Emily August

Young woman being dumped from her bed as part of a game offered during the World's Fair.
Location: New York, NY, US
Date taken: 1940
Photographer: John Phillips

Loving the big bird's nest pretty hair, lace, and painterly facade on these photos by Joanna Kustra, just in time for Easter.


via: foto decadent.

Last Thoughts

Brand yourself. You are your own brand. Even if you hate the idea of it, you are presenting an image that others are responding to on first glance. Work it to your advantage and to the entertainment of your new audience.

There are millions of people who do what you do and unfortunately you are probably not special. Disagree? Prove it: Show me why your shop is special. The more creatively you present yourself, the more points I will give you.

Don’t sell yourself before you’re valuable by flooding your blog with advertising. The blogs that are successful advertising revenues have real content and are not just there to garner comment counts. This is a trust issue for your potential customers.

Build support by sharing your success with others in a non-competitive, generous way. That’s how the DIY world has always worked. On a related note, Reviews and giveaways are most effective when you are genuinely excited and invested in the giveaway. Don’t use them as your sole comment-getting attention scheme. Yet, think about your favorite blog. Every so often when a giveaway is posted, you see hundreds of comments flooding in with love and genuine praise for the author. That should be your goal: Quality not Quantity. Develop a following on authenticity.

Trade in your camera phone for a digital camera and get good photos. Lots of good tips online of how to do this. Get a tripod to avoid blurry shots and learn about lighting. More on this in another post.

Have fun but also realize that your products are in a market where they will be taken into someone else’s home and used or handled. How are your products going to hold up? If not well, then, please reconsider.

Here are some further resources on getting a great image:

Lifehack:
5 Things to Do Before You Build Your Personal Brand

Freelance Advisor:
Marketing yourself: 7 steps to creating the right impression

Shop 101
Seller Handbook
The Art of Pricing

The Brand Called You | Fast Company

Web 2.0 Expo NY: Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine Library)
Building Personal Brand Within the Social Media Landscape
(Note: This presentation contains adult language.)
“You need to build brand equity in yourself.”
“If you love it, you will win.”
“The only way to succeed now is to be completely transparent.”

via ThinkSimpleNow:
How to Design Your Ideal Life
The Popularity Factor

Last Thoughts

Brand yourself. You are your own brand. Even if you hate the idea of it, you are presenting an image that others are responding to on first glance. Work it to your advantage and to the entertainment of your new audience.

There are millions of people who do what you do and unfortunately you are probably not special. Disagree? Prove it: Show me why your shop is special. The more creatively you present yourself, the more points I will give you.

Don't sell yourself before you're valuable by flooding your blog with advertising. The blogs that are successful advertising revenues have real content and are not just there to garner comment counts. This is a trust issue for your potential customers.

Build support by sharing your success with others in a non-competitive, generous way. That's how the DIY world has always worked. On a related note, Reviews and giveaways are most effective when you are genuinely excited and invested in the giveaway. Don't use them as your sole comment-getting attention scheme. Yet, think about your favorite blog. Every so often when a giveaway is posted, you see hundreds of comments flooding in with love and genuine praise for the author. That should be your goal: Quality not Quantity. Develop a following on authenticity.

Trade in your camera phone for a digital camera and get good photos. Lots of good tips online of how to do this. Get a tripod to avoid blurry shots and learn about lighting. More on this in another post.

Have fun but also realize that your products are in a market where they will be taken into someone else's home and used or handled. How are your products going to hold up? If not well, then, please reconsider.

Here are some further resources on getting a great image:

Lifehack:
5 Things to Do Before You Build Your Personal Brand

Freelance Advisor:
Marketing yourself: 7 steps to creating the right impression


Shop 101
Seller Handbook
The Art of Pricing


The Brand Called You | Fast Company




Web 2.0 Expo NY: Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine Library)
Building Personal Brand Within the Social Media Landscape
(Note: This presentation contains adult language.)
"You need to build brand equity in yourself."
"If you love it, you will win."
"The only way to succeed now is to be completely transparent."




via ThinkSimpleNow:
How to Design Your Ideal Life
The Popularity Factor

I met Hikaru Furuhashi virtually through Rory’s friend Aichen. Hikaru’s shop is so promising and cute.

