Last week I was in NYC for one of the conferences my company produces, and our emcee, for the third time in four years, was Steve Thomas. He is one of the smartest, most interesting, interested people I’ve ever met, and I love working with him. The first time I met him I was a little nervous -- after all, I had been watching him host This Old House on PBS for years, and then Renovation Nation on PlanetGreen… and how often do you meet someone you’ve seen on TV?
As you can see, he knows how to ham it up when the occasion calls for it. I wish I had taken a seriously-posed photo as well so you could better see how handsome he is, but I feel a series of celebrity cheesy prom pose photos will be my legacy.
I have not yet caught the IFC original series Portlandia, but my dad sent me the link to this NPR story on it, with specific instructions to “watch the bird video”. It is a hilarious parody of how a design trend can go awry.
My poor little birdies, I still love them, even if they are doomed to become passé.
That’s right fellow shelter mag junkies, I said Domino. The word in ad-land is that Conde Nast has a soon-to-be-released Gourmet app –- that may be followed by a Domino version.
The Gourmet app launches in November, and while it will include selections from Gourmet’s treasure-trove of classic food editorial, it will be a social experience “that will involve earning points, spending virtual currency and sharing recipes.” According to Ad Age, Conde Nast CEO Chuck Townsend said other shelved brands that failed as print publications during the recession could be brought back in different forms, such as the beloved shelter title Domino, "one of those brands we know has real legs."
I can see the attraction of a recipe and grocery-list app for a smartphone (I already have 3 for my iPhone). But when it comes to a potential Domino version, two things worry me: the impact of good decor photos will be completely lost on the small screen of a smartphone*, and the prospect of user-generated decor photos + virtual currency + social experience makes me think of Farmville decorated by Apartment Therapy. And that can’t be good.
That’s not to say I wouldn’t be one of the first to download once it becomes available, however. ;-) *hmmm, would look great on an iPad…
All of the P&G Thank You Mom commercials shown during the Olympics have been very touching, but this one really got me (I should note that I tear up at the slightest provocation. Hallmark commercials. Maxwell House Christmas commercials. Parades. I’m a sap). I sang this song in college glee club but our rendition lacked the touching visuals. I especially love the scene of the mom changing her own tire in front of her daughters. I couldn’t change a tire if my life depended on it.
The song is from Rodger and Hammerstein’s 1945 musical Carousel. It is also used as an anthem by the Liverpool Football Club, among others. If you go to the YouTube site for the above commercial there are some hilarious comments by soccer hooligans who are up in arms about P&G appropriating “their” song. Apparently they were not aware that its origins have nothing to do with football, although it is well documented, and actually gives more credence to P&G’s selection of it as a theme for this commercial.
Star Wars creator George Lucas is an architecture buff (who knew?). The Architects' Journal, a British mag, recently chose the top ten buildings from the Star Wars series, and lists the real-life buildings that inspired or were inspired by them.
{This is not the home of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars (Episode IV, my favorite) or The Phantom Menace (Episode I), but the Ksar Ouled Soltane, one of the Berber granaries of Tunisia. According to Part 2 of the AJ article, they were the inspiration for the artisanal houses of Tattoine}.
The headline for this post is a line from Episode IV. Yes, I am a geek. But only for the "real Star Wars", the ones from '77, '80 and '83. "Help me Obi-Wan, you're my only hope"
Photographer Dina Goldstein has injected a dose of Brothers Grimm-type reality, circa 2009, into the Disney Princesses. These fair maidens face modern-day issues such as addiction, self-image, illness and war. While the Snow White and Sleeping Beaury scenarios seem familiar, the consequences of Belle/Beauty's vanity and irony of Rapunzel's hair loss are a sad truth for too many real women.
Saturday night the boyfriend and I went to see a little piece of stop-motion genius, Henry Selick's Coraline. If you've seen James and The Giant Peach or The Nightmare Before Christmas, you are familiar with Selick's work. Coraline was three years in the making, employing dozens of artisans, artists and crafters (like Althea Crome, who knitted Coraline's tiny sweaters and gloves on needles smaller than toothpicks) to create the wondrous world of a curious girl and her mysterious neighbors.
Coraline is gorgeously made, and meets my main criteria for any film: a good story, well told. I think it is being marketed as a kid's film, and while there certainly were a lot of kids at the showing we went to, there were plenty of adults, and everyone was equally mesmerized by the spectacle Selick and his team have created. But the thing that made me squeal like a little girl was Mr. Bobinsky's Mouse Circus. See, when I was a child I had this thing about mice, this secret belief that behind the walls they lived a Borrower's life, wearing tiny clothes, sleeping in little beds made from matchboxes, dining at spool tables, tooling around in toy cars, Stuart Little-style. As an adult, I may or may not have let that belief...um... go (and this despite having once owned an old house that had many a mouse trap to catch the little buggers before they could do too much damage). Mr. Bobinsky's mice wear cute little red band uniforms, play tiny musical instruments, and put on a circus performance with military precision. There's a secret behind their showmanship that I won't give away here (go see the movie), but they are just adorable and must be forgiven for their role in any deceit. Plus if you ask them nicely they will spell your name with their tails (click the pic below to make your own).
