I hope it inspires a desire to resist thingification.

Brilliant!

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/foodie/2010/01/you_dropped_food_on_the_floor.php

Thanks to my friend BFF I. for forwarding this video.

So imagine the excitement that befell me yesterday when we saw the Bauhaus exhibit at MoMA. It is an amazing retrospective, covering the group’s works from the beginning to the end. On display are notes, writings, catalogs, curricula, homework, paintings, posters, furniture, even weird objets d’art such as Moholy-Nagy’s Light Prop for an Electric Stage. A short 1930 film shows how it works here.

Then, there was all this revolutionary design:

More about the exhibit can be seen here.

And please don’t forget to stop by the African Chair, it is extraordinary.

(Photos of the Breuer chair and the African chair via http://www.curatedobject.us/the_curated_object_/2008/07/exhibitions-ber.html; from http://www.furniturestyles.net/european/german/bauhaus.html; shelf image from http://archiv.hofmobiliendepot.at/bauhaus/bauhaus-e.html. All are on display at MoMA)

While doing research yesterday in the archives (really, how inspiring is this room!), I came across a fascinating news piece from the French weekly L’Illustration from 1925 that reported an event I am familiar with from an altogether different context.

On April 16, 1925, the Bulgarian Communist Party, not fully legalized and still quite marginal, carried out a terrorist attack against numerous government officials and public figures who had gathered at the Sveta Nedelia for the funeral of General Konstantin Georgiev, himself assassinated a few days earlier. The attack injured and claimed the lives of hundreds of people. King Boris escaped unhurt.

Either way, this piece of news from otherwise largely ignored Bulgaria (outside of the ethnographic journals, that is) apparently made the first page of the journal that week.

The photos below show the destroyed cathedral, and King Boris, accompanied by members of his cabinet, surveying the damage.

(Image of NYPL Main room via http://altipalti.blogspot.com/2009/11/new-york-public-library-some-facts-and.html)

Rue Cambon

• 1.5 oz Hendricks gin
• .5 oz St. Germain elderflower liqueur
• .5 oz Domaine de Canton ginger liqueur
• .5 oz lime juice

via http://www.brazenhussies.com/Gals/Divas/CocoChanel/coco.chanel.html + a few brilliant quotations.

Thanks to Kansas City, opinion, cocktails, snark for this awesome cocktail.

So we were very thrilled to see a multi-media tour of Mademoiselle Coco Chanel’s apartment in the first arrondissement in Paris, at 31 Rue Cambon. I love the ways different pieces, styles and periods have been incorporated. Look, for instance, at the lovely dining room: a European antique table, modernist chairs, Chinese screens, neo-classical busts…

Take the tour with NPR here. Lovely as it is, there’s something lacking.  Don’t forget to listen to the audio story to find out what.

Before we approach those head on, we are very glad to have a few relaxed days in New York (as we all know, traveling this holiday season wasn’t a great option). Luckily, the city has a lot to offer.

While walking around Soho on a chilly but sunny day, we came across a lovely gallery, the Mimi Fertz Gallery on Greene Street, which currently has an exhibit of Russian-American artist Alexander Ney.  His work is so fascinating: sculptures, most of them consisting of one piece, whose presence is enhanced by the pores, or holes of varied size, of the material itself. The pieces on exhibit at the Mimi Fertz Gallery were so evocative of primitivist and modern shapes, of traditional Russian imagery, of a physical materiality brought forth by the purity of the clay’s whiteness.

We are looking forward to exploring further Ney’s work and to Mimi Fertz’s future exhibits!