I can’t get over the Rope Necklace, which has been featured on Etsy Front Pages, and is photographed in a super fun style. Check her out by clicking on one of her photos, below!

I think this is a great example of marketing yourself and your personal brand with great graphics, high quality items, super photos and visual play. I am working on a post on personal branding to tell you more so stay tuned!

PS: find Hikaru’s blog feed here! And if you still haven’t done it, add my blog to your feed reader as well!!

I am so happy to announce that I won a free download from Design for Mankind, a monthly publication put out by Erin Loechner of the equally cool and inspirational Think Bakery. Its a very inspiring little magazine with interactive PDF elements like clickable links and embedded video. This month, it even includes a free music download. I’ve been meaning to check it out further and write about it here, so I am very glad to be one of the chosen winners of the giveaway.

I especially agree with and love their music suggestions near one of the last pages. In particular, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart (going to see them on friday), and Fever Ray.

PS: celebrate with me. This is the 300th post on gogodistro.com! Cheers.

The Sultan’s Elephant was a giant public art installation featuring miraculously big marionettes, in, funny enough, Nantes, France. You can listen to the song in the background of reading this blog post, and you’ll see it goes along nicely.

These images are via Wikipedia:

Credit for the find goes to Jenny Hart, founder of Sublime Stitching who linked to the Wikipedia entry and pointed out that the girl was meant to have run around wreaking havoc all around her, and that she had literally stitched cars into the pavement while at play. Brilliant!

My favorite line of her post is, “These are cars she stitched to the earth.”

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The elephant

The Sultan’s Elephant was a show created by the Royal de Luxe theatre company, involving a huge moving mechanical elephant, a giant marionette of a girl and other associated public art installations. In French it was called La visite du sultan des Indes sur son éléphant à voyager dans le temps (literally, “Visit From The Sultan Of The Indies On His Time-Travelling Elephant”). The show was commissioned to celebrate the centenary of Jules Verne’s death, by the two French cities of Nantes and Amiens, funded by a special grant from the French Ministry of Culture and Communication.[1] The show was performed at various locations around the world between 2005 and 2006.

Design and construction

The elephant was designed by François Delarozière.[2] It was made mostly of wood, and was operated by 22 ‘manipulateurs’ using a mixture of hydraulics and motors. It weighed 50 tons, as much as 7 African elephants.

[With] hundreds of moving parts and scores of pumping pistons (22 in the trunk alone), the elephant appealed to the same part of the British psyche that admires Heath-Robinson contraptions and reveres eccentric inventors. More than 56 square metres of reclaimed poplar was combined with steel ribs to create the elephant’s sturdy skeleton. The attention to detail was extraordinary, from the flapping leather ears and deep wrinkles around the eyes to the puffs of dust sent up by its plodding feet, and the snaking, reticulated trunk.[2]

The elephant no longer exists: Helen Marriage of Artichoke, the company that produced the London performance, said “Royal de Luxe were so fed up with being invited all over the world to perform The Sultan’s Elephant, they just destroyed it.”[3]

A replica of the elephant was built in Nantes (France) in 2007, as part of the Machines of the Isle of Nantes permanent exhibition.[4]

The work of artist Lisa Kokin is beautiful, intricate, and obsessively pixilated in the most perfect way. I’m so glad to have stumbled upon it this morning! Made of up mostly buttons and other findings stitched together with interesting materials. Read Lisa’s description below.

I most enjoy her simple silhouettes.

This piece, titled “Moment” could likely be Barack and Michelle Obama, but I’m not sure.

