The World Examining Works

What We See

 

In 2006 we went to live in Morocco which was wonderful but felt a bit isolated. My son asked me if I had ever thought of starting a blog --which he explained was a WEB-LOG. 

So I started blogging ( sans photos) to record our rather different life there. So when we came back to New York, I continued blogging for all sorts of reasons.

In truth, I had become a shutterbug. My husband meanwhile was painting and painting and showing his work at a gallery in Chelsea and looking at things all the time.

Recently he asked me if he should start a blog to record images and ideas. An excellent idea. So he did, and it is here.

So here are both of us playing with images and looking at the world from the same spot but differently.

What would I do if I couldn't look out of the window?

As to what blogs are for.......well, they're for anything you want.

 

Weekend

 

 

Apps and gadgets prove splendid fun... the kitchen cupboards

lots of coffee

on our afternoon walk 

 

then Deniz came over and talked about Turkey

and brought us a splendid cake

to urge us to go there soon.

 

Aftermath/ Tuesday

 

 

The unexpected blizzard was pretty dramatic

and the aftermath messy and slushy. 23rd Street and 8th Avenue.

Nice to stand up high and admire the view, while others picked their way gingerly through narrow crevasses.

I decide I had better buy some rubber Welly-boots. Immediately.

Penn Station a madhouse of people milling about -- waiting and waiting for trains.

The snow was melting a bit. I set off to Macys to look for said boots. (What was I thinking?) Gustave Dore's illustations of Dante's Inferno had nothing on the shoe department. Acquired boots elsewhere. $26.

 

Everyone else had their boots on already

and the blue sky was reflected in the puddles.

 

 

I was so sad to hear of Tessa Edwards' death. She painted, mothered, travelled,  blogged and supported grandmothers in Africa who live in awful poverty. She wrote me lovely letters and enjoyed my books. She sent me her own copy of a book about English landscape in literature -- a subject she knew was dear to my heart. I know she did similar thoughtful things for all her many friends in both the blogworld and real world. I had known she was ill for some time. Still it's shock, and I feel blessed and priviledged to have known her, however briefly.

Other Places: A Writing Workshop in Morocco

 I'm very excited to announce that I'm going to be teaching a writing workshop in conjunction with Angela Ritchie's ACE CAMPS at Maryam and Chris's enchanting Peacock Pavilions just outside Marrakesh early next spring  - February 19th- 26th to be precise - just when it's nasty and cold here and the blossoms are coming out there.......

 

 

This first picture is a collage of a window in the Bahia Palace, a camel bone mirror in the hall of our little house on derb Djedid,  the very same house where Blinky, the little cat below, was born.

Blinky now lives in the country at Peacock Pavilions.

I hope that the workshop at Peacock Pavilions, with its visits to Marrakesh itself and to Essouira on the Atlantic coast, will be a window into another world, a time for reflection and a door to greater creativity. I have lots of plans and ideas brewing.

Below is a collage of some of my memories of the two years I spent in the magical city.

 

Cats, art, fruit, flowers --above all else COLOR.

This is the house of a collector of Saharan artifacts.

 
 This is rue riad zitoune djedid (Olive House Road)

For more pictures and an account of Holly Becker's recent Decor8 design workshop at Peacock Pavilions

go here

My workshop is limited to ten participants. Four places remain open.

Please contact me at elizabethwix@hotmail.com for more details.

Earthbound and Ethereal

Yesterday afternoon

Susanna and I shared the Napoleon above at Bergamot, having spent the morning failing to add stuff to this blog's sidebar. Typepad makes things infinitely more complicated than Blogger. Anyone got any idea why? Typepad has nicer designs. Blogger is easier to navigate in general.

It was a very large Napoleon.

Then

we wandered by the window of Rootstein mannequins where fairies awash in purple and pink gossamer wafted ........

Nexus of Greed and Complete Lunacy

A timid flower on 21st Street, rain-spattered and presumably rather chilly.

