Recent Musings. . .

Won’t be posting until Friday the 20th – am working the gift fair with Fern Brooklyn - come visit! We’re at booth 8184.

Chat with you Friday!

I love to visit churches and breathe in the cool, creepy air.  If I could decorate my home like any particular place, it would be a Catholic church. No one decorates like the church, let’s face it. The pinioned saints, weeping madonnas, vaulted ceilings with the dead bishops’ hats dangling down, it’s all so beautiful and peaceful, like what I imagine death to be like. When I was a kid, my mother somehow got on the topic of saints one day, and told me to ignore them, they were all insane. That made sense to me, and that’s why I’ve always loved them.

Above photo by me. Visit my shop for more wierd church photos.

I was not one of those girls who always wanted to be a movie star, much to the frustration of my favorite aunt, who was an agent. She was so cool in my book, single, always drunk, fabulously elegant and very dramatic. A career woman before it was considered acceptable, she had a knack for charming people to death and then getting what she wanted.  All in all, a great role model. She would drag me to her very girlie vanity, drape me in her outrageous jewelry, pin up my hair, and proceed to make me up. Her cigarette dangled from her lips, her scotch glass tinkled in my ears, and she layered on the makeup. I always ended up looking like what my father called a “tart.” She was partial to the rouge circles on the apples of my cheeks, a throwback to her own childhood dreams of being Shirley Temple. She’d break out the show tunes and trot me out in front of her theatre friends, cooing at what a beauty I was, and how tragic I was so shy because I had the face of a star. Whenever I feel bored with myself, I try to see what she did, even if she was always crocked. And oh, those cherry red cheeks…

Above skateboard by the wonderful House of Tears Design, who designed this site…

Sky Pape is an artist I recently met and visited in her studio.  Being someone who lives in a vortex myself, I lost myself in her deep black ink-blown paper pieces and found myself reciting mathematical formulas.  Her work is intelligently obsessive in its minute details, and lest you think you’ve seen each piece on first glance, you’d be misled. Looking closer you are pulled ever deeper into a kind of mathematical reverie (one of my favorite places to be) – you know something’s just been ordered in your own chaotic mind and you see shining in the hallucination of her blacks.  Travels through a magnificent space…one everyone should take.  Not being an art critic I have no language to describe it (I’m not going to do the whole “Can’t you feel the chiaroscuro” thing since people who talk about art are usually annoying, including me.) Suffice it to say that ever since I’ve seen these pieces I’ve kept them in my eyeballs for future journeys… to bump into things in the dark.

For more information or to schedule a studio visit, contact Sky Pape  or June Kelly Gallery.

I felt it was time for another pillow round-up as I have a particular need to rest my own weary head…  One thing that I never understand is when people have ugly pillows. It’s very nearly a crime in my book as pillows are the first place the eye goes in a room and the first place your head goes too.  I once had a dream wherein I was trying to pick my way through a field of pillows. They were all so beautiful I didn’t dare land on one. Up ahead was a hippo who was waving me onwards with his little ears, snorting, beseeching me to get the hell over to him as his foot was caught between rocks. I wanted to help, but I also wanted to preserve the wild pillows in the game preserve.  They were all undulating and making it very difficult to pass over, but finally I chose a path along pillows which had crickets on them. Needless to say, I got to the hippo and helped him. He proceeded to bite me.

Eco bags are great, useful and important in their little contributions to earth.  Other than that, there’s not much to say, so I’m telling another story today.  When I was in college I found this great little vintage shop.  In it, I found a trove of paper skirts made from old paper towels in the wildest patterns.  I bought as many as I could afford. They were laminated and lasted forever and ever (these were from the 50’s!) and I loved them like no other skirts I ever owned.  I was made fun of, people tried to set them on fire at clubs, asked me to mop up their drinks etc.  All very amusing, but screw them – I was wearing a piece of domestic history, not for any political statement but because they were so beautiful.  I am sorely disappointed in today’s paper towels because I have had a taste of the best.  That’s why I never make fun of my crazy little Austrian aunt-in-law, who saves everything to the point of weaving new socks out of old ones from the war, tears off the back of greeting cards someone else has received to re-send them out herself, pulls stray threads from your clothes for future use, and in general follows people around to see what they’re shedding.  Because you just never know where the gems lie.

