I’ve been listening to Poliça nonstop for the last couple of weeks thanks to my friend Sky.

They are playing at Airwaves this year, hmmmmm……

Happy Monday!

As many people are starting to realize, I have been back in NYC for 6 straight days ^-^

And many (super observant) friends noticed, thanks to foursquare, that I have been spending a lot of time at 3RDWARD.  The reason is only partly because I think the place is awesome.  Starting this week, I have become their Marketing Director ^-^

If you know me even a little bit, then you know how AMPED I am about this!  Not only do I love the space, the brand, the mission and the products, but I am super excited to work with so many inspiring people.

So, I am back and ready to bask in the glory of NYC springtime, reconnect with people and do new awesome things.

Besides 3RDWARD I am working on/interested in working on more projects related to:

• innovative education experiences
• disrupting the publishing industry
• the burgeoning fashion design scene in New Orleans

xo

I saw Esmerine for the first time last year at Airwaves and was instantly mesmerized (it was the perfect end to Glacier visiting day).  They are an experimental instrumental group started in 2003 by Bruce Cawdron and Beckie Foon, who have contributed to many other amazing Montreal-based bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Set Fire to Flames, and A Silver Mt. Zion.

I was pursuing their website and found a cover of my favorite Arvo Pärt, ”Spiegel im Spiegel”

And some of their own stuff…

Happy Monday, from Kansas City!

Sicily was far more amazing then I could have ever imagined.  From meeting family members for the first time to getting lost in mountains (thank God for Google Maps) it was a non-stop adventure.  I must have listened to this Youth Group song 500 times, which immediately takes me back to 2006.

Babe, let’s move to Sicily 

Just you and me 

and the mediterranean sea. 

I work on a scallop boat 

that would keep us afloat 

the sun would burn my throat.  

You lie beneath the shade 

writing songs all day 

into the summer haze, 

and in the evening 

we go stealing 

out beneath different stars. 

Night would hold us 

and gently fold us 

we’d lose our minds 

in tiny bars.  

We never argue 

’cause with just us two 

there’d be no point to. 

They need a surgeon 

’cause in this version 

we become one person.  

And in the evening 

we go stealing 

out beneath different stars. 

The night would hold us, 

and gently fold us, 

we’d lose our minds 

in tiny bars

Good Morning Parlermo…

Next stop, Santa Cristina Gela

Lago di Piana degli Albanesi or liqeni i Horës së Arbëreshëvet

Piana Degli Albanese – the largest Arbëreshë community in Sicily.

<3 miei cugini Giovanni e Giuseppina

We arrived just in time for San Giuseppe Day, just like in New Orleans, there was a parade but they couldn’t have been more different…

This cannoli was as big as my hand. swoon!

Getting ready for the benediction.

And we’re walking…with no idea why.  For some reasons the kids all had plastic bags, like Halloween.

The priest goes from house to house blessing the altars. The whole commune smells like fresh bread, rosemary and citrus fruit. The loot!  The kids divi up the sweet bread. I feel like I am in a movie :)  That is Gaspare’s hand on the right and my cousin Katarina on the left! Immediately behind Hotel Belvedere.

cimitero di Santa Cristina Gela

Piazza Mariano Polizzi

Waiting for the Procession to begin.

And here comes the statue…

And the procession through the cobblestone streets begins.

This altar was nearly the length of the Piazza…

On the other side of the Piazza

Back on the road!  Villafranca Sicula -> Agrigento

Mediterranean Sea

Scala dei Turchi

Off-season

Sigh…

Agrigento – produce cart

Agrigento – Valle dei Templi

Tempio della Concordia - 5th Century BC

Temple of Juno Lacinia

Ikaro crashed, bronze sculpture, Igor Mitoraj

I really wish that I could have seen the rest of the installation from 2011.

I am annoyed with myself for not capturing the names of these two contemporary sculptors…

I’ll figure it out on day…

  LOVED both of them.

I have been at the Magaggiari long enough for special pastas ^-^

<3

<3

<3

<3

Of Monsters and Men has finally released a music video!

and it’s AMAZING – Little Talks.

and with Papa New Guinean inspired makeup!

 

Directed by Weweremonkeys

You can listen to their NPR session here.

or pre-order album on iTunes (release 3 Apr)

LOVE Memoryhouse

via +aziz

 

Happy Monday!

 

Soooooo Brooklyn.  Soooooo good.

Gospel/Grace from Frankie Rose’s new album, Interstellar

<3 <3

 

“So, out with the reverb of the Frankie Rose and the Outs, and in with something altogether more glam, glittering, shivering. On “Interstellar” Frankie takes the lessons learned with her debut album – like reverb as the holy route to pop-grandeur, scaling a wall of teenage tears – fully digests, and transfers those skills into the brave new world mapped out by ten new songs. In its place is the confident swagger of a singer and auteur fully aware of how to build the simplest of pop moves into aching, full-blown melodramas, how to grab hold of an emotion and ride its darker waves. “I always have a big picture in mind,” Frankie reflects. “I knew I wanted a HUGE sounding record. Big highs, big lows, and clean. There is no fuzz on this record. I knew I wanted to make a streamlined, spacious record with big choruses that sometimes referenced 80s pop.” But that referencing never swamps the melodies: this record isn’t a retro trip. If anything, it liberates sounds familiar from that decade and gives them new context, breathes life into clay golems of sound that too often become basic, pre-set triggers.”

