[The] notion of household products as psychological furniture is, when you think about it, a radical idea. When we give an account of how we got to where we are, we’re inclined to credit the philosophical over the physical, and the products of art over the products of commerce. In the list of sixties social heroes, there are musicians and poets and civil-rights activists and sports figures. Herzog’s implication is that such a high-minded list is incomplete. What, say, of Vidal Sassoon? In the same period … Sassoon made individualization the hallmark of the haircut, liberating women’s hair from the hair styles of the times-from, as McCracken puts it, those “preposterous bits of rococo shrubbery that took their substance from permanents, their form from rollers, and their rigidity from hair spray.” In the Herzogian world view, the reasons we might give to dismiss Sassoon’s revolution-that all he was dispensing was a haircut, that it took just half an hour, that it affects only the way you look, that you will need another like it in a month-are the very reasons that Sassoon is important. If a revolution is not accessible, tangible, and replicable, how on earth can it be a revolution?
“Because I’m worth it” and “Does she or doesn’t she?” were powerful, then, precisely because they were commercials, for commercials come with products attached, and products offer something that songs and poems and political movements and radical ideologies do not, which is an immediate and affordable means of transformation.
— Malcolm Gladwell, “True Colors: Hair dye and the hidden history of postwar America,” The New Yorker, 1999.Joan Didion’s Packing List
To Pack and Wear:
2 skirts
2 jerseys or leotards
1 pullover sweater
2 pair shoes
stockings
bra
nightgown, robe slippers
cigarettes
bourbon
bag with: shampoo, toothbrush and paste, Basis soap, razor, deodorant, aspirin, prescriptions, Tampax, face cream, powder, baby oil
To Carry:
mohair throw
typewriter
2 legal pads and pens
files
house key
This is a list which was taped inside my closet door in Hollywood during those years when I was reporting more or less steadily. The list enabled me to pack, without thinking, for any piece I was likely to do. Notice the deliberate anonymity of costume: in a skirt, a leotard, and stockings, I could pass on either side of the culture. Notice the mohair throw for trunk-line flights (i.e. no blankets) and for the motel room in which the air conditioning could not be turned off. Notice the bourbon for the same motel room. Notice the typewriter for the airport, coming home: the idea was to turn in the Hertz car, check in, find an empty bench, and start typing the day’s notes.
—Joan Didion, The White Album
(Source: girlcrushzine)
Many-Roofed Building in Moonlight, by Jane Hirshfield
I found myself
suddenly voluminous,
three-dimensioned,
a many-roofed building in moonlight.
Thought traversed
me as simply as moths might.
Feelings traversed me as fish.
I heard myself thinking,
It isn’t the piano, it isn’t the ears.
Then heard, too soon, the ordinary furnace,
the usual footsteps above me.
Washed my face again with hot water,
as I did when I was a child.
Noosa, Queensland
Noosa, Queensland
Worst suburb names in Brisbane
Beenleigh
Bald Hills
Browns Plains
Cornubia
Boondal
Runcorn
Deception Bay
Geebung
Shailer Park
Burpengary
NYE
Polka dots, polenta chips and fish cakes, Absinthe, friendly taxi drivers, primary school alumni all grown up (but still playing in schoolyards), a paper folding fan, secret passwords, positive/negative body language, three graces lovely from afar and obnoxious up close, “78% NARCISSIST!”, romance in the veggie patch.
Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests
Merry Christmas 2011
Home for Christmas
My elderly black cat is turning red.
Solstice
It is possible to walk around in the sunshine well into the evening. A man seated on the tram catches me looking at his cone of ice-cream. He has been holding it aloft and ignoring the vanilla drips as if to convey it was somehow accidental that he bought a soft serve and then boarded a tram.
Strolling up Brunswick Street is a mature Christmas elf dressed in a green dress with a full skirt. She is smoking a cigarette and it looks like her candycane shoes pinch. She strides quickly past several small parties eating and drinking at outdoor tables. Maybe she is perturbed by their cheap glittery hats and plastic leis.
I see several girls around town wearing glossy, gummy Melissa shoes and those Emily Green necklaces, which are like tiny neon rosaries. Once you notice a pattern, you cannot stop.
The ABC reports that bee populations are decreasing around the country. Flower droughts. A frugal honey season.
Rooftop, Melbourne (via mishobaranovic)
Rooftop, Melbourne
