8 CLOTHING: Fashions by Andrea Langlais

by Ted Langlais

One of the things that most people who grow up in large families are familiar with is the fight over the television set. I was always a Star Trek and Science Fiction geek, taking in as many hours of fantasy television as I could get my hands on. The summers when I came home from university I would plomp myself down on the couch every evening to catch up on all the hours I had missed, not being able to afford cable television on my student allowance. I admit that I’m pretty selfish when it comes to hogging the remote control. But my sister always did a pretty good job of persuading me to change the channel.

She has always been obsessed with fashion programs. Back in those days, before the fashion network came along and provided twenty four hour a day clothing coverage, watching these programs, for my sister, was kind of like me trying to watch Friday night videos before Much Music became a staple of the Canadian airwaves. And, like my mother six years earlier, I learned that I was able to sit and endure the fashion program for a half hour. Of course, Canadian television has never been as conservative as the United States; if Janet Jackson had performed at the Grey Cup half-time show, her breast might have made headlines for about a day and a half afterward, and that’s only if her publicist was good enough. The occasional nipple slip which invariably occurred on my sister’s fashion television made the half hour worth while.

My sister, on the other hand, actually watched these programs for the clothes. Ever since she can remember she’s been interested in fashion design; it has been the only thing she has ever wanted to do. Following her first year of university, she moved to Toronto to study fashion, and a few years after graduating moved to New York where she works for a company in the fashion and design industry. More recently she has become the designer of her own label: 8 CLOTHING.

Last fall she released her first line, including a jacket inspired by traditional military designs of the previous century. It was a classy dark grey jacket, trimmed with red. The colors reflected those of our old High School, a fitting tribute to the institution which offered her her first taste of serious art lessons. The jacket and the other items from this clothing line were available at Gallery Vercon in the East Village.

This March, Andrea’s first spring line will be released. It consists of classy, feminine clothes made from fine silk fabric with a layer of lace and sporting nicely understated floral patterns. The clothes give the impression of lingerie, a naughty but elegant style that looks both sexy and respectable.

“My ideas for designing for spring and fall are so completely different,” says Andrea, “for spring seasons, I want to do feminine and pretty clothes, and for fall seasons, I want to do more androgynous type clothing. At least for the first few seasons, but who knows where it will evolve to in the future.”

In the words of Andrea Langlais, 8 CLOTHING produces “ultra feminine, classically hip, and high quality” fashions for the 20-40 year old urban woman.

Andrea is the classic example of the individual relying on pure talent and determination in the pursuit of her dream. She had no relatives and few connections in New York when she first moved there. She currently works as a textile designer in the fashion district during the day and devotes the evenings and weekends to 8 CLOTHING. Even though 8 CLOTHIING is a small company just starting out, Andrea has faith in its potential and in the quality and appeal of her designs.

I slipped into the New York industry by being transferred from Canada. You almost always need a degree in fashion and then hopefully you can get lucky by getting a job in the field. I had a teacher in school give me the best advice...."Do not take a job outside of the field once you graduate, because it will make getting into the industry almost impossible". There are few jobs opening up and a lot of people with fashion degrees.

There is currently no word as to where 8 CLOTHING’S spring line will be available, but a website and web store are in the development stage. In the meantime, Andrea Langlais can be reached through ScribeCentral.com if anyone is interested in contacting her directly about purchasing her clothing.

Ted Langlais writes and teaches in Medellín, Colombia along with a few of the other guys at ScribeCentral.com. Ted admits his bias when talking about his sisters work, but as he says, "I admire Andrea's work in spite of the fact that she is my sister, not because of it."

Bullfighting Ernest Hemingway

by The "EX" Patriot

Like many married couples, my wife and I like to take a break from the city once in a while. We’ll pack a couple of night bags, hers inevitably much larger than mine and hop in the car. More often than not, these weekend getaways are spent in the pueblo of El Retiro, a little mountain town about an hour outside of Medellín. The air is cool and fresh, like early autumn in my native Canada and the faint scent of cut wood wafts out from the doorways of the carpentry shops.

We’ve gone their often enough that we’ve developed our little traditions and rituals, one of my favourites being drinking beer and aguadiente in this little cantina off the main square. It is run by this peasant woman whom I would guess to be in her mid forties and the music played form bootlegged and home burned CD compilations is a mix of rock tunes and traditional Colombian arrangements.