- Slumberland Records

More Here:

 

“One shop teacher suggested to me that ‘in schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.’” - Matthew Crawford, NYtimes

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to have more tactile experiences, in other words, make things. Things that don’t involve pixels, or computer based algorithms. Things that I could touch or where the output is not a plan. Things that I could actually rip up to pieces or throw when I got frustrated because I’ve messed something up in the creative process.  Not that I was devaluing the processes or the output of my knowledge-economy based life, anyone who knows me knows my passion for and the beauty and power I find in the digitization of things, I just wanted more.

As I have become more and more transient over the last couple of years, my life has seamlessly become more and more digital as I subconsciously adjusted the settings of my day-to-day through different technological means. A slew of amazing products, start-ups and technologies allowed me to build, organize, communicate and transfer my creative processes in intelligent ways for my nomadic lifestyle.

Although I am constantly inspired by traveling and seeing the world around me, I began to have the feeling that something was missing. At first the feeling was small and barely noticeable but over time it grew bigger and stronger until I felt like there was a giant bolder sitting on my shoulders all the time. I tried to fill the void my making wilder ideas and more efficient and organized plans, but no matter how much I read or art I visited I still felt this void and it started to make me feel a little sad.

Over the holidays I went home to New Orleans with even more anticipation because of my new apartment. Although tired and mentally exhausted, I quickly slipped into a routine of clean, paint, clean paint, clean, paint, unpack. I was so tired and out of practice that I made several mistakes – using the wrong paint, breaking things while unpacking, buying the wrong materials and became increasingly frustrated, but the desire for wanting to finish made me push harder.  Eventually, I could see the light at the end of the tunnel and the work became more cathartic and almost zen-like. During these routines my thinking became more clear and I became incredibly inspired not just about process of interior design, but for other projects I had been working on for months. When the time came to go back to New York, as always, I made a promise to myself to find more balance in my life. But this time it was different, this time it wasn’t about balance between work and non-work; it wasn’t about adding more yoga and more museums and more sleeping. It wasn’t about more downtime. It was actually about more active time; less time thinking and more time doing (which ultimately leads to more time thinking).

So, I signed up for a membership at 3rd Ward and got back to the basics and since have spent my nights and weekends taking classes in Drawing, Photography, Silversmithing, Casting and Textile Dyeing. The textures, the chemical processes, the fire, the people, the failures, the frustration of not remembering what to do next in the process, the experimentation, the anxiety of having to do all of this in front of other people – I love it all.  My favorite part about the experience is how much it stimulated creativity in all other aspects of my life. I suddenly find myself inspired to make dresses again and go to the theatre and learn to play piano and THIS is what made the boulder on my shoulders go away.

So, I am a little bit in love with 3rd Ward.

The rest of the photos are here.

<3

It’s cold, rainy and I have been up since 5am.

TURN UP THE VOLUME!

F. M. Belfast remixes Seabear’s I’ll Build you a fire.

I’ve never been a person who is concerned with getting older.  I’ve loved every year of my life more than the one before because I know more, know better, care less about certain things, care more about other things, etc.  I can’t wait to see this documentary of an different generation of NYC fashionistas, by Ari Seth Cohen.  ^-^

I should be starting a writing assignment but I can’t stop watching jpop videos on youtube…

I blame this bout of procrastination on Luke.

^-^

When I was in Iceland last October, I stumbled into a bookstore hoping to find a DVD of Backyard.  Feeling highly unsatisfied after not finding the film, I poked around until this AMAZING book cover caught my eye, and perked me up at once knowing that my consumerist mood would be fulfilled after all. I got even more excited when I picked the book up and realized that it was in fact, an apocalyptic zombie story set in Reykjavik and there could be no better gift for Alex.

Zombie Iceland by Nanna Árnadótti.

The book got stowed away (and subsequently forgotten about) during my packing frenzy back in October.  So, I got a little extra surprise and delight when I was unpacking a box over the holiday break and discovered this hipster-zombie staring back at me.

I got even more excited when I turned the cover and saw this:

Whhhhhaaaaaaa?  There was QR code for a zombie Iceland playlist on gogoyoko?!?!

I couldn’t be bothered with the QR code, but did tear away to my browser to see if this could really be true, and lo and behold:

It turned out that each song in the playlist corresponded with a chapter, so each chapter also had it’s own QR code that played a song by an Icelandic band.

There were also fantastic illustrations all throughout the book, by Hugleikur Dagsson.

It get’s better!  The book was full of footnotes that explained different things about Iceland and Icelandic culture, so it was almost part travel guide.  And the footnotes were written in a cheeky tone which made me actually want to read them.

Also included was a recipe for traditional Icelandic Kjötsúpa, (mental note: send to Liza) which appeared when the characters cooked their last meal before their great escape.

I ended up staying up super late, two nights in a row, to finish.

I LOVED THIS EXPERIENCE.  One of my favorite parts of the book was when people finally began to realize that zombies were attacking the town, because the narrative was told completely through Facebook Status Updates.

All in all the book could use another edit, especially for flow in the beginning, and all of the different elements can make the read choppy, but it didn’t bother me at all.  I mean, this zombie survival guide didn’t take itself too seriously, so it felt more like playing a game then reading a book anyway.  HUGE kudos to Nanna for being so experimental with different mediums and also for having amazing taste in shoulderware.

<3