feel like smiling

princess leia

Picked up a dress/cardigan/skirt over the weekend. I saw it on the model styled with a belt and bought it without trying on because the store was closing in 5 minutes. I still haven't managed to recreate the way it was styled, but found lots of other ways!

I've no idea why I just spent 10 minutes cropping my face out of all of these. I doubt anyone reads this (though I have love for those that do!) and if people do, they either have no idea who I am and don't care, or they are reading this because they know who I am. 

Hello.

More Hwimzee

Another image post, and word of the day. 

NB: Now actually a rant and image post because the word of the day did not go as smoothly as one would have hoped. 

whim⋅sy

  [hwim-zee, wim-] 

–noun, plural -sies.

1.	capricious humor or disposition; extravagant, fanciful, or excessively playful expression: a play with lots of whimsy.

2.	an odd or fanciful notion.

3.	anything odd or fanciful; a product of playful or capricious fancy: a whimsy from an otherwise thoughtful writer.

Let's talk about this definition for one second. 

Putting aside for the moment that the 'h' is in fact silent and so if you go around pronouncing it 'hwimzee' you are going to sound Victor Krum inarticulately lusting after Hermione, I have some serious problems with this definition.

Firstly, and indeed lastly, it is flat out wrong. That is not what whimsy means. Odd or fanciful? Excessively playful? Extravagant? I suspect capricious is meant badly as well, as the dictionary says it means 'erratic'. Why this attack on whimsy at a time when we need more whimsy?

This place in history is whimsy starved. In the evening, just after the sun sets, strange thoughts come into our heads, and, afraid, we think of other things like schedules and lists. Sometimes in the witching hour we awake - not often, perhaps just a handful of times in a lifetime - and think of a different world and believe, in that dark hour before dawn, that we could make it so. This is whimsy. 

I also have to take issue with whimsy being diametrically opposed to thoughtfulness in the not-very-helpful example sentence. Maybe to dictionary writers who wear bow ties and whose skin is the same grey colour as their hair, whimsy cannot co-exist with thoughtfulness, but for the rest of us, it can and it should. 

This, my friends, is whimsy - Nightingale.

So fuck off, dictionary, Keats and I think you are a loser.

Noorda Worry in the World

I swear I never even used to make puns (terrible or otherwise) until titling posts. I just hope it doesn't spill over into other areas. Maybe I should stop apologising for it and embrace the atrocious punning. 

Really liking Kim Noorda's hair this season. It's a less tacky take on Pip Edward's two-tone white trash tresses. Drew Barrymore one-upped her anyway at the Emmy's with the black ends, so that's all passe now as far as I'm concerned. But back to Kim, who is looking just lovely and making me wonder if I can get my hair to do that. 

Behold. 

From style.com, twenty8twelve and burberry prorsum respectively.

I'm too alive right now...

This is old news now, a 2006 book, and I don't even own it.

'The Next Big Thing - A Short Story About the Creative Process"

It is authored by Aesop Rock and illustrated by Jeremy Fish. His website here is full of some weird drawings. So if you like the unexpected and the absurd, check it out here. 

All I know about the creative process is that I don't know much. Creativity is being increasingly commodified, and to put it bluntly, if this goes too much further we are all screwed. Think Farenheit 911, think the Time Machine. 

So there are no flowers in this book, no goddesses of creativity, and no three muses. Nuh uh. There are skulls, pigs, nice hats, hotdogs and pin up girls, which to me seems to have a lot more to do with my own experience of creativity. 

A secret you and me house

A tree house, a free house,

A secret you and me house,

A high up in the leafy branches

Cozy as can be house.

A street house,

Be sure and wipe your feet house

Is not my kind of house at all -

Let's go live in a tree house.

- Shel Silverstein

In winter I went on a holiday to a treehouse. I've always been a tree lover, so it was a dream come true. Everywhere is lovely wood, with driftwood art installations and sketches from the artist who used to live there. The house is built on stilts on the top of the highest cliff in the area. The balcony is in the treetops, and the backyard is a national park. I'm hoping to go back this summer, because apparently you can sleep out on the balcony then, and look at the stars. 

Courts of the Sun

Got distracted by the rooftops in these photos by Meisel taken in 2000. Very distracted. My taste in interior design fluctuates between natural minimalism (modernist decor, natural accents like stone and wood) and balls out crazy antique-gatherer-sparkles-collector-intricacy. Obviously the former would be more livable but then a see a house like the one in this shoot and think that that is so much more of a home than most homes I've been in. Though form the other photos in the shoot, I suspect it is a temple or a spiritual retreat in Asia somewhere. 

Just imagine what the sparkled/mirrored room would be like at night, with candles.