"The problem is that children believe what adults say, and once they're adults themselves, they exact their revenge by deceiving their own children. "Life has meaning and we grown-ups know what it is" is the universal lie that everyone is supposed to believe. Once you become an adult and you realize it's not true, it's too late. The mystery remains intact, but all your available energy has long ago been wasted on stupid things. All that's left is to anesthetize yourself by trying to hide the fact that you can't find any meaning in your own life, and then, the better to convince yourself, you deceive your own children.... I wonder if it wouldn't be simpler just to teach children right from the start that life is absurd."
- Profound Thought No. 1- The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery
Thursday, August 20, 2009
The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Friday, August 14, 2009
Parking Meter Happiness
I want one of these. Room for 10 quarters, and a timer to remind you when your parking meter is about to expire. Genius.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Living in the thick of chronology
Article in the New York Times, By Verlyn Klinkenborg
Published: March 28, 2009
The last time I stayed at the house up the hill and around the corner from Point Reyes Station, Calif., there were Holsteins grazing on the tidal flats below. Now the tidal flats have been restored, the cows are gone, and all day long the equilibrium shifts before my eyes. On one tide Tomales Bay runs up into Lagunitas Creek. On the next tide, Lagunitas Creek runs out into Tomales Bay. No matter what time of day it is, the wind tends to confuse the appearance of the tides, depending on how it’s blowing.
I suppose those old Holsteins were tidal creatures in some sense — eating salt grass, their udders filling and emptying like the flats themselves. But now the creek channel spills out across the mud and the grass twice a day, and birds rise and settle without ceasing. Now, it’s possible to feel the bay respiring. The water is constantly catching me by surprise. I look, and there’s a bright, wind-tugged sheet of it from here to Inverness. I look again, and the light adheres strictly to the creek channel, eeling its way across the darkness.
Vultures flare just above my head, and quail start across the lawn. An osprey dangles in the stiff wind, then folds and drops on its prey. Great egrets practice their stillness, and above them, looking out across the flats, I find myself thinking of all the chronologies in which I live, all the ways a life gets measured out. The least familiar of them is the one right before me — the coming and going of the tides. I find a suspense in it, a constant sense of expectation. I consult a tide chart and note that the tide is ebbing, but I’m not experienced enough to feel it. The best I can do is see where the water is now, and then where it is an hour from now. It’s like having to look repeatedly at the sun to guess its direction across the sky.
I always tell my writing students to avoid chronology, because we live utterly in the thick of it. We need no reminding how it works. But that’s what I love about watching these flats. They undermine my landlocked sense of chronology. The day comes to an end, but the tide may be ebbing or flooding. Morning breaks, but the tide may be ebbing or flooding. The perfectly cyclical nature of the tides feels, somehow, counter-cyclical to my understanding of the flow of time. If time were like the tides, we would surge into the future and rush back to the past, twice daily, while the narrow balance point we call the present worked its way steadily forward.
Surely the egrets and the ospreys and the plovers understand all of this intuitively. So do the flocks of waterfowl that beat their way out over the bay. I suspect those long-gone Holsteins also would think of the tides as a wonderment in this otherwise sensible world. VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Friday, March 27, 2009
Dream Interiors
I want to live here.
I love Design*Sponge. They recently did a spread on this house, decorated by Jessica Helgerson Interior Design. I keep going back and looking at all the details in every room. I love the kitchen. I love the sink IN the kitchen.
I love the details of the crisp white walls, and the clean crisp dark trim. In the hallway, I love the way the light fixture creates a pattern along the walls.
It's perfect.Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Green halls and memories, encased in glass
of course, so now I am seeing people right and left, collecting those images. And I kind of love that.
I like this one. I like the green and the matching simple black frames with matching white mats, and just the idea of it. I would love to do something like this in my hallway.
Monday, March 9, 2009
The Perfect Bath
When I was little, I told myself that they were backgrounds for my paper dolls (which they were).
When I got older and put away such childish things, I missed these imaginary trips into pictures of beautiful places.
And then I was old enough to get magazine subscriptions of my own. Then, I justified my clippings by telling myself that I was developing my taste, I was preparing the groundwork for the day I would own a home of my own.
And that might even be partially true. But mostly, I am still looking at the pictures and playing pretend.
In my perfect house, there is a small cabin in the back yard. A one room shack really. It is surrounded on at least three sides by sliding rice paper screens (or possibly something more substantial... ) It is surrounded by Japanese style gardens. Sometimes it is my art studio. Sometimes it is a separate meditation retreat. Sometimes, I imagine it looks just like this picture, and I go there sometimes, when it's raining, and sit in the warm and steamy water and watch the water trickle through the leaves.
Image from Apartment TherapyOf course, for pure beauty of the bath, this outdoor bathroom, looking out over the ocean, would also suffice.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Queen of the South
Quotes from Queen of the South by Arturo Perez-Reverte
“Books are doors that lead out onto the street,” Patricia would tell her.
“You learn from them, educate yourself, travel, dream, imagine, live other lives, multiply your own life a thousand times. Where can you get more for your money, Mexicanita? And they also keep all sorts of bad things at bay: ghosts, loneliness, shit like that. Sometimes I wonder how you people that don’t read figure out how to live your lives.”
“I want you real awake for what I’m going to tell you,” said Patty, recognizable again.
“I am very fucking awake,” said Teresa. And she was prepared to listen.
