Hey ladies!

Okay, this is for any female readers out there. Or actually, any readers who wear make-up (because I don't judge).

So, I'm looking to buy some make-up for this whole wedding party thing happening in about a month. Items such as: foundation, eye shadow, lip stick, and other things that are as foreign to me as the Mandarin language.

Here is where you come in: does anyone have recommendations for what the good stuff is, and what I should avoid like a leprous appendage? I'm really quite clueless when it comes to this stuff. I blame my feminist mother (love you mom!).

Overall, I would like to look pretty, but not like I am covered in a layer of flesh-colored frosting. Any suggestions?

xoxo - C

You're All I Need

The invitation:



The inspiration:



By now, you've all hopefully received your invitations to our shindig in October. If not - contact us!! And if not again, how do you even know about this blog?? Anyway, we decided fairly early on that we wanted to replicate an album cover for our invitations. For Colleen, there are too many beautiful stationery designs to ever choose the one design that she could live with without going slowly bananas after the order had been placed. And we wanted something out of the ordinary, that would hopefully represent our love of music. There were a few album covers contemplated, but the Marvin Gaye/Tammi Terrell cover was so sweet and simple, and honestly - fairly easy to replicate.

So our friend John came to our apartment one morning and shot many photos of us doing our best Tammi and Marvin. And did an amazing job capturing the vintage-ness of the shot, and the angles, and everything. Then another friend, Andrea took the chosen photo and some fairly loose ideas about what we wanted, and created some pretty unique and amazing invitations.

When the invitations came in the mail from the production company, we were so excited and eager to send them out to everyone. Then we remembered that we actually had to assemble them, and the excitement made way for mad resolution and the need for a bit more caffeine. But our friend Leah stepped up and helped in a major way with the cutting, folding, stuffing, etc. that was needed, and we're ever so grateful... Here are a few shots of Colleen and Leah, hard at work:


This seemed funny at the time.


Leah hard at work at the assembly line. The photo is blurry because she was fast as lightning.


Colleen thought the back of the mailing envelopes looked like little monster faces.

And here are some shots of the aftermath:







So the moral of the story of our invitations is: friends are awesome. We are very grateful for all of the help that has been offered to us as we check off our "to do list" leading up to October 3, including with the invites. And we are pretty proud of how they turned out - dropping them off at the post office felt like nudging nestlings out of the nest. Or, maybe that's a tad dramatic...

xoxo
c+r

PS - Don't forget to RSVP!

Favorite Place: Lurie Garden, Millenium Park

As promised, we're going to use this whole blog thing to highlight some of our favorite places in Chicago. We want to get you excited to come visit our fair city, and figured what better way than to take you on a tour (albeit virtual) of some cool spots, shops, nooks and eateries.

First up, Colleen's choice: The Lurie Garden at Millenium Park



The Lurie Garden is the perfect little hideaway right in the middle of the city. It has these amazing, 15-foot high hedgerows on the north and west side of the garden, which protect the plants within, and also make the interior of the garden feel surprisingly tranquil, given that busy Michigan Avenue is so close by. The hedgerows themselves are called the "Shoulder Hedges," meant to represent Carl Sandburg's idea that Chicago is the "City of Big Shoulders."



Within the 5-acre garden are tons of perennials, grasses and shrubs, which sway in the city breezes.



Another highlight are the hardwood bridges bordered with tiny water streams. In the summer, it's fun to slip your shoes off and dip your tired feet into the water. By October, that might be a fun experiment with hypothermia. But the walkways are beautiful nonetheless.



And the best part of all? The Lurie Garden is right smack in the middle of Millenium Park, making it very easy to get to. So, here's the plan: grab a coffee or tea at any one of the many nearby cafes, then take Washington Avenue east, across Michigan Avenue and into Millenium Park. Once you get to the Pritzger Pavilion (it's the giant metal ampitheater at the north end of Millenium Park), hang a right (that's south). The entrance to Lurie Garden is past the Pritzger lawn. Go in, sip your tea, have a walk and take a breath. It's a lovely place to relax and contemplate all of the fun things you've done/you're going to do in Chicago.

