Mulberry Jam

You may notice that Mulberry Jam is looking different today. As in the last big change I made to the blog’s appearance, this one was more or less forced on me at short notice. While working on website administration over the weekend, I noticed that Google was flagging my blog as potentially dangerous. I have no idea why, and my first reaction was, “But I write about birds and gardens and yoga?  How could that be dangerous?”  Because of the possibility that there could be some problem with a script in my blog’s theme, I’ve changed the theme that governs the appearance of the site, just as a precaution.  Fortunately the blog software I use, WordPress, uses CSS so changing the look of the blog is relatively simple. The new theme is called Fauna, one of the best free themes I’ve seen.

All the old content is still here. In fact, the new theme offers an improved archive page, which I encourage you to check out. I’m still learning my way around the new design, so you may notice tweaks here and there in the coming days. Or if I find something better, there might even be another wholesale change to the site.  Though I sincerely hope not– I have other things to do, believe it or not!  (Like actually writing a few more posts!)

Since this change was made on the fly, I haven’t had time to test it with all browsers. If you see anything really odd, please don’t assume I wanted it to look that way! Coincidentally, I’ve redesigned my professional website at slschramm.com.  That re-design was neither quick nor simple, and I’m very glad it’s finally launched.  I’d love to know what you think about both new designs.  Please drop me a line via e-mail to let me know what you think.  All opinions welcomed, positive or negative.

Last week Mark and I went to the final day of the exhibit on Modernism at the Corcoran Museum downtown. I’d love to tell you to go see it; I wish we hadn’t waited until the very last minute to go see the show. It was a top-quality blockbuster, organized by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London with material from mostly European collections.

When I say blockbuster, I’m not kidding. This show was huge. Room after room of posters, building plans, painting, sculpture, industrial design and more and more. We kept coming around corners into new sections of the exhibit saying, “There’s more?”

Favorite things:

• A rotary airplane engine designed by W.O. Bentley in 1917. This was the same Bentley who later founded the luxury car company. The gleaming aluminum engine was all shiny fins and smoothly machined surfaces. Gorgeous.
• Several groupings of elegant modernist china, always in pure white. I’m a sucker for this stuff. See my article on Eva Zeisel.
• “Der Mensch als Industriepalast”, a German poster showing the internal organs of a man organized like a factory. It was both funny and stylish.
• Short clips from Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” shown on a gallery wall. I own a restored DVD copy of “Metropolis” myself, and I’m fascinated by every single image from that film.
• Continuous profile of Il Duce, by Giuseppe Bertelli. A Futurist work, this bust creates the illusion of Mussolini’s famous profile spinning through 360 degrees, like something cut on a lathe. The Futurists were all Fascists, and I know I shouldn’t like their art so much, but I do anyway.

After spending the full afternoon there, I was really amused by how little styles have changed in architecture and domestic design since modernism was new in the 1920s. There was much space devoted to Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer and others of that ilk. Any of these homes or items of furniture could have come straight out of last month’s Dwell magazine. It really brought home the fact that modernism nowadays is in fact deeply conservative!

My one regret about the exhibit was that it was very weak in covering American modernism. They had a small assortment of items from the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and little else. But that’s a small gripe since I can see American Modernism lots of places. This collection of so many items from Germany, Italy and other European museums was all fresh and new to me. If you missed the exhibit, I can at least really recommend the catalogue. That link will take you to the hardcover version on Amazon, but the paper-bound edition may still be available directly from the Corcoran.

So have you seen the new logo for the 2012 London Olympics? Wow. This is so bad that when I first saw it I thought it was a joke. So bad that a petition circulated to protest it gathered almost 50,000 signatures in England within a few days. So bad it’s precipitated discussion in the House of Commons. There have even been warnings that an animated commercial using it actually caused epileptic seizures among viewers. No, I’m not joking! And this was some very expensive design work– 400,000 pounds worth, according to this story in the UK Telegraph. That’s almost $800,000 for something that just makes me want to scratch my head. Are the pink rectangles meant to suggest bodies? Islands? According to the Telegraph, “A year’s research, including consumer testing, went into creating the jagged new logo, intended as a modern take on the Olympic colours. Organisers have hailed it as dynamic and vibrant but critics say it resembles a ‘toileting monkey’ or a ‘broken swastika’.”

I’m told the pink bits are actually meant to signify the date of this upcoming event: 2012.

