after party

Did you watch the Oscars last night? 

If you did, are you in it for the red carpet? The teary acceptance speeches? The old-fashioned tinsletown celebration or the cynical how-long-can-this-go-on spectacle of it?

I, myself, am partial to the gowns and the glamor. I get drawn in to the sweeping musical numbers and get a little weepy with all of the emotional thank-yous. And it's worth the hours of settling in for all of that when you catch a quick glimpse of (my favorite) Doris Kearns Goodwin walking the post-show red carpet arm in arm with a victorious Daniel Day-Lewis and Rebecca Miller, off to celebrate, the chumiest of chums. 

Ah, Hollywood.

Faye Dunaway's breakfast with Oscar at the Beverly Hills Hotel, 1977.

Godard on Allen

Watching the recent two-part Woody Allen documentary (currently streaming on Netflix!) has sparked a bit of an independent Allen retrospective on my part. Some of his films leave me cold, but enough of them are a beloved layer of the collage of images and ideas that informed my young adult, rural-island-dwelling-heart of what it might be like to be smart and funny and to live in New York. And that is enough to keep me fairly loyal to the work (and curious enough to get right out there to catch To Rome, with Love).

And then, thanks to Mike Mills (have you seen Beginners? I mean, really, you need to see this movie as soon as possible.), I came upon this brief meeting of the masters directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Of course it is a little strange, but also insightful and worth a watch just to see the exchange between these two auteurs.

Boom

Happy 4th of July, firecrackers.              

Memorials

  

Remembered on the Boston Common

A picnic a day in Boston parks: Arnold Arboretum, Jamaica Pond & the Esplanade

Hot day, cool fountain... walking along the Rose Kennedy Greenway en route to Haymarket for picnic supplies!

 

happy (holiday) weekend

Curation

What is Curation? from Percolate on Vimeo.

Intellectual hunger and creative restlessness... could anything be more wonderful than that? Curating curiosity to get from here to there.

That Girl

Just in time to wrap up Women's History Month, Joanna Goddard has posted some doozie examples of advertisements from not so long ago over on her superblog. As much as I love the graphics of the Volkswagon campaign, the text is just so 'Gah... lady drivers! Amiright, fellas!?'. Pretty amazing how quickly times can change... or not.

Fascinating, but...
Why don't we end this annual endeavor on a slightly more inspiring note. Just take a minute to take a look at all of the stories of ground-breaking, history-making American women documented on the PBS-initiated series Makers.

'I never knew what I wanted to do, but I knew the kind of woman that I wanted to be... and I became that woman.'
- Diane Von Furstenberg

'I kind of consider it part of the job... doing a little bit of groundbreaking.'
- Miranda July

There are two types of people in the world...

via i love charts
via wit + delight

What kind of bird are you?

The trailer for Moonrise Kingdom was released last week and there has been quite a bit of analysis of just how Wes Andersony it is. I think that it's safe to say the answer to that is very Wes Andersony. Maybe you love that, maybe you hate that. I can't help but love it. But I am, admittedly and if you couldn't tell, more than a bit of a nostalgic romantic. A few elements that I especially love:
this François Hardy song and these other things...

Letter writing in a Quonset hut with the cast of Grease in the background...

Shades of desaturated coral, puffy clouds, faded sea & sky blues, binoculars and a light house!

Camp nostalgia.
(All sorts of nostalgia, of course...)

Frances McDormand, paintings of ships, and megaphones.

Yellow filters and grassy fields.

Fantastically imaginary dream tree houses.

Artfully framed catastrophe.

Petite wooden sailboats.

More yellow.

And a dramatic departure from futura.


Let's all go see it together this spring.

Highway Romance

I'm certain that it's not just me... don't we all have a bit of romantic attachment to our first car? It's just such a significant teenage time of life anyway and then you add to the mix all that freedom of being able to get yourself from here to there and... the heart soars, the mind reels. The possibilities are endless even if, as in my case, you were just driving around in circles on an smallish Big Island! The proof is in the little bit of lightness and footloose freedom that I feel just seeing pictures of the roadway romances of my past...

Something like my mom's 1968 Ghia... she drove it all over California and Washington and cared for it so lovingly that I was driving it around the Big Island in the early 90s. So low and so sporty... and so loud with the top down and the radio up!

Nearly just like my 'first car'... and a perfect Hawaii vehicle. I drove it across lava fields and into taro valleys with black sand beaches for overnight camping trips. Well used when purchased, but tricked out with pipe bumpers, a fancy stereo system and a huge custom sub-woofer in the back!

Boxy but good: my college-in-New England transportation was bought off a small used car lot near Providence. It came with the extra way-back seat, which meant that I could pack 6 friends and myself into the thing for trips to amusement parks and ski mountains. I covered the back bumpers and windows with typical college-y bumper stickers ('mean people suck', 'visualize whirled peas' and, for a reason that escapes me now, the UC San Diego logo). A very happy Happy Valley vehicle.

To keep the car romance fires burning, Chance has a few covet-able cars in their blog archives ... my heart is all a-flutter over that Mercedes 190SL from their October post!

