Just now, moments ago, I completed a years-long saga to replace my day-to-day glasses. The last time I had regular-person glasses I was still slaving away, polishing pixels cut raw from the bit-mines for the man.

I’ve been resisting hopping on the “thick rims” bandwagon for long enough now. I have to admit I’ve lost the argument. Jared linked me to a Globe article about aesthetics which was helpful, but keeping those guides in mind I wanted to step outside the bounds a little.

I was at the doctor getting some pills topped and saw, incongruously, a copy of Paper in the waiting room. I made a note and checked their blog when I got home.

By an incredible stroke of luck they had a post up talking about glasses. I checked out the company they mentioned, Warby Parker, and loved their chutzpah:

Most high-end fashion house brands don’t design or produce their own eyewear. They sell those rights to massive international companies that do it all for them. These large companies control the market and sell frames and lenses to retailers for astronomical prices. Then retailers mark up frames and lenses an additional 2-3 times before selling them to you.

Yeah! Stick it to whomever! Goo Goo Goggles, I guess!

WP also gives a pair of glasses to a person in the developing world for each pair you buy and their Virtual Try-On is easy to use, and actually kinda fun. Cheap, socially-responsible, well-designed eyewear, all through a high-tech interface. And they make a monocle.

Sold! But they don’t ship to Canada. Otherwise I would totally be rocking their specs:

Cross-border shipping is doable but ridiculously complicated for some reason. The basic idea is to get it shipped to somewhere just over the border, like Point Roberts, and then drive over and pick it up. K-Lo the American, for example, recommends TSB Shipping.

But! There’s also Clearly Contacts, an unfortunately-named online glasses retailer in Vancouver which has some style:

However, Clearly Contacts’ website is effing terrible: The worst combination of poorly thought out, slow, and badly implemented. The virtual mirror (comparable to Warby’s “Virtual Try-On”) is just crap — it doesn’t do enough processing and doesn’t autoconfigure your webcam. But no worries: even if you can get it to work the results aren’t worth it.

Worse, there’s no “back to search” button on the details pages, so if you decide you don’t like a pair — and most of them you won’t — you have to start your search again from the top. But it’s not even that easy: it retains some of your search information and manages it so poorly you’ll have random fragments of old searches come back to terrorize you regularly. To get around this, use the “Clear All” buttons they provide liberally (you should also use a popular browser).

Weak! But they do ship to Canada — they’re based in Vancouver — their prices are ridiculously cheap, cheaper than Warby and about four times cheaper than local retail like Goo Goo, and you get a bunch of free stuff with your purchase like a chamois and case. They also have a bunch of customizations, like lens material and tinting. Clearly can do prescription sunglasses, for example, while Warby doesn’t (but then, Clearly doesn’t have a monocle).

If you choose to order from CC, make sure you Google around for coupons. I managed to get 25% off after a one minute Google, saving me millions — seriously though, at these prices you could have six-to-eight pairs for what it costs to get one pair of store-bought Dolces.

Last, Clearly will ship Canada Post or FedEx. They charge the same price, but FedEx delivers faster and Canada Post has taken to robbing me. Guess which got my coin?

… is ad-heavy, but pretty awesome:

Again, I like the weirdness more than the music — though this is a decent club track. I’ve long thought that using digital artifacts in art might be fun. I think this is that.

Again, notice Gaga’s vision/eye-obsession.

First, Lady Gaga on fashion (via CNN):

Second, Alexander McQueen (worn by Gaga) committed suicide today. Here’s a brief retrospective. First, a sampling from 1995′s Highland Rape collection, themed on the English rape of Scotland:

2008′s re-take on Victorian fashion:

2009′s Escher-inspired gown with a trash heap of old design props:

2010′s infinitely-long catwalk, from the show he simulcast online:

I read somewhere that Lady Gaga wrote songs by, first, picking the outfit she would perform them in. Some glossy rag sampled her thusly: “Fashion saved my life.”

Here’s her latest joint, “Bad Romance” via BB (click through for video of Gaga rocking a talent show in her NYU days). Check the outfits:

Gaga’s is the first pop act that’s come along in quite a while — basically since MJ’s Thriller days — that I enjoy, and her style has much to do with that. Her music is take-it-or-leave-it, but as a platform for her personality it works. I like how her work is quietly obsessed with eyes, vision, seeing.

The title of this post is a Pharrell quote. The video is from InterScope-Geffen-A&M‘s official YouTube channel — thank you, IGA, for making embedding easy.

Coco Chanel revolutionized modern women’s fashion:

I bickered through the trailers because I was feeling anxious. I noticed that what I was talking nonsense so I popped an Ativan and settled in for the film.

Coco is about a desperately mentally ill Nietszchean transvestite. Poor, she uses aesthetics, intelligence, and vast social transgressions to rise above. She rocks the fashion world from the top down but remains essentially isolated forever.

The movie rarely gets into her inspiration or creative process. You see some ripping, chalking, and sewing, but her creations just kind of materialize when she needs them. Her notable decision to dress like a fisherman is one of the only, though best, examples. By the end you see how, maybe, she wouldn’t have been the nicest boss — shades of Lucille Bluth — but you’re on her side.

There’s a lot of beautiful photography in the film, like the scenes at the racetrack, the beach, French estates, and the fashion show at the end. The car crash is also well-shot. I’m beginning to pay more attention to photographic choices and there’s nothing better for seeing that stuff than playing with a camera yourself. Right now I’m noticing how cameras move at scene changes — in that film they were rarely still.

What else is there to say? It’s a French character study. Not a lot happens. You’re supposed to get into Coco’s mind, and I think Ativan helped.

The drug was surprisingly mild. There are all these warnings on the packaging about ending up in jail. It’s a date rape drug and it was a passenger on Michael Jackson’s and Heath Ledger’s last trips, so it holds a dark romantic fascination. That said, I can almost convince myself that I’m on sugar pills. “No strange effects, no drug cloud, no anxiety” I scribbled in my commonplace book.