{Matthew Modine and I, apparently about to break into a tango. Sorry about the bad photo quality, blame my iPhone}
Earlier this month the BF and I went to a swanky fundraiser for the local arts council, where we tasted lots of wine, sampled food from local restaurants, schmoozed, and bid on silent auction items that we didn't win (we forgot to keep going back to check on our items and were quickly outbid by others. This is what happens when you stop tasting wine and move on to martinis). Amidst the crowd of local business tycoons, non-profit leaders, arts execs and hoi polloi like ourselves was a tall dark & handsome guy that I kept thinking I knew, in a "did I go to high school with him" kind of way. Um, no, actually it was more like "did I have mad crush on him while I was in high school and he was starring in Vision Quest*".
Matthew Modine, one of the objects of my teenage affection, is in town in rehearsals for To Kill A Mockingbird at our (Tony Award-winning, thank you) regional theater and came to the fundraiser with the theater prinicipals. We don't get a lot of big stars in town so when one is in our midst the reactions range from stammeringly starstruck to ridiculously over-familiar. I was somewhere in between, but the real estate developer who owns the building where I work falls in the latter category, shouting out (like they are old pals) "Hey Matthew, Robin would like a photo with you" as Matthew entered the room we were in. Thankfully, Mr. Modine was not only gracious about the whole thing, but a little corny, hence the cheesy prom pose (as he put it) above. We even had a nice conversation about how rehearsals were going, how he liked Hartford, etc. He is very charming and looks you right in the eye when he speaks to you. My teenage crush is renewed.
*Yeah, now you have Madonna's Crazy For You stuck in your head don't you? Me too.
Rockin' Robin, as sung by the Jackson Five, was the bane of my grammar school existence. John Turner used to sing it to me every day on the bus. Also, lots of jokes about Batman and Robin, Robin (robbing) the bank, Robin Hood, etc. Hilarious. But the song was the worst. Over and over, every day. Kind of like the way it is stuck in your head now. He rocks through the treetops, all day long...
Third-grade angst aside, lets talk about tweeting. As in Twitter. As in I am in a self-taught crash course in Twitter via a personal account so I can start Twittering professionally for work (is that an oxymoron or what?). I was trying to avoid this, but apparently all the kids are doing it, even in the business world, and I figured its safer to muddle my way through on my own before I create a profile for work and drag our sterling reputation into the muck and mire of social networking, late to the game though we may be.
Besides Julia@hookedonhouses (and thanks again Julia for my first tweet) do any of you Twitter? Got any advice, tips, or tweets for me? You can find me at @abirdinthehand.
He rocks in the tree tops all day long Hoppin' and a-boppin' and singing his song All the little birdies on Jaybird Street Love to hear the robin go tweet tweet tweet
Rockin' robin, tweet tweet tweet Rockin' robin' tweet tweetly-tweet Blow rockin' robin 'Cause we're really gonna rock tonight...
No, we're not talking about me here (I'll never kiss & tell), but Sex & The City author Candace Bushnell, a Glastonbury, CT native whose country home in tony Roxbury, CT is featured in the Home section of today's Hartford Courant. One of my non-Resolution resolutions is to purge everything from my home office and start over with a nice clean slate, kind of like her desk here:
{photo by Cloe Poisson, click here for more photos of CB's surprisingly country colonial.}
Below is a pic from her NYC apartment, which was featured in Elle Decor a few years ago, one of the few issues I kept because I really like her style and use of color, but with white walls in most of the apartment.
I really like the color of my living and dining rooms, but since my apartment faces north, every winter I get the urge to lighten and brighten with some paint. Luckily for the BF, who has volunteered to help me paint, my Gemini nature has issues with choosing a color, so we'll stick with Behr's Caribbean Coral for now.
PS - thank you for all the well wishes with my lousy sinuses over the holidays. I'm all better now!
Rudolph, with your nose so bright, won't you be my eye tonight?
Actually, I don't need Rudy, as I've been sporting a nice red eyeball since Friday, along with what I thought was a Christmas Day Cold but the nice doctor tells me was a sinus infection with a side of pink eye. I'm sure I picked up these germs while Christmas shopping at the fifth gate of hell mall on Christmas Eve eve. I've never been sick over the holidays before, and it bites. I had big plans -- Big Plans, I tell you -- for these two weeks. Visiting with faraway friends in town for the holidays, visiting with local friends that I haven't seen in weeks, closet cleaning, magazine purging, dinner party-throwing. Not to mention the BF is a teacher and this is one of the few times during the year that he has time off and I my work schedule allows me to take time off to match.
But enough whining. In between coughing fits, cabin fever (from which Meg & Mo have been so good about trying to rescue me), daily chats with Mumsie, and The Lounging Party's favorite activity (cat-naps), I've had lots of time to catch up on reading. Two books, a dozen magazines, the daily paper from cover to cover, and blogland. My Google Reader was overflowing with long-unread posts -- some of you are prolific and I've been really bad about keeping up.
