“Achieving” this rumpled slept-in look is key to living the relaxed, Hermette-ic lifestyle. We love the luxurious look of sleeping in your clothes in the middle of the day.
Afternoonwear doubles as napwear. Nightgowns as day-wear, sleeping in evening-wear, power nap suits… it’s all good. Keep people confused! The lewk is day-to-night-to-day-to-night. Dress codes, detonated!
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All of this activewear- everyone parading around with their mons pubis on display - the new category is inactive-wear where you look like you just sat down and fell asleep. Stop trying so hard! Passive-wear is watching the world pass it by - and is better rested for it.
Ah, the childlike wonder of sleeping alone in a twin bed… where your arms can dangle down both sides - you’re sleeping on all sides of the bed simultaneously… not calling yourself slumber royalty for some dumb reason - when beds get to be the size of California Kings - at this point it’s just like sleeping alone!
Sleep alone! In your clothes! In the daytime!
That’s enviable style!
Giant beds are stupid. Yet, even when we want to sleep alone, we have to clothe our beds in a twin sheet as though there’s some other dead twin we’re left to grieve. Can’t a person ever just be alone?!
How to signal your affection for people while letting them know that you don’t feel like talking to them. And that you respect that they, even if they miss you, may have no desire to talk to you.
It feels like friendships need tending to, like plants do. Friends are like a bunch of balloons you need to keep in the air. Personally, I also worry about people, and I worry that they might be getting mad at me if I don’t give them the attention they require.
Often I think of someone and want to reach out to them but I also want to be left alone.
I propose a new universal signal for keeping friends and for keeping friends at bay.
Send them the Double Crab.
🦀🦀
It means United In Solitude.
The proper response to this message is:
🦀🦀
By double-crabbing each other, you’ll be both making contact and also leveling any power dynamic that makes one person seem thirstier than the other by saying “I salute your right to be alone and I second that emotion.”
Respectful appreciation of aloneness is a powerful symbol that will help women who worry about people getting mad at them to reach out and pinch someone as if to say, I’m thinking of you and/but let’s both be left alone together.
Or simply add the Double crab after your name as a sign to alert people that you are hermetically inclined.
What better way to connect than to connect about the desire to be left alone?
It somehow makes the world feel less pressured and less lonely and more in agreement with the world around you.
No matter how much you like to be alone, it’s nice to be understood. 🦀🦀
We want to love and be loved and we want to be alone.🦀🦀
One of the great pleasures of being a Hermette is going down rabbit holes.
This time, I fell into a lint trap.
While looking for an illustration for The Magazine’s recent I AM LINTY article, I found the art of Slater Barron , who made portraits and l’installations out of dryer lint.
I am particularly moved by the many linty portraits she did of her mother who had Alzheimer’s disease.
These maternal lint-works are hilariously and tragically about domestic drudgery, frailty and the ephemeral and disposable nature of women and their work. About waste and the hidden hazards that haunt domesticity.
Jennifer Lin, Slater Barron’s daughter, kindly agreed to let me use her mother’s work for the Magazine.
I spoke to Jennifer Lin about being a Hermette, about houseflies, poisonous pies, 70s West Coast feminist performance artists, Johnny Carson, and about where her mother got ahold of all that lint.
Clink here to hear the l‘interview with Jennifer Lin, daughter of Slater Barron.
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My l’interview with artist Slater Barron’s daughter, Jennifer Lin.
Six O’Clock Evening News by Slater Barron. L’installation 8 feet x 15 feet x 20 feet. Media: Lint, found objects, mixed media, slides, and recorded sound.
Mother, 1984 (60″ x 40″) Media: Lint
Mother 1986 (60” x 40”) Media: Lint
Mother 1990 (60” x 40”) Lint
Some of the things I asked Slater Baron’s daughter, Jenny Lin, (and some of the things I didn’t):
Did your mother enjoy being alone?
How did she guard her alone time?
How old were you when she began making art?
Did you make art together?
Why was lint something she wanted to work with?
Did she buy and wash colorful things to make her work?
What are some of your favorite pieces?
There’s something so maternal about lint. What do you think?
What are your ambitions for your mother’s work?
What would you think of it if she weren’t your mother?
How did she feel about her work? What was her relationship to it?
How can people collect her work?
My mother put drier lint outside for the birds to use in their nests. Did yours?
The Irascibles - the dashing Slater Barron is in the back row far left - the group is recreating the group portrait of the Abstract Expressionists in NYC by photographer Nina Leen.
Lastly, a totally charming interview of Slater Barron by Californian historian Huell Howser.
Biography of Slater Barron
by Carol Norcross
Slater Barron (1930–2020) was a Southern California feminist artist known for her use of unconventional materials, controversial themes, and supportive nurturing of artists.
She was strongly connected to the Orange County/Long Beach art community and she became well known throughout California due to her interviews with PBS host Huell Howser. Barron attended Orange Coast College, University of California, Irvine, and California State University, Long Beach. She taught at UCI Extension, Brooks College in Long Beach, FIDM/Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, Interior Designers Institute, and other colleges. She organized exhibitions of Orange County women artists in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s when the art world was virtually closed to them, wrote articles and poetry, and was featured in national magazines (Time) and on television (Johnny Carson and others).
Barron’s work could explore difficult topics such as child abuse, the terror of war, the hope (and heartbreak) of marital bliss, and the ravages of her parents’ Alzheimer’s disease, often with a light touch and humor. Her lung cancer was the inspiration for lyrical paintings. Family life made her explore what is now considered a “feminist”medium, dryer lint.
Barron’s name itself was a statement of life as a female artist at that time. Born Marylou Slater, she created an alias cobbled from this and her husband’s last name, Barron, hoping that her work wouldnot be dismissed out of hand because of her sex.
