simon pearce

According to my mailbox, it is autumn. All of the fall catalogs are rolling in and after this scorcher of a summer- I am ready. Of course I am coveting all of the clothing, but I also love to look through the houseware catalogs and check out their fall spreads. Simon Pearce has some shots that are so simple and feel like New England- I can just smell the hot cider and feel the crisp air.

Ah, September....bring it on!

getmortified

There really is a site for just about every subject out there and that means there are fantastic places like getmortified.com . Getmortified.com is essentially a home for angst and awkwardness - it calls itself a "comic excavation of the strange and extraordinary things we created as kids". Adults share everything from their childhood journals and letters to the movies and photographs of their youth. (My personal favorite- reasons they deserve to marry Jon Bon Jovi)

The site also features the publications to come out of these often hilarious walks down memory lane and the live performances folks will give recounting their own mortification for an audience. I would love to catch one of these shows I don't doubt they are funny, but I also bet it feels so liberating for the participants. Imagine being brave enough to share your own special brand of teenage craziness in front of all those people?

{Image courtesy of getmortified.com}

Oronoco Gold Rush Days

Thanks to a gal about town in Minneapolis, I learned of the Oronoco Gold Rush Days and I am so jealous I live half a country away from this event. This flea/antique market that takes place one weekend a summer in Oronoco, MN has been happening for over 30 years. Just based on the photographs my friend snapped during her day there, I know I would be crazy for it....
I heard vintage suitcases are all the rage....what a treasure trove.
Ah, the dreamy feathered hair captured on a tin lunchbox for posterity.
I love the groupings by color- it makes everything that much more appealing.

I wish that there was a market like this near my hometown.....even the photographs are fantastic finds from time spent there.

{All images courtesy of pairofjacks}

magic lantern magic

I know I just mentioned magic lantern slides, but I stumbled on these from the late1890s/early 1900s on a really pretty tumblr blog called "Mothic Flights and Flutterings" and I just had to share. No wonder the French writer Marcel Proust was so fixated on the magic lantern from his childhood... 

"At Combray, as every afternoon ended, long before the time when I should have to go up to bed, and to lie there, unsleeping, far from my mother and grandmother, my bedroom became the fixed point on which my melancholy and anxious thoughts were centred. Some one had had the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set on top of my lamp while we waited for dinner-time to come: in the manner of the master-builders and glass-painters of gothic days it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colours, in which legends were depicted, as on a shifting and transitory window...."

"...But my sorrows were only increased, because this change of lighting destroyed, as nothing else could have done, the customary impression I had formed of my room, thanks to which the room itself, but for the torture of having to go to bed in it, had become quite endurable. For now I no longer recognised it, and I became uneasy, as though I were in a room in some hotel or furnished lodging, in a place where I had just arrived, by train, for the first time." 

Quoted passage from the Overture of "Swann's Way" (1913) which is the 1st volume of Proust's 7 volume novel. The name of the entire work is  "À la recherche du temps perdu" which is translated as Remembrance of Things Past" or as "In Search of Lost Time." You wanted to know all that, right?

{Larger versions of these slides can be found here or here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.}

Good Night, Tiptoe

Illustrator Polly Dunbar has a series of "Tilly and Friends" books, published by Candlewick Press, that are some of the best toddler titles around. They are charming and humorous with a group of the most unique illustrated chums to come along in quite awhile. Sarah Jane over at sarahjanestudios also posted about the Tilly series not too long ago and I am so happy to see the word spreading about these books.

My favorite of the six book series is Good Night, Tiptoe. Around here we always welcome new bedtime stories, but in particular my two-year-old (a harsh critic who will simply shut the cover of a book you are reading if it does not suit her fancy) needed something different to add to our collection. Tiptoe passed with flying colors. It is the story of a stubborn, but always adorable, bunny who is just not sleepy. His bedtime shenanigans are both funny and ultimately sweet.

Books for this age group can often be too saccharine, but Dunbar balances the sweet elements of her story and illustrations so that the charm is not lost on an audience of any age. A wonderful series overall, but a stand out bedtime tale for sure.

