Macerated Ego
Coilhouse plates
One of my favorite Christmas presents that I got this year round is the amazing three-piece set of miniature (3″) porcelain plates from Coilhouse’s shop, featuring art by Zoetica Ebb and typography design by Courtney Riot. Of course, I will never use these for any other purpose than to sit and look beautiful and adorn my home. Woe be to the cat of mine who might end up smashing them.
Pictures from Zoetica Ebb and Coilhouse.My own crappy pictures after the cut:
See more after the cutTags: coilhouse, decorative items, intricate line drawings, nouveau circus aesthetic, porcelain, sinister arts and crafts, zoetica ebb
798 Art Zone in Beijing
When I went on my recent trip to China (that’s where I’ve been these last two weeks), I visited this amazing art district in Beijing called 798 Space or 798 Art Zone. Though I liked many other places in Beijing, it was my favorite, and even though 798 seems to be a pretty popular tourist site, it seems different somehow from anywhere else in the city. It’s so nice and quiet there, the aesthetic being minimalist and modern but really interesting, quirky, and quite beautiful, and the art is creative and right down my alley. I loved how we could just walk unobtrusively, stealthily into any lofty, white gallery and check out the art as we liked and go around; there weren’t many people around. It was like a giant First Friday, a fantasy one for me.
798 used to be an industrial area that many artists have since converted into an inspiring contemporary art community with loads of studios, galleries, and cafes. The military factory buildings built in the ’50s in a unique, Bauhaus-influenced architectural style, redesigned and reclaimed by the artists in the ’90s and 2000s, now house works of art and provocative exhibits. Their former status as factories and industrial buildings, in their modern incarnation, serves to give them a beautiful, original, rather than sterile quality. I’ve never seen such spacious and minimalistically majestic indie art galleries and studios. I loved it.
Found on Flickr; not my image.
Not my image
Not my image
A postcard and bookmark I picked up there.There was this amazing installation, “Tears” by Luan Jiaqi, in one of the exhibits. I now regret not taking a picture of it. Even though there were “No photos” signs all over the place, everyone seemed to be taking pictures, anyway. I sadly can’t find any of it on the Internet. If anybody knows what the hell I’m talking about and has pictures of this installation, please let me know. My description would only sound crummy and probably not give you any real idea of what it looks like. The closest comparison that I can draw is to the work of Jin Young Yu; it was a group of expressive, white faces hanging from the ceiling/floating in space, with “tears” streaming down.
It’s kind of ironic that I do this blogging thing, because I don’t feel that any of the art or images I like really need to be explained, or can be. Maybe that’s why I’m liking Tumblr so much.
Tags: 798, beijing, contemporary architecture, pop surrealism, weird sculptures
Site Redesign: From Disposable Darling to Synesthesia Garden
If you used to follow DisposableDarling.com, you may have noticed that the blog has undergone a total makeover. The redesign had been brewing in my mind for months, and I and N. (the Webmaster) finally got down to it this past week or two.
Here’s a screencap of the old blog:
Click for a larger viewI conceptualized/visualized the new design, down to the last detail (or rather, I imagined it pretty much all at once, in a complete image), and N. worked reeeallly hard to get everything right and the way I wanted it, as I’m really OCD and picky with details and was literally going, “Can you shift this two spaces to the right?” every five minutes.
I wanted to take the site in another aesthetic direction. I have about a million directions in me, but I settled on this one and had a vision of it inside my head that I would tweak and bring different parts of into focus at random times during the day. While Disposable Darling was white with red as the accompanying color, minimal, and rather precious-looking, I wanted the new one to be a little bit grungier, edgier, and more cluttered (a very orderly clutter). It’s basically a sort of visual negative of Disposable Darling – an inversion. The colors are black (the base color), white, and pink. Fonts are bigger, bolder, more graphic, and more integrated with the whole layout. Everything is enwrapped in boxes to satisfy my lust for visual order and integrity.
