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Favourite things
Stuff in the office
I try to fill my workspace with the things I care for; they make work that much more hospitable and pleasant (especially when you’re pulling late nights after everyone else has gone home!). So since I’ve already put up that picture of the wolf, here are a few more.
This is a little corner I’ve set up with all kinds of writing utensils. The large lacquer tray’s one of the sort used at Wacha (once my favourite Japanese restaurant, it has unfortunately since closed down). On it, starting at the upper left hand corner and going clockwise: a bottle of Aurora black ink; three J-series Esterbrooks from the 1950s, and a Lamy Safari (these pens do most of the work in the office); a pad of paper (a Teachers’ Day gift from a student); a little makie paperweight from Yamada Heiando; a small gridded Rhodia pad (I love their paper); and on it, a copper yatate (portable Japanese brush-and-ink holder) from the 19th century.
This painting’s next to it:
That’s an original painting of Couch Kelp by Janet Chui, from the book A Field Guide to Surreal Botany. I haven’t got room for a couch in my cubicle, so this will have to do.
And this old hawk is hiding in a corner behind the lamp:
It’s actually an old Japanese box that has seen considerable wear, and can’t really serve as anything more than decoration. But that’s a job it does very well.
More to come, when I get around to it…
Pewter, silver, lapis lazuli
I hammered out this little pewter bowl at Royal Selangor’s School of Hard Knocks yesterday. I’ve given it a good polishing, and love the liquid way it catches the light — a cross between moonlight and mother-of-pearl.
The pendant in the bowl, though, is by far more interesting. It’s a little something I bought Amy M. for her birthday, a simple lapis lazuli rectangle mounted in silver. It looks absolutely beautiful round her neck. She wore it all evening. I think I’ve chosen well.
Workhorses: 1970s Japanese steel black-striped pens
These steel Japanese pens all date from the 1970s. (more…)
Microscope and sextant
Diana and I visited a few stores of the junk-and-antique persuasion in Jakarta, and came away with these: a thoroughly elegant brass-and-steel microscope from Beck-Kassel CBS, and a little replica sextant marked “Kelvin & Hughes, London, 1917″ (yeah, right). Diana kept the microscope. I took the sextant.
Neither piece is functional, but they’re both quite pretty sitting on a desk. Here’s the little sextant on my table at home, paired with a Leatherman Micra pocketknife.
I like the way the brass glows in the evening sun.
My favourite things
Been ages since last I updated this blog. Work and busyness got in the way, but those aren’t the only reasons. Slowly over the past few months — over the past few years, in fact — I’ve become increasingly tuned to the material world, become more inclined to experience the world firsthand than to write about it. I suppose it’s as Toni Morrison once said: “At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t have to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.” I dance, sculpt, climb, walk, make tea, enjoy art and music and architecture; life for me is to be experienced, to be lived. I’ve never been one of those people who carry cameras everywhere they go; never been the sort to “record the moment”, in all its concreteness and ephemerality. This may be a literary sort of blog, but I’m not a very literary sort of man. At the end of the day I suppose I’m less an artist than an artisan.
But still I enjoy writing every now and again, and I’m also a lover of beautiful things. So it’s time to take this blog in a new direction, one more in line with prevailing trends in my life. I’ve spent much time writing about events and situations: now I’ll begin writing about things, about all the lovely little objects I’ve accumulated through the years. And I’ll give it all a new category: favourite things, dedicated to all things counter, original, spare, strange.
This might just be fun.
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