My friend packed up her apartment and called me up.  Do you need napkins?  Dish towels?  Tea?  Bungee cords?  Worchestire sauce?  A can opener?  Well, sure.  I know that the city recycles itself in a lot of ways, and I can't imagine every bag gets opened up and inspected for useful/intact things.  I couldn't carry everything, and it pained me to see perfectly good things go in the trash...to think, this happens every day!  (But don't call me up if you're moving to LA/London/Toronto - my little place can't take too much more...)

From the Globesity Festival website:  

This is an Announcement of a Showdown
. . . From the Personal to the Global . . .

GLOBESITY is the over consumption of all natural elements that create and sustain life on Earth – some of the most vital and visible being water, minerals, oil, and FOOD. Our approach to food and sustenance is destroying our personal and social health. Our Earth and our Bodies cannot sustain the beastly grind of consumption. This beast is Globesity. It has been named. Now is the hour of confrontation.

The Globesity Festival is FREE to Everyone.

COME JOIN US for a Week of discussions, solutions, community building and PERFORMANCE.

---

I'm sure I wouldn't agree with all of the opinions expressed by the artists and thinkers presenting this week, and I'll bet they're putting some thought-provoking stuff out there.  I'll be out of town: somebody go to the Thursday night presentation "Eating Good in the Hood," a topic I want to look into in the coming weeks.   Click here for the full schedule.

I went back to the gallery three times before I actually bought it.  I've been wearing it as a uniform, every day, which is having powerful effects.  I'm waffling about the office: I've worn it all day there though I haven't been quite brave enough to wear it every single day - my boss even gave me her blessing.  I've been telling myself I need a little separation between work and not-work and the clothes that I wear there (which are so limited they are like a uniform, too) help me do that.  Any energy I spend thinking about other clothes - dance clothes, bike-riding clothes, which of the work uniforms to wear - feels like a complete waste.

I've failed Fix in that I bought something new, something that I charged to my credit card - which I haven't done all year.   At the same time, Fix is about exposing the connections between buyer and seller, getting out of the conventional mode of commercial exchange, and challenging expectations about consumption.  This purchase reiterates all of the nasty things of shopping with some important differences: with a little effort, I can email the artist who made the dress and talk about the process; the gallery that sold it and earned a commission is part of the art market but not part of the fast fashion industry, trying to convince everyone that they need this now but not next week; and, the amount I spent on this little item and the ideology behind it ensures that it won't go into the landfill after a couple of wears.  Let's say I bought a really expensive prototype; I'll make the next one.

I'll leave you with the press release for the smockshop show, which helped convince me that Andrea Zittel wasn't kidding herself about the smocks.  She knows that they're fashion; she's trying to get a little art in there too.   

I broke down and bought some deodorant.  I've got a trip coming up in which I'll be sharing pretty close quarters - I don't think this particular traveling partner will appreciate even a little bit of natural fragrance.  And packing baking soda seems like asking for disaster.  I must have looked pretty funny, spending 30 minutes or so in the deodorant aisle at Whole Foods scrutinizing the evils: packaging, aluminum, icky fake smells.  I settled on some Kiss My Face "Liquid Rock" (who knows what that means), only because I've liked their products in the past.

On an even more personal note, it's time to order The Keeper, an enviro-alternative to tampons.  My friend Jenna mentioned it early in the Fix experiment, and I've been following the Crunchy Chicken blogger's adventures with this particular option.  You can read about them here.  I'll spare you the gory details, but maybe I'll offer a thumbs-up or thumbs-down after a couple of months.   

I've got a new prescription for reading glasses.  If I buy them this week, I can get some cute frames for really cheap (a sale); if I wait, I can still buy different ones, maybe better, for a good deal at the eye doctor's office.  The new prescription is slightly weaker than the last one - filled in 2000 I think - which was weaker than the one before that.  The doctor said I could continue to wear my old ones, but... (of course she's supposed to sell glasses too).  I can put it off until January but maybe the glasses at the doctor's office aren't as good as the sale ones!  And what if the doctor's office changes their inventory and the ones we picked out are no longer available!

