the awesome book of thanks

not much to say at the moment besides no, thank YOU, dallas clayton. infectious and happy-making.

An Awesome Book of Thanks! from Dallas Clayton on Vimeo.

o perfection, thy name is schwartzman.

it's ridiculous, it's over-the-top, it's hammy and it's contrived. and it's jason schwartzman, and there is nothing he could do that wouldn't make my dimples deepen.

make yourself happy

this year, my only resolution is to take responsibility for my own happiness. eek.

may 2010 be a colourful year-


...admiring it


...eating it


...wearing it


...and feeling it.



let's make something good.

x

megazines

having spent chunks of time recently in various airports and remote outposts of WH Smith i can say for sure that if the magazine industry wasn't dying it'd probably be a candidate for compassionate euthanasia. seriously, grazia, with your constant hysterical claims to have FINALLY REVEALED: THE DIET THAT KEEPS CHERYL COLE SO INCREDIBLY SLIM can i help you out? her entire daily calorific intake is derived from mascara. mystery solved.

conversely, yay for the good ones. here are a couple to have a gander at, none of which are likely readily available in your local petrol station but nonetheless worth locating (and some are just on the interweb, so no excuses there).


wooooo magazine is written by the irrepressible jason crombie. it's kind of vice-y in its irreverence, but where vice is basically knocked out by spoiled kids angry at the world because they weren't born dov charney, wooooo is charmingly and unprepossessingly off-kilter. and then completely juvenile. jackpot! read the blog if IMing strangers, penis cakes, 'foxy but worm food' features on deceased beauties, shark obsessions, interviews with david byrne and dancing to lou reed tickle your fancy. if they don't, i feel a little bit sad for you. i bet you don't even like jelly.


i've never happened across a real-life copy of monster children but i'm intrigued. previous issues have included sister corita's art, todd selby's favourite shoots, beautiful losers, geoff mcfetridge and kate moss's nipples. it's an aussie effort, so little wonder it's a bit surf and skate obsessed. i'm not so sure about the 'freebies' though - an asahi coaster?!


it's nice that is more of an occasional publication but it's marvellous, collecting all sorts of loveliness within its (ad-free) pages. issue 1 was brilliant and number 2 is due out shortly. you might want to pre-order it because it's going to be amazing. i feel it in my waters. also it's going to involve karlssonwilker, fred butler and rob ryan, so there's pretty much a moneyback guarantee on it being mint.


uppercase magazine is a sweet little thing out of a gallery of the same name based in calgary. the third issue is imminent, but if past issues are anything to go by, it'll have gratuitous double-page spreads of people's obscure collections (scissors, anyone?), funny illustrations and a bit of design nerdery.

all you need now is a sunny afternoon and a mini milk, and you're in business. what are you reading?

a small list

a few things to help you out in case you haven't found enough things to like about today:
each and every one of the supersweet editions paumes books (buy in € from yvestown).


lena corwin's travel poster that reawakened my weird elvis thing.


these stuffed dog portraits cracked me up. is it just me?

having a world full of music to listen to after a week-long roadtrip with only the same. three. cds. to listen to... oh god. liking 'the gardener' by the tallest man on earth, very much.

plimsolls and no socks. summer's on the turn but for now i'm drinking it in.

plimsolls via stevsoll's flickr

step one: open a bottle of champagne

most people love apple for their slick, designery gadgets. me? i love them for their cooking skills. well, alan dye, their creative director, at any rate.



any man who whips up a plate of oozy mac n' cheese, washed down with copious bubbly is alright by me. that might just about be the best sounding meal i ever heard of.

attention, men of the world (okay then, man of the world): please woo me with carbohydrates and bubbly. thank you.

marilyn agrees with me:



champagne and potato chips? that's a GOOD PARTY.

i wish the world was like this all the time

this is wonderful beyond words. stick with it - its charms swell. i promise.



via the truly marvellous duo that are something's hiding in here.

this just in from the great blue yonder

national geographic reports the likely discovery of a new kind of cloud - a roiling, rolling, tidal-looking thing called undulatus asperatus - or, affectionately, the 'jacques cousteau cloud' by cloud expert gavin pretor-pinney.

Asperatus clouds may spur the first new classification in the World Meteorological Organization's International Cloud Atlas since the 1950s, Gavin Pretor-Pinney said.

(there's an International Cloud Atlas? i need this!)

if you're a cloudlover after my own heart, check out his talk at the marvellous 'do lectures':



there's also a handbook, and a society if you're that way inclined.

if that tickles your fancy, swing by gavin pretor-pinney's other love - his magazine, The Idler. it's a beautiful thing.

go love yourself some clouds.

love is coming to us all

i think i've found my favourite (caveat: for now) crosby, stills and nash song. it's the perfect combination of all the power wielded by the mighty band of brothers: it's unashamedly catchy but then weird and intricate beneath the immediate earworm potential. it's poppy enough for them to smuggle in a brief moment of psychedelic freak-out in the middle, too, which momentarily disorients before sending you spinning back into the chorus:

Carry on
Love is coming
Love is coming to us all

Where are you going now my love?
Where will you be tomorrow?
Will you bring me happiness?
Will you bring me sorrow?
Oh, the questions of a thousand dreams
What you do and what you see
Lover can you talk to me?

two weeks ago, i got to stand in a field with rapturous hippies and old men listening to these three play as one again. my dad texted me midway through to say that he was watching too, on television. they've still got the power to turn a mess of separate individuals into a unified loveworn and lovelorn collective.


they've still got the power.

album version here.

a lot of things in life feel hard

...so it's a relief to find soft alcoves - which is exactly what sarah applebaum creates.


wild explosions of colour arcing across a white space...


