klinker: April 2011

Thursday, April 28, 2011

NBC News Picture Book of the Year 1969

This book by NBC News is amazing. Pictures from the highlights of 1969 and there are a ton of highlights. The war, President Nixon, the Black Panthers, Africa...it's an amazing flashback.

organization!

Link

Found this awesome organization tool. Reality is, it's a distraction from other work but it looks like I'm getting stuff done! Now if I could just cross a few things off the list. Kinda' hilarious to see the world link to something so archaic!

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Handcrafted furniture? Yes please!

I love wood. It's natural, whimsical, and earthy. I love anyone who can find a way to reuse something old and turn it into something great. Wood is the perfect transition material, it unabashedly tells it's age, and warmly welcomes you into it's story. These coffee tables by Brand Mojo Interiors rock my socks off. A strand of lights over head, a linen runner down the middle and vintage glassware, some holding tea lights others with cocktails and you've got yourself the beginnings of some amazing summer nights.

rustic coffee table

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Ciara Obscura - top five tuesday drinking glasses

So very excited to have been discovered by Ciara Obscura's blog! She's puts together a fun collection of drinking glasses for her Tuesday top five blog post. That's me, number 5, but I feel like number 1!

drinking glasses - number 5

Friday, April 22, 2011

New Orleans

We took a trip to New Orleans this Spring. It was an amazing city. Never before have I visited a place with such a love for music. The people stop to listen to street performers and tip consistently it was a sweet encounter. These are pictures from our stroll to the 9th ward.

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk

I first came across Orhan Pamuk by "mistake." I picked up his book Snow and read it in one sitting. The story was endearing and the setting memorable, it was great. Then I found out he was infamous! A friend gave me the book Istanbul which captures the essence of Turkey's major city and the feeling of the people as they transition from what the author calls the past to present but what the west calls east to west. It is so poignant and I am loving it.

Something I found interesting, that has very little to do with the book, was to learn that Turkish has a story telling tense. I love a good story teller, I feel like it's a dying art and I love that this language has an entire tense dedicated to this art. I wonder what it would be like to hear Orhan tell the story of Istanbul using this story telling tense.

He's so accurate at depicting feeling. Though I've never been to Turkey I can sense that I would walk to these famous places as see them just as he does. As I read his remembrances I tap into my own history and I see overlaps of things one would assume were unique to just your family, if not culture, at the very least. He describes a sitting room so sacred, the TV was placed in the hallway. I think about watching cartoons on the ceramic tiled floors as my grandmother walked past carrying the groceries from outside through the hallway to the kitchen. Surely that was only her house? Family ties, described only as a "mounting pile of unsettle scores" whose only certainty was that resolution would never come. Was he listening to us as we spoke?

Orhan Pamuk frames this distant city through the lives of it's people and makes me feel a closeness to the Turkish community I hadn't expected.