Barley Blair vs. the World

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I just finished reading "The Russia House" by John Le Carré, and although it took me way too long to read, it's highly recommended if you are looking for a summer thriller or just a great book to carry around with you as an accessory. Written by a man once in the spy game himself, I was tipped off to pick up something by Le Carré after reading this article he wrote for The New Yorker.

Quote on the inside jacket: "Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of their way and let them have it." –Dwight D. Eisenhower

Sometimes I Go Whole Days

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School of Seven Bells "Half Asleep" from the album Alpinisms

Develop Don't Destroy

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[Please note: Some photographs (and links to/information regarding their original source) have been removed from this post at the request of the photographer. With that in mind we would like to take the opportunity to note that we do not maintain this blog for commercial purposes, and no profit is derived from it. When we post photos or other artwork it is with the intention of commenting on information or items that we find interesting; we hope that by doing so we might inspire readers to learn more about the topics we discuss, and to support the artists we feature.]

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Glenwood Power Station. Photo courtesy imposemagazine.com

Our friend Maya (whose wedding we attended in Vermont last September, at the beginning of our road trip West), recently put us up on some beautiful photos of the Glenwood Power Station in Yonkers, just north of NYC on the Hudson River.

The station was built in the early 1900s as part of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad's switch from steam to electricity, and later used to supply power to Yonkers and the surrounding region. (The architects, Charles Reed and Allen Stem, also designed NYC's Grand Central Terminal, along with the firm of Warren & Wetmore.) The power station was shut down in the 1960s and has been peacefully decaying since then, although it apparently remains structurally sound.

Photo courtesy imposemagazine.com

There have been attempts to protect the building through local landmark legislation, but those efforts have been stalled since 2005. In 2008, the Preservation League of New York State named the building to Seven to Save, its list of the most endangered properties in New York.

Photos courtesy imposemagazine.com

The building's current owner is actively marketing it for development. A proposal to turn it into an art museum with condo towers on top (removing the smoke stacks and skylight roof) was reportedly withdrawn in late 2007.

Photo courtesy imposemagazine.com

I hope that someone with the foresight to develop the building in a way that's respectful of the beauty of the original structure steps forward. If not, I'd rather just see it slowly disintegrate into its surroundings, industrial decay at its finest.

Photo courtesy imposemagazine.com

More photos and information at Impose, here, and the Preservation League of New York State, here.

BBBBound

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[ click images to examine / click here for more ]

Go Ahead, Jump

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If I could go back in time to shop (just think of how much further the dollar would go...), this is the jumpsuit I'd buy for the season:

Catsuit by Emanuel Ungaro, 1970

And maybe this too (you know, for hitting the slopes next winter):

Ski suit by Michele Rosier, 1968

Seriously. They just don't make them like they used to.

Images from Francois Baudot, Fashion: The Twentieth Century

"It's very subtle, but it just looks right."*

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Celine Resort 2010 [click to enlarge]

Phoebe Philo presented her debut collection for Celine yesterday (Resort 2010, which will begin appearing in stores in November), and I thought it was a brilliant beginning. The pressure on Philo was tremendous. She'd been on hiatus from the fashion biz since the beginning of 2006, and after the magic she worked in her nearly 10 years at Chloé, the last five under the title of creative director, she had nowhere to go but down. But Philo rose beautifully to the occasion with a first collection full of clean lines and quietly luxurious details that should please Celine's mainstay clients, while injecting ultra-modern twists and a fresh mood that the cool girls can love. If that sounds like a vision that's trying to do too much, it wasn't; instead, it came across as coherent, cohesive, and timeless.

Celine Resort 2010 [click to enlarge]

Celine, which began in Paris in 1945 as a boutique selling made-to-measure children's shoes, and expanded into women's ready-to-wear, footwear, and handbags in the 1960s, has been essentially rudderless since 2004, when Michael Kors left after 7 years at the helm. I was often a fan of Kors's work for the label (one of my all-time favorite coats is his below, second from the left), but at the end of his tenure there didn't seem to be a lot of difference between his own line and the collections he was turning out for Celine (a distinction that I suppose can't always be easy to maintain when you're an established designer with a strong sensibility).

From left: Celine F/W 2004; F/W 2003; F/W 2004; F/W 2004
[click to enlarge]

Philo looks to be subtly taking the label in a new direction, and updating it enough so that it looks really right for now. She obviously has a talent for tapping into the moment, but this is not Chloé part deux – Philo just as clearly has an impressive ability to allow a label's own identity to breathe.

More images from the collection are below. I could easily have included the whole thing, as I thought there was hardly a miss and little redundancy in spite of the simplicity of the pieces and the strong themes that carried throughout.

Celine Resort 2010 [click to enlarge]

I can't wait to see what Philo does for Spring 2010. No pressure at all.

