beautiful things

absolutely loving this beautiful collaboration on the marginalian. an animated version of emily dickenson's bloom with music by joan as police woman. it's breathtaking and it was exactly what i needed on this dark, cold, rainy february day.

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heather moore (of skinny la minx fame) is doing a great noticing project #theattentionproject on instagram. in january, it was weeds, now it's "just before you let go." i definitely noticed a lot of picturesque weeds on my january walks. now i need to take a closer look at the things i'm about to toss (or should be tossing).

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loving the @dear_white_staffers account on instagram. they're giving me hope for the world. or at least for the country of my birth. still hoping not to be stateless. 

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have you binge-listened to the trojan horse affair yet? it's so, so good. like first season of serial good. we need more podcasts like this in our lives.

blog crush: ohfortheloveofblog

it was so much fun indulging yesterday in the whole concept of outwardly declaring my blog crushes (instead of just stalking them in silence), that i have to give you another one for the weekend!  and yes, it's another south africa-based blog.  i have a bit of a thing for cape town and have been a faithful reader of molly's ohfortheloveofblog since she found me last summer (after i bought heather moore's fabulous patchwork and went all giddy about it).

so molly, since it's the weekend and who the hell cares whether it's 5 p.m. yet (it must be 5 somewhere), this glass of crisp cold chardonnay is for you. i hope you like it, i bought it in norway, so it was $45.

i recently gave molly a blog award, but i really can't stress enough how cool and funny and smart i think she is.

1. she's the one who has me counting all my creativity during 2009 (we're both trying to reach 100 things created and we may have gotten a little creative in our counting--hey, does that count?). 
2. she has the cleverest titles to her posts. like this. and this.
   
3. she loves murakami. 
4. she rants and swears. 
5. she makes lists. (sigh) oh, how i adore lists.
   
6. she devises clever plots against her avocodo-hoarding neighbors. 

and except for the camping, she's pretty much me living in cape town. or so i feel sometimes (and i realize she may find that deeply disturbing). there are a few people i've found here in the blogosphere who i feel are my long-lost sisters and molly is definitely one of them.

so please go check her out, if we all do it, she'll have to change her tagline which today reads: "blog like nobody's reading." 

happy weekend!

thinking and hyperlinks

as we've seen already this week, my mind works very strangely. i can go from a simple teapot to early soviet film in one post. and even (more or less) explain how i got there. and because i just finished malcolm gladwell's blink, i've been pondering thought processes in general.

consider the following series of pictures:

our brains are processing stuff in the background all the time. as an example: i tried to consciously note all of the things that went through my mind as i just went downstairs to pour another cup of tea--a simple and rather automatic act. along the way, i noted that one of the pictures in the stairway was a bit crooked and thought about how they get that way all the time because they're in such a high traffic area. i flashed also for a moment on the ruin of pergamon that was IN the picture and smiled as i remembered the heat and sunshine and how i was wearing white linen and sabin a sundress that day. as i stirred my tea, i looked at the skinny laminx cloth napkin that was sitting on the countertop with a sprig of evergreen still laying on it and one of my precious resurrection fern crocheted stones. which led me to think of the set of my own stones that i sent to margie yesterday. that in turn made me think of some of the stones upstairs in a dark corner of the bookshelves and i wondered if i should have included any of them. i went up, cup of tea in hand and looked at the stones and saw a shard of ceramic with numbers on it that i found on the old base in subic and i remembered the little bottle of sea glass gathered on a beach near there in the philippines. which made me think about how the treasured and revered sea glass is really trash that some jerk has thrown into the ocean in the form of glass bottles which then break and tumble in the waves until they are smooth, pretty pieces of tumbled glass that wash up on shore and which people actually sell on etsy. which made me think of my list and how i need to just get my eyeball pillows up on etsy already.

it has taken me nearly an hour to write and gather pictures for the above (while doing laundry and lighting two fireplaces and a dozen other tasks), but the whole chain of thoughts probably took under 30 seconds in reality. because our minds are fast. they link things and make connections. i've been thinking for awhile about hyperlinks and whether they map this thought process and reflect it. and that's part of why i set all the hyperlinks above.

of course the whole concept of hyperlinks is manmade, so it no doubt reflects something of a human thought process, since it is born of it. (why am i always getting myself into chicken and egg circles?) but is it an example of that sense i get of the internet as taking on kind of life of its own--evolving us (and perhaps itself) to the next level? or is it just a topography of thought insofar as thought can at all be mapped? how many thoughts did i actually have along the way during those 30 seconds that i didn't catch hold of, that couldn't be mapped? would my topography simply have blanks, or would i be able to fill them in if i could tune in to that unconscious level?

that's some heavy pondering for a thursday and i'm definitely not done thinking about it. how about you?

pretty patchwork art

at the eleventh hour, just after the first guests arrived (some were early!!! such bad manners!!), we hung the fabulous patchwork curtain from skinny laminx. my dear mother worked all morning, battling my old thrifted husqvarna sewing machine to hem the edges and make pockets top and bottom so we could hang it. we managed to find a black rod in ikea that works pretty well with it. there's another rod in the bottom pocket, so you can fold it up as well.

there are spaces at the edges because of the way the bracket it hangs on has to be attached to the wall. it has the feel of a large canvas artwork that i had hoped it would have. the colors are perfect for the very white room and it lends a warmth and homeyness to soften the stark white. 

when you're sitting at the dining table, looking up at it, this is the view:

and from above, it lets plenty of light through and has an almost stained-glass effect with the sun shining through. it's all i had hoped and even more.  thank you so much, heather, for your fabulous creativity!!!

p.s. the party was a big success.

arrivals!

midmorning this morning, the fabulousity arrived:

the wonderful patchwork that heather made and sent to me from cape town (one of my favorite places on the planet!)

look, it actually has matryoshka on it! i love those!!

and a mere few hours later, my parents and sister arrived as well. strangely, i totally failed to photograph that, but we have had a wonderful time catching up, laughing and eating good food. this is gonna be a great week!