“Buttons have made cameo appearances in much of my previous work; never have they been the primary material until recently. My parents were upholsterers and my earliest memories are of playing in their shop with piles of vinyl and foam rubber. I have sewn since I was a child and the stitch plays a major role in my work, so it was natural to join the buttons together to form a reconstructed family portrait. What began as a memorial to my father soon expanded to the realm of family portraits, past and present, human and canine. Most recently I completed a three-part commission for a juvenile justice center of button portraits of Rosa Parks, Cesar Chavez and Fred Korematsu.

My work has always had an obsessive quality and this body of work is no exception. Every button is stitched to its neighbor to form a low-tech pixilated composition. Up close each piece is an abstract melange of colors and shapes; the further back one stands the more decipherable the image becomes. This interplay between abstraction and representation intrigues me. It is as though I am painting with buttons, building my palette as I go along, adding and subtracting until the interplay of colors and forms coalesces into a coherent image. “

Link:
Lisa Kokin Buttonwork Portfolio

Rory’s grandmother is the matriarch of handmade traditions. His aunts and his mom are the same way and it is so much fun to see what they make for each other, and how they incorporate love into each holiday, even with the food they serve and the way they put it all together.

Each of Meme’s children and her grandchildren have stockings that she fills every year with funny little things. Often she hides money and gift certificates in unexpected places and you have to be very careful as you open not to miss anything. For instance, one year Rory’s cousin Katie threw out a check that Meme had rolled into the toe of a pair of slippers!

This year was really quite a whirlwind Christmas Day for Rory and I (Christmas Week, really, because we are helping so many people at once with pets and errands and switching off cars and watching dogs, etc.). Meanwhile, Rory and I are cat-sitting for Chessie again in the midst of not being home every day… so we ended up opening gifts at my parents’, driving up the Parkway, stopping at our apartment to visit the severely depressed kitties, then driving further North for another family party where everyone arrived at once and we had to do “Christmas morning” again but amongst extended family and amid the baby’s first Christmas experience, as well. There was also Barney the bulldog to contend with and, well, you can see how I missed the fact that Meme had added me to the family tradition.

I was so touched by this, I just had to share it.

Especially recommended to those who are keen on singing old-timey gospel songs a the top of your lungs, and getting excited about your relationship with God as it relates to the fact that music is part of who you were created to be. Just saying.

I’ve even gone so far as to write his name down on napkins and hand it to friends to look up on their own time, at the risk of coming across too boldly.

Here is his myspace page, but even better than that I suggest you download the singalong album for free at philwickham.com, then tell me this isn’t the perfect thing to lift your spirit on a dark, sweaty subway ride or even at the gym. Thank God no one can really hear what I’m working out to, because maybe its a little strange.

The album was recorded live at a church in Portland, Oregon. My favorite song is “Beautiful.” His higher register reminds me a lot of Jeff Buckley and makes me cry in a good way.

I’ve been dying to start a chorus or a choir out of my apartment, and I’ve talked to several people about doing this with a surprisingly positive reaction even from those of whom I would not expect more than a snicker. Not sure if its feasable, but this free album download was just the thing I needed to feel like it is still possible!

On a related note, my sisters and I saw him perform last weekend in South Jersey at this giant church and I wish he played a longer set. *Sigh* Definitely a top 5 for me this year, as corny as that may sound to my friends with impeccable music tastes.

Feminine, fairy-tale inspired, fantastic illustrations via Katogi Mari’s web portfolio.

Ruby appears in the last one as Dinah the cat.

On a related note, we watched this adaptation of Peter and the Wolf via Netflix this week, and it was everything I hoped it would be. Highly recommended.

Last night at the IAC building designed by Frank Gehry, ITP, the program at NYU where Rory is doing his residency, presented a night of projects on the big screens across from Chelsea Piers. Rory wore a suit that was part of the control of one of the projects, made with conductive thread and wireless radio controls. As the suit was touched in different ways, a circuit was completed through your body and large time-elapsed photos of gorgeous flowers opened and bloomed on the giant screens, closing down once your hands were removed from the suit.

All of the projects were neat. It was fun, especially because of the free wine and hanging out with friends, which is the nicest thing about going to art events like this.

