J. Cruel: Constant Sartorial Wonderment: fantastic little snippets written about fashion magazine photos and assorted products.
A small sample of the awesomeness - this is the description of today's featured item, one of those ubiquitous ruffle necklaces:
'She was surprised when Trevor began to bring her home small trinkets: a knitted hand soap cover, a felt rock. He’d always been so thoughtful. He made her this necklace of felt flowers and vintage baby ribbon. He made her a pot holder crocheted with owls. He made her a lot of things at his secret Brooklyn Crafternoons, just so he didn’t have to tell her that he had been fired from his investment banking job two months ago. Leonora and Zoë were receptive to his troubles. As he crafted, they started at him like two crocheted owls. He felt like a man again.'
I think I want to go to secret Brooklyn Crafternoons. Found via The Rumpus.
4.30.2009
file under things i wish i had thought of
4.29.2009
out + about
Something to wear + something to eat ... all part of my guest post at The City Sage today. Too much fun.
love hurts
I'm spending the afternoon listening to Gram Parsons. It's one of my favorite ways to spend a day.
why is this bag in japan and not in my closet?
Michael has a gift for finding things I covet - today's item is courtesy of Cramp Leather Goods.
I either need to get to Japan or make a friend who lives in Japan who will send me this stuff.
holding on
The best part is at 1.04. Someday, I'd like to go on a trip just to watch big-wave surfers.
4.28.2009
you are the daughter of the sea
You are the daughter of the sea, oregano's first cousin.
Swimmer, your body is pure as the water;
cook, your blood is quick as the soil.
Everything you do is full of flowers, rich with the earth.
Your eyes go out toward the water, and the waves rise;
your hands go out to the earth and the seeds swell;
you know the deep essence of water and the earth,
conjoined in you like a formula for clay.
Naiad: cut your body into turquoise pieces,
they will bloom resurrected in the kitchen.
This is how you become everything that lives.
And so at last, you sleep, in the circle of my arms
that push back the shadows so that you can rest--
vegetables, seaweed, herbs: the foam of your dreams.
Pablo Neruda.
Image from here.
evolution of waters
The animation for this was done by Una Lorenzen and is composed of three layered parts - oil paint on backlit glass manipulated frame by frame; line drawings scratched by needle on 35mm film; and an experimental 16mm film performance by Miles A. Martinez.
(Bonnie Prince Billy will be at the Beachland in two weeks and a day. I can't wait.)
4.27.2009
surfaces
(Vija) Celmins's intense monochromatic images, based on photographs, focus on small and individual marks in the context of vastness. The images seem fragile because they record a specific human glimpse through a telescope or camera which is frozen in time. Celmins's serial exploration of her subjects, including ocean surfaces, allows the artist to exploit the distinct characteristics of the variety of media she uses. Celmins worked on this wood engraving for a number of years, beginning in 1995. She used an engraving tool rather than a knife to make detailed incisions which produce a variety of markings on the paper, from deep black to the white surface of the waves.
Above: Ocean (2000) - wood engraving on paper, 21x26cm.
Below: Ocean (1975) - lithograph on paper, 31.7x42cm.
sea change
Sea-change or seachange is a poetic or informal term meaning a gradual transformation in which the form is retained but the substance is replaced, as with petrification. The expression is Shakespeare's, taken from the song in The Tempest, when Ariel sings:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Per Wikipedia. Image from here via ffffound.
4.26.2009
sunday tune: looking glass - brandy (you're a fine girl)
Your eyes could steal a sailor
From the sea ...
4.25.2009
4.24.2009
this weekend
Watch out for sirens. Additionally:
- found footage
- monumental ideas in miniature books (@ the Morgan)
- heaven's my destination
- the ceremony
- sunday brunch
Image from here.
imaginary outfit for arranging imaginary flowers in my imaginary house in san francisco
I've never been to San Francisco - never even been to California - so it's perfect territory for imaginations and projections of all sorts. No unkind realism need bother to intrude. Today I'm imagining a careless, graceful life, the kind of life where you have large airy rooms full of carefully chosen things, in the kind of house where you always find fresh flowers on tables in hallways and dishes of cutup pineapple in the refrigerator.
Luxury.
i wish i had money
... and this house in San Francisco. I'm starting to think I'd like to live near the ocean.
4.23.2009
the view from space
Rhett Dashwood's Google Maps Typography - letter forms in Victoria, Australia, found using Google maps.
Seen at The Strange Attractor.
4.22.2009
changing horses in midstream
Comments have been shut down - I appreciated each and every one, but it was time to shake things up. If you like, you can reach me via email at evencleveland@gmail.com.
Thanks.
turnkey property
key ring
Rivy Ng key master. The daily chore of finding my keys would be a pleasure if they were attached to one of these.