Barron seriously started exploring art when she was in her mid 40s, but led an interesting life long before that.
After college, she became a social worker, for her it was heart wrenching to see families in tragic circumstances. Needing a career change, Slater joined the U.S. Navy as an officer where she helped young service members and their families.
Marriage to a Marine officer followed, they lived on military bases around the U.S. and in France with four children in tow. They settled in Southern California in 1969. In 1970, a permanent home in Orange County, allowed her to pursue her passion for art at Orange Coast College. She soon transferred to University of California, Irvine, where she completed a bachelor degree in Studio Art.
Whileshe was much older than most of the students, she became part of the Orange County art scene, participated and created some of the first feminist exhibits in the area, and collected ephemera from everything she attended or was a participant. Her life experiences found their way into her art.
From 1974 to 1978 Barron attended California State University, Long Beach, for an MFA in Studio Art and created two large works, Barrons of Seventh Street about a summer spent with her family in a sketchy Long Beach motel and Reality and Romance, possibly about her abusive marriage.
It was in 1974 that she realized that lint produced by her clothes dryer was an abundant, inexpensive material at hand. She became a “freeway flier” teaching wherever she could, attending CSULB and always doing art. Her main diet during this time consisted of coffee, cigarettes, and a box of Hostess Ding Dongs.
She realized that both of her parents were showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease and in 1981 she acquired 1000 pounds of upholstery stuffing made from recycled lint and bathrobes and began doing large installations, often about Alzheimer’s. She felt that this material was painterly and impressionistic but also expressed their fragile world.
My Mother’s Garden and Six O’Clock News were about her parents’ deteriorating condition. The Magic Laundry Room (I, II, and III) about home life, Escape from the Castle about the wives of Henry VIII were shown at university galleries in California and Arizona. Barron embraced this alternative, feminist material that was intimately connected to a woman’s sphere.
Because of the novelty of dryer lint, Barron was given the nickname “the Lint Lady” early on. PBS host Huell Howser interviewed her in 1988 for his Videolog program about her installation of Six O’Clock News at Whittier College. He would interview her again in 2007 for Visiting with Huell Howser. Both exhibits dealt with Alzheimer’s disease.
Over the years, Barron explored lint in many different ways, creating books, portraits,“paintings,” and delicate reproductions of sushi and candy using this material. She continues to have exhibitions on her art. Her work is included in the permanent collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Long Beach Museum of Art, Chapman University, and the Smithsonian White House Collection.
- - April 2024
To purchase or exhibit work or to learn more about the artist, contact Jenny Lin at www.slaterbarron.com
Weirdly, the very day that the I AM LINTY issue was published, this came up in the NYTimes puzzle! Thank you Herms. Maria R and Margaret B. for sending this.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Linty people and not-linty people.
Six O’Clock News installation sculpted in lint by artist Slater Barron. #LintLife
Fresh from the dryer, lint is weirdly l’intimate.
What is a linty person?
Linty people naturally attract lint. There’s often lint on them or there’s just something linty about them. It’s a relaxed aesthetic that’s attractive to many people and animals and their hair or fur.
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Linty people get very nervous staying at the houses of the Not-Linty because they know they’re going to mess something up.
Not-linty people wear clothing that seems to magically stay ironed. They have no qualms about buying a white sofa. Their cars don’t have Cheerios or crud in the cracks. They never have crumbs on their boobs or in their beards.
It may be something genetic or electromagnetic but as far as I can tell it hasn’t yet been studied. Science cannot or will not explain the linty v. not-linty phenomenon.
How is it possible? How has this trait that bifurcates all of civilization for all time never been discussed?
It’s crucial to see the linty in the world because linty-ness (or non) can create a never-before-experienced international sense of kinship.
We can transcend old divisions and find new alliances.
If people took the time to identify lint-wise, they would recognize the affection for each other that goes beyond religion, gender, language, nationality, age, skin color, height, taste in music, aversion or non-aversion to meat, or any of the just-as-random things we use to divide us.
There is nothing inherently superior or inferior about being linty or not-linty. And, anyway, there’s nothing you can do to control it or change it.
It’s just the way you are and you’ll never switch from one to the other until the day you die. (And when you die they will make you look non-linty even if you never were. This is weird and should stop.)
I am linty. And now that I’ve told you about it, you’ll begin to see how central it is to your identity to be or not to be linty.
Robert Oppenheimer, Amal Clooney, Mitt Romney, Kamala Harris, Paul Lynde, Ali Wong: NOT LINTY.
Bette Midler, Questlove, Billie Eilish, Margaret Cho, Kurt Vonnegut, Ozzy Osbourne, Bernie Sanders, Fred Flintstone: LINTY.
We are linty. Or we are not linty.
Let’s embrace it. Let’s roll each other all over with lint rollers. Let’s feel the magnetic attraction!
Imagine: the world’s divisions, obliterated and replaced by one warm and fuzzy binary.
ARE YOU LINTY?
Little bits of fluff and stuff seem drawn to me. Y/N
There is often something on my shirt, in my hair, or on my face. Y/N
I feel linty. Y/N
I am attracted to linty people, almost as though we share a religion. Y/N
My heart is at ease in linty places. Y/N
I like linty yoga places more than non-linty yoga places. Y/N
I enjoy eating in linty restaurants. Y/N
I might wish I could become not-linty but I know I never will. Y/N
If you answered YES to any of these questions, you are one linty individual. If you’re Not Linty, congratulations and how do you manage to be so repellent, lint-wise?
Are you, perchance, linty?
#Lintlife
Hermette Magazine is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
