Word Blur

A few links, some commentary

Here’s an article about how the forthcoming Jane Austen biopic will be marketed to aggressively to teens, in which the director is quoted as saying, “There is a stereotype of Jane as a spinster obsessed with manners. But we are looking at her when she is 21, full of life and hope and kicking against the restrictions around her." Are we going to get a randy Austen, to go with our randy Bennets and Eyres?

It seems there is a full-fledged movement, a handful of revolutionary cadres around the nation, at work implementing my soup collective idea. And in the spirit of our new open source world, they share their blueprint for soup swapping.

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, it’s worth mentioning that I still love cupcakes. Nothing says Valentine’s Day like cupcakes.

Also, check out this extremely cool public [art?] project – a guy who sets up his sewing machine in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district once a month and sews whatever you bring him.

I Appreciate the Idea of Books

I don’t have time for reading anymore. I just spend my evenings running back and forth between the two kids trying to help them sleep. Sometimes I watch reruns of The Colbert Report. Then I pass out. Luckily, I still troll the new book shelf at work. So today I recommend Balenciaga and His Legacy, a big beautiful book with gorgeous photographs and documentation. The best of his pieces are intensely sculptural and full of asymmetrical folds and poofs that pre-suppose the work of cool Japanese designers like Rei Kawakubo.  I'm dying to take up sewing.  In all my spare time.

Findings

I recommend, for the hard-core crafters and intellectuals, the beautifully designed book that was on the new arrivals shelves at work (already checked out!): Findings: The Material Culture of Needlework and Sewing.  It documents sewing implements found at archeological sites and it's full of beautiful, glossary-style picturs of old scissors.

Here's a quote:
"In Findings, Beaudry offers for the first time a scholarly, theoretically enriched and historically situated guide to the needlework and sewing tools of the British isles and North America. She employs these ‘small finds’ to write 'large histories.'"—Lu Ann De Cunzo, Professor of Anthropology and Early American Culture, University of Delaware

Woodchuck Style

The book I want to write about doesn’t exist. It’s finally winter here in the arctic finger of the northeast and everyone’s sporting heavy coats and hats and boots. I’m drawn to outerwear fashion this year, probably because it’s been so late in coming. I was really taken, for instance, with a hipster wearing a furry bear head hat, replete with ear flaps, and, in lieu of boots, a pair of old school all-white leather Velcro hightop sneakers. Even the been-there-done-that Ugg lace ups that are cropping up like the plague on my campus get a little more interesting with neon green shoelaces. There’s something so charming about the amount of effort it takes to generate any kind of aesthetic pleasure out of these giant puffy hindering garments. Plus I like the sort of trapper chic that can happen. I’m personally working a Soviet clerical worker look, with my long white parka/trenchcoat ($2.50 church basement thrift store), fake fur hat (used to belong to my grandmother), understated lipstick, and shit kicker boots. So, what I want is one of those street fashion books, like NYLON’s, or that awesome Phaidon series on Japanese kids, but devoted entirely to winter wear.