4.21.2009
drawings
Pablo Picasso drawing with a flashlight, Vallauris, France, 1949. Photos for LIFE taken by Gjon Mili.
4.20.2009
following the right hand of
Pierre Bismuth, Following the right hand : drawings made by projecting films onto plexiglass and tracing the motions of the lead actress' right hand. The point he stops following the actress in the movie is marked by the still image placed behind the drawing.
Below: Following the right hand of Joan Crawford in "Dancing Lady". 2009. Marker on plexiglass over c-print. 30 x 40 inches.
(Mr. Pincus tipped me off to these. I'm much obliged.)
4.19.2009
4.18.2009
4.17.2009
this weekend
We've been doing a lot of traveling lately - none by balloon, though. I need to look into that.
Things to do:
It's a full slate. Happy weekend.
Image from the Cluster Balloon Flight Page.
4.16.2009
4.15.2009
peace of mind
Jackson Wang's PEACE OF MIND™: vending machines stocked with 'a line of products designed to alleviate fear and anxiety'.
It's a pretty great concept. This is what I would buy:
some people call it angst
Paul: I'm....sorry. Is he all right?
Holly: Sure. Sure. He's okay. Aren't you, Cat? Poor old Cat. Poor slob. Poor slob without a name. I don't have the right to give him one. We don't belong to each other. We just took up one day. I don't want to own anything until I find a place where me and things go together. I'm not sure where that is, but I know what it's like. It's like Tiffany's.
Paul: Tiffany's? You mean the jewelry store?
Holly: That's right. I'm crazy about Tiffany's. Listen. You know those days when you get the mean reds?
Paul: The "mean reds?" You mean, like the blues?
Holly: No. The blues are because you're getting fat or it's been raining too long. You're just sad, that's all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you're afraid, and you don't know what you're afraid of. Don't you ever get that feeling?
Paul: Sure. Some people call it angst.
Holly: When I get it, what does any good is to jump into a cab and go to Tiffany's. Calms me down right away. The quietness, the proud look. Nothing very bad could happen to you there. If I could find a real-life place that made me feel like Tiffany's, then... then I'd buy some furniture and give the cat a name...I'm sorry. You wanted something. Oh, the telephone.
Breakfast at Tiffany's. Screenplay by George Axelrod, novel by Truman Capote.
nothing in particular is wrong
From Jenny Holzer's Living series. 1980-82. Bronze, 8 x 10". © 2009 Jenny Holzer / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
4.14.2009
4.13.2009
happy tape
I found Happy Tape through a post on Oh Happy Day, and it was a happy day indeed. I've been coveting Japanese masking tape.
I think I'm going to be taping everything now. My gluestick will probably get jealous.
how to have fun with markers
Set them up on a ream of nice paper, leave them alone for a month, and see what happens.
Daniel Eatock has done two sets of prints like this - once in 2008 using a set of Prismacolor markers:
Sheet 1/31
Sheet 20/31
The number of prints available was determined by the number of sheets the ink bled through, and each one was different, because it had received different amounts of ink.I. love. this.
Discovered at shape + colour.
everything color circle
Brooke Inman's Everything Color Circle 2007. Makes me wonder what all my art supplies would look like laid out chromatically.
Seen here.
4.12.2009
4.11.2009
we traveled as fast we could
Leo's Song from impactist on Vimeo.
Jamie at Doodler's Anonymous posted this the other day, saying 'I'm not going to lie, you're probably going to enjoy this.'
I did. You will too. I think it's my favorite thing on the internet this week.
4.10.2009
pack it up
We're driving to Boston this weekend for family fun time, but if I was sticking around, I'd be checking out:
- Christian Wulffen
- art + object
- the best farmer's market in the city
- children of thorazine
- empire of passion
- chess sets (at the library through today)
i wish i could travel like this
But with actual flying.
Jan van Holleben's photos charm me. This one seen here.
lost luggage
Is this your luggage?: an oddly fascinating site dedicated to one person's voyeuristic passion for photographing the contents of unclaimed airline baggage. And if you recognize your bag, you can contact them to get it returned.
Seen at Notcot.
away we go
I saw this preview before Adventureland (surprisingly good, and being advertised all wrong) and I am kind of excited about it.
4.09.2009
imaginary outfit: brunch in boston
It's been a while since we had one of these. I thought it was about time.
This weekend, Sean and I are driving to Boston for a family jamboree. Boston is not one of our favorite cities - for whatever reason, we just don't click. It's like meeting someone at a party and finding out that you both have good friends in common, but after a few minutes of awkward chitchat, you're staring at your wine glass and thinking of ways to make a break for the bowl of Cheez-Its across the room.
