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ciarabird2014  Things I loved this year.

Personal Style Blog Maja Wyh / Karla's Closet / Fashion Toast / Hippie, Hippie — Milkshake! / Gary Pepper

Art/Design Blog Sketch42 / Miss Moss

Designers Kelly Wearstler / Christine Dovey / Sasha Bikoff

Cities London. Barcelona. NYC.

Music Jhené Aiko / FKA Twigs / J. Cole / Blood Orange

Magazines PORTER / CR Fashion Book / Suitcase

Artists Nina Chanel / Donald Drawbertson / T.S Abe / Delāno Brown

Movies The Grand Budapest Hotel / Mademoiselle C / The Eye Has to Travel / Gone Girl / Beyond the Lights / If I stay

Books Crazy Rich Asians / Swans, Legends of the Jet Society / Irreverent / Erotic Art 2

Colors Pink green green green black white nude gray + touch of orangey red or spicy yellow

G.O.M.D.

journey  I keep my head high
 I got my wings to carry me 
I don't know freedom
 I want my dreams to rescue me 
I keep my faith strong
 I ask the Lord to follow me 
I've been unfaithful
 I don't know why you call on me

//

Apparently, you believe in me, you believe in me
 Apparently, you believe in me and I thank you for it

love love loving j.cole's latest, 2014 forest hills drive.

baselme2.

artbasel-miami-6  I left the show feeling so inspired and refreshed. My traveling it starting to become so addicting. I get a rush every time I go somewhere new, I never want to stop. Basel in particular though gave me so many ideas I feel like I cannot execute them fast enough, changing plans again, pushing me further. I love it.   artbasel-miami-7   artbasel-miami-8   ARTrepreneur Session Three with Delano Brown was surprisingly good. All I knew about it was the snippets I'd seen on insta and could round up online. I'm not going to sugar coat it, the event didn't start on a good note at all — there were quite a few things I was annoyed about upfront BUT when I say his talk completely made up for it I'm not exaggerating. It was so refreshing to hear from a young guy in his position with his style and sense talk about his story and his ideas and just wow. I was really impressed. I look forward to seeing where his career goes from here.   artbasel-miami-9   Unfortunately, I wasn't thinking at all and didn't capture the names and artists of all the work I photographed, so if you know or want credit please email me!   artbasel-miami-10   Part 1.

baselme1.

artbasel-miami-1  ahh art basel miami beach 2014. how can i describe you.

I had the BEST time. Per usual, I really didn't have any idea what to expect. I understood the show and concept of everything since I've been only hearing about it for years, but actually being there in the middle of all of the excitement. so amazing. and I saw art, lots and lots of it. incredibly satisfying art. There have been comments about how commercial Art Basel Miami is becoming, but I don't see it falling off any time soon. The world needs events like this to exist. The energy was trippy everywhere we went.   artbasel-miami-2   We ended up going to the Wynwood Walls & Design District, Art Basel, UNTITLED, Mana Contemporary, and a slew of parties including ARTrepreneur Session Three by Delano Brown. I'm really really bummed I missed the SCOPE and Design Miami shows, but next year we'll plan buffer days instead of arriving and leaving the first and last days of the shows.   artbasel-miami-3 artbasel-miami-4   Unfortunately, I wasn't thinking at all and didn't capture the names and artists of all the work I photographed, so if you know or want credit please email me!   artbasel-miami-5   Part 2.

theeyehastotravel.

DSC01030  DSC01038   The High Priestess of Fashion.

"allure" is a word very few people use nowadays, but it's something that exists. allure holds you doesn't it? whether it's a gaze or a glance in the street or a face in the crowd, someone sitting opposite you at lunch... you are held.   DSC01042   DSC01052   DSC01057   style was a standard. didn't hurt anyone... but you gotta have style. it helps you get down the stairs. it helps you get up in the morning. it's a way of life. without it you're nobody. i'm not talking about lots of clothes.   DSC01062   DSC01071   now brodovitch was the tutor of all these people of harper's bazaar of layout, and many of them had gone to his classes at night. he was a very remarkable man, he loved his white space, he loved empty pages-oh, he couldn't stand me. i mean, i wanted, of course, to put in as much as possible. i only wanted fashion.

