Inspiration From Above

I know there has to be a light bulb joke in here somewhere, but in the meantime, I will say in all seriousness how much I dig 'The 9th Annual Year in Ideas' cover of the New York Times Magazine. I think I have never seen light bulbs shot from above like this and how often do you get to say the words “I have never seen…?” The bulbs form a thought cloud. What a great uh—idea!

In the name of thoroughness, I checked to see if, in fact, there are any appropriate light bulb jokes. I just visited--you guessed it--lightbulbjokes.com and sure enough there is one for art directors.

Q: How many art directors does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Does it have to be a lightbulb?

Well, no it doesn’t have to be a light bulb. Last year they put Einstein on the cover of the 'Ideas' issue, and a few years ago they used a blackboard covered in equations à la A Beautiful Mind. But the truth is, if you want to communicate ‘idea’, the clearest, handiest, image really is a light bulb. So the answer to the art director’s question (which was an answer to a question) is ...

A: No, but I’ll be darned impressed if you can pull off using one in a non-cliché image.

I am darned impressed.



Photo illustration by Reinhard Hunger. Set design by Sarah Illenberger.

Bodies in Motion

Just a handful of the over 3,000 images of dance in the digital collection of the New York Public Library.

Top row: Ruth St. Denis in Siamese Ballet, 1918
Rows 2 & 3: Ted Shawn in Death of Adonis, 1923
Row 4: Merce Cunningham at Black Mountain College, 1948
Row 5: Male students of Ted Shawn, 1919
Row 6: Ted Shawn in Krishna and Radha, 1917
Row 7: Marmein Dancers, 1924?
Row 8: Jitterbug, 1939-40
Row 9: Split, 1939-40
Rows 10 & 11: La Sylphe
Bottom row: Ted Shawn in Sunrise, 1914

Happy Ha, Cha ...

This pie chart of the popularity of various spellings of Hanukkah (the most popular) arrived uncredited in an email.

A little googling took me to a 2005 post from Unbecoming Levity. Turns out that this is no whimsical bit of holiday levity. The post includes a complete dissection of the "core word" and its "variants", resulting in a table of nine columns and 16 rows. I can appreciate the obsessiveness, but it's definitely TMI. Okay, I never knew that French speakers use Hanouka, and it seems that in the effort to not miss any possible spelling, an e-tailer of holiday merchandise keyworded any and all possible spellings including: Chanuko, Kanukkah, Khannuka, Khanuka, Khanukah, Khanukkah, Khannukah, and Xanuka.


Edward Livingston Youmans, Chemical Atlas, Chemistry of Combustion and Illumination, 1855

First candle is tonight. Chave a Chappy one!

Global Warnings

Now, I know you do not need more proof that there is global warming, but if you’d like to actually see the effects that climate change is having on our planet, watch this TED talk by James Balog (you'll have to go the the link, embedding slows down the page load too much). You will witness actual footage, created with time lapse photography, of glaciers melting and retreating. Stunning.



Below, posters from a 2008 exhibit at the Max Huber Museum in Switzerland.

PREPARE TO MIGRATE, Handoko Tjung, Indonesia


USE BOTH SIDES, Rebeca Ramírez Guerra, Mexico



TIME COVERS Oct. 19, 1987 The Heat is On; April 9, 2001 Global Warming; April 3, 2006 Be Worried, Be Very Worried



Humble Oil ad in Life magazine, 1962. From treehugger, where you can read the grisly details.

Sophie Cook, Genius in a Bottle

I gasped when I spotted the pastel chorus line of vessels in Daily Candy, of all places. I quickly clicked on the thumbnail and was taken to Horne, the online purveyor of beautiful objects. When I saw the lineup full scale, I was truly overcome with awe and delight. I then went on to the British ceramicist’s website and got to savor the porcelain pods, teardrops, and bottles individually. The shapes, colors, postures and surface subtlety makes for quite a visual feast.




Each piece is hand thrown and, as Cook describes it, “every piece is a challenge to make as porcelain is such a fluid medium on the wheel. I can throw up to six pieces a day but rarely, if ever, do all six survive the making and firing processes. On average, three will make it to their final destination.”

