I’m thinking about fuzzing up my home this fall with a duo or trio of these sixteen inch fibery felt cushions from Canvas Home.
Would just have to pick a room…
Orchestrate the right color palette…
And rationalize the cost.
(Help me rationalize the cost.)
How much energy do we spend obsessing over life’s imperfections, distorting and disguising them in an effort to feel flawless?
It’s often a waste of time, so from now on I’ll try and remember that setting a giant, gold frame around a problem (be it literally or figuratively) can be the brightest way to make a flaw fade away.
Yesterday’s attention to design, updated with the technology of today. The electronic offerings from Harajuku-based Amandana.
Your phone may have a calculator conveniently built in, but I doubt it’s as geeky chic as this one:
The electric oven is now long overdue for a compact comeback. Two or three more seasons/jumps forward in time and Betty Draper’s gonna pout right next to one, I guarantee it:
I still have the tongue of a seven year old; the taste of coffee strikes me as bitter and wooden-banister flavored, but for full-fledged grownups with the palates to match, a mini home brewer like this adds instant hip to your kitchen counter:
Two or three issues ago, GQ swore that cell phones were slowly and not-so-secretly killing us all, men and women alike. So get a land line while there’s still time. Safety first, supreme style second:
– A chunky clunk of metal from Porte de Vanves. An old dye embosser is our best guess.
– Happy cans of canned goods from a small sidestreet market.
– Fancy, Franc-ish coin dish from the Musee d’Orsay gift shop.
– Flea market, vintage beaded flowers for my sister.
–The gilded glam at Versailles inspired me to luxe it up more in my own life, so I picked up handfuls of golden flatware at Zara Home.
– Strawberry tinged tater chips we ate for lunch in our hotel room after we were stranded by the volcano. They were actually nice and quite light and unbelievably un-odd tasting.
– And lastly, an alien pod vase from my favorite of the big department stores, Printemps.
– From a nothing-special supermarket in Paris, some super special grid-lined notebooks.
– From down at the Porte de Vanves Flea Market, a mysterious hand clamp/claw used for reasons so far unknown. We’ve been calling it an Automatic Eyeball Remover.
– A box of 24 macarons for the family who babysit our dog.
– The only real article of clothing I found in France. A pair of, I think, Jil Sander designed Uniqlo pants.
– And a pair of pairs of Great Gatsby styled tennis court socks.
– The prettiest stuffed bird in all of Deyrolle.
– His little I.D. bracelet is my favorite part.
A mixed bouquet of images to celebrate Spring.
It’s not my favorite of the seasons…
…to me it usually feels like Things Ending, rather than Things Beginning.
But this year I’m feeling unusually excited and optimistic…
and I’m planning little plots to keep everything rolling.
There’s a room where I live that’s turned a little musty and museum-like in its aesthetic. Inside sits an oak-y old grandfather’s clock, a taxidermy partridge, a military trunk, and a tarnished metal desk seemingly salvaged from Ichabod Crane’s first house.
My goal is to gradually mod the place up and propel it into the 21st century (or at least the middle of the 20th) and the shiny slickness of the 1960s Space Race seems a futuristic yet rightly retro reference to start with.
Designer Ross Berens has created a series of science-lab-ish prints for the original nine planets on cotton rag archival paper, available at inPRNT.com.
Mercury, the most heavenly of them all, is orbiting toward my mailbox later this week to rocket my rusty old room into a revolutionary new era.
Do you forever become a tool if you even think about using tools like these at your desk?
Cause I have a reputation to uphold. I can’t let posh pens or pencil-refills be my ruin.
Save yourself some grief and don’t even start pining for the prints that are already sold out.
Mark Weaver.
Gold and silver and other metallic-ized gifts.
1. Postalco Jotter Notebook.
I had really needed this as all year I had been scribbling phone numbers and directions on a stupid stocking stuffer from last year: a box of little loose (and easily lost) sheets of paper printed with a light orange graphic of man climbing a cliff or jumping over a river or something (I’ve blocked the beyond-dumbness from my memory) and the words “The will to succeed.” (Yesterday I easily mustered the will to successfully toss them in the trash!)
2. My dog Aesop looks like a fox, so thus this door-knocker looks like my dog.
3. My mother gave me the vintage spoon, along with a story: When we moved from England back to America when I was nine months old, the movers had accidentally packed up my baby spoon and my mom was in a panic about how she was going to feed me during our week long sea voyage back to the states. She said every restaurant in England had these little silver spoons in the standard brown sugar tins set on each table. So she guiltlessly stole one with which to feed me at sea. Flash forward 30 some years and she comes across the spoon somehow in my sister’s kitchen and steals the spoon (once again!) and gives it to me for Christmas.
4. Ultra-chunky pretend nails, perfect only for laying around looking pretty.
5. Another vintage English gift, though not stolen. A stamp sheet cover from the 1940s. Trying to figure out how/where to display it as it doesn’t really fit modern American stamp books.
6. A hunk of Brazilian pyrite now giving gritty glam to the top of a stack of books.
With all these shining, sparkling gifts, my digs are one big disco ball!
I’d like to take a moment and applaud the makers of American, low-cost health and beauty products because they’re one of the few sectors remaining that let the packaging of their products get so old and outdated that they’re actually awesome and attractive looking again! Since I’m not much of a pill-popper, it’s my primary reason to head to the drug store.
So far things have been going smooth, but I know in a week or two the weather’s gonna get rude and rough, and two days later so is my skin. This winter I’m reverting back to good old school cocoa butter. I aimed to do so last December but I could no longer find the bright, retro yellow line of Cococare products locally, and I just don’t want to slather chocolate scratch-n-sniff sticker scented lotion on my face unless it’s coming out of a tub or tube destined for a Vincent Gallo movie scene.
(Wow, get this: I just looked it up and Cococare has actually been manufactured in Dover, New Jersey the past 40 years. Vincent Gallo indeed!)
This year I hopped online to locate Cococare and Walgreens.com let me know that a few select stores in my area actually still carry the line. So cocoa-ed, glowing December skin, here I come.
The Kiosk has unloaded another haul of simple, sweet souvenirs from its adventures around the world – this time from an extended journey to Portugal.
If you’ve been wishing your degreaser, floor wax, and vanilla sugar came in prettier packages, today’s totally your day!
Load up at KioskKiosk.com.
A preface to this volume including further information on its founding editor.
Get the latest Treasury additions in your RSS Reader.