Fortunately, Boston has a number of our favorite people (and the ten hour drive is perfect for listening to new music). We'll get to hang out with our niece and nephew, and we are meeting new friends for brunch. I'm excited about this because not only are the people we are meeting rad, the place we are going to has some sort of delightful thing called 'spoon fruits'. I'm assuming this is a particularly wonderful sort of jam, and I can't wait.
This ensemble is what I'd wear to eat the spoon fruits amongst the Bostonians. If they are tasty enough, maybe we'll be friends with Boston after all.
i like to watch things on tv
Lee Friedlander's The Little Screens.
I would love to get my hands on a copy of that book.
4.08.2009
spelled out
Images from a mailer designed by Stefan Sagmeister (with Ariane Spanier) for Anni Kuan. Unfolded, it reveals the phrase 'material luxuries can best be enjoyed in small doses'.
different order
I think I'll start choosing my clothes based on their ability to make interesting compositions.
Liberation Styles, 2007 by Maurice Scheltens. Seen @ +.
4.07.2009
stillness
There is a point where in the mystery of existence contradictions meet; where movement is not all movement and stillness is not all stillness; where the idea and the form, the within and the without, are united; where infinite becomes finite, yet not losing its infinity.
Rabindranath Tagore, The World of Personality
Photo: Laura Letinski (seen on Lark About).
4.06.2009
it is time to build new monuments
Still from Karthik Pandian's Darkroom, an installation of three films with optically printed soundtracks currently on view at Richard Telles Fine Art.
It's worth downloading the press release and reading Pandian's statement (the post title is a quote).
Seen at South Willard.
suns
Penelope Umbrico: Suns from Flickr. Her statement:
This is a project I started when I found 541,795 pictures of sunsets searching the word “sunset” on the image hosting website, Flickr. I cropped just the suns from these pictures and uploaded them to Kodak, making 4" x 6" machine prints from them.
For each installation, the title reflects the number of hits I got searching "sunset" on Flickr on the day I made/print the piece – for example, the title of the piece for the Gallery of Modern Art, Australia, was “2,303,057 Suns From Flickr (Partial) 9/25/07” and for the New York Photo Festival it was "3,221,717 Suns From Flickr (Partial) 3/31/08" - the title itself becoming a comment on the ever increasing use of web-based photo communities, and a reflection of the ubiquity of pre-scripted collective content there. I think it's peculiar that the sun, the quintessential life giver, constant in our lives, symbol of enlightenment, spirituality, eternity, all things unreachable and ephemeral, omnipotent provider of optimism and vitamin D, and so universally photographed, finds expression on the internet, the most virtual of spaces equally infinite but within a closed electrical circuit. Looking into this cool electronic space one finds a virtual window onto the natural world.
Seen at i heart photograph (via ffffound.)
4.05.2009
something i've been working on
Announcements for Leon.
I had so much fun with these. Erica gave me free rein to be as creative as I wanted to be, which meant deconstructed color gradient garlands, a coral and black color scheme, and collaging the words of the announcement.
You can see the finished product here.
(And the best part is the part I had least to do with - the photos of Leon tucked inside. Beyond adorable.)
4.04.2009
4.03.2009
one last thing
Those nice gals at Design Crisis let me do a guest post this week on the topic of clouds. Specifically clouds you can climb into. Fun.
They are the raddest. Thanks, guys!
this weekend
I will be remembering last weekend and consoling myself with:
Happy weekend.
musée du quai branly
Museums are strange places, and big museums are the strangest of all. Small, esoteric museums make sense in a way. They are just particular collections writ large - one artist's works, an assemblage of specific things like dollhouses or teakettles or tintypes. Sometimes overwhelming in its obsessiveness, but clear in its boundaries. Giant compendium museums are cats of a different color.
Much smarter people have written about the idea of museums - how they have evolved, their functions as storerooms of history and culture - but I couldn't help rethinking our human impulse to exhaustively collect and display after our visit to the Musée du Quai Branly.
It's big - 300,000 objects, 3,500 on display - and a kind of hybrid between the specific and the compendium. The specific bounds is that it houses indigenous art. The compendium part is that the objects are from Oceania, Africa, the Americas, and Asia - a sizable chunk of the world to lump together.
The building and park were designed by Jean Nouvel, and outside, it's a wild amalgamation of shapes and facades. We walked to it from the metro station at Bir-Hakeim, so the first thing we saw was the shaggy green of the living wall designed by Patrick Blanc:
Inside looking out (the windows in that portion of the building are covered with green film that mimics the foliage):
The main part of the museum is cantilevered over a large garden that you walk through to get to the museum's entrance, tucked way back off the street.
Inside, a large ramp spirals up to the permanent collections. It revolves around a large, darkened glass column, filled with shelves upon shelves of stored indigenous musical instruments, like some sort of wild Raiders of the Lost Ark archive. The ramp itself is covered with projections:
The collections are are housed in a long, dimly lit space, with raised and lowered levels, and undulating dividers covered in leather carving out distinct spaces. The jutting cubes on the exterior are small rooms devoted to specific collections of objects from particular groups. Everything is dark and barely lit to conserve the items on display, which are are ravishingly spotlit and mind-numbingly diverse - Amazonian tunics made from parrot feathers, beaded bags from Plains Indians, Aboriginal paintings, antique stencils for Japanese kimonos, insanely pleated Hmong skirts, Javanese shadow puppets, Masai shields, gorgeous ikat fabrics and totems and idols of all sorts.
My eyes couldn't get enough (I could have used another visit just to sketch shapes and patterns) but it was unsettling. It was sobering to think of the amount of colonial plunder involved in each item, and to remember that only a tiny fraction of the collection is on display. The dim seductive lighting (contrasted with the brightness of the Louvre, for example) heightened the feeling of the exotic, unknowable other. Even if the structure of the building was deliberately evoking that (and that might well have been part of the idea), it felt like playing with fire. It was unnerving to realize how much power lighting and place have on elevating a object beyond mundane utility into the art-world ether, and it made me look harder and differently at everything when we went to the Louve and the Musée d'Orsay in the following days.
I don't know. I'd go back, though. The patterns alone ...
musée d'orsay
The view of Sacré Couer from behind the clock in the Musée d'Orsay.
I tend to roll my eyes a little bit at the French Impressionists - too many waterlilies and ballerinas endlessly reproduced on so many posters in so many waiting rooms, on innumerable PBS totebags and museum shop scarves. It's always a bit of a shock to see originals in person and remember they are actually pretty kickass.
Degas particularly is poorly served by reproductions, I think. This ballerina's skirt has about seven different shades of blue in it, like a living butterfly wing, and her tights are almost a shocking pink. It is ravishing.
I took about ten pictures trying to capture that blue and pink. Nothing doing.
The musuem's collections only span from 1848 to 1915, and it's mostly French art, but the absolute plenty of gorgeous things bends your brain a little. They have five (FIVE) of Monet's cathedrals - lined up on the wall, it's a bit like impressionism meets Warhol.
We thought these two looked like they could have stepped right off the street today. Both were painted around 1890.
After all that art, we had to refuel, so we stopped in the museum café for $6 coffees and Sean was especially taken with the waiters' aprons - they came equipped with a special pocket for ties:
the louvre
I could probably spend a month in Paris going to the Louvre every day (I'm a little sick like that).
Some of my favorite parts (besides the Winged Victory):
Crowds of art paparazzi (this is the crew around the Mona Lisa on a Monday at 11:30 in the morning):
Little peeks into storage rooms, with the extra treasures draped in plastic sheeting:
Pocket spheres for worldly travelers of the 1800s:
Very old Roman perfume flasks that reminded me of Toikka birds:
Fierce looking Danish children:
Rembrandt foreshadowing Francis Bacon:
Red-headed art lovers:
galerie de l'atelier brancusi
Photos from the Galerie de l'Atelier Brancusi, a reconstruction of Brancusi's Paris workshop. We stumbled across it after we left the Pompidou, and it ended up being one of my favorite places.
It was like looking at an alternate universe's organic forms, familiar but strange in their austere jumble.
The tools were the best part.
hyperkulturemia
Stendhal syndrome, Stendhal's syndrome, Hyperkulturemia, or Florence syndrome:
(def.) a psychosomatic illness that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to art, usually when the art is particularly 'beautiful' or a large amount of art is in a single place.
(I'm still recovering from the museums in Paris. Today, I'm posting some of my photos from them. They may be a little blurry - I was dizzy and confused.)
4.02.2009
ships in the night
Flag pins and necklaces by Cheri Messerli (a.k.a. Scout Holiday). They are part of the Selby shop at Collette.
If only my vacation had lasted a day longer ...
on the street
I love street art and the visual noise it creates in a city, and Paris is particularly great - maybe it's the dissonance of seeing the classically beautiful Parisian architecture covered with coded marks and images instead. We spotted mosaics by Invader (above) and Mr. Brainwash's wheatpaste Hitchcock (below the ubiquitous Obey giant):
Everywhere I looked, there was something to see:
This especially was a message I could get behind:
how we started our days
In Paris, our first stop every morning was the nearest corner store for yogurt. It was the perfect thing to tide us over until the first croissant and coffee of the day. Even the dinkiest little convenient shop had a staggering selection to choose from - some drinkable, some spoonable, most in wee glass bottles, and all delicious. Yogurt here is nothing to it. This particular one had wild blueberry preserves on the bottom.
I think I need to start making my own, but I don't think it could ever be as good.
4.01.2009
the cruelest month
April may well be a cruel month, but at least it brings daffodils.
Nine daffodil polaroids by David Gauntlett. Originally seen here.
