i love these little ghosts. sorry i’ve been acting like a ghost recently, i promise i’ll reappear soon.

by Christopher David Ryan.

incredible hand cut maps of NYC by studiokmo on Etsy.

Michael Johansson.

I WANT THIS NECKLACE SO BAD. but of course it is already reserved for someone else. all of the jewelry in spinthread’s etsy shop is gorgeous, i’ll probably end up buying another little something form her shop.

Did you miss me? I apologize for being gone for so long. Between the jet lag, and the insane number of beards I made the past couple weeks, I haven’t had much time for blogging. Still don’t, actually. But I couldn’t pass up posting this picture, which appears to be Salvador Dali walking an anteater and some other animal that looks like a cross between a dog, bear, and sloth… Not exactly sure what’s going on here.

So excited for my trip! Vintage travel poster from Design Observer.

What I’ve read this year.

I am currently reading Jill Bolte Taylor’s book about the stroke she had when she was 37. She is a neuroscientist, and her insights into the mind are completely facinating. I think you’d love it. I have been reading some really interesting books lately, and I wanted to share. Here’s the list of what I’ve read so far this year:

Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food
Maira Kalman, The Principles of Uncertainty
Shalom Auslander, Foreskin’s Lament
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
William McDonough & Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle
Bill Buford, Heat
Steve Martin, Born Standing Up
Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire
Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames
Natalie Angier, The Canon
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Coney Island of the Mind
Benazir Bhutto, Reconciliation
Pablo Neruda, Love Poems
Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation
Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect
Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan
Paul Rand, Conversations with Students
Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems
Chelsea Handler, My Horizontal Life
Haruki Murakami, After Dark
Fred Rogers, Life’s Journeys According to Mister Rogers: Things to Remember Along the Way
Marc Johns, H is for Holy Crap
Marina Lewycka, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
Jonathan Franzen, How to be Alone
Elizabeth Lunday, Secret Lives of Great Artists
Thomas L. Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded (in progress)
Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot
R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
Neal Brown, Tracey Emin
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (in progress)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Pictures of the Gone World
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Gerd Gigerenzer, Gut Feelings
Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight (in progress)

36 books in 38 weeks. I am a bit behind, but I’m working on it.

A new book, titled In The Sweet Bye & Bye, about the late Margaret Kilgallen, one of my favorite artists.

Here’s a nice clip of her work from Art 21.

i want this dress! but unfortunately, i cannot afford it. it goes down too low in the back anyway… but yeah, i’m needing some new things. everything i own is full of holes.

Why is there no food in my house?? It’s breakfast time! I wish I could make these lovely blueberry muffins, found the recipe at Salt and Chocolate.

photo by Katherine Squire.

while this is only tangentially related to the above photo, i am feeling kinda meh after reading about half of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. i feel pretty solid in my agnosticism, so why do i just feel bummed out watching Dawkins defeat magic through science? probably for the same reason i get excited that there might be ghosts in my room when frida knocks something over in the middle of the night: magic can be fun. if anything, i want athiesm + penn and teller.

oh, wooster collective. this makes me smile.

i want to work for a company like Friends With You, and make bounce houses and giant rainbow worms all day.

The end of the world will look like this.

Beautiful project by Pascual Sisto.

I love these tattoos! Found them on Sylvie LS’s Flickr, she seems like an amazing tattoo artist! Can you imagine having a tattoo that showed all the ingredients you need to make hummus? So helpful.

It has been almost two weeks since I last posted! Shameful! Upsetting!

And yet, unsurprising. I feel like I am running about with my head caught on fire lately. I want to make my absence up to you, though. I’m hoping you didn’t notice I was gone, but in case you did, here is a photo of balloons, which I found on ffffound.

pink gloves

found this on flickr this afternoon. that site is amazing. i could browse around there for hours. this photo was from ten minute’s photostream.

YES YES YES. I’m a huge Matthew Feyld fan, his paintings are so delightful. See more here.

Installation by Mckendree Key.

Thought these were balloons at first, then realized they are those plastic balls that are put in ball pits. FUN. To be honest, though, I am beginning to question this trend in the art world of “let’s amass as many mundane (or throw away) objects as we can, and turn it into an art installation.” Looks amazing, to be sure, but what should we take away from these exhibits?

Not to say that I don’t enjoy this type of art, because I often do.  I often find a sense of pleasure in looking upon huge collections of mundane objects (remember the drinking straw sculptures I blogged about a while back?) I love that this particular installation throws adults (presumably the target audience) back into the ball pit, immersing them in their childhood. But I always wonder what happens to all these objects once the show is over. Do people buy them for their houses? Are they permanently installed somewhere? Or is that the point: a self-conscious critical understanding of how artists fit into throw away consumer culture? Beautification of mass produced, utilitarian objects has been going on for a long time, but I wonder how it has changed over the last decade or so, as we enter into what some people (admittedly not myself) perceive as a “green revolution”.

Let’s discuss this more at a later date, shall we?