green roofs

photo by This Old House

Starter kit.



Add water.


photo by Alycat
Lower Manhattan


The idea of a rooftop garden is the perfect combination of all that is good about materials and all of that is good about nature, namely to be in it. By the good in materials I mean the want you feel when standing in front of scored horizontal panels of porous white travertine. You have to touch it, and it is quiet when you do. Or upon seeing black-as-night hot-rolled steel flooring, you want to lay upon it, because it must be cool and soothing somehow in its sheet-cake likeness.

I am charmed by a garden at the tip top of my building. I can climb up there, like I did when I was little to our tree house. From a roof garden you have a bird's eye view. You have your head in the breezes and are safe from exhaust. You are closer to the sun and can stroll where there's traffic just below. Elevator going up!

The terminology today is simply: green roof. Chicago, Portland, Atlanta and Philadelphia all have city programs to engender green roofs to pop up all over town. There are quite a few environmental benefits, as you would imagine: less run-off from the greater absorption of rain water for one, and cooler temperatures down below. In my search I discovered that New York City is considered an urban heat island. Concrete is an impervious material that retains heat, even after the sun goes down. Flashing back to my first August in NYC, standing in the middle of Union Square dripping sweat from my legs, yes, New York streets are hot. The gardens up above reflect heat rather than retain it, so that's a good thing. Green roofs come in several varieties: prairie-like, garden-lane-strolling-like, zen-garden-like, even farm-like.

Please enjoy.





photo taken by anyhoo
London, England


rooftop in Germany


photo by dreamymo
Toronto, Canada



photo by Payton Chung
Battery Park City, New York


photo taken by jthorvath
111 South Wacker, Chicago, IL


photo taken by holdfast4
Vancouver Public Library



Chicago City Hall


photo by GreenGrid
American Red Cross Center, Chicago, IL


Vancouver Public Library


photo by Deutche Telecom
Art & Exhibition Hall, Bonn, Germany


photo taken by 天曉得。
Rogner Bad Blumau in Styria, Austria


photo by PortlandTransport
Amsterdam


photo by identity chris is'



photo by jippolito
Japan


photo by grooble
Laos


photo by gullevek
Japan


photo by driftlessmedia


photo by Flatbush Gardener
Madison Square Garden, New York


photo by Devatar
Venice, Italy

miser works on the walls

This Saturday night artist Rebecca Miser will be showing several paintings from her extensive body of work in Houston at an art space called Super Happy Funland. Works will remain for viewing for at least a few weeks. Becky is one of my dearest and most talented friends. She paints in abstract expressionist style, using the prominent figure to tell narratives. Vibrant color, thick outlines in black, and whimsical elements that almost look stuck on make up the foreground and background of her stories.

Please wander through her paintings here below and here.

Art Show at Super Happy Fun Land 2610 Ashland Street (@ W27th Street in the Heights), Houston, TX 77008

"A Sunbeam in the Abyss"

Matt Zoller Seitz is a former Dallas Observer writer, Dallasite, and Wilson brothers fan. He writes a very moving article about Owen Wilson here, entitled, "A Sunbeam in the Abyss." Here's a little from the piece:

Art is always informed by life, but one doesn't automatically predict the other. Depression is an implacably private thing, a fog comprised of biography, present-tense experience and body chemistry. It's as unpredictable as the elements and as unknowable as God. It's an abyss that you fall into, and you either die there or climb out.

Owen, peace be with you.

these are the chairs

I bought my first dining room table three summers ago at this relatively new mom and pop hardware store in Austin. They utilized half of their floor for furniture that mixed a certain ranch grandiosity with Crate and Barrel contemporary. The table is a large rectangular slab made of rosewood, from the rainforest I later discovered (felt like I'd committed a sin upon learning that). The large slats are bumpy instead of smooth, and show the grain beautifully outlined in black where the mahogany stain set in. It looks a little like a farm table in that regard but with formal turned legs. I got this beauty at a sale for half its original price, making it doubly delicious.

There wasn't any way that I was going to purchase furniture showroom chairs of brown or black leather. I wanted something to contrast the slightly rustic, formal feel so that each element would stand out.

