2. This comic strip:
15 years ago
Showing posts with label steampunk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label steampunk. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Two Pieces of Good News
1. Girdwood Forest Fair, which was cancelled last year thanks to too many rowdy partiers, is scheduled to be BACK ON this year. Nothing can keep me away. Not to mention it's on my birthday ^_^
2. FUNGUS FAIR. 'Nuff said, right? Check this out. Oh, I so can't wait till September.
2. FUNGUS FAIR. 'Nuff said, right? Check this out. Oh, I so can't wait till September.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Thanks for the Super Cool Link
This is great. Lego Steampunk.
Also, have you noticed the new Steampunk Esurance ad featuring Cloud Cult? Makes me want a steampunk band SO BAD.
Also, have you noticed the new Steampunk Esurance ad featuring Cloud Cult? Makes me want a steampunk band SO BAD.
Saturday, December 6, 2008
London vs. Betsi's Heart. Point: London
ok, so i thought i'd like it. but i didn't know i'd like it this much.
except for the sun setting at about 330, and the conspicuous absences of mountains or snow, the city is pretty much perfect.
today we discovered camden market, where you can find any trendy aesthetic your little heart could desire. well, there was a conspicuous absence of steampunk, but in a few years, i'm sure that will have filtered in as well. black leather and silver studs, baby doll brit, hippie goddess, asian kawaii, you name it. i could have spent hundreds of pounds, but, as i have not chosen an aesthetic subculture to adopt as my all-around identity, i didn't know where to start. i left without spending anything (well, 80p for a coffee). i was hoping to find a new bag, as my current GR-tastic one is starting to lose zipper teeth, but to no avail. the crafting hipster movement was also rather under represented.
erik leiser's film last night, imagination, was a wonderful exploration into the psyche of twin, pre-adolescent girls who let their imaginative and spiritual exisitences control their physiological existence. though i am by no means an animation or puppetry buff, my stomach reacted with little thrills at the aesthetics of the film. furthermore, his exhibit of recent holographic work explored some of the same themes - linking infinity with deity, mystery, and exploration. his newest piece shows exciting promise as he moves toward a more organic sensibility and his holographic skill improves. both the screening and the exhibition were at Goldsmiths, University of London, which is apparently famous for birthing the ever-entertaining Damien Hirst.
i am lucky to count him as a friend. thanks, erik.
except for the sun setting at about 330, and the conspicuous absences of mountains or snow, the city is pretty much perfect.
today we discovered camden market, where you can find any trendy aesthetic your little heart could desire. well, there was a conspicuous absence of steampunk, but in a few years, i'm sure that will have filtered in as well. black leather and silver studs, baby doll brit, hippie goddess, asian kawaii, you name it. i could have spent hundreds of pounds, but, as i have not chosen an aesthetic subculture to adopt as my all-around identity, i didn't know where to start. i left without spending anything (well, 80p for a coffee). i was hoping to find a new bag, as my current GR-tastic one is starting to lose zipper teeth, but to no avail. the crafting hipster movement was also rather under represented.
erik leiser's film last night, imagination, was a wonderful exploration into the psyche of twin, pre-adolescent girls who let their imaginative and spiritual exisitences control their physiological existence. though i am by no means an animation or puppetry buff, my stomach reacted with little thrills at the aesthetics of the film. furthermore, his exhibit of recent holographic work explored some of the same themes - linking infinity with deity, mystery, and exploration. his newest piece shows exciting promise as he moves toward a more organic sensibility and his holographic skill improves. both the screening and the exhibition were at Goldsmiths, University of London, which is apparently famous for birthing the ever-entertaining Damien Hirst.
i am lucky to count him as a friend. thanks, erik.
Friday, November 21, 2008
Victorians, Post-modern architecture, Ikea, and Kung Fu. Not a bad night, if I do say so myself.
Tonight we went to a bar in Corso Sempione, near the park in Milan. The bar was an Indian bar, and it was beautiful, with elaborately carved wooden doors and golden pictures of elephants on the walls. We sat in a red, turquoise and blue tent to take our drinks. I wanted to order something off the “Indian Drinks” menu, but they had run out of the Indian liquor, so I ordered a Long Island Iced Tea instead. I am constantly ordering mixed drinks even though I know I don’t like them. I much prefer beer. Anyway, it wasn’t bad.
The night was that perfect temperature where it’s cold but not too cold. It felt like the wind was blowing warmer air into the night, but Federico tells me it’s going to snow. Tomorrow night we are going to the Chinese restaurant and wouldn’t it be perfect if it were snowing. I chatter along in Italian, pausing now and then to let Valentina help me with vocabulary. I know my grammar is awful, and I use that to my advantage in telling bizarre jokes. The jokes don’t have to be funny, but because I am clearly poking fun at my own ineptitude, everyone enjoys the comedic relief.
