Shop till you drop on Black Friday

Black Friday, do you really want to risk your life for the flat screen TV you don't need?

Thanksgiving day, the parade, the food and the turkey.

Thanksgiving day is America's annual feast of travel and gluttony, here's this year's score; 45 million turkeys are eaten at Thanksgiving this year, that's one sixth of all turkeys sold in the US each year. The american per capita consumption of turkeys has soared from 8.3 lbs. (3.76 kg) in 1975 to 13.8 lbs. (6.25 kg) in 2007.
As if this wasn't enough to scare you, how about trains, planes and automobiles? Thanksgiving will see 43.4 million people traveling in one way or another, 38.9 million or 90% of those will take the car and 3.14 million the plane, whereas the average travel distance will be 601 miles (967 km).
Tired already ?

   

  

 

  

Cold turkey, clockwise from top left ; Arthur Getz's New Yorker cover of Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, my own take on the same subject, Martin's children waiting for the parade and Donald Chaffin's animal feast, a vintage illustration of the american turkey, a New Yorker cover by William Joyce, an animal gluttony feast by Hans Fischer, the pilgrims and the turkeys by Kathy Osborn, William Steig and the inevitable  Saul Steinberg's Picasso inspired Thanksgiving cover.

ROYAL BLUE

According to Vincent Gregoire of Nelly Rodi trend forecasting agency in Paris, Royal Blue will be the trend color for the year 2014, however Karl Lagerfeld tells us that "trend" is the last stage before the "has-been".

 

Royal blue, clockwise by; Miles Davis' "kind of blue" album cover, pantone color chart No 18-3949, french artist Georges Rousse optical illusion in blue, Henri Matisse blue nude paper cut out 1952, the blue city of Jodhpur in India, Valentino 2013-2014 fall/winter collection of delft blue dresses, Robert Wagt fashion illustration of an Yves St.Laurent dress and make up artist Pat Mc Grath's eyeshade for Anna Sui.

In the air: GOLD

Whether it  were the alchemists, trying to liberate parts of the cosmos from temporal existence and trying to achieve perfection which, in metals is gold, the spanish Conquistadores in search of the Inca gold or the poor sods responding to the major gold rushes of the 19th century, man's obsession with the precious metal seems to have no limits.

Although Democritus told us as far back as 370 b.C., that happiness resides not in possessions and not in gold, but dwells in the soul, in this age of excess, with it's emphasis on status and consumerism, gold still holds the main stage. 

PRECIOUS METAL Clockwise from top left : Alexander Mc Queen  gold-leaf-painted feather coat with gold-embroidered tulle skirt, Golden Tortoise Beetle, Yves Klein's untitled Gold monochrome of 1962 and underneath Gustaf Klimt's famous portrait of Adele Bloch, Regent's Place pavillion by Carmody and Groarke a spider silk cape by Peers and Godley and Alexander Mc queen's gold leaf clutch bag.
 

Anthropologie rhymes with creativity

Anthropologie is known to have some of the most creative and elaborate decor showcased in their windows and throughout their stores.

The store which opened in 1992, has currently over 147 stores in the US and two stores in the UK, most of their home good items are hand made by various craftsmen around the globe.

Check out the amazing video of the time and effort gone into these displays here.

They recently launched their new beauty products line called "Grown under Glass".

Cool in the summer soup

Extreme heat with humidity levels that are amazonian, as we were reminded in recent weeks - the 111th anniversary of the air-conditioner- is no fun.
We have greater incentive and thus inclination to retreat indoors now.
And of course, when it's the mid-90's (35C) for days in a row, not much else seems very sensible.
In terms of indoor temperature we've arguably never been cooler.
According to Con Ed, in the New York city area alone there are 525.000 central air systems now and increasing by 6% every year and the number of window units is estimated at six million.

Window and wall units are problematic because they are so poorly insulated.
Two years ago a study by the URBAN GREEN COUNCIL found that the average room air-conditioner leaked as much as a six-inch-square hole (15 cm) waste amounting to 1% of city greenhouse gas emissions.
It is good to know that transportation accounts for 33% of carbon emissions in the united states, whereas buildings account for 40%.

While larger cooling systems have become more efficient in recent years, we don't necessarily use them as well as we could.
Federal guidelines and Con Edison advise to keep your home at 78 degrees , the same as municipal buildings.
For every degree a thermostat is set below that, cooling costs increase by 6%.
Extensive research found that, 79 degrees was the upper temperature threshold at which most people could maintain comfort.
Three years ago Con Edison began offering free programable thermostats to residents with central air systems, the thermostats would allow them to adjust temperatures remotely via the internet or mobile phone, so that houses did not have to be chilled when no one was in them.
Only a small fraction of central-air customers are enrolled.
A newer program providing the same service for those with room units has only 1.175 customers signed on.

