, in intimidatingly good company. Here is a behind-the-scenes photo from the shoot with Annie Leibovitz, in which I am wearing my soul in sweatshirt form: GIRLS AT NIGHT ON THE INTERNET.


For the unacquainted:

Hi! I'm editor-in-chief of Rookie, a website for teenage girls that I founded in 2011. Every year we put out a book that compiles the best content from that year of the site. Our most recent is Rookie Yearbook Three, published by Razorbill. It is just over 350 pages, and in addition to loads of beautiful artwork and writing are print-exclusives like stickers, valentines, a Rookie pennant, and contributions from the likes of Dakota and Elle Fanning, Shailene Woodley, Lorde, Grimes, Kelis, Sia, Broad City, Bob's Burgers, and more.
They are my babies, and they can be adopted here.

I'm currently acting in This is Our Youth at the Cort Theatre on Broadway until January 2015. How can you even stand the unabashed enthusiasm of the trio below?
Photo by Brigitte Lacombe
Here's an ad that will tell you some of the nice things people have said about it:


Other recent developments: I was on the cover of magnificent, ad-free The Great Discontent, as well as New York Magazine and Nylon. This is Our Youth playwright Kenneth Lonergan wrote something about me for Vanity Fair, and Annie Leibovitz took the accompanying photo in the same backyard where I used to take pictures every day after school for this blog. Here I am babbling on about all this lunacy:


♡✿♡✿♡

current events

LONG TIME NO TALK. Here's what's happened since last spring:


Rookie Yearbook Two is out! It is the print edition of our best content from our second year as a website and I am crazy proud of it. This one was a real labor of love -- I flew to Montreal twice to work with Drawn & Quarterly in person, and what you see in these pages came from two suitcases full of my clothes, trinkets, jewelry, cut-outs, record covers, journals, et cetera times infinity. It is so hugely satisfying to have put our contributors' amazing work into a tangible form, exhaustively designed and obsessively detailed. There are also a bunch of extras you can't get on our site: letters to our readers from Judy Blume and Mindy Kaling, an interview with Mindy by Lena Dunham, pages from Grimes' sketchbook, and enough stickers to make you swoon. Here are two videos of tiny previews of my favorite spreads, and two reviews that made me feel like, cool, yes, we put this out into the world and other people feel the way we do. More important than what a buncha fancy GROWN-UPS think, though, is that our readers like it, so thank you to anyone who's come to any of the events on our book tour and shown the love. I'm rubber, you're glue, your enthusiasm bounces off me and sticks 2 u.


I was asked to share my "big big world" at the Sydney Opera House and the Melbourne Writers Festival and mostly talked about fangirling, the anxiety of influence, and being happy instead of putting pressure on yourself to be some tortured artist. I love Neil Gaiman's "make good art" speech, but I wanted to talk about what happens when you can't make good art, and about how fulfilling it can be to appreciate other people's art. If you prefer to watch the FIRST-EVER DELIVERY of this thing, the Sydney one is here, but I've embedded the slightly-updated Melbourne one above.


I tackled my love for Taylor Swift in a 4000-word piece for the Believer. A nice Tumblr user scanned the whole thing. I HAVE NEVER STRUGGLED SO MUCH WITH WANTING TO GET SOMETHING RIGHT. This love is difficult but it's real.


Last August/September, I filmed a supporting role in Enough Said, real live goddess Nicole Holofcener's recent movie. (Early readers of this blog will remember lame references to musical theater. In the words of KP, This is a part of me.) It's out in theaters now! I'm really proud of it and still shocked that I got to work with such funny, wonderful humans.


I am on the latest cover of BULLETT, accompanied by a piece by Fiona Duncan. As you can see, my hair is also shorter. I'm not much taller.


Finally, this month's theme on Rookie is Forever. My editor's letter went up tonight, and it's already been hugely validating to see the response from those of you who feel similarly about this period in one's life. I mention in it that Petra gave me a book of her documentation of our shared adolescence, and above is the cover and last page.