anyone who's afraid and does not search and give as much as possible to the world of pleasure is a totally ignorant person. we were put here for the joy of it, for the hell of it, and it's all here now; nothing has been taken away. it's a question of creating it.   DSC01078   DSC01085   DSC01091   DSC01102   style: all who have it share one thing—originality.   DSC01108   DSC01126   UNDER VREELAND, VOGUE BECAME A COMBINATION OF CULTURE, ART, HAPPENINGS, AND VIBRANT FASHION. "I THINK PART OF MY SUCCESS AS AN EDITOR CAME FROM NEVER WORRYING ABOUT A FACT, A CAUSE, AN ATMOSPHERE. IT WAS ME—PROJECTING TO THE PUBLIC. THAT WAS MY JOB. I THINK I HAVE ALWAYS HAD A PERFECTLY CLEAR VIEW OF WHAT WAS POSSIBLE FOR THE PUBLIC. GIVE 'EM WHAT THEY NEVER KNEW THEY WANTED."   DSC01116   can you tell I LIVE for diana vreeland!? i mean. she's just wonderful. hideous and marvelous. in her documentary "the eye has to travel" there was a quote about her that went something like "she was never a very beautiful woman and she was never a very wealthy woman, but she created beauty and wealth."

love.

all quotes from diana's book, the eye has to travel.

snoopthepainter.

1096123-750x499  1096122-750x499   1096125-750x278   1096118-750x499   1096121-750x499   snoop-dogg-painting-03-750x498   Discovered this on Sketch42 and it pretty much made my day.

“For many years I’ve always felt like painting was something that I wanted to do, but I never had time to do,” Snoop explains. “Painting gives me an emotion like no other. I could cry while I’m painting. I can laugh while I’m painting. I can be serious while I’m painting. I don’t have no parameters. When I’m rapping there’s certain things I can’t do. When I’m acting there’s certain things I can’t do. There’s certain things I won’t do. But with the painting, there’s no limit.”

“I know that I’m an artist, I know that my paintings mean something and people are going to be interested in them and they’re gonna want to buy them, and, you know, have them hanging up on their walls in their favorite spots because it’s an expression of somebody who has been giving the truth from day one."

“I definitely gotta have a blunt, because the blunt is inspiration to the creation.” –Snoop

A few other articles I've loved this week: How to live like a motherf**ker The iPhone 6 is Basic Old Masters: After 80, some people don’t retire. They reign.

Happy Halloween!

glory.

halloween  “I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up in a numb core of nonfeeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out. To learn and think: to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.” -The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

chamberofcuriosity.

1  thechamberofsecrets-2   thechamberofsecrets-3   thechamberofsecrets-4   thechamberofsecrets-5   thechamberofsecrets-6   thechamberofsecrets-7   thechamberofsecrets-8   thechamberofsecrets-9   thechamberofsecrets-10   thechamberofsecrets-11   My newest book love. The Chamber of Curiosity: Apartment Design and the New Elegance is like having all of my favorite ELLE Decor and AD homes in one book. Since visiting so many different european cities I've been obsessed with seeing whats going on inside of the buildings and how differently (and similarly) people around the world choose to live and decorate.

I was particularly pleased to find many of the homes I've pinned are featured with more images and details so I feel like I will always have them, whereas I occasionally stress over the thought that my pins could and will disappear at some point in the future. oh well haha.

atelier.

artist-ateliers-6  im obsessed with watching artists work.

i love the movements and the passion on their face that lets you know something intense is going on behind their eyes. or maybe not. maybe they're so lost in their work that its allowing them temporary relief from the world.   artist-ateliers-7   artist-ateliers-5   the studio tour photo shoots are my absolute favorite part of the magazine process & they always leave me aching for more workspace of my own.

i have so many ideas bouncing around at once that i need to have multiple canvases set up so i can do them all at the same time, but also other areas where I can experiment with my collages and other things. I set up a mini workspace in my garage but its still missing that certain je ne sais quoi to get me in there. i realize this is just an excuse but I'm fine with that for now. my art is so deep-rooted into my being and the way i see the world and images and everything that I know whether I work everyday or take a 5 year hiatus it will always be there.   artist-ateliers-4   artist-ateliers-3   artist-ateliers-2   ps— totally crushing on fly art productions. all images from here or here.

perfume.

yes Over the course of my trip I read 5 books selected to go along with the places I was visiting. While traveling through France, I read Perfume: The Story of a Murderer; which was set in the slums of eighteenth-century Paris. It was creepy, very strange, slightly disturbing but very passionate, tragic and beautifully written. and while in the French Riviera I was able to visit the Fragonard factory, one of the oldest parfumeries in the world (I believe) that happened to be playing the movie version of the book (lol).

Here are a few of my favorite excerpts:

“He drank in the aroma, he drowned in it, impregnating himself through his innermost pores, until he became wood himself; he lay on the cord of wood like a wooden puppet, like Pinocchio, as if dead, until after a long while, perhaps a half hour or more, he gagged up the word “wood.” He vomited the word up, as if he were filled with wood to his ears, as if buried in wood to his neck, as if his stomach, his gorge, his nose were spilling over with wood.”