See the whole collection at style.com, here (and read Cathy Horyn's take – Philo "makes one of the strongest sportswear statements we’ve seen in some time. . . . [The clothes'] value is to a large and almost novel degree in their practicality" – here).

*Phoebe Philo speaking to Nicole Phelps about a detail in her Resort 2010 collection for Celine

The ill Na Na

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Last week I got some unsolicited CDs in the mail from our friend at Una in Portland. In the mix was a disk from Fredrik, a not quite pop, not quite folk release out of Sweden from late last year entitled Na Na Ni. Perfect for driving foggy mountain roads or listening under the covers late at night.

Released by The Kora Records, Oct. 2008.

Grin and Bear It : )

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Tonight as part of the Seattle International Film Festival, Los Angeles band No Age is performing an original live score to L'Ours (The Bear), a 1989 film by Jean-Jacques Annaud. Take that, Grizzly Bear.
From siff.net:

When a rockslide kills a mother bear, her cub Douce becomes an orphan in the threatening Canadian Rockies. Luckily, she encounters Bart, a full-grown male bear on the run from hunters after mauling their pack animals. Though the ill-tempered Bart initially rejects Douce’s companionship, the cub wins his affection by licking Bart’s gunshot wounds. Psychedelic mushroom trips and a rendezvous with Doc (the effeminate male bear who plays Bart’s love interest) are woodland fun at its finest, but the invasive fear of being hunted drives The Bear forward. Staged with trained bears and filmed in the Italian Dolomites, Jean-Jacques Annaud’s film seems like realism in drag as documentary. Yet it’s this feeling that makes The Bear a magical discovery and a welcome departure from the ordinary wildlife exposé.
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As Douce and Bart sift through the maladies and joys of their precarious existence, so too does No Age’s music filter raw sensation through art-punk chaos.

I like bears, I like the Canadian Rockies, I like mushrooms, I like art. I like punk, I tell you what. I like that stuff. I'm not sure about the chaos, it's complicated.

No Age Every Artist Needs a Tragedy mp3

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Triumph of Lethargy also playing tonight, at The Mix in Georgetown (info here)

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Loud good times

Today is my brother's birthday.

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Daniela and Sky in Italy

Happy birthday Sky!

One in a Million

Robert Henri, Jesseca Penn in Black Dress with White Plumes, 1908
[on view at SAM]

I've been volunteering at the Seattle Art Museum since this past winter – twice a month at the Information Desk and every other week up in the galleries, fielding questions that range from "where are the bathrooms?" to "what's a chromogenic print?" My shift in the galleries falls on a day and time that is often pretty slow, which isn't good for feeling extremely useful but is great for wandering around and enjoying the art, and SAM is constantly making enough little changes to what's hanging in the permanent collection spaces to keep things interesting.

One of my favorite paintings up right now is pictured above: Jesseca Penn in Black Dress with White Plumes, by American artist Robert Henri (1865-1929). Penn was a chorus girl in the Ziegfeld Follies and was a favorite model of Henri's; Christie's presided over the sale of this work in the spring of 2005 for $3.6 million, an auction record for the artist.

I have a weakness for large-scale painting and this is a big one, almost life-size. I love the color palette: the beautiful light blue and creamy white against the dark background, and the shock of red hair. The dress, which actually appears more navy than black in person, reminds me of something that Olivier Theyskens could have sent down the runway at Rochas a few years ago. And Penn's expression – with her heavy-lidded eyes and the tilt of her chin – seems fearless, both introspective and direct. Click to enlarge the image above to get a closer look at the details (though this is also one well worth seeing in the flesh).

Your Weekly Mr. Littlejeans

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Brothers start to shake when Jeans digs in the crates

Dig It

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Due to building regulations, the owners of this 1960s house in Switzerland could not expand outward or upward, so they went underground.

I love the way it looks – I think maybe it appeals to me for similar reasons that building forts did when I was a kid.

More info and images here.

Via Apartment Therapy

The Cappy

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oowwww my head hurts

True Master

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Local architecture firm Build has a great piece on its blog right now profiling the residential work of Arthur Erickson, a master of Northwest modernism who died last month at the age of 84. Seems like he might have been a big influence on one of my favorite current architects, Tom Kundig.

Above and top: Graham House, 1962. Photos by Ezra Stoller

Smith House, 1964. Photo by Ezra Stoller

Catton House, 1967. Photo by John Fulker

Click here for more pics and info.
See also: arthurerickson.com

One To Grow On

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At one of my favorite stops elsewhere on The Internets I saw that comedian Eugene Mirman recently delivered a stellar commencement address at his old high school:

(Via A Special Way of Being Afraid.)

While we're on the topic of commencement addresses that don't suck – and just for old times' sake – here is my own personal favorite, which I like to review every now and then: Conan O'Brien's blockbuster speech to the graduating class of 2000 at Harvard, his alma mater. (If you prefer, watch the video in two parts here.)