Dali and Barcelona Encore

When I was a young girl, I was frightened by the work of Salvadore Dali; I have vivid recollections of being introduced to some of his more massively renowned pieces in elementary school art classes, of perusing the pages of a book belonging to my older sister, always shivering, the feeling of moth wings grazing my eyes. Bodies and other organic objects contorted and pulled apart, like mechanical devices in various stages of construction, doused in acid and the colors of oceans and sunsets. Alluring but comfortably disturbing. It was not until a number of years later, as a young woman, after exposure to different and new philosophies, colors of aesthetics, that I began to truly appreciate Dali beyond the obligatory nod to the Surrealist master, which a certain knowledge of basic art history warrants. It is not at all surprising that his illustrated interpretation of Dante's Divine Comedy is a glorious amalgamation of the bizarre, the beautiful, and the grotesque.

In a few hours, I again fly over to Barcelona, not terribly far from the birthplace of Dali, Figueres. The June skies and air in Spain are supposed to be ideal: warm and clear, before the arid overbearing heat of the later summer months descends. Although I was just in Barcelona this past April for nearly a week, my trip had been predominantly confined to the city conference center; this time around, I have a few days open and free, to explore and venture to the city sites. This side of the Atlantic has been almost growing unfamiliar, but, I am not complaining.

Barcelona bound soundtrack: Lucky Shiner Gold Panda and Coastal Grooves Blood Orange

(image taken from Open Culture)

Parisian Gray

While in Paris early in April, I read the classic novella Quiet Days in Clichy by Henry Miller; the narrative opens with a meditation on the gray skies of Paris, the gris that settles across the horizon, hovering above the roofs of the buildings, a gray that is faceted and intricate, allowing the colors of the city beneath it to saturate. A sort of elemental gray, as though it has a specific weight and mass, an ability to change and react with other materials surrounding it. As I mounted the dome at Sacre-Coeur, reaching the pinnacle of the city, I peered into clouds of gray, unable to see the expanse of the land before me, as others often boast. Mildly disappointed, for a moment, to have my view obscured, I quickly transformed my attitude, thankful and grateful to see the city in such quintessential form.


Saturday afternoon, packing for yet another trip, soundtrack: Forget Twin Shadow

Outfit for a Thursday: Sailboats and Lucite

I have a not insignificant, but brief confession: I love Talbot's clothing store. Obviously, the sort of refined, older lady aesthetic is alluring and undeniably attractive to me, particularly anything in navy and white. This sailboat pattern, a bit kitsch, surely, was an immediate and impulsive purchase. The skirt is a cotton and linen blend, a fuller cut, and perfect for heavily humid and treacherously warm summer days. Coupled with a simple and classic navy and white striped tee shirt and some lucite accessories, complete with red peep-toe shoes, I was ready to give almost any seafaring blue-hair a run for her money.

Iconography: Ray Bradbury

Coincidence is a strange and complex force, with many textures: in recent months, I have been voraciously attacking many classics of science fiction literature; this week, both The New Yorker and Tin House are releasing volumes dedicated to the often misjudged or illegitimately ill regarded genre; and the filmmaker just began to read The Illustrated Man, his first foray with the late literary genius Ray Bradbury, who passed a mere two days ago. Such cosmic parallelism, were it more grand, replete with political intrigue or humane struggles or philosophies of personal freedoms and rights in the era of technological pioneerism, could form the foundation for a Bradbury story. He is being heralded with being one of the premier writers in contemporary times to bring science fiction, a genre elusively ubiquitous and mocked or scorned, woefully so, into the mainstream, assuredly assuming that the mainstream is something to be sought and desired. For me, he was simply a great writer, one who did not spurn or shun the inevitable scientific details that surround and encompass and pass through us all daily, and who dared to explore the implications of these inescapable truths, some natural and some constructed by our own advancement, on humanity and society. 

(image taken from UCLA Newsroom)

Outfit for a Monday: Black Bangle, Baubles, and a Bumblebee

With the birth of Winona, the rhythmic cadences of the infamous ABC Book by Dr. Suess have come spewing forth from the hidden recesses of a child-brain. Recently, a friend of mine brought to my attention to Pentametron, a poetic robot algorithm on Twitter designed to locate and re-tweet updates written in iambic pentameter, mostly accidentally and completely unbeknownst to the masses who use the platform as a means to inform us all of where they purchased their cereal or at which bar they are currently imbibing. The concept is, in a word, brilliant. I am particularly impressed by the rhymes the algorithm randomly concocts. It makes me feel relief at participating in a social media platform, which, despite its great potential and opportunities, inherently contradicts some of my firmly held philosophies with regard to constantly streaming news and media, construction of false or at least altered online entities, and skewed notions of celebrity and importance. Hypocritical, perhaps, my participation, but if it means I can read lines of modern, impromptu poetic gold, then I accept.

In recent months, I have amassed quite a collection of the typical, French-inspired thin striped tee shirts, in navy and white, in navy and red, and the requisite black and cream. When I found this sweater, for a great discount, I was drawn to the broad blocks of color; the pattern, technically, is a stripe, but it has a greater geometric quality to it. Stacks of planar bodies, rectangles dangling in a mathematical proof. The fabric of this sweater is nice and thick, yet still ideal for summer, and will not be too warm. On Monday, I paired it with a basic camel-toned pencil skirt, but I have visions of it coupling well with a simple white cotton skirt.

With such simple, muted, neutral colors, white, black, and tan, I layered two bombastic vintage rhinestone necklaces: a thicker choker and a longer chain with an almost princess neckline. These necklaces are always a bit tawdry, but always a bit fun as well. Sharp right angles are mirrored in this Grecian-inspired black and white bangle, a favorite of mine.

My sister and I have a bit of an ongoing joke about yellow shoes, after reading this article on popular culture, politics, and art commentary This Recording; we are, each of us, targets of this satire, as is the author herself, I am sure, an encompassing audience among our generations and our fair, fair sex. As with all satire whose victims are cognizant of their role in the interplay between critic, social structure, and text, it is simultaneously hilarious and painful; a bitterly amusing truth, though, one that also probably deserves a critical eye. Surely, not all young ladies who adorn their feet with yellow shoes can be guilty of an obsession with bygone eras or with the storing capacities and sheer opacity of glass jars or with being inundated with knowledge of the bizarre or the arcane; in my case, however, guilty as charged, I suppose, so mock away.

Perhaps, the guilt associated with being wealthy but not that kind of wealthy can be assuaged and dissipated with the simple and pure fact that my shoes, in this case, are not entirely yellow. For the record, yellow is one of those colors that often looks jarring against my more olive-toned skin, such that I appear as if I have just crossed the Atlantic in the hold of some wooden barge. So, yellow accessories and, yes, even shoes are welcome in my closet; they are more flattering and they permit some pleasant warmth in my wardrobe. Like red, they are desirable because of their versatility as well; I can pair them with black, cream, navy, gray, and brown, easily. 

Landscape Lusting

For the past two days, the vista views from my grand cubicle windows have been of deep, dark gray skies and lush greenery, the grass and the leaves of the trees ripe and drunk with the deluge of recent rains. Since returning from Peru, life has been a reality of tribulations and trivial tasks to accomplish, of mountains and molehills; my head churns and my mind can be likened to biologic primordial soup, something made of potentially critical and worthwhile elements, compounds correctly concocted yielding proteins and nucleosides and potential for an organic sentient whole, which, for the time, are just floating idly in a muck.

Ever since my brother-in-law, a title that I believe I have never been officially used before, at least not in formal text, introduced me to the bucolic, romantic, idyllic compilation of faraway escapes that is Cabin Porn, I have frequently returned to the collection, wistful and yearning and a bit bitter. I am here, and these, all these houses, are out there, someplace wild and wonderful and remote. In my fantasies, the internet and telephones do not exist, not out there, and there are no obligations to participate in teleconference calls or brainstorming sessions or legal review discussions with client compliance police. There are no duties to travel to long, arduous meetings, where talk is circular and tiring. Out there, one hangs the wet laundry to dry on a line, drawn from a local tree to the side of the house, shirts and sheets and worn pants tittering to the seductions of a gentle wind. Out there, flowers are plucked from the earth, rouge dirt still clinging to their weak roots, to be scattered in clean glass jars on tables, laden with butter and cream and fruits and breads, things made with animals and their gifts, things made with gluten and sugar, things made to eat and eat much of, without thought to carcinogens or other foreign invasive infiltrates. Out there, at night, during sleep, the windows are left open, open to the moon and her symphony of crickets and creatures.  

(image taken from Cabin Porn)

Parisian Street Art

As I travel to new cities, exotic or familiar, or even return to cities that I know well, I enjoy seeing the known sites, the icons, the beacons that are permanently seared in the collective cultural conscious, however, I also really enjoy just seeing the city belly: the shipping trucks, the bank buildings, the grocery stores, the food carts, the hordes of pedestrians crawling and strutting and cavorting about their daily business, the effusive trashcans, the dogs, the patterns of pavement, and the marks of graffiti art, works of anonymity masked by the cover of night, both transgressive and elusive. 

Perhaps it is my own complete ineptitude to wield a can of spray paint that leads me to so deeply admire these images; I recall a certain afternoon before my junior year of college, having just moved into an old bland potato apartment, attempting to maneuver a can to cover a small book shelf in a hue of canary yellow. It is also an element of the mundane that draws me; stencils and sketches and tags and signatures cover at least parts of buildings and bridges and signs in most cities around the globe. They are ubiquitous. For a place such as Paris, always and forever a bastion of aesthetics, a salon for the cultivation and dissemination of new artistic movements, I love the juxtaposition of quick, dirty, and ultimately transient, fleeting, worn down by rain moments of creative expression against the milieu of the masters in architecture, painting, sculpture.

Staying in the tame touristic and student centered neighborhoods of town, I did not have much opportunity to discover broad and intricate murals, rivaling those I have seen in New York, or in the club-centric part of town in Barcelona littered with grubby disco youths. These are more idle, less pompous, a heavy reliance on stencil work; silly dalliances that made me smile, chuckle, caught my eye while meandering the gray streets, alone, wrapped in my camel trench