That pretty much sums up the philosophy of Spider Jerusalem–the anti-hero of anti-heroes. The apotheosis gonzo journalist of the future. The bad-ass that can and will verbally eviscerate you and then mix your blood with heroin and shoot it into his eyeballs.

What I’m basically saying is…I’d have millions of Spider Jerusalem’s babies.
Written by the brilliant and insane Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan is tied with the Sandman series as best graphic novels of all time (although completely different in theme and approach), and if you’re not reading it right now, you’re brain-dead, and we probably can’t be friends.

Somebody please dress up as him for halloween this year?

his cat has three fucking heads and it SMOKES

easy costume: black suit, sans shirt, painted-on tatts, and the glasses

but its all in the attitude

damn it, maybe *I'LL* dress up as him.

Just read it. Thank me later.

Here’s what I have so far:

Stormy Monday

Il vigneto del sole

Fiori di Campo

Firenze

Soprattutto

all of these are available for sale on my etsy store:
(and yes, I’m aware that they’re AMAZING)
foxontherun photography

Jean Seberg

I have a good friend who looks like Jean Seberg. Same haircut, same cute pixie-ish face, same sense of style, even. I hate her. It’s not fair. Seberg was another French New-Wave regular, appearing in Goddard’s Breathless and L’Amant de cinq jours, among others. Along with her acting, she was such a vocal activist for movements such as the NAACP, Native American rights, and the Black Panthers, that the FBI considered her a threat to the government and started closely monitoring her, tapping her phone, and having her followed. Shame on you, J. Edgar.

She committed suicide at 41, a victim of barbituate addiction and a life that was overfull with trouble and anxiety. However, her beauty lingers, in her film work and in print. She had the gamine grace that tends to be my highest ideal when it comes to beauty, and she had an ethereal, somehow innocent quality enhanced by her minimal, feminine sense of dress. She tended to bare a lot of skin, wore simple, classic pieces, and had a penchant for stripes (as do I). All she needed was a striped, boat-necked top and a pair of white shorts with black ballet flats. It’s a timeless look. Once you get that look right, you don’t really need any frills.

Isabella Rossellini

I’ve been in love with Isabella Rossellini ever since I first saw her in Blue Velvet (also my favorite movie of all time). She has a different kind of beauty from most of the people on my list of style crushes. She’s darker. More dynamic. Her beauty isn’t femme or ethereal, it has heat to it. She’s the kind of sexy that is made even sexier by her flaws. She’s not the classic beauty of Audrey Hepburn or the waifish ethereal beauty of Jane Birkin. She’s the kind of beauty that’s hard to understand, which just makes it more compelling. Kind of like the movie Blue Velvet, actually. She earned her style chops, anyways. Her mother is Ingrid Bergman, one of the great beauties of all time and a style icon in her own right. Rossellini began her career modeling for Vogue, then Dolce and Gabbana, then becoming the face of a new line of cosmetics called Lancôme. She’s been photographed by Helmut Lang, Richard Avedon and Robert Mapplethorpe. But it’s her film work that draws me in. In Blue Velvet she was a seductive, submissive contradiction. In The Saddest Music in the World (a MUST watch movie from Guy Maddin–hugely weird and funny and shot in black and white) she was a regal, angelically lit, and slightly evil beer hall empress with no legs. Imagine that! She has made a fascinating career out of picking projects that are highly outside the realm of the mainstream. She likes to be experimental. She’s put out a series of short educational films about the nature of sexuality, with herself playing various insects. In the film “My Dad Is 100 Years Old,” based on a biography she wrote, she plays nearly every part–including both her mother and father. She is also a National Ambassador for the U.S. Fund for UNICEF. If I could be anyone on this list, I’d pick her. She leads an interesting, intellectual, and charitable life.

And now on to someone who proves that you have to be a little wrong in the head to be a true iconoclast.