The past few years have been dauntingly magical, with many thanks to supporters of Rookie and of the other odds and ends listed here, and I'm just at an interesting time right now in figuring out what's next. Thanks for sticking around, coming by for a first time, what have you -- I know I said last spring that I was trying to let go of my need to document, but I figured out in writing the Forever letter:
"Reflecting and archiving is not the same as dwelling in the past. It is not anti-living, but a part of life, even a crucial one. We do this to highlight one thing above others, so that a special moment can take up more space in our brains than an inconsequential one; so that, by plain math, our personal worlds contain more good things and fewer bad ones. Or more interesting things and fewer blah ones, since you have to record the bad, too."
Much more to come.
240 comments

five years


Sunday was the five-year anniversary of this here blob, which I've neglected in the past months in the interest of Rookie, high school, friends, sleep, and other things. Aside from that, I don't feel like I have much to say, or rather, I prefer now to say it in private. My most recent journal is my favorite thing I've ever made, and nobody will ever see it.

I have been thinking a lot lately about what validates an emotion/event/observation, makes me feel like it really happened and I really lived it, and this seems like the right occasion to word-vomit these ideas. (Plus, I miss having time to keep this thing going, and I do feel an obligation to people who have read my blog for a long time that is not unlike the unspoken understanding you have with your first best friend, the one who watched you like stupid bands and stupid people and embarrass yourself and cry a lot, whose insight into whatever you do from now on is shaped by a unique knowledge of all the ties which bind New You to Old You, and who refrains from bringing up in front of new acquaintances that time you were on the 8th grade hip-hop team in the interest of letting you become more of yourself. In other words, we had a time, but there's so much time ahead, and it is, somehow, at the same time, quickly running out.)

I. The school year begins, ending a very special summer. I begin breaking down the different kinds of memories I have:

1. IMAGINED

"The difference between reality and imagination wasn't ever clear to me at all." —David Lynch
"Everything you can imagine is real." —Pablo Picasso

I keep a list in the back of one of my journals called "Moments of Strange Magic." It contains events that were either (a) just really, really happy (jumping around to Beyoncé with friends) or (b) aesthetically cohesive and perfect and synesthetic (driving through the desert in a blue convertible to Nancy Sinatra's "Bang Bang" past a bunch of neon-sign motels and trailer parks). Each event is marked with a symbol indicating whether it took place in real life, a movie/TV show/book, or my imagination. Examples of some imagined (b) ones would be: sweaty teens in shiny pastels dancing in unison at a wood-paneled, tinsel-covered community-center room to "Snowqueen of Texas" by the Mamas and the Papas; a view from the side of a guy walking down a school hallway to Frank Ocean's "Forrest Gump," passing lockers painted in the 1970s and a ton of muted, rowdy students; a girl submerging her head into a tub of red hair dye to the chorus of St. Vincent's "Cheerleader."

Where do these episodes come from? A past life? An innate discontentment with everything life already offers, combined with a form of voluntary synesthesia developed from an adolescence of perpetual loneliness manifesting itself in movie marathons and an inconvenient impulse to pay attention to every visual and auditory detail of every situation as an escape from the social interaction at hand?

An argument for the past-life theory might include this anecdote: A drawing I did in my journal of how I remembered the backyard of my boyfriend's house looking on a night that it was snowy and dark included a metal swingset. The next time I went over there, I realized I'd only imagined the swingset, though he later told me that they did have one when he was little. My mom then told me that our family almost bought that same house before I was born, meaning that, in that timeline, I would have known that metal swingset, in that backyard. 

References: Zoltan Torey copes with blindness by reconstructing reality in his head. Wes Anderson called Moonrise Kingdom a "memory of a fantasy," and envisioned the whole "These Days" scene from The Royal Tenenbaums when he first heard the song, building the rest of the movie around that moment (I have no source for this, a friend told me, I'll choose to believe it's true). I also wrote a bit about this in relation to The Virgin Suicides here.

2. DREAMS

Unlike imagined memories, dreams are not witnessed or crafted by the conscious brain (then again, "WHAT'S CONSCIOUS, MAN?" —the tiny stoner living inside me who mocks my every semi-deep thought). I account for dreams as real memories, or at least truthful ones, because of the idea that in dreams come truths that are too difficult for the conscious mind to accept.