Thanks to the miracle of modern medicine I am feeling better and am hoping to make a brief cough-free, red-eye-free appearance at a New Year's Eve party and then cram some fun times (and perhaps some of that closet-cleaning) into what's left of my vacation. Wishing you all a fabulous New Year's!
I am a girl who wears skirts. And dresses. Mumsie always said "Dress for the position to which you aspire," and I'm sticking with that rule, even though I am always "overdressed" compared to some of my co-workers. I like getting dressed up for work every day and I curse whoever invented "casual" dress code. I have a thing for heels and handbags. And accessories. I'm a girly girl, and not ashamed to say it.
I tore the hem of my skirt today during a run-in with an unruly file cabinet. I mended it at my desk (while wearing it) and it wasn't until I was threading the needle that I really took a good look at the sewing kit. It's a little plastic box with 7 spools of colored thread (there were 8 but I lost one). Of course the black thread is almost gone, followed closely by the navy. There's a plastic thimble, safety pins, a threader and a couple of needles. And then I realized: I have had this sewing kit in every desk I've ever sat at, at every job I've ever had, since graduating college. That's almost twenty years.
I'm sure the gals at Basket of Kisses would agree that "Joan" would be proud.
{Christina Hendricks as "Joan Holloway" in AMC's "MadMen"}
Joan Holloway dresses like the hot ticket she is, and keeps aspirin, a sweater, safety pins and a fifth of something in her desk. For emergencies.
What do you wear to work? Does anyone like getting dressed up anymore?
Sorry for the long absence. Thanksgiving melted right into a non-stop 10 days of work and travel that I only recently surfaced from. Just in time for Christmas shopping!
I have no idea where I was from 1999-2006, when the show originally aired. Well, I know where I was, I just can't pin down the specifics of why I didn't watch it. It has all my favorite things - great writing, witty banter, smart female characters, realistic plot lines and a talented cast and crew to bring it all together. I'm sorry I missed it the first time around, and although I've caught a glimpse or two on Bravo, it's not the kind of show where you can jump feet first into one episode and know all you need to know to understand it (like Law & Order). Add to that the following:
Continued media/blog speculation that "the West Wing is coming true" with the election of Obama and his appointment of Rahm Emanuel (alleged inspiration for the "Josh Lyman" character on WW),
there is nothing on now that Mad Men is over for the season and Lost won't be on until January (!!)
my increased need for escapist entertainment during this, the busiest season of my work year
my neighbors, Meg & Mo (aka Two Ladies In Waiting) and Lyrical Uncertainty & his wife Muffin, blathering on about their mutual love of WW and arguing over whether a certain incident happened in season 2 or season 3
the fact that said neighbors have most seasons on DVD
... and you have a recipe for me becoming a hermit. I watched 5 episodes in one sitting yesterday.
Ooh! And because I love floor plans almost as much as I love maps, look what I found online:
Gotta go. Episode 10 is about to start, and The Lounging Party is waiting for me.
Hey kiddos, sorry for neglecting my space here, work keeps getting in the way of my social life, both real and virtual. Post-Labor Day may be back to school for us Northern Hemisphere types, but for me it is also the kick-off to our busiest event season of the year. My posts may become a bit sporadic at times; bear with me.
So here's a few random pop culture bits that have made it through the fog of my brain these days. First, Victoria Beckham got a new haircut. Now here's a celeb who is famous (currently) just for being famous (and fashionable). But a haircut as news? Hmph. I admit I watched the one and only episode of her "Posh and Becks come to the US" reality show. It was a fascinating train wreck, I couldn't look away. Far more entertaining than most of the reality drivel on tv.
{Gosh Posh, keep your head girl. photo from UK Telegraph}
Her head is just not connected to her body. Note how the pasty English girl is more tan than the hot Latino girl. And she is just too skinny. Posh, a grape is not lunch, go eat a hamburger for cryin' out loud.
Kind of "Lost" meets "X Files", courtesy of "Lost" creator JJ Abrams (early X Files, when it was about aliens and creepy, not later X Files when it got all weird and paranoid). Interestingly, the music sounds like they are using the same composer and/or some of the same music as Lost. There's even a big menacing corporation performing its own experiments. Yes, there was a kind of superhero-finds-the-antidote-in-the-lab moment, complete with swelling brass orchestral theme. Which was preceded by a rooftop chase scene a la Bourne Ultimatum. The ending was also a bit too tidy; let's see what the next episodes bring.
{Project Runway Season 4 Finale, from Bravotv.com}
Lastly, Remember the Fab AssistantKelly? One of her college gal pals is photog Stephen Meisel's neice (I know! How cool is that?) and gets to work backstage as some kind of assistant at the Project Runway fashion show today (I know! How cool is that?). So she (and the rest of the anointed ones) will know who the final four are (they always let the 4th one show, to keep the real final three a mystery), even though on last night's episode they were down to only the final six. I'm a bit jealous...
