BEAUTY: Interior--Marky Morel

I love what Los Angeles-based interior designer Marky Morel designed for a client who wanted a kitchen with a French vibe, one that seemed to have been collected and assembled over time, a kitchen with history and patina...a bit Parisian, a bit Provençal, and generally all around Old World loveliness.

And check out the sad, sad, sad before photo...

http://www.mkydesign.com/

BEAUTY: Illustration--Yosuke Yamaguchi

Japanese illustrator Yosuke Yamaguchi's imagination runs in a direction that is sympatico with my own: a bit magic realist, a bit surrealist...a bit like dream logic...and a bit like a shaman might see while deep in a trance. Enormous spirit animals protect humans in forests, magical rites are underway, and lycanthropy is alive. Human/animal, animal/human...it's a fine line. We're all animals after all.

Top to bottom: hidden history; nemure 1; nemure 2; nemure 8; nightwork; shiranaikoto; slowending; someday; viridarium cymicum; we know you; wolf in her breast; yakoku 11-12

https://www.flickr.com/photos/cribas/

I Had That Dream Again

BEAUTY: Photography--Evelyn Bencicova

Photographer Evelyn Bencicova created a fascinating series called Asymptote which deals with ideas of anonymity through conformity. She was born in Slovakia which must account for the setting of institutionalized Soviet-era sparse grandeur.

Asymptote: In analytic geometry, a line that a curve approaches, as it heads towards infinity.

http://www.evelynbencicova.com/

You Should Have A Dog

I had a dream a while back that I owned a beautiful collie named Shelby, and while we must wait until our beloved cats have moved on (we just can't turn their world upside down, they trust us too much), I know Shelby is out there waiting for us. He'll be with us at some point...

(Images from "Awful Orphan" with Porky Pig, 1949)

Hang on Shelby...we'll see you soon!

"We have no choice in the bodies that hold us" by Holly Amos

We have no choice in the bodies that hold us
by Holly Amos

Thing of dirt and water and oxygen marked by thinking
and reacting and a couch
one may or may not be permitted
to sleep on. He may not permit me
to touch him or to take the bone
from his mouth, but he does, and that’s a choice
based on many factors, not the least of which
is his own desire to let me
do these things. How I could ever
think or feel myself more
deserving of a single thing than
this being, whom I call by a name the same way
my parents chose a name for me. The same way my genes
went expressing themselves to make my face exactly
my face. This isn’t special. Or this is special. But it’s one
answer, the same, for us both.

https://hollyamos.net/

BEAUTY: Interior--Thom Filicia

Let's make the most of the waning days of summer with a visit to a lovely lake house designed by celebrity interior designer Thom Filicia.

Ah, summers on the lake...

http://www.thomfilicia.com/