The walls sport posters advertising Pilsen, a local beer. Each ad comes complete with a gorgeous model in a bikini. The rest of the wall space is papered with bullfighting placards from years gone by. My wife doesn’t really like the beer ads very much, and objects if I spend too much time looking at them, so I normally content myself with analysing the bullfighting placards. They remind me of movie posters, the matadors depicted in paintings, like old caricatures of Bogie or Brando, and each one locked eternally in a moment of mental and physical struggle. Each matador is stern and straight, holding himself with dignity and grace, while the bulls are drawn as savage and growling, yet noble creatures. The muscles and hair on their backs ripple in anticipation of the upcoming struggle. The names of the matadors are even painted in bold letters like the cast of a movie. The star’s name is printed in letters larger and bolder than the rest. This is the man you’ll pay to see, they say.

These placards possess a sense of romance and manliness, recalling the novels of Hemingway and the stories of Kerouac, stories that had been my mental escape when I was young and miserable, stories that still live in my fantasies.

I can’t remember when I first learned of the concept of bullfighting, but I do remember my first encounters with the passages from these works of fiction. I first read Hemingway when I was twenty, during my second vacation from university. I was working at an electric power generating station that summer and was driven to work each morning by one of the regular employees who lived nearby. Each morning, I’d sit on a bench in the parking lot of the store where he met me, reading The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls, or one of three or four other novels that I read during that period. Jack Kerouac, I began shortly afterward, inspired by a biography that I friend had loaned me. To this day, the works of these two men remain close to my heart, as does the depictions of bullfighting found within their pages.

Hemingway considered himself an “aficionado” of the sport. The Sun Also Rises deals with the festive spirit of Pamplona and the finesse of bullfighting, its sense of tradition, and its place within the hearts of the people of Spain. Yes, there is the famous scene where it briefly focuses on a man, gored during the running of the bulls, but in true Hemingway fashion, its primary goal glorify the contest and hold it up as something to be cherished and admired.

Kerouac too, dealt with bullfighting in his short story collection, Lonesome Traveller. In the final story, the traveller makes his way to Mexico City where he takes in an afternoon of bullfighting. It emphasizes the feelings of the narrator, his anticipation, disappointment, and horror. He builds up the greatness and beauty of the events in his mind prior to witnessing the fight, creating expectations so vivid that the reality could never hope to live to. The bullfighting story ends with the sickness and horror he felt, having witnessed the dire spectacle.

One day this past February, my third in Medellín, I finally worked up the nerve to check out the bullfights for myself.

It was a perfect afternoon for a little blood and gore. When my wife and I left our apartment for the bullfight, there were a few clouds hanging over the mountains on the outskirts of the city but overhead the sun was shining, warm and comforting. We joined a group of about ten other gringos; my wife and the woman from school who arranged this annual outing for expatriate teachers were the only Colombians in the crowd. When we arrived at the newly renovated stadium, there was still an hour before the fight was scheduled to begin but already the Plaza de Toros was filled with people drinking aguadiente and beer purchased from the stands outside. Most of the women were dressed in the low rider jeans and shirts that exposed their midriffs. The men were wearing jeans and shirts unbuttoned sufficiently to expose their tanned chests. Nearly everyone was wearing white vaquero hats, and filled with anticipation of an afternoon of showmanship.

Our seats were in the new stands that had been built just this past year on top of the older section of the stadium. When we arrived three inflated advertisements, for cigarettes, aquadiente, and the local internet company occupied the ring in the centre of the arena.

One of the teachers passed me the bota. I held the skin up to my mouth; the plastic spout aimed at my throat and squeezed the sweet, red liquor into my mouth—the first attempt left a red streak of warm wetness on my shirt. My wife wiped the wine that had dripped down my chin. It looked a little like blood on her fingers tips.

We were sitting so high up that even when blood was streaming down the backs of the bulls, it simply didn’t seem real. Most of the bulls were killed easily and cleanly, except for the second fight. The matador misplaced his sword, spearing the animal off to one side so the metal did not pierce any major organs. The sword was retrieved from the animal and the matador tried again, and again. Each time the metal hit bone, scrapping another wound in the bull’s hide. Finally, the weakened animal collapsed from loss of blood, and in minutes, strapped to the chariot that dragged it from the ring.

The local Colombian, matador, Cesar Rincon, had the first and fourth fights, and although competent and clean with his two kills, the bulls just had no spark in them. “Your going to kill us, anyway,” they seemed to say, “so why should we bother playing your silly game.” Try as he might, he could just not get them to put on much of a show. If he hadn’t been the local hero, he certainly would not have received the warm applause that the crowd offered him.

