SIMPLIFY
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Minimal Effort
Emily and I have gone through many, many parallel obsessions. We share a love for legitimate LES punks, comfortable "fat american" clothing, conceptual art, efficient alarm clocks, smoking newports (well i'm a baby and can't really), moccasin boots, kate moss, ebay, driving around, inadvertently funny rap lyrics, body modification, bauhaus, doodling, and sweetie boys. However, nothing compares to the overwhelming drive for minimalism we have been consumed with over the past year and a half.
Someone once said that "minimalism is at constant war with real life;" maybe that's why I like it. It's an impulse born out of anxiety disorders, and on a superficial level creates an environment free from stress. There is a definite high resulting when an OCD or otherwise psychologically warped person is in the thick of an activity directly relating to their problem, and throwing everything you own out is pretty fucking good.
Emily told me that when she was in the first, admittedly violent throes of this spartan phase, her dad asked her if her bare room indicated that she was moving out. I don't like orchestrated minimalism, where there is one flower laid on a steel table, surrounded by mies van der rohe chairs or some phillipe starck shit. I like the kind of minimalism where everything is beat up, worn in, well loved, and with a great history behind it. The combination of old elements and the echoes of a near empty room reminds me of traveling or moving to a new house - change being something that terrifies me, it seems healthy to live with its trappings on a daily basis. Minimalism has also helped me overcome one of the more obvious expressions of my obsessive compulsive disorder, that being my unstoppable pack-rattiness. From the time I was a kid, I saved everything. Almost literally. Throwing things out that I only thought I needed has proved to be incredibly therapeutic.
Orchestrated minimalism, the kind you see in the apartments of Karl Lagerfeld et. al., also distinctly smacks of consumerism to me. It is the tasteful kind - better, i guess, than tacky nouveau riche stuff, but not by much. What is usually the case is that a maid comes in daily to keep the place looking for spotless. For me, the look is less important than the physical lack of things (oxymoron?). When your possessions are few and special, anything you throw together will be beautiful, as opposed to someone who collects crazy knicknacks and just sticks them all over the place with no personal connection whatsoever.
I guess this is why going to new houses always frieks me out. I can't deal with the Lladro angels, fake French toulouse lautrec posters and patisserie signs, ironwork purchased at Home Depot, plastic plants - stuff designed to look intimate and wonderful (and whose origins are definitely so) but that is actually cold, fake, mass-produced, and terrifying. The echo of tiles and space in McMansions doesn't signify transition to me, but rather an emptiness that may never be filled.
But yeah, I hate mindlessness anywhere, and i'm sure it exists in NYC, london, tokyo, africa, the south, Latin America, and everywhere.
things to think about.
Someone once said that "minimalism is at constant war with real life;" maybe that's why I like it. It's an impulse born out of anxiety disorders, and on a superficial level creates an environment free from stress. There is a definite high resulting when an OCD or otherwise psychologically warped person is in the thick of an activity directly relating to their problem, and throwing everything you own out is pretty fucking good.
Emily told me that when she was in the first, admittedly violent throes of this spartan phase, her dad asked her if her bare room indicated that she was moving out. I don't like orchestrated minimalism, where there is one flower laid on a steel table, surrounded by mies van der rohe chairs or some phillipe starck shit. I like the kind of minimalism where everything is beat up, worn in, well loved, and with a great history behind it. The combination of old elements and the echoes of a near empty room reminds me of traveling or moving to a new house - change being something that terrifies me, it seems healthy to live with its trappings on a daily basis. Minimalism has also helped me overcome one of the more obvious expressions of my obsessive compulsive disorder, that being my unstoppable pack-rattiness. From the time I was a kid, I saved everything. Almost literally. Throwing things out that I only thought I needed has proved to be incredibly therapeutic.
Orchestrated minimalism, the kind you see in the apartments of Karl Lagerfeld et. al., also distinctly smacks of consumerism to me. It is the tasteful kind - better, i guess, than tacky nouveau riche stuff, but not by much. What is usually the case is that a maid comes in daily to keep the place looking for spotless. For me, the look is less important than the physical lack of things (oxymoron?). When your possessions are few and special, anything you throw together will be beautiful, as opposed to someone who collects crazy knicknacks and just sticks them all over the place with no personal connection whatsoever.
