(by Dawn Landes)
Archive for the 'things' Category
A lot of the things I look at regularly on the internet are about dresses. Some of it is about making dresses and some is unabashedly fashion. Yeah. I read fashion blogs!
Mostly it’s that journal articles are in black and white and badly photocopied and I need to look at pretty things every now and then, or I’ll wilt. It’s like the poster or print up on the wall at Kat’s house, “girls need cute things or they’ll DIE.”
Dresess like this one! (which is from mociun) And Built By Wendy stuff. And all the vintage patterns over at A Dress A Day. I have a few patterns and some washed and pressed fabric that’s meant to be magically transformed into dresses, but I’m not actually working on that at the moment.
I will say, though, that I am bored bored bored of all the Japanese dress books and the adoration of them on many of the dress and craft blogs. The dresses are all so shapeless and boring (and no doubt would look terrible on anyone with boobs), and the books all seem so samey-same, with models standing in front of white or grey-ish walls, holding on to some inane object. It’s better than the overcutseyness of the amigurumi japanese craft stuff that I’ve never been a fan of, but I have no desire to look at any more shifts or tunics. Urgh.
For those of you that love the japanese dresses (or just don’t know what I’m talking about), Karyn has a quite a collection of them that you can see here.
In the opening scene of the season finale of Mad Men last night, Betty Draper goes to visit Roger Sterling in a freshly mowed hay field wearing a huge white wedding dress and gets shot in the head with a rifle by an off-screen Jane. She was aiming for Roger, but the first bullet missed and he hit the deck like a good soldier. As the second bullet entered the back of Betty’s head, the camera swung around 180-degrees in a Matrix-like way and we see the bullet exit her neck about two inches below the ear. A ray of light shines through the hole as the bullet exits, as if Betty is made of pure light. (not really)
But seriously, folks, it was a good episode, no?
At Anna’s wedding, there was a moment when Anna and Leah and I posed together for some professional photographs. The only one I’ve seen of those (maybe the only one there is?) is of our feet:
I also came home with this shot of my family’s feet at the wedding:
(I switched shoes at some point, from the yellow heels to the blue flats.)
I love these feet photos (and the ones up on the blog header)! I don’t really know why, though! Maybe because they are self-portraits I can take without too much trouble, and they often really do capture the place and event…
As a counterpoint to the cranky, here’s something wonderful I found on Franklin Avenue: Street Plans with a gate made from pieces of an air conditioner.
I’ve always liked this song:
A few weeks ago when I was up visiting Anna at the farm, we went to a cider party nearby. People brought boxes of apples and milled them and pressed them using the massive cider press. We hung out outside for hours eating food (cider doughnuts!) and drinking the sweet apple cider (different from juice in that it’s not filtered).
The cider press looks like this:
The amazing amount of apples:
And then I got home, and glanced at the calendar hanging up in my kitchen, and it made me smile:
I was not sad to switch the calendar to November (or have Emily switch it); it’s just as beautiful.
“Squealed” sure is a funny looking word.
SQUEALED
This is a real course in the Sociology department, but it totally seems like a joke:
SOCI G9080 - Contextualization of Contexts
3 pts. Prerequisites: None. Structure embeds with process and events with networks among observings and signalings, as variously perceived and constituted in levels and extensions. The central issue is contextualizing contexts wherein social is interdigitated with cultural, narrative with situational.
This is a super-lovely NYT illustrated story about the author’s children, who love the New York City subway.
The illustration above goes with the line
Arthur spends hours studying the subway map. He laughs at his mother when she suggests taking the B on a weekend. The only questions he has are about the pronunciation of some station names.
Moving means giving things away!
(click to make bigger)
It totally drives me crazy when journalists–in print and on the radio–say that person/thing/event “made headlines.” As if they, the media, have nothing to do with what “makes headlines” and becomes part of the discourse.
Maybe they’re just giving a lot of respect to the late-night copy editors who actually make the headlines.
I’m looking up scone recipes on the internet this morning, and they all suck. They all say things like “2 cups of bisquick” (bisquick? seriously? if was into using premade stuff I wouldn’t be looking up recipes!) or “spray pan with non-stick cooking spray” (that stuff is scary and gross!). Maybe it’s my own cooking up-bringing, raising myself on vegan cookbooks that all say things like “your choice of sweetener” to accommodate all the folks who don’t eat sugar/honey/agave nectar/whatever, but I want these recipes to say things like “do what you need to do to prevent these from sticking to the pan.”
If these recipes were in cookbooks, there’d be a whole intro section on nonstickage (or on sweeteners, or about substitutions, or whatever), and the recipes can refer you back to the what-cooking-is-all-about pages. But with the dumb internet, recipes are not part of a collection of anything, they’re one-offs. They’re hit singles with no album.
This makes me sort of sad–I feel like all these awesome skills, like the ability to curate or edit or collect or compile are slipping away. We get things totally disjointed and discrete.
I know that there are plenty of people curating all the stuff that’s on the internet–that’s what all those lovely blogs like CRAFT or Swissmiss or Kottke do. And I like them, but sometimes the endlessness of them feels tiresome. ESPECIALLY with the CRAFT blog–if anyone does anything crafty on the internet, it gets reposted there. And just as a link. It’s pointing: “look at this!” “look at that!” and most of it sucks. I know I shouldn’t get all righteous about something that is so clearly a promotional marketing tool for an overpriced magazine ($15 an issue!), but somehow it’s positioned itself at the head of the internet craft world.
Now I’m actually going to go make some scones.
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