“Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair.” ~Unknown
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Archives
Yvonne Reichmuth
Oct 25, ’18
9:42 AM
Excerpt from an interview by Tanya König from CNN
You don’t follow seasons. You do one main collection a year. What is the main idea behind that?
I don’t really believe in the system with the seasons anymore. I just think it went way too fast, there are way too many collections, and I don’t want to be repetitive, and I think it takes time to really develop a new idea. Not just to have the time for a great design but also make sure the fit is perfect and the quality is perfect so I’d rather do less and do those pieces really well.
Is mass production the opposite of style?
I wouldn’t say it’s the opposite of style but it’s just not a way I feel comfortable working with. Because I really started with this whole craft because I like the material, I like the crafting itself, I really enjoy doing the pieces as well, so I don’t want to be on the computer and order 3 million pieces and I think its not sustainable the way how we shop and sell, how we produce, and the way we do it it’s different in a lot of ways. We also don’t release a collection, put it
I feel like that’s an insult to your design because I want to do a design that’s timeless and that’s just as attractive two years after I released it. So people can choose which piece they like the most based upon their personal taste, depending on the style they’re looking for and not because it’s Fall/Winter 2017 or whatever.
R1.
Oct 24, ’18
12:48 AM
“Grief is not an enlightenment program for a select few. No one needs intense, life-changing loss to become who they are “meant” to be. The universe is not casual in that way: you need to become something, so life gives you this horrible experience in order to make it happen. On the contrary: life is call-and-response. Things happen, and we absorb and adapt. We respond to what we experience, and that is neither good nor bad. It simply is. The path forward is integration, not betterment.
“You didn’t need this. You don’t have to grow from it, and you don’t have to put it behind you. Both responses are too narrow and shaming to be of use. Life-changing events do not just slip quietly away, nor are they atonements for past wrongs. They change us. They are part of our foundation as we live forward.”
It’s ok that you’re not ok, Megan Devine
Ultima
Aug 17, ’18
2:02 PM
My vision for the future is comprised of positive experiences that intertwine my ‘personal’ and ‘professional’ lives into a single life structure. Because of this, the long-held notion of “work-life” balance is significantly lessened, and at its extreme, no longer required. By thinking strategically, I am able to spend the majority of my energy on activities that pay dividends over both the short and long-term. A continuous and purposeful stream of explicit and implicit challenges allows my mind to expand at an accelerated rate. With this expansion comes possibilities, and possibilities spark further action towards an ideal state called “Ultima”. My relationships are continuously expanding, but only at a rate where the relationships themselves are developing at a natural and lasting pace. My ability to see the unique qualities of each person and strive towards relationships that are, at their core, genuine, helps build strong partnerships that ultimately become central figures in a life structure built around growth, energy, complexity, awareness,
– Personal notes (January 2010)
Questions of Reliability
Aug 16, ’18
1:46 AM
“He was good, I believed, at heart. Or mainly. He was kind, or could be kind. He knew things. But I was also certain that I knew things he didn’t and could see how he could be led wrong and be wrong that way all his life. “Niall will come to no good end,” my mother said a day after his letter came. Something had disappointed her. Something transient or displaced in him. Something had been attractive to her about Niall in her fragile state, and been attractive to me, in my own rare state. But you couldn’t bank on what Niall was, which was the word my poor father used. That was what you looked for, he thought, in the people you wanted closest to you. People you could bank on. It sounds easy enough. But if only—and I have thought it a thousand times since those days, when my mother and I were alone together—if only life would turn out to be that simple.”
“Displaced” by Richard Ford
Baseline
Jul 15, ’18
6:10 PM
“But if there’s one single thing that has made the difference between partners who have hope and partners who are struggling, it’s this: we – the ones with ADHD – have to own it. We have to say to ourselves and our partners: “Some of the things I do don’t work for us. They don’t work for the family, for my job, for me. I want to change them.”
That’s it. That’s the baseline. There are many different ways to go from there: couples counseling, education about ADHD, medication, support groups, and forgiveness and growth. There’s no one-size-fits-all “next step,” but if we can’t at least do this – if we can’t at least say “something has to change” – there’s nowhere we can go.
ADDA – We All Want to Be Heard
False Imitation
Jul 15, ’18
1:03 AM
“[…] Governor Cuomo praised the design of the broad, bland new stations to the New York Times as a “public space where community can gather and where culture and shared civic values are celebrated,” and, at a news conference, predicted that “this is just the beginning of a new period of rebirth.”
What actually happened was that the design of the new subway stations was outsourced to assorted stars of the modern art world, most of whom not one New Yorker in ten thousand would likely recognize by name or achievement. One of them, Chuck Close, filled his station with mosaic portraits of “New York artists who have formed Mr.Close’s wide circle,” which includes Lou Reed and Kara Walker along with Cecily Brown, Philip Glass, Alex Katz, several younger artists he favored, and two self-portraits.
The artist Vik Muniz did Close one better, providing three dozen images of various friends, relatives, and cultural celebrities dressed up, reported the Times, like “normal people,” including “the restauranteur Daniel Boulud holding a bag with a fish tail sticking out; the designer, actor, and man-about-town Waris Ahluwalia”; and Mr.Muniz himself, “in a Rockwell-esque scene of him tripping, spilling papers from his briefcase,” as well as his son, dressed “in a tiger suit, like a Times Square mascot on lunch break.” Isn’t it marvelous? The artists are depicting themselves and their celebrity friends imitating us, waiting for a train and doing all the perfectly ordinary things that we ordinary people do?
The Death of a Once Great City, by Kevin Baker (Harper’s, July 2018)
Paying Attention
Jul 14, ’18
12:52 AM
“If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.” – Lao Tzu
Richter
Jul 2, ’18
2:50 PM
Quite early on, you were described as “inconsistent’, because you were always swapping levels, both in your subject matter and, even more, in your style. You have described yourself as ‘uncertain’. Or is some of it about proving to yourself and to others that you can do anything?
No, it isn’t that. Painting a copy of a photograph is something that can be learned. And there are so many conceivable kinds of artistic statement that I haven’t made – I’m relatively limited – a bit one-sided, in fact. Never anything but oil painting.
Inconsistency is simply a consequence of uncertainty, which I certainly do tend to suffer from – but then I also regard it as inevitable and necessary.
So perhaps uncertainty is the overriding theme?
Maybe. At all events, uncertainty is part of me; it’s a basic premise of my work. After all, we have no objective justification for feeling certain about anything. Certainty is for fools, or liars.
Posttraumatic Growth (6/17-6/18)
Jun 16, ’18
12:38 AM
“PTG is a cousin to resilience, but more of a thug: meaner, more brutal, more devastating – and more transformative. Rich Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun, psychologists at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, coined the term in 1995, when they noticed they some people did not recover from their traumatic experiences in a typically resilient fashion. Rather than return to their set point, everything about them radically changed: their worldviews, their goals in life, their friendships. […]
“The one thing that overwhelmingly predicts it is the extent to which you say, ‘My core beliefs were shaken,'” Calhoun adds.
“What kind of core beliefs? “The degree to which the world is just,” Tedeschi says, “or that people are benevolent or that the future is something that you can control. Beliefs about, basically, how life works.”
Life Reimagined, The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife, Barbara Bradley Hagerty