The matador of the afternoon was named, Victor Puentes I believe. (To be honest, I didn’t get a program, and was not even thinking about writing this article, so I didn’t bother to learn it.) His fights and his style played to the crowd. As the bull ran around the ring, the matador turned his back to the animal, dancing and taunting the creature, showing the crowd which of the two competitors was truly in charge. He was the only matador who truly demonstrated a touch of the beauty and the grace that Hemingway wrote about--drawing the bull toward him, stepping off to one side at the last minute, pirouetting to bring the bull back so that it ran circles around the master of the ring. As he played this dance, the crowd shouted “Ole” with every charge of the bull and music blared over the speakers, prodding the spectators and the matador to wring every drop of excitement and enthusiasm from the fight.

And it was a thrill.

I sat in the stands as I sit at a baseball game, absorbing every detail, every charge and step made in the ring. It was during this fight that I finally caught a glimpse of the coup de grace, the plunging of the sword into the flesh of the bull. I discovered in the first two fights, that this happens so fast, if you blink you miss it. Then, all you have left to watch is the bull slowing down, blinded by pain, until its feet gives out and it falls to the dirt, dying. It took two fights for me to learn what to look for so that I was paying attention when the metal was plunged into the animal’s hide.

Despite the excitement and emotion of the day’s events, there was still a feeling of disappointment I could not seem to shake. I felt the same sensation when I attended a Pink Floyd concert about ten years ago. The show was breath taking, if more than a little reminiscent of their previous tour and the songs and the performances outstanding. Yet there was still a problem, this nagging feeling I couldn’t place. It wasn’t that the band was bad by any means, but there was still something just a little off about it; Roger Moore wasn’t there, David Gilmore was a little too old; the songs a little too worn. I left with a strange sensation that I had seen this wonderful band about fifteen years too late, past its prime. I longed for my own personal Time Machine so I could travel back to the glory days and see them when they should have been seen.

This is how I felt as I watched the matadors lead the bulls to their ultimate demise. The wine skin had a plastic top. There were advertisements all around the ring. The music blaring through the PA system was tinny and obviously a recording. And many of the people were chatting on cell phones as they watched the performance. I wondered what Hemingway or even Kerouac would have thought of it.

But, ultimately, I left the Plaza de Toros that evening with the darkness growing full around me, lost in thoughts and memories and a sense of fulfillment that I had finally seen an afternoon of bullfighting. Yes, there is a thrill, an excitement to the sport similar to that of watching a horror movie and I found myself wondering if I would want to go back again next year, or even the next week.

Check out the photo album.

Dirty Limerick: A Review of Angela's Ashes

by Theenglish

Of the true Irish I have met in my life, some have been adamant supporters of the IRA while others have only desired an end to their country’s hostilities. Some have taken a serious interest in and somewhat racist attitude toward the religious and political conflicts pervading Northern Ireland, while others done their best to put those types of conflicts behind them. Of all the Irish I have known, there has been a passion and an intense, patriotic dedication to their stories, their music, and their Guinness.

And this is what the memoir of Angela’s Ashes is truly about.

Many have harped about its portrayal of poverty and marvelled at the lack of resent expressed by author, Frank McCourt. His portrayal at his families intense poverty, only augmented by his father’s addiction to alcohol is a frightful experience. The ignorance of his father’s attitudes about work and money was directly responsible for the deaths of several siblings, yet McCourt still finds moments to show us the warmth and tenderness of the father figure in the story.

His old man is responsible for introducing young Frankie to the folkloric traditions of the Irish people, and the beauty of their stories. It is these stories that stick out in the mind of the readers, sometimes moreso than our anger toward the drunken bastard squandering every last shilling the family has, forcing their mother into a life of begging and the family into a squalid home where the public lavatory for the entire lane is just off the kitchen. The house flies that the family picks from their soup were hanging out in the feces of dozens of people, only moments before. These flies were most likely responsible for the bout of typhoid and conjunctivitis young Frankie goes through while living in this house. If it wasn’t for being saved by nuns and government sponsored medicine at the last minute, he wouldn’t have survived to write the memoir.

The saving grace of his young life is introduced to him through his fathers stories of Cuchulain and, later, an old man’s love of Jonathan Swift. This man pays young Frankie to read to him even though he has Swift’s work memorized. Later, while in the hospital, recovering from typhoid, young McCourt learns the beauty of Shakespeare, even though he doesn’t understand what the words actually mean. He also gets his first taste of poetry from a young girl dying from diphtheria who introduces him to The Highwayman, much to the dismay of the nuns. The typhoid is also directly responsible for McCourt’s first reward in the field of creative literary endeavours as an essay he writes shortly after prevents him from being held back due to his long absence at school.

