I've been without access to you for 40 hours this week, and spent a larger amount of time than that trying to catch up on sleep. This hasn't left much time for you. I miss you.
I've had such fun curling up with you on my lap this weekend. You've introduced me to the following wonderful things, my favorites for this week:
1. The world's largest mass ascent of hot air balloons, in Chambley France, via Flickr Blog.
Photo by gbatistini.
2. The Madsen Bucket Bike, via Nie Nie Dialogues (worth reading that really sweet post).
Last summer, when I agonized over whether or not to buy a car, the one obstacle to me scrapping my reliance on a vehicle and relying on two wheels and two feet was the hassle of grocery shopping. Not so easy to do on a bike or a scooter, I thought, and too much of a burden to call a taxi every time I needed a gallon of milk. It's a shame I didn't know then about this beauty of a bicycle. Sure, it would still be tough to survive a Utah winter using only this as transportation, and road trips and day trips would still present a problem, but what a great design! And surely a nice way to supplement the utility of the Yaris in the future. As a huge bonus, Madsen is a local Salt Lake company (my pride swells), and they're currently working on a prototype for a cargo bike like this to be used in developing countries (read here). I'm impressed, and hope all their ideas spread like wildfire.
3. The Free Wedding, via Once Wed. This couple was so incredibly lucky to win this contest and have such a beautiful, fun, unique wedding thrown for them, for free, with all the details planned by geniuses. Just check out the links and be amazed: i, ii, iii, iv, v, vi, vii, viii, finale. The whole thing isn't exactly my style, but that's the point - I'm sure it fit this couple and their taste perfectly, and I love how it screams individuality. Some of my favorite images, by Our Labor of Love:
4. The radio documentary Ghetto Life 101, which Cameron and I heard for the first time on Saturday night's The Changing World (the original doc aired in 1993).
5. The New York Times article, The New Antiquarians - Cultivating a Late 19th-Century Style At Home, and accompanying slideshow, via Unruly Things.
Photos by Michael Weschler for the NY Times.
This humors me on so many levels, but at the same time, I'm impressed. The academic in me adores such devotion to a specific time period and aesthetic, and it makes me feel inadequate not only for my lack of such specificity but also for my really lazy decorating. It can also be read, of course, as such perfect parody. I offer the following eloquently worded quotes:
On the Hovey sisters' home: "...a habitat that embraces, among other cultural touchstones, W. Somerset Maugham’s last days of colonialism, Victorian memento mori and the Edwardian men’s club. There are also apothecary cabinets, fencing masks and pith helmets, stacks of antique luggage and a taxidermy collection that would make Teddy Roosevelt proud."
On the aesthetics of Ryan Matthews: "Mr. Matthew, 29, is a silversmith with a knack for articulating, to use the expert’s parlance for rigging and displaying skeletons; for creating the tiny domed vignettes the Victorians were so fond of (artful arrangements of taxidermied squirrels, for example, in twiggy settings); and for making delicate pencil drawings that look like old photographs. His apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, is accessorized with mummified hunting dogs, wax figures and Black Forest taxidermy. There is also a bone saw from the Civil War and a cabinet full of antique medical specimens." (!!!)
And some direct commentary on commodification and those things we're all thinking when we read things like this:
Valerie Steele, director of the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology, on the "new vintage" trend: "It’s way more than anti-modernism, this sort of deep spelunking into the past. It’s not aspirational and it’s not nostalgic. It’s a fantasy world that is almost entirely a visual collage. It’s a stitched-together, bricolage world, an alternative world...Authenticity is such a fed-up idea. But collecting these old things, it’s like there is an aura attached to them. It’s not some prepackaged product being foisted on you by a big corporation. Too bad it’s going to be commodified. Everything in the fashion world gets hoovered up."
It's too bad so many things can be fascinating and admirable but inauthentic in their quest to be authentic. I'll never tire of watching this cycle...but then again, I have always been a fan of the visual collage and the intellectual collage, high and low, ironic and authentic. Just throw all the good bits together and obsess over them for a lifetime, I say. To quote another New Antiquarian, Sean Crowley, "There’s so much to learn. I am curious - ravenous, really - about everything." Indeed.
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