lead, the way

He's never sold a one.  Given them all away as gifts to friends.  Each taking a few months to a few years.

It's clearly a love of pencils.  A love of lead and wood, to say nothing of the obsessiveness;  the frame of mind he must go into to get this to come out of it. 

I love pencils.  I love their beauty, their simplicity, the way the lead shines on the paper.  The daily use of pencils are one of the things that have kept me in classrooms into adulthood.  I write entire missives in pencil.  I would sign checks in pencil! if it wasn't for all the implications...

Monsters aren't always that bad...

 

{once upon a time there was a 

monster and he was very lonely.

and he was very sad about

that nobody ever came to his

house before}

I wonder what goes on in little kids' heads.  I remember a little bit of what went on in mine.  And then I think how every single one of us is so different, imagine that magnified by being only 8.  It's a combination of having no idea what the hell is going on and feeling like you know exactly who you are and what you want.  But then a wave of 'whatthehellisthisthatsgoingon?' hits you like a ... a wave.  Every day, each and every child, this is what's going on inside.  Add that in with a society of adults.  Who have exactly the same combination of dichotomies inside of them.

When an adult tells us who they 'are', is it really any different than when a kid tells us who he or she is?  At that very moment, it is who they are.

It's like thinking somewhere, out there, is a monster who is lonely because he has no one to hang out with. 

Visiting People Would Be A Whole Lot Easier

I'm always feeling like I can't really leave home because I have so much to do allllllll the time.  And everything I have to do is AT home.  But this, this is an idea I could get behind.

The clever man behind these moving homes is also the brilliance behind the busycle and the park spark. 

In the landscape of a new America, maybe this guy could run for President.

New Date

Vintage French Linens
Originally uploaded by frenchfleas

Kick's Santa Barbara sale was weather postponed to this Saturday!

There but for...

Thanks to each gesture, emotion, offer, gift, moment, glance, job, compliment, defeat, extension, graceful miss, justice, we find ourselves here today, doing this, enjoying that and we could never be more grateful.
Thanks for the giving, indeed.

It's a Comin'

Every Single One

Birds by Emily Sutton
And more

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don't know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me

(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even

what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can't find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.

written by denise levertov 

Nostalgia in Pink

When winter falls around here, it always renders me a little bit mopey for NYC.  I miss it. 
Yes, I still miss it, lo these many years later.  My good friend, and great artist, Karen Slovak paints NY scenes that make that missing-it-pattern ease my heart ache just a bit.

A few years ago, Karen and I were in NYC at the same time.  So I showed her my old haunts and we wandered down old streets new to us, all the while Karen was snapping photos of a New York she hoped to recreate in paint. 

Karen grew up in the city and it's where her family history still lives.  This painting, lovingly recreated from an old photo, was her Uncle's barber shop.

I have my own piece of Karen's New York now.  A tiny pink version of a building after my own heart.

Ned's (Old School) Wallet,
given to his father, when he was 16, by an exchange student from Argentina in 1955

I love the idea that one might have so much money in their wallet, they'd need to categorize it by denomination.

But for the Rain,

This coming Saturday, Kick (a.k.a. my mom) is participating in an open air market in Summerland, near Santa Barbara.

Kick's the queen of textiles.  She never misses a good deal and has been collecting for years.  Our annual trip to France is no exception.  She spies them from far away, sidles on up, does a 'hem and a haw' routine she's worked out with myself and my sister and darn it all if she doesn't walk away with some of the prettiest linens you've ever seen.  There's a tiny sample of goods on her Flickr site, just to whet the appetite. 


Kick at the woad forest, shrugging her shoulders at a field of blue. What else can we dye?


Kick and myself looking for the linens....


Kick sorts the linens in France.

No matter what she finds or where she finds it, the linens always come out looking like new.  I wore Kick's wedding dress on my big day, but before I did, we had to pull it out of a box that had been in the attic for 30 years.  Besides removing the sleeves and making some room in the busty area, mom knew it had to be cleaned.  We were bemoaning the fact that we were quoted around $300 to clean it.  To a woman who grew up on a farm, that seemed crazy!  Instead, Kick soaked the whole thing in the bathtub in her secret ingredient, laid it out on the grass for the chloroform, and dried it by the light of the moon.  It was the most beautiful site I'd ever seen...  She's magic like that.

Newspaper Taxi

There's a shop in Australia called Newspaper Taxi that carries my cards and just the other day did a fun little interview with me for her new blog.  Big thanks there, Stef!

Interviews are a funny thing:  I'm always fairly confident in answering the questions, and then always fairly shy about the fact that someone is reading my words without actually knowing what my voice sounds like.  Then there's the "ohyeah, i wish i'd said that or this or that other thing" when you read it in "print".  And always, in interviews, you're asked what you're listening to and who or what you're inspired by... and THOSE lists are so insanely long in my head that I tend to over list or under list.

Funny, those lists.  Funny, these interviews.  Funny, this life.

fashion slave

 

 Without fail, every single time I spend any amount of time drooling over the photos on The Sartorialist, I tell myself I am going to up my fashion game starting NOW.

tee-hee. silly me.
i should stop doing that.