You know how many artists say that they are inspired by nature? I’m thinking that in Sophie Cook’s case it might be the other way around.

Low Rollers

When I found this cigarette card of a ‘horizontal bicycle’ in the archive of the New York Public Library, I just had to send it to my friend Shelly Mossey at Urban Mobility Project. You may have seen him on the streets of NYC or on Martha’s Vineyard—usually with his wife Rachel and son Jackson—and always on a recumbent bike. His fleet includes a recumbent pedicab and a recumbent tandem. Always looking ahead, he shot me this futuristic creature called the Pardo, short for cheetah in Spanish. It’s been prototyped and tested, and I hope to see Shelly on a family version sometime soon. See details on Treehugger.

A Counterintuitive Counterinsurgency

Looks like we’ve now outsourced and offshored our counterinsurgency strategy.

The diagram here, outlines the Afghanistan counterinsurgency strategy. It was obtained by MSNBC's Richard Engel, and aired on The Rachel Maddow Show. Labeled a ‘working draft’, the slide is branded with the logo of PA Consulting Group, a UK-based firm.

The company made news in 2008, when it lost a memory stick containing data on the entire UK prison population of about 84,000. PA Consulting has worked successfully with the U.S. Navy on cost-cutting privatization initiatives.

You can see the full PDF here for an in-depth look at what we must surely be paying big bucks for.

Scenes From a Weekend

Some visuals from my four-day action-packed weekend in the Berkshires.


Germain is a very cool store that just opened along Route 7. You’ll find modern and vintage home furnishings and quirky original artwork. The store also features the Martin clothing line by Anne Johnston Albert. The designer was formerly based in the East Village and the clothes have quite a following. Check out the press link on the website. Germain is actually a nestled right behind …



the 7-year-old Metropolitain, a charming 2-story cottage filled with French country antiques.

Owls have an amazing ability to hunt swiftly, accurately, and silently in the dead of night. Come learn how they do it! We’ll listen to the calls of several species and try to draw them in.

I mean, how could we not sign up for the Owl Prowl, a two-hour nighttime hike through Bartholomew’s Cobble in Sheffield. Our very knowledgeable guide led the way with his boom box of recorded owl calls, stopping when we reached the territory of a specific species. He’d play the call and we would silently wait for a feathered predator to appear. Well, we never did get to see any owls, but it was a perfect opportunity to roam through the woods and balance ourselves as we made our way, single file, over log bridges in the dark. And there’s nothing like the ubiquitous ring of a cell phone in response to a recorded owl mating call for comic relief. All in all, dare I say, it was a hoot!

We were so curious about where exactly we had been, that we went back and hiked the next day. The green of the moss-covered bedrock outcropping was dazzling against the bare branches and dried fallen leaves. Maybe it's the angle of the sun at this time of year, but the moss surface was so sculptural, kind of like thick cut velvet upholstery.



SoCo is the beloved local ice cream of the Berkshires (and is now available in NYC at Fairway). At their store on Railroad St. we were able to hang with Elvis—that’s a flavor. I can’t really describe it; you just have to taste it. These are their new orange chairs.


A plaster wall plaque at Real Gustavian, on Main St. in GB. Exquisite 18th and 19th century Swedish antiques and a line of reproduction classic painted furniture, direct from the land of blonde. A wonderful shelf of books on Swedish decorating and style was my excuse for taking up temporary residence in the store.


I might have to devote a separate post to all the vintage fabric I photographed at Sideshow Clothing in Sheffield. This awesome photorealistic print is from slinky vintage pants, probably from the 70s.


I absolutely swooned at this chess set on the shelf in my room. It’s aluminum and the pieces are stamped 1962 Austin Enterprises. Turns out it was a commission by ALCOA. See more images and read more about from this unusual and spectacular piece from informed fans here, here, and here.


Believe it or not, the 'Campbell’s' lettering was the hardest. That is before you go into a Zen state of fitting together pure white pieces. And then of course, there was the drama of crawling on all fours to find the missing piece at the end. I was sure that I had heard the piece drop the previous day, but it was no where to be found. Then I thought back to my cat hiding in the radiator when she was just a tiny …