I love this. It’s already dated!
Oh! Prfoper credits and purchasing oppt’y here.
Vested
Finally getting around to watching the third and final season of Deadwood, loving it as much as the initial two runs.
I was startled to note that the vest worn by Hearst in the scenes where he is placed under arrest by Sheriff Bullock is a near match to one of my antiques. Pausing the show and rushing down to the basement, I was surprised to note several things about the piece that had escaped me previously:
– a name, presumably the comissioning owner, is crow quilled into the inside of the right cinch belt in time-reddened india ink, “C. SCOLA.”
– a cleaner’s or tailor’s tag has been whip stitched on the outside of same: “07 96,” it seems to read.
– nearly all the fabric is silk, save the decorative front-casing of mauve and blue chalkstriped yellow cloth
– there is an unhemmed flap at the root of the interior of the right cinch belt with a clearly visible ink blot and the numerals 08 in what appears to be fine black Sharpie. Just under them is an illegible and very finely drawn inscription, much lighter and fainter than the “C. SCOLA” but sharing the reddened tone of century old ink.
– the buttons are all true mother-of-pearl, with shaping irregularities and visible layering
There are divers stains and wear marks as well, such as a right-angled corner hole on the interior lining corresponding to the right lower front pocket, just where I would carry a lighter if I were to wear the garment as a smoker for any length of time.
Overall, the fabric remains supple, alive to the touch.
My guess is that whipstitching is the maker’s initial delivery date – July, 1896.
le blog
le blog d’evelyne blondeau. via things.
With pleasure, I realize I can still read French, more or less.
Affiches
Cuban Posters. via old pal Everlasting Blort.
BLIZZARD
OK, in the past ten minutes, half-an-inch of snow has accumulated, and if anything, it’s snowing harder.
.
Cathy
Cathy’s Book – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For whatever reason, this 2-year-old ARG popped up in some Google ads for me today. Here’s a nonlinked version of the ad:
Cathy’s Book
If found call (650) 266-8233 — And change the default access code!
www.cathysbook.com
I’m interested, but what’s even more interesting is this:
When I saw the ad, I immediately thought, “Wow, someone’s directly looking to drive ARG traffic via ads! I must investigate!”
Given that my operating assumption is that I am just like everybody else, I wonder if that means everybody else also has such well-tuned ARG antennae by now.
Probably not, huh?
Omie
This is the gravestone of Naomi Wise.
She was murdered in 1808, and her body was thrown into the Deep River.
After her killer was found and escaped punishment, the killing became famous, and a ballad (or two or three) was written about the murder, Omie Wise.
Omie Wise, it seems, is the wellspring of a particular tradition in American murder balladry, centered on the theme of a cad doing in his pregnant girlfriend by the banks of a river. Pushing beyond a strict folkloric interpretation, one might argue that the murder ballad gives rise to crime stories, and in particular murders, as a central narrative element in popular entertainment. An element in many of these songs is a verse which describes the grisly moment of the killing, often in conjuction with a first-person perspective. The best-known example of this is Knoxville Girl, which is in and of itself not based on a true murder, unless it is Omie Wise’s death which has been crossbred with the older British sources. At any rate, one can draw lines straight from this gravestone to today’s police procedurals, such as CSI. One wonders if a pregnant murder victim, done in by her fiance and tossed into the river, figures in any of these contemporary works. One certainly hopes so.
In the last week of March, my family and I drove to the cemetery where this stone stands. (I was in North Carolina to visit my parents and for a business conference). It is an old cemetery, and most of the original stones are long gone. I was able to locate three from just after 1808. Instead of the typical arch-top marble slab we think of as a gravestone, these early markers were made from a slick, greenish-grey local stone similar to slate. They were lightly engraved by, as one might say, ‘divers hands.’
In researching this, it became clear to me that the stone I took a picture of is a replacement. In addition, near the stone, there is a large block-shaped marker in the center of an area without markers. The stone is inscribed as a memorial to the cemetery’s anonymous dead. Given these three elements (very few original markers, one replacement marker only for a well-known interment, and an open section without markers identified as containing unknown interments), I would speculate that the stone bearing the name of Naomi Wise might be a memorial stone rather than a true grave marker. However, the headstone is accompanied by a footstone, a mostly-neglected practice whereby a smaller stone is placed at the foot of the grave.
In the older graves in this cemetery, the practice was clearly standard. Markers switch to professionally engraved white marble sometime around 1840 or 1850, and these markers continued the practice of placing a headstone and footstone pair at the site of the interment. So it’s quite possible I am wholly off base in my surmise.
PS X
Adobe: Adobe Photoshop Express – Made You Look. Free image hosting and editing, 2gb storage. Interesting.
Hey
Heyokay, per Tom. Fuck yeah.
off the cuff
So my friend Andrea messaged me on Facebook wanting my thoughts on a building project in Louisville I hadn’t ever heard of. I ended up kinda going on at length and I thought that my quickie analysis might be amusing. She mentioned Stonehenge as a descriptor in her initial take on the design.
—
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=127240
– bunch of renderings, better context and diff viewing angles
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H-qhbIIMyk
– pitch film
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisville_Museum_Plaza
At first blush I was reminded of some of the Ground Zero proposals, as I recall there were a couple of linked two-tower ideas. The pitch film seems to give the most context, visually.
I did not find info linking the design of the building to the Ground Zero proposals. BUT:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Prince-Ramus
– “partner-in-charge of the Seattle Central Library”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/arts/design/14pogr.html
– “Joshua Prince-Ramus Leaving Koolhaas’s O.M.A. to Start New Architecture Firm…”
The film clearly links the building to the Library; giant rooms with dedicated uses piled onto one another in ways that presumably reflect and express the use structurally – or so reads the promo literature, anyway.
I like the giant video screen thing as an idea because of Blade Runner, but in real life I HATE video in my field of view when I am driving, even other driver’s little DVD screens distract the shit out of me.
Take my increasingly skeptical opinion of the new Seattle Library:
- it’s confusing to navigate even when you know it’s confusing;
- it’s noisy pretty much no matter where you are because of the lack of interior sound baffling and the open insides of the building;
- it’s hard to understand visually because of the solid intensity of the color schemes of all the interior spaces except for the top-floor reading desks and study carrels and the ground floor.
Looking at that list, the overriding quality underlying each of these critiques is a building that actually emphasizes noise, meaning sensory overload, at the expense of usability. The big video screen on the Louisville building actually takes that problem and expands it into the city itself. I rather doubt that interior of the building would be any more conducive to clear and rational thought.
Oh, look, Prince-Ramus worked on a Guggenheim museum project based in Las Vegas. The aesthetic line I am seeing looks at Vegas’ lines of blinking distraction and robbery machines and casts that as a good and desirable thing. I see it as a mechanism to increase the concentration of power and wealth by making it that much harder for Joe Average to think clearly about his life and role in the economy, something that actually threatens participatory democracy itself.
So, Stonehenge? If Stonehenge is a place of religious spectacle and intoxication, maybe so. I think, however, it’s currently thought to be a sort of astronomical observatory, right? That sort of constructed artifact celebrates the cyclical, the predictable, the knowable, and the real.
These buildings I looked at this morning don’t seem interested in that set of values.
Ha, it’s fun to just come up with stuff like this on the fly!