Little Edie Beale

Yes, it’s Little Edie Beale. Every style blog gets around to her at some point, I think. Edith Bouvier Beale is probably best known, these days, because of the Documentary Grey Gardens, (another must-see), which turned into a broadway show, and then a movie by the same name starring Drew Barrymore (I didn’t see it, so I can’t comment.) Little Edie (her mother was Big Edie) was a cousin of Jackie O., a socialite, a model, and, in later life, a shut-in. Born in New York in 1917, she lived the good life in the city-wealthy, beautiful, stylish–she was a model and a wannabe actress, until, after significant failure to find either an acting career or a husband, she moved in with her mother in the early 50s, into a rambling, run-down estate in East Hampton. Both women led an increasingly reclusive life, letting the estate fall into such disrepair due to their poverty (and disfunction), that in 1971, inspectors from the Health Department raided the house and declared it completely unlivable. The story was a huge scandal (for obvious reasons), and Jackie O. ended up bailing out the Beales, so that they could retain their ownership of Grey Gardens. Both Beales became famous due to the documentary, which showed their eccentric and unstable lives, and managed to impart both a depressing sense of two women who lived far from healthy reality, and a playful, hopeful side to the story–Little Edie, in her fairyland where she lived perpetually dancing and acting to the delight of her nonexistant audience, was an engaging character, full of her own style. Her signature turban bobbed up and down to the music as she danced for the cameras. Clearly she thought herself delightful, and as a result, she was delightful. Deranged maybe, but delightful nonetheless. After the movie came out (she loved it), and her mother died, she moved to New York again, to begin a cabaret career, and was again unsuccessful, living out the rest of her life in quiet, writing poetry and letters to friends and fans.

It’s not her merely her life that makes Little Edie a style icon, it’s the legacy she left after she was gone. Spreads in Vogue appeared, inspired by her lifestyle; a musical was created, then a movie, based on Grey Gardens. Rufus Wainwright wrote a song about her. Various fashion designers, including Marc Jacobs, have dedicated pieces or even whole lines to her. For a woman who never achieved the fame in the outside world that she clearly felt in her mind, Little Edie remains one of the most influential style icons of the century. I like to think she would have found this totally unsurprising.

Some examples:

Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers is my favorite alcoholic female writer from before 1950 (I like her even better than Dorothy Parker. Gasp.). She wrote haunting, lyric novels about isolation and unrequited love, misfits and characters. Jarvis Cocker set her narration of The Member of the Wedding in a song on his first album (Big Julie, if you’re interested). Charles Bukowski wrote a poem about her. In all her pictures she looks like a fragile, lean, doe-eyed creature (maybe an antelope or a timid, tiny woodland animal.) Yet by all accounts, despite alcoholism, depression, suicide attempts and strokes, she was a vital, strong woman who refused to give in to her demons until they finally got the better of her, in the form of a massive brain hemorrhage, in the late 60s. She was also bisexual (which for some reason makes her legend still more attractive.) Her style seems to reinforce her personality–she dresses with vaguely masculine, bohemian flair, instead of playing up her waifish femininity.

And then there’s beautiful Anna Karina, high priestess of French New Wave:

Anna Karina

I suppose it’s not entirely fair to the rest of us that there are people born this beautiful. And not only beautiful, but probably the most stylish woman that ever lived (in my opinion)–fashion model for Chanel and Pierre Cardin at age 17, with an effortlessly gamine, essentially french sensibility (even though she was Danish-born). A little mod, a little playfulness, a little classic, timeless style, grace and charisma. She’s Audrey Hepburn, but with her own special caché. Not to mention being Jean-Luc Godard’s muse and wife, an actress in many of the best French new wave films (Une femme est une femme being my favorite) and recording a song with Serge Gainsbourg. If that’s not enough style cred, I don’t know what is. She is the pinnacle of style, and I aspire one day to be one-tenth as effortless as she.

Jane Birkin

Speaking of Serge Gainsbourg–let’s take a look at Jane Birkin. How do you do it, Jane? Maybe it helps having a father who is a british spy and a mother who acts in Noel Coward musicals. Maybe growing up with that kind of James-Bond-meets-Blithe-Spirit background somehow predisposes a person to have style greatness within. I’ve been obsessed with Birkin ever since I saw her kiss Brigitte Bardot in Or if Don Juan were a Woman and subsequently Blowup, which, if you are majoring in photography in college, is pretty much required filmage. Growing up in the beating heart of Swinging London, and then spending the rest of your life in France with Serge Gainsbourg, collaborating on songs with Feist, Yann Tiersen, and The Smiths, Jane Birkin lives the kind of style icon life that only someone who has an Hermès bag named after her could live. Her style is waifish, long-haired, long-limbed, ultra femme with a little hint of wilderness. She has a certain feral quality around the eyes that elevates her look from the merely beautiful. Plus, her daughter is Charlotte Gainsbourg, who is a style icon in her own right and with whom I am passionately in love:

Oh, my, Charlotte

Ok, that’s all for today. I can’t stand looking at these women at the same time I’m sitting on my couch wearing L.L. Bean slippers. Tomorrow: Jean Seberg, Yma Sumac, Catherine Deneuve, and Lauren Bacall.