If a dream is not considered as valid as "real," conscious memory, then I'll still regard it in some corner of the mind as a tiny piece of my history and identity. In Chris Ware's Building Stories, one character is able to partially reconcile her life's regret of neglecting to pursue a creative career because she dreams she had written the book she'd always hoped to. The fact that this book could exist even in her subconscious fantasy was enough for her. Just the notion of her own potential had her wake up in tears.

References: Agent Cooper's dreams in Twin Peaks. Jenny Zhang's wonderful piece for Rookie. Joseph Cornell's dream diary. Robert Altman's 3 Women, which came to him in a dream (the casting, the colors, the story, everything) and was shot without a script, with only his memory as a guideline.

3. SECONDHAND

"The world is bound with secret knots." —Athanasius Kircher

Secondhand memories come from storytelling — a movie, a book, a song, or a person recalling an event of their own past. 

When I saw Ware give a talk about his book last November, he said that he could remember what he'd visualized as a child listening to his grandmother tell stories about her own life better than he could picture some events that actually happened to him. When I interviewed him for Rookie, I asked about the one character's dream, why he included that Picasso quotation on the inside cover, what convinced him that such memories could have the same effect on a person as real ones. His response:
"Well, really, our memories are all we have, and even those we think of as "real" are made up. Art can condense experience into something greater than reality, and it can also give us permission to do or think certain things that otherwise we’ve avoided or felt ashamed of. The imagination is where reality lives; it’s the instant lie of backwash from the prow of that boat that we think of as cutting the present moment, everything following it becoming less and less "factual" but no less real than what we think of as having actually occurred."
When I remember eighth grade, I recall scenes my mind illustrated while reading Norwegian Wood, just as well as, and in some cases more vividly than, classmate interactions and walks to school. I spent a lot of freshman year analyzing my close, personal relationships with Rayanne Graff and Laura Palmer. I cried when I had watched The Virgin Suicides so many times that I could no longer remember how I'd first visualized the book. I still miss the characters I'd pictured before, and the school, too. Strangely enough, my first mental images of the Lisbons' house came flooding back to me when I set foot inside a neighbor's for a wake a couple years ago. When I walked outside, I saw that across the street was an old brown Cadillac surrounded by bushes and a sunset, mimicking two Corinne Day photos from the set of The Virgin Suicides almost exactly.

I don't actually think these events really happened to me, but they'll still come to mind when I think back on a time when a secondhand event seemed to hold some kind of truth that reality did not. Example: I felt all weird and drifty at the beginning of last summer, and when I try and revisit that place, I don't literally imagine the view from behind a car windshield and how everything must look to the narrator in Yo La Tengo's "Today Is the Day," but I sure remember the exact sadness that it captured.

References: Ronald Reagan, long before he had Alzheimers, would repeatedly recall some great war story with tears in his eyes. As it turned out, the incident was actually from a 1944 film called A Wing and a Prayer. Every other part of the Oliver Sacks essay where I learned this is also amazing and relevant.

4. EMBARRASSMENTS

These memories worsen with time. The original events often occur in adolescence, are usually social interactions, and, at worst, were intended to be romantic. One remedy is to frequently remind yourself that you won't have to live with your humiliation forever because MORTALITY. Or that our perception of reality is pretty inaccurate no matter what (see: Chris Ware; the tiny stoner I quoted earlier). Or that technically — TECHNICALLY — we have no way of knowing for sure that any of this is happening AT ALL. You could also just watch Freaks and Geeks.

5. NOSTALGIA

This is when the act of remembering an event becomes more enjoyable than the event itself, conjuring feelings that are warm and fuzzy, but also painful in the best way. From what I've gathered, the majority of people feel nostalgia most strongly for:

(a) Adolescence. Not for all the sweaty, horrible stuff mentioned in #4, but for the positive feelings and experiences which are only accentuated by the fact that your developing brain is taking them in for the first time. And even the sweaty, horrible stuff can be kind of great to revel in. Or, in the words of John Hughes, "At that age, it often feels just as good to feel bad as it does to feel good."

(b) Love.

Lolita and The Virgin Suicides combine (a) and (b) most perfectly, both being stories of men who spend their entire adult lives trying to hold onto what they once had, or once wanted.