Am I so desperate for new things that I'm trying to justify the purchase of glasses that I don't actually need?  (Need taken in a real-life need sort of way.) I think I'm coming up against something big here on material items...The food thing hit about 4 or 5 months in, and I've had creeping moments of wanting to buy things here and there, but now it's really bad.  Becoming more conscious about the things I desire, buy, consume, and throw away is transitioning to me becoming obsessed.  I'm wasting a stupid amount of energy on these decisions: first about the decision to buy or not to buy, and then trying to analyze the tricks I'm playing on myself and psychologize what my desires might mean.  Maybe it's just better to buy the damn things and get it over with!

Of course I could be trying to justify the failures of my experiment and its ideology. 

a dress.  This is so problematic in so many ways.  With all my talk about "making do and mending" and the absurd expectations placed on us by the fashion and beauty industries, I can't believe I've allocated any brain space on the beautiful item.  Most breathtaking is the fact that the dress costs $340.  I've never spent that much on any piece of clothing, shoes and coats included.  And still I've been trying to arrange and re-arrange the various extra little amounts and overtime I've earned in the last couple of months to rationalize the price tag.  Then there's the "new" thing: this particular dress can be justified by Fix rules - more on that in a sec - but the fact remains that buying it would give me the delicious rush of bringing home a gorgeous new thing.

A little more about the dress: it's part of a project by artist Andrea Zittel, a big hero of mine.  I saw it at a Chelsea gallery last Thursday, and it set in motion a whole chain of ideas that both totally violate Fix and are oddly in line with it.  I told myself I was going to look at art and I knew in advance that the dresses were going to cost $250-350 -- out of the question.   According to the smockshop site:

"A smock is a simple double wraparound garment designed by Andrea Zittel. These versatile garments are both attractive and utilitarian - each garment is one of a kind, and is sewn by an artist who reinterprets the original design based on their individual skill sets, tastes and interests.

The smockshop generates income for artists who’s work is either non-commercial, or not yet self sustaining."

 After pathetic lingering and admiring, I decided that just trying one on wouldn't hurt, and I chose an orange canvas utilitarian model with an unfinished neckline and a navy cotton dressy one by a different artist with a hot pink lining and contrasting embroidery.  While the orange one was very punk rock and looked good, it was the embroidered one that chose me.  The smocks are amazing on - they have a great line that I imagine would flatter anyone; the minimalist yet feminine aesthetic feels exactly my style.  Of course I love the idea of wearing the same thing every day, I practically do that anyway.  Andrea Zittel has been exploring the concept of the uniform for years, with criticisms (implicit and explicit) similar to mine about fashion and expectations; all of her work, the uniforms included, is concerned with utility/functionality and explores the surprising connections between design and the patterns and requirements of a person living in space.

As I tore myself from that beautiful dress, I couldn't help but think,  "I guess I'm not an emerging enough artist to get an Andrea Zittel pattern..." Does that mean I'm such an emerging artist that I'd consider scraping all my money together to buy one?  Or maybe I'm just a groupie...or a latent fashionista...

I find it troubling that the smocks are a commercial enterprise - of course an artist has to make her money, and she's giving "most of the profits" (according to the gallerist) to the emerging artists.  At the same time, I'm not sure many, if any, of buyers are going to: a. wear the smocks as uniforms, i.e.: every single day, for every purpose; or, b. inquire into the challenges these smocks present to the fashion and art industries, as part of Andrea Zittel's body of work.  My guess is that the people who can afford the price tag also buy lots of other beautiful clothes and want to wear those, too.  And if they're spending all that money on fabulous clothes, they're probably not very critical of fashion.  As an art object, the dress is unbelievably cheap - but it wasn't exactly made by Andrea Zittel; if it achieves its art-object function in performance, as a uniform, it is clearly not an investment as other art objects might be - it will wear out very soon.  Maybe I'm just bitter because I can't really afford it and I'm doing this project where I don't buy anything new...

As a Fix transgression, the smock might be justified as buying an experience (something I'd commit to wearing all the time not at work or cleaning or dancing), a one-of-a-kind handmade art object (still a thing, though!), or as a quasi-donation to an emerging artist (but the gallery - and Andrea, I imagine - will still get their percentages).  On the other hand, I've seen the pattern, and it isn't complicated.  It would take me a couple of tries on less-nice fabric to get to a perfect shape and technique; I even know how to do the hand-stitched neck and embroidery.  I would have to clear the space in my office for a borrowed sewing machine, and get that machine fixed.   To be quite honest, these details could potentially take me months, and by that time, this bee in my bonnet might be gone...

Cool things going on this weekend in New York City.  Check out these lectures about sustainable/green building through Open House New York.