March madness

Halfway through March and nary a post to be had!  Let's rectify that.


So far this month I've:


read the first 3 chapters of Ulysses (hurrah!), went to a talk on a rainy muggy Sunday afternoon by my favourite Greek professor Vrasidas, on Homer's Odyssey (he also threw in Joyce's and Kazantzakis' modern interpretations for good measure), resigned from my job (14 more working days until corporate freedom!), farewelled my laptop with tears, cautiously welcomed another (I have finally crossed over to the Mac side, let's see if this one holds up longer than my last 2 frustrating PCs), went for an interview for my dream job in Sydney (haven't heard back yet...eeep!), visited Sunny Corner once more and kinda fell in love with NSW's Central Tablelands, resolved with Luke that if we bought a car we could explore all these little country roads and towns and take some awesome photos and  buy crazy homemade relishes and good things, watched 6 episodes in a row of the new series Once Upon A Time (my brother and my mum are similarly hooked!), started reading the Hunger Games in advance of watching the film (Katniss, you rock), went to the Blue Mountains for 24 hours and revelled in the mysterious mist around me at nightfall, got my paws on a bottle of Stony Pine Gin (it has Australian native herbs and botanicals which makes it extra-unique so I'm saving this New World gin for the right moment), watched a film about a girl in Paris who is obsessed with Woody Allen, watched Woody Allen make a cameo in the aforementioned film and had to stop myself from squealing with delight (along with the audience!), bought a pair of patent maroon brogues and love their shiny-manly-clunkiness,  have been a little bit addicted to that freshly-scrubbed feeling that my Clarisonic gives me, been appreciating Sydney doing that amazing Autumn thing that I love so much, seriously...Sydney is the absolute best in Autumn; crisp air and sunny bright blue big skies, perfect, perfect, perfect.




So that's been my March so far.  I will post about some of these things in more detail, just thought I needed to make an appearance on my blog...what a bad host I am.

Hope you are all swell




xo

Muybridge's dancing couple

I'm sure Luke would love this framed (me too! swoon). He's got a nice big book on this guy.  

clever photo by clever Eadweard Muybridge

Madewell

The blogosphere has been getting giddy over MW's polka dot flats. They're fine...but just look at these beauties!!

Yes please. Add to basket.

big love: Noosphere

Tatiana Plakhova, you make my heart and my brain hurt. These are magical.

avoiding Ulysses

I set myself a little-ish goal this year, to read James Joyce's Ulysses by Bloomsday (June 16).

So far I've read about 55 pages about a month ago, and haven't touched it since.

I have read two books and started a third, in the time since then. All because I am avoiding Ulysses. This is why I could never join a book club, this is why I came to resent my English Lit. degree and didn't want to pick up a book for far too long after I graduated. I don't like it when reading is given a deadline. I don't like it when reading becomes a chore instead of a choice.
Now, I know it's not a chore if you don't want it to be. And I know it's a self-imposed deadline, so it almost doesn't count. But my brain is funny. And Ulysses is.....weird.

I am stubborn though and I want to finish it, it seems interesting. I can tell already I'm going to love some bits and really really struggle through others. If I start it up again now I have 4 months to get through the 18 chapters that amount to almost 800 pages. And then I can start on Proust. Cough.

At least I enjoyed (and shed many many tears throughout) Diane Keaton's Then Again and especially when re-reading Jane Eyre. I literally could not put it down over the ten days I devoured it, every spare moment I had, even for three minutes, I would be reading it. I miss that feeling of being obsessed with a story. It doesn't happen very often to me at all but it's a thrilling thing to have when it takes over.

The current book to elbow Ulysses out of place is Matt Bondurant's The Wettest County in the World (read in anticipation of the film currently being made and shocked as to how I had never heard of it before!) which bowled me over from the very first few pages. I am already invested in the Bondurant brothers and their tales. I do not want to drink their moonshine though.

I will keep you posted on my inevitable struggles with Ulysses. Advice welcome.

It's a man's world

Perusing the excellent online version of The Shortlist,  I found a tab called 'Instant Improvement'. This intrigued me, and I must say; judging by the many (suprisingly genuine) 'how to' guides offered here, it must be seriously dangerous and difficult business being a man in this day and age. Good luck to you gents!

 little George Clooney

Here are the links to some skills that I think are essential for the modern man;


-How to avoid a bullet


-How to make perfect onion rings


-How to survive a cougar attack


-How to propose


-How to make the perfect paper plane


-How to jump from a first floor window and survive


-How to get into opera


-How to iron a shirt without leaving a crease


-How to wear shorts


-How not to lose contact with friends

Rothko rags

Isn't this dress just.......well!

Talbot Runhof Rothko dress

Rothko 1957

on taking photos....

" Everybody does that now. We all take pics… you do the same with holiday photos. You record something to look back on it, even though you’re not really there when you’re taking the picture ‘cause you’re too busy recording it - so you retrospectively go to look back on where you weren’t and tell yourself you had a good time.'
                              -Dylan Moran 

I have a friend who is well travelled and hardly takes any photos, if any at all. This astounds me, but then again I really feel like I am bursting with electricity and energy when I take photos.  It does something that my brain just finds so agreeable.  And I can get just as excited taking photos around my room, or in my street; it certainly doesn't have to be foreign lands.   I always make sure that I absorb where I am first, because I don't want to only experience a place through the photos I took afterwards (hence the above quote which sums it up much better than I ever could).  It's such an empty waste of an experience.  I absorb, enjoy, and then I think about what would be the best way to try and sum up how I perceived something in a photograph.

