ON BEING A BETTER BLOGGER

This might be the last post I ever make on this blog.

Well, not the last post I ever make on Fruitpunch, but the last post that ever goes up on this Blogger incarnation of it. I've been oddly silent all week because I'm trying to upgrade my site, or, in Bieber patois, "step up my game". After a shit ton of deliberation and even wasting $82 on a Blog Milk theme I ended up finding too limiting, I shelled out a good deal more money for a Squarespace account—and I already regret it. But let's back up.

PEACE OUT, 2013

Since I celebrated the year's end with my zine (have you read it yet? shared it with your cousin? good) I'm just posting some snapshots of new friends and old friends, if only to remind myself to get out of the house more often in 2014.

Long story short: Miley Cyrus's tongue ain't got nothin' on me (and Mac). Big ups to all y'all for reading along—it's much appreciated, as ever! LMK what you'd like to see more of on the blog in 2014, and be sure to follow along on social so that I can get internet famous off selfies. Thx and happy new year!

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FRUITPUNCH THE ZINE

I know what you're thinking: This is just like last week when Beyoncé dropped her album without hyping it at all, I know. It's like crazy similar and kind of embarrassing I have one more thing to add to the already super long list of things I have in common with Beyoncé lol awkward.

So, yeah, I turned my blog into a 'zine to commemorate the year that was 2013. It's still digital, because IDK how to get this kind of thing printed and I'm pretty sure it would cost a million dollars to do that. OMG wait Yoncé's new album is only available online too, isn't it? You see you guys, I'm not even trying. It's right below here and I'd love it if you take a peek and share it if you like it. Which you will, duh.

But what's inside?
Interviews with Richard Haines, Joy Gryson and Shana Tabor, not to mention a selection of my favorite/best street style shots from the last year AND a whopping 20+ pages of #GPOY action PLUS ten diet tips you never knew you needed AND exclusive shots of Sandra Bullock without makeup on! (Some of this is lies.) Enjoy!! P.S. If for some reason it doesn't load (hehehe, load) correctly below, here is the link.

WHAT I SAW TODAY

“You can ask anything you want.” Thus begins my conversation with Richard Haines, better known as  Designerman NYC, blogger extraordinaire behind What I Saw Today. Haines occupies a unique position in the blogosphere as one of its top illustrators—or should I say 'quick-draw artists', zing—and is known for impressionistic sketches that add an element of louche sophistication to whomever he's turned his eye onto. (He even drew me! Ah! That's the manliest I've ever looked, by far. You can see what I was wearing that day here.) Read on as Haines and I talk drawing, dating, and why Bushwick is where dreams come true...

FP: So I've read a little bit about your background in previous interviews you’ve done, but it’d be interesting to see what you think the importance of blogging is and where you think it’s going. The internet is obviously something you’ve been able to kind of leverage, especially...later in your career [laughter/nervous giggle].

RH: The twilight years?

Well you’re not Tavi, or…

I’m 61. It’s been five years now and I usually do this thing on my blog where I thank everyone, but I forgot to do it this year because I’ve been so busy. But that says a lot. I mean, I think for me, because I really remember life before the internet, this is all still kind of astounding and mind-blowing. That I could just start a blog, really with nothing…I mean, I had a scanner and a laptop, just like everyone else. And I was at a crossroads with my career as a designer...I wasn’t getting the work that I wanted. I had a small business making shirts and that was really floundering and I just thought, well, there’s no overhead in drawing and posting it. And I remember the first drawing I scanned and put up. It was an amazing thing to just have that ability to have my voice, unedited and out there where people could respond to it. And it’s really been like that ever since.

I feel like five years ago in the blogging game is such a difference, it's so dramatic. That’s the old guard, if you will. 2008 is worlds away. We have a girl at work who’s doing some illustrations and doing it all on an iPad with a stylus…the idea of drawing and scanning that in, I guess we may have done that a few years ago, but now? Have you ever thought about switching mediums?

I can’t say it hasn’t crossed my mind—I mean, I’ve seen people do amazing things with digital and the possibility of it is really wonderful. But there’s something that just feels incredible to me about a charcoal pencil and a piece of paper that I can’t really duplicate. What I do is very basic, it’s very primal. But I kind of like that. It works for me.

I think it’s good that you have something that’s so...not off the grid, but offline. That’s so disconnected from constantly looking at a screen. A lot of photographers and people who are blogging constantly...it’s just incessant screen to face time. To be offline and to be disconnected is probably very healthy.

I mean, it’s healthy for me. I started drawing as soon as I could hold a pencil. Now the idea of scanning something and writing a caption and downloading it is just like, oh my god, that’s so much time, you know? I just want to shoot it and Instagram it. It’s amazing. And when I first started to blog, people would come and leave these lengthy comments and I would go to other people’s blogs…and that’s how it started, it was really viral. I would say, “I see you like fashion blogs, I just started a fashion blog, here’s my link.” And now the idea of people even leaving comments is this kind of charming and old school. Now it’s just like, ‘like.’ The attention span is really changing.

