February 2010
11 posts
2 tags
Coloring Book
In the opening moments of Bright Star we see the hands of Fanny Brawe (Abbie Cornish) capably sewing something very complex and very beige. The texture of the cloth, the push of the needle through the fabric, the effort of making so many fine stitches is made perfectly clear, even as we simultaneously admire the less workmanlike aspects of the shot—the light on the cloth, the balletic...
2 tags
Disney, Without Sneering
My favorite scene in all of Disney is in Cinderella, when the mice and birds and other beasties dress Cinderella for the ball. It is the loveliest makeover scene, all the better for being almost wordless. A suggestion of the origin of the idea for this scene appears in the third gallery at the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco: a pagan spring goddess with long blonde hair, two birds...
2 tags
The Future of Snacks
You know you are in northern California when:
1. You look out the window, and there is a man meditating under a tree across the street.
2. The tennis courts at the local park are dominated by old men wielding wooden swords.
3. Nori is offered as a kids snack.
4. When you buy lemonade at a lemonade stand, the mom prompts the kids selling it to tell you its ingredients. Meyer lemons picked...
1 tag
Beyond Bodoni & Corb
Jessica Hische’s Evolution of Type Taste poster (via Swiss Miss) made me laugh. As the daughter and granddaughter of graphic designers, I have always had a vague sense of what might be considered bad taste in type, and therefore an uneasy relationship to my own taste. I.e. I usually check with my mom before selecting anything. When she told me Bodoni was acceptable, and usually impeccable,...
2 tags
Serious Fun
From Charles Moore’s You Have to Pay for the Public Life written in 1965 and still one of my all time favorites.
Whatever the nature of the welfare state, these public buildings seem to offer less to the passerby than such typical—and remarkable—California institutions as the Nut Tree, a roadside restaurant on the highway from Sacramento to San Francisco, which offers in the middle of a...
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The Extinction of the Unisex
When I was a girl, I put away girly things. From the age of five or so, I would not wear a dress, embraced flannel shirts and overalls, knickers and vests and bowties, and shopped in the Sears boys department. I fondly remember a pair of teal corduroy knickers my mother made me, as well as a gray canvas jacket lined in plaid. Both would probably be very fashionable on the Lower East Side today....
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On The Moment: Plastic Fantastic
Bakelite, the 20th century’s first plastic, was invented in 1907, 60 years before “The Graduate” suggested the industry was on the cutting edge. “Bakelite in Yonkers: Pioneering the Age of Plastics,” an exhibition that opens on Saturday at the Hudson River Museum, showcases 300 objects from the 1910s to the early 21st century that exploit the unique properties of Phenol-formaldehyde: brilliant...
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Still Ugly After All These Years
What We Learned: The Yale Las Vegas Studio and the Work of Venturi Scott Brown & Associates closes tomorrow at the Yale School of Architecture, so unless you are already in New Haven, you missed it. But the exhibition provoked some excellent commentary (by Julie Iovine, among others) and made me think again about Learning from Las Vegas, the Venturis, and the question of tacky.
LLV (as I...
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In AN 02: As the Tide Turns
In Issue 02 of The Architect’s Newspaper (available online tomorrow), my take on MoMA’s Rising Currents exhibition. The architects involved presented their work to a surprisingly large crowd on January 9. Best quote:
Certain tropes of contemporary waterfront design immediately surfaced: walls are bad; wetlands are good. And each project seemed to have a farmer’s market, whether on...
2 tags
All Rubble Is Not Alike
I watched Manufactured Landscapes in the weeks before Christmas, and it was just too depressing to post about in the run-up to gift day. Want a new digital camera? Watch as e-waste pollutes the rivers and consumes the lives of Chinese villages? Want something beautiful from abroad? Watch as tankers go to their unquiet rest in Bangladesh, torn apart by men and boys in flip-flops, slipping in the...
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Wives of the Architects
Gregory Ain House Model. Photographed by Ezra Stoller/ESTO.
She tried to open the kitchen window. It was stuck. She knew it was stuck. It had been stuck since the summer, two summers ago. In fact, she had known it would be stuck when her husband showed her the plan for the kitchen. The window rested on the countertop, set into a groove. The countertop was wood. The window in question was...
