Decaying Beautifully Thank-You

I just wanted to do a quick post to say thanks to Fei (also known as trytobegood) for featuring my work on the online magazine BEAUTIFUL/DECAY. So nice of her - thank you very much!

PS. check this out...Yes!

xxx

Exactly How I Feel Today

via unchanging window

xo

Flower Delivery New York City

I thought that in lieu of building a whole new website, which I do want to do eventually, I would start to kind of sift through and showcase some selects and outtakes from my unwieldy flickr account. Just to kind of feel like I have something more coherant and strong.

The images and videos I have chosen for my new flickr account - Flower Delivery New York City - are not so much a best-of, or my favorites, but more things that may have got a bit lost in the shuffle, or ideas that momentarily have my interest. I think I am going to keep it as a free account - not a "pro" - and then that restricts me to only having 200 items at a time. Maybe once I have reached 200, I will delete everything and start new.

Anyway. A little experiment. I feel really good about having a fresh space.

Next up: To Do list. Yikes.

x

The Dawn of the Fashion Video

“In 1967 Peggy and I had just returned from ’swinging London’ and Paris to work in New York. We were commissioned by a small commercial production company to come up with something which would serve as my ‘reel’ in order to get hired to direct TV commercials. While sitting on our bed at the Algonquin Hotel, we collaborated in writing a shooting script that would show fashion, makeup, and hair on three beautiful models wearing the fashion designs of avant-garde Rudi Gernreich’s collection for that fall. We shot the film on a weekend, had original music composed for the sound track and ‘Basic Black’ was born. It was very well received, won several awards and has been referred to as the first fashion video.”

- William Claxton

...via the Worn Journal...


This just toally blew my mind. So cool. Reminds me of these "fashion videos" made for Complex Geometries by my good buddies Arianna and Stacy Lundeen. (the site only features a montage of clips - of their videos plus a couple of others - but I think the whole thing will be put online somewhere hopefully soon - it also takes a little while to load - so just hang on!)

...and also: Peggy Moffitt image gallery - Yes!...

:)xoB.

Nest Magazine

(...thanks very much to Ouno Design for most images and others can be found here and here...)

Nest Magazine died awhile back, in 2004, but it is one of my most important cultural reference points. I have been meaning to post about it forever and was reminded of this when I ran across these great photos on flickr from Ouno Design.

The reasons for my great love are many. I found this one delightful quote which partially sums up my feelings:

“I have a problem with corporate America,” he said. The Christmas 2003 issue (No. 23) contained a series of mysterious headlines — like “Lo, ink-clad Nest” — which turned out to be anagrams for “Kill Condé Nast,” Mr. Holtzman said. He had planned to put “Kill Condé Nast” on the cover in glow-in-the-dark ink, he said, but could not get the ink to look right."

- from here

Nest Magazine favoured hands-on artist collaboration, elaborate die-cuts, glosses, and avant-garde graphic design that was truly ten years ahead of its time (pattern-on-pattern, hard edged abstraction, and clashing color palettes when sleek white cold homogenized Wallpaper* minimalism was the order of the day), and most importantly, the magazine made it its mission to feature diverse and unique living spaces from the grandest estates to grandma's living room, with equal measure of enthusiasm and reverence. Editor Joseph Holtzman conceptually pushed interior decor far past the usual endless, brain numbing desire for luxury goods and luxury lifestyle that defines the industry in most cases. Nest was such a comfort and inspiration in that it illustrated an alternative, inclusive, and deconstructed version of what it means to personalize the world around you.


Here are a few links I dug up.

...archive of past issues with cover images...
...a promise I wish was fulfilled (but I won't hold it against them)...
...2004 NYT article...
...What Do I Know blog post...
...Ouno Design blog post...
...Joseph Holtzman's country home in New York Magazine...
...a book about the magazine which I flipped through in the library years ago but it just didn't feel the same...
...Nest as the Interior of Imagination...
...article from The Independent from 2000(!)...
...Ellen Lupton write-up from book Inside Design Now...
...2002 article, The Nesting Instinct...
...Home Alone essay in The Atlantic...
...little NYT review from 1998(!!)...
...in Architectural Record 2004...
...short interesting article in The New York Review of Magazines...

xxx

Ann Woo

I really love this work by the photographer Ann Woo.

I think there also might be a few different photos here on her tinyvices page...

:) :9 :( :D

Showpaper Submissions

(..click on images to see full size...)

I submitted these posters for an open call to artists that Showpaper was having back in October - but I guess it is safe to say after all this time that I didn't make the cut! Oh well.

I really kind of like these as a triptych. The first one is a design I originally created as an illustration for an article on Sonia Delaunay for the Worn Journal - I was always looking for a good opportunity to be able to use it again because it got kind of hidden by the text in the article and I think it is super.

The last one was cobbled together with little icons and images I either found or created this summer and was using as little visual totems at the time.

Here are a few other Showpapers that I collected and photographed awhile ago.

Anyway - maybe I will just make posters out of these myself if I ever get a little extra money. We shall see.


xxx

Linkz?

(...image of the oh-so-Fabulous Anjelica Huston from over here...)

I am now kind of hoarding these types of things over on delicious for the most part - but I thought I would share some here too because that is always nice and it feels like I am giving you an internet present.

So here you go:

...Words Without Pictures - downloadable texts on photography - I still need to check it out but it looks worth it - via Happy Accident...
...Folkstreams - a national preserve of hard-to-find documentary films about American folk or roots cultures - streamed full-length! Via the super blog an ambitious project collapsing...
...on a personal note - I found my Soul Animal at last - I was really wondering all this time what it could be - glad to have found it...
...a Sioux girl's two-hide dress in 360 and the rest of the exhibition Identity by Design via WORN...
...two new discoveries - great blogs on books - Used Books and A Journey Round My Skull - whatever they said about the internets affecting people's love for the written word (plus its glorious illustration) was obviously a lie...
...I love this opening page on Andrew Laumann's website - so beautiful...
...I keep meaning to read this but haven't done it yet - a short interview with William Eggleston - plus did you know that his whole film Stranded in Canton is online?...
...downloadable essays and such from the ever-lovable and inspirational smartpants Dexter Sinister/Dot Dot Dot crew...


Hope you like those. And hey! I finished my first truly successful knitting project - just in time for the Spring weather we have been getting. Over here for a looksee...

Bye!

b.

Stuff Made

I made these weird kind of sculptures over the weekend. I really like them but of course I could not get a good photo. So I inverted them in photoshop and I think I like that better anyway.

I seem to keep making "unmonumental" assemblages. I am not sure how to avoid this since the only things I have to make stuff out of is dollarstore flotsam and shiny things I collect. Oh well. Maybe I will work through this and find myself somewhere else. Must keep moving onward I suppose...

Obviously Haven't Worked Through the Neil Young Thing Yet

(...images linked their source over here...)

Sheesh. Sorry. Sometimes this happens to me. I know it is kind of boring after not posting anything for 5 days. I promise something novel and entertaining next time! For now you are stuck with my latest crush.

I think my favorite album might be On the Beach - here is an audio clip of a 1974 live recording of the title track to this album...