victoria thorne

22.9.11

21.9.11

19.9.11

restore

milan

madonna della neve

2003 adaptation by the avogadro-pozzi firm | frescos from the beginning of the 16th century

photos: v thorne

14.9.11

finding beauty (in no particular order)

jean toomer, yale

barbara munsel

richard henry pratt, yale

mccartneys, taschen

london, near-ish st. john's

mary corita

moosehock boots, maine

13.9.11

To become attached to something or somebody: this is always a curious state.

Today, I listened to three older women fight for their right to sunlit yellow walls, 'though they seemed curiously unaware that the true sun had been blocked, utterly (with flattened cardboard boxes, at that!), from the windows above them. The yellow walls the ladies prepared to do battle for were a weak stand-in for the sun, but they were the stand-in that had become an accustomed, unrealized sun-substitute.

"You cannot paint the wall gray! It will be dismal and unhappy and perfectly awful on a cloudy day!" said the older ladies as they practically stomped their feet on the floor.

In truth, the gray in question was actually a lovely bluish, green-tinged, hazy sort of floating cloud color, and the yellow they were fighting for was a sad, dilapidated faux-Tuscan romp. But it was a yellow to which they had become attached, and for which they felt such strong admiration and longing that they practically yelled, in the quiet coffee shop, that this was simply not to be accepted.

The color these three sweet ladies believed they saw was sunny and brilliant (and it might once have been, but that once was long since past). It was the color they had clearly come to expect each day while drinking their quite-decent cup of espresso. For twenty minutes each morning, the lovely ladies felt they owned a tiny bit of real estate on the main street of an insistently charming little town in California surrounded by hills and real sunshine and happy jogging people, or people who were dressed as happy jogging people.

They owned the yellow walls, too, for those twenty minutes. Perhaps they felt they had found, finally, a way to make their sun stand still...but I am with Andrew Marvell and believe we cannot make our sun stand still, yet we will make it run.

My guess is that the sweet hazy green-tinged-blue cloud gray will suit them just fine, in time. It might take a bit of getting used to and several dozen espresso-filled mornings spent pondering the sky.

I think we will give them just a bit of a spicy clean clear yellow, too, so that their sun does not turn to dust.

[this was the first post ever on the blog.
i'd just finished working with two magnificent
(new) cafe owners & was pondering the response
to a fresh color we'd introduced. (4 years later,
i'm happy to say that it has been well-received
and still looks awfully fresh.)

the blog? the blog has been a good
exercise. and Mary? what did she have to do
with color and Andrew Marvell, los gatos and
blogging and who knows what else? she is from
Munich, this Mary, and had been visited over the
summer.

if i'd started a blog to (a) just figure out how
to blog (b) jot down a few notes about things i was
working on or thinking about (c) communicate with
those far away whom i missed desperately, or
(d) all of the above- well, i suppose Mary and Marvell
were good to start with. happy about my foresight, there.

& if you answered (d) you were right.]

photo: munich, 2008ish

11.9.11

somewhere over new jersey

(on a flight from jfk this summer.)

taking photos of clouds. with my

iphone. why? because. because i

never cease to be amazed at this big

country of ours. the skies, the roads,

the crickets that sing loudly in our

neighborhood at night. the way

californians tell you it's all good,

no worries (even if they're worried).

the way new yorkers are in a hurry.

the way you can get moon-pies and

mallomars at a highway rest stop &

you can find yourself fighting tears

when a bunch of kids sing about fruited

plains. i never stop loving how we can

fight over our amendments (which give

us the rights to fight over them) and tell

people what we really think (in print, in

black and white, in color; we can tell

people, and no one has the right to tell

us not to) and i never stop loving how

we keep trying to do the right thing.

we do, almost all of us- and if we keep doing

so, we'll probably get there. to the right thing.

and, in the goodness of that, we can keep

being the place that people from all over

the world come to for the freedom that

jefferson and lincoln and m.l.k. and you &

i talk about. and depend on. & live for.

10.9.11

what to do

No one can alter truth.

What we can and should do is to search for truth and then serve it when we have found it.

-Maximilian Kolbe

Kolbe refused to see an enemy in any man.

His goodness caused those whom one might
not expect to do so to assume a more human
stance. For this reason, I have been reading
quite a bit about him lately. What better
lesson might there be?

That- if we choose to- we can go beyond ourselves
and reach for truth.

That- when we find it- we will know what to do with it.

7.9.11

physics

When I read a book
on Einstein's physics of which
I understood nothing,
it doesn't matter:
that
will make me
understand
something else.

-picasso

6.9.11

3 ways to make yourself happy

Even better than chocolate, and lasts longer:

help out

a magnificent group of people
who are swimming to
make
a difference...

Abilities United
is in the San Francisco Bay area-
it's
a non-profit agency
that provides education, training and
support so that
people
can
live
more independently. HERE.

(the other 2 ways? earl grey & rose otto, at miette in the ferry building)

...seeing that it was a soft October night, Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

this, purely wonderful- to hear eliot read prufrock

while working-

or not working-

glad to be of use

stockings: barbara munsel

on being light of heart: please take note of

those flowers.

glimpsed in the brilliant here,
via the wonderful there

5.9.11

what we can do

...is seek
truth

-m. kolbe

3.9.11

true

only love is creative
-maximilian kolbe

31.8.11

that indescribable blue of autumn

I took a long walk north of the town, out into the pastures where the land was so rough that it had never been ploughed up, and the long red grass of early times still grew shaggy over the draws and hillocks. Out there I felt at home again. Overhead the sky was that indescribable blue of autumn; bright and shadowless, hard as enamel. To the south I could see the dun-shaded river bluffs that used to look so big to me, and all about stretched drying cornfields, of the pale-gold colour, I remembered so well. Russian thistles were blowing across the uplands and piling against the wire fences like barricades. Along the cattle-paths the plumes of goldenrod were already fading into sun-warmed velvet, grey with gold threads in it.

-my antonia,
willa cather

yhbhs + lama

so excellent

please go & tell me how

magnificent it all is.

grasshopper & friends

grasshopper chair & friends
from
Tod Donobedian
in
San Francisco

27.8.11

on the back of a plain white postcard

i think my reaction is that the question was
too mighty to answer offhandedly and i
don't have time to answer any other way.
-john updike to james martin

24.8.11

candid

e.g. a stamp for this letter

never exaggerate.
never say more than
you really mean.
- c. s. lewis

"Dear Joan, Hurrah! The essay on Easter is a promising bit of work; the sentences are clear and taut and don't sprawl. You'll be able to write prose alright. As for what you are saying, I think you are exaggerating a bit at the end. Everything I need is in my soul? The Heck it is! Or if so, it must contain many virtues and a great deal of wisdom which neither I nor anyone else could ever find there. Very little of what I need is present in my soul. I mean, even things of the soul's own sort, like humility or truthfulness. And it certainly does not in any obvious sense contain a number of other things which I need at the moment: e.g. a stamp for this letter. Never exaggerate. Never say more than you really mean..." [C. S. Lewis, Letters to Children]