Zedd’s new album is catchy. This is from my favorite track.
Couldn’t quiet the clacking ivory keys.
Jake pawned the clock he won in Dubai off on me. I added flair.
I’ve been cooking.
Sun-dried tomato/mozzarella/basil artisan sausage with pesto pasta.
Farmhouse bread tartine with fresh ricotta, pickled figs, and drizzled honey.
An homage to Christina Tosi’s love of candy bars, I helped ring in Miss Lulu’s 21st with this one today.
Mother’s Day tarjeta for Momma.
I’ve pioneered a new technique called watercolour-fingerpainting. It’s truly revolutionary.
The Bad News:
I won’t be able to spend Mother’s Day with my favorite mom.
The Good News:
I will be able to spend it with some top notch Vander-Moms, and I can create-my-own Mother’s Day for La Una e Unica soon.
“Vandermom.” Put our name in front of anything and it sounds like another name.
Lake day: melting sun, swimming puppies, and dreaming of swedish fish.
If I think too hard about the notes I’m trying to play, I forget them. As a result, I often need to trick my hands into remembering how a song is played (like with this one that I learned back in beginner piano lessons).
Then after, I just started joking around and recorded it.
Improv-ing a edit, of sorts.
In our whirlwind three-day summer juntos, we threw together this messy, uke cover of a Young the Giant favorite of mine.
James tells me that it sounds like a “Jess song.”
I have no idea what that means.
The end of metals class came too quickly. I still have so many ideas! I popped into the studio for a few hours and whipped these together. It’s rainy out…not much of a summer welcome.
Luckily, the studio doors open again in the fall.
Welcomed in my first afternoon of summer with a pie.
16-gauge copper wire. Powder coated in a dirtied, olive drab. And several dozen hours.
Her dress was a sight to be seen,
pressed in blue, pink, yellow and green.
And with perfume and pearls
and such colourful swirls,
she felt like a tropical queen.
But,
when you’re a young girl, you don’t know
that a dress can tell all whom you show
you’re entitled and bratty
and a favorite of Daddy
with a backyard where money trees grow.
“Lilly Pulitzer represents something that money cannot buy.”
- Robin Givhan
Inspired by this Atlantic article and a youth showered with Lillies.
I’ve always been a fan of the Seth Macfarlane version of “You’re the Cream in My Coffee.” But for the first time yesterday, I listened to the version by Nat King Cole.
Listen to the way he pronounces “you’re.”
It’s more like “youer” as opposed to the more colloquial “your” pronunciation.
And this changes everything! It’s more poetic: the lyrics are far more assonant and parallelized. If you take another listen, you’ll hear it. And like how performing Shakespeare in the original pronunciation matters, it more accurately reflects the speech patterns of its time (early-ish 1900s). As a contraction for “you are” and written as “you’re,” the natural, phonological drift towards sounding like “your” probably just happened with time.
Of course, I can’t blame Seth for singing in his own accent. But isn’t it a wonderful surprise to learn something new about something you thought you knew?
Egg.
Grandma is withering away, and she knows it. She cringes climbing out of bed each morning; when she can’t stand sitting, but standing is worse. She counts down the clock to the end of each day. She picks up the phone to distract herself from the drone of the ticking. Four funerals this year? The contact book is slimmer. She calls the only bra that fits her “Party Bra” to prop a smile onto her gaunt face, her body weeping from its bones.
It’s no surprise that Grandma doesn’t want to spend her time “being painful”. That among the entree of pills for breakfast, she wouldn’t mind throwing an anti-depressant into the mix. It’s just another pill.
But she is still Grandma. A woman satisfied with the simplicity of the status quo and the comfort of normalcy. It’s this aging that takes away what she knows as her most meager essentials. That is what is killing her. Her body demands a new normal. That she summed up so succinctly: “the most I can do is protect my world as best I can.” Because right now,
Grandma’s world is falling apart.
“Just don’t give up on me.”
“I won’t.”
Spring Break, 2015 in San Francisco.
Thanks for being my photo model and travel companion @we-allc0mplete
It took months to finish Ben’s birthday present,
and it fittingly took months for me to see it finished.
The piece is inspired by mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot’s sketchbook drawings [seen by us while visiting the “Fractals, Chaos, and the Materiality of Thinking” exhibit at the Cranbrook Art Museum].
There are 30 cards,
18 of which have hidden meanings (some more hidden than others),
and all of which remind me of Ben.
Don’t tell mom.