We used to wait

I know that this is going to sound all so nostalgic, and it probably is, but I really miss getting letters in the mail. And even sending real letters, because I don't do much of that either. I used to... all the time... with little scraps of images and drawings and bits of whatever taped to the pages. It was like being with the person you were sending it to, really thinking of them reading it... a connecting thread along a time line. Now I spend quite a lot of time g-chatting with far away friends, and that's great too: immediate and spontaneous and totally informal. But an actual letter: the weight of the paper, the sender's handwriting and pen choice, even the indentations of typewriter keys... it's like a touch, like something to hold on to in a way that you never would or could, even if you printed and bound all of your most lovely emails.

Just knowing how excited I always am to see a letter in my mailbox, slipped in between the coupon fliers and the magazines, makes me want sit down and write a few myself, for old times' sake...


Fruity embossed rhymes

Joe ♡s Jane
Someone found this in a book. A (non-digital) happy accident.

Clouds in my coffee...

In spite of my focused & clearly-seduced-by-the-marketing-strategies-of-Starbucks desire for a personalized gold card (hard earned by friends like Joe & Kellyn), I typically make my morning coffee at home. Sometimes (okay, most of the time) I'm in a bit of a rush and fill my travel mug as I head out the door, but lately I've been making a little more time for my addiction of choice and I owe it all to the Bodum battery operated milk frother. It's really a ridiculous little gadget and, in theory, I am opposed to having a bunch of little single task appliances taking up space in the kitchen. But the reality is (and I'm admitting it here for the first time) that I have loads of little, single task, but oh-so-useful kitchen tools. Sometimes they are so magical that it is completely worth the space that they consume, and this is one of those times.

Is it quite clear how much I'm enjoying my homemade hybrid latte-mistos? So much easier and less clean up than busting out the cappuccino maker... just a cup with an engineered lid that quickly foams the milk (I like a combo of low-fat with a splash of Boathouse Farms Vanilla Chai Tea for a little sweetness) to nearly double its volume, radically transforming your morning cuppa in a snap!* This is really going to throw a wrench in my Starbucks gold card aspirations...

The Bodum milk frother, in lime green: my new morning ritual.

The whole Bodum Bistro line is pretty fun, with it's scaled-up logo, LEGO-like texture and pop-y colors.*

* I realize that this is all sounding a bit advertisement-esque, but none of these companies pay me a penny to say anything about any of this!

Listen Up!

I've been listening to the new Danger Mouse album, 'ROME', all afternoon (while CAD-ing interior elevations) and I'm still not sick of it. It's an edgy shout-out to the Sergio Leone soundtracks of yesteryear. For full atmospheric impact, I really think that it's best to do something that I so rarely do these days: sit and listen to the whole album in one go. And thanks to NPR's First Listen, you can! Don't be surprised if it leads to visions of imaginary Spaghetti Westerns in your mind.

On the bookshelf...

Though my post-grad school reading pace is not exactly what I would like it to be, I live with quite a lot of books and, occasionally, I actually read them! I also like to know what others are reading and what you've loved & devoured or couldn't put down or couldn't get through and what you've thought about what you've actually made time to read. So I've added an 'On the bookshelf...' column just over there to the right, with a list of what I've been reading and links that are somewhat related to those books. What's on your bookshelf these days?


The library above is from the blog Bookshelf Porn, a great site if you're someone who loves to live surrounded by books.

Words, to live by...

Some friends and I recently had a conversation about writing, the internet and, more specifically, thoughtful content. With all of the blogs and online news outlets that we're reading daily we have found ourselves craving carefully edited writing that isn't just sent out into the world willy-nilly to be quickly digested, words that are thoroughly considered and, occasionally, painstakingly chosen. As wonderful as the all-info-all-the-time world wide web is, it can tend to be short on the well-chosen word. To balance all of that free flowing information out, I've felt a gravitational pull toward poetry. It began, innocently enough, by listening to Garrison Keillor's daily podcast The Writer's Almanac, a lovely full five minutes a day to consider a writer's life and to listen to Keillor read a single poem. But wait, there's more...

If you're feeling a similar pull toward a bit of old-school word play, turns out there's an app for that. The Poetry Foundation has it's own iPhone app that is a perfect marriage of technology and text. You can select a hybrid of subjects manually or via a roulette wheel-like spin, bringing together such classic combos as passion & love or the less expected optimism & aging. And so, after scanning through an endless stream of new posts and status updates and tweets, via the very same gadget, you can enjoy a few quiet moments of good, old-fashioned written words. Ain't modern life grand?

Happy Valentine's Day ♡

Keeping Afloat

It's been a tough few weeks for many of those near and dear. We've been fighting battles on many fronts, some together and some on our own. Remembering this flag, and other old battle cries, feels surprisingly inspiring to me at times like these... I guess that's what all of those old mottos are there for.

So long, sweet summer!

Reading a few of the really lovely summer send-offs that friends and favorite bloggers have posted lately, I was inspired to do a little of my own remembering of things {in the not so distant} past. This summer flew by faster than many in recent history, but only because it was so full, filled to the brim with wonderful people, places... and food! It was truly a time to savor the little big things in life.


