My talented friends...

Another amazing book cover from my friend, Katya Mezhibovskaya...

Curation. And junk like that.

I love the verb to curate. It implies something done carefully, lovingly and with great consideration. Curation is something done by museum experts, shop owners and anyone who decorates his or her home. The act suggests choices of thoughtful inclusion and exclusion.

So I am quite irked when the word curation is used cavalierly. When the writer thinks that by simply using the word, she has implied that care has been taken in the selection of objects. When I see that a grotesque hodge-podge of items offered in a shopping venue has been “curated”, well, I am ready to jump through my computer screen and down the throat of whoever wrote that. (possibly now might be the time when I should switch to de-caf)

Perhaps an example: a day or so ago, the online shopping site, Gilt Groupe, offered “a line of décor in that jetset style”, which had been curated by the “famous designer Matthew Patrick Smythe”.
























Now I am not within the economic demographic to know who Mr. Smythe is and I am sure he is a wonderful interior designer (for some people. the room photos shown on the site looked a little too precious and insincere; i.e. books as objects). I wonder about the people who are buying this stuff online. Do they really like these things? Do these things fit in with what is already in the home? Are the items being bought simply because Mr. Smythe put them up for sale? Are you really going to put this on your mantle?




All of these items are random, like someone’s front yard junk sale. Curated? Hardly.



(readers, i am sure you are just as shocked that the high prices are not accompanied by any historic documentation as i am)

Invitation to FIGMENT NYC 2011 wrap-up meet & greet

Invitation to FIGMENT NYC 2011 wrap-up meet & greet

Newsprint scented candles. Gee, now that's a good idea.

Think it smells as good as burnt hair?



They really should come out with mimeograph candles. That, I might buy.

Never fade away

Now I know why I feel invisible in my own neighborhood...

No Enclave for Old Men*
by James Wolcott
June 6, 2011, 11:14 AM

*Or women

Brendan Bernhard, the Orwell of the East Village (yes, I know Brenda says Auden but maybe we're both right), writes about the chasm between young and old in the theme park of the conscientiously hip.

You notice them everywhere in Manhattan, but perhaps particularly in a slightly out-of-the-way neighborhood such as the East Village — middle-aged or older New Yorkers who look as if they have remained in the city that doesn’t sleep way past the limits of insomnia or common sense.

They seem a little lost in this International House of Cupcakes, among i-Stoned youth, galvanized immigrants, packed bars, and cafes where the music is always played at a volume whose message might as well be posted on a notice board outside — Adults Permitted, But Youth Preferred.

Aging is a delicate, unrewarding business at best, and some people — as a result of genes, outlook, resolution, and money — manage it better than others. To judge by the relative lack of oldsters in the East Village (anyone over 40 is a rarity on the streets after 9 p.m., and most of those are either homeless, comatose, or possibly dead), it’s obvious that this is one of the more trying places in which to grow old. Those who hang on must also confront the irony of living in an era in which they are constantly scolded that it is within their power to remain “young,” while being made to feel ancient almost all the time.

[snip]

Journalists generally don’t write about growing older in a hip young neighborhood because even hinting at an interest in the topic is tantamount to an admission that they may be getting a little long in the tooth themselves. Yet age apartheid is one of the most salient and least discussed aspects of life in the East Village. In his disastrous but unforgettable mayoral campaign of 1969, Norman Mailer suggested turning the East Village into an autonomous zone, leaving the acid-heads and “freaks” to run the place, rather as the Danes did with the Christiania section of Copenhagen a couple of years later. It never happened, but in a way the neighborhood is as unbalanced as if it had.

No such apartheid here on the Upper West Side, where the oldsters terrorize young and middle-aged alike with random complaints that have long, complicated histories attached that we're all supposed to be familiar with. I would provide examples but it's no way to start a Monday.

Simple. And clever.

A friend of ours recently bought an apartment and planned some minor renovations: sand and seal the floor, take out the walls of the second bedroom and add a Murphy bed. A Murphy bed? Yippee!

In space shy Manhattan apartments, it is the perfect solution to the problem of a seldom-used guest bedroom. There are other options. There is the daybed, the fold-out couch, the aerobed, and the “don’t-go-to-bed-drunk” hammock but none of them are all that clever. The Murphy bed really is clever, isn’t it?

And who doesn’t love a Murphy bed? As a kid, I was fascinated by these life-size gadgets. I loved the presto change-o aspect of them. One minute you see a plain wall and the next, viola, a perfectly made bed. It was like the secret door in the bookcase of a mansion’s library or (eek) in the guest bedroom. As kids, we like gadgets. We like things that do stuff, things that change from one thing to another, things in which the ultimate intention isn’t immediately clear.

Of course I don’t remember where I saw my first one; it must have been on television or in the movies. The bed just seemed like a genius idea. It seemed like a great place to hide but onIy if you were two-dimensional.

