cricket bats, cherry blossoms and korean girls with pin-curls

Surely we can all agree that this wintery winter's been lovely, but that it's now time again to start dreaming of longer days, sprays of forced quince blossoms in the entry hall, and that beautiful, frosty, misty, foggy part of early spring, that part of the season that is so delicate and promising, that almost-melting, not-quite-slushy, sauntering-out-in-Wellies part, when every living thing seems to be entwined in ether, curlicued in vapor.

At least that's what I start dreaming of when I see these odd, enchanting images from a Korean Vogue shoot, called "Romantic Sport Fashion."



Via Abby's Road.

unsalted butter and radishes make a great sandwich if you have good bread

don't think i've ever seen a more beautiful salad than this one of heirloom radishes that penny los santos, a national geographic photographer, created and photographed for d*s.

ps: doesn't "radish pink" sound like the best pink you've ever heard of? pink can get awfully frou frou, but radishes are peppery and spicy and crisp and I'm going to start calling everything radish pink from now on.

personifying the world around us is too easy when things look like this

Image of Sanno-Iwa ("three rocks"), taken by my brother James, who's currently living in Japan.

If only Blue Note Records had limited edition prints....

Found these, and others, over at an incredible Japanese website while researching images for the poet Major Jackson's favorite poetry covers. Click over and you'll find a treasure trove of Blue Note album covers, and others. Just an incredible resource. I'm dazzled, and longing for images big enough to frame.

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"I will really feel like celebrating when they are here on earth again"

I'm perennially fascinated by our human longing to see vastly, and the artist's interest in recording that longing. See here for another post on this.

Today, the New York Times has collected some incredible images of July 20, 1969 in honor of the 50 year anniversary of mankind's first walk on the moon. It is really moving to see and read of the exhilaration that people were experiencing that day. This woman's postcard, above, is one example: "The moon's surface is so interesting. I can't wait to see color pictures in Life magazine etc.... What a fantastic thing to see on live TV!... What a day!"

Someone else wrote in about what it was like to be a little boy at the time: "I was only 7, but I did not sleep the whole week! My eyes were trained on Neil Armstrong the whole time."


Photographs taken by the then-22-year-old photojournalist David Burnett; more about his prescient choice to take shots of the onlookers, here.

cherry blossom festival

happy spring from hirosaki!

(taken by my brother james, who is a photographer and is living in japan)

in search of lost time

the new york times magazine had a stunning, clever editorial on men's watches this past sunday, titled "in search of lost time"... this one, with the dinosaur and the little "leaves" of goldleaf was beautiful... and i loved the tomahawk one too...




this is by way of saying that i am myself in search of lost time... finishing up a manuscript, and will return to silk felt soil in the summer.

xx p

back to school = cool online industrial supplies

In exploring the coolest online resource ever for affordable, modern shelving, etc, etc, etc; thanks Blueline!), i found this "map rail," lined in cork and full of fun clips and so on, which is $15 for 4'. I think the graphic stripes of cork and steel would actually provide a stunning and unexpected graphic pop, like a really great belt for your walls, in an entryway (stay tuned....!) or an office, & used all around the room. What a fun alternative to a traditional picture rail: easy to install, and a no-effort way to hang (and re-hang) your gallery .... kind of like a more yang version of mav's ethereal inspiration line, which I've never been able to get off my mind.

Julia Christie at Lumas: 21st century landscape photography

I've been reading a lot recently about 19th-century landscape painting... it's interesting to compare the perspectival confidence of Friedrich's 1818 "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog"

... with Julia Christie's bleached-out, 21st-century landscapes in which the small human figures are swallowed up even though the beach setting is ostensibly benign...



Seems in some ways similar to Zen Sekizawa's work,
although his take definitely feels more carefree (maybe because the figure, even though headless, is closer to us, and positioned at the top of the frame, like Friedrich's Wanderer)...

Julia Christie's starkly beautiful White Sands photograph series available for purchase at Lumas. Thanks to Angela for the great link to Lumas!

blue feels new

loving the saturated hit of lapis lazuli that makes a neutral-toned arrangement of boxy objets suddenly feel moody, languid, just right.




photograph of bureau by Alexandra Rowley via Desire to Inspire

bringing early spring inside: forced branches

forced quince branches, indoors, abloom.... (from apkoski's flickr stream)

for a great how-to, see here.

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yet... even before they bloom, forced branches are glorious, gorgeous displays on their own, as bare branches.









images, from top: camilla engman's polaroid snap; ktsadowski's flickr'd willow branches; Lee Friedlander's photographs are almost as good as the real thing...; and a soft, spare branch from sherrieg's flickr stream.



(BDDW via AT.)

photography: zen sekizawa

this 2006 image by zen sekizawa is so atmospheric and leaves so much unsaid... i love how it walks the line between abstract and representational art.

small spaces at home: try a painting or photograph gallery

images, from top: david netto design; southern accents via style court; marie claire maison.



PS: confession-- as much as I love clusters of paintings or ordered groupings of photos, I am a bit of a perfectionist and thus take a verrrry lonnnng time in putting up art in the house. This time around I'm thinking of starting small, doing a gallery of my brother's amazing b& w photographs [H*A*P*P*Y B*I*R*T*H*D*A*Y, JAMIE!] from top to bottom of one wall in our 'thirties b & w tile bathroom. Would welcome thoughts or suggestions! xx p

recycled design, etsy-style: envelopes that play with scale

An Etsy shop, Bellis Celebrations, gives PR mailings a second life:

"I'm a graphic designer and some of the paper promotions and stock photography brochures I get are just beautiful. Too beautiful, I just can't bring myself to throw them away."



I love the hugeness of the Q-Tips and the precariousness of the window-washer...

Each set of envelopes around $2 here. Or, make your own. Just recently, I made some envelope liners using images from an old New Yorker; it was fun to give a small, unexpected jolt to the inside of a plain envelope, like La Perla under jeans!

"Susan Sontag, Petra, Jordan, 1994" - by Annie Leibovitz

Photograph by Annie Leibovitz, from her newly-published retrospective, A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005 (New York: Random House, 2006). Image courtesy of The New York Times, October 6, 2006.

fashion photography: catherine keener

Catherine Keener, whom I have loved since I first saw her in the 1996 film Walking and Talking, looks superb here -- more alive than I have seen any actress look in a long time.

Gorgeous photo by Raymond Meier.

[courtesy of The New York Times Magazine, August 27, 2006.]