5 year birthday

 

i've been posting this crap for 5 years as of today.

thanks for being here! and for being there! and all for the support in the form of clicks and comments! you know it's true, everything i do, i do it for you.

this picture was the first post ever.

nose ear guitar and slipper socks

arts

"There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth."
- Richard Avedon

link roundup

here are some things i'm loving on the internet recently:

• kid D is seriously psychic: dream about girl with cancer; girl really has cancer

• lydia see's lost & found boot

• tyler blue's journey as a writer

• the bugg blog cries in the lunchroom, remembers grandma

• jay archibald's latest project, kaleidoscopic fine art set to music - "scope aesthetic":

taters & unions

saw this handmade wooden potato and onion bin at the asheville goodwill today.

i can only assume some nice man (?) made it and engraved it in his woodworking shop about 50 years ago. when he brought it inside, did anybody notice the spelling mistake? did they tell him? it is phonetically correct, i'll give him that.

when parents email: movie recommendations

DAD:

"I know you only documentaries but still. Maybe these qualify. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m sure these aren’t the best things you’ve ever seen but a little entertainment isn’t the end of the world right? You’ve probably seen Songcatcher. See it again. You’ve probably never had any interest in Cool Runnings. See it. So there. You have my suggestions of the day. Ciao"

i had not seen either of these movies. thanks to netflix, now i have.

cool runnings was visually stunning. based on a true story. i remember the true story from the mid 80s. the costumes were so 80s and so vibrant. every scene was like a rainbow doing a ballroom dance. the main character's name in the credits is just "Leon." awesome movie.

songcatcher is fascinating! it was filmed 15 miles north of asheville. when i go on hikes, the scenery looks like that. amazing singing. amazing singing. aidan quinn. DEFINITELY rent this movie if you get a chance.

also, if you like this movie, you will love the book "Hands in Harmony" full of striking black and white photos and stories of hard scrabble craftspeople of Appalachia by Tim Barnwell. I rented a house from Tim in 2008 and he is an outstanding photographer and really nice person.

road to shambala

everyone is lucky, everyone is kind

million dollar soup bowl idea

i would love to have soup bowls with spouts. then i could drink the soup dregs straight out of the bowl without spilling on myself or needing a bib.

you are free to take this idea and run, just please send me one.

happy national peanut butter month!

gonna have to face it - you're addicted to peanut butter

the forest glen inn

the forest glen inn was my house.

i was 9 years old and had been living in new york - huntington, long island, for about 2 years and we had many many visitors friends and family from rhode island stay in the guest room during that time.

it was mainly my grandparents - flops & drez - and the revens. 

i painted a wooden sign and put it in the driveway when guests were coming. i made that flyer on print shop and colored it in. i made comment sheets and did turndown service. this was the first comment sheet that i typed on my dad's old real typewriter.

drezza easter weekend 1986:

after this, i typed one and my dad brought it to work and made copies for me.

revens 1987:

at this point i seem to have charged my grandma for some lavender crap someone gave me: 

i never worked in a real hotel

the truest sentence

Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

- Hemingway, A Movable Feast

happy hump day

3-D life-size furry nacho fingerpainting

i fingerpainted nacho last week, and then brushed him and put varnish on the canvas and attached the fur to the varnish. i think it looks pretty cute.

it came from this photo

my hippo

speaking of hippos, check out lindsay's little hippo ethan! he's only 6 months old. nothing cuter than a chubby baby. (other than a chubby puppy).

Dear Solid Gold,

Dear Solid Gold,
We want to have a rock group we already made up 3 songs, The name of our group is Heather + Carin and the rock + roll fevers. We have eight people. Carin and I are 7 three of them are nine 1 is 8 and one is eleven. We desided to start early and our teacher said our songs were EXCELLENT! Our costumes are jeans and sweaters but if you can please send us something more fancy our sizes our three sevens three 10's and one eleven. If some are to big or to small can we send them back?
Are addresses for the costumes are- 316 Crestwood Rd. and 132 Windermere Way Warwick, R.I.
Yours truly,
Heather McTammany & Carin STEGER & the rocketts

P.S. Were sending some extra for Marilen McCoo

[Koala bear sticker that says Heather + Carin]

[band aid stuck to the other side]

i can't believe i never mailed this, i feel sure they would have sent us some costumes that were more fancy.

solid gold california envelope

i think it's dashing

There's a fantastic article in yesterday's Palm Beach Daily News about my Grandpa Wallace. (photo by Joyce McTammany, Warwick, RI, 1984)

Architectural delineator Wallace McTammany has made a career out of being very deliberate

By JOHN NELANDER
Special to the Daily News Monday, December 14, 2009

Daily News Photo by Jeffrey Langlois

Wallace McTammany shows some of his architectural renderings. 'I was always interested in drawing. I had a lifetime of it.'

Perhaps the most prominent landmark on the West Palm Beach skyline is the Northbridge Centre on Olive Avenue. The building, which rises tall, sleek and black into the warm, azure sky, is better known by its local nickname: "The Darth Vader Building."

Here's an interesting factoid about it: The first person ever to see it — to admire its jutting, quirky coolness towering over the South Florida coast — was Wallace McTammany. It came out of his head.

He worked slowly and methodically to create a picture of it from an architect's plans. When he was finished, McTammany looked at the building and said: "This is it. This is what it will look like."

And he was right. The Northbridge Centre is one of the 3,512 projects he has brought to life as an architectural delineator over his career, which has spanned seven decades.