The bed is a piece of furniture that has remained virtually unchanged since around 8000 BCE. The early beds were made up of straw or any other natural cushion found nearby (fir boughs, palm leaves). Around 3200 BCE, beds in Scotland were raised boxes topped with comfortable fillers. Like the pencil, beds do exactly what they are designed to do. With a few aberrations, the main difference in beds has been in their decorative framing. But the Murphy bed does something different. It doesn’t need to be tarted up to look like a space wasting sexy thing. It is cool and sleek just as it is. And it disappears.

Little Dieter needs to fly

Keep your eyes peeled for this Dieter Rams sticker project.






Because we do adore him!

Fearless

Life, death, love, fear, and God (along with the application of darkness and light to the artistic portrayals of these words) are the most daunting themes in literature, art, dance and film. Yet, to varying degrees of success, these are the most frequently addressed ideas in the arts. Cliché’s are easy to come by. Masterpieces are not.

While Peter Weir’s feature film, Fearless, is one of my favorite movies, I will not call it a masterpiece. But the director does handle the concepts of love and fear, life and death and a bit of God, masterfully, through his protagonist Max Klein, played by Jeff Bridges. He does this with repeated motions. For example: a character’s movement through a hallway, the opening of a door, the resultant light and the subtly abutting darkness. The corridor, the door, the light and the darkness represent the character’s search for answers to the death he avoided. Weir adroitly sidesteps cliché by housing Max’s actions in an organic progression throughout the narrative.




After surviving a plane crash in which many people died, Max walks away from the wreckage with the sense that he has “passed through death”, he begins to think that death can no longer touch him.




He experiments with tempting fate, first, as he punches the accelerator of his rental car upward toward 90 MPH, sticks his head out the window and drives with his eyes closed; second when he orders a bowl of strawberries at a diner, having been deathly allergic all his life. The third time, he walks across 8 lanes of freeway traffic and reaches the other side without a scratch. He lies on his back and screams up at God, “See? You can’t kill me.” His fourth dare finds him standing at the edge of a tall building in a Christ-like pose; he dances on the precipice with the wind blowing all around him. He is unscathed in each instance.




Max is not a jackass. He is not flaunting his invincibility. He is trying to understand it, which is why he continues to put himself in a position of testing it.



































Throughout the film, Max walks through corridors, opens doors and steps into light. The hallway of the motel to which he retreats after the crash, the hallway leading to his dead friend’s apartment where he goes to inform the wife of her husband’s fate, the corridor between file stacks through which he runs, fleeing from the promise of a lie. He opens doors. He stops before entering the bedroom door of the emotionally battered fellow survivor, Carla (played by Rosie Perez). The doorway to the roof, the door to the cockpit, the door from his home to the outside all signify a step into the next world. The doors open into light and light is what beckons him. He is trying to leave the darkness. He claims to have passed through death but rather he is walking toward it, trying to touch it. The light comes in two forms. It shines on his face then it shows him the way. We see the light shining on his face as the plane is going down. It shines through the window. The light shines on his face when he realizes how he can salvage Carla. We see it when he walks toward it on streets blocked by “Danger” signs. We see it as he emerges from the cornfield leading survivors to safety. It shines on his face when he crosses the 8-lane highway. Each scene of hallway, door and light represents not just his search but also his conviction of the existence of the other side.




His home is cast in darkness. It is bleak and oppressive. It is a place where lies live, something Max no longer does. He suffers through a strained dinner with his wife and son in the narrow, darkly lit dining room. The dismal workspace his wife keeps in the kitchen is surrounded by darkness. The view up to his office from the kitchen is also devoid of light.




His wife, played by Isabella Rossellini, begins to understand his limbo when she explores his office and finds the images he has been collecting and drawing. At the top of the pile are violent telescoping circles that swirl to a black center. Eventually the sketches of the center are white. The final image she sees on his desk is Hieronymus Bosch’s Ascent into the Empyrean with its accompanying message; “The dying shall go into the light of heaven naked and alone”.




Throughout the film, Weir uses the filmic devices of lightness, darkness and movement through delineated space to explore the difficulties of the examined life and shows that it is not a comfortable journey, though it is an essential one to the survivors in question.


I like movies.

You'd better watch your step!

(Thanks DailyWhat)

House of Eaves

While I don't find this house appealing at all, I do have affection for its cartoon precursor.





(and general affection for all things triplets of belleville)

Chigurh, Chigurh

When pitting cherries last week, I was a bit jarred by the violence of the task. I wondered if Cormac McCarthy was inspired by this tool when he dreamed up Anton Chiguhr's brain plugging device in "No Country for Old Men".






(ouch)

Awwwwwwwwww....

It's ok, you can call me a sap cuz I cried.




(thanks, again to The Daily What)

By the way the mural is at 2nd St. and Avenue A.

You can also call me lazy cuz I have been simply posting links lately. But really, I am collecting stuff for original content. Really. Honest. (how's my tan?)