Recommended Reading / 41.

Every Monday, words to start the week. 

This week: gorgeous words from Nagano-based photographer Mikio Hasui, courtesy of FvF.

My new photo series is on fogs. They are all white – just fog, with a bit of landscape. So when you go to the gallery, you walk into a room with white photos on the walls. When I went to shoot these images, it just happened to be foggy. I was thinking, I can’t shoot today. I couldn’t see anything, so I waited a bit for the fog to clear. When the fog lifted for one moment, I saw the mountain, covered with trees in bright autumnal colors. But I was thinking that if the fog wasn’t there, and it was just a mountain covered in autumnal leaves, the experience and shot would’ve been pretty boring. It was beautiful because it was hidden, and because it was only revealed for that one moment, just that one part of the mountain.

I felt like it was a metaphor for my life. I’m living in a fog. Even though I’m facing forward, I’m not sure which direction that is. I don’t belong to or work at a company, and I live life day by day. Sometimes I’m like, is this all right? Is this okay? But that’s the kind of thing everyone thinks about. I wonder what’s ahead. Work, marriage, kids – everyone has those questions. But when you’re inside the fog, when everything is foggy, you can’t see what’s ahead of you. When that fog lifts and you can see even a bit of something, you’ve got to believe in what you just saw, right? When the fog lifts, there’s that mountain covered in trees with beautiful leaves and colors – you can’t see it right now, but it’s there. You’ve got to believe in that.

Three more, just because:

-A bird-shaped treehouse.
-Jewelry made from blueberries and biscuits, chocolate and cherries. Also: clothing with patterns inspired by personal stories.
-My friend Sean Santiago, an editor at Refinery29, has launched a Kickstarter to fund his amazing queer zine, Cakeboy.

More recommended reading, here. Have a wonderful Monday — and thank you so much for your lovely comments on this weekend's birthday post. So happy and humbled to have you as readers.

POV: Thirty.

POV ("point of view") is a series that addresses many of the same themes covered in my Equals Record column: growing up, saying yes to adventure, learning to embrace a quarter-life crisis. While my previous column focused largely on ideas, POV focuses on moments - glimpses, glances, tiny stories.

Every now and then, my seven-year-old niece and I play a game.

“Guess how old I am,” she says. And I pretend to think.  “Three,” I say, and she shakes her head.  “Five?” I ask, and she tells me I’m getting closer.  “Hmm,” I say, pausing for effect. “Twenty-two?” And she shrieks.

A couple weeks ago, we had dinner as a family, walking afterward to an ice cream shop on the Lower East Side for dessert. “Guess how old I am,” I said to my niece. She’d just finished tying my wrist to hers with a black elastic hair tie.

She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “A million?”

“Guess again.”

She looked at me and pulled at the elastic band, daring it to snap. "Was I close?" she asked.

Wild & Free.

With its patchwork houses dotting over 7,000 acres of Northwest Spanish mountainside, Matavenero is something of an eco-village paradise. Once abandoned, the village is now inhabited by a community wishing to preserve its lush surroundings, and who rebuilt its ramshackle houses and instituted cable transport for more convenient access. I've always loved alternative living spaces (case in point: these staggering Swedish tree houses I was lucky enough to cover for VICE), and these photos by Kevin Faingnaert have been perfect daydream fodder for this hot, humid NYC Thursday. See more — including villager portraits— here.




Visit Kevin Faingnaert's website, here. New POV to come tomorrow!

Chelsea Miller on FvF.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Chelsea Miller, a Brooklyn-based knife-maker (and a neighbor of mine) for Freunde von Freunden. Chelsea's windowless Williamsburg studio, wallpapered in palm trees and festooned with plastic flamingos, is about the size of a toolshed — and it feels like one, too. It's not short on warmth, though, and neither is Chelsea, whose hand-crafted knives are made entirely from repurposed materials – wood from her family’s home in Vermont, old mechanics’ files, horseshoe rasps.

She says, "I wanted to be an actress for as long as I can remember, which is why I moved to New York when I was 19. I wanted to be a storyteller. And I feel that I am, in a way. Knife-making is another form of storytelling. Take a look at a knife – there’s a story behind that wood. There’s moisture in the grain; there are markings. Each one is so different. And since my knives are made from other tools, there’s a story there, too. They belonged to other trades altogether. And, of course, my own personal story is part of each piece. These things have lives beyond what we can see."

   

Find the interview in its entirety on Freunde von Freunden. Photos by my talented friend Nick Vorderman.

Other recent work on FvF: Nawab Khan / Linda Derschang / Henry Hargreaves. (More, here.)

Recommended Reading / 40.

Every Monday, words to start the week. 

This week: a short film about Neil Harbisson, a colorblind artist with a surgically-implanted antenna that allows him to hear color.  Harbisson hears hues of cities, the sky, human faces. (As it turns out, people, no matter their skin tone, are all varying shades of orange.) "Now that I can hear color," Harbisson says, "I can relate [sounds] to an object or a color. When I hear the G sharp of a taxi...that, to me, is related to limes. It sounds just like a lime." Watch (and hear) more at The Atlantic. Film by Greg Brunkalla; photo by Lars Norgaard for The Guardian. 

Three more, just because:

-Posing with polar bears: a long-lost pastime. 

-Watermelon ice cream that's coconut-based and exquisitely colored.

-Teju Cole's commentary on New York Magazine's coverage of the Cosby case is impressive and important: "We must fight rape culture, even in its allegedly mild manifestations, we must be grieved with the grief of those who commit the crime and those who benefit from a world built on such crimes, we must oppose men who wade in with stupid explanations and caveats and distractions, we must surrender the poisonous sentimentality that makes us believe a 'great artist' over a less well-known woman."

More recommended reading, here. So happy to be returning after a short break while I was traveling with family — and looking forward to sharing more about the trip tomorrow. Have a wonderful Monday in the meantime!