Map by Rodrigo

For those of you who prefer visuals, here is how you can get to our party in October. Click on the map, and it'll get really big! Then you can print it! Computers are so much fun...

Unflattering portraiture

Yesterday, Rodrigo and I took a stroll into Bucktown, for the explicit purpose of getting a portrait made. An ugly portrait. The good folks at Renegade Handmade were hosting the Misanthrope Specialty Co., so that some Chicagoans could get unflattering portraits made of themselves. We jumped at the chance to have severely ugly versions of ourselves hanging on our wall, and I couldn't be happier with the result:


Aitor, our portraitist, captured every feature I was hoping he would emphasize: my upturned snout, Rodrigo's scruff, my John Travolta-esque chin. And, bonus!, he also seems to have given me a goiter and elfin ears, and Rodrigo an unseemly large nose. We brought the portrait home and instantly housed it in the gaudiest frame we had:

Definitely check out the other unflattering portraits on Misanthrope Specialty Co.'s site - you can even submit your own photo via e-mail!

xoxo
C

Something to look forward to

Honestly, it's about time Rodrigo got a little doofier. He's just so able to accomplish tasks and press buttons and ... be generally capable. It's so annoying. I can't wait until he's breaking things or trying in vain to figure out how things work or burning the apartment down.

xoxo
C

colleen vs. rodrigo: random rules

since we want to make this reception the dance party of the (albeit young) century, we've been thinking a lot about music.

we are of the firm belief that a person's musical taste is an interesting way to get to know them, and since we haven't seen many of you in quite a while, we stole this idea from the onion's a.v. club, in order to give people a taste of who we are through what's streaming into our ears.

here's how it works: we each grab our iPods, and set them on shuffle. then we comment on the first five songs that come up. then the other person is allowed to ask a follow-up question or make a comment. no hiding guilty pleasures (rodrigo!). it's us, in five-song increments.

#1
rodrigo
The Happy Song (Dum-Dum) - Otis Redding

I'm very glad this song came up first. There's no guilt in loving Otis Redding. I have to admit that I'm a bigger fan of his ballads. If you like Otis or Al Green or Marvin Gaye or Sam Cooke, we are destined to be friends. If not, we are going to have words. Stern words.

colleen: Which of Otis's ballads is your favorite then?
rodrigo: "I've Been Loving You Too Long" might be one of the top ones. The MGs (Otis's backing band) - their dynamics and their control is... solid. It needs to be studied.

colleen
Electioneering - Radiohead

I have to admit, I think this is my least favorite song off of this album (OK Computer). Not to say that it's a bad song, just that the other songs on this album - like Let Down, Karma Police and No Surprises - are blow-your-face-off amazing, that for me, this one pales a little. It doesn't quite have the Thom Yorke weirdness that I crave.

rodrigo: which thom yorke song satisfies your weirdness craving?
colleen: I don't even have to think about this one - "We Suck Young Blood (Your Time is Up)" from Hail to the Thief. it's so creepy and slow, with the thick hand claps and then the up-tempo piano freak-out in the middle. yum.

#2
rodrigo
Come to Me (Unplugged) - Björk

I'm not surprised Björk came up. I have an unneccessary amount of Björk on my iPod, that I've slowly trimmed from the 500+ songs that were on it. Or maybe it was one gigabyte. When we were first dating, we listened to a lot of her album Vespertine, and I still think that's a pretty perfect album. This Unplugged album is a pretty neat bootleg. Björk always finds talented and weird musicians to bring her strange little songs to life.

colleen: do you secretly want to make out with Björk? It's okay - I kind of do...
rodrigo: It's never been a secret.

colleen
The Empty - Le Tigre

"I went to your concert and I didn't feel anything." Ouch, Kathleen Hanna. I love Le Tigre. It's one of the few "loud" bands that I was obsessed with in college that I still frequently listen to. You know, in between all of the Yanni. And "Eau de Bedroom Dancing" off of this album is so beautiful - that weird mournful guitar and the Casio beat? There's a reason it's "Bedroom Dancing" and not "Kitchen" or "Garage Dancing." You dig?

rodrigo: I dig. Whose mustache do you admire more: Yanni's or JD from Le Tigre?
colleen: Well, considering that the hormones were against her and she was up against a Greek guy, I'd have to say JD's. It's formidable.

