The Week's End

Tomorrow will be so much better...Thank you for your kind words of support this week. Love you all so much.

(Photos: Rusted Wound, inanutshell, and the incomparable Rosie Hardy.)

End of an Era

The death of Irving Penn marks the end of the era of seminal midcentury fashion photographers, according to a fantastic Los Angeles Times story by Emili Vesilind in today's Image section.



Emili writes:  "Penn, along with Richard Avedon, who died in 2004, practically invented modern fashion photography -- a place where art meets commerce -- in the mid-20th century."



The influence of both photographers -- and a group of mavericks who followed -- figures prominently on the pages of fashion magazines and books to this day.
{More details here in Emili's story}

{Also, an LAT slideshow of Penn photos here}

I hope you're having a lovely Sunday.  I'm reading the Sunday papers and sipping chai tea. Very relaxing.

Next, I have to do the laundry. Sigh. Another laundry crisis...
xo

(Photo credits: top and bottom photos by Avedon, middle photo by Penn.)

Missed Connections

Artist Sophie Blackall has created the most clever blog...


... illustrating posts on the Craigslist Missed Connections sites...



"Messages in bottles, smoke signals, letters written in the sand; the modern equivalents are the funny, sad, beautiful, hopeful, hopeless, poetic posts on Missed Connections websites," she writes....



"Every day hundreds of strangers reach out to other strangers on the strength of a glance, a smile or a blue hat. Their messages have the lifespan of a butterfly. I'm trying to pin a few of them down."

Lovely!

Sophie's blog Missed Connections {here}.

And...her magnificent inspiration board.

It Never Rains in Southern California

Hello everyone! This seemed like a fitting video for a day filled with rain in Los Angeles. (It also reminds me of Lisi's beautiful twilight post.) Before I moved to California, one of my friends warned me that it pours here in the winter -- sometimes for days. Another problem: No one knows how to drive in the rain. It's better just to stay in and listen to the rain on the roof.

But today I was out braving the weather, driving from Beverly Hills to Hollywood for two movie screenings. First one: A Single Man, with Colin Firth. (Wait till you see Julianne Moore's house in the movie. It's gorgeous 60s chic -- Tom Ford style!) The second movie: A Serious Man, a la the Coen brothers. A Serious Man was very funny but a Single Man made me cry. Now I'm too tired to go to bed.

Tomorrow: Sunshine.
xo


PS: Here's a little more detail about A Single Man on Woolfe & Wilde.

Twilight

{sensitive space}

happy tuesday lovely readers!
l.l. here from The Beauty File blog.
this week I bring you an awe-inspiring group of photos by
the incredibly talented flickr photostreamer, futureancient.

prepare to be mesmerized...

{dawnman}

{*}

{enchantment}

{soft music under the stars}

{homeward bound}

{ancient note}

{eternal}

all photos via futureancient flickr stream

David Hockney's iPhone Art Obsession

Lawrence Weschler, the Director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University, has a brilliant story in the Oct. 22 issue of the New York Review of Books. It seems Weschler's friend, famed artist David Hockney, is obsessed with making art -- via his Brushes application on his iPhone.

(Witness above!)

Weschler explains: "Over the past six months, Hockney has fashioned literally hundreds, probably over a thousand, such images, often sending out four or five a day to a group of about a dozen friends, and not really caring what happens to them after that. (He assumes the friends pass them along through the digital ether.) These are, mind you, not second-generation digital copies of images that exist in some other medium: their digital expression constitutes the sole (albeit multiple) original of the image."

I want to be on that email list!

(Hockney art via the New York Review of Books).

An amazing glimpse...

Last week, the Anne Frank House posted a YouTube video of the only moving pictures ever captured the young girl, who is seen in this clip leaning out of the window of her house in Amsterdam to get a better look at the girl next door and her new groom.

David Ulin, the book editor at the Los Angeles Times, wrote about the film so beautifully. Here are few graphs from Ulin's story:

"A newlywed couple leaves an Amsterdam apartment building. People hover on the sidewalk, watching them go. Then the camera pans upward -- and there, gazing down from a balcony, is Anne Frank.

"The date is July 22, 1941. She's 12 years old. It's a year before she and her family will go into hiding, less than four years before she will die of typhus at Bergen-Belsen in the waning days of World War II. We watch her watching, watch her look back over her shoulder, quick and coltish, as if in response to someone inside.

"'As familiar as we are with images of Anne Frank," Francine Prose writes in her provocative "Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife," "as inured as we may think we are to the sight of her beautiful face, the film pierces whatever armor we imagine we have developed. . . . It's less like watching a film clip than like having one of those dreams in which you see a long-lost loved one or friend. In the dream, the person isn't really dead. You must have been mistaken. You wake up, and it takes a few moments to understand why the dream was so cruelly deceptive.'

Remarkable.

For the rest of Ulin's story, please click {here}.

Happy Weekend

Hello everyone, what are you doing this weekend? I'm taking my daughter to a carnival with one of her friends. And I'm hoping to try out a few new (vegetarian!) recipes. Have a lovely one! -- Tina


Photo from the October issue of Marie Claire

"Focus on Recovery" Project

{"Focus on Recovery" Project}

...

I had the greatest time this week with you, the very lovely readers of English Muse!

Hope to see you soon here or there!

Wish you the happiest weekend!

Love,

Shokoofeh

xo

Man Shops Globe!

This show looks amazing! Could you imagine having a job like this: traveling the world looking for cool things for Anthropologie stores? Where would you go first? I think I would go to India!

(Thank you My Dog-Eared Pages and Ciao, Chessa! for the tip!)