It's been three summers, and today I found them (thanks to a random blog find: Silk Felt Soil). Phoebe from that site posted these earlier this month from a fantastic design website entitled StudioIsle. The shots above are from a restaurant in London called Cecconi's. StudioIsle revamped the restaurant and how. The only problem is that these chairs are not for sale that I can see. Perhaps the designer custom made them for Cecconi's. If you know the name of the style these chairs are designed in or have seen anything similar out there I would greatly appreciate your pointers.

turn ons

Do you know what turns me on? A strapping thirty-four-year-old, former child prodigy, grown up to be geneticist, anthropologist, and master mind of National Geographic's Genographic Project.

Sigh.

Even though we both went to the University of Texas, and I've got a year on him, he graduated 6 years ahead of me. If I'd only known I would have studied harder and not dropped Honors Physics my senior year in high school to pursue a life of leisure.

Dr. Spencer is captivated by a subject fascinating to all of us--where we come from--and he's developed a way for us all to participate in his Genographic map making with a kit that you can send off for. The kit contains a tool, a cotton swab with which to swab the insides of your cheeks in order to get all the little DNA bits to send to the lab. After several weeks go by, you receive a report that tells the story of either your maternal or paternal ancestry (not both; men have to choose, and women have to go with the maternal strain of lineage since we are without a Y chromosome).

Dr. Spencer cautions that the project does not give percentage break downs of ethnic make-up or pinpoint a family crest. His research reveals what the project calls, "deep ancestry along a single line of direct descent," tracing your path backwards to the beginning.

It looks something like this.

There's a lot more to it than just lines and arrows on a map. I dig. To read more, click here.

one more, I couldn't resist

Black, white, and green is my favorite color combination these days. The Danish company Ferm Living (Ferm, meaning clever), has two new designs for the fall--this beautiful Cherry Tree design and another called Bamboo. Scrap booking away samples for the house purchase. More to come on that later.

pretty things

Thank you to blog friend Maryam at My Marrakesh for adding me to your blog list! Good lady that you are . . .

So, a young gentleman named Joseph is helping me come up with a new blog header to freshen up the place. I told him that I wanted hues of orange sherbet, persimmon, and buttercream. Sounds yummy. Then I thought some more on it. It need not be too modern. I like bold graphic designs, but then, it must also convey a sense of handmade. I like designs that are layered on top of one another to create dimension, and then, I like those that are simple line drawings with a touch of whimsical yellow, like on Happy Cavalier. Oh man do I love that blog header.

I send Joseph images every week or so, a hodgepodge of others' blog heads, photographs, posters, and wallpaper snippets. And that has me thinking about wallpaper. My thoughts on it have changed from yuck to wowza like most of us who have an eye for the pretty. But even if I see the most delicate and beckoning image of a ginkgo leaf, let's say, if it is repeated exactly the same like a grid, I don't want it in my house. I would go crazy in a house of grids. It conveys a uniformity that doesn't ring true to my insides, the wandering nature of my thoughts and desires. Now here are some papers up my alley:

Oh beauty!

I detect a theme after this exercise. It has to do with night. Only one bright, sunny one in the bunch. Okay, from left to right and so forth:

Takes me into a fairy story. Midnight Butterfly. Johanna Basford Designs

Looove it! Amour Plantarum. WerningWallpaper manufactured by Boråstapeter.

You could melt into the bindweed. Bindweed 108. Ferm Wallpaper

The brightest thing I've ever seen. Leaf Turquoise/Gold. Jocelyn Warner

The green is almost neon. That does it for me. Victoria and Albert Museum. Hand printed flocked wallpaper with leather decoupage. Linda Florence

post-cry

I have a friend who is heartbroken. I saw her at dinner the other night. Three friends sat in a dark sushi restaurant next to a table of men speaking Japanese. We were celebrating a birthday. My friend looked fresh-faced with no makeup. I didn't notice the post-cry look in her eyes until she brought up her ex late in the evening. She talked about how she has no attention span, for our book club reads, television shows, movies. No patience to allow thoughts to rest upon something and absorb it. No tolerance to absorb anything new because this man whom she let know her all the way inside has taken himself away never to return.

