A friend sent me a link to the NYTimes Style section article on streampunk, whose “definition is loose enough to accommodate a stew of influences, including the streamlined retro-futurism of Flash Gordon and Japanese animation with its goggle-wearing hackers, the postapocalyptic scavenger style of “Mad Max,” and vaudeville, burlesque and the structured gentility of the Victorian age”

It really reminds me of Moulin Rouge – which I watched at a drive in movie theater in Vermont one summer so long ago and loved the infectious energy of it in the mountain air.

My favorite quote: ‘If steampunk has a mission, it is, in part, to restore a sense of wonder to a technology-jaded world. “Today satellite photos make the planet seem so small,” Mr. Brown lamented. “Where is the adventure it that?” In contrast, steampunk, with its airships, test tubes and time machines, is, he said, “sort of a dream , the way we used to daydream. It’s like part of your childhood’s just bursting forward again.”‘

Genius. More here.

I’ll be the girl with the vintage aviator goggles and burlesque striped tights.

I’m kidding.

Sort of.

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(Image of Met’s Period Rooms via Diana: Muse )

Today I headed to the Metropolitan Museum’s symposium of the “Past, Present and Future” of the Period Room, which was an amazing day of lectures. I enjoy period rooms for their romance and human scale — they are often a respite from museum fatigue. However, I’ve also wondered how museums will handle the continuing addition of “period” rooms. I mean, in a hundred years, what rooms will people want to see? Uber modernist rooms? 1950s playrooms? Bomb shelters? Ina Garten’s kitchen? The last lecture of the day was the best in many ways as it addressed this very question of the future of the period room. The lecture was given by Julius Bryant who has the delicious title of “Keeper of Word and Image” at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He mentioned the artist Mark Dion, whose work, focused on the processes of collecting and discovery is fascinating. I did a little google research and found that Dion is playing with the aesthetic and fantastic qualities that attract us to these displays. Here are two samples:

(image via nature network )

(image via )

One quote from Dion that I loved (since I’m a student of the decorative arts) is this: “I am very excited by the decorative arts. To study the history of the decorative arts, one must follow developments in science and technology, political economy and aesthetics and iconography.” Yes! Yes! Yes!

Full text of the interview here.

Via Flickr some delicious miniature rooms to inspire. I can’t quite tell you what fascinates me about mini models of everyday things. My favorite of the lot is the first image which is a model of the kitchen at Monet’s house outside Paris. I was charmed by its yellow cheeriness when I saw it in person, and this model is brings back that sense of wonder at seeing Monet’s talent turned toward his interior.

While I try not to “collect” things (bad feng shui, I hear), I do have a growing pile of snapshots I’ve picked up here and there when my will is weak. Or, if the pile in the flea market is big enough and I have the pleasure of winnowing down to a few really wonderful photos that I simply can’t bear to throw back into the mix.

Needless to say, if I let myself, this would become pure mania (look below, from ebay!). Before I can buy a single additional photo, I need to figure out how to display the photos I already have. Somehow the idea of these photos just sitting in a book or box bothers me — I want to see them, be inspired by old colors, old perspectives. Many little frames — a rotating gallery — pined up plastic sheets.

The reason I’m so into landscapes on ebay is that I’m looking for a painting similar to this one of my mother’s (which was my great-grandmother’s — a souvenir from a trip to Italy). My mother refuses to part with it (with good reason) and so I’m hunting for one of my own! (See below — sorry for the horrid photo and flash marks… its an old snapshot). From my unofficial research on ebay, it seems that these painting must have been realatively common and inexpensive at the time — there seems to be a genre of “tourism” painters — I suppose much like today when you go to Paris or New York and there are people selling you photos and paintings/posters on every corner. I love the idea that there is such continuity of human desire to remember a trip via a painting/photo/poster. As much as we change we stay the same. As I hunt, I’m finding some lovely landscapes that are less in the tourism genre (and of course cost more). Anyone else know more about tourism water colors?

How fantastic is this photograph? There is a third person standing behind them, making it look like they have 6 arms.   I love the vitality of the people, and the laughter and good vibes (and ice cream!) nearly jumps off out of the photo. $3 on ebay…   From the material culture perspective, I’m interested in our love affair with photography, cameras, memory, illusion.

For your desk… and the new rate stamps… currently 7 bucks…

These photographs are offered for sale at Sotheby’s April 25th auction of photographs from the private collection of Margaret Weston, one of the first photography dealers, and a major force in the development of the international market for fine art photographs. Starting in 1975 she exhibited photography in her gallery in CA, long before it was de rigueur in New York and London. According to the auction catalog, her passion is for 19th century photography of which the above are a small sample. I’m drawn to these early nature photos, although I’m hard put to explain exactly way — they are beautiful, a little ghostly, and oddly innocent. In any case, check out the rest of the online preview at Sotheby’s — it is a chance to see some of the most highly coveted (and expensive) photographs in the world before they are snapped up into someone’s collection to never be seen again.

