rereading blogger

revisiting classic works from 2007-2015

above: my attempt at making sense of my inability to be, like a doctor or something, as shared on this blog post called “why geminis are the best workers”¹ from 2010

The other day, my brother alerted me to the fact that Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, in a not at all strategic move, are hosting a new podcast² where they will be rewatching every episode of the cult classic (?) Portlandia (which just happens to have recently been re-released on Netflix), giving us all the inside scoop.

Most surprising in this revelation was the fact that my brother seemed excited about it, as previously, when he lived in Portland, he had turned his nose up at the show, but then again, nostalgia does weird things to us, so I get it.

I enjoyed the show (Whole Foods IS corporate! Plus love a mayor Kyle MacLachlan) and will likely listen to the podcast (fast forwarding through the 50 minutes of ads sprinkled throughout the 45 min discussion) and will also likely reup my netflix subscription to rewatch it because marketing works.

I bring up this “rewatching ourselves from less than ten years ago” podcast not because I’m planning on dissecting the podcast, nor the show, but because it gave me an idea. And that idea was that it might be “fun” for me to go back and reread some of my classic writings from a past life, primarily when I was in my “sure I’ll try freelance writing” phase after I got a useless graduate degree in media studies.

So buckle up baby, because you are about to get an inside look into past me that you’ll (probably) never see anywhere else!

operation sparkle

Now, if you know me, you know that there are fewer things that make me swoon more than THRIFTING and DEALS. This was the entirety of the basis of a BLOG I started back in 2010 with my good friend Laurie, who also loves to thrift and deals.

As I don’t want to destroy either of our “careers,”³ I will not tell you what the blog title is in reference to⁴, but I WILL say that this blog really captures a moment in time, with its fuzzy banner (apparently we didn’t understand pngs and/or resolution), broken links to our other likewise fuzzy graphic headers⁵, and an elaborate tagging system that included categories ranging from “Meta Sweater,”⁶ to the decidedly deep and ambitious “Overcoming Racial Ethnic and Geographic Differences,” to “peter pan collars,” to “post traumatic thrifting syndrome⁷” and over TWO HUNDRED ENTRIES spanning the time of 2010-2012, documenting Laurie and my thrifting exploits. There is also a long sidebar list of “things we like” of which I haven’t clicked through, but am willing to bet that roughly 99% of the links no longer exist.

Unlike many of my writing samples, Operation Sparkle continues to exist online thanks to the good people over at Blogger who apparently are down to let us just hang out in perpetuity. Still, it’s not like I have it bookmarked or anything, so I had to google “operation sparkle blogger holly” to find it, and was THRILLED to note that the second link⁸ that popped up was a post titled “Retail Therapy As Seen With Capes,” which really just sets the scene for us.

Less google-able, but equally fun titles included posts such as “The Boundary-Pushing Velvet Frock,” “Has Anyone Seen My Pentagram Necklace?” and “What to Wear to a Nirvana Tribute Concert in Russia.” We were also incredibly committed to this project at certain times, as seen with a daily “Beltane to Memorial Day Countdown” and faithfully documenting and sharing about every thrifting trip we did, especially on vacations (the best kind of thrifting, obvs).

Now, while Operation Sparkle ultimately fizzled out once Laurie decided to focus more on her legitimate career of being a fashion designer, I ended up taking the path of leading me to…whatever I’m doing here. Perhaps a cautionary tale (stick with your blogging dreams!) as we could have, just maybe, become THE VOICES of the resale fashion craze.

Regardless of how we abandoned a good thing, Operation Sparkle remains, hands down, probably the thing I am most proud of in my writing career, ever. Read the magic of this rich text here!

other blogs

So in doing “research” for this post, I discovered (as I had suspected—recall how many of my past works were via publications that went the way of “RIP”?) that pretty much NONE of my “professionally published work” still exists on the internet because, unlike Blogger, no one was willing to continue footing the bill for citypages.com.

And thus, this “reread” quickly morphed into my various (still in existence!) blogger accounts covering 2007-2015, of which I evidently had EIGHT. Because I’m an insane person, apparently.

We have C.L.A.P. (Creative Ladies are Powerful), the community zine/group I started that later was passed to two of my buds/ longtime contributors, Shieva and Ryn. As most of the content on this blog is repurposing the print contributions from our writers, here you primarily just hear from me as I herd cats/try to get artists to send in their articles on time, but still, a cool capture from something that was a good time for a few years.

There’s my singular attempt at political humor writing with one post fervently defending my love for Bernie Sanders. There’s a couple (??? why not just one ???) that stand as my first attempts to share about my visual art (I think?), and one in which I document my freelance work (!!!!), all of which is, as I suspected, no longer available, but I DID grab this rundown of a series of articles (ignore the hyperlinks as I couldn’t figure out how to remove them) I wrote for the now defunct Ironing Board Collective which included:

• Week #3: Bully Blondes: Kate Hudson and the Rom Com (as influenced by my viewing of Something Borrowed)
  

• Week #4: The American Way: Growing up and getting "malled" by consumerism (all about the M.O.A., Claire's, Auntie Anne's and Hot Topic. Not to be missed).
  