It's so humiliating, demoralizing, chaotic. I don't want to love. I can't quite reach for it. And then, I feel like I'm running out of time. Saturday night at the phenomenal Neko Case and Rufus Wainwright show in Austin, Neko introduced one of her songs with a dedication to all those people who are never going to get married their whole lives. I stuck my arm straight into the air and "wooooo'd" with the rest of the contrarians. And then I felt funny.

I was perusing the blogs tonight and found that persisting stars recently featured a book called, Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam. I can only get to the cover, barely peek at the excerpted quotes. I feel little patience for the tedium of being a lost lover, little capacity to absorb it. Maddie of persisting stars writes, "[in] angry observations he illuminates the distance between human beings in a sparkling web of quests." I think Aslam is angry with me. He watched me raise my fist into the air, the impostor revolutionary that I am. Oh goodness me.

cozy

I've been looking around a lot lately. This new job affords me such luxuries. A work break is going some place else besides Microsoft Outlook, and there's so much to see! Tonight I have a new favorite. She's this Midwestern woman who now lives in Portland with her husband. I read that she had an accident, a serious one where she might have lost her foot, but she didn't, thank goodness. She spent a year or so in recovery at home, all the while in loads of pain. During this year at home, she took up needlework. She wrote that she did this needlework for something like twelve hours a day, and when she would stop in the evening, she noticed the pain much more acutely. It was through these experiences that she came to the conclusion that she would leave her career, her corporate job, her ball and chain, whatever you want to call it. Since then she's been tapped into one thing, her creative inklings.

I am taken by her blog, something I like to think of as a little magazine if I had one. I like to think of me as this school kid who says, if I had a magazine it would be dynomite! I'd have Kung Fu, momma's kick-butt bok choy recipe, and some slasher stories mixed in, something like that. You can make whatever you wanna make. Web master, writer, photographer. Whatever. Be it baby, be it. So this woman's blog, Posie gets cozy, is just simple, really. She writes about her days and her peeps. She is an amazing photographer. She mostly photographs food. She loves cooking, and that makes me love her. It's funny to me how she happens to have her camera with her through every meal-making experience, like it's her intimate photo shoot. You see her camera pop up at cafes too, taking the most elegant and delectable picture of a cappuccino with raw sugar crystals on top that you've ever seen. The most recent pic of sprouting garlic made me want to dive right into it. How does she do that?

Anyway, I like her. Something there you may like too. It's girly, crafty and crochety, but there's something more there I tell you. Here's an excerpt from one of her entries:

Nevertheless, I started thinking about creative blogs in general last night, and what I like about them. What I like about them most of all is how you can ultimately, eventually, "hear" people in them, maybe even hear them in a way you wouldn't necessarily hear them in real life, somehow, and watch their travels near and far. Don't we read novels for the same reason -- to find out how it was for them? To see how it was, might have been, maybe will be for us? I want to know. And my favorite blogs are not the ones that are most pretty, or informative, or most prolific -- they're the ones that have a voice. The ones where the people behind them sort of shine past the photos or the punctuation and grammar (so what about that anyway -- never let that stop you) or the crafts or any of that stuff -- I like voices. I like thinking, "Oh, she's gentle, " or "Bah! She's hilarious!" or "Wow -- how thoughtful," or "Mmm -- I see now," when I hear people -- and then I like it when those impressions grow and layer, like puff pastry, into something thrilling and full. I like watching people discover things, I like how the blog changes and develops by sheer virtue of its happening at all, those magic moments when someone discovers something, understands something.









All photographs by Alicia Paulson.

Feng ZhengJie

These paintings make me feel longing. It's the color, how they're lit up, and their vacant eyes. They pose and say look at me.

The MFAH in Houston is currently running an exhibit that they're calling: "Red Hot--Asian Art Today." Well, okay, if you want to go with that title. Here is a little about the artist. His name is Feng ZhengJie, and he is about my age. I'll call him my contemporary, but he's much more interesting. See for yourself.

from the Goedhuis Contemporary--
Feng Zhengjie was born in the countryside of Sichuan Province in 1968. In response to the explosive development of China's entertainment industry, Feng creates works that serve as a commentary on the new glamour and fashion of today's society. His works also reflect a personal ambivalent fascination with and an aversion to Chinese pop culture.

sumptuous

Please spend your next lazy Sunday with Maryam at My Marrakesh. You won't be sorry. She creates a portal of sumptuous visual bites and stories from faraway lands. See:










Read: a sample of Maryam's writings


I peer out from the balcony, and the view of the Eiffel Tower makes me catch my breath.