But perhaps I’m being unfair. According to a BBC news website:

Michael Wolff, who co-founded designers Wolff Olins, which created the logo, although he is no longer with the company, said it had not been “done justice” and blamed Olympic organisers for not publicising it properly.

So there you have it. A designer who believes bad design can be overcome if it’s simply publicized enough.

It’s been a busy week, so posts have been scarce I’m afraid. My teacher and mentor at the yoga studio is away for two weeks and I’ve picked up several of her classes as a substitute. I’m having great fun but it has taken away from time at the desk for writing.

So to tide you over until I get back to original material, here are some cool links I’ve had fun with in recent days:

Little sis turned me on to the Gama-Go website. Connie is a connoisseur of Japanese pop culture and design, and this kind of thing is right up her alley. There’s something very appealing about this little guy. And check out the design for one of their men’s tee shirts:

Another fun site I’ve recently added to my Design Links is Plan 59. The site collects and sells images from mid-century commercial design. These images straddle the line between cool and kitsch for me.

And high on the “just plain neat-o” meter is this site managed by Nikon. The Nikon Small World competition collects scientific photos of extremely tiny things. Some of these images are startlingly beautiful. See last year’s winners here.

I’ll be back with more gentle ravings next week.  Have a nice weekend.

Oh, this is cool. This is from a series of photos on Flickr that look like something Escher would have drawn. I’ve no idea how it was done. Although the photographer explains it, I don’t mind saying it was over my head. Please check out the full Recursive Series here to see a flash slide show.

I hate to be mean, but this may in fact be the ugliest piece of furniture I’ve ever seen.

This is a hand-painted chest that retails for a cool $7,800 from the Mackenzie-Childs Company in Aurora, New York. My mother, who lives in upstate New York, had warned me about this company, but words failed to give me an adequate picture of the kind of god-awful design we are dealing with here. I pulled a catalog out of the mailbox the day before yesterday and slapped my forehead. Now I see what she was talking about! I wouldn’t have believed it unless I’d seen it with my own eyes!

The company calls this little item a “Belvedere Bombay Chest”. (And here I thought the term was bombe, from the French.) By their own admission, the makers have applied no fewer than five decorative techniques to create this mind-bogglingly awful thing: “marbleized painted top, decoupaged flowers, gesso stripes, mirror mosaic front, and seashell encrusted foot board.” Not to mention the opalescent drawer pulls, silver rococo carvings and gilt bun feet. Wow. It’s so over-the-top awful it achieves a kind of legendary quality.

How does one even conceive of something like this? Does one of the M-C “artisans” just start painting and keep adding stuff at random until the whistle blows at the end of the day? “I know—a mirrored mosaic will really add that special something to this piece!”

I asked my mother, who’s been to the company headquarters, who was buying this stuff. I wanted to know, did they look crazy? She said no. They just looked like they had more money than they knew what to do with. Well, obviously. Then she told me the capper. This manufacturer has achieved cult status because of patronage by a small circle of taste-setting entertainment industry luminaries. Among them, Rosie O’Donnell. Well, say no more.

Don’t you love art supplies? When I was a girl, I used to love the beginning of school mostly because it meant new school supplies– scissors, pens, crayons and pencils. Now that I’m all grown up, I thought I was past all that, but I find I’m not. Not at all.

Maybe it’s because I’m a student again. I recently began a program to become certified to teach yoga. I now have a lot of homework. Mostly it’s reading homework, but we also have something that’s both teaching and fun– an anatomy coloring book. You color in the anatomical features along with their names, and it’s a great way to learn how things interconnect. But it’s also really fun. I reconnected with my former love of coloring books in a big way.

At first I thought I could get by with 12 colors. After all, this is business, I thought. No sense getting all wild and crazy. But I quickly found I was completely dissatisfied with just twelve colors. I couldn’t make the illustrations as aesthetically pleasing as I wanted to, and it bugged me. Within a week I was back at the store buying a set of 32 colored pencils. They fill a cup on my desk.

And just sitting there, they are calling me to do more. Soon I found myself thinking of other things to do with them. I began doodling on the desk calendar I use as a blotter. First just stripes of color to see what shades worked well together. Then little pictures began to appear in the margins.