References: Why You Truly Never Leave High School. Paul Feig's guest DJ choices on KCRW. Chuck Klosterman's essay on Dazed and Confused, in which he states, "Dazed and Confused is not a movie about how things were; Dazed and Confused is a movie about how things are remembered." Those fuzzy photograph-looking paintings by Gerhard Richter. Any Rodarte collection that cites California as inspiration. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

II. My understanding of death deepens. I think I'd always assumed I'd at least get to watch my funeral go down and have a few suspicions confirmed concerning who would write awkward "Happy Birthday! Miss you :(" messages on my Facebook wall long after I'd passed. I thought I'd get to still see how this whole "world" thing turns out: Do we all explode? Do things start to suck less first? Does everyone get sick of technology and start to live like the Amish, inspired by that one episode of Arthur? DO PEOPLE STILL WATCH ARTHUR?

But a few experiences take me out of all the stupid, floaty thoughts you get alone in your room and it hits me, quite tardily, that death is really the end.

III. I start watching Six Feet Under, which helps in some ways ("Why do we have to die?" "To make life important") but feeds my anxiety in others (every episode starts with some really unfortunate freak accident).

Everything is now a matter of life and death. Math homework: NOT A PRIORITY WHEN THE END COULD BE RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER. Cleaning my room: IS THIS REALLY HOW I WANT TO SPEND MY LAST HOURS ON EARTH WHEN I COULD GET HIT BY A CAR TOMORROW? Etc. The habit that blog-keeping instilled in me of compulsively archiving every single thing only worsens. If I get behind in my journal, I spend hours wondering where to even start. I can't pay attention in class, only make scattered notes where there should be a timeline of the Industrial Revolution, listing all the details I need to get down properly as soon as I have time: The music we listened to in Claire's room, the old man I saw on my way to school, the view from my boyfriend's car when we sat in a 7-Eleven parking lot watching people walk in and trying to predict their purchases, along with a record of what each person looked like and what they bought. My hands tremble, relaxing only once everything has been sufficiently documented, each memory in my grasp, as if by putting them down on paper, I can make them last forever.

I develop my own form of sacred geometry to find the secret knots among these details and fit them into the rest of my journal. I go through one every two months or so, and for that period of time, coordinate it and all other parts of my life with a specific mood. My handwriting, my doodles, the clothes I wear, the books I read, the music I listen to, the movies I watch, and the streets I walk down all match up. One goal of this is to create memories that are aesthetically pleasing and cohesive and perfect and synesthetic, each element in place (and never repeated in another journal or memory, making its singular usage especially special) so that the nostalgia will feel extra good. The other is to be as many people as possible, until I'm nobody at all.

IV. I listen to the "Bliss" episode of Radiolab, and the reasoning behind my impulses feels confirmed by the segment on snowflakes. So taken with their beauty, a young man in the 1880s named Wilson Bentley spent day after day trying to catch and document them, first through drawing and then photography. He only had about five minutes before one would melt, and had to hold his breath the whole time to keep from giving off any extra heat. Today, physics professor and snowflake expert Kenneth Libbrecht travels worldwide to do the same.
"…All of a sudden they'll get really good, and then I just start out there, frantically trying to collect as many as I can. One of the things I like to think about is, here I am, with my little piece of cardboard, in the middle of a continent where it's snowing all the time, and so I'm catching some incredibly small number of these things for a brief period, and getting some really cool pictures. So you kind of wonder, what else is out there? What are you missing? I mean, imagine just all the beautiful little works of art that are just falling down, totally unnoticed, and then they just disappear. Stuff that is far prettier than the pictures I have. 'Cause they're out there, you know they're out there. Statistically, they're out there, so you know, there's just an awful lot of really gorgeous things, that are just totally ephemeral and you'll never see them. And they're falling constantly. You sorta wanna just stop the world and go look at them."

V. I get to the finale of Six Feet Under. One character begins readying a camera until she's told, "You can't take a picture of this. It's already gone."

I talk about hoarding with my neighbor, whose house is very clean and calming, who has no trouble ridding of her two sons' childhood things. "I don't need to keep them, because I have every memory in my heart."