Not a single locust in sight.

I sit in a cafe with Tara of the blog Paris Parfait. The waiter says "avec plaisir" and takes our picture. Tara's eyes are enormous and a color so remarkable that I can't help but stare. She relates tales of Middle Eastern intrigue. The tales, all true, involve her in complex and astonishing ways. She then tells me of her novel in progress. I feel a kind of longing that is hard to describe; a longing for a book of my own - not fiction, but truth. I wonder - shyly - if I can add that book to my list of dreams that I dream by day.

I then realize that my problems, though big - though quite big - are really only small. As I walk back to my hotel I smile at the passersby. They smile back at me.

Image acknowledgements: (1,2) Steve McCurry, (3) persisting stars, (4) Maryam Montague, (5)BabaSteve, (6) morgueprincess, (7) Aline Thomassen

movie sunday

I am hoping to inspire [the American public] in some way, to become active, and to do something.
Michael Moore on Sicko

I was dreading going to see Sicko. I didn't want to be brought down, man. I don't want someone shaking his fist in my face in a rant that's supposed to make me care. I've got other things going on.

As a recent LA Times article relays, the movie doesn't follow the same trail leading to a suit being protected from handheld cameras by security guards. It takes a circuitous route, back and forth between people's stories, happy and sad. There's lots of laughter and good feeling about your fellow man or woman. There's a certain function and flow about town in the places Moore visits, in the people he meets. Of course, these places are in other countries. The people he visits in our country share their dysfunctions and heartbreak so that we can see that things aren't working as they should, and that every time we don't want someone in our faces with their rants to try to make us care when everything in our worlds is just peachy, somehow things aren't peachy when you become indifferent.

In one segment, a video recording shows a cab dropping off an elderly, disoriented woman wearing a hospital gown and nothing else. The cab does a quick u-turn to reach the curb. The door opens, and she gets out. She shuffles up the street, not bothering to find the sidewalk for awhile. And then she does her own u-turn thank goodness, up onto safer ground. By this time a shelter worker goes out and greets her, then brings her inside. In this country, hospitals have taken to acquiring cab services to take indigent patients to shelters. That is the most humane thing they can think to do. We can't treat you, so we'll drop you at the next Salvation Army doorstep.

I try not to think about my health too much. I am an irregular visitor to doctors' offices. All in all, I've got good health. I have also been without health care coverage for about 5 or 6 years of my adult life. That's my little Aetna bio. Although it's one of those things intensely personal that we relate to me rather than we, our own physical health, I do believe that we are supposed to care for the sick and the poor. Why is it that a doctor would ever have to refuse to make someone well and order them a cab instead? We create these moral dilemmas for ourselves as Americans because of greed; ultimately greed separates you from your neighbor--there's no sharing in greed. So we live in indifference I think, because our collective moral health isn't good. Look at the south side of Chicago vs. the north, New Orleans and so on. It's not that we don't care as individuals, or maybe some don't; it's the characteristic of societal systems who don't care that we shouldn't be accepting. No one wants to change a system, though, and why should we? It's working just fine, and if it's not for some people, well they need to go and fix it themselves. I'm too tired for all that.

ny children

Project description
(from the organizatation's website)

Photograph one child from every country on earth. Each child must live in New York City.

Children from 148 countries have already been photographed. The search for the remaining 46 continues as the project moves toward completion.

* * * * *

Check out the cute pics!

happy birthday america!

photos by Mari

internet radio

pastemagazine.com

savenetradio.org

summer

Katherine O'Brien


I love the light in these photos, shooting up in a diagnal like they're a pair. I happened upon this woman's site when I was searching for photos of Chapel Dulcinea, designed by the architect Marley Porter who built One World Theatre in Austin. If you love church architectue like I do, you'll be charmed. And back to Katherine O'Brien, her images are fun to sift through, and full of life.