The area around Corso Sempione was built during the same time as the park and the aquarium, during that wonderful late-Victoria era that I love so much. The houses drip with an art nouveau sensibility—square and tall and with tall, narrow windows. The period has been associated with a stiff collar and stiff upper lip, but in the details of these houses we can see the truth of the aesthetic. The ornate window irons are not so formal and symmetrical as the Elizabethan, or even early Victorian, periods. Today we insist that ornamentation like this is formal, stodgy even, but there was a time when oriental rugs harkened to lush opium dens and hedonistic harems rather than our grandmother’s parlor. The patterns are inspired by leaves and vines, wrought into man-made materials, as if the wild lustfulness of nature could be captured in the windows and ushered into the house.
The Victorians planted aspens throughout their cities, planted rolling parks in the midst of their new industrial centers and populated them with quaking trees. Aspens may be planted in rows, but they nevertheless grow in a twisted dance. Their leaves may look like plate gold, but they twist and spin and show all their colors, colors which are reflected in the speckled smooth bark of their trunks.
Last weekend I went to Bologna and in the park were fantastic ferocious statues from the same period. There were two of lions and their prey. One showed the lion, his phallic tail stretching straight up behind him, snarling over the great body of a bull beneath him. The other showed a lion (phallic tail long-since broken away) battling a serpent with evil teeth over the victory of a massive mountain goat. Half the snake’s head had crumbled, but a full set of iron teeth remained. The other two statues were of busty mermaids in sensual, homoerotic (can we use that word for women?) poses, looking like stone representations straight from a Mucha painting. Their hair swirled around their nipples and the fullness of their flesh. Everything was pockmarked and vaguely green with a pervasive fungal life form.
In Parco Sempione is the Aquarium, built in 1906, with the hippo’s head spouting water into a tiled pool with poi fish and lily pads. The decorative tile around the perimeter of the building echoes the sensibility of the posh neighborhood it was built for.
I eat up the ornamentation, I who usually snub my nose at formal decoration. But the details here reveal whimsy. The artistry and revelry, which we now assume the Victorians brutally repressed, is revealed at every corner. Here, for example, is a fence in which every rung ends at a different height in a fantastical curlicue. Here is a white box of a mansion with a fantastic balcony busting with great drooping plants like it’s a portal to a tropical world. Even the lower level sports marvelous germanium plants—that red blossom that I once associated with domesticity, thanks mostly to New England watercolors, but now I see as a wild red-headed vixen in the midst of a grey city.
If I were in Grand Rapids, I would host a party. Art Nouveau Party, I would call it.
“Come celebrate those twenty years (give or take a decade on either end) from 1890-1910. Come dressed as your favorite buxom Greek goddess (if Mucha is your preference) or as your friendly Victorian couple on holiday (if Talouse Latrec is more your style). Come as Sarah Bernhardt or Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Come as a Baudelaire adventurer, eagerly conquering in the name of England, God, or Science. Come as a Bohemian, emerging from the darker alleyways of Paris or Prague. Come celebrate that, for the first time in human history, we have money to spend. Come pour green into your drink, whatever it may be, and pretend it’s absinthe. Come commune with those people who pretend to be sober at work and keep their private lives hidden behind tall, thin, iron-barred windows. Come and make merry, for tonight the show must go on.”
That’s what I would say.
We drove away from the neighborhood of dreams and on through the city. The last beautiful thing I saw out my window was the porticoed Italian mansion with Michelangelo’s great horse rearing on copper legs in front.
Then we passed the stadium, which looks like a monument to communist-era architecture. An unwitting monument, the type that thinks it protests cement soviet blocs by using cement to make turrets instead. Great round, striped turrets that were either parking garages or nothing at all except a pitiful post-modern attempt at design.
“When was this built?” I asked.
“The early nineties, I think.”
Of course. I had guessed a few years earlier, before the fall of the wall, but the early nineties were the same. The cement of cities was upheld as gritty reality. That proletariat, industrial glorification is so communist in origin, yet there we were as “free western countries” promoting the exact same aesthetic. It makes me shudder as much as the green-tinted glass, brick and exposed metal beam omnipresent CAD-program aesthetic of today. In 2002, my high school was featured in an architectural magazine for it’s cutting-edge design. The library which faces the entrance drive is reminiscent of a lantern shape, green oxidized exposed metal making up the bone structure for the large glass windows and ligaments of brick. By the time I left college in 2008, every new bank, hospital and office park in Grand Rapids utilized the exact same idea. Puke.