She had emptied another glass of tequila as they walked, and then had set the glass down at some point on the path. And being awake- she thought, without knowing what made her think it- was very much like being all right again. Like finding yourself unexpectedly at home in your own skin. Without thoughts, without memories. Just the immense night and the familiar voice speaking in a secretive whisper, as if someone might be crouching in the shadows, spying on them in that strange light silvering the broad vineyards. And she could also hear the chirping of crickets, the sound of her friend’s footsteps, and she swishing of her own bare feet- she had left her heels on the terrace- on the loose soil of the path.
It occurred to Teresa that every human being has a hidden story, and that if you were quiet enough and patient enough you could finally hear it. And that that was good, a lesson that was important to learn. A lesson that was, above all, useful.
The advantage of books, she discovered, was that you could appropriate the lives, stories, and thoughts they contained, and you were never the same person when you closed them as when you had opened them for the first time. Very intelligent people had written some of those pages, and if you were able to read with humility, patience, and the desire to learn, they never disappointed you. Even the things you didn’t understand stuck there, in a corner of your head, ready for the future to give them meaning, to turn them into beautiful or useful lessons. Fascinated, shivering with pleasure and fear, she had discovered that all the books in the world were somehow about her.
Friday, February 20, 2009
What New can do
Found this amazing little animation, via Grain Edit, by Tomorrow Partners.Board Game Store
image from Just Awesome, the storeI can't wait to check this out. It looks... well, ok, that's too easy.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Invisible Cities: Gained and Lost
The connections between one element of the story and another were not always obvious to the emperor; the objects could have various meanings: a quiver filled with arrows could indicate the approach of war, or an abundance of game, or else an armorer's shop; an hourglass could mean time passing, or time past, or sand, or a place where hourglasses are made.
But what enhanced for Kublai every event or piece of news reported by his inarticulate informer was the space that remained around it, a void not filled with words. The descriptions of cities Marco Polo visited had this virtue: you could wander through them in thought, become lost, stop and enjoy the cool air, or run off.
As time went by, words began to replace objects and gestures in Marco's takes: first exclamations, isolated nouns, dry verbs, then phrases, ramified and leafy discourses, metaphors and tropes. The foreigner had learned to speak the emperor's language or the emperor to understand the language of the foreigner.
but you would have said communication between them was less happy than in the past: to be sure, words were more useful than objects and gesture in listing the most important things of every province and city- monuments, markets, costumes, fauna and flora- and yet when Polo began to talk about how life must be in those places, day after day, evening after evening, words failed him, and little by little, he went back to relying on gestures, grimaces, glances.
So, for each city, after the fundamental information given in precise words, he followed with a mute commentary, holding up his hands, palms out, or backs, or sideways, in straight or oblique movements, spasmodic or slow.
A new kind of dialog was established: the Great Khan's white hands, heavy with rings, answered with stately movements the sinewy, agile hands of the merchant. As an understanding grew between them, their hands began to assume fixed attitudes, each of which corresponded to a shift of mood, in their alternation and repetition. And as the vocabulary of things was renewed with new samples of merchandise, the repertory of mute comment tended to become closed, stable. The pleasure of falling back on it also diminished in both; in their conversations, most of the time, they remained silent and immobile."
- italo calvino, Invisible Cities
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
39. Learn the inherent benefit of Moderation, on a personal level
image via FDATo be honest, this is one of those things that I think I *should* learn for the sake of learning, more than from some deeply personal need to be more in balance. Moderation should be taken in moderation.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
36. Bring my characters to life
This was an illustration I did for a poem by James Whitcomb Riley I used to LOVE to hear my mom read to me when I was little.The Little Orphan Annie
Little Orphan Annie's come to my house to stay.
To wash the cups and saucers up and brush the crumbs away.
To shoo the chickens from the porch and dust the hearth and sweep,
and make the fire and bake the bread to earn her board and keep.
While all us other children, when the supper things is done,
we sit around the kitchen fire and has the mostest fun,
a listening to the witch tales that Annie tells about
and the goblins will get ya if ya don't watch out!
Once there was a little boy who wouldn't say his prayers,
and when he went to bed at night away up stairs,
his mammy heard him holler and his daddy heard him bawl,
and when they turned the covers down,
he wasn't there at all!
They searched him in the attic room
and cubby hole and press
and even up the chimney flu and every wheres, I guess,
but all they ever found of him was just his pants and round-abouts
and the goblins will get ya if ya don't watch out!!
Once there was a little girl who always laughed and grinned
and made fun of everyone, of all her blood and kin,
and once when there was company and old folks was there,
she mocked them and she shocked them and said, she didn't care.
And just as she turned on her heels and to go and run and hide,
there was two great big black things a standing by her side.
They snatched her through the ceiling fore she knew what shes about,
and the goblins will get ya if ya don't watch out!!
When the night is dark and scary,
and the moon is full and creatures are a flying and the wind goes Whoooooooooo,
you better mind your parents and your teachers fond and dear,
and cherish them that loves ya, and dry the orphans tears
and help the poor and needy ones that cluster all about,
or the goblins will get ya if ya don't watch out!!!
- James Whitcomb Riley
35. Own an entire suit made of soft dark red leather and be told on wearing it, “You were meant to dress like that”
image of women police circa 1920, via Sparticus
U.S. Army Medical Corps contract surgeon's uniform, via Smithsonian Legacies
Pace Red Leather chair, via NetFurniture