All images courtesy of Amazon.com

“I engage in the ritual of making and reshaping stories and histories.” - Maurizio Anzeri

 "Penny" via The Saatchi Gallery

Good lord am I in love with Maurizio Anzeri's work.

His embroidery on found photography is just so incredibly jarring and mesmerizing. It reminds me of that "Moving Pictures" series that I posted about last month, the color combinations found in magic lantern slides, the "Freemotion Art" of Gillian Bates, and the patterns we all produced as kids with the aid of the "Spirograph" toy. Someone has to make me a knock-off and quick!

(Mae! I'm looking at you... your plate isn't too full to make me a half dozen of these, right? Lucky for you I'm satisfied with admiring the images of the originals anyway... :) )

via beauty call

 "family album" via riflemaker

"Rebecca" via The Saatchi Gallery

{quote via beauty call}

"cat gentlemen"

Yeah, I'll call myself a "cat lady" if that means I'm in the same company as these feline lovin' macho men...

Ernest Hemingway via The Cat's Meow

James Dean via somerset

 

James Taylor via Let Us Read and Let Us Dance

  Marlon Brando via Ab Imo Pectore

one benefit of marrying a shorter man...

Marrying a guy like this:

Means getting to wear beautiful flats like these:

Image of Dustin Hoffman and his wife Anne found here.

Jessica Simpson (seriously) "Lepolia" flats found here.

Cheerful Pink

Image courtesy of bellamumma at tumblr

Image courtesy of weheartit

Image courtesy of weheartit

Image courtesy of weheartit

Image courtesy of mogh_ip at flickr

How to Be Alone

A video by filmmaker Andrea Dorfman and poet/singer/songwriter Tanya Davis for your viewing pleasure...

Shot in Halifax, Nova Scotia, produced by this Bravo!, found here.

a museum for nature's oddities (and beauties)

 "The Tanager genus is a testament to nature’s variety, with 50 colorful species found in North America and Australia." via wired.com

So I'm in Boston for about 10 days right now and each day is just packed to the gills. Lots of visiting with friends and family. Lots of talking about the wedding. But a lot of getting sh*t done too like finally getting my wedding dress (task accomplished with much gratitude to Lorelei for finding it on a crowded rack at Vows and for dealing with my hemming and hawing while I tried on 20 additional dresses before returning to the first).

But thank goodness there's also been some time for a little wandering too. For example, I finally made it to the Harvard Museum of Natural History and it was amazing. Owner of the world's largest egg, Vladimir Nabokov’s collection of butterfly genitalia, and the most gorgeous and intricately made collection of glass flowers you've ever seen, this museum is like nature's cabinet of curiosities. So glad I finally got to see it and if you can't make it to Cambridge, do check out the book about the museum, The Rarest of the Rare: Stories Behind the Treasures at the Harvard Museum of Natural History - with images like these - it's a coffee table must.

"As a research fellow at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology between 1942 and 1948, Nabokov specialized in the study of blue butterflies, which he classified by genitalia rather than wing patterns. His collection has been preserved intact, right down to the cigar boxes he used to store specimen vials." via wired.com

"The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit"

"The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit" by Sargent courtesy of Google

I took three art history courses in college and I loved each one of them. Sure, they involved some lengthy lecturing and an abundance of slide presentations, but the professors I had were charismatic and enlightening and every time they talked about a piece of art it was if they were discussing it for the first time- there was genuine enthusiasm.

In a survey course, we briefly discussed the John Singer Sargent painting "The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit". It was fascinating to me, not only  because of its significance as a piece of art, but those dark and melancholy girls.....they were haunting. Plus, I had actually viewed the painting in person and that always added a layer of interest for me.

Recently, I saw that Erica E. Hirshler, a Senior Curator at the MFA Boston, wrote a book about this captivating painting, Sargent's Daughters: The Biography of a Painting. She, of course, discusses the artistic significance of the piece, yet she also delves into the lives of the painting's subjects and I am anxious to learn about them. The questions I had about Sargent's painting back in college were not about composition or technique, I was interested in who these people were. I guess amazing portraits do that- curiosities are piqued- and I am hoping Hirshler's book answers some of my questions. I can't wait to find out.