"I don't think anybody has made as many perspective drawings as I did," he says. Of the Northbridge Centre he adds: "It's a landmark. For a modern building, I think it's dashing."

McTammany and his wife, Margaret, have lived in the Patrician condominium in Palm Beach since shortly after it was built in 1969. Until this year, they spent summers at a home in the North Carolina mountains.

McTammany's home office is decked out top to bottom with memorabilia from his long and colorful career, highlighted by some of his most striking renderings. He has a framed 1960 letter on the wall from the governor of Rhode Island, congratulating him on his rendering of the Providence post office, which was made into a commemorative stamp.

On another wall there are photographs of his 1951 Jaguar, a classic car he drove to parties in Newport when he lived nearby. That was a sprawling home he designed on 10 acres — the structure was based on a 1698 house in Massachusetts.

"I tell you," he says, nodding in the direction of the framed Jaguar photographs. "That was really a flashy car."

He's put together a booklet featuring some of his favorite renderings. An accompanying list of project sites goes on and on, from St. Augustine to Immokalee to Key West. In the United States, from Maine to Kentucky to Colorado. Worldwide, from Acapulco to Paris to the United Arab Emirates.

Architect Eugene Lawrence, founder of the Lawrence Group, has been working with McTammany since the mid-1960s. He says the business now uses a lot more computer-generated images, but they still can't match the detail and quality offered by McTammany's brand of hand work.

"To this day, some of the better delineations are done by hand," Lawrence says. "They have to give people a 3-D look at what something is going to look like, whether it's for a homeowner or a potential investor. That's why it's so important for them to be accurate.

"Wallace has always been very deliberate. When you got a Wallace McTammany delineation, you knew what your building was going to look like."

Drawing and painting

McTammany has been doing renderings in Palm Beach for more than half a century, from private homes to hotels to fire stations. He began in 1944 when the Allies were still fighting their way through France. He was in the Army stationed in West Palm Beach with an office on Clematis Street.

His personal story, though, begins in 1921 when he was born in Providence, one of a family of five boys. His father was an architect but left the family when McTammany was 4. His mother managed to keep things together while nurturing her children's varied talents.

"I was always interested in drawing," McTammany says. "I had a lifetime of it. At our home in Providence we had a blackboard in the kitchen. Half the blackboard was my mother's notes — what to buy at the store. The other half was my drawings, in chalk."

McTammany always preferred to work in charcoal and pencil. "It's softer, I think." But one day his mother brought him a set of oil paints, and he recalls: "I wouldn't go to bed. I stayed up all night doing all sorts of things, just fooling around. I painted a guy in a Mexican sombrero, someone else skiing."

His favorite oil painting hangs on the wall of his dining room — a picture he made of Margaret. "He did it when I was 60," Margaret says. "But when he did it, he made me look younger."


War and paradise

McTammany wanted to be a pilot in the war, but couldn't because of an eye problem. So, he decided to be an airplane mechanic. He arrived at Morrison Field, the military forerunner of Palm Beach International Airport, in 1942.

"I immediately got out of my heavy clothing and into a light khaki uniform. Then they said, 'We're going to send you overseas,'" he says. But overseas turned out to be Nassau, and he spent a year living in the classic British Colonial Hotel.

McTammany got married — to his first wife — and lived in an apartment on Worth Avenue toward the end of the war. He eventually designed and built a home in the south end of West Palm Beach.

As the war ended, South Florida remained and undeveloped paradise, its potential untapped. "I used to take my children out to Military Trail so they could listen to the frogs at night. The only other way for them to keep cool was for them to lie on the terrazzo floor."

Love of the classics

Through it all, McTammany has always worked at home. He says he'd still be working now if it weren't for the economy — projects have been canceled or put on hold.

One such project is a hotel in North Carolina, for which he recently finished a strikingly detailed charcoal and pencil rendering. Color would have come next, had the project not been shelved.

Of course, the truth is that McTammany never really liked working in watercolor anyway. Clients began demanding it, so he complied. But even the color work is completed with astonishing detail. He has spent his life, he says, working under a magnifying glass.

"I love the classics," McTammany says, paging through his booklet. "I love the refinement and scale, the artistic stuff. Like this house in Beaver Creek, Colorado," he adds, pointing to a mountainside mansion on the front cover. It's a single-family residence with 10 bedrooms.

"I thought it was just so neat," he says. "If you look very closely, in the doorway you can see a tiny 6-foot man."

Wallace McTammany

Occupation: Architectural delineator.

Favorite quote: 'See what you're looking at.' — A principle developed by McTammany.

Most admired person: New York architect Seth Harrison Gurnee, who was involved in the design of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Favorite movie: 'Summer Lease,' a 1989 UK film about an English family who rents a villa in Tuscany for the summer.

Photo courtesy of Wallace McTammany

Wallace McTammany with his 1951 Jaguar Mark V drophead coupe.

through wine glass out window

indian summer here, not feeling the greatest, not calling it flu, may good health find you and slap you silly

halloween

halloween, originally uploaded by skippy haha.

halloween is easily my least favorite holiday of the year. i don't like the colors orange and black. i don't like spiders. i don't like being scared. i don't like deception and fakery. i don't like girls dressing up like sluts. i don't like high fructose corn syrup. i don't like cats. i don't like circus peanuts. i don't like when the leaves die and fall off the trees. i don't like razor blades in fun size snickers bars. i would like a friendly ghost in my life though.

morning glory squished turtle

morning glory squished turtle, originally uploaded by skippy haha.

the stomach panel looked like a morning glory to me, so i turned the section purple with photoshop