Categories
Character Finds

London Map

Isn’t this the best map ever? The lines for the streets have been taken out leaving only the typography of the streets (click on it to see larger version).

Via Rob, Rambling.

Categories
Character Design2

Green Magnolia Wreath

greenmagnolia

How gorgeous and overpriced.

$146 at Gardens.

Categories
Character Design2 Wishlist

Tod Table

tod

tod2

This is one of my all-time favorite tables for obvious reasons.

via Todd Bracher Studios.

Categories
Character Quotes

I look the way I look…

I look the way I look. There’s nothing I can do about that short of getting the knife out. I remember talking to Gary Oldman—we came up together years ago. We agreed we were basically a couple of pasty-faced Londoners, but if we got our foot in the door, we’d probably last longer than the pretty boys. So far I think that’s paid off.

– Tim Roth of Lie to Me (via Psychology Today).

Categories
Art & Photography Character Wishlist

Manshroom

manshruum

Love this print by Amy Ross. I’m definitely into more of the fairy-tail, wonderland pieces lately, and this one makes me want to pick a manshroom from the patch. Alas, it’s sold out. We always want we can’t have, eh?

Sold Out except $2000 version at 20 x 200.

Categories
Art & Photography Character Wishlist

Blue Bird

bluebird

Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous.

$35 at Office via Oh Joy!

Categories
Character Design2

Wood Wall Cabinet

cabinet

Gorgeous wood cabinet. I love furniture that has no feet and is attached to the wall…

via ATLITW.

Categories
Character Style Wishlist

Toscana Trapper Hat

Ooooh! This is the perfect cozy hat for a blizzardy winter in Wisconsin.

$168 at J. Crew.

Categories
Character Design2 Wishlist

Pinch Sofas

The sofas from Pinch Design are gorgeous. I’m in love with the classic styling with hints of irreverence, and loads of comfort.

$5000 at Pinch Design via Decor 8.

Categories
Art & Photography Character Wishlist

Brooklyn Blue

blue

Doesn’t this make you want to watch your neighbors out the window with a cup of tea warming your hands? So melancholy.

$30, via Simply Photo.

Categories
Art & Photography Character Wishlist

Franck Juery

franck

A Polaroid wonderland.

By Franck Juery via Please Sir.

Categories
Personal branding Self-management

The Corruption of Authenticity

The derision and drama on blogs, news and broadcast nowadays is entertaining, like a domino of tabloids back-to-back. And while we instinctively know that insistent self-actualization is an incredibly banal form of entertainment, it remains so vast in its infectiousness, and so strong in its self-referential feeding, that navel-gazing is now suffocating in its empire.

Let’s poke some holes for air.

You are not genuine because you told me of your heartbreak, or your success or your disease or your strengths or your weaknesses or miscarriage or move or relationship or promotion or demotion or disability or conflict or how your cat peed outside of its litter box.

Gross over-sharing is not encouraging or revolutionary or innovative. You are not absolved because you made what was once private now public.

Enough of the cultish drippy-rainbowed sentences: “What’s holding you back? Yourself;” “Motivation is first about taking that first step;” “Do whatever you want, your intuition will guide you;” “Force yourself to look inward;” “Start telling yourself positive things instead of negative things.”

Enough crowdsourcing your life’s misdeeds, your life’s lessons, your life’s minutiae. Enough with bogus empowerment, dramatics, and inflated realities in the name of support, transparency, attention, acceptance. That is not authenticity. That is allegiance to a culture of nineties motivational speeches.

“For me, the demand that everything be paraded in the public space and that there be no internal forum is a glaring sign of the totalitarianization of democracy,” philosopher Jacques Derrida maintains. “If a right to a secret is not maintained then we are in a totalitarian space.”

“Which is to say,” author Zadie Smith argues in Changing My Mind, “enough of human dissection, of entering the brains of characters, cracking them open, rooting every secret out!”

Authenticity is not about revealing it all, nor complete transparency, nor opening the door and shining a very bright light on every raised goosebump. Authenticity is not about blurring public with private. Authenticity is not about the flailing and flapping of our entire hearts and minds to an audience of mirrored hosts.

We have a right to our private lives. Dear God, we have a right to keep the corners of our lives to ourselves. And it is delicious to do so.

Gulp of Air.