I tell Claire that before, I felt like an event had only really happened once it had been documented, shared, and praised. Then, just documented and shared. Now, just documented. She reminds me that there are always more moments to come, and that they will be fully experienced only once I've let go of those of the past.

I revisit American Beauty. This part at the very end leaves me feeling like Alan Ball has, once again, personally slapped me in the face. 
"...It's hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst...and then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life."

VI. My boyfriend and I take a tiny road trip during spring break. We skip stones on the beach, drink Coke out of glass bottles, and watch a pink sunset sky settle into nighttime. We walk along train tracks in the dark and stop to look at an old car behind a restaurant. I ask him to stand in front of it so I can take a Polaroid, the only picture I would have of him.

I retrieve it from my bag once we're on the dull Midwestern highway, leaving for good. The photo got exposed in the streetlight and came out as a mess of brown and blue spots. In a panic, I rapidly replay the day's events in my mind, and jot down a few details to remember. At some point, my notes turn into questions that I just can't shake:

"You can't grasp your legacy when alive, and it makes no difference in death. What if I leave behind no record? What if I let every day vanish? If I don't archive anything, am I free to change?"

The endless gray road with its yellow lights begins to feel less like a stretch of perpetual sameness, and more like an infinite sky filled with stars.
253 comments

pardon my heart

I think blogging for a period of time (especially a formative one) makes a person sort of eternally obsessed with recording and organizing everything, so this is what I've mapped out for the coming of fall:
(readable version)
(readable version)
(readable version)

Clips (spoiler alerts! Not like PLOT HEAVY stuff necessarily, but if you haven't seen any of these movies don't let me rob you of experiencing these scenes in their full glory!):
One thing I forgot to write down was the shared Super 8 memory sequence in both Paris, Texas and Submarine. SO HEARTWRENCHING.

Relevant links:

A playlist:

1. Opening - Cowboy 2. Strange Magic - ELO 3. Wild Heart - Stevie Nicks 4. Long Live - Taylor Swift 5. Everywhere - Fleetwood Mac 6. Love Me Like Music (I'll Be Your Song) - Heart 7. Marie - Jack Nitzsche 8. Pardon My Heart - Neil Young 9. Don't Let Me Down - Dillard & Clark 10. These Days - Nico 11. Wild Horses - Rolling Stones 12. Baby Just Break - King Tuff 13. Love is Strange - Mickey & Sylvia 14. Cancion Mixteca - Ry Cooder 15. A Blossom Fell - Nat King Cole 16. Crazy - Patsy Cline 17. Sometimes I Cry - unknown 18. Unknown - Yellow Balloon 19. Snow Queen of Texas - Mamas and the Papas 20. The Moonbeam Song - Harry Nilsson 21. Unknown - Saba Lou 22. Hiding Tonight - Alex Turner 23. Forget About - Sibylle Baier 24. Lady O - Judee Sill 25. The Weight - Jackie DeShannon 26. Crossroads - Robert Johnson 27. Rock and Roll - Velvet Underground 28. Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon - Urge Overkill 29. What's Important - Beat Happening
I hope your fall is really, really enjoyable.
52 comments

IS THIS THE REAL LIFE? IS THIS JUST FANTASY?

WELL HI.

We have a lot to catch up on. I guess I've put off writing this because there is SO MUCH.


It was always in the back of our minds that we* would do a yearly print edition of Rookie, and by the time May rolled around, we realized that we should probably get on that if we wanted to publish it in time for our September anniversary. After a call with Drawn & Quarterly (and years of admiring basically everything they publish), it was clear that they were the perfect publisher for this...book? magazine? of online content, edited by a minor. IT IS SO AMAZING THAT THEY BELIEVED IN US. I cannot think of better hands to have been in.

In early June, I spent the summer days I had at home living out the PG version of Dazed and Confused and working on the book. In late June, the Rookie Road Trip kicked off in New York. We went record shopping and banner-making in Philadelphia, got ice cream in Columbus, played arcade games in Ann Arbor, made zines and saw Girls Rock! Chicago in Chicago (and my WORLDS COLLIDED through a viewing of Superbad with my school friends and Rookie staffers), went vintage shopping in Iowa City, saw Moonrise Kingdom and crafted at Urban Outfitters in Omaha, raced go-karts in Boulder, made banners in a sculpture park in Salt Lake City, I was sick in Boise, made crowns in Seattle, got Voodoo Doughnuts in Portland, got ice cream in Eureka, got ice cream in San Francisco, hung out at the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, and created an installation in Los Angeles, where we held a week of events.