I’ll even bet you this beautifully-made ‘Silver Seahorse Cigarette Case’

found at CosmicFirefly.etsy.com

Or if you don’t smoke, you can choose to wear your immense love of octopuses (octopi? Octopedes? Apparently all three are correct) proudly on any number of t-shirts.

I, of course, would go for the Chris Ware 8-bit inspired psychotic one:

I want to point out that this shirt is called “Octopocalypse”

I could go on all day just with Octopedes (I like that name best), but I’ll limit myself to one more item. There are a whole lot more fish in the sea, as they say.

It was a tough choice, but I’m going with these Octopus Tentacle Earrings (made from a real octopus, apparently, although I’m not sure how that works…)

OctopusMe’s Etsy Earrings

For sheer craftsmanship, these take the cake. The cupcake, even. They’re not only gorgeously made, but DANG. How many people do you know that have a pair of these babies? $75 bucks is a steal for these, especially considering every set of earrings made by this shop is unique.

But there’s no reason to stop at octopi, when you could be effortlessly whale-chic:

Blue Whale Summer Tank

And the oft-ignored nautilus gets a very pretty pastel update in this tote:

Get one at HopefulMonsters.etsy.com

Maybe there will even be a revival of interest in old classic books like Moby Dick, or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Or…The Little Mermaid. Or Jacques Cousteau, who failed to get much of a revival out of The Life Aquatic. Second time’s the charm, eh, Jacques?

Jacques obviously approves.

So I will leave you with this—a t-shirt featuring a Narwhal (my personal favorite sea creature because, duh, it’s the unicorn of the sea) riding a Segway.

Because why not?

A Narwhal Named GOB

Hopefully this whole trend will go the way of the cupcake and start ending up in couture lines and Urban Outfitters all over the country (if it hasn’t started to already). I’d love to see Bjork rocking a horseshoe-crab dress at her next press appearance.

Still, I got some good shots. More and more Boston girls are looking like supermodels than makes me entirely comfortable. Being normal height and pudgy doesn’t quite seem to cut it these days–at least not on Newbury St.

Winter tones and aviators

Handbag envy

^ This girl, for example. Brazilian swimsuit model?

Chill hat

Laid-back

^ I decided I need more dudes when I take street photos. This guy was perfect.

Fitted jacket, nice boots

Another handbag envy moment

^ She was wearing a little gold headband with a bow. Killer.

Outside Marc Jacobs

^ tough florals is my favorite look this season. Doing a flouncy little chiffon baby floral-print minidress with black leggings/stockings, shoes, and a tough jacket? Outstanding. Oh and I wanted to give a shout-out to her equally stylish friend who’s photos I managed to lose because I am a terrible person.

That’s it for now. Italy next!!!!

Layers

One way to do it is tasteful layering. Scarves and caramel-colored leather.

Military Coat

Love a good pea-coat. They work pretty well as transitional outerwear–fall and spring coats. This one has great military detailing.

Knee-Length

I think she was hurrying somewhere from work, so the lack of coat is understandable. Love the pencil skirt and fun color on the top. Work outfits don’t have to be boring!!

Fuzzzzy

The cute fuzziness of this coat is a great contrast to the big roomy cobalt bag (my favorite color).

Mint Julep

Ok, not technically “street” fashion, but Mint Julep is one of my favorite stores in Boston, so it makes sense that their employees know how to dress. Love the ruffles on the plaid winter dress on the right and the peach color of the sweater on the left. Riding boots are always a good winter shoe, and the color of the boots on the right is unusual and works well with the look.

Cobalt blue again!

I like this tough-cute combo look, plus the color palette she’s working with. Bright blue tights and awesome shoes, leather and pigtails. It works.

Pink and Prada

I think she was the most stylish person I saw that day. I love it when older (not old, mind you) women can dress like nobody’s business. What a great color coat for spring, unique and fun top, and of course, great bag. Kudos.

So that’s it for now. Stay tuned, soon, for a street fashion post straight from Italy!! There might be gelato involved, too. At least I *hope* so)

Here’s a sampling:

ClosetGothic by foxotherun featuring Sanctuary pants

gemini5757 by foxotherun featuring J Crew shoes

ArtGirlX by foxotherun featuring DAY Birger et Mikkelsen jackets

More on this later….