I think we all know by now that Marie Antonette never actually said “Let them eat cake!”  But it’s part of the popular imagination because it’s absurd and delicious at the same time.  Particularly since she herself quickly lost her ability to eat anything at all, what with her head on the ground.  It’s a statement that so shockingly doesn’t belong to the situation, just like her bizarre hair and her hauteur.  An image to seduce anyone – thinking of her closets filled with jeweled gowns, empty, silly and haunting.  We love to make fun of the aristocracy, but let’s be honest here – who doesn’t want that ship hat?

A long time ago, my rich friends used to torture their butler by buzzing him with a bell-pull and asking him to bring them cheese crackers and maraschino cherries on a silver tray.  Why they got this particular combo into their heads I don’t know, but I’m ashamed to say I partook of said crackers and cherries more than once.  He was good-natured about it only for so long until one night he took us to a voodoo ritual.  We were terrified and mollified all at once, and upon our return home, the sisters never asked him to serve them again.  This was a good move on their part.  Apparently he had spoken to the nanny about this, and she proceeded to tell them the world was going to end in flames the very next day.  Naturally, the sisters ran over to tell us this fact, and we all planned our terrified exits, absurdly packing suitcases.  The point of this story is simply to say that we should all serve each other, on the most magnificent trays possible, in case the world ends tomorrow.

 ”He became frightened of flowers because they grew so slowly that he couldn’t tell what they planned to do.”  Georg Buchner

I used to have my own personal little patch in our beach house’s garden. Every year when we got to the beach, my mother would take us to the 5 & Dime and we could pick out flower seeds. I always, without fail, picked portulacas.  I still don’t know why, but maybe it was because they grew quickly and every day, lying in a hammock, I could almost see them grow.  My sister always picked something slower, something more blazingly fantastical when it bloomed, and somehow this makes sense – she’s an artist and I’m a writer. I often felt an unease around the simplest and most innocent of things, suspicious of how things would turn out or what they were up to when I wasn’t looking. Flowers are big players in this unease.  And when I found this quote, it all made sense.

 It’s picnic season! Invite some ants to carry away your crumbs. Whether you’re having a regular old American picnic or an English-style shooting party snob attack, here are your supplies. I’m off to one now, so no time to wax poetical! Have fun everyone!

What is more magnificent to give a child than a rocking horse? Nothing quite compares to the magical power of one, riding into imagined forests and conquering Picts and Huns.  A tamed horse, one you can ride without going to a barn or worrying it will buck you. It left scrapes in the linoleum but who cared? It was a horse, damn it, and you can’t predict what they’ll do. Living in an apartment in NYC was no problem because a rocking horse didn’t care about the neighbors or your mother or bedtime. And he watched you while you slept, making sure no one put an arrow through you. Ahhh, such noble creatures. Who needs a blankie or a nightlight? If you have a  rocking horse, you’re safe.

Animals are so incredible, and I mean that literally. How can we believe that such designs exist? The hinging, the skin, the faces? Take the hedgehog for instance. Or the mandrill.  Only on a fantastical planet like ours can we have our breath taken away in such a manner. And the things they are capable of! Just yesterday I was lounging on the couch, having finished some bruschetta. A fly landed on my plate and sniffed the crumbs. It decided on a large one and proceeded to kick it about, then chew on it. When it had taken from it whatever it took from it, it did a little hop and then started on another. (I myself hop when I eat bruschetta, it’s so good.) But I can’t bend my neck like a flamingo, I can’t flatten myself into a disk like a mouse, and I most certainly can’t hang upside down like a bat. Oh the joy of animals!

                                <—wallpaper by rats

Once during my Bahamian childhood I was drifting way out to sea on my trusty float, dragging my hand in the water waiting for a ray to swim by and let me pet him, as they often did.  My hand hit a bottle, and I looked over to see a very crusty old bottle with a cork in it (I am not making this up).  I grabbed it before the current took it and inside was a note. Naturally I had to read it.  It was a love letter to a Mexican sailor that had been written 10 years before. It had a sentence in it I will never forget: “My love will never shatter even if this bottle does…” I asked my aunt, floating nearby, what she thought. She said, “Throw it back! It’s bad luck to interrupt a love letter!” So I did, and wonder to this day if the sailor got it. What are the chances? So I began my own bottle quest, writing love letters to boys I’d never even met, just in case they wanted to find me.  And eventually one did, on the coast of Ireland.  He was holding a bottle of beer and reading a scrap of paper he’d found.  Naturally, he finds me fanciful and a little creepy in my sense of symbolism.

You should blow these up as most of them are not what you think! Some are window blinds, furniture, wallpaper, etc.