From the flea market today

Vintage La Mondiale goat fur apres-ski boots, vintage Obermeyer during-ski sweater, an awesome set of Japanese Jepcor enamelware, an English wooden wine rack kit with Milton Glaseresque typography, and a litte wooden pig with bright pink eyes.

Koji Tatsuno

Designer Koji Tatsuno's (Alexander McQueen's old boss) very cool Paris apartment. From British Elle Decoration magazine, 1998.

70's sofa and rug found at the Marseilles flea markets.

"Home is about creating a space you feel comfortable in, and to me a comfortable environment is one that is aesthetically pleasing."

R.I.P. Lawrence Halprin

The things they carried

Never able to pass up an interesting bag at a yard sale, we've accumulated kind of a lot, especially of the canvas/tote variety. Most are kept in the car (ostensibly) to make grocery shopping more fun, and to convince Linda that they're actually useful and we should probably keep buying them, unlike the giant leather gladstone bags she's put the kibosh on.

1. An old heavy canvas workhorse, stencilled "Dennet's Wood-Yard", used for hauling coal way back when, with convenient handles on the bottom for dumping everything out. Soon to be filled with wooden blocks.

2. L.L. Bean zippered duffles. At one time we had about 14 of these, my reasoning being that at some conceivable point years from now, it would be fun to send our conceivable son off on a hypothetical Boy Scout trip and outfit the whole Troop with old Bean duffles, but realistically when that day comes I'm sure he'd rather have a Transformers backpack, or whatever's popular, or at least a normal hands-free backpack (which we also have...), or, ideally, take one of these and and sew Lego: The Movie patches all over it.

3. An old Liddesdale (Scotland) Creel. This was at a stoop sale, and the woman who had it said "Oh I used to use that all the time back when everybody had those!" I didn't ask, but I assumed it was the late 70's Stephanie Powers/William Holden-early Banana Republic-Safari time.

4. Museum of Modern Art bag. Probably from the same time period as above. The leather band goes all the way around, and the stitching has come loose, so it acts interestingly like a canvas totebag in a leather sling.

5. The big bag is an old LL Bean boat-and-tote, watertight for filling with ice or bailing out your sinking ship. This one is from the 60's and stiffened in this shape from years of salt water interaction. In front of it is a neat compartmentalized tote, specifically for going out in risky weather. Like our unpictured collection of "Le Bag"s and old Channel 13 (Herb Lubalin) totes, we're fans of type on bags, and "raincoat" in Hot Dog font was too funny. Lastly a well-worn denim and leather bag made in 1960's Massachusetts.

6. Tracey Emin's "This Way Mice" (there's a cat on the other side) tote bag from the 2007 Venice Biennial, thoughtfully brought back by our friend Friederike.

Finally, a nice article by Zachary Sachs about Dmitri Siegel's enlightening article on Design Observer about the proliferation of canvas tote bags. Here.

A la Recherche du Cardin Perdu

A few months ago John and I went down to New York for a friend's wedding party. I had just bought this fantastic vintage Pierre Cardin cross pendant specifically for the party. It was in a case of old jewelry at a flea market, yet completely on its own in terms of coolness- the Avon baubles around it certainly didn't have secret disco cocaine compartments, accessible by a simple tug. This was an anomoly, and I can't even imagine how it ended up here in Maine, but I was so happy it did.

Everybody at the party (who noticed it) loved it, and I loved that, and it was a great party and a great evening. Until the next morning when we woke up and I could only find half my necklace. Uggh! The secret bottom stash was missing! Nowhere in my bag, nowhere in John's pockets, nowhere in the hotel room. We'd shared a car back from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and didn't know the car service, let alone even really who we shared it with. This was all bad. I called every car service in Dumbo and then every Gypsy cab driver but it just seemed in vain. Resigned to disappointment we went to get breakfast (first asking the front desk if anyone had dropped a piece of metal off for me (no), and walking around in Chinatown we thought we should probably look on the sidewalk, or the gutter, around where we were let off, or the general area, since we couldn't remember exactly- it was raining the night before and we had the car stop mistakenly 6 diagonal blocks away from our hotel. I think what compounded my awful feeling of sadness was that I felt responsible- like I had taken this poor pendant from its content life with its Avon friends and brought it back to the dark nightlife of New York (and I didn't even know if it was from here in the first place). But just when I thought blocks and blocks of mucky fishy Chinatown gutters were going to be angrily ingrained in my memories, there were the two little missing pieces. Run over by delivery trucks, torqued, bent, and wet, they were a vision of happiness- I couldn't believe it- at this point I felt like I had found a long lost kitty cat. Crazy. It's never going anywhere again.

belt buckles

63217

Speaking of Los Angeles, these giant numbers came off an LA apartment building where they once served as the address. When we finally buy a house hopefully some sequence of them will work for our own.