We went across the street afterward to Chelsea Piers and had holiday microbrews with delicious warm/soft pretzels and wings. Then we got into some shenanigans* that led us to getting a cheap cab ride back to the PATH, where we were able to return to JC and continue the drinking at a few stops: LITM (Love is the Message) for Tequila Iced Tea specials, and Skinner’s Loft for delicious Japanese Pretz and more holiday biers with a table full of friends.

*I was almost attacked by an angry Polish limousine driver, but Rory protected me with his stalwart silence and also walking away after apologizing twice and getting nowhere. I heart NYC.

Check out this lovely little interview-profile published over at Draw and Quarter. James asked me to send him some info on all the things that I do, and he edited it so nicely into this little profile. I am so impressed and honored. Thank you!

Music and photos: Widower on a mountain in Pennsylvania.

I am so glad to read the Draw & Quarter blog, because those guys are doing wonderful things, and highlighting some great goings-on in the downtown Jersey City realm. I love their interactive approach of getting people involved and sparking creativity.

In fact, I was so inspired by the profiles on Draw & Quarter that I decided to start a Flickr group for the Downtown Jersey City arts & music scene. Please join, because we are only a few members so far! The photo above is from the flickr group for the Downtown Jersey City arts & music scene by doryexmachina. I think I’ll highlight my favorites every week?

Excerpt from Agitator
Tymoteusz Karpowicz

It was a lion that devoured
your trees in the garden
a goldfish
swallowed your hands

1958, translated by Malgorzata Sady.
Karpowicz was born in Lithuania in 1921.

I love the sense of something large or small creating an unbalanced amount of trouble in its wake. A building falls and only a field of flowers is crushed, no one is harmed. A fly lands on the tip of a glass in the store display and the entire thing tumbles. I also spent too much time reading The Chronicles of Narnia when I was younger, and tend to enjoy the idea of lions unexpectedly entering backyard gardens.

Memory of Your Hands
Malgorzata Hillar

When I remember
the touch of your hands
I am no longer the girl
who quietly combs her hair
and sets clay pots
on a pinewood shelf

Helpless I feel
how the flames of your fingers
kindle my neck and arms

Sometimes I stand this way
in broad daylight
in a white street
and I cover my mouth with my hands

so I will not scream.

1957, translated by Iwona Gleb.

This text feels like the wake of a panic attack, and reminds me of the insurmountable feelings you have when you first fall in love with someone. The feeling of being crushed under the weight of even a memory of feeling is very indulgent and happily reminds me of being a teenage girl. I also love the idea that you can control the impulse to scream by simply placing your hands over your own mouth. I know that I’ve used this imagery myself somewhere and perhaps that is why I enjoyed this poem so much.

I’ve been drawn to the Polish Books books section at the Jersey City Free Public Library, perhaps I am trying to find something about myself there. This is the first of three in a series I plan to write about, taken from The New Polish Poetry: A Bilingual Collection, 1978; Holton and Vangelisti eds. University of Pittsburgh Press.

Yesterday we were in Van Vorst Park for the Soundwalk, wearing headphones and listening to little radio sounds as we made our way through the park. We were tuning in to three simultaneous broadcasts of things like historical texts and scores written to coincide with the sounds of the park. There were also hidden microphones that were picking up and transmitting more sounds into the broadcast, but we couldn’t find any. We had a lot of fun with it, dancing around whenever our transmission was broken up by hardcore screamo from a neighboring college station.

We had made our way around every area of the park, and I was photographing the three sculptural pieces on display when on top of her radio broadcast, Allison suddenly heard something like, “Sorry lady, you’re going to die!” Sure enough, she was about to get liquidated by the laser gun this child had just purchased from the Van Vorst Flea Market. How exciting!

Here, Allison has just found out that there is a red dot on her leg from the light of the laser gun. Seconds later, the red dot was aimed at me. Horrors.

