Hello, Monday

I was happy to discover that We Heart It is working again. I almost gave up completely on the site, which was slower than a dial-up in the 90s. (Above are some of my recent saves.) But all the problems seem to be fixed. Do you have a favorite bookmarking site? I was on vi.sualize for awhile, but always liked We Heart It best.

What are you doing this week? I'm working on a writing project today and meeting with one of the editors at a major blog (name TBA!).

I'm very hopeful. Just keeping on...Have a lovely day.

xoxo

Day of the Dead

I love this post-Halloween holiday, especially the Mexican sugar skulls and the macabre music, like "Secret" by the Pierces.

A flip-book video of the sisters' song -- with its pipe organ riffs -- is charming, although a little overloaded with gun imagery. So goes the holiday. I can't wait to hear more from this talented duo...



What do you think?

Tagged.

This tag comes from my dear Liss at Daydream Lily. I haven't done one of these in ages....So here goes:

1. Where is your cell phone: Within reach at all times.
2. Your hair: blonde. Usually tousled and pinned up with a pencil.
3. Your favorite food: Candy, especially Hot Tamales in the boxes that you get at the movie theater.
4. Your dream from last night: I only remember the dreams I have about finding hidden rooms in houses. It's a recurring theme. Maybe I'm longing for a bigger house.
5. Your favorite drink: Chai.
6. Your dream/goal: to work for myself.
7. What room are you in: the living room, in my favorite chair.
8. What are your hobbies: blogging, reading, collecting vintage treasures, taking Polaroids.
9. What is your fear: I used to be afraid of being laid off. Now that that's happened, I'm fearless.
10. Where do you want to be in 6 years: exactly where I am now. Happy and free.
11. Where were you last night: Home, on the Internet.
12. Something you are not: shy.
13. Muffins: Yes, please.
14. Wish list items: A book deal and a little extra pin money.
15. Where did you grow up: Albuquerque, N.M.
16. Last thing you did: Opened the window to feel the evening breeze.
17. What are you wearing: a little blue and white cotton dress.
18. Your TV: It's always on, but I'm usually not the one watching it.
19. Your pets: two black cats and an old dog who smacks his gums.
20. Your friends: all of them creative, funny and interesting. I love people from all walks of life.
21. Your favorite store: thrift stores, book stores, drug stores.
22. Your favorite color: Pink, of course.

I'm passing this on to anyone who wants to do the post...
xo

Wanna Get Away?

Hello everyone, I'm taking a few days off to spend some time with my best friend Elaine (visiting from Paris). Will see you back here on Monday! Have a great weekend! xoxo Tina

R&R

Hello my dears, Happy Tuesday afternoon. It's so nice to be posting here at 3:37 p.m. on my own schedule -- away from the 9 - 5 work grind. I've been getting a little R&R -- long naps, long walks, long baths, making delicious salads for lunch, savoring magazines. I have been working a bit, too, on a new blog which I hope to debut soon. I'm doing this one on WordPress.org, which is definitely outside the comfortable ease that I feel on Blogger.

It's exciting though. I think I've finally settled on a header (which is the most important part, right?). I'm so thankful for these blogging platforms. It's the democratization of publishing (and design). You don't need a printing press to believe that what you say matters.

Can't wait to show you! Maybe next week. Also, I'm working a new blogroll for The English Muse. Please email me if you want to be included. Email me anyway. I'd love to hear from you. Here: englishmuse (at) yahoo (dot) com.

xoxoxo

Tina

(Photo by Rodney Smith, again)

Beauty, Illustrated

It's Lisi from The Beauty File and I'd like to introduce

you to Melbourne's own, Nevin Hirik.

The paintbrush: her instrument.

The canvas: her linen storyboard where dreams come alive....

Remember, 2009

Dreams to Remember, 2009

Three, 2003

Dreams to Remember VI, 2009

Theme of the Uprooting II, 2006

I Will Wait to See You Again, 2008

In Nevin's studio...

I had the opportunity to interview the lovely artist.

She shared her inspirations, experiences and favorite music.

Enjoy!

1. What inspires you? Art? Music? Literature? Other artists?

Life!! Everything really. Literature, film, dance, history, traveling, stories, my life, your life, pain, happiness, one word in the movie, a line in the book, Art itself, and Music, of course.

2. What colors do you feel most comfortable using? Are there certain shades that you are drawn to?

Not really. Every painting has its own story and the colours come with the painting naturally, I don’t plan this before the painting. Funny thing is if I want a painting with lots of red it ends up blue, if I want it blue it ends up red. So the best thing is not planning it, it tells me what it wants!

3. Your work truly invokes a dreamlike state and your use of layering is incredible. How long does it take you to create your work?

Thank you. It really depends on the painting, also my mood. I am a full time artist. Sometimes I am locked in my studio and paint days and nights, and I get burned out, physically and mentally, I get so tired. And then I have a break. Then back to the studio again. One solo show a year. And some mixed small shows. I can’t have more than one solo show a year; really I don’t know how people paint like that.

4. Do you paint with music playing in the background? What is on your play list right now?

I do. I can’t think of my studio without music. I love listening to music when I am painting. I listen to lots of different music.

I listen to lots of world music, classic, opera, hip-hop, Blues, Gypsy, Jazz. Lots of good music. I listen to lots of silly music in private life, but in the studio I listen to good music:

Eleni Karaindrou, Zulya, Portishead, Djivan Gasparyan, Elliot Goldenthal, Arto Tuncboyaciyan, David Hirschfelder, Elvira Uzunian, Kim Kashkashian, Robert Levin, Fazil Say, Nick Cave, Rashid Behbudov and Erkan Ogur.

5. What experiences/people from your own life are reflected in your collection?

I sometimes call my paintings a mirror. Every single private story behind these pictures also belongs to you. I am not unique, none of us are. We are all human. We share all the stories.

You can see my stories in my paintings. I am a migrant. I came to Australia from Turkey when I was 23 years old. There is a girl in my painting carry her house in her hand; another one has got the tree inside the house. So this is my experience, but it is also others stories too. For me it represent more than private stories. Thousands of people are homeless now, countries simply can’t share the earth with other nations.

Painting is the language I choose. And I love sharing this with others, that is the best part.

Visit Nevin's blog to view all of her work here

To contact Nevin, email her at: nevin@nevinhirik.com

top photo: silence is everywhere, 2008

(Guest Post by Lisi at the Beauty File.)

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