About Me
Joon Oluchi Lee
I’m a girl who loves red lipstick... oh, sorry...I sometimes forget...I’m a boy who loves red lipstick, a boy who also loves to love boys. But I’m also a Korea-born, Midwest-bred, Virginia-groomed, Bay Area-harvested faggotte who is above all a black feminist.
A couple Saturdays ago, my partner-in-crime Trace made this observation as if she were welcoming an old friend: “You’re wearing your favorite shirt!” So I was: an original, circa mid-1970s tee-shirt in glorious beige emblazoned with the image of one of my favorite records, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. Or more accurately: so it seemed as though I were wearing my favorite shirt. In fact, I was wearing a copy of my favorite shirt. And when I say “copy,” I don’t mean “reproduction,” an icky knock-off with a computer-scanned image ink-jetted onto an American Apparel shirt. No, I mean a literal copy: I’ve been owning a 70s Rumours tee that I bought in Berkeley back in 1998, but the shirt I was wearing when hanging out with Trace was another 70s original that I recently bought on ebay by sheer dumb luck/ fated miracle. Yes, I possess two of the same old and used tee-shirt.
Hence the images below, which is actually not the same photo or even two photos of me in the same outfit but two different photos that look the same from afar. In the first photo, I’m wearing my first vintage Rumours shirt, the one bought in 1998. In the second, I’m wearing my new vintage Rumours shirt, bought 2010. Even though I do collect all kinds of Fleetwood Mac shirts, I love this specific model of shirt most of all because one, the image: the quasi-Victorian meets ballet meets sorcery: that’s me. Also, printed on beige, it’s roughly the tone of nude pantyhose. Wearing it, I feel chicly redundant, like I’m wearing my own skin over my own skin. The two shirts above are almost identical, save the idiosyncrasies of wear-and-tear of the decades. The Berkeley one was pretty worn when I bought it. It was already so soft from repeated wearing that for my “wild” twenties, it was my favorite shirt to wear on hangover Sundays: aaaahh the memory of sitting around watching old Joan Crawford movies eating pizza or Jack-in-the-Box while in a state of painful yet fuzzily comforting debilitation, snuggled against a solid sofa of a husband body, cocooned in a tee shirt that spoke to the unique alchemy of tee shirts: cotton can become silk through years of abuse. So now, having logged twelve years of wear on this war-torn body, it’s become almost transparent, the neckhole rib stretched beyond bounce.
The second copy of the shirt is in a weird condition. Textile-wise, it is in much better shape—the cotton is soft but not thin, not near translucence. Judging by the length of the torso, the crispness of the tell-tale 70s tag and the intense black of the silk screen, it was worn but hasn’t been washed and dried. It probably spent most of its life in storage. Yet it has strange black-edged holes all over that look like cigarette burns. And there is one particular hole that punctures the “O” in “Rumours” that Trace said is “shaped like a heart.” Weirdly, the hole goes all the way through the back of the shirt, as if someone really did put out a cigarette on the shirt while it was lying helpless on a table. The cigarette hole is, appropriately enough, on the left side, so the hole is literally over my heart. So when I wear it, I feel all cheesily romantic—like someone put a cigarette out on my heart. (Awwwwwww)
http://lipstickeater.blogspot.com/20...takes-two.html