I guess this is why going to new houses always frieks me out. I can't deal with the Lladro angels, fake French toulouse lautrec posters and patisserie signs, ironwork purchased at Home Depot, plastic plants - stuff designed to look intimate and wonderful (and whose origins are definitely so) but that is actually cold, fake, mass-produced, and terrifying. The echo of tiles and space in McMansions doesn't signify transition to me, but rather an emptiness that may never be filled.
But yeah, I hate mindlessness anywhere, and i'm sure it exists in NYC, london, tokyo, africa, the south, Latin America, and everywhere.
things to think about.
DMs
I wrote this in July 2009, before I went to college for the first time. It's one of the few things from my old blog that remains relevant.
I had a dream last night that leftover crack played at my ex-high school, I found treasures while garbage picking in front of an apartment building on my street (that doesn't exist), someone stole my doc martens and I had to wear two different-colored ones from two different people, I met my mom while stealing from a local supermarket, and that I found a baby crying in a water bottle. Either my subconscious is smoking crack-cocaine or my life is about to get really nuts.
I had a dream last night that leftover crack played at my ex-high school, I found treasures while garbage picking in front of an apartment building on my street (that doesn't exist), someone stole my doc martens and I had to wear two different-colored ones from two different people, I met my mom while stealing from a local supermarket, and that I found a baby crying in a water bottle. Either my subconscious is smoking crack-cocaine or my life is about to get really nuts.
I got up at two this morning and wore the boots to Target, just to kind of make sure they weren't lost. I hate chain stores and the like, but when you have to buy desk lamps, sheet sets, power strips, etcetera, they're essential. I felt like this is such a perfect metaphor forFordham, or college at all, or maybe my whole life - necessary compromise. I don't have the chutzpah or the bollocks to make my own way in life, so I'm lightening the load via higher education. At least it'll buy me some time...
I'm at a point right now where everything is in flux, which is good and fucking terrifying. Most of the people I used to call my friends have either drifted away or proven themselves to be wildly incompatible with myself. The closest relationships I have are with my parents and with whoever I'm seeing (romantically) at the time, although when my novios and I break up, we don't talk or usually ever keep in touch at all, so that's limited. It's good to realize that in life, the most important relationship you have is that with yourself - I've come to realize that your self-respect and esteem are entirely central to your happiness and success. Relying on others to make your life happen or happy leads to inevitable disappointment. This doesn't mean loving, caring, and trusting are irrelevant - just that the respect you show yourself will make you strong and be there when the respect or love of others isn't.
In any event, I'm glad to have the people in my life that I have right now.
Tenenbaums, Typography?
I don't understand the cult of typography. It seems obvious that good graphic design is important in the conveyance of messages: however, I can't say that I see much of an improvement in using Futura over Helvetica, or why Tahoma is such a crime against humanity. However, this analysis of typographic use in The Royal Tenenbaums makes a lot of sense.
The typefaces used are crisp, and square, echoing the crisp, square cinematography which frames the decidedly rumpled, eccentric family. Interesting.
The typefaces used are crisp, and square, echoing the crisp, square cinematography which frames the decidedly rumpled, eccentric family. Interesting.
Postmodern Love Affair
A fragment from one of my emails:
My days have been somnolent and half-remembered, images flashing by and giving way to long, opaque nights; I predict this one will be preoccupied with thoughts on the feel of carpet under my hair, drowsy embraces and my two fingers holding a ripe strawberry, sticky small seeds on your lips.
photo credit unknown
Sunday, October 10, 2010
About the Layout
When I was little, my family became members of a private lake club in western New Jersey. My parents weren't into the local town(y) pools, so this was the alternative.
When we used to make the twenty minute commute there, we always took the highway (my parents are also highway travelers, a trait they have passed on to me, for better or for worse). Initially it seemed interminable, as do most boring things to eight year olds. Eventually, I realized that with the back windows of the mini van cracked open, the air rushing past sounded like (to me, good Catholic girl that I was) angels talking to each other.
I was going to change this layout - it's just a preset from the website, and I'm not into presets, I'm always trying to customize even when it's unnecessary - but it reminded me of so many trips in New Jersey, on the highway, going to a lake, listening to the wind. I still drive with the windows down on the highway sometimes, messy hair be damned.