On Sunday, Mark and I went to the Sackler Museum of Asian Art here in Washington. A new exhibit opened last week with more than 100 artworks by Hokusai, the great Japanese artist best known for the woodblock print called "The Great Wave". It is undoubtedly one of the best art exhibits I have ever seen. Hokusai lived to be almost 90, and worked prolifically his whole life. The exhibit was full of sketches, paintings, prints and illustrations in almost every medium. A great many of the works were drawn from nature. One that particularly captivated me was a painting of spring greens in an overturned hat. Each work made me think "here was a man who really saw– who truly looked closely at the world."

Last week I bought a new journal to use as this year’s garden log. For more than ten years I’ve used a looseleaf binder to keep notes about my gardens– what’s growing or blooming at a given time, what I planted, what I used against various pests. But I’ve gotten bored with the format, and last year I was halfhearted at best in keeping my usual notes. The new journal has a sewn binding, and pages that are lined on the right side and blank on the opposite side. Already I’ve been sketching the daffodils blooming in my garden, coloring in the many shades of yellow with my new pencils. To say my sketches are amateurish is being more than kind, but I had so much fun, I hardly care. No-one will see this log but me, and I can’t wait to try illustrating my vegetables, my flowers, the insects and birds in my garden. I have no aspirations to art, but I can at least enjoy the effort of looking a little more closely at my own world.

This ad is from the October 1929 issue of Vanity Fair magazine. I seized this copy in a junk shop years ago, and have treasured it ever since. Knowing what happened at the end of that pivotal month, I read the articles and advertisements with fascination for a vanished moment of prosperity and modern aspiration. It also intrigues me by raising the question, what is modern?

In some ways the content of the magazine is surprisingly familiar. Vanity Fair was a magazine with a mixture of coverage of the arts and popular entertainment. There are photos of film stars, including Greta Garbo, Claudette Colbert, Conrad Veidt and others. Whereas now Vanity Fair relies on Annie Leibovitz and Herb Ritts as house photographers, the luminaries of those days were captured by Edward Steichen. Their styles are not at all dissimilar. Steichen created dramatically posed portraits with studio lighting and few props. Liebovitz uses more props, but the drama and artificiality of her photos have very similar effect.

But there are other, higher-culture elements that don’t seem so familiar. New York stage stars receive the same adulation as movie actors. The literary contributions seem to have aged the most noticeably. Essays from Aldous Huxley, Sherwood Anderson and Harold Nicolson are dated in both style and subject. A piece by Paul Geraldy includes the aphorism, “You ask everything from your wife. But do not ask too much…I have been happy in love since I realized that a woman could never be an intellectual comrade.”

The advertisements are the best part. They are gorgeous things, with lavish illustrations and carefully composed typography. They sell with a combination of snobbery and style. Most of the high-end brands are very familiar: Van Cleef & Arpels, Tiffany, Johnston and Murphy shoes, Gorham silver, Abercrombie & Fitch, Guerlain perfumes. There are many ads for “modern” electric tools and conveniences, with technology easily recognizable even eighty years later. The desirable gadgets include clocks, radios, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, cameras and telephones.

Automobiles are more of a mixed bag. While survivors such as Cadillac, Ford and Buick are represented, so are others that are familiar only because they are associated with bygone luxury: Pierce Arrow, Packard, Deusenberg. And clothes have changed so much that whole categories of garment are now gone. While magazines today still advertise scarves, shoes and coats, I am charmed by the ads in here for the vanished elegance of spats, suspenders and hats.

Most things are advertised with a strong whiff of snob appeal, which can have laughable results when the modern reader hits some unfamiliar product names: “A long run and a fast fox…then back for coffee and bacon, talk and Spud cigarettes!” No, I’m not making this up—look here.

Seven years after this issue, the magazine folded. The market for these pricey consumer goods had shrunk during the depression and the public’s interest in this kind of frothy mixture of art and literature had waned. Vanity Fair as a title was dead until 1983, when it was successfully revived for readers enjoying the prosperity and pretension of the Reagan years.

In a few days I’ll come back to this issue with a short rumination on the 1950’s concept of “modern”.

I have surprised myself by developing a love for mid-century design. By that I mean furniture and industrial design meant to look “modern” in the decades from the late forties to the mid sixties. I’m not alone in my infatuation. After years of seeing this kind of stuff reviled and ridiculed, and available for cheap in thrift shops across the country, I’ve realized that it’s getting easier to find others who share my interest. There’s even a magazine about the tract houses built to contain this kind of furniture, Atomic Ranch. I’ve been a subscriber since Issue 2, but I have mixed emotions about this style’s renewed hipness. This only means the stuff will get more expensive from now on.

