In the Letterpress Room

I may not be a graphic designer, but I've always had an appreciation for beautiful typography and graphics (cannot stand Humanist sans serif types: Verdana and Calibri and the ugliest typeface on earth is Comic Sans). I love vintage, antique, retro serif types or modern, geometric, sleek sans serif types. I really admire Shy's work, because she deals with typography and graphics on a daily basis and her style is very versatile. This semester, she's taking a letterpress class and yesterday, she invited me to join her in the letterpress room.

Letterpress printing was first invented in about 1440 by Johannes Gutenberg, he is credited with the invention of modern movable type printing from individually-cast, reusable letters set together in a form (frame). Letterpress printing became more popular in the advent of the industrial revolution.

In the recent years, I've become very interested in fine arts, being crafty and making art with your hands. This recent realization has made me very frustrated, because this school only allows us three art electives, unless you want to pay for classes that don't go towards your degree. Unfortunately and fortunately, I transferred in five classes from my year in London and three of them were transferred in as art electives. This wasn't finalized until last summer, can you imagine my horror (this was only finalized after my third year here)? Last summer, I had taken one class, one class(!) of Silkscreen and was scheduled to take Book Arts in the fall, but all of my hopes and dreams were crushed after a single phone call and several meetings with my adviser. I was completely heartbroken.

So yesterday, when I went to the letterpress room and saw all the Vandercook printing machines and trays of stencils and type blocks - I was in awe. As fun as letterpress sounds, it is a very tedious and time consuming process. You have the find all the letters from a sea of thousands of letters and different types, then arrange them backwards and fill in the gaps and spaces with leading. The fun part is coming up - the mixing of colors for the ink. I love colors and wish I knew how to paint. I used to do watercolor as a kid, but my confidence as an artist deflated when I went to boarding school. By the time I was 14-15, my artistic confidence was non existent, so I stopped doing art completely. But now, my appreciation and confidence are back and it was about time!

The highly coveted color was a dull turquoise or bright teal combined with a coral (example: the very last photo of the poster on the wall with a T.S. Eliot quote). Admittedly, it's a great, complementary color combination, but I personally prefer warm muted colors like mauve, mustard, olive, sienna, puce, etc. I loved looking at all the stencil blocks and type blocks and you can carve your own illustration or pattern on a linoleum block. Once the color has been mixed, it's time to do some rolling. Wait, actually, you need to figