I love the home of textile designer, Carolina Irving, featured in Lonny magazine. For someone who was suffering such serious withdrawal symptoms since the demise of domino, reading the online mag, which is basically domino incarnate, was complete happiness. The pictures! The books! The mishmash of prints! I do literally gasp like that in front of the laptop as I slowly make my way through the magazine. And this one goes straight into my inspiration folder.
At some point we must have all had it right, before we began shaping it /
holding it up to each other and explaining it. There is a reason we love
campfires and flashlights, treehouses and bicycles, and why they are drawn over
and again with different lines and with different spirits and why we continue to
find comfort in them / sometimes joy / sometimes everything. I will meet you
outside at dusk and we can go anywhere. We can go anywhere we like with cold
fingertips and everything echoing and imagine that at home there are still
dinners going cold in houses filled with yellow light.
I haven't had much time to sit and relax this week, having just started on my new job (!) in the home furnishings/lifestyle industry. It has been exhilarating to say the least. So reading the above passage, found in the Tiny Showcase email (always such a lovely read), takes me somewhere really nice and comforting. When things get a little less new and exciting, I hope I'll have the spare time to sit by the ornamental lake they're creating in the park fronting my house, and finish reading my copy of Anna Karenina. That's something to look forward to isn't it? It has been the subject of my daydreams.
In the week or so that has transpired between my last post and today's, my 22nd birthday has flown, and these are some of the delightful gifts I've received. Post-birthday, I've also received perhaps the singular best news, one which promises exciting things for me in the future. I'll like to thank the universe!
Sometimes, there is no better reason for loving something than simply because it makes you happy. I like to think that there are subliminal impulses and connections within us which defy logic and humanly understanding. It's like the Rilo Kiley song, Science vs. Romance I guess. So I'm with Keats when he said Newton "destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism" (although this interesting article brands that as fake reductionism, but I digress.)
Anyway, this sterling combination of song and moving images definitely got me where it counts. Its bucolic charm tugs at my every heartstring I tell you.
I was immediately intrigued by artist Mercedes Helnwein after watching the short clip, Dark Star, featuring her work on the Lula homepage. After reading a bunch of interviews and viewing the drawings in her online gallery, I am completely hypnotized by her and her posse of sinister girls.
Dream Job! Just watching the trailer sent me into spasms of excitement.
Catch snippets of the show where they follow Keith Johnson, buyer-at-large for Anthropologie, on his treasure hunts in France, India, South America, Turkey, Tunisia, UK, Argentina, and Holland here.
some day, originally uploaded by liekeroomijs.
“I think I got left behind somewhere; I seem to be the only romantic left.”
- Grace Coddington
"Gas released by a dying star races across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour, forming the delicate shape of a celestial butterfly." - Hubble site
I can't believe I've missed this all the time it's been out. All I can say is if you're going to click 'play' now, you have to watch it to the end, because there is no point otherwise. Not for this there isn't.
The very first piece from my dressmaking endeavour! I'm onto my third piece now, and along the way, I find that I've really relished the opportunity to design and have everything go exactly my way (or you can say I get to unleash my inner control freak). The way I've felt is perfectly encapsulated by what Faythe Levine, creator of documentary, Handmade Nation, expresses in an interview in Frankie magazine.
"My personal belief is if you are making something by hand then that itself is a political act. We are living in a disposable society and we have so much being thrown at us of how we're supposed to live and how our house is supposed to look and what we're supposed to wear, and so when you are stepping away from that and taking control over your life to make something yourself, I believe that's a very quiet political act."
Perspective. Perspective is one of those things one
ought to be able to purchase and administer intraveneously.- Naive. Super
Erlend Loe
This supplement came with the September issue of Korean Vogue Girl. Calling itself a Traditional Lifestyle Guide Book, I would say it is my kind of lifestyle indeed. And pity that it is that I can't understand the Korean content, I'm happy enough just looking at the pictures.
Fake conversations on a nonexistent telephone
Like the words of a man who's spent a little too much time alone
(at 3:57 and on, my heart faltered.)
I've been so charmed by this song and its video, I can't seem to get it off my mind.
The line below from an article I read awhile back has been haunting me as well. It scares me quite a bit, in the way when things sometimes strike a little too close to home.
the unhinging sensation that she would forever be an inch away from the life she was so hungrily seeking
When do things which stir and inspire cross over to become vicious reminders of what appear so very out-of-reach?
Being a Grup isn't, as it turns out, all about holding on to some misguided, well-marketed idea of youth - or, at least, isn't just about that. It's also about rejecting a hand-me-down version of adulthood that asks, or even necessitates, that you let go of everything you ever felt passionate about. It's about reimagining adulthood as a period defined by promise, rather than compromise.
What, or rather, who is a Grup? You can find out in the article here. I have it printed out and it has been my no-fail pick-me-up for the longest time.
dialogue #2
A: I lied, I don't want to go it alone. What good will that do me? What I love most, what I cannot get out of my mind, is the way you lean your forehead against the glass window to look at the world go by. When your eyes take on that sheen, and I know they're traveling, flitting past these fields that you know you may never see again, or will never see again with the same eyes, thinking these same thoughts.
B: You know what I love most? I love that moment when I know you're sitting there in the back seat with bated breath. When you fall silent in anticipation of whatever spectacular sight we're about to see. And then, and then that gasp, when we turn the corner and it was all wildflowers and ocean. In those moments, it feels like life is worth it.
A: All wildflowers and ocean...I will never forget that spellbinding vista for as long as I live.
Born with what my mum defined as an "artistic temperament," Gretchen
floated from blossom to blossom in a blissful haze. Staring dreamily up at the
sky, she tripped over logs and stepped out in front of speeding bicycles. When
the casts were placed on her arms and legs, she personalized them with Magic
Marker daisies and fluffy clouds. Physically she'd been stitched up more times
than the original flag, but mentally nothing seemed to touch her. You could tell
Gretchen anything in strict confidence, knowing that five minutes later, she
would recall nothing but the play of shadows on your face. It was like having a
foreign-exchange student living in our house. Nothing we did or said made any
sense to her, as she seemed to follow the rules and customs of some exotic,
faraway nation where the citizens drilled the ground for oil paint and picked
pastels from the branches of stunted trees. Without copying anyone else, she had invented her own curious personality, which I envied even more than her artistic ability.
- Me Talk Pretty One Day,
David Sedaris
A: I want to take a train by myself and gaze out at the ever-changing landscape. And be able to get off when I see somewhere pretty and back on when I want to move on.
B: So what's stopping you?
A: That I'll be alone.
B: But why do you want to do it so badly then?
A: You'll think it sounds stupid but I want to find inner peace.
B: I think that's a very brave endeavour but I don't think you'll find it.
A: Why not? You can come along and help me find it.
B: You don't really want my company. It's only so you wouldn't be lonely.
A: I am always lonely. It's just that when I'm with you, that's when I'm least lonely.
B: You can't find inner peace because you're always searching for the next place, somewhere better. I can see why this train thing appeals to you. The scenery outside blurs continuously into each other and everyday, every moment, is in a persistent state of flux.
A: Everyday that I'm in this place, my soul dies a little. I'm not always searching for somewhere better. It's just that because I still haven't been able to get to somewhere better, that's why you're under the impression that it's an endless search.
