Warning Signs

Today I was charged with the task of writing some office etiquette signs for the Opera Company. The two problems at the shop are:

1.

    not cleaning out fridge

2. 

  not keeping kitchen tidy

I prepared to create a way of expressing these problems that would suit our philosophically minded staff.

…

These are the messages I came up with:

1. (for the refrigerator)

Attn OCP Staff:

You are what you eat.

There are many things you’d like to be someday, but realistically won’t.

When the current opera ends, so must these illusions.

Free Your Food.

…

2. (for the kitchen)

Cleanliness is next to godliness

The sponge is next to the faucet.

The cabinet is above the sink.

Cleanliness prevents joblessness,

Among other things.

The Mighty Hougan

2/16/2012, after Hougan recommended a D.C. restaurant

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The Mighty Hougan

(from an email to Hougan, 3/4/11)

I woke from a dream this morning of which the last line was, “Put that mozzarella on the wall; it will look professional”. And that sort of sums up where I am in life.

Thought: sometimes you accidentally input an extra digit into the year: i.e., 19993 and you add 18,000 years on to now, and you realize that the year 19993 will one day exist and that time is a scary thing, indeed.

— Microserfs (via charliehoey)

this would make a great costume for beyonce. just sayin.

minusmanhattan:

Leviathan in the Grand Palais in Paris by Anish Kapoor.

Photograph by Alexis Paoli.

This is amazing. This fellow is a great thinker!

ohnewengland:

This is brilliant

How to Learn to Make Clothing

(I suppose you could just enroll yourself in a fashion program, but this is how I did it/am doing it)

1. Free yourself from mental oppression

2. Practice drawing, collect images, inspect your clothing. Buy fabric you won’t use for years but really like, try and mostly fail at teaching yourself how to sew, take something apart with the intention of altering it but fail to put it back together. Alter something by making it uglier or very very weird, by hand.

3. Take any basic sewing class anywhere. Make a pillow case. Put a button on something. Insert a zipper.

4. Buy a comprehensive sewing book with pictures. Like a thrift store 70s version of The Vogue Sewing Book. Things don’t change that much.

5. Buy commercial patterns online and make them by following the directions. Always make a test garment out of muslin first.

6. Make a friend who knows things that you don’t and bother that friend. Or call the Vogue helpline and bother a tech. Mine was named Donna and she was very patient.

7. Alter your commercial patterns so the finished garment fits you perfectly. This will give you such satisfaction! Even if your garment isn’t so special, people will compliment it because they aren’t used to seeing things that actually fit people.

8. Take an Intro to Patternmaking class at a fashion school.

9. Buy a patternmaking book. It will tell you how to do just about everything.

10. Get involved in something above your skill level. Like making a wedding dress out of live flowers and dupioni silk. 

11. Give yourself creative projects and complete them. Try draping. Do that DIY style. Give yourself free range. Get weird. Make accessories and sell them somewhere.

Make gifts for your friends. Like a drapey dress.

Or a lion tamer’s jacket.

12. Start getting paid to sew. It is a real motivating factor in the learning process. Find a wing to get under. Then find two or three.

Art & Science

While I understand the desire to pursue them, I would describe most modern attempts to fuse art and science (an artist rendering of the periodic table of the elements, say) as belonging to a very specific set of works producing a very specific reaction in me that I call Not Actually Interesting. 

Or, more accurately perhaps, modern attempts by art to celebrate science. The way that art can celebrate science is by understanding it and applying its discoveries, not by fetishizing it. Pretty much anything artistic with ‘Science!’ in the description is Not Actually Interesting. 

We must accept that the path of the ancients is closed. But it’s true that you can almost see the corner of it with enough LED lights.

How to Lose a Rose

How can you claim

Notoriety, Influence, A voice in the global community

If you don’t even know one whale?

November

I wish I could remember as well as the dove day does. Spring in the fall softened my brow, it tapped my wrists and hands spilled out of my sleeves, it breathed into my ears, untied my scarf, made me giggle a little, wiggle a little, wriggle a little. Then it turned my mind to the Jovian, those that sigh instead of taking form. It squared off and peeled back my senses revealing the happy figurative. I wonder if November noticed.