• Week #5: Viva Sookie Stackhouse! Anti-style icon (everyone's favorite smutty vampire romance/mystery novel heroine/ tv show character)⁹
  

• Week #6: Shoes Oh My God Shoes: the case for comfort (a.k.a. heels are bullshit)
  

• Week #7 (after you write "week" that many times, it starts to look weird): Sew What? Handmade for everyone! (influence by my recent trip to the North Shore, I am going to start sewing all of my clothing by hand¹⁰)

I don’t remember writing a single one of these articles. This particular blog of mine is also relevant because it captures what is likely the first time I tried to coin the zingy (but apparently highly confusing) moniker of “creative communications.”

Strangely, I have yet ANOTHER blog that encompasses most of these topics (art, writing, vintage, etc.) with the same name as my one-off fashion magazine, Yoko in Mom Jeans, which I lost steam in continuing after a random person online freaked out at me for fetishizing asian culture because I had named my cat after Yoko Ono (and then named the magazine after an inside joke about said cat. It was a complicated web). This blog also appears to capture my VERY FIRST¹¹ blog post ever¹², from 2007 (!!!) musing on…I don’t even fucking know? the act of googling shit???¹³

above: a smattering of the genius that was my very first blog (covers face with hands…but at least i’m consistent?)¹⁴¹⁵

Apparently I wasn’t finished because then there is yet ONE MORE blog that also covers these topics and if that isn’t proof that I am a Double Gemini (count them: roughly FIVE blogs all on the same general themes of shit I like and do), I don’t know what is. This one includes some fun quips like “I love vintage. I love ladies. I love photographs. Put the three together and you have awesomeness;” a post that was just titled “Rocks” with the text “because I like them” and a photo of (you guessed it), some rocks; and an inspiring story that shared “A few years ago, we had this band staying at our house and one of the visitors made me a god's eye as a thank you. This token, along with a huge pot of bitchingly awesome chili, solidified their stay as one of the top strangers-sleeping-in-my-house events. Little did I know that it would set in place a series of events that would get me to where I am today.”

That’s all to say, I’d like to now take the time to pat myself on the back for sticking to JUST ONE substack¹⁶ for the over two years I’ve been on here. I see this as proof of my maturity and ability to reign it in, so good job old (like as in age, not past) me!

If you are still with me, thank you for taking this little trip down memory lane that is the hot mess of my blogger accounts! Kisses!

xo,

Holly

1. Jesus Christ.

2. One episode in and the most surprising piece of information I’ve gleaned is that Fred was apparently married to self-proclaimed Scientologist and (confusingly) feminist Elisabeth Moss?

3. Of which Laurie has an actual one.

4. Just know it involved Brandon Boyd, Jay Gordon of the band Orgy, a live stream and a soundtrack of “Nights in White Satin” by the Moody Blues. Let your imagination take you to where it wants to go with that one!

5. The last time I checked, they still existed, so not sure what’s happening there, but I sincerely hope it’s not a sign of Blogger’s ultimate demise. I’m not sure I could take it if Operation Sparkle went the way of my MySpace account.

6. TBH it STILL haunts me that I did not purchase the original meta sweater (which was a sweater that had an image of a sweater knit into it, with the word “SWEATER”), showing how, in many ways, Operation Sparkle doubled as a record of all my biggest thrifting regrets.

7. Unclear as to whether or not this condition is well documented in the DSM.

8. The first was our barely used former twitter account, with the description: Fashion blog about beating the system. Self-proclaimed thrift store stylists who want to show the world that thrifting your style is fun, affordable, and rad.

9. It goes without saying that I would pay an exorbitant amount of money to be able to read this today.

10. LOL

11. Maybe? TBH I’m getting pretty hot sitting here outside on my computer and tired of combing through blogger so we’re just gonna go ahead and say it is so.

12. Read this at your own peril. It makes literally no fucking sense, whatsoever.

13. My first think piece?

14. Okay, actually the deeper I go into this blog, the more I think it’s worth spending sometime poking around on. A blast from the past indeed!

15. I (for a moment) freaked out looking at this snapshot thinking that I was talking shit about Critical Mass, but really, that post was ironically titled in reference to some right wing POS who wrote an angry piece in the newspaper about the how these hippy dippy radicals were fucking up traffic. Sweet, naive 2007 Holly is so gravely incensed by this piece that it makes me laugh/cry to imagine her reaction if I told her what was to come. This post also illustrates my apparent habit of sending letters to the editor with grammatical errors, which is always a good look.

16. YES! I know I’ve also written on substack for Good Day Studios but as that is a collaborative project, let’s call it separate, shall we?