tis the season

...for boot sales!!!

went to my first boot sale since being back in england.  and it didn't disappoint, as usual!

i think i spend a grand total of £5.70!

books, cds, and a lovely bag that i'm very excited about!  (it almost takes away the pain of me deciding that i had too much stuff already and not buying a gorgeous olivetti lettera 32 manual typewriter for only £10...um, yeah. painful i know.  i'm literally in agony.  maybe i'll find something at the bank holiday boot sale tomorrow? one can always hope).

robin hood.

saw the new robin hood movie today - it was excellent!  definitely way better than i thought it would be - quite a clever and inventive story of the man before he became an outlaw, and quite different than gladiator+1100 years!

geez, life in the middle ages really was quite bleak and grotty.  the movie had the appropriate new additions of no-tights russell crowe and sword-wielding cate blanchett.  but for all the dirt and unshavenness and, well, sword-wielding (and arrow-slinging!) it wasn't too much.  this robin hood, surprisingly enough, had no flying limbs (or heads, in the rather horrifying style of mel gibson and the patriot).  and the beautiful cinematography was gorgeous.  the lush green landscape of late twelfth-century england (rolling hills and forests and forests and forests), the bright gold and burgundy of the coats of arms rippling in the wind as their riders charge into battle...it was enough to recall the glory of the legend who was robin hood and make us temporarily forget why we would never want to live back then.

and mark strong as the bad guy, again.  and bald, again, like in sherlock holmes.  i wonder if he is just naturally bald now?  or maybe he just shaves his head because it makes him seem more evil.  (after seeing him in so many roles like this, it's going to be hard to see him in the kate beckinsdale version of emma).

robin and marian, as romantic as ever, despite the general grottiness of the middle ages!

airplane movies

two good movies that i saw on the airplane (british airways, right before the strike haha):

1. nowhere boy

i had wanted to see this - about john lennon when he was younger.  it did not disappoint!  very well done.  it's definitely up there on my "heavy-but-not-so-depressing-as-to-start-bawling-your-eyes-out-as-in-atonement" list, along with an education.









2. the princess and the frog

okay, so i finally capitulated and watched this...as there was nothing else i particularly wanted to watch.  it was a pleasant surprise (still not as good as mulan or anastasia in the animated movies/musicals category though).

the start of the summer holidays :)

i went in to clean up my desk on saturday.  studio was a complete disaster zone - and i thought my room was bad!  anyway, i took pictures of my last project before tearing it apart.  it was sad to do so, but at the same time it was kind of an ugly design...and not modeled so well, thanks to my inability to work with foam core.  the chipboard parts, however - not bad in my opinion.  i realized that the two pieces - the park and the studio - look better separately - so that's how i took pictures of it!

also yesterday - picked up some free t-shirts screenprinted by sadie; her blog is here.  they are pretty cool!

red velvet

ruthie henshall in marguerite, the musical

would you be mine, valentine?

valentine typewriter
ettore sotsass, 1969

i want one!

five minute study break.

i love playing around with brown paper + black graphite pencil + white pencil.

i also love my fair lady.

hm, bad quality photo + very fast sketch = questionable results...oh well.

(oh no, another white dress...that was completely unintentional, i promise).

white dresses, part 3: more paintings!

i just love the pre-raphaelites and pre raphaelite-influenced art.  people may call it kitschy but oh well.  i enjoy some bad architecture just as much as some good architecture, so i may as well feel the same way about paintings.  plus, it makes me feel calm.  which is a good thing.

The Lady of Shalott, John William Waterhouse, 1888

The Accolade, Edmund Blair Leighton, 1901

white dresses, part 2: paintings

Two contrasting depictions of white dresses in the Victorian Era - one impressionist, a windy walk outside, the white dress all the more impractical but picturesque (i'm thinking Anne of Green Gables or A Room with a View); the other a portrait of a woman sitting down on a luxurious chair, her elusive expression challenging the viewer to question a woman's role as just another ornament in a lovely house.

Claude Monet - The Walk, Woman with a Parasol (Madame Monet and her Son), 1875

John Singer Sargent - Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, 1892-93

girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes...

...and red and yellow and green and brown and scarlet and black and ochre and peach....and white cotton....

Anyway, enough with the quoting of song lyrics.  Have I mentioned that I love white dresses? No, it's not wedding dresses in particular that I'm fond of (although they are awesome in their own right, and I love Vera Wang).

It's just the thought of clean white dresses in general.

At my high school graduation all the girls wore white dresses, and although I was admittedly a little bummed about not getting to wear a cap and gown, everything turned out beautifully.  (i'll just wait till i graduate from uni for that, which will be plenty since i'm pretty sure the cap would look horrible on me).  i ended up making my dress:

oh summer dresses.  they are so pretty.

and then we have white dresses in the more historical/literary/romantic/whatever-else-that-is-not-directly-related-to-contemporary-fashion-tastes context.

In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald described a scene in which "the only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon.  They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house...Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor."

It's a beautiful passage, and i could go on and on about the fantastic prose of Fitzgerald (drool...), but back to the subject, it sums up perfectly what I visualize when I think of white dresses - white flutters and the green of summer.  I have yet to see The Great Gatsby movie, with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow.

There are, of course, the stiff but beautiful Victorian whites in movies such as Anne of Green Gables and A Room with a View (obviously the ones in which the lace/ruffles goddess didn't have too much of a field day with the trims).

...and the classic, empire-waisted whites of Pride and Prejudice and all those other Jane Austen movies, although I don't necessarily associate them with rolling green hills or the like.

Finally, before I get too distracted and avoid doing all my homework, there's the new movie coming out, Princess Kaiulani.  I think at least part of the movie will have its share of white! (so excited!)

revelations about paper sizes (and root 2 rectangles)

today in architecture class we learned about the four important shapes of architecture - the square, the double square, the golden ratio rectangle, and the root-two rectangle.

naturally root-two rectangles captivated me; not only are they just naturally awesome, but they also gave me a bit of insight into paper sizes (now i understand!).

so to explain the basic idea of a root-two rectangle: it is a rectangle with the ratio of 1:1.414 (or, square root of 2), and its diagonal forms the angles of 35 and 55 degrees.  most interestingly, when you cut it in half it yields two similar rectangles.

this is the principle that yields the paper system used in countries that are, well, let's just say, way more practical than the united states.  yes, just like how the metric system makes SO MUCH SENSE, so does this system.  so, the standard A4 page is half the size of an A3 page, which in turn is half the size of an A2 page, which is half the size of an A1 page, which is half the size of the gigantic A0 sheet...i am still fascinated.

i need inspiration (not just another negotiation...)

i love drew barrymore's clothes in music & lyrics.  it's the kind of stuff i would want to wear but probably wouldn't.

(okay, this seems a little bit random, but "way back into love" popped up in my itunes, and it reminded me of the movie...)