These diaries on Rookie and tidbits on the Rookie tumblr might begin to give you an idea of how amazing it all was.

I realized recently that most of my memories are of things that never happened -- I rarely get nostalgic for actual events, just for book illustrations or scenes from movies or fantasies or unmet expectations. This summer created the kind of moments that I always thought would've only existed in my memory as fantasies. But they were real life! And they were shared with people who really wanted to be there! It's all too much for me to wrap my brain around, frankly. Last summer was when I really started transforming my room into my own world, and it became the school year's setting for feeling really happy and really sad and everything in between. Last summer I also started working on Rookie, and it became the school year's setting for a bunch of us for dealing with feeling really happy and really sad and everything in between. The installation in LA, Strange Magic, was basically a mutant teenage bedroom/gigantic shrine, with photography from The Ardorous curated by Petra on the walls, and teen bedroom arrangements by both of us everywhere else. The whole thing -- creating it, dismantling it, and all the events -- was heinously and overwhelmingly emotional in a way only silly teenagers crave and thrive off of. I'd shipped a huge box of stuff from my own room to the space for us to use, and we asked girls who came to our meet-ups to bring souvenirs from their own sanctuaries as well, and it was such a perfect manifestation of everything that's shaped how I see things these past few years that I feel like there's nothing else I can do to honor them all. Like it's time for me to get really into sports and black clothes and never watch The Virgin Suicides again. We ended up shipping home FIVE BOXES of everything accumulated, and I think I just need to put it all in a time capsule. Then I will simply lie on a mattress on my floor with nothing on my walls but a Pulp Fiction poster as a reminder to just be Mia Wallace. Then my parents will suspect I have turned to drugs, and then I will probably once again go back to all that Strange Magic stuff eventually. You can see photos of the installation here, and photos of our last event -- a prom -- here.

Rookie Yearbook One is officially out, available on Rookie, Amazon, at Barnes & Noble, and at various independent book and zine stores. Because it's a more unique situation than if I had just written a book, this is how it worked: I send the moodboards/theme/musings about the theme to our contributors for every month of the website, Anaheed and I choose from our contributors' resulting pitches, Anaheed and Phoebe edit everything and I put together the photo albums, I sometimes have a couple notes on written pieces. For Yearbook, Anaheed and I narrowed down the pieces from the site that would go in, I gave initial direction and feedback on how every spread should look, every photo story edit, every title font, every border, every illustration placement, I scanned my doodles and fabrics and handwriting for decoration, etc. Sonja decorated most spreads with her beautiful collage and illustration, and Tracy from D&Q designed it. I knew we couldn't just transfer all this content you can get for free online in a simple, minimalist layout, plus I get too excited about the look of each monthly theme, so this book was obsessively art directed with lots of love. I don't think I've slept since Rookie started last September, and I couldn't be happier. Not sarcasm!

Then I went on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon to talk about it, and to teach him how to bitchface (and got to wear a lovely dress by my pal Rachel Antonoff, which had me feelin' like I could lead a ladies lunch seminar on DRESSING FOR CONFIDENCE):


I am also on the August/September cover of one of my favorite magazines, Bust, which you can get here. Support them! They rule! Anaheed did the interview, and Laia styled the shoot, and I just think often about how grateful I am that my favorite people are also the people I work with.


I suppose that's it for now? Life is very strange and very funny and I am very, very, very lucky that I get to do something I love and that you pay even a smidgen of attention to it, so thank you, times a lot, times a bunch.

