Blazer: What do you think about Elvis Presley? This is a genuine question. To me, Elvis has always been this larger than life, picture on an American Icons poster (with Marilyn Monroe and Mickey Mouse), rock and roll hall of fame, bedazzled souvenir token. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to to get beyond the pompadoured gold lame baggage of Elvis to really hear his music[1] with anything like an objective ear. It’s all mythology and glitter. And it’s weird because I can get there with other bands. Like, I can listen to the Beatles, especially the early Beatles and still hear precocious teenage boys in Liverpool rushing home through the rain with r&b records under their school blazers. I can’t quite get to Tupelo, though, or even early Memphis. I can’t quite get a handle on Elvis Presley as human being. And it’s not for lack information. Mississippi is in my blood. So is Tennessee. I know what that landscape looks like, and how ironic it is that any place that noisy and green can feel so barren of better options. It’s a cliché, and not even a good one, to point out that there’s a reason why people sing the blues in the places where they do.
But the kitsch is built in now, isn’t it? I can’t do anything about that. I grew up in a generation, and specifically a subset of a generation, enamored of the kitsch, for all the ironically, unironic, semi-ironic reasons. By the time I made it to Graceland at fifteen, itself a semi-ironic detour on the way to New Orleans, on a trip engineered by a parent who was never an Elvis fan (but like many of his generation a huge fan of Paul Simon’s Graceland), I’d already invested considerable hours on both John Waters and the B-52s. I stocked up on bottles of Elvis Conditioning Shampoo in the shops across the street from the house because it was hilarious and pined over a clock with Elvis and Jesus airbrushed across its shiny, lacquered face. Because I was already collecting weird shit from vintage stores that I couldn’t figure out if I loved because it was so tacky or in spite of it.
After a while people started giving me weird Elvis shit, and I took it. Despite the fact that the Elvis I really love is not that Elvis and, in fact, not really an Elvis at all. I have a Velvet Elvis, by the way. I found him at a yard sale, literally for free because the woman selling had been given it as a White Elephant. Just take it. It’s hideous. He hung in my dining room for years, on opposite walls from a portrait of Henry the 8th, another larger than life, mostly-kitsch figure. What if ol’ Harry just been able to tour off “Greensleeves?” You figure that divorce Reformation beheading thing would have still happened?
My favorite Elvis song is his version of “Blue Moon.” And I’m pretty sure I only really feel that way because of, respectively, The Cowboy Junkies and “Mystery Train,” my favorite Jim Jarmusch movie and itself an extended rumination on Elvis and Memphis. Also it features the late Joe Strummer, another of my favorites, and no stranger to Elvis homages himself.
I guess it was inevitable, then, I end up with a gold lame blazer. This one has never quite fit precisely, but that doesn’t really matter because I’m ever going to wear it exactly straight. I bought off a clearance rack at a big box store so heavily discounted the stack of sale stickers on the price tags had taken on a fully-three-dimensional form.
Sweater: I’ve never really been a sweatshirt person. I have a few. I have a hoodie even, as improbable as that may seem at this point in my life. I don’t find them very soft. They don’t breathe well, When they get damp, they stay damp. There’s something about a fleece interior, after multiple washings, that starts to feel like crumbs in your sheets.
Instead, I have a lot of sweaters. This one is a low key favorite, both extremely soft (cashmere even) and also a coral-adjacent orange-y red (one of my all-time favorite colors. I believe this sweater was a Christmas present from a member of my family. I do not remember which member. So apologies to one and all of you and thank you. On the bonus, I love it very much. Though I always figure this sweater begs for better bangs than I’ll ever have in real life . Like true 1960s Francoise Hardy French girl bangs. Maybe I should start wearing wigs. How much would that freak people out?
Shoes: I may have actually bought these shoes the same day as I bought the blazer. They are almost a full size too big, deliberately because I thought that would make them more comfortable (a stockbroker friend of mine suggested going up a size on heels if you wanted to stand on them all day). This is mostly true, so long as you’re not doing too much walking, at which point you may walk right out of them and end up barefoot in a place you do not want to be barefoot.
Earrings: You know those shops that sell lot of whimsical doodads, fancy candles, expensive coffee mugs, and journals. There are at least three of them in downtown Durham. I love those stores for the same reason that I loved any and all gift shops as a child[2] . One of them is located beside my GP’s office and I usually find a reason to drop in if my doctor’s appointment does not involve a communicable disease. Last week’s physical (a contagion and mostly worry-free event) afforded me exactly this kind of opportunity.
Did I buy a journal? Yes. Did I also buy this elaborate pair of beaded earrings as an early birthday present to myself? Sure. I told the cashier it was my birthday, though then I was one week off. He said it was his birthday too and also Kurt Cobain’s and something about all of us being Pisces. I considered mentioning that, had Kurt[3] lived he would have been 57 years old, which is almost as wild as me being 48, and that cashier looked like he was hovering around 50 himself. What does our horoscope say about aging gracefully? I said I didn’t pay much attention to astrology, which is both true and sort of a lie, and listened to Hole all the way home.
Outfit: My parents came to town last weekend. I wore this to go meet them at The Fearrington House, where they’d checked into a room that looked so much like a staged corner in some historical landmark I had to double check and make sure the chair seat wasn’t roped off with a Please Do Not Sit in this Desk Chair( ca. 1782) or whatever. I came armed with cocktail peanuts, gin, and tonic—the traditional sustenance of my people—and we enjoyed a nice drink by the fire.
Blazer: Boden,` 2018
Sweater: Anthropologie, Christmas, 2021
Pants: Saint and Sofia, 2023
Earrings: Indio, Durham, 2024
Shoes: Franco Sarto, 2018
[1]I don’t think it’s an age/time thing exactly. Elvis is old to me, in the sense that even my parents were a bit young to have been Elvis fans but there’s a lot of music from the fifties–that early r&b/country/rock&roll scene, in particular—that I do connect to. I mean, I’ve never had that kind of problem with Eddie Cochran, or even, like, Johnny Cash. But there’s no getting around the paradigm-shaking superstardom of Elvis. I will admit to you that I have a similar problem with seeing Marilyn Monroe, as just an actor, for probably the same reason. I wonder people younger than I am maybe feel the same way about Michael Jackson, but his legacy is so complicated by scandal and allegations that I don’t know if it would be at all fair to make the comparison.
[2] The greatest of all gift shops was at the Trawler Restaurant in Mt Pleasant South Carolina, which despite it’s fishing-centric name had a pirate theme and a shockingly well-stocked gift shop (everything from sea shells to Christmas ornaments to pirate paperdolls to those overpriced hyper-realistic stuffed animals that were kind of a thing in the early/mid 80s). I could barely make it through my hushpuppies because the anticipation for the gift shop’s wonders was so great. The original Trawler (and its gift shop) burned down in 1989, just in time for me to have actual spending money, but I still dream about that gift shop from time to time.
Tiny Commotions 