Since arriving in Italy I have visited my first Ikea. This experience would be almost exactly the same anywhere in the world, but I had to come to Italy to finally discover the joy of mass-produced homeware fashion. At least here is something we can’t blame on the Americans. The Swedes are to blame, although we can always point to Ford or McDonalds as the originators of the cookie cutter model that has been applied so ubiquitously. Many thoughts (probably not original ones) ran through my head as I followed the school of shoppers through the store’s current. Is Ikea bad? Is it wrong to have our aesthetic handed to us on a plate? I found myself attracted to many things in that store. Was I attracted because Ikea has hit on the common current aesthetic and now offers it to us at affordable prices? Or has Ikea in fact /created/ this aesthetic, which has pilfered into my brain because it’s on tv and in my friends’ houses? If Ikea didn’t create it, then some other designer did. Is there a problem with that? Is a designer for Ikea no less an artist? Must everyone create their own living aesthetic instead of picking and choosing from those offered commercially? Is it even possible to live outside of a commercial identity?
As I said, these aren’t original questions, but there they were in my head. I have an itch when it comes to aesthetic tyranny. We can’t escape it. What the stores tell us to like, we like. At least those chains like Ikea, Pottery Barn or Anthropologie (oooh, I love their aesthetic) have an intentional aesthetic. At least there is recognition of the artistry of life. What’s worse is the tyranny of aesthetic that we experience every day without even being aware: the color and font choices in advertisements, for example, affect how we think and view the world. Advertisements, at their core, are intended to manipulate. Thus, for the last 100 years (since the period I have already exalted), our social aesthetic has been moved forward primarily by manipulation, sometimes really shitty manipulation at that.
I suppose that for this reason, someone has argued that the impressionists were truly the only artists unaffected by manipulation. Prior to that, it was religious purposes. Afterwards, it was the bas-cultural trends. I’m sure I don’t agree with this at all, but whatever. It’s something to think about.
After the bar in Milan we drove to Andrea’s house and watched Kung Fu Panda. I think there must have been a drug in my Long Island Iced Tea, because I felt sloshy-headed yet somehow hyper-attuned to everything. The daoist philosophy shining in the movie was reassuring, even if it was a cartoon.
As I’m applying for internships and jobs back in the States, I find a lot of solace in stoicism. By non-resistance, my path will take its natural course. By trusting in God, I know that He will bring me to the right place. By working hard to follow every opportunity that seems good, not getting too attached to any particular one, and leaving decision-making until the time when decisions must be made, I can balance fierce excitement about my potential futures with calm reassurance that what will be will be.
And all these thoughts thanks to an Iced Tea. I wonder what the Indian liquor would have done?
The night was that perfect temperature where it’s cold but not too cold. It felt like the wind was blowing warmer air into the night, but Federico tells me it’s going to snow. Tomorrow night we are going to the Chinese restaurant and wouldn’t it be perfect if it were snowing. I chatter along in Italian, pausing now and then to let Valentina help me with vocabulary. I know my grammar is awful, and I use that to my advantage in telling bizarre jokes. The jokes don’t have to be funny, but because I am clearly poking fun at my own ineptitude, everyone enjoys the comedic relief.
The area around Corso Sempione was built during the same time as the park and the aquarium, during that wonderful late-Victoria era that I love so much. The houses drip with an art nouveau sensibility—square and tall and with tall, narrow windows. The period has been associated with a stiff collar and stiff upper lip, but in the details of these houses we can see the truth of the aesthetic. The ornate window irons are not so formal and symmetrical as the Elizabethan, or even early Victorian, periods. Today we insist that ornamentation like this is formal, stodgy even, but there was a time when oriental rugs harkened to lush opium dens and hedonistic harems rather than our grandmother’s parlor. The patterns are inspired by leaves and vines, wrought into man-made materials, as if the wild lustfulness of nature could be captured in the windows and ushered into the house.
The Victorians planted aspens throughout their cities, planted rolling parks in the midst of their new industrial centers and populated them with quaking trees. Aspens may be planted in rows, but they nevertheless grow in a twisted dance. Their leaves may look like plate gold, but they twist and spin and show all their colors, colors which are reflected in the speckled smooth bark of their trunks.