As surprising as it is that the narrator holds no resentment toward his father, it is even more surprising that he holds none against his mother. Even after leaving home late in the novel, at the young age of thirteen he still holds affection for her. This, even though the mother is nearly as awful as the father. As much as anything else, it is obvious that her nagging is at least partially responsible for his father’s drinking habit. And, later, when his mother moves back in to sponge off his one pound a week pay check. Through all of this, Frankie remains surprisingly resilient.

Despite the horrifying depiction of the squalor and poverty drenched streets of Limerick, the book shines in its humorous moments. Frankie’s First Communion is marred by his fear of confessing that he heard the word “piss” spoken by a neighbourhood boy. He is dragged back into the confessional only a few hours after receiving Communion because of vomiting it up in his grandmother’s yard. Another time he is embarrassed about being caught wearing his deceased grandmother’s dress to keep himself warm.

The writing itself, achieves truly poetic moments while remaining highly readable. McCourt seems to be a kindred spirit of Roddy Doyle, and many of the anecdotes will ring familiar to anyone who has read Paddy Clark! Ha! Ha! Ha! What it lacks however, is the ability to break free of the structure and rules of narration that McCourt has set for himself. It is narrated entirely in the voice of the child, relating in detail his emotional reactions to each of the events, but by the end of the story, we are left starving for perspective, for an adult’s reflection upon the child’s experience.

Please Mr. McCourt, we want to scream, unleash your vitriol, your invective toward your mother and your childhood, or your compassion and understanding if that’s the way you feel. How do events like this, a childhood lived the way you tell it, stain, or strengthen the psychology of the adult?

Obviously, he has done well for himself, having been a teacher in New York for thirty years. Was the novel written as a therapeutic endeavour, and to provide reflected insight would only destroy the intention of the telling? These are questions that remain hanging in the air, even after one has finished the final pages of Angela’s Ashes.

"Vote, F*cker" T-Shirt

The following is a press release from www.busproject.org in response to this article which was posted on the homepage March 3, 2004:

Vote, F*cker T-Shirt To Combat Urban Outfitters Anti-Voting Slogan

Urban Outfitters has started selling t-shirts with the slogan Voting is for old people, leading to numerous complaints by people concerned that the t-shirt simply reinforces the negative social trends of voter apathy and disengagement.

Rather than complain about it, young activists at the Portland, Oregon based Bus Project have unveiled a t-shirt that they promise is just as inappropriate, except that it encourages voting. The shirt has simple block letters spelling VOTE, F*CKER , with a red star in between the F and the C.

We have a t-shirt that is just as obnoxious, and nearly as ironic, but that does not discourage voting, commented Heather Kmetz, a lawyer and Co-Chair of the Oregon Bus Project.

The Project developed the VOTE, F*CKER slogan in 2002, following a conversation during which board members debated calling college students in the middle of the night, yelling Vote, F*cker before hanging up. The idea: people wouldn t like the call, but it just might make them vote

We generally focus on sweetness and light, explained Project Chair Jefferson Smith, but now, in light of the controversy surrounding Urban Outfitters, we think it s the right message at the right time. We d like Urban Outfitters to carry both shirts, and see which sells best. We could call it a shirt off. And it might get some people to pay attention and get involved.

Jennifer Yocom, Bus Project Director of Operations, explained that although the group was taking a lighthearted approach, the issue was quite serious. The Urban Outfitters anti-voting shirt appeals to a sort of anti-establishment market. You don t want people to protest the current power structure by deciding not to vote. You want them to protest by voting and helping to change things.

Other Board Members of the Bus Project denied any knowledge of the Vote, F*cker endeavor. Yes, I own one of the Vote, F*cker t-shirts. And yes, I purchased one for a friend. And yes, I was involved in the development of the slogan. But beyond that I have no knowledge or affiliation with any profanity or inappropriate activity, said board member Joe Baessler.

The Bus Project bought a very limited run of the shirts, and they have really caught on. In fact, they are probably the coolest thing in Oregon politics right now, and there s nothing cooler than Oregon politics.

Recent studies have shown that less than a third of young people vote, and only a tiny fraction volunteer for political candidates and causes. The Bus Project has a mission to engage, educate, elect and works to connect young people in positive political action. Their website is www.busproject.org. You can view and purchase the T-Shirt at www.votefcker.org.