Just a few of the summer moments that I'd like to remember to remember...

Took my first trip to Lake Winnipesaukee and stayed in a cottage perched on the lake shore and built by a friend's grandparents in the 1930s when lake cottages were just what they should be... charming retreats for friends and family to gather & really spend time together... which we did, over good meals and good news.

Traveled with a very creative and talented friend to Nantucket to visit other creative and talented {and industrious!} friends who spend each summer out there running a picture perfect market by the shore. Ate more than my fair share of lobster, learned how to shuck an oyster, sang along during after dinner sing-alongs, and swam in the Atlantic under a nearly full moon.

Went to the first concert that I've been to in ages and was reminded of that feeling of instant communitas that can happen when a whole crowd of people are together, so absorbed and in the moment, dancing and singing their hearts out.

Spent many afternoons on boat trips and ferry rides from Maine to Martha's Vineyard and was invigorated by the restorative powers of salty sea air and the New England seashore. Boating out to explore little island summer communities in mid-coast Maine reminded me that there is a slower, more summer-y way of summertime living.

Celebrated my birthday by throwing a mid-week pizza cook-off party attended by thoughtful and caring friends... an outpouring of friendship and love that made me actually feel pretty wonderful about turning a year older!

Ate many beautiful and delicious meals al fresco, including this gorgeous salad niçoise. Eating outdoors, especially in a region of real seasons, is such a simple summer pleasure that it seems to make the food taste that much better.


Spent some real quality time with my mom during her visit from the west coast and was reminded by the too-soon-passing of a family friend of just how precious that kind of time together, just being, is and of how important it is to treasure those moments.

Celebrated the marriage of beautiful, wonderful friends in the mountains of Virginia where we feasted {oh, how we feasted!} and swam and danced into the wee hours to send the lovely couple off into a happy and full life together.


With such an optimistic note to end the summer on, how could one not look forward to the fall? It only gets us nearer to next summer!

Banksy in the Bean

Walking home through Chinatown a few weeks ago, I bumped into this piece by British 'graffiti' artist, Banksy. At the time I hadn't heard that a couple of his works had turned up in the city (on Essex Streets in both Boston and Cambridge) and, not looking for but stumbling upon it, the image became one of those moments of spontaneous wonder that come from walking through a city on a summer afternoon.*

*I don't know who those shoes and bike belong to...

Easter eggs

The weather here in Boston feels like it might be springing right into summer, which made Easter Sunday perfect for dining al fresco and inaugurating my friend Sara's yard for another season.

For this Easter brunch I decided to try my hand at deviled eggs... an old standby that I love but have never actually made! Thought that I'd start out with a couple of variations on the traditional, adding bacon to one batch and horseradish to another, giving them both a little something extra.

The eggs were added to a feast of delicious Easter dishes followed by a multiple course dessert of the amazing things that can be made with strawberries. Happy Easter and welcome spring!

Bacon & Eggs

6 eggs
1/4 cup mayonnaise
2 slices of bacon
1/2 tablespoon mustard
dash of paprika

1. Place eggs in a saucepan, and cover with cold water. Bring water to a boil and immediately remove from heat. Cover, and let eggs stand in hot water for 10 to 12 minutes. Remove from hot water, and cool. To cool more quickly, rinse eggs under cold running water.
2. Meanwhile, place bacon in a large, deep skillet. Cook over medium-high heat until evenly brown. Alternatively, wrap bacon in paper towels and cook in the microwave for about 1 minute per slice. Crumble and set aside.
3. Peel the hard-cooked eggs, and cut in half lengthwise. Remove yolks to a small bowl. Mash egg yolks with mayonnaise, crumbled bacon. Stir in mustard. Fill egg white halves with the yolk mixture and garnish with finely crumbled bacon. Refrigerate until serving.

Extra Devilish Deviled Eggs

6 hard-boiled eggs
1/4 cup mayonnaise
1 tablespoon prepared horseradish
1/2 tablespoon chopped fresh dill
1/4 tablespoon mustard
1/8 teaspoon salt
dash of freshly ground pepper
dash of paprika

1. Cook eggs as described above. Cut eggs in half lengthwise. Remove yolks; set whites aside.
   
2. In a bowl, mash the yolks. add mayonnaise, horseradish, dill, mustard, paprika, salt and pepper; mix well.
   
3. Pipe or spoon into egg whites. Garnish with chopped dill. Refrigerate until serving.

Sara's lovely al fresco table

Strawberry-fest: Ming's almond strawberry layer cake (above) & Erin's berry tart with rosemary crust


Thanks to Ming for sharing the beautiful photos!

Ladies who brunch

The ladies that I worked with at a Cambridge architecture firm have instituted a long-standing, monthly potluck get together. The hostess, theme, and location is on a loosely rotating schedule and this week it was brunch at Sydney's lovely home. As is customary with this crew, the food was fantastic and the laughs were plentiful.
My culinary contribution to the feast was two variations on my favorite apricot-sage scones: one batch of pecan-rosemary and one batch of cherry-almond. Delish, if I do say so myself!

Post-brunch clean up... thanks Sydney!