Recent foraging through my favorite thrift store had proved fruitless for months on end, but the curse was finally broken this week with some shiny, fine finds.
Totally “Hot” bling – for my house, not me.
The “family portrait” of all I found including a massive quartz crystal that Speidi would die for.
The fine print on my ‘lil British tin.
I found a place for all my shiny finds in almost no time; although the lamp is resting in a closet, waiting for some shade.
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.
Incense is for hemped up hippy-dips and candles can get a little soccer mom-ish. The “hot” new way to play with fragranced fire is with Armenia Papers.
Florentine pharmacist Santa Maria Novella offers an abundance of dramatic costume-drama-like cosmetics and tonics, and their frankincense and myrrh-scented Armenia Papers singe away the stagnant staleness of our modern days with a cinematic sense of ceremony.
Sized like a stick of gum, each scented stick is to be folded back and forth like an accordion, set on its side, and set aflame, to fill your room and your soul, once again, with a sense of romance and of warmth.
On my window today, there sat a frosty peacock…
…and it stood still just long enough for me to snap its picture.
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!
Their label said Beauty Berries, and they were almost $15 for a bunch of three at the expensive grocery store.
They’ve lasted a week already – maybe they’ll stay this bright and happy forever.
If I put a little thought into it, and maybe do some re-arranging, I think I could plunk this swivel-armed clock somewhere in my house.
I’ll figure it out, just give me a minute…
Even though it seems I’m always acquiring framed prints of pirate pistols, military ships, and solider choruses, I’m equally drawn to gaudy glam when it comes to dressing up my digs.
Saturday night I dreamt for hours of a jagged, Kelly Wearstler-like quartz statue (not pictured, per se) and I’ve spent the past two days criss-crossing the city to various stores trying to get my glitz hit taken care of.
I’m not sure how all my rugged warplane photographs ‘n such will work in the larger context of my ongoing disco decor-addiction, but if you simply surround yourself with true blue treasures, the aesthetic elite proclaim, then everything eventually sorts itself out.
I’m gonna trust that’s true.
Elements of my domain’s design, present and future…
Curated junk that’s been sitting real still atop a wooden plank on my stairway radiator. A tablescape but minus the table.
And a new (but old) photograph of the ZR1/US Shenandoah drifting above the Lakehurst Hangar, December 1923. Currently awaiting a wall to land on. Probably in my office or the larger one across the hall.
Sometimes I’ll see an old black & white photograph of soldiers and think about taking it home and tacking it up on my wall. But it seems slightly insensitive, turning their wartime tasks and troubles into trend-ified decor.
Photographs of rugby or rowing jocks seem safer and equally as stylish, but, really have no place padding the walls of anywhere I live – there’s nothing about me that’s ever been slightly sportsman-like.
So it was such a score to come upon this American Legion Chorus image. Former soldiers singing on stage, dressed up to the nines – that sits with me just fine.
I’m really hypnotized by the regal pomp of the image. It has such a magical mood to it that today is all but extinct, I think.
If directors of Jenny Lewis or The National music videos don’t read this and cop the concept themselves, I’m gonna dress one of my gal pals up in a Lady Liberty look and set her on stage with some white-tuxed tenors and baritones and shoot something similar myself.
So inspiring…
Made from .375 H & M Magnum shells these beauties are mighty on many, many levels. A round of five, standing at attention in a glass jar would be bad (in the good way) on any gent’s desk.
A preface to this volume including further information on its founding editor.
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