"Or why should smoke possess only the name “smoke,” when from minute to minute, second to second, the amalgam of hundreds of odors mixed iridescently into ever new and changing unities as the smoke rose from the fire … or why should earth, landscape, air—each filled at every step and every breath with yet another odor and thus animated with another identity—still be designated by just those three coarse words. All these grotesque incongruities between the richness of the world perceivable by smell and the poverty of language were enough for the lad Grenouille to doubt if language made any sense at all.”

“And what was more, he even knew how by sheer imagination to arrange new combinations of them, to the point where he created odors that did not exist in the real world.”

“Perhaps the closest analogy to his talent is the musical wunderkind, who has heard his way inside melodies and harmonies to the alphabet of individual tones and now composes completely new melodies and harmonies all on his own. With the one difference, however, that the alphabet of odors is incomparably larger and more nuanced than that of tones; and with the additional difference that the creative activity of Grenouille the wunderkind took place only inside him and could be perceived by no one other than himself.”

“He was not out to make his fortune with his art; he didn’t even want to live from it if he could find another way to make a living. He wanted to empty himself of his innermost being, of nothing less than his innermost being, which he considered more wonderful than anything else the world had to offer. And thus Baldini’s conditions were no conditions at all for Grenouille.”

1.2.3.4.5.6

parisvsnewyork.

ciarabird-zing-magazine-1  I discovered Zing in a shop near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. It was wrapped in plastic so i had no idea what was inside or where it came from, but I was obsessed with the cover and it's subtitle "a curatorial crossing". I discovered later that it's been based + published in Brooklyn since 1995.

I love their manifesto:

"zingmagazine came out of the idea that within certain disciplines, artistic and otherwise, various cross-references occur, both with individuals and the material of their particular interest. Rather than remaining isolated and apart, either through an unaware and uninformed (or aware and informed) malaise, there is a need to commingle arenas.

By establishing a forum of collaborative exchange, zingmagazine examines points of both similar and dissimilar articulations. Like sets and subsets in a mathematical diagram, having similar and opposite properties, parts of the exchange will share epiphanies while others will securely diverge.

But in the examination of these current issues, born out of the curatorial collaborative spirit, zingmagazine reaches for the crossing point, and it is from this "crossing" where fiction meets poetry for lunch, theorists mingle with artists over which they are, and while we all assume new boundaries with an excess of technology in the modern world that we find our inspiration. Likewise, it is from this crossing that the title is honed.

The format of zingmagazine is comprised of rotating curatorial projects. Each curator is invited to create a context of their choosing for each issue. A myriad of different disciplines are explored in each issue from architecture, design, fiction, poetry, drawing, photography, video, music, fashion, as well as a special projects including books, posters, and CDs. Lack of parameters or limits is the impetus, with the idea that the creative impulse, within each of the curators/disciplines, will produce individual projects both of the curators and the participants."

Devon Dikeou New York, New York 1995   ciarabird-zing-magazine-2   ciarabird-zing-magazine-3   ciarabird-zing-magazine-4   ciarabird-zing-magazine-5   ciarabird-zing-magazine-6   ciarabird-zing-magazine-7   ciarabird-zing-magazine-8   ciarabird-zing-magazine-9   This issue is from August 2013 so I hope they're putting out a new one soon. www.zingmagazine.com

#this.

matureloveosho In fact a mature person does not fall in love, he rises in love. The word ’fall’ is not right. Only immature people fall; they stumble and fall down in love. Somehow they were managing and standing. They cannot manage and they cannot stand – they find a woman and they are gone, they find a man and they are gone. They were always ready to fall on the ground and to creep. They don’t have the backbone, the spine; they don’t have that integrity to stand alone.

A mature person has the integrity to be alone. And when a mature person gives love, he gives without any strings attached to it: he simply gives. And when a mature person gives love, he feels grateful that you have accepted his love, not vice versa. He does not expect you to be thankful for it – no, not at all, he does not even need your thanks. He thanks you for accepting his love. And when two mature persons are in love, one of the greatest paradoxes of life happens, one of the most beautiful phenomena: they are together and yet tremendously alone; they are together so much so that they are almost one. But their oneness does not destroy their individuality, in fact, it enhances it: they become more individual.

Two mature persons in love help each other to become more free. There is no politics involved, no diplomacy, no effort to dominate. How can you dominate the person you love? Just think over it. Domination is a sort of hatred, anger, enmity. How can you think of dominating a person you love? You would love to see the person totally free, independent; you will give him more individuality. That’s why I call it the greatest paradox: they are together so much so that they are almost one, but still in that oneness they are individuals. Their individualities are not effaced – they have become more enhanced. The other has enriched them as far as their freedom is concerned.

Immature people falling in love destroy each other’s freedom, create a bondage, make a prison. Mature persons in love help each other to be free; they help each other to destroy all sorts of bondages. And when love flows with freedom there is beauty. When love flows with dependence there is ugliness.

— Osho