A Treasury Of… Minneapolis Fashion and Interior Design Blog

After five hours of traveling we capped off our 95 minute sprint through Mt. St. Michel with a cone of crispy Chu-Chis, deep fried twigs of dough that are then doused in a dramatic downpour of sugar. Like a funnel cake, but tough and crunchier.

We were held up by Mean Mickey at the Porte de Vanves flea market. It’s a drastic makeover, but he wears armed & insane surprisingly well.

Flower-buddy spices at the Galleries Lafayette über-market.

I assumed the golden nose on this $1400 McClown lamp was its on switch, but, sadly, the joke was on me.

France is the land of 10,000 carousels. We saw many, rode one, and photographed most of them.

Down in Nice there was a strong Italian influence and so we strolled around the city with gelatto cones twice a day. At our favorite shop, if you ordered two flavors, they didn’t just plop one down on the other, snow-man style, but created radial little blossoms of creamy coolness.

Whenever I’m in a foreign land, I like to hunt down grocery market finds by brands we have back at home of specific products which we do not. I even sacrificed precious room in my suitcase to pack in a big box of Kellogg’s Tresor cereal.

The daffy door leading to the unisex restrooms at Colette.

As you can see, France isn’t all fussy refinement. It can flash a little crass and whole lot of sass.

Looking back at my mad dash around France through the lazy lense of my Lomo LC-A film camera.

Glowing stone figures in the gardens of Versailles. It was so bright and brilliant it nearly burned my eyes:

Stepping up out of the subway system to spot the older (but not oldest) of the three eras of the Metro Stop signs made moving through the city even more movie-like:

A tiny drop of ornate greatness in the giant ocean of ornate awesome-nesss that was Le Train Blue restaurant. (Much more on that later.)

My first glimpse at the delightful Deyrolle taxidermy shop, and the first photo I took in France:

(Me and) my shirt sleeves annoyingly un-cuffed inside a Parisian Palace:

We traveled by train down to the coast into Nice for two days. It wasn’t any warmer there, but the palm trees seduced you and your bare arms into feeling otherwise:

A fizzy fountain back in the capital. Five seconds later, it full on splashed me as I ran away in an un-classy spaz:

I had suspected that once I visited France I would never want to leave. Nine days into my visit, it seemed as though I truly never would…

My trip began with a frenzied flurry of cathedrals and cafes, croissants and charm. Every day was a rigorously scheduled stampede past Paris’s prettiest or pleasingly grittiest spaces and places.

Striving to slot in not only the iconic museums and monuments of history but the long and lovely list of Treasury reader recommendations of shops and stylish sites as well, there were few moments in my first days in France that felt fully experienced. Fully felt.

A silvery gold brunch at Ladurée with baskets of baked bliss and pitchers of milkshake-thick hot chocolate was one of the few itinerary items I didn’t just check swiftly off of my list, but actually absorbed languidly with all my senses and my entire soul.

For anyone who carts at least three cameras to any vacation destination, it can be a tricky challenge to not simply photograph the glory of your getaway, but actually FEEL it too. I have to get better at this.

As the trip was just about to end, an ashy disaster in Iceland erupted, shutting down all European air traffic and trapping us on the far side of the ocean. Unsure of whether we would return home to Minnesota in mere days via plane, or not for three months via a sluggish U.S. Army sea vessel, we washed our clothes, mildly panicked, at a Parisian laundromat. (And accidentally laundered 10 Euros worth of Ladurée chocolate into them, to make matters worse.)

Our pressurized yet picture-perfect vacation had slammed on the breaks at last and we were forced to slow down, set the cameras aside, and look at the city not as time-strapped tourists but as lazy (temporary) locals.

For six extra and almost-agonizing days…

It may sound like I’m whining, because I totally am, but let me explain.

Of course there are way worse things than to be stranded in Paris. The city of lights is lovely, for sure – but nothing is lovelier than home. And when you can’t get there, and a volcano that last erupted for two whole years is standing in your way of ever returning, Paris transforms from the culture capital it normally is. It becomes, unfortunately, a cute but confining cage.

I’m just so very glad to be home again. I missed it, and you. I’ll share more stories and snapshots in the days ahead that showcase and celebrate France and all its non-cage-like best!

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.

In prepping for Paris, I could (after four years) no longer postpone purchasing a new and perfect digital camera. I had been eyeing the hunky chunky Canon G10′s and G11′s for over a year, but at almost $500, until they shoot HD Video, I figured I should hold out. I also considered the Canon S90 with a ring around the lense the user can assign to adjust either exposure, ISO, or focus – but after finally trying one out this past weekend, the ring seemed clicky, clunky and surprisingly inconvenient.

I ended up opting for a camera that wasn’t really ever on my radar screen – the Canon SD1400, and here is why:

First off, it’s awesomely pocketable. There’s already a D-SLR in my house, so it’s nice to have something on the way other end of the size spectrum.