 *We = me, my dad (our unofficial business advisor), managing editor Lauren, and editorial director Anaheed.
279 comments

my united states of whatever

Petra visited during spring break a few months ago to take these photos for Oyster and we were way in our own world and it was so pretty and kind of like Heavenly Creatures without the murder and stuff. You can see the spread here, where I also wrote a little bit, but these are my favorites, and I happen to be looking down in almost all of them! It was just really satisfying to make a thing with someone whose brain is similar when it comes to colors/the various subcategories of suburban homes' doors' windows/points of inspiration/etc. and feel slightly less crazy for being obsessive over all those details. In general, I guess, it can be isolating to realize your world is very different from that around you and it's easy to decide whenever there's some conflict that it's because you yourself are too strange and your point-of-view is too twisted, but it makes it all the more comforting and exciting to find someone who kind of feels or sees the way you do in some way or another. Man, whoever invented friendship was really smart.
And, as it goes without saying, Petra is ridiculously talented and makes everything look 2903x prettier. Normally I don't post press stuff on here (especially since I rarely post here at all anymore) but I feel that I can take credit for more than just standing there this time and I am psyched at how it turned out.
Also, HAPPY ROAD TRIP KICK-OFF! If you don't know what I'm talking about, read this, and then look at this!
(Here's the poster for it. Also of me by Petra from when she visited. It felt a little weird making it MY FACE but it's blurry and sunsetty and American and a pretty photo so shrug.)
394 comments

she had to get out

These are some photos I took a while ago for MAC's MacZine that just came out, so here I am now, posting them, online, on the internet, on my weblog!!!!! The theme of the issue was "Wanderlust," so I did a Los Angeles-inspired moodboard and outfit, which is not surprising to readers of this blog. (This is also basically the outfit form of next month's Rookie theme!)
Weetzie Bat, postcards from a Peter Max paper airplane book, Joan Didion, Elle Fanning in Rodarte in A Magazine Curated by Rodarte, postcards and photos from an antique store I went to in Pasadena with Autumn and Arrow, a tapestry my mom made a long time ago, daisies from the craft store, and Joni Mitchell's Song to a Seagull, which ends with my favorite Joni song, "Cactus Tree."
My top is vintage, my eyelet skirt is from the dress-up box my sisters and I used when we were little, my platforms are by D&G, my necklace was a gift from Chris Habana, and I made both my crowns from craft store flowers and joke shop houses.
Every time we visit I'm particularly delighted by all of LA's pastel houses and surrounding floral life.
I added the necklace for the spooky side of LA and Hollywood Babylon-type stuff, and for the weird psychics that are everywhere and other mystical things Weetzie Bat is obsessed with. I just like that something so sunny and colorful with pastel houses and flowers everywhere can also be so dark and David Lynch-y. But I should probably stop talking about it before it becomes too obvious that I'm trying to justify to myself that time that I murdered a person wait what?

IN OTHER NEWS, I saw Moonrise Kingdom yesterday thanks to a screening set up by their PR for me and my friends, and it was EVERYTHING I'D HOPED IT WOULD BE AND MORE. During the school year I usually avoid watching movies that I know will make me that emotional and inspired because I'm left with all this energy that school doesn't allow for and then it has nowhere to go, but it's almost SUMMER, so soon I get to run away and read fantasy novels and play records as much as I want! (People rolling their eyes right now might like to know that I thought the movie did a good job of not being too self-indulgent on the montage-of-cute-people-doing-cute-activities part. Just enough for me to be like, "Oh Wes, that is so you! Typical Wes! Wes, you aesthetically-defined bitch! =P I heart u so effing much!!!!" before complimenting him on his shoes and throwing my yogurt spoon in the air, but not so much that it stops actually helping the story move along. Also the main kids were so absolutely perfect, and too witty and dark and confused to be cutesy, too. The other kids were also absolutely perfect. So were the grown-ups. Oh my god it was all so good. I may have liked it more than Royal Tenenbaums, which is my favorite Wes Anderson? Oh my god I don't even know I just want to go back. I plan on seeing it at least four more times once it's out in theaters.)
241 comments

