If you'd like to see my work work, skip on over to www.vanessaholden.com.
In my real life you can find me at vanessaholden[at]mac[dot]com; in studios and meetings & offices quite (but not too) often; most happily at the beach; at Pearl Paint buying stuff for a project; at La Colombe or The Adore, & sometimes (just quietly) at Beard Papa, but then I don't like to talk about that particular addiction.
Gritchie: “Since was the Village so prep-ified?”
Good q, as it turns out: there we were at The Rusty Knot and the White Horse, surrounded by prep-etry such as we’d never seen: jeezy when did Sperry’s and button downs and LLBean khakis become coolness non sequiter? Obvs I was sleeping, b/c this made me quite/v. whoozy. Or maybe it was the Dark and Stormys.
ngoc:
I was in LA for three days and the sun came out at 5 o’clock my last day there, just in time for me to get a couple of shots in before heading out to the airport to catch the red-eye flight back to New York. I absolutely love the Schindler House, built in 1922 by Viennese born architect Rudolf Schindler for him and his wife to share with the engineer Clyde Burgess Chace and his wife. “The space was divided into 7 sections, four of which were assigned specifically to each of the four residents… this division was an expression of the independent but common goals of each of the individuals in the house.” Each person had a work/studio space that opens onto an outdoor space. I love that idea. There are also open-air sleeping lofts on the roof, which I also love. What I appreciate also about this house is its human scale. So much of contemporary architecture is about being impressive, starchitects doing show places for rich clients. The Schindler House feels absolutely real.
I love this idea of a commune/community of people: I’ve always loved this idea of sharing a big house with friends and their kids, or buying connected houses and tearing down our backyard fences and living/easting/working/playing together. Nelson and Melissa are kind of doing it in Gowanus now: it’s such a human way to live. I’m a hippy, I know. Don’t hate me, I can’t help it.
Yasmin: “I’m helping Harper face his fears … you know, shutting him in the closet …”
LOLOLOL.
“Most of the year he wore nothing but shorts, a shirt … but when the winter wind came sweeping up from Antartica with ice in its tongue, licking and smoothing his cheeks into cold flat pebbles, he put on one of his father’s thick coats that came down to his ankles. Then he would turn up the collar, let his hands dangle down to get lost in the huge pockets, and go outside again as snug as a penguin in a burrow. For he couldn’t bear to be inside. He loved the whip of the wind too much, and the salty sting of the spray on his cheek like a slap across the face, and the endless hiss of the dying ripples at his feet.
For Storm-Boy was a storm boy.”
Harper’s middle name is Cloudy, which has something to do with the romance of cowboys and wide western spaces, but reading this last night it occurred to me that maybe it has something to do with a windswept Australian coast too. I think (I know) there is something in me that has always wanted to live someplace sometime we could be less tamed, a little more wild, a little more sunshine-y and stormy.
