Hi all, I'm having a lovely time in Australia right now, and alas the lack of a card reader in the PC at home prevents me from sharing the pictures I've taken. So, I guess we'll meet again in the new year, dear friends. Have a warm and fuzzy Christmas!
I'll leave you all with this song and its verses which I've been contemplating for awhile, and of course, to celebrate that Kings of Convenience will perform in Singapore come March. That's one more gig on top of Andrew Bird, Cat Power and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I say cheers to 2010 already!
We'll be rich in memories of all the places
We've captured without camera
We've seen the pyramids
We've seen the Louvre
We've seen Orion upside down
Total eclipses and the moonlight shadows
We've seen dolphins jumping waves
We've ski'ed the mountains and we swam in the rivers
And let the sunlight dry our skin
But freedom, freedom
never greater than its owner
Freedom is the mastery of the known
Freedom, freedom
never greater than its owner
No view is wider than the eye
Show a view to someone who chose
to live his whole life in a cave
He'll raise his arms to protect his eyes from learning
And the blindness to which he belongs
This time it's me, it's me
Cascades of chances I'll just let them be
The unfamiliar is right below our eyes
Don't look for what we know
The unfamiliar is right below our eyes
Freedom, freedom never
greater than its owner
Freedom is the mastery of the known
Freedom,freedom
never greater than its owner
No view is wider than the eye
Uploaded by liekeroomijs
Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.
- Willa Cather, 1927
Beautiful teacups my aunt got me from Japan, and in the background, 'Two Girls Fishing' by John Singer Sargent, recently back from the framemakers.
Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, lost souls mourn beauty, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea. Silence descends, one hears the wind outside, the autumn leaves rustle and take flight, the cat sleeps in a warm pool of light. And with each swallow, time is sublimed.
- The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Muriel Barbery
Uploaded by junelibeloved, via some required
Well, after the initial buzz has died down, it became strikingly clear to me that my duties at the new workplace are mundane, monotonous ones I will go crazy doing. Add to that a host of other existing faults within the company which basically killed off any remaining enthusiasm I had for the job. So, it is without much fanfare that I've decided to quit serfdom and embark on my original adventure as planned. So dear friends, I'll be in Australia yet again in December, and right into the new year. This time it's the Gold Coast I'm going, and yes it's summer break all over again!
I will be staying with my relatives in the house my aunt is house-sitting for a friend, and looking at the address my aunt forwarded to me, I can only say it's a fortuitous twist of fate, and of course, very very apt, that the house is located on...
Runaway Bay.
Does anyone other than me find this really funny?
I hate my job. I am running away to Runaway Bay, everyone.
I love the home of textile designer, Carolina Irving, featured in Lonny magazine. For someone who was suffering such serious withdrawal symptoms since the demise of domino, reading the online mag, which is basically domino incarnate, was complete happiness. The pictures! The books! The mishmash of prints! I do literally gasp like that in front of the laptop as I slowly make my way through the magazine. And this one goes straight into my inspiration folder.
At some point we must have all had it right, before we began shaping it /
holding it up to each other and explaining it. There is a reason we love
campfires and flashlights, treehouses and bicycles, and why they are drawn over
and again with different lines and with different spirits and why we continue to
find comfort in them / sometimes joy / sometimes everything. I will meet you
outside at dusk and we can go anywhere. We can go anywhere we like with cold
fingertips and everything echoing and imagine that at home there are still
dinners going cold in houses filled with yellow light.
I haven't had much time to sit and relax this week, having just started on my new job (!) in the home furnishings/lifestyle industry. It has been exhilarating to say the least. So reading the above passage, found in the Tiny Showcase newsletter (always such a lovely read), takes me somewhere really nice and comforting. When things get a little less new and exciting, I hope I'll have the spare time to sit by the ornamental lake they're creating in the park fronting my house, and finish reading my copy of Anna Karenina. That's something to look forward to isn't it? It has been the subject of my daydreams.
In the week or so that has transpired between my last post and today's, my 22nd birthday has flown, and these are some of the delightful gifts I've received. Post-birthday, I've also received perhaps the singular best news, one which promises exciting things for me in the future. I'll like to thank the universe!
Sometimes, there is no better reason for loving something than simply because it makes you happy. I like to think that there are subliminal impulses and connections within us which defy logic and humanly understanding. It's like the Rilo Kiley song, Science vs. Romance I guess. So I'm with Keats when he said Newton "destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism" (although this interesting article brands that as fake reductionism, but I digress.)
Anyway, this sterling combination of song and moving images definitely got me where it counts. Its bucolic charm tugs at my every heartstring I tell you.
I was immediately intrigued by artist Mercedes Helnwein after watching the short clip, Dark Star, featuring her work on the Lula homepage. After reading a bunch of interviews and viewing the drawings in her online gallery, I am completely hypnotized by her and her posse of sinister girls.
Dream Job! Just watching the trailer sent me into spasms of excitement.
Catch snippets of the show where they follow Keith Johnson, buyer-at-large for Anthropologie, on his treasure hunts in France, India, South America, Turkey, Tunisia, UK, Argentina, and Holland here.
some day, originally uploaded by liekeroomijs.
“I think I got left behind somewhere; I seem to be the only romantic left.”
- Grace Coddington
"Gas released by a dying star races across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour, forming the delicate shape of a celestial butterfly." - Hubble site
I can't believe I've missed this all the time it's been out. All I can say is if you're going to click 'play' now, you have to watch it to the end, because there is no point otherwise. Not for this there isn't.
The very first piece from my dressmaking endeavour! I'm onto my third piece now, and along the way, I find that I've really relished the opportunity to design and have everything go exactly my way (or you can say I get to unleash my inner control freak). The way I've felt is perfectly encapsulated by what Faythe Levine, creator of documentary, Handmade Nation, expresses in an interview in Frankie magazine.
"My personal belief is if you are making something by hand then that itself is a political act. We are living in a disposable society and we have so much being thrown at us of how we're supposed to live and how our house is supposed to look and what we're supposed to wear, and so when you are stepping away from that and taking control over your life to make something yourself, I believe that's a very quiet political act."
Perspective. Perspective is one of those things one
ought to be able to purchase and administer intraveneously.- Naive. Super
Erlend Loe
This supplement came with the September issue of Korean Vogue Girl. Calling itself a Traditional Lifestyle Guide Book, I would say it is my kind of lifestyle indeed. And pity that it is that I can't understand the Korean content, I'm happy enough just looking at the pictures.
Fake conversations on a nonexistent telephone
Like the words of a man who's spent a little too much time alone
(at 3:57 and on, my heart faltered.)
I've been so charmed by this song and its video, I can't seem to get it off my mind.
The line below from an article I read awhile back has been haunting me as well. It scares me quite a bit, in the way when things sometimes strike a little too close to home.
the unhinging sensation that she would forever be an inch away from the life she was so hungrily seeking
When do things which stir and inspire cross over to become vicious reminders of what appear so very out-of-reach?