I keep thinking about a conversation I overheard in PA last year with Jon and Carrie, on a rainy, grey weekend getaway where we went to a headspinning number of antique stores/ junk shops. The conversation was between a couple of guys who primarily sold postcards/old photos. They were sorting through thousands of postcards, getting ready to post the most collectible on ebay, where they do a thriving business (single card could go for $32, one said). I easedropped as I browsed, and it turns out that there is a huge market for vintage postcards — people collect postcards with images of hometowns, of their summer camps, of their favorite getaway, of the mountains, of India, of naked ladies. An amazing tangle of emotions, memory, desire and our crazy human urge to collect, to order the choas of living through organizing a collection. All the topics I’m interested in writing about: memory, collecting, photography in modern life, paper.

My mother and sister are documentary filmmakers and I’ve always hoped we would collaborate someday. Maybe this is the project?

I’m almost done with my first year at the Cooper-Hewitt Master’s program, and as much as I love the decorative arts, I realize my passion is in the area of material culture — the study of the relationship between “things” and people.

Jules David Prown’s definition in his essay “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method”:

Material culture is the study through artifacts of the beliefs—values, ideas, attitudes, and assumptions—of a particular community or society at a given time.

A further definition from “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method.” Material Life in America: 1600-1860. (via University of Wyoming):

Material culture as a study is based upon the obvious fact that the existence of a man-made object is concrete evidence of the presence of a human intelligence operating at the time of fabrication. The underlying premise is that objects made or modified by man reflect, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, the beliefs of the individuals who made, commissioned, purchased, or used them and, by extension, the beliefs of the larger society to which they belonged.Every man-made object requires the operation of some thought and design. It is the assumption of material culture studies that this thought is a reflection of the culture that produced the man-made objects.

My current research area is how we “remember”; memorabilia, scrapbooks, postcards, snapshots, diaries, formal portraits, really any ritualized celebration (weddings?). I’m also thinking a lot these days about interiors and how we construct identity through interior design.

These are shots I took of my parents house in Vermont when we were there two weeks ago. My childhood home looks so different, so much more elegant through my 28-year old eyes. As we struggle to find the right mix of modern and elegant, I realize how much this house grounds me, how much I hope to recreate this mix of comfort and elegance in our own home. I realize looking at the photos below that my interest in print rooms has a very early start in the laundry room where my mother put up all my sister and my art.

We’ve been in the new apartment for a week — chaos still reigns, but we’re making progress. We have internet, a bed, only two forks (my fault, I left the rest in Brooklyn), this oversize lamp and a craigslist find of a $40 “english butler table”.

Browsing Duane Keiser’s project on the places we call home:

“Home, aside from being the building in which we live, is a state of mind. Home is an idea that has been silently, and uniquely, cultivated in us throughout childhood. It is where we experience many of our most personal and intimate moments and it is where our memories reside long after we a moved on to other houses: revisiting a home from our past always triggers a flood of forgotten memories that come back as we walk through the rooms in which they were formed.”

For my weekly post on decorative arts, I thought I’d write about material culture and the history of card writing and of Christmas cards in particular, since I finished sending mine (shown here) just last week! I’m interested in the study of “material culture” since it explores the relationship between artifacts and society. Christmas cards are certainly a cultural artifact, reflecting our collective interests, decorative tastes, social aspirations and beliefs.

This post was prompted by coming across George Buday’s The History of Christmas Cards when I popped in to Heights Books this afternoon. It is my favorite bookstore, the place I go when Tim’s out of town, when I’m lonely, killing time, or looking to get lost in the world of ideas. It was here that I discovered Japanese gardening at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, that interior decorating (something I had previously held in some contempt) could be about making were you live home, and fed my obsession with stamps.

The “first” christmas card was designed by John Callcott Horsley, an English designer, in the 1840s.

A quick comparison of my Christmas card to the one of the first commercial cards made in England in the 1840s shows both similarities (a non-religious image and greeting) and differences (my card is much more abstract, whereas the earlier card shows images of Dickensian poverty, my card is personalized, and printed by hand). More on material culture at a later date!

I’m fascinated by the idea of private space and the extent that studies have remained unchanged over the last 500 years. I found this image of Andrew Carnegie’s study, completed in 1901. Note the paintings around the room and the bust on the filing case. And the dinosaur too! If you are in New York, come to the Cooper-Hewitt gift shop and walk around the inner room of the shop which is what is left of the study in the current incarnation of the Carnegie mansion. The paintings and the woodwork are all that remain.