I think it’s because of the way people can have those conversations on social media now and connect online on so many platforms. You just don’t need to be leaving a blog comment anymore, it's just an endless stream.

I think Facebook changed that with the ‘Like’ button and Tumblr changed it because if you like it you’re just going to repost it. It eliminated a comment.

Do you think that it’s harder to start a dialogue, per se? Or have you found over the years that your feedback has changed at all?

No, people don’t leave comments on the blog but people still have a real need to connect. So now people connect with me through Facebook chat. People from all over the world talk to me through Facebook chat. It’s really amazing. Other illustrators, or students, or just people who like what I do. I don’t think people have really stopped connecting...or...

Reaching out?

Yeah, reaching out. Communicating. It’s just the format is different. If anything, contacting someone through Facebook chat is much more immediate than going through a blog.

5 BLOGS THAT ARE KILLING PRINT

I should subtitle this, 'for me', because I don't mean to imply that I've done any research or statistical analysis - that would be ridiculous. The other night I was at a blogger dinner, conversing with someone who said something along the lines of, "I don't want to be a blogger when I'm 40," as he thought that would be kind of silly. He mentioned hoping to get a job at a magazine and I couldn't help but think to myself: you want to jump ship from digital to print? Really?

I've said it before and I'll say it again: blogs are an ever-evolving and almost limitless platform for content. What we can achieve through them is limited only by our gumption and skill sets (and/or budget). Web design is changing (almost always for the better, less Facebook) at a delightfully rapid pace, diversifying the ways content can be shared and compartmentalized online and for mobile devices (iPad reference! I know technology!) This can be couched in the rhetoric of a digital revolution, or we can just tacitly accept the fact that it's What's Next. Duh.

As for print...my magazine buying habits have changed dramatically over the past few years and everyone reading this, whether you are an avid consumer/borderline hoarder of printed matter like me, or a casual Us-Weekly-in-the-checkout-line-picker-upper, knows that it's the internet's fault. Because the internet is a bish like that. These are the blogs that have entered my life and, in one way or another, to some degree, killed print for me. Just a little bit. And P.S. yes these are all fashion-y blogs because I don't read anything else or care about it bluh whatever. Photo Stevie Dance for Shop-Ghost.

Jump the cut to find out which five blogs I'm talking about! Do it!

ON BEING A FASHION BLOGGER

photo Ari Park // coat Uniqlo (seen here) // scarf vintage (seen here) // beanie H&M (seen here) // jeans Cheap Monday (seen here) // glasses Warby Parker (seen here and here) // shoes vintage (seen here)

You guys, this is a really serious post. Look at how pensive I am on that rooftop. That's how serious this is!

Jokes about blogger poses aside...I really feel the time is now for a post articulating a certain frustration with the role of the Fashion Blogger. Two articles I read recently have led me here, both from fashion journalists I've followed for some time and whose opinions I respect: one, from BuzzFeed Shift editor Amy Odell, asks where fashion will find its next Bryanboy - aka its Next Big Thing; the other, by Suzy Menkes, takes a closer look at that ultimate arena for the self-made style star, outside the venues where collections are shown during Fashion Week. Odell talks to a few blogging stalwarts regarding the future of the nascent occupation, all of whom say things developed naturally for them, with apparently a good bit of luck thrown in. Hark to this giant effing block quote from Odell that I can't bring myself to cut down to size:

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PERSONAL STYLE VS. THE INTERNET

The other day I thought to myself, "That guy's outfit is so Tumblr." A strange sentiment on the surface, but as I got to thinking about personal style and the internet it occurred to me that the symbiosis between online style stars and the omnipresent photographers that celebrate them has created a chicken and egg situation with far-reaching repercussions. Are these people popular because they're photographed so much, or are they photographed so much because they're popular? More than that, what does their popularity mean for the sizable audience digesting their de facto style creeds on a million different dashboards?

Image-based platforms for social interaction have inevitably wound up as tools for sociocultural coding, providing a visual demarcation of who gets It and who's from Florida. You can see it in Pinterest's evolution beyond its humble beginnings as an online scrapbook and content-bookmarking service; the site now serves as a portal into a world of rough-luxe Scandinavian cabins, artisanal fig tartines and fireplace-adjacent thoroughbred labradors. The same can be said of Tumblr, with its users' adherence to an aesthetic equation that drives the popularity of most images on the blogging platform. Conformity can come as no surprise - what else could be the end result of 10,000 reblogs? Is Tumblr more of a collective digestive system than anything else?

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Fruit For All Seasons

The year is rapidly coming to an end (and the world, too, if you're a believer), so I figure it's time for the magic and wonder of a big blogging round-up! You can check out my round-up from last year here, then scroll down to peep a few of my favorite outfits from 2012, handily-dandily grouped by season. Revel in the ladypants, the bean action and oh so many pairs of shoooooes. I'm headed out of NYC on vacay this weekend and am taking a self-imposed Blogger Break. I won't be back in action until the thirty-first, but the action I have planned is eXtrA SpeciAL, TOP SECRET and awwwesome - so buckle up and enjoy the ride! Photo via Summer Layers: Torn.