Recently I was delighted to inherit a group of 1960-vintage Danish Modern furniture from my parents. No, my parents are fine, thanks. They just needed to make room for some large pieces of furniture inherited from my grandmother’s house as she moved into an assisted living facility and out of her farmhouse. My mother was delighted that I wanted the stuff. It hasn’t worked with her own house for years, but it works very well in my own 40’s-modern style house.

The surfboard coffee table in walnut with tapered legs is a classic. I could wish my folks hadn’t refinished the surface of it, but I suppose after receiving wear and tear from kids and dog in its early years it may have needed a touch-up. The buffet/sideboard is in excellent shape. It was only used for the “good” china and linens and lived in the formal dining room that we rarely used, so it’s in pristine condition. The third and final piece passed on to me is a floor lamp in walnut and brass. The wood is in good shape and it has a nice modern tapered proportion. But the original lampshade was long gone, and the pleated replacement that my mother had chosen worked much better with her own eclectic mix of antiques and colonial style pieces than it did in my house. I thought it was completely out of keeping with the original spirit of the lamp.

Fortunately for me and the lamp, the revival of interest in the mod served me well. I easily found a company in Texas called Moonshine Shade that will custom make the lampshade of your dreams. I spent hours poring over their elaborate website, choosing exactly the combination of options that matched my mental vision. My dream shade arrived just three weeks later, and now every time I walk by that lamp I get a little buzz of satisfaction. Cool, I think to myself. It goes perfectly with the framed albums of fifties- and sixties-era jazz records on the wall behind it. Vinyl is the wave of the future, don’t-cha know. But that’s a topic for another blog entry.

If you live near Washington, have any interest in design, and you haven’t yet been to the Hillwood Museum to see the Eva Zeisel exhibit, you must go soon. This is one of the best temporary exhibits I’ve seen in a long while, and it closes after December 4.

Eva Zeisel, now considered one of the twentieth century’s great industrial designers, was born in Hungary in 1906. After beginning her career there, she went to the Soviet Union from 1932 through 1936 and designed porcelain and china for the Lomonosov Porcelain Factory in the twenties and thirties. While her earlier tableware designs done in Germany for the Schramberger Majolika factory are charming Deco-influenced designs, the later work she did for Lomonosov 1933 Intourist tea service were fairly horrible in my opinion. Chunky shapes that were designed to be easily shipped, views of monumental statues of Lenin, ugh. I can’t imagine wanting to see Lenin waving his right arm over my breakfast table every day. After years of work at Lomonosov, the Soviets accused her of being anti-Stalinist and threw her into prison for more than a year, much of it spent in solitary confinement. Friends negotiated for her release, and she emigrated shortly thereafter to the United States, where most of her best work has been done (in my opinion).

Take a look at the photo above, which shows the smooth curving forms of her well-named Classic Century table service. This service is still available through Crate and Barrel. It virtually defines the term modern, but despite the pure white, un-filigreed forms, the shapes are organic and warm. This kind of design never goes out of style. She followed it with the Town and Country collection. These colors and forms seem trendier to me and more closely linked to mid-century styles and tastes. But you can’t help but smile when you see the salt and pepper shakers of this set, consciously modeled after the protective outlines of a mother with her child.

Eva Zeisel is still alive and still working in her New York studio. I wish I could afford some of her most recent work. She’s now working once more with the Lomonosov factory, and the new table service designed for them is in a smooth, transparent white porcelain with more of her signature organic shapes that just beg to be held. Hillwood is the first museum to acquire and exhibit the complete new design.

Eva Zeisel: The Playful Search for Beauty will be shown at the Hillwood Museum & Gardens through December 4. The Hillwood Museum is the former home of Marjorie Merriweather Post, and houses her extensive collection of Russian art and French furniture. Reservations are required to visit the museum. Call 1-877-HILLWOOD, or go to the museum website at www.hillwoodmuseum.org.

Hillwood Museum & Gardens
4155 Linnean Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20008
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 10:00 am–5:00 pm. Closed in January
Admission: Adults $12, Seniors $10, Students $7, Children 6–18, $5

To learn more about Eva Zeisel, an excellent place to begin is the Eva Zeisel Forum, which has a website with an extensive list of links to other sites that discuss or sell her designs.