This threat of violence was not part of the exhibition but I wanted to find out more about the walk, so I looked it up this morning. From the artists’ post on WiredJC:

The Van Vorst Park Soundwalk is an interactive sound art piece which simultaneously uses the park as a musical score and instrument. The public is invited to experience the piece through portable headset radios as they walk through a loosely defined route within the park.

For a detailed project description please go to:
http://art.rutgers.edu/~catera/vvp.html

This is a solo version of collaborative pieces that I’ve participated in in NYC and Warsaw, Poland. The Jersey City Museum has been gracious enough to present the piece to coincide with this year’s JC Artist Studio Tour.

Observations

Sounds in the park: many dogs (there is a dog run); running water (fountain); skateboards and scooters scraping on the ground, buses pulling up, stopping, and pulling away; wind; my own footsteps; bird wings flapping (pigeons make a lot of sounds); conga drums (from the Spanish-coalition sponsored flea market set up along the edges of the park).

It was weird to hear historical texts about settlers but not have enough time to sit and really listen to process the context. I have a terrible mind for historical fact and numbers. Definitely made me curious about the history of where I live.

This is the first time I’ve ever participated in something like this and I loved how supported the project seemed: Its nice to know that the Jersey City Museum, NJ Arts Council Fellowship, and free103point9 had the means to make the piece come alive with equipment and programming. I have so many ideas that I always think could never happen, so I guess I found this pretty inspiring. Then again, I didn’t go to art school or anything, so maybe this type of sound sculpture is a common form of interactive design. Either way, super cool and nicely done.

I know its been mentioned elsewhere, but I can’t help sharing this fantastic blog: Advanced Style …Proof from the wizened and silver-haired set that personal style advances with age.

I am one of those girls who has friends that point out older ladies on the street (you know, the ones wearing furs, hats, huge sunglasses, or just a striking pair of nylon stockings) and say, “Emily! That will be you someday,” and to whom I turn back and say, “Oh, my goodness, I hope so! I can’t wait!” My boss calls me “an old soul,” and I have to take care when meeting older gentlemen because they inevitably latch on to me and don’t want to end their conversations with me. I remember working through the Gifted and Talented program in elementary school at this convalescent home somewhere in Bricktown, and the woman my friend and I were assigned to took such a liking to me that she started insulting my friend and saying she should act more like how I was acting (something about posture, in that case, but clearly an ‘old soul’ type of connection between us).

I collect vintage clothes, have probably eleven different vocabulary words for what one would call “old man pants”, and get a bit obsessed when it comes to thinking about wigs. I want to be someone’s great aunt with the crazy outfits someday. This is like a goal I have, but not quite so much a goal as an inevitability.

That is why I am so excited about Advanced Style, because the men and women featured on this blog are completely amazing.

Case in point: Irene Williams.

Allison is going to laugh at this post, and say that it is so like me to post this. I can’t wait to show this to her, but she is at the Low concert that was sold out. (I M SO JALLOUS)

In the meantime, enjoy, old souls.

found via Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog of a song by The Lovely Sparrows.

You were into that romantic shit and wanted to die young;
it was plain to see to everyone but me,
there are no haunted places, only people we
still wish that we could see.

french netting is a must

that little round thing with the kind of a point at one end

Helping my sister with her wedding veil, and learning to love the idea of millinery, due to two great books from the Jersey City Public Library:

Saturday Night Hat by Eugenia Kim (love love love).
“I Do” Veils by Claudia Lynch (a bit outdated, but wonderfully so).

I just wish I had some old feathers laying around! Any recommendations for friendly trim stores in NYC? I wonder if Rory will want to incorporate LED’s and circuits into the design.

One can dream.

We go shopping on Friday and I can’t wait.

I spent a good part of yesteray watching these videos, which seem to be pulled from Kathryn Kuhlman’s show in the early 70’s. Reminds me so much about growing up the way that I grew up, and a lot of things that shaped the person that I am now. I post these here with love, for your enjoyment, and also as a comment on the season of fashion we are about to embark on. We all come from somewhere. Enjoy.