01 Seanny-Kate Olsen 

02 Chambray Shirt + Boyfriend Jeans

03 Carried Away

01 Shorts Story: CrazySexyCool 

02 Shorts Story: Fresh To Death

03 Summer Layers: Waisted

01 Khaki In The Afternoon

02 The Italian Twist

03 Good Old Fashioned

01 The Carhartt Jacket

02 Winter Wanderland

03 Any Given (Super Bowl) Sunday

And a special big THANK YOU to the photographers I was lucky enough to work with this year: Joel Codiamat, Fareine Suarez Benz, Kelly Kollar, Izzy Tuason and any/all friends who got corralled into shooting for me!

ON PUTTING YOURSELF OUT THERE (ONLINE)

I'm not sure where to start this post, as it's coming from a place of indignation and frustration (indignant frustration?) and I don't want it to read as a rant. The other week I published another piece on The Huffington Post (you can read the first here) that was meant to be a tongue-in-cheek look at a year in my life without sex. People - or, rather, the subspecies Internet Commenteri - seemed to take it a bit differently. It got so bad that one thread compared me to Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal. "His whole story is a lie," chimed in one reader (referring to my decision to define sex more narrowly as penetrative sex, for the purposes of a tagline - so sue me.) Others described my writing as, "self-absorbed" and "pointless"; "I couldn't even finish the article for yawning," said another.

There were just over sixty comments total and just about fifteen click-throughs to my blog. These people did not read my piece and then seek out my other essay on the site, nor did they make any attempt to better understand who I am as a writer - or human being - by contacting me via email or Twitter. It is 2012. It is not difficult to get in touch with someone and more than that, it is almost repulsively easy to get in touch with someone like me - someone with active accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, YouTube and Flickr. My email address is in multiple places online. You can Google me. All of this takes just slightly more effort than being already logged in to your HuffPo account at work, feeling bored and lashing out at a stranger. A lot of the comments were weirdly aggressive and inflammatory - why would I dignify such vitriol with a response? Why did these people even bother to read the entire article? Why didn't they stop after the first paragraph when thinking, "this isn't my cup of tea"?

I showed the piece to some friends, some of whom liked it, some of whom were a little indifferent. Duly noted - moving on. It may not be my best piece, but it was an idea I had and I wanted to push myself to put it out there. I did. And then a bunch of people hated me. "Comment trolls" are a common digi-plague (you can read a Salon.com article about them here); I think the nicest thing I've ever heard about online forums for discussion is, "they make me lose faith in humanity." I know not to take the attacks personally, but it's hard not to be at least flabbergasted when the attacks are so personal. There's an immediate leap from, "I dislike this article," to, "I fucking hate the piece of shit who put this in front of my face." Newsflash, troll: you put it in front of your own face!

Getting ranty, I know...so here's the video (NSFW [language/sexual content]){Mom, that means don't watch this} I made to supplement the post, or at least better clarify the tone I meant to take when writing. What about you? Have you had to deal with comment trolls? Is my indignant frustration justified (say yes or I'll eat your face!)?

UPDATE: I feel I should mention that I did receive positive feedback via social media, Twitter in particular, and I really appreciate that! This post was to simply voice to my bewilderment at a phenomenon of sorts...not to focus on the negative. Thanks to all of you who were encouraging!

Click through to check out my vlog!

ORIGINAL CONTENT

The Man Repeller shot by Vanessa Jackman

Lately I've been thinking a lot about original content. What is it? How do you create it? Why isn't there more of it? Debaters seem to get hung up on creation vs. curation vs. consumption. A blog can be everything and nothing; it can be sharply edited, wholly original and beautifully designed. Or it can be an unhinged pictorial f*ckfest, a.k.a. the Tumblr of any bored teen, inevitably publishing under the username "nuclearchanukah," or "crackponies" or something. Sometimes the photolog blogs are totally awesome repositories of otherwise easily missed gems (Stuff and Nonsense, Maryam Nassir Zadeh). They are wordless compendiums, purposefully detached from their creators and expressly for the purpose of curating links and images. Other times the blogs that really take off rely solely on sharing their favorite finds from around the web, slickly edited together (Honestly...WTF). A mix is oftentimes nice to find and a nice mix is what I strive for on this blog - hopefully that doesn't come as a surprise to my readers! Said mix is a big sticking point though, as "stolen inspiration" is digital piracy to some and simply sharing to others.

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JORDAN GRACE OWENS X *fruitpunch

I'm sure many of you have by now noticed that *fruitpunch has gotten a bit of a redesign, but for those of you who may have missed it, be sure to take a look at this post in your browser. I've been working with artist Jordan Grace Owens over the past few months on getting some gorgeous new graphics and our end result is fruitier and punchier than anything before! I found Owens' work at an alternative craft fair over the holidays (you can see the card I picked up above) and felt her aesthetic really jived with my vision of the blog. Our art direction was a Wes Anderson anime with Warholian flair and I think we got something really gorgeous and fun. Hope you like it! Stop by Owens' Etsy shop and website to see more of her work.