Instead of a baroque design with lots of flourishes and an old-timey vibe (which I love also), I opted for a starker, sleek, modern layout. But I always wanted a kind of elaborate crest in the header image, so we used a vector graphic from Chadlonius (he’s amazing) and modified it and added the twin hearts, which are vintage medical textbook illustrations. Those two hearts represent the idea of the “second heart,” which comes from a poem I really like that goes, “the second heart murmurs/its beatific perversions/to the first” (see poetry post below). That can mean a lot of things, obviously; but part of it, for me, is that my vision of the future incarnations of the blog would keep whispering to me and making my fingers itch, it wouldn’t let me rest. We are inspired to change by that restlessness.
{Another part of it is that I don’t think that we’re always guided by our most obvious motivations or goals, five-year plans or whatever; like, with me, all my actions can sort of be traced to an emotional origin that lies in a deeper, more buried, and more embedded sort of “second heart,” maybe, that lives alongside the first, or encloses the first within it. This has nothing to do with the subconscious or intuition, but everything to do with the primary, underlying motivations of our personalities and the broad themes that shape and describe our lives. And our complexity has to do with modernity; it’s as if we grow a second heart over time, as we evolve.}
Anyway, thanks to everyone who ever glanced at the blog and liked what they saw. And thanks especially to those 300 or so of you who’ve read it on at least a semi-regular basis. You guys are all wonderful! I hope you still enjoy it. I’m going to try to make things a little more organized from now on. I’m currently going through the 200+ posts I made on Disposable Darling and editing each one of them, which is a pain in the ass. God, I write poorly sometimes. A lot of them probably won’t be put up. I’m trying to be more disciplined – let’s see how long that lasts.
Goodbye, Disposable Darling.
Hello, Synesthesia Garden.
- L.
Dream Machine [001]
I had this weird dream one night last week where there was something wrong with my chest — I felt it, and so my teacher said, “Go to the hospital, a doctor,” and when I went to the hospital I saw a group of doctors standing in front of me, and I went forward, bent sightly over, with my hand over my chest, holding it carefully, with a wounded look on my face, and I felt a slight pain, no more than a papercut or a dull tiny cut, though, really. It was like I was tenderly holding my wound like an injured sparrow held cupped in my hands against my chest. I was afraid of showing it to the doctors, like you’re afraid of opening your mouth for the dentist when you’re a child. I imagined, from outside me, I saw an image of myself with a big hole in my chest, punched right through the rib cage, right in the center, with my heart missing and only destroyed tissue there. (In true dream fashion, it was right in the center, not slightly off to the left, because I don’t think my subconscious takes note of these details.) But when I pulled my hands away and finally showed the doctors, it transformed into, or turned out to be, only a small wound near my collarbone, on my right side, that was thick and dark with blood already like a clotted rope.
The End of 2009
Image by Caryn Drexl“Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go.”
- Brooks AtkinsonTags: it's almost over
9/9/09
“I never saw a worse paper in my life.
One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.
It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate, and provoke study, and when you follow the lame, uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-of contradictions.”
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall Paper”I’m reading The Haunted Omnibus, a compilation of “Great Ghost Stories of the World” that was first published in 1937. It includes “ghost” stories by M. R. James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Algernon Blackwood, Guy de Maupassant, Pliny the Younger, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ambrose Bierce, Poe, and others. This is a 1941 copy. I love old books, and old things in general. I look at this book and I think, This is 68 years old…. And I have it right here, it’s so far and so close to me at the same time. I also like it when I find things left in secondhand books, tucked away and forgotten, like lovely cloth bookmarks, slips of paper with quotes on them, tickets to the ballet, or a decade-old article about Virginia Woolf in a Woolf book.
Oh, God, I was on the bus today, and I smelled something, like baking bread, as we went over the bridge to the U-District, and it plunged me into a memory of my childhood. Isn’t it weird how smell can carry you back to the past? It’s almost like deja vu, the strongest throwback of all your senses, to the actual experience of life. It’s beyond words. I’m not even sure what that scent is, or if I’ve ever really smelled it before or not, or my brain is just glitching, but that momentary sensation of actually being in the past that it triggers is so real. Smell has the strongest ability to get you back to the past, more than anything else.
