The Things, by Donald Hall
When I walk in my house I see pictures,
bought long ago, framed and hanging
—de Kooning, Arp, Laurencin, Henry Moore—
that I’ve cherished and stared at for years,
yet my eyes keep returning to the masters
of the trivial—a white stone perfectly round,
tiny lead models of baseball players, a cowbell,
a broken great-grandmother’s rocker,
a dead dog’s toy—valueless, unforgettable
detritus that my children will throw away
as I did my mother’s souvenirs of trips
with my dead father, Kodaks of kittens,
and bundles of cards from her mother Kate.
(Source: poets.org)
Vintage Zabuton - ca. mid 20th century
A vintage zabuton or seating made from a katazome like cotton in the classic chrysanthemum and karakusa or trailing vine motif. The cushion is completely hand sewn with quilting details stitched in red cotton thread; corner tufts are of green cotton. The cushion is stuffed with cotton batting, as is tradition in Japan.
Olive Cotton, Tea Cup Ballet, 1935
The second image from a series of one family’s photographic plate portraits found in The Junk Company, North Melbourne. Ca. late 1800s. (Photo by mishobaranovic).
From a series of one family’s negative photographic plates, found in The Junk Company, North Melbourne. Ca. late 1800s.
(Old technology meets new: mishobaranovic’s iPhone shoots, makes positive, and instantly publishes the incredibly preserved detail on the plate.)
Select pieces from the reproduction of the 69-piece dinner service Marc Chagall painted for his daughter, Ida, as her wedding gift.
(The full Bernardaud set will only set you back $34,115.80 plus shipping.)
BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour: The end of the dinner service
Do we no longer value an expensive and matching set of china?
“The one exception I always make, when I must have a piece of china, is when I have a cup of tea. I think tea out of a china cup – even a china mug, I will go so far as a china mug – tastes so much better. And I think there’s a scientific reason for that but I believe in the romance of it.”
Die Nähmaschine ist bestimmt kaputt?
I bought this in near-mint condition for $26, because the antique dealers couldn’t work out how to open the cover and priced it while unsure if it was in working order.
“Un Saluto da Taormina”
I pulled this postcard out of a box of hundreds of others in a bazaar in Brooklyn.
The message reads:
Of course it’s all due to your good wishes so I am having a fine old time. I feel quite guilty living in these old monasteries where women were not allowed and not even mentioned. L. G. S.
And on the front, it is addressed to a Miss Sibley, 500 Madison Ave, New York, USA, and is dated April 1904.
Patsy Cline, “She’s Got You”
I’ve got your memory, or has it got me?
I really don’t know, but I know it won’t let me be
I’ve got your class ring; that proved you cared
And it still looks the same as when you gave it dear
The only thing different, the only thing new
I’ve got these little things, she’s got you
The armchairs had gathered to warn her. But alas, the ferns were already in formation.
By unhappyhipsters, (Photo: Jessica Antola; Dwell)
In an analysis of the interieur around 1900, Georg Simmel distinguishes it from the interieur of the first decades of the nineteenth century through the ‘attachment’ of people to things, possible in the earlier period owing to their durability and simplicity, which ‘appears to the younger generation today as an eccentricity on the part of the grandparents.’ Simmel claims that this state of familiarity was brought to an end through ‘the sheer quantity of very specifically formed objects.’ What interests him here is not the rise of this multitude of things, due, for example, to industrial textile and furniture production or to ersatz materials, but the consequences of this development in this consciousness of the inhabitants.
[…] In Simmel there is a light feeling of uncanniness in the face of the sheer ‘quantity’ of things—he speaks of the ‘indepedence’ of the things crowded around, of their service as fetishes, of a feeling that the things interfere with one’s freedom, and thereby refers to the underground physiogony of the interieur, which the surrealists were the first to lay bare. The things that are not needed begin slowly to appear as strange. … Things simply sit there, like untouchable images of the divine in an imaginary cult of boredom.
— Christoph Asendorf, Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and Their Perception in Modernity. He continues, “The slight uncanniness of the things amassed in the interieur might derive from the circumstances that they are not only not needed by people but that they make use of people—the simplest treatment of space given over to chains, curtains, cords, little boxes, and plants presupposes that people’s movements conform most precisely to the given disposition of the world of things: movements must remain in the paths left open in the jungle of things.”A METHOD OF A CLOAK
A single climb to a line, a straight exchange to a cane, a desperate adventure and courage and a clock, all this which is a system, which has feeling, which has resignation and success, all makes an attractive black silver.
**
From Gertrude Stein, “Objects”, Tender Buttons (1914).
