Beauty of a Day

Beauty of a day here in Montreal - cold and snowy but sunny enough that I could cozy up in our front windows for hours to read the book I’m going to be reviewing for the Spring issue of Worn. I slog away with these fashion books happily - for one, I may be the least fashiony person on the Worn team.. unless you don’t count punk as fashion, but I think I do. They at least seem to put more conscious thought into dress then I do, and to have an idea of the history they reference with their sartorial choices. I am more likely to be seen in a chaos of tshirts and layers of my own half-assed-hand-making then in something that resembles a coherent outfit. In part, I can’t be bothered; but also I like to keep folks guessing. It’s more fun showing up in a party in a vintage gold dress if your friends would never have predicted it, trust me. So I pour over the fashion books to educate myself on the work I do with Worn, and to balance out all my years of geeky software reading from the masters thesis with a little more stylin savvy.

Anyway, I cozied up today, hustling toward tommorrow’s deadline. Maryanna Hardy dropped by in the afternoon with Iris (designer behind the line Haiku, which I think they’ll be getting together to get up on Indyish soon.) They swung in to grab my camera, then headed back out to shoot shots of street style for the back page of Worn. We spoke for two seconds and it was lovely, we agreed, that just at that moment it felt like everyone we knew was tangled up the big projects that are afoot - especially the new issue of Worn, but also The Assembly, which has garnered some really exciting attention lately from artists who’ve signed up, and from others; for example, the Celtx developers who noticed the project and mentionned to Tessa they might be able to put together some fun swag for participants. Yay, we love swag!

Iris and Maryanna and I talked about the fun art in the off’ing - a dress and photo project for Worn that Iris is designing a piece for; a dance, fashion collaboration for a POP show at the Drake; their recent weekend of photo play in the country with sparklers… and Maryanna brought me a gorgeous screen printed poster from the Secret Fire Escape show at the My Hero Gallery! (that’s as much of it as i could scan in that picture there). Saying she’d thought of our house, and how we have others up in on the same paper and how she’d thought it would match. And it does of course, perfectly, and the blue in it is my favorite colour. Maryanna, by the way, aside from being nice in these surprise gift kind of ways, is now officially the Arts Community Developer for Indyish.

Jay got a great film job in the North on and off for the next months and decided it would take too much of his time for him to be officially the go to guy for arts community stuff on the site- though he will be heading up some future Indyish film and music video projects, and taking part, I think, in the Assembly. Our Indyish staff is organic and changing - organizations usually are, and volunteer ones all the more so, and volunteer arts ones perhaps the most. It’s part of the fun, and also the constant shake up is good for keeping us on our toes.

Tonight, soon, Elran and I will head over to Dan and Dayna’s new place to have a little chili and do some house warming and if we’re lucky there will be many music friends with their guitars. So today, officially, I start to have a feeling of being a part of an arts community here that’s similar to the feeling I had during those summers when I lived in Kensington market in Toronto with Serah-Marie, long before she decided to found Worn fashion journal. Kensington at that time had an irresistible electricity- I’d walk out of the house in the morning in the big, yellow cotton pants that Courage My Love had donated as costume piece to the play I was in town for and in some ratty tank top, and get swept up into a whole day of epic travels, hikes to theatres or free shows, or rooftops for watching parades. On quiet days, you’d sit at one of the two neighborhood cafe’s as a steady stream of friends of all ages joined you and left, or didn’t; sometimes just settling in their with you, making a crowd that build with the day, turning into back yard fire pits and barbeques. These days I’m less likely to have to have time for the full cafe day, but for me, it was the fact of optimistic making, researching, craft all around that was the most galvanizing and lovable. Though there have always been other things I’ve always loved more about Montreal, I haven’t quiet felt that particular relentless collective art vibe that so defined my early adult experiences of Toronto… but these days, something chemical is happening here and it feels wholly La Belle Province unique and yet, in all kinds of good ways, totally familiar. Beauty day.