I realised just now, I STILL haven't posted about our amazing trip back in September...isn't that bizarre? Maybe I'm nervous that writing about it won't capture what we felt and experienced.  I know the photos certainly capture many aspects of it, good! I worked my backside off to take them and thought carefully about each one because I knew that I'd want to remember these vistas forever, and I knew that each place had it's own energy and needed to be treated differently within the context of a frame.   I would really like to share some with you, and also, to get some printed up.  Isn't that the curse of the digital age? Because you have them on your computer you tend to forget that you can hold them, display them on your wall or in an album like you did analog photographs.   I'm going to print some up, it's time.

mid-week afternoon light in Reykjavik

two things: Marilyn 1955

I wonder if anyone has done a coffee table book of black and white photos of beautiful Hollywood actresses looking out onto the city from a rooftop/balcony? I'd buy it. You know how much I love the one of Natalie Wood. Sigh.

I like the symmetry of both these photos being taken in 1955, and the total difference in the environments and her mood.

Turandot

We saw this last night, it's such a novelty going to see an opera at the Opera House..and we have such a lovely one in Sydney!  Graeme Murphy's production was gorgeous and fluid, the stage was crammed full of people at some parts and the costumes and sets were gorgeous. 
I had big fat tears hanging in the corners of my eyes during Nessun Dorma and I haven't been able to stop humming it ever since.   

Here's Placido with a pretty neat version:

Blue + Green

This dress makes me happy, it's like wearing an artwork.  Whoever said 'blue and green should never be seen' was an idiot.

Reed Krakoff silk chiffon wrap dress via Net-a-Porter

Hemingway

Is it just me, or is Clooney looking like Papa Hemingway in this photo?

Niiiiiiiiiiiiiice.






Also, here are some blonde jokes via McSweeney's as Hemingway no doubt would have told them if you asked him for one:


Q. Why was the blonde staring at the frozen orange juice container?
A. The container brought to mind the Sunday breakfasts with her mother in the days before she took her life.


Q. How many blondes does it take to change a light bulb?
A. Margot preferred darkness.

                   photo via the chive

Pin-up gal

I should very much love to have this huge poster hanging somewhere in my house, preferably near a reading nook and not too far away from a martini. Dorothy you are magnificent.

big love: Brooklyn Bridge

This bridge is fantastic. This photo is also fantastic.  I wish I were back there walking across it right now.

photo of workers painting the Brooklyn Bridge October 1,1914 taken by Eugene de Salignac

Thirty, flirty and thriving

So far, being 30 is pretty good. I have felt very loved this entire week, and Luke spoiled me rotten...I'm not used to being spoiled.

We received the box of books we posted to Oz when we were on holiday in London this week too, it was thrilling opening it up and seeing the books we bought from our trip. I pretended that they were another birthday present (!), and it has been months of waiting for them so I had forgotten exactly what they were.
Luke had a lot of architectural theory books, I had a slim book of poems from Iceland, some paperbacks from NYC (from the amazing Strand and the huuuuuuuge Barnes & Noble near us in Union Square), an amaaaaaaaaazing book of stories about and from Venice and a couple of books about all the secret and lovely walks you can do in London. I will post photos of our book box soon. I like those two words together; book.....box.

The books about London made me so teary, and I felt such an urge to be back there again I couldn't even turn the pages towards the end. I pretended that just for a moment all these things were right outside my door, I could put on my jacket and start walking along the Thames, or along cobble stoned streets and meet my friends later in a warm pub.
Leaving London, or indeed, missing London, has been one of the single biggest heartaches of my short life. It's different from mourning a person, obviously. Have you even mourned for an entire city? A country? It's such a strange all-encompassing bittersweet melancholy. Often I grow tired of it because it exhausts me, but I know it's my heart telling me that's where I should be, and you shouldn't ignore your heart.

I also learned this week that I hugely and almost exclusively prefer gin martinis. Luke made me the most amazing martini I've ever had. It was so simple, but the flavours were so clean and fragrant and refreshing; thank you Tanqueray! He's really gone out of his way this year, but as he sees it, 30 is a landmark birthday and the presents should reflect that. I can't wait to look back on these things in 10, 20, 30 years time and see how they've aged and worn and remember how loved and blubbery with tears of surprise I felt this week when I opened them up. (Number one extravagant present, a sublime pearl necklace with little pearl earrings...swoon). I love pearls, . I'm not a (white) diamond gal at all, ever. Black diamonds, yes; which is why I have them on my engagement ring!

They were so cool to touch when I lifted them out of the box, and in next to no time the contact with your skin warms them up and they glow in a special way. Utterly magical.

Here's a clip from a wonderful, cheesy, nostalgic, sweet and funny movie that I have such a soft spot for:
                 

Colossal: Rainbow Brite

I dare you to check out my new favourite website and not be leapfrogging around the posts for hours and hours looking at all the beauty and wonder a creative mind can think of. It's moments like these that make me so proud to be human, and hopeful that all is not lost.  
Here are some of the more colourful examples:

Chromatic typewriter by Tyree Callahan

 

 Aqueous Fluoreau by Mark Mawson 

this room used to be white, before Yayoi Kusama gave

 kids free reign with thousands of stickers

what David T. Waller did with 2500 toy cars

pretty Penguins

I think Penguin is making us (me) more shallow.  How could you NOT judge a book by it's cover when they look like this? Luckily they are all classics too, so the judging happened long before you or I took our first breath.

a set of Dickens...ok by me!

 the modern illustrated covers on some older titles are also exciting

the food collection, writing from the last 400 years. Yum!

the original classics, now up to 29 titles I believe

the new set that made me swoon;

 Art Deco foil print covers for F. Scott Fitzgerald...sigh.

My favourites are the ones in the Great Ideas series.  Tiny slim volumes with embossed and pressed covers each with their own font or design and some of the greatest thoughts and essays from some fascinating people. They are up to series 5. There are 20 in a series.

 They are about a fiver each.  Phwoar. One day.