#3
rodrigo
Beat My Head Against the Wall - Black Flag

I was an angry youth. This is my favorite Black Flag record. They were getting real dark. Cynical. I once put the song "I Love You" off of this record (My War) on a mixed tape for a girl I was dating in high school. It really creeped her out.

colleen: I want to hear it. * Listens* Yeah - that's a restraining order waiting to happen, dude. Did you put it on the tape as a joke?
rodrigo: She was rightfully creeped out. The joke was, here's a mixtape full of potentially sentimental, definitely 'heart-on-sleeve' songs; and to end it all, the punchline is a song that is absolutely terrifying. I do like the song - it's a dark tune. The guy's losing his mind, going to some scary places.

colleen
Ragged Wood - Fleet Foxes

This song was the hook that baited me to first buy this album (Fleet Foxes). I love the harmonies so much, and how old-timey so much of their subject matter seems to be at first listen - it's a lot like Midlake in that way. Except Midlake actually does sing about old-timey stuff like mountaineers and raising barns. Fleet Foxes just sounds old-timey, but Robin Pecknold is really just singing about his family. When he's not raising baby birds in his beard. And now that I've listened to the album another, oh... 500 times, I'd say that "Blue Ridge Mountains" is currently my favorite track.

#4
rodrigo
Good Times - Sam Cooke

I have a lot of favorite Sam Cooke songs - this is one of them. "Come on and let the good times roll. We gon' stay here till we soothe our souls... if it take all night long." Such a great lyric. So simple. Sometimes you need to stay longer than all night to soothe your soul. That's how we wound up together.

colleen: And doesn't the xylophone marimba in this song remind you of the cartoon skeleton playing his own ribs?
rodrigo: It does. I'll think of it as one of those clever musical metaphors that Sam Cooke managed to work into his songs: even the guy with neither dermis nor epidermis can get down and make the best of the situation. Play his ribs, join the party.

colleen
I Can't Really Talk About It - El Perro del Mar

Because she is Swedish and has a bit of an accent, I thought for about six months that she was actually saying " I Can Really Talk About It," which really changes the dynamic of the song. Like - " I could go on and on about it, girl!" instead of the correct "It's too hard for me to talk about it right now," or maybe "the person that I'm mad at is in the room right now, so I can't really talk about it." Either way, she has a really unique way of capturing the sound of Motown girl groups, making it sound a bit more depressing (probably because of the lack of light in the wintertime in Scandinavia) but also sugary.

rodrigo: Because she repeats "I Can't Really Talk About It" over and over in the song, it's funny to think of it being heard as "I CAN Really Talk About It." As if she's threatening to actually talk about it, without ever actually saying anything about it, or ever getting to it.

#5
rodrigo
Eleanor Rigby - The Beatles

This is a brilliant song. This is one of the Beatles songs that's been covered with the least degree of success, I think. Aretha Franklin did an okay job. I think Irma Thomas did a version that's kinda wack. It's very hard to improve upon this original, let alone reinterpret something so singular.

colleen: Well said, Palma. Well said.

colleen
The Big Guns - Jenny Lewis with The Watson Twins

The tussle over "alt-country cred" aside, I really enjoy this record. I think Jenny Lewis has a nice songwriting style that gets overshadowed a bit in all of the Rilo Kiley pomp. This album seems simpler, but still heavy on narrative, and those Watson Twins are phenomenal. This song's guitar and drum sounds have definitely been done before, but I think Lewis takes inventive risks with her lyrics. However, I do not really enjoy the cover of the Traveling Wilburys' song "Handle With Care." Sorry, Conor Oberst. You O'Whine too much.

rodrigo: Do you like Jenny Lewis more for having had a small role on a Golden Girls episode?
colleen: There are no small roles - only small actors. And since she was seven or eight at the time, she was pretty small. Especially standing next to Bea Arthur. R.I.P.