Last weekend I went to Bologna and in the park were fantastic ferocious statues from the same period. There were two of lions and their prey. One showed the lion, his phallic tail stretching straight up behind him, snarling over the great body of a bull beneath him. The other showed a lion (phallic tail long-since broken away) battling a serpent with evil teeth over the victory of a massive mountain goat. Half the snake’s head had crumbled, but a full set of iron teeth remained. The other two statues were of busty mermaids in sensual, homoerotic (can we use that word for women?) poses, looking like stone representations straight from a Mucha painting. Their hair swirled around their nipples and the fullness of their flesh. Everything was pockmarked and vaguely green with a pervasive fungal life form.
In Parco Sempione is the Aquarium, built in 1906, with the hippo’s head spouting water into a tiled pool with poi fish and lily pads. The decorative tile around the perimeter of the building echoes the sensibility of the posh neighborhood it was built for.
I eat up the ornamentation, I who usually snub my nose at formal decoration. But the details here reveal whimsy. The artistry and revelry, which we now assume the Victorians brutally repressed, is revealed at every corner. Here, for example, is a fence in which every rung ends at a different height in a fantastical curlicue. Here is a white box of a mansion with a fantastic balcony busting with great drooping plants like it’s a portal to a tropical world. Even the lower level sports marvelous germanium plants—that red blossom that I once associated with domesticity, thanks mostly to New England watercolors, but now I see as a wild red-headed vixen in the midst of a grey city.
If I were in Grand Rapids, I would host a party. Art Nouveau Party, I would call it.
“Come celebrate those twenty years (give or take a decade on either end) from 1890-1910. Come dressed as your favorite buxom Greek goddess (if Mucha is your preference) or as your friendly Victorian couple on holiday (if Talouse Latrec is more your style). Come as Sarah Bernhardt or Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Come as a Baudelaire adventurer, eagerly conquering in the name of England, God, or Science. Come as a Bohemian, emerging from the darker alleyways of Paris or Prague. Come celebrate that, for the first time in human history, we have money to spend. Come pour green into your drink, whatever it may be, and pretend it’s absinthe. Come commune with those people who pretend to be sober at work and keep their private lives hidden behind tall, thin, iron-barred windows. Come and make merry, for tonight the show must go on.”
That’s what I would say.
We drove away from the neighborhood of dreams and on through the city. The last beautiful thing I saw out my window was the porticoed Italian mansion with Michelangelo’s great horse rearing on copper legs in front.
Then we passed the stadium, which looks like a monument to communist-era architecture. An unwitting monument, the type that thinks it protests cement soviet blocs by using cement to make turrets instead. Great round, striped turrets that were either parking garages or nothing at all except a pitiful post-modern attempt at design.
“When was this built?” I asked.
“The early nineties, I think.”
Of course. I had guessed a few years earlier, before the fall of the wall, but the early nineties were the same. The cement of cities was upheld as gritty reality. That proletariat, industrial glorification is so communist in origin, yet there we were as “free western countries” promoting the exact same aesthetic. It makes me shudder as much as the green-tinted glass, brick and exposed metal beam omnipresent CAD-program aesthetic of today. In 2002, my high school was featured in an architectural magazine for it’s cutting-edge design. The library which faces the entrance drive is reminiscent of a lantern shape, green oxidized exposed metal making up the bone structure for the large glass windows and ligaments of brick. By the time I left college in 2008, every new bank, hospital and office park in Grand Rapids utilized the exact same idea. Puke.
Since arriving in Italy I have visited my first Ikea. This experience would be almost exactly the same anywhere in the world, but I had to come to Italy to finally discover the joy of mass-produced homeware fashion. At least here is something we can’t blame on the Americans. The Swedes are to blame, although we can always point to Ford or McDonalds as the originators of the cookie cutter model that has been applied so ubiquitously. Many thoughts (probably not original ones) ran through my head as I followed the school of shoppers through the store’s current. Is Ikea bad? Is it wrong to have our aesthetic handed to us on a plate? I found myself attracted to many things in that store. Was I attracted because Ikea has hit on the common current aesthetic and now offers it to us at affordable prices? Or has Ikea in fact /created/ this aesthetic, which has pilfered into my brain because it’s on tv and in my friends’ houses? If Ikea didn’t create it, then some other designer did. Is there a problem with that? Is a designer for Ikea no less an artist? Must everyone create their own living aesthetic instead of picking and choosing from those offered commercially? Is it even possible to live outside of a commercial identity?