sixteen and spring

Oy vey, I've given up on collecting all the images/playlists/collages/stickers/diary entries/etc. necessary for my usual all-encompassing VIBES posts. The task has suddenly become really daunting! And tedious! And a blog is probably not the best format for being retrospective and examining all the music/movies/outfits/etc. I was into at a certain time and looking at the colors and motifs and things they share and finding the conceptual parallel. Rookie's monthly themes are a good place for that, on a less personal level, and my tangible diaries have been good for that, but they don't want to be shared. Also, the herds of sheep I've enslaved to form tiny colonies, each one themed according to a certain vibe. That's been a great outlet for this kind of obsessive organization, too.
But I still like having this outlet, and so, my spring so far:
Claire and two friends both named Alex and me performed at V-Day, a good, loud celebration of vaginas. Autumn took those photos. The last one is me in the last hour of my 16th birthday a couple weekends ago. I am wearing my friend's sweater, a skirt I got to keep from the Wren shoot, and a jacket gifted to me by Risto.
A car Petra and I found, a sundae Grace and I shared, a crown of real roses that Ella gave me for my birthday, and the view from my angst-gazing/Say Anything-worthy window.
Apple blossoms I put in shampoo bottles from the Chelsea Hotel, where most of the initial Rookie meetings between Anaheed and me took place last summer.

(Vintage collared shirt, tye dye top gifted by Proenza Schouler, necklace gifted by Pamela Love)
These photos are by Lauren Dukoff, styled by Ashley Furnival for Vogue Nippon. We shot in January, but they fit in so much with what I've been feeling for spring -- the '50s/'60s jumble, the beehive, applying the bright, pink/green/orange/sky blue colors I normally associate with Los Angeles (see: these posts) to '50s shapes I normally associate with being home in a suburb (see: fall vibes). I was really lucky to get to work with friends who understand my loyalty to my personal style (see: inconvenient pickiness over VIBES and COLORS and HOW THEY FIT PERFECTLY IN REFERENCE TO ALL OF THE THINGS THAT I LIKE) and wanted to create looks we would all love. That last picture is of Ashley and me, and it's so dusty 'cause it's been on my shelf.
Petra and her boyfriend visited during my spring break and we basically lived in a bubble of our own vibes and references and color associations for days in a row and it was MAGICAL. Like Heavenly Creatures, only instead of writing and molding intricately designed fairytales, we just tried to wear relatively nice things while watching Dazed and Confused and found ways to call junk foods aesthetically pleasing.
Hangouttimez, and my room's constant state for the past couple months.
Claire and I saw Hunx and his Punx and it was many many kinds of amazing. Our underagedness got us seated at a counter behind the bar and it was actually really nice because we had room to dance and were elevated so we could see and people-watch. I wore my Twin Peaks best friend/rosary necklace and kept my Hunx comb in my sock like a switchblade and Claire's skirt looked like the red room floor in TP. Hunx and all of his punx were so NICE and ALIVE and then when we went home and watched Community we kept pausing it to be like, "Wait, THAT SHOW WAS SO GOOD."

Here I am attempting to channel Wanda Woodward with a pout-bitchface hybrid. My coat is also from the Wren shoot and Rachel Antonoff gave me the spiffy saddle shoes and my top is vintage and my hand-me-downed pants are made of lace and I think it's like the one time I've ever worn pants other than when I had a bad week where I wore jeans every day.
Olivia with her talented tendencies took these when she visited and we saw Amish people at Ed Debevic's and they wore the paper waiter hats on top of their own and that was pretty great.
Drinks at the bowling alley, Petra's situation, a day I spent in the treehouse reading Chris Ware comics and listening to Fleetwood Mac and sleeping, and FRIES.
For my birthday I had friends over for dancing and hugging and waffles made out of cake batter. The waffles were a huge hit, and I highly recommend the recipe for your next social function, or just your next meal, or every meal ever. Grace and I decorated our dining room like the high school movie prom of my teen dreamz, with bubblegum colors like this shoot Petra did for Rookie and banners that said SWEET 16 (not pictured) and POOP (definitely pictured). I wore that Wren skirt again 'cause I guess it's perfect for everything, and a baby blue embroidered top, and sandals I got at a vintage fair. I was prepared to be all mopey and Samantha Baker about it just in case it was underwhelming, but it was honestly the bestest day of my life? A song like "Blister in the Sun" kind of reaches a new level when a bunch of people who are used to dancing to it alone all go at it together. Meagan is responsible for these lovely photos. Also not pictured: the love notes "Justin Bieber" (Grace and I -- don't tell anyone!!!!!!!!) left sitting around.
217 comments
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)