Lux Lotus

LL Top 10 04

I started Lux Lotus last spring (with this post) and intended it to be a microsite where I could post things that caught my eye and experiment with different kinds of writing as well as document my travels and adventures.

I've been rather bad about keeping up with that last bit: trips to Big Sur & The Monterey Peninsula, San Francisco, Martha's Vineyard, Connecticut, Boston, Ithaca, Washington DC, St. Michael's, various locations in France and Switzerland and more were scarcely mentioned. [One of my resolutions for next year is to start taking more photographs, posted here of course, and also to try my hand at some of the descriptive prose imagery Ruskin espoused. Recently read, and highly recommended: The Art of Travel by Alain Botton.]

Instead I've tried to focus on an evolving exploration of art and commerce, history, design, and culture, and to keep my core readership of friends and family up-to-date on the news in my life.

In the spirit of year-end reflection, here are a few of my favorites from the dusty old attic:
it's psychedelic, baby
he prefers organic tobacco
collecting desire
i'm no foodie, but
snapshot
outside looking in and outside looking in, continued
cruella deglitter
de stijl
pop, pow, now, pucci

The wonderful feedback and fabulous new people I've met as a result of this site have far surpassed my wildest expectations. Thank you for reading, and for all your lovely comments and letters. I have a few significant work matters to attend to in the next couple of days, but several new posts should be up over the holiday weekend. Happy New Year, and best wishes for joy and success in 2005!

One For The Style File

Last time I came to visit her, my mother gave me a first edition of Harper's Bazaar: 100 Years of the American Female: The Sumptuous, The Expensive, The Precious, The Moneyed, The Luxe, The Tasteful, The Opulent and The Amusing Woman From Bazaar, a suitably weighty tome created in the '60s for the magazine's centennial.

I'm sure I will come back to it again and again, as it includes selections of the best of the magazine's photography, literature, fashion, essays, interviews, observations and criticism collected over a century.

I couldn't haul it back to New York with me at the time, and so it was a thrill to come across it this morning as I was looking for something to read. My selection for contemplation today is from an essay entitled, "Individuality in Dress: The Secret of the Well-Dressed Woman," by Paul Poiret:

I cannot help feeling a vague contempt for those who ask at the beginning of the season, "What is to be the favorite color?" Choose the color that suits you, madame, and if some one tells you that red is to be worn, dare to wear violet and consider only what is suitable to you, because there is only one single rule for the well-dressed woman, and the old Romans expressed it in one word - decorum - which means, "that which is suitable." That which is suitable! ...

... Choose whatever is most in harmony for your character, for a dress can be the expression of a state of mind if you but try to make it. There are dresses that sing of joy of life, dresses that weep, dresses that threaten. There are gay dresses, mysterious dresses, pleasing dresses, and tearful dresses.

It's such a gloriously strident essay, and - even though he could never have predicted the rise of such fashionable disasters as Sex and the City and The Meatpacking District - Poiret's words ring just as true today.

Conversation Pieces, Indeed

Currently reading, recently received: Conversation Pieces, by Grant H. Kester.  Noted:

Some of the most innovative art of the past decade has been created far outside conventional galleries and museums. In a parking garage in Oakland, California; on a pleasure boat on the Lake of Zurich in Switzerland; at a public market in Chiang Mai, Thailand--artists operating at the intersection of art and cultural activism have been developing new forms of collaboration with diverse audiences and communities. Their projects have addressed such issues as political conflict in Northern Ireland, gang violence on Chicago's West Side, and the problems of sex workers in Switzerland. Provocative, accessible, and engaging, this book, one of the first full-length studies on the topic, situates these socially conscious projects historically, relates them to key issues in contemporary art and art theory, and offers a unique critical framework for understanding them.

More on that, definitely. Further details on the book can be found here.

Also, while we're on the topic of the kind of highly-charged, culturally provocative and purposeful work that I tend to adore -- a handful of gems from the Lux Lotus archives: Outlaw Representation, Scarlet-Starlet, Wien, Bad Culture, No Ladies, Exile Art Down Under, The Charms of Small Collections, and The Beautiful and Sublime Science.