children's caves

I am such a fan of children's homemade (and sheet-made) forts and tents that the series of photographs by photographer Björn Ewers and STUDIO314 of children's "caves" made me quite happy and eager for the time when Sweet Pea can make this kind of imaginative mess out of our living room.

{discovered via a friend and PetaPixel}

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.}

forts and tents and childhood

I saw "Where the Wild Things Are" yesterday and loved it to pieces. It was so beautiful and wistful and sad. It really captured the essence of the book, the mood - which is something much more difficult to grasp than mere plot points. Not a movie for children, per se, but definitely a movie about childhood.

One of the things that it brought back for me was my long lost love of forts and tents. My sister and I used to make pretty elaborate ones in our bedroom on the weekends and we loved sleeping in it (it'd always have to be done before "Golden Girls" started on Saturday night. Apparently, the experience of sitting in a fort made out of your bed blankets and sheets is only made better by the banter of the elderly).

But isn't there something so magical about sleeping in your own homemade (or bedroom-made) fort? The coziness of it. The way the light comes through. How secret and safe it feels to be inside, but yet it is so vulnerable (the structure itself, yes, but also the you inside of it). As an adult, I think there is also something so incredibly romantic about it too. There are scenes in movies like "The Royal Tenenbaums" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" that really capture that romantic aspect as well as the security and desire to have an even more inside space (more private, more yours) than the inside your own home or your own room. Anyway, here are some of my favorite images of homemade tents and forts...

image via home sweet home

image via nine kinds of crazy

image via somerset

image via somerset

image via Fifikoussout

And, yes, it is a "real" tent and not homemade, but Richie Tenenbaum's tent was still perfect:

image via ready to die

image(s) via be my cupcake

Remember that scene under the covers in ""Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"? It totally counts as a fort moment:

images via this michel gondry fan site (dialogue via imbd)

Clementine: Joely?

Joel: Yeah Tangerine?

Clementine: Am I ugly?

Joel: Uh-uh.

Clementine: When I was a kid, I thought I was. I can't believe I'm crying already. Sometimes I think people don't understand how lonely it is to be a kid, like you don't matter. So, I'm eight, and I have these toys, these dolls. My favorite is this ugly girl doll who I call Clementine, and I keep yelling at her, "You can't be ugly! Be pretty!" It's weird, like if I can transform her, I would magically change, too.

Joel: [kisses Clementine] You're pretty.

Clementine: Joely, don't ever leave me.

Joel: You're pretty... you're pretty... pretty...

P.S. In my search for fort images, I discovered the Wild Things Forts' Contest! I think it's over, but I hope they put up some more images soon.