Initially I thought it was almost too small, but after firing some test shots in the store, I noticed that when the flash fired, it didn’t fry out the image into white, hot, horribleness. The camera automatically dials down the force of the flash, depending on the shooting conditions, to ensure un-ugly images. The camera was tiny, but it was proving to be quite quick and ultra clever.

At 14 megapixels and $279 dollars, while still at the store, I went online quickly to see if there were similar Canon models with less pixels and for less pennies, and of course there were. But those models didn’t have my new favorite shooting mode/effect: Miniature.

Used to replicate the Photoshop tilt/shift effect that transforms ordinary cityscapes into seemingly scaled-down miniature sets from movies, applying this shooting mode isn’t just awesome for wide, outdoor shots of streets and oak trees.

It’s just as enchanting using indoors and close-up, for mega-macro close-ups or almost Holga-like abstractions of ordinary, straight-on set-ups. (You might need to click and enlarge the images to properly witness the full miniature effect.)

So with a D-SLR, my Lomo LC-A, and my new pocket-powerhouse SD1400 from Canon set for departure, I’ll be able to obnoxiously over-photograph every pastry, peony and park bench I come upon in Paris.

Never has a vagabond-ing bum looked so honest and hard-working. Or maybe it’s the opposite…

Never has a hard-worker looked so bummy and so vagabond-ing.

Were it not for the gloves, I’d probably toss quarters in the guy’s dingy tin cup and walk on by. But what with the white jeans and the kerchief and the lovable gloves worn without any coat, he isn’t so much a street corner charity-case as my (surprisingly employed) Spring Style Icon.

I think of photos like these when I have to do something boringly back-breaking, like shoveling mounds of Minnesota snow.

(And, note to self:
Invest in some overalls.)

I know it’s the weekend, friends, but I’m giving us all a homework assignment.

Get yourself a treat and enjoy it next to your glowing-est window. Make sure it’s otherwise dark inside, and make sure it’s good and quiet.

When you think you’re finished, look just a little bit longer and listen just a little bit more…

Then on you can go.

On my window today, there sat a frosty peacock…

…and it stood still just long enough for me to snap its picture.

Pete, Catherine, and especially Josie all better watch their backs…

My plaids are now flannel, my thermos is full to overflowing, and my un-scuffed shoes are straight from Japan.

I’ve been perfectly outfitted for the new position I blackmailed myself into down at the Packard Saw Mill and my first order of business is tracking down trouble.

(Trust me. I can find it anywhere…)

There’s a trick, and I’m figuring out how to master it, in creating a head-to-toe timeless look that says to the world “Anytime” and yet still whispers clearly enough “But definitely right now.”

My best guess is keeping everything square and standardized, and then finding one focal feature to totally flub.

Any other theories?

At an almost fancy film-festival nearly three years ago my best friend told me about this girl named Saucy and I instantly hated her.

“Is her name seriously Saucy?” I asked.

“I think,” said my friend.

“And what did she say to you?” I asked.

“She had an accent and she said ‘Oh I saw the poster for your movie. It’s like a rip-off of Juergen Teller, right?” my friend recounted.

So, needless to say, I didn’t like some super skinny, stylish to the point of scary little thing slamming our movie’s aesthetic as a rip-off. (Stylish foreigners intimidate me, I admit.)

But a few days later, after having seen our actual movie, Saucy stopped using the word rip-off and started gushing on and on over our mini-movie, begging to buy the costumes featured in the film. So, egos being what they are, I stopped hating her just about instantly.

Although she looked sullen, super-styled, and snotty, she was actually friendly, fun and unfussy in person. She said she was an Australian photographer with childhood ties to America, her name wasn’t really Saucy (although her nickname most definitely was), and she had a blog about her life and her art called Cigarette Jeans.

So although I only knew her for five days and four conversations, I kept up with her blog through the past three years. Her love of photography seemed to ebb for a while, but her writing was always a stitch. Like if the CATHY comic strip was post-feminist and actually funny, or if Carrie Bradshaw wrote about idiots and omelettes instead of bags and Big. Really, the way Saucy can ridicule the tards of her day, or fawn over fudge brownies on Cigarette Jeans is top notch.

For a while, I kept meaning to post comments like, “Saucy, you should set aside photography and concentrate on being a wise-assed writer. I think it’s your true calling.”

But Saucy was recently sent back to Australia, away from her boyfriend, and is pouring her mourning into a reinvigorated barrage of flashy, fun photographic work. I keep dragging images off her site and wanting to design pretend cd covers with them.

For me, the best blogs are secret sneaks into someone else’s life and Saucy’s sometimes-Aussie life is droll and delicious and delightfully lensed.

I’m really glad I met her. You should meet her too.