Portland

Here is my visual summation of the Portland leg of our summer vacation journey (with apologies to anyone who was following along live as it happened on instgram and has therefore already seen all these images). We took a prop plane to get there, walking out across the tarmac like 60s celebs, and once we got there stayed in the small purple guest house of our pals. After that, adventures and enjoyments of various sorts ensued:

Visiting

Have now returned from our glorious two-week vacation which had three parts: a long weekend visiting pals in Portland (from which leg of the trip comes the quintessentially summer vacation image above), a week being tourists in Seattle (a new city for me, and a lovely one), and a few days of "staycation" at home (eating in restaurants! playing with the daughter in the middle of the day!). A great time was had by all. And now I just hope that this overall feeling of relaxation, contentment, and well-being will stay will me beyond about 9:00 this morning. Will do my level best to see that it does.

Art + Lunch

How much do I love the fact that Damien Hirst has donated one of his paintings to a London Burger King? Sooo much. (Story via Arrested Motion).

Second in the New Ongoing Poem Series about the Winter of 2005 and 2006

December 2, 2005
Between seeing friends

on both Wednesday and Thursday nights
while Bill was at class
totally unheard of for me

have had hardly a moment to myself

still can’t decide if this was
a good thing
or a bad thing

had fun
but missed the quiet
and the midweek blue bowl of mac and cheese


image source is here

Matchbook Stories

Conscientious overachiever that I am, I generally try and avoid just reblogging a story I've seen elsewhere (the usual exception being posts like yesterday's, that are more like overarching love-notes to some particular site--those I'm happy to jettison out into the world with impunity). This adorableness, however, that I saw on Design Sponge yesterday, is just too great an example of a) teeny-tiny cuteness, b) handcrafted exquisiteness, and c) indie publising cleverness for me to pass up. Matchbook Stories: a literary magazine with four tiny stories, each one in its own matchbook, all packaged in a match box and limited to 100 copies? Come on! 

Wear Color

 

I love color. Love it. Reading fiction and wearing color have probably been the two most consistent passions of my adult life. So it's no surprise that when I recently discovered the excellent blog Wear Color, it more or less instantaneously vaulted straight to the tip-top pinnacle of my personal website enjoyment list. It features loads of wonderful, perfect, delicious colorful clothing images every day: movie stars, super models, regular girls, fashion photography, street photography, vintage photography, it has it all. I've come to the conclusion that the woman behind this site, Mallory McInnis, has basically the best eye ever, or at least the best eye ever for sartorially pleasing yours truly.

all images sourced from Wear Color, original sources can be found in photo file names

Sant'Angelo Bridge

Here is Mabel posing with her Grandpa on the Sant'Angelo Bridge in Rome on her 7-month birthday. Whereas usually the thing that boggles my mind about old photos of her is how teeny tiny and wee she looks, in this instance it's actually sort of the opposite--how very much she looks exactly like her own dear self of today, though she is less than a third of her present age in this picture. But that face--and the way it engages with the world--has been inherent to her, pretty much from day one.

Abstract Expressionism

Of course I do realize that posts like this one, or this one, or this one, where I say things like, ooh, I've discovered twitter or tumblr or instagram and aren't they cool, will very rapidly--if, indeed, they haven't already--date to the point of hilarity; not unlike a journal entry a pal of mine recently dug up from 1996 that included the sentence "I've gotten really into email lately--it's rad!" But nevertheless I must take this opportunity to sing the praises of another new-to-me web adventure: art.sy. A vast online resource of art images that can be filtered, sorted, searched, sliced, and diced a million different ways. Today I explored the "Abstract Expressionism" category, and was reminded how much I really, and I mean really dig Abstract Expressionism. It's rad.

Above, Franz Kline, Painting, 1952

 Mark Rothko, Number 18, 1951

Jackson Pollock, Watery Paths, 1947

 Robert Motherwell, Orange Personage, c. 1947
 

Willem de Kooning, The North Atlantic Light, 1977

Helen Frankenthaler, July Understated, 1967

Michael Loew, Green Depths, 1961

Lee Krasner, Milkweed, 1955

Hans Hofmann, Golden Splendor, 1957

Theodoros Stamos, Infinity Field #2 (Lefkada Series), 1978