If you do have to go out, you'll find yourself wrapped up in the "summer soup", as William Bryant Logan calls it in his Op Ed piece for the New York Times.

Water vapor is not the only thing in that sopping summer air, it also contains aerosols -both solid and liquid.

They may have condensed from the gasses that emerge from your tailpipe or from a factory chimney, or they may have risen into the air from the ground: tiny particles of silicon, organic matter, threads, starch,spores, bacterial cells, tire rubber.

One of the most common aerosols in the New York City air, thanks in part to the booming restaurant scene, is fat. 

The aerosols and the water-vapor together make summer soup.

A halo of water condenses upon each bit of stuff and this spicy mixture sloshes against your skin, leaving behind a bit of fat and water, while picking up a few of your skin cells for it's own purposes.

Before the industrial age , even at the height of summer, there were not enough aerosols to mix with all the water in the air.

So a small amount of stuff would quickly attract all the extra water, making drops that were heavy enough to fall from the sky as rain.

But nowadays we put so much stuff into the air , that mot every tiny vapor puff has an aerosol partner, making for a lot of little wet airborne parcels, each to small and to light to fall.

There is on average 5% more water in the air now than there was during World War II.

This is the summer soup, it can stay put for a long time.

It envelops us with it's miscellany of flavors , solids and liquids.

It is reluctant to rain.

Today it just doesn't rain, it pours.

We get cloudbursts , the soup hangs around us for days.

Then suddenly there's a change, a cold front of converging air, or hot rising air, pushes the soup up higher into the atmosphere.

There it get's colder and the rest of it's vapor condenses.

One drop falls into another, pick's it up and slams into another.

Finally, big , thick drops come down.

Victorian glass domes

With crabs, starfish, taxidermy animals, natural curiosities of all sorts, the Victorian glass domes (or the Napoleon III era domes as they are called in France) are rare and extremely decorative objects.

 You can find them at Deyrolle, this beautiful Parisian treasure trove, which was substantially destroyed by a fire on february the 1st 2008 and lost most of it's inventory, but has since been rebuilt.

A particular beautiful dome can be found in the collection of Andre Breton, father of surrealism, artist and an avid collector of art, ethnographic material and unusual trinkets.

He was particularly interested in materials from the northwest coast of North America.

During a financial crisis he experienced in 1931, most of his collection, along with his friend Paul Eluard's was auctioned.

He subsequently rebuild the collection in his studio and home at rue Fontaine 32 in Paris.

The collection grew to over 5.300 items; modern paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, books, art catalogs, journals, manuscripts and works of popular and oceanic art.

A wall of the apartment is preserved at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

Wegner Wishbone Chair

The Hans Wegner Wishbone Chair has been one of our favorites for a long time and we could just picture them around our dining room table, up until recently when we came across the Burrow, home of the Weasly family in the Harry Potter movies, we just love this hodgepodge of different chairs around their table in their handmade house.We just love this decoration , but couldn't get find more information  from Warner Bros.

Cherry blossom at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

We visited the BBG whilst still living in Paris, paradoxically we've been living  for more 

than 4 years in the US now and missed out on the cherry blossom at the BBG each spring, but we have our own weeping cherry blossom in our front yard and a Magnolia in the back.
They always make me think of Van Gogh, no wonder he's so popular in Japan where the blossom season is almost a religion.

The Brooklyn Botanical Gardens is known for their spring Cherry Blossom Festival (Sakura Matsuri Festival). It has more than 200 cherry blossom trees that come from 42 different species. 

The month long festival that takes place around April-May is a spectacular sight to see. 

If you want to track the progress of the cherry blossoms in bloom to plan your trip, 

you can follow the progress on the BBG website. 

You can also watch a  time-lapse video created from over 3,000 digital photos, 

one taken every three minutes from April 18 to April 26, 2008, of BBG's Cherry Walk.

Fortune teller pendant light

Since we always have problems finding lamps we like, we made ourselves 

this pendant light for over our breakfast nook. To ad our personal touch, 

we used pages out of a book and folded fortune tellers out of them, 

after that we glued them with a glue pistol onto a white chinese paper lantern.

  

Happy Easter

Happy Easter! Vrolijk Paasfeest, Bonnes Paques,  Buona Pasqua, Frohliche Ostern etc. etc. etc.

Albrecht Dürer at the National gallery of Art

Nice exhibition of Dürer's work, from the Albertina in Vienna, on display at the NGA in Washington.

Every time we visit an exhibition, we play a game which picture we would like to take home with us.

This time we couldn't decide between these two, what's your choice?

Google

Came across this in New York, true enough.

Bliss point

I had to think of this illustration whilst reading this stunning article about the food industry in the New York Times, by Pulitzer Prize winner  Michael Moss.