When we used to make the twenty minute commute there, we always took the highway (my parents are also highway travelers, a trait they have passed on to me, for better or for worse). Initially it seemed interminable, as do most boring things to eight year olds. Eventually, I realized that with the back windows of the mini van cracked open, the air rushing past sounded like (to me, good Catholic girl that I was) angels talking to each other.
I was going to change this layout - it's just a preset from the website, and I'm not into presets, I'm always trying to customize even when it's unnecessary - but it reminded me of so many trips in New Jersey, on the highway, going to a lake, listening to the wind. I still drive with the windows down on the highway sometimes, messy hair be damned.
Makeup
I recently read about a nationwide event called "No Makeup Week," designed to raise consciousness of artificial standards of beauty imposed on women, etcetera.
This came at an inopportune time for me, as this summer I recently started wearing makeup again, after four years of nothing more than chapstick. During high school, I was obsessive and yet weirdly low-maintenance about nearly everything (obsessive about being low maintenance?); the idea of worrying about haggard-looking streaks of red on my mouth was a huge turn off, and a few boyfriends who genuinely appreciated the quote-unquote natural glow look convinced me to just ignore the whole industry.
A desire to compete with the beautiful, in-shape, well-turned out girls at my university probably influenced me to start wearing makeup again (because, let's face it, nothing will reform a grungy/punkish/anti-whatever girl quicker then not being noticed). That, and the hypnotically black-and-white tiled Sephora.
Sephora. I have no idea why they decided to name a makeup chain after the wife of Moses, although it's appropriate for me because I initially went there to mist myself with perfumes that were appealing due to some similarly arcane, vaguely literary/historic backstory.
In any event, I now have a small battery of cosmetics, which are stored in an equally small overseas-flight complimentary toiletries bag: I'm afraid that if I get something bigger (say, the lucite train case at the container store that i'm totally not still obsessed with six months after seeing it) I'll just buy more to fill it, like my parents slowly filling our too-large house with furniture that doesn't get used.
One example of something I'd buy to fill the empty space?
This blush compact, Hungry Heart by Nars. You can't really tell, but it's shimmery and sparkly and reminds me of the two-toned tights at American Apparel (this entry is turning into a laundry list of things I lust after but refuse to let myself buy).
I actually bought it, and had it briefly, during a rush of false shopping enthusiasm brought on during Fashion's Night Out; then promptly returned it the next day, a sheepish pit stop on a seemingly endless trek back from one outer borough to another.
This came at an inopportune time for me, as this summer I recently started wearing makeup again, after four years of nothing more than chapstick. During high school, I was obsessive and yet weirdly low-maintenance about nearly everything (obsessive about being low maintenance?); the idea of worrying about haggard-looking streaks of red on my mouth was a huge turn off, and a few boyfriends who genuinely appreciated the quote-unquote natural glow look convinced me to just ignore the whole industry.
A desire to compete with the beautiful, in-shape, well-turned out girls at my university probably influenced me to start wearing makeup again (because, let's face it, nothing will reform a grungy/punkish/anti-whatever girl quicker then not being noticed). That, and the hypnotically black-and-white tiled Sephora.
Sephora. I have no idea why they decided to name a makeup chain after the wife of Moses, although it's appropriate for me because I initially went there to mist myself with perfumes that were appealing due to some similarly arcane, vaguely literary/historic backstory.
In any event, I now have a small battery of cosmetics, which are stored in an equally small overseas-flight complimentary toiletries bag: I'm afraid that if I get something bigger (say, the lucite train case at the container store that i'm totally not still obsessed with six months after seeing it) I'll just buy more to fill it, like my parents slowly filling our too-large house with furniture that doesn't get used.
One example of something I'd buy to fill the empty space?
This blush compact, Hungry Heart by Nars. You can't really tell, but it's shimmery and sparkly and reminds me of the two-toned tights at American Apparel (this entry is turning into a laundry list of things I lust after but refuse to let myself buy).
I actually bought it, and had it briefly, during a rush of false shopping enthusiasm brought on during Fashion's Night Out; then promptly returned it the next day, a sheepish pit stop on a seemingly endless trek back from one outer borough to another.
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