...and inviting little places built for curling up in.


it's like holi festival inside a gallery inhabited by a knitter ecstatically losing her mind. or something.

tea? i've got the kettle on; i was hoping you'd come knocking.


ps: sanky, the gorillas are especially for you...

tell the right stories and we live better lives

In four months and eight days I acquire a new age, a new year, and a new decade. I’ll be 30. Until today I felt more or less fine about it: it’s just another numeral flicking over into the next. But today it’s taken on hall of mirrors-style horror, all warped and weird.

Thing is, it’s not really just another year. It’s a big landmark on the roadtrip from here to there, the kind of thing you’d stop the car to have your picture taken beside; a Tropic of Capricorn on the unspooling road north. And while you were there you’d maybe hop back and forth across the line a few times, knowing it’s just a painted line indicating a fairly arbitrary location, but wondering still at all the distance you’d come and all the way still to go.

I thought that by the time I turned 30 I’d be good at something, really good, that I’d be recognised for the Thing, that people would be talking about the Thing and someone would say, ‘Let’s ask Clare, she knows that stuff better than anyone’ and everyone else would nod and feel reassured that the Thing was now in my good hands. I thought I’d have a book with my name on the spine wedged between Ali Smith and something I like a bit less than Ali Smith.

I thought I’d have a house. And a garden that I’d have finally learned how to be patient with and committed to so that it wasn’t a tray of drought-stricken seedlings I never seem to have time to plant out.

I thought I’d have a home, that somewhere would feel like home, that saying, ‘I’m going home now’ would be a place and a meaning and a sweet feeling.

I thought I’d have worked out how to be lovable all the time. That I’d be good at loving all the time, that I’d met somebody who thought I was all the world’s best magic and run down the aisle to marry them.

I thought I’d maybe have babies, bobbing in a bicycle seat behind me as I pedalled along the canal paths.

But I know that this is what I do: worry that there isn’t enough; turn the world into an empty pantry in ration time and me too hungry. I have a tendency to tell myself the wrong stories.

Actually, I have a lot. I have a beautiful, funny-shaped family that looks out for each other and mostly manages to love each other exactly as is, and I understand more and more how rare a gift that is. I am in love, fiercely, and when I let him, I’m loved back. I have a job that pays me enough money to have adventures and fresh food and new shoes. I’ve made a whole new life for myself, by myself. I’ve had cats and best friends and faraway friends and chance meetings that I’ve loved, and loved, and loved.

Lately the pace of things has been too fast, too many things that aren’t the things that make my world juicy, too much muchness, and it’s given me a bit of life-sized car-sickness. Maybe I’ll pull over and watch some clouds instead of pushing on towards that stupid line of latitude, and make up some stories about plans that didn't quite come off and about not having a plan at all.

we gave ourselves away

tiding myself over until Where The Wild Things Are blows my tiny mind watching other pupil-dilating Spike Jonze efforts, like this music video for UNKLE's song, 'Heaven'...




the sun's out. go kiss somebody.

giddy

spike jonze + dave eggers + arcade fire + monsters + MAURICE FRICKING SENDAK? ladies and gentlemen, that wild rumpus cannot start soon enough.

the art of happiness

I’ve been a bit obsessed by the question of how to be happy for a long time. So much of our happiness is down to our personal quirks, the vagaries of our days, whether the guy in the café butters your bagel while it’s hot out of the toaster so it goes all deliciously melty, or waits for it to go cold and then thickly slathers cold grease over it. But it seems that the structures for improving happiness might actually be fairly quantifiable.

To some extent, a one-size-fits-all approach is still pretty effective. Physical activity is proven to improve emotional wellbeing, for example. So is feeling engaged within a community, be it colleagues, family, or fellow members of the Justin Vernon Appreciation Society.

But listening to Martin Seligman’s talk on TED last night, it got me thinking about how much of happiness is also knowing who we are, and skewing our lives in the directions we’re more or less built to go in. He talks about the Pleasurable Life, the Good Life, and the Meaningful Life, and though I’m totally mangling this, each of us is hardwired with certain skills to derive more happiness from one of these ways of living more than any other.

It made me realise I maybe just don’t know myself very well. Which is interesting, really…hi, nice to meet me! I sat down to take Seligman’s Signature Strengths questionnaire and the process of working out my answers was as interesting as the results. I think it’s cheating, but I had to enlist my housemate, Badam’s, help with some of them. Would friends say I can be arrogant? Um, Badam?

So 240 questions, 2 glasses of wine and the realisation that I am utterly unambitious later, I get to find out what my signature strengths are and it’s pretty much a longwinded way of saying surprise! YOU’RE A LIBRAN.