one for good luck
Lemon crème fraîche cake with a layer of vanilla bean lemon curd and lemon cream cheese frosting with blackberries and raspberries and beeswax candles.
Joyeux anniversaire!
care to dance?
“At times, the precision of the display recalls computer animation — but it’s real, and it’s the work of a team of hundreds of volunteers, whose off-screen efforts are the subject of the video’s second half.” Read here.
beauty is embarrassing
“It’s so beautiful, it hurts my feelings.”
DIY pastoral
White-washed,
Curated blogs
And magazine revival.
Design is king
But substance is the thing,
Marked by simplicity.
Food, craft, lifestyle –
Anti-industrial,
The romance of labor.
Eschewing the mass produced.
Chewing the homegrown,
Local,
Organic,
Artisanal,
Authentic,
Handmade,
Precious.
Too precious.
The new premium is the old premium,
One-of-a-kind.
Rustic but refined
Lacking self-awareness
Yet completely self-reflective,
And without humor.
Hallowed but not haunted.
All sweetness and light.
Whimsical without darkness.
A forced mantra,
This Is Real,
This Is Real,
This Is Real.
the last 70
For the last seventy years this apartment sat full and cluttered with the props of someone’s life. Paintings hanging on walls and resting on chairs, papers stacked, hairbrushes neatly lined up, Mickey Mouse sitting at the taxidermy ostrich’s feet (or is that an emu?), smiling and waiting patiently.
Full and cluttered, lived-in, the way my house looks mid-week with the addition of Parisian glamour. But empty and abandoned too. Props turned into relics. A lively vault. Bathed in sunlight, moonlight, shadow. And so quiet. That’s what I imagine – seventy years of changing light and unchanging silence.
“Entering the untouched, cobweb-filled flat in Paris’ 9th arrondissement, one expert said it was like stumbling into the castle of Sleeping Beauty, where time had stood still since 1900.” (The Telegraph: “Parisian flat containing €2.1 million painting lay untouched for 70 years”)
Sleeping Beauty had woken up and run off to the south of France when WWII began. She started a new chapter. Left the castle behind, under a spell, frozen in time and waiting. It was her death that broke the spell. It was the Internet that let us all in.
But there is a certain sadness in cracking the seal and disturbing the peace. Thinking of the love letters handled, their colored ribbons untied, the paintings sold, the dust that took seventy years to gather just wiped away, everything tidied, priced and sorted and carted off. There was so much promise in all of it silently waiting for Mrs. De Florian to return.
This story, first read here.
rest
I’ve never wanted a tombstone.
Until this morning.
When I realized that a tombstone
is something that could wash up on a
beach a hundred years from now.
And be found by a girl who loves to find treasure.
Hello, Delia Presby.
It is nice to meet you.