Selbu 2.

This time with white and gray. I used size 0 needles for the brim and size 4 for the rest of the hat.

J. Crew.

I love J. Crew. I only have a few items from there, because it's expensive, but the things that I do have have held up very nicely over the years - like my MoMA shorts. Right now it's thundering (and scaring Miss Tetocat; she growls at the thunder sometimes) and I'm sitting inside enjoying the lovely visions of a fair weather summer as brought to me by J. Crew.






That last picture just cracks me up; it's just so funny, because that's exactly what I look like when I sit down to write. I put on my fancy top and my $200 blazer, sit down in front of my pink typewriter and stare pensively into the distance. There are no pajamas involved, ever. Or screaming. Nope.

Pictures from Jezebel.

Fall.

As some of you may know, I'm headed off to Oxford University in the fall. I've avoided mentioning it too much here because ... well, I don't know; I guess I'm afraid of jinxing it! I've never even been out of the country (unless you count Canada) and I really don't know what to expect. I'm excited and scared and anxious and thrilled and all of that.

I can't tell you a whole lot about Oxford, having never been there before. All I know comes from books and meetings held for international exchange students at my school.

I can tell you that there are 38 colleges within Oxford University. I'll be attending Wadham College, which is - from what I've gleaned - the young hippie child of the bunch. By "young" I mean it was founded around 1610, by Nicholas and Dorothy Wadham. And by "founded by Nicholas and Dorothy Wadham" I mean that Nicholas died, leaving Dorothy with money that she used to basically build the college by herself.


There are no classes, per se, at Wadham. There are lectures, which you may attend to your heart's content (or not), and there are tutorials. In my program, we are paired with two tutors who each instruct us in a different subject, one-on-one. I'm planning to study Anglo-Saxon history and Latin.

What else can I tell you about Wadham? Howabout ... this is the dining hall:


I get to have one meal there a week. My parents were all like, "Only one meal a week?" and I was like, "I would be happy to have one meal EVER at Hogwarts, for God's sake." (Actually, the dining hall used for the Harry Potter movies is at Christ Church, not Wadham. But hey, a ridiculously ornate and old dining hall is a ridiculously ornate and old dining hall.)

I couldn't find a decent picture of Wadham's library, but here's the library at Queen's College, Oxford:


And the library at All Souls College, Oxford:


Here's a picture of the outside of the famous Bodleian Library, which is open to all Oxford students:


And here is a picture of one of the streets of Oxford, which is home to several universities besides Oxford University, but who cares about them.


For more very, very beautiful libraries, check out Librophiliac Love Letter: A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries over at Curious Expeditions. That's where I got the pictures of the Queen's College and All Souls College libraries, and there are many more on that page.

For more information about Wadham, check out its website. The Bodleian Library has a website too.

More MoMA!

Here are some of the other pictures from my MoMA trip. I like how MoMA is slightly different every time you go there, but there's still plenty of stuff that sticks around, if you feel like seeing it again.

This time there were a lot of small pictures shown in clusters, and it was fun to imagine them as if they were on the walls of my house.


Here are some other things I saw for the first time:


Oyvind Fahlstrom, Sketch for World Map, 1972


Pablo Picasso, Green Still Life, 1914

And here is a very, very fun piece: Measuring the Universe by Roman Ondak. It's a performance piece, and guess who got to perform in it?


(Hint: look all the way on the left, towards the middle.)

The concept is simple: you stand somewhere in the room, and somebody else (a museum employee) draws a line to mark your height and writes your name next to it. Most people's names are gathered around the same level, but there are some outliers, including some very tall and very small people. I imagine a few of them were bebehs. The names covered the entire room.


Here's Alex taking part:


Moving on, here's an old favorite of mine at the MoMA:



Gustav Klimt, The Park, 1910

... aaaand Penis Hat.



Paul McCarthy, Penis Hat, 2001

Fun fact: when I first glanced at the artist's name, I thought it said Paul McCartney, and I was like, "Wow. This is an interesting career move for you, Paul." Then I realized it was McCarthy and went back to having no respect for Paul McCartney whatsoever.

Here's a picture of me taking a picture of me in Michelangelo Pistoletto's Man with Yellow Pants, to match the one I took last year:



Yes, I am wearing the same shorts. But the moccasins are different!

Lastly, here are some pictures from the garden, including a shot of some of those skinny old apartment buildings that I love so very, very much.



Can you imagine living that close to MoMA? Sigh.

The sleep of reason.

I got to go to the city again yesterday! I went to a dinner party with my father's friends from high school. I got some nice pictures on the drive down. The clouds were doing cool things:


The stoopid trees blocked this shot, but it's still pretty cool. This cloud had a silver lining.


These pictures were from earlier in the drive, when we passed a forested area filled with trees that I call "Sleeping Giants." That's because they're covered in ivy, which makes them look like monsters that got frozen by a magic spell in the middle of fighting with each other, and over time the forest grew over them.



It's kind of like "Castle in the Sky," when all the robots get covered in moss and stuff.


Anyway, back to the city - I have a recurring dream about living in an old-ish apartment in New York City, in one of those skinny buildings with the curved windows, like these:



However, as my occupation for at least the next decade is shaping up to be "student," who knows if I'll ever get to live in one of these. At least I can dream, literally and figuratively.

Waste Not.

I love MoMA. I have been there 250934 times. Not really, because the place is so damn expensive (except on Fridays after 4:00, when it's free!). It's a real treat when I do get to go. The place is filled with the works of talented artists and Roy Lichtenstein. That was my attempt to insult Roy Lichtenstein, if you couldn't tell.

You can see pictures from my previous MoMA visits if you'd like: here is December 2008, July 2008 part I, July 2008 part II, and September 2007.

Below are a batch pictures from today's trip. I went with my friend Alex. The first thing we saw was a huge installation piece by Chinese artist Song Dong called Waste Not. It consists of "the full complement of worldly goods belonging to the artist's mother, Zhao Xiangyuan (1938-2009), including the wood frame of her house."


The description on the wall behind the piece goes on to say this about Zhao Xiangyuan:

Song's mother was typical of the generation of Chinese who lived through the hardships of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s abiding by the dictum wu jin qi yong (waste not). This guiding tenet deemed that resources be squeezed for all their value and nothing be wasted.

It was quite breathtaking. More amazing than the sheer number of items preserved was the fact that they all fit into Zhao Xiangyuan's tiny house at one time.

Kitchen things:


Bottles:


Art supplies:


Shoes:


Magazines, newspapers, and books:


Toothpaste:


Bits of string, ribbon, and cloth:


Knitting supplies (my favorite):


Despite the fact that many of the items were mass produced, they felt very personal. It was easy to imagine that they retain a part of Zhao's presence within them. They also convey a sense of grandiosity, even though the house and individual objects are very modest; it's almost incredible how much stuff may be attached to one person, when absolutely everything she touched is preserved. Waste Not draws our attention to the vast graveyard of goods we all leave behind in our wake, and forces us to wonder what story they would tell about us if they were laid out for all to see.

More from the description of the piece:

Waste Not is a collaboration with the artist's mother, initiated in an attempt to wrest her from grief following the death of his father in 2002. In the process of organizing and arranging the goods, the baggage of the past was, quite literally, unpacked and given a new life. Zhao's unexpected death this year adds a special poignancy to the neon sign high on the wall that reads, "Dad, don't worry, mum and we are fine."

Mini.

This is my summer mini project: a mug cozy designed by MK Carroll. It took a couple of hours and fits my big white mug quite well. "My big white mug" sounds like a euphemism for something, but it's not.



I may just have to make some hot chocolate sometime soon. It's been a pretty cool summer, so it's not that weird.