✸ Artist Interview: Hush Clark
Hush Clark is my new secret best-friend art-crush, only he doesn’t know it yet.
Magic art that speaks to my heart.
✸ Vietnam’s Mammoth Cave
Colin and I are both avid spelunking-fantasists, and are considering having our wedding in a cave…
Surely everyone will just fly to Vietnam, right? Well, maybe if we were into eloping –
only, we’d probably try and take up permanent residence..
✸ Jamie Livingston (October 25, 1956 – October 25, 1997) was a New York-based photographer,
film-maker and circus performer who took a polaroid photo every single day for almost twenty years.
Strange, sad and beautiful. – PHOTO OF THE DAY: 1979-1997, 6,697 Polaroids, dated in sequence
✸ Stunning Vintage Photos from Sydney’s Police Museum – from COILHOUSE
These are beyond words. So elegant and haunting. Clear as glass, real as now.
✸ Hestia, help me
A prayer for Hestia, Goddess of hearth and home from Drucilla Pettibone.
This helped me – I think we all could do with some calm and happy hearth wishes of late, don’t you?
Our power got shut off yesterday, for hours and hours (because we’re busy, and harried, and poor)
and the immense relief I felt when it finally came back on made me so thankful for all that I have.
My full refrigerator, the ability to wash and dry my clothes mechanically, my hot bathwater,
my clean drinking water, all the little space heaters I crouch in front of… It made me consider
what my life would be like if all that were gone. Think about it. Be glad for the comforts of your home!
✸ Design Sponge had a great feature on Doctor Zhivago style
that makes my heart flutter and chime like a frozen chandelier.
(Muchas gracias to Mr. + Mrs. Leaf-Arrow for sending it my way!)

✸ Mervyn Peake: A Centenary Celebration
I so wish I could go see this:
“British writer and illustrator Mervyn Peake has earned an international cult following
for his Gormenghast series of Gothic fantasies which were inspired by Arundel Castle.
To mark what would have been his hundredth birthday, Pallant House Gallery presents
a display of his most famous illustrations and prints as part of the major centenary
celebrations which will also include the publication of ‘Titus Awakes’, the final part
of the Gormenghast sequence recently completed by his widow.”
✸ Also this! Man, I need to get across the sea! Never been to the UK before, can you believe it?
Royal Shakespeare Company to sell thousands of costumes
“More than 10,000 items will go on sale next month, including shirts, hats, shoes,
Egyptian head-dresses and a variety of military uniforms, jewellery and other accessories.”

✸ Ellen Harding Baker’s “Solar System” Quilt, made in 1876
“The design of Ellen’s striking and unusual quilt resembles illustrations in astronomy books
of the period. Ellen used the quilt as a visual aid for lectures she gave on astronomy in the
towns of West Branch, Moscow, and Lone Tree, Iowa. Astronomy was an acceptable interest
for women in the nineteenthth century and was sometimes even fostered in their education.”
✸ Bees, Bees, Bees – By Maria Popova at Brainpickings
If you click on one link here, and have time to watch one video, let it be the TED talk
from apiarist Dennis vanEngelsdorp – he really lays it all out for us succintly, and
passionately. What an inspiration! I can’t wait to start keeping bees of my own.
✸ Lynda Barry is my number one hero. The next time she does one of her writing classes,
I’ve promised to take myself. I hope it’s soon! In the meantime, I really need to get a copy
of her new book, “Picture This”. If you don’t know who she is, please fix that, immediately.
Read Cruddy. Today. I mean it. See also:
Interview with Lynda Barry in The Onion’s AV Club
Lynda Barry on ‘Picture This’ from The Paris Review
✸ Russia has more occult healers than doctors
✸ Drowning Beautiful – another excellent find from Two Four Flinching
Artist Jason de Caires Taylor creates life-size cement sculptures of people and submerges
them into the waters of South America. Magical, moving work. I’d love to go scuba down and see it
in situ one day! Totally enchanting. (Thank you for the tip, Mlle. Labry!)
See also: The underwater sculpture of Jason de Caires Taylor – on Boing Boing
✸ Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service
How did I never know about this until now? Well, better late than never.
I could listen to Jarvis talk all day long, and he really does play the best music.
✸ A great interview with Dawn of Faun Fables – I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of their new album,
Light of a Vaster Dark, which is out now. There’s a good review of the album up at Pitchfork, also.

Alan Moore on Austin Osman Spare: “The greatest English magician of the 20th century”