As I said, these aren’t original questions, but there they were in my head. I have an itch when it comes to aesthetic tyranny. We can’t escape it. What the stores tell us to like, we like. At least those chains like Ikea, Pottery Barn or Anthropologie (oooh, I love their aesthetic) have an intentional aesthetic. At least there is recognition of the artistry of life. What’s worse is the tyranny of aesthetic that we experience every day without even being aware: the color and font choices in advertisements, for example, affect how we think and view the world. Advertisements, at their core, are intended to manipulate. Thus, for the last 100 years (since the period I have already exalted), our social aesthetic has been moved forward primarily by manipulation, sometimes really shitty manipulation at that.
I suppose that for this reason, someone has argued that the impressionists were truly the only artists unaffected by manipulation. Prior to that, it was religious purposes. Afterwards, it was the bas-cultural trends. I’m sure I don’t agree with this at all, but whatever. It’s something to think about.
After the bar in Milan we drove to Andrea’s house and watched Kung Fu Panda. I think there must have been a drug in my Long Island Iced Tea, because I felt sloshy-headed yet somehow hyper-attuned to everything. The daoist philosophy shining in the movie was reassuring, even if it was a cartoon.
As I’m applying for internships and jobs back in the States, I find a lot of solace in stoicism. By non-resistance, my path will take its natural course. By trusting in God, I know that He will bring me to the right place. By working hard to follow every opportunity that seems good, not getting too attached to any particular one, and leaving decision-making until the time when decisions must be made, I can balance fierce excitement about my potential futures with calm reassurance that what will be will be.
And all these thoughts thanks to an Iced Tea. I wonder what the Indian liquor would have done?
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Blaschka's Glass
went to Harvard's Museum of Natural History last week to see Blaschka's glass flowers. these works appeal to me on so many levels - the fusion of science and art for one, and also that they come from the very fascinating period in history when the entire natural world was catalogued in a massive effort by scientists, adventurers, and amateurs worldwide.
also saw the temporary exhibit of invertebrate sea creatures - comissioned before the flowers in response to the problem that these ephemeral creatures (jellyfish, octupi, squid, anemone, sea slugs, etc) were not easily preservable for study in the classroom. have you ever seen a pickled sea creature? not so pretty - a slump of whitish material on the bottom of a glass jar.
After the flowers, Rudolfo Balschka (the son, in his seventies by this point), finished his career making models of rotting and blighted fruits as well as fungi, ferns and mosses. right up my alley - yum. unfortunately, i am having difficulty tracking down this collection - where is it housed now?
the whole experience was deliciously inspiring - i especially loved the close ups of the flower organs, for example cross sections of the ovaries. i did not take my camera, because in my mind taking pictures in a museum is highly taboo, so i have no photo evidence.
therefore i bought this book: ---------------->>
i'm taking it to italy and have decided to take my oil paints that i was initially planning to leave home. i've been sitting on this project since spring; i can't put it off any longer. it's itching to get out of me.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Steampunk Dinner Party, anyone?
New York Times has recently had two food articles with Steampunk references. We need to celebrate with a Victorian evening of frankenfoods and apotheke. Who's in?
Illustration by Thomas Herpich
Illustration by Thomas Herpich
Thursday, September 11, 2008
hello moto
welcome to my blog.
in a few weeks i'm headed off to milan for three months. this has finally inspired me to start a blog, but it will hold a lot more than just travel updates. i hope you will enjoy.
In anticipation of moving to MILAN, I am watching the fashion collection for Spring 2009. This week is Fashion Week in New York City. I am enjoying the coverage smattered all over the internet.
For example, I love the steampunk flair in this couple's outfit:
and it amuses me that I have these jeans:
at least i'll have something cool.
I will miss Milan's fashion week by just two days - the last event being the 27th. Not that I would be attending any of the events anyway.
I am eager to experience the fashion culture of Milan. From what I understand, the attitude is much less lenient than NYC or London, where there is a wide variety of styles to be found roaming the streets. In Milan the expectation is to be well-heeled, period. And well-heeled means the most recent collection from the top brands, complete with matching shoes and handbag. Not exactly my cup of tea.
This summer I met a lot of Italian teens at my job in California. For the most part teenagers dress like teenagers and I'm not going to take my fashion advice from them. But when, for a night on the town, all the boys show up in dress khakis, button down shirts, sweaters around their shoulders and pennyloafers, it suggests something about the style standard in their city. The prevalence of LaCoste reinforces that this is the epitome of PREPPY. Not to mention how excited they all were to buy Tiffany jewelry in San Francisco.
I'm sure I'll find my niche.
For the most part I really enjoy this year's fashion, at least as it hits the street.
Here's a fun website of streetside photos from NYC this week: http://www.style.com/fashionshows/sartorialist/
and of course the best place to find photos and reporting on the runway shows is the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/pages/fashion/shows/
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