September 22, 2009
It is an amazing thing in life when your heroes become your friends. And so it is with friend Les Blank.
I rented Gap-Toothed Women in the 1990’s when I was living in Vienna. And then came Burden of Dreams. A clear addiction to documentary films ensued.
Don’t miss this great interview with Les @ Vice Magazine.
September 14, 2009
Red can be a naughty color — red-light districts and bordellos. It is both the color of Satan and the color of the Roman Catholic Church. Stevens notes that red was a color often associated with divinity; medieval and renaissance paintings show Jesus and the Virgin Mary in red robes.
Red is for happiness — Indian brides get married in red saris. Red for good luck — the one-month birthday of a Chinese baby is celebrated with red eggs.
Red is rarely an accident.
“A textile is not dyed red by chance,” Stevens says. “No you use red for a specific reason whether it’s for love, for fertility, for happiness — you made it red on purpose.”
From: The Color Red: A History in Textiles
Read: A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire
September 3, 2009
While I love a good apron and The Gentle Art of Domesticity, cleaning has never been a particularly sexy task around our house. However, I loved the article below that ran in our local paper on Tuesday of this week.
It makes me happy that living clean is going mainstream.
Some great recipes are available here.
Maggie loved mixing the ingredients with me in the kitchen last night.
BUT, I still swear by Mrs. Meyers Lemon Verbena for washing our clothes…
*Make your own apron like the one above with the Bloomers Pattern available as a pull-out from our Alabama Stitch Book.
August 31, 2009
Delicious airplane reading en route from Ketchum back home to Maggie (and, of course, Alabama):
A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table by Molly Wizenberg
August 25, 2009
August 20, 2009
While looking out over the water from the balcony of a mansion on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut tells his friend, Joseph Heller, that their host makes more money in a single day than Heller will ever earn from his novel, Catch-22.
Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have.”
Vonnegut questions, “What’s that?”
“Enough.”
Untitled 10 by David Schoemer via Lee Cerre
& a thank you to Conrad Pitts for sharing this story. . .
August 6, 2009
“Benjamin Franklin was a genius, one of the great inventors of this country. What did he do? Well, everything.”
July 19, 2009
July 18, 2009
July 17, 2009
This beautiful story from The New York Times today: Femininity, Salvaged
Anais Nin – The Delta of Venus
It has taken me two years to finally see this film that friend, 