I do get weird e-mails. See below: 

You and I go back a long way‏

From:	Darcy Burner and Democracy for America (info@democracyforamerica.com)
Sent:	Tue 3/30/10 12:51 PM
To:	elizabethwix@hotmail.com

Elizabeth -  I feel like we're old friends.  Because before I became the Executive Director of the Progressive Congress Action Fund and started working on buildi....... I do not know anyone called Darcy. Who on earth thought it would be a good idea to open thus? Oh, well. Outside the florist on 21st street  So next I opened an e-mail telling me what tasteful blogs I had, and that if I included the words 'TV stand' in a post I could have up to $100 worth of merchandise. I think they wanted a 'link' which is something ( apparently) of value. They wanted me to put it on the blog about Morocco where we used to live. However hard I tried,I could think of no possible way I could include anything about TV stands since we lived in a 500 year old house with no TV....   My notice board: my brother, me and my cousin Sue circa 1954, the table in Morocco, a card of a painting by Edward Ardizzone sent me by Bee. So then I started thinking about filthy lucre and politics and bribery and ethics and graft and impartiality and advertising and money and influence-peddling and trade in general. I wonder what Reya would make of it all? She's rather good a that sort of thing.  ps When I print this up, some of the words are cut off. I wonder why?

 

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Signs of Spring and Drowning in Stuff to Read

The reflection of St. Columba's church looks somewhat like a butterfly.  

I'm really not interested in cars except when they make nice abstracy shapes.

That aside, I was trilled yesterday when I saw my first snowdrops, which are awfully stale news to people who live in England and have a nice long, slow spring and crocuses and daffodils and things like that. The rose is budding....

The seasons change and Berch has painted the Moonstruck diner window to suit. Blogland, like kindergarten and nursing homes, always celebrates the things that people who are busy with real jobs don't have time for.... 

The apartment is swilling with things lying open that I'm in the middle of reading which include, in no particular order:

last week's New Yorker

the week before that's New Yorker

Yesterday's Sunday Times Book review

Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities

The Persephone catalogue 

Travel and Leisure Magazine

Better Homes and Gardens ( colloquially"Better Homes than Yours" )

I think I enjoyed books more when we lived in a country where it was very hard to get books in English and each one, however trashy, was treasured and savored.  

A Meditation on Breakfast

A breakfast at the Neue Galerie last week.

The texture of bread: a feast in itself.

A counter stool in Huntington, Long Island. How white things and metal contrast well with food.

A rather humble breakfast at home.

This delightful little pewter creamer courtesy of Willow Manor. To be used as a prompt for short fiction.  Herewith and very short indeed: 

    It was the jug Sophia wanted most: the wreath of laurels, the look, almost, of an upturned helmet. How elegant it would make her table!

    She knew, of course, that Annabel would have it. 

    "Gosh, Soph, why don't you take the candlestick? Grandma promised me the jug."

    "She did? When?  She never told me."

    "Well, she did." Annabel put the little pitcher in a box with all the other exquisite little things, sealed the box with tape, and waved goodbye to her sister.

ShadowShotSunday

The Typepad homepage says post what interests you. What interests me is probably beyond dull to most people. Herewith a yellow cloth hanging from under the High Line. Does it signify anything? It is eye candy of a sort -- like William Carlos Williams' enigmatic red wheelbarrow.

For an interesting post about what makes a good blog, visit Sarah Laurence.

Such an avalanche of yellow lately and patterns that repeat themselves.

This is an example of something that doesn't interest me in the least -- except to look at. They are doing complicated things to the traffic lights with cables and wires. I have absolutely zero interest in knowing how these work-- but how awful it would be if they didn't work and all these systems fell apart. (See Haiti) So I look at all this and feel guilty. Bee had an excellent recent post about being a Luddite and slow to learn tecchie stuff. Anyway...

This man was washing the windows of Dallas Barbecue. I'm sure he didn't have the least idea that his sweater echoes the color of the chairs inside.

For lots of other Shadowshots go here  

Invited to the Ball

What to wear? What to wear? I am invited to the virtual ball at Willow Manor. You can come too; I wish you would. I'm sending the ghost of my former self with Oscar to escort her.

 

So unfailingly witty but full of insight too. He recently said, "A man can be happy with any woman so long as he does not love her." Hmm.....

But the problem with the dress! Like Gilda Radner, nowadays "I base my fashion taste on what doesn't itch." 

I have found the dress. Circa 1870 and since restored.

The slippers are way too demure but all I could get on the 'net in a hurry. As dear Oscar says,"Only very shallow people don't judge by appearances." I hope  Linda Sue will introduce Tom Waits to me. I hope they don't laugh at me........

But no one will laugh at our car.......a Bugatti, of course. What fun we will all have!