Gothic Mementos

photo credit: Joshua Franzos

I'm the opposite of a moth; I'm attracted to darkness, it holds many mysteries, unknown. I'm a curious sort and have been as far back as I can remember. In order to keep my nose out of places it didn't belong, my mother always threatened me with the adage, "curiosity killed the cat." As a child, that just made me imagine that a giant monster killed the cat. I demanded to know more about the monster, so I could learn how to beat it, but she wouldn't tell me. (Age old wisdom parallels were clearly lost on dumb kids). All my life I've been exhilarated by fictional, supernatural terrors only to collapse back into the lightness and safety of laughter. Sometimes, supernatural terror is simply more palatable than the horrors of our personal lives. It is an escape. Everyone has their escapes from reality. For a long, long time I wanted nothing more than to escape my own life.  

photo credit: Joshua Franzos

 And so I escaped through literature. My reading preferences....predominantly dark. I adored the Byronic heroes of 18th and 19th century Gothic fiction.  Particularly, those proud, brooding, defiant characters that lingered at the precipice of self-destruction, but were capable of deep love and loyalty....if given a chance...if only they were understood and loved....Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Horace Walpole, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Bram Stoker, Charlotte Bronte, even Jane Austen, of the old ladies and gentlemen authors that have delighted me with crumbling castles, ancestral curses and secret passageways. (I just love a decaying literary setting). But my literary friends pleaded with me to read the works of living authors. So I picked up Bukowski and Thompson. But it wasn't long before they were dead too. I dug deep, I knew I'd read some living authors at some point, albeit few and far between. But you could probably guess, right?  Stephen King and Anne Rice.

photo credit: Joshua Franzos

I read Interview With a Vampire by Anne Rice, when I was a teenager. Oh, how I loved it and identified with Louis, the vampire. He was a lonely and immortal philosopher, doomed to walk the earth without a companion rather than keep the insufferable sadist, Lestat, by his side. (Sounds like stuff a teenager would identify with, right?) A couple years ago, when the "you should read living authors" prodding started, I picked up another Anne Rice novel, The Witching Hour, and was immediately entranced with the setting of New Orleans, specifically, the garden district with it's decaying, shuttered mansions, old ironwork, mossy trees and cryptic cemeteries....it's about as Old World as you can find without leaving the US. I had to see it, experience it...so I did. Twice in two years. This most recent visit was a family visit, where our goal was to share the New Orleans experience of gulf oysters and Preservation Jazz Hall with Mr. Franzos' father. In the early morning, before the rest of our traveling companions woke, Mr. Franzos and I did a shoot in Lafayette Cemetary No. 1. It was inspired by my love for Gothic anti-heroes and Anne Rice's vampires and witches of New Orleans. Rice has a new vampire book out, Prince Lestat, just released this week. I can't wait to check it out. 

photo credit: Joshua Franzos

photo credit: Joshua Franzos

photo credit: Joshua Franzos

This post was supposed to be light and easy. I just was going to talk about fashion and literature. But life and death happens. Thanks in large part to my family and my writing outlets, I'm not nearly the dark soul I used to be, but I still have my moments. These past couple weeks for instance, they have been difficult for Mr. Franzos and I. We lost someone very important to us, Josh's Dad, (my father-in-law), Stan Franzos. He had an amazing, fascinating and rich life with a beautiful companion that he shared all but the last two years with. Stan and his muse, Dolly, were my inspiration behind this blog, because I see shades of Josh and I in their love story. But here's one of the most beautiful things about this sad event....Stan died on the 2nd anniversary of his wife's death. The. Very. Same. Day. With the same romance and pentameter as a 19th century poet. 

photo credit: Joshua Franzos

 It is a long-standing, New Orleans tradition to honor the dead and revere their resting places on November 1st, All Saints Day, when according to the liturgical calendar, their souls ascend to Heaven. I don't know what happens after we die, but I know this much, the loved ones we lost do live on in us, if we let them come marching in. 

          Oh, when the stars fall from the sky
          Oh, when the stars fall from the sky
          I want to be in that number
          When the saints go marching in.

photo credit: Joshua Franzos

What I wore: White blouse: past season, Anne Fontaine. Waistcoat: past season, Masnada. One of my new, favorite brands! Earrings: Baublebar, here. Skirt: vintage, Thierry Mugler. Shoes: past season, Casedei.

Your Bosom Friend From Pittsburgh,

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Start Loving Elastic Waistband Pants, Which Are The Bomb

 

photo credit: Joshua Franzos

I've lived in Pittsburgh for eleven years now. Although I've developed an acute case of civic pride, I can never be a real Pittsburgher, as I'm indifferent to televised sports. Good for the Steelers, the Pirates and the Penguins, but my blood runs red, not black and gold. As a child, I hated airplanes and flying, but I loved airports and watching the people in them. My brain worked over time as I tried to make out a person's character based on how they dressed and presented themselves to the world. Short stories cropped up in my mind and entertained me through many a flight delay. With my little face perched on my hands and my legs swinging from my gate side seat, I observed the hustle and bustle of airport terminals like a tennis match. Business men and women dressed in suits. Europeans wore black leather jackets and fancy sunglasses. Flight attendants were called stewardesses back then; they wore lots of make-up and fussy silk scarves. I miss the days when people dressed up for travel, but I understand. Air travel is a sordid business now. My stomach lurches every time I forget socks and have to shuffle through the security line barefoot, positive I'll contract plantar warts, or worse.

photo credit: Joshua Franzos

Traveling in the 21st century has neutered our sense of style in favor of comfort (on the plane) and function (of getting through security lines). What is the point of dressing up to travel? We have to take our shoes, belts, jackets, watches and jewelry off. We worry about leaving something behind. Sometimes we do. Sometimes we have to assist the other younger, older, sicker people we are traveling with. It's just easier to wear less and forgo belts and extraneous accessories. Yes, we understand these precautionary measures are in place to secure our safety, but it's still stressful. There is an internal countdown for when the plane leaves. The seats on the plane are narrower, the rows are cramped, closer together than ever before. It is uncomfortable. Babies just do what we all wish we could do, scream at the top of our lungs for being massively inconvenienced. Though I long for the romantic Humphrey Bogart steamer-trunk era of travel, when men and women wore suits and chapeaus, I understand the threats of terrorism and the airline's struggle for viability. Here in lies the reason why elastic waist band pants and socks with sandals have become de rigueur. There's a saying while traveling, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do." I'd like to amend that with, When in an airport, wear stretch pants. Fashion blogger. Stretch pants. Fatal system error, right? No, seriously, I'm not talking about your Grandma's stretch pants. I've developed my own version of an air travel uniform that includes elastic waistband pants and I think it looks so cool, I want to wear it all the time. I want to be this cool, world-wise traveler all the time!

photo credit: Joshua Franzos

 In his essay, The Philosophy of Travel, George Santayana wrote, "We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what." Perhaps we travel to experience new and interesting things or to revisit something we once knew. We  might  travel to feel a sense of wonder and bigness of the world but are often reminded just how small it really is. We travel for that personally significant moment and we will accept the massive inconvenience and discomforts of air travel as a matter of course. The important thing is we are moving and as an object in motion, we will gather no moss. 

photo credit: Joshua Franzos

photo credit: Joshua Franzos

 Mr. Franzos and I got off the plane and checked in to the Sully Mansion Bed and Breakfast, in the gorgeous garden district of New Orleans. Instead of taking off our shoes and socks, walking barefoot on the carpet of our room and making fists with our toes (I hear it's better than a shower and cup of coffee after a flight. Thanks Die Hard!), we immediately headed to the New Orleans Botanical Gardens. We checked our mental baggage at the Japanese garden and got into the vacation mindset for a long, oyster-y, bourbon-y weekend in the Big Easy. There is an uncanny duality between the idealized, natural space of a garden and the act of travel. When we travel, we long for the comforts of home, but also want for things that are not home at all. Serenella Iovino writes, "the garden most of all represents the human aspiration to harmoniously live inside nature and, at the same time, to morally and culturally step outside her."* We are humans, we want it all and yet we don't. So in the tradition of the never-ending human dichotomy, we morally and culturally, stepped out of the zen garden to see what debauchery we could find on Bourbon Street. Follow my blog with Bloglovin


*Iovino, Serenella. Universita di Torino. "Redeeming Nature? The Garden As A Moral Space." Awesome article. Read it here.

What I wore: Vest and Tank: past season, Angelos Frentzos. Crop Pants: past season, Free People. Boots: past season Jeffrey Campbell, roscoe cut-out boot. Necklace: 1976 Magic Pyramid Talisman Guild Necklace, vintage. Bracelet: vintage.

photo credit: Joshua Franzos

Your bosom friend from Pittsburgh,

...In Bed with Mrs. Franzos

Photo credit: Joshua Franzos

It is a popular American custom to eat Chinese take-out and end our fortune cookie parchments of wisdom with the phrase, "in bed." Hilarity ensues when a state-the-obvious fortune would normally leave us unfulfilled or rolling our eyes. This week on Mrs. Franzos blog, I've been challenged by the lovely Melody Sours of Blingaholic88 Blog, to give up thirty random, hilarious and freaky facts about myself. Yes, thirty. So to make this less tedious. I urge you dear reader, to mentally add the phrase "in leather pants" at the end of every fact I proffer.

1. The last thing I googled was, "why do my ice cubes taste like old people ice cubes?"
2. I used to collect Victorian post-mortem photos. Don't judge me.
3. A donkey tied me to a tree once. He was evil donkey with a mustache. If there had been a train track, he would've tied me to that. Just kidding, he didn't have a mustache.
4. I had my first raw oyster at age 30 and haven't stopped since.
5. I used to be an improv comedian.
6. I can drink a man under the table.
7. I consider myself a feminist.
8. I talk like a sailor.
9. I collect books. I have one old tome from the 1600's, It's called the Book of Martyrs and it has some crazy etchings of people burning on stakes.
10. I was born in California, but like the Johnny Cash song goes, I've been everywhere man.

    

    photo credit: Joshua Franzos

11. I am writing my first novel.
12. Karoake terrifies me. Literally. But I have one song I could do, if a life depended on it and no one will ever know it because that scenario will never happen.
13. I have been in one fist fight. 
14. I can appraise antiques, jewelry, fine art, furniture. I have made a lot of money on the ignorance of stand-up organizations like Goodwill and Salvation Army. I am a jerk.
15. Oxford commas bother me.
16. I have been gluten free for four years.
17. Cops and security guards love me for some reason.
18. I detest books written in the present tense, unless they're Choose Your Own Adventure.
19. I have played Dungeons and Dragons and liked it.
20. I made a pregnant woman cry this week. On purpose. She dared me to. Don't judge me.

    

    photo credit: Joshua Franzos

21. I have a jack ass terrier. No, I didn't mean Jack Russell. I meant jack ass. He's a Jack Ass Terrier named Lando and I love him.
22. I have actually used an algebraic equation in an office setting, twice.
23. I am obsessed with finding white rabbits in the world. They're rare, but not so rare.
24. The longest time I've gone without vomiting, 10 years. I hope to beat that record.
25. I was raised by Born Again Christians that forced me to watch The Thief In The Night Series, ala A Clockwork Orange Style....when I was 9. Sort of not kidding.
26. I learned how to play the piano out of a Liberace piano playbook. Beautiful Dreamer was my go-to song when I was 10.
27. I have completely forgotten how to play the piano and Beautiful Dreamer.
28. I was on 29th street during 9/11.
29. If you like something that I own, I'm talking like, A LOT.  And you tell me this, on multiple occasions, I'll probably just give it to you. To date, I've given away one amazing grommet purse and one taxidermied albino Cobra.
30. And lastly, I still love and don leather pants even though my tenth grade algebra teacher said, "Those leather pants you wear really turn me on" and an old boss said, "You can't wear leather pants around dirty old men like me!" Never let anyone ruin a good thing.
    

    

    photo credit: Joshua Franzos

Mr. Franzos and I traveled to Swissvale, an east end borough of Pittsburgh to try out a new ring flash. We are both pleased with it, but I didn't know that until later. I was dancing (including the sprinkler) because I love my new leather pants. Actually, here's the coolest thing about the leather pants. They're not leather. They're "Vegan Leather." They look and feel like leather and, wait for it......they're completely machine washable! I styled the Free People "quilted vegan skinnies" pretty simply because I wanted the pants to do all the talking. I paired it with an Old Navy t-shirt, Yves Saint Laurent gunmetal heels and a cheap gunmetal chain bracelet. That's it.

photo credit: Joshua Franzos

I want to take this opportunity to thank Melody for tagging me in the 30 facts challenge, read her 30 facts here. In classic chain letter fashion, I'd like to tag a couple of other bloggers that have caught my attention in my brief time in the fashion blogosphere. They are seriously great and you should check them out. Caroline of Pardon My Obsession and Carelia of My Small Wardrobe. Ladies, if you are reading you can accept the challenge or not. No pressure. Just a shout out that I enjoy reading your blogs and look forward to your outfits. Follow my blog with Bloglovin

photo credit: Joshua Franzos

What I wore: T-shirt: Old Navy, On Sale Here. Motorcycle pants: Free People, Here. Heels: Yves Saint Laurent, vintage. Similar $ and here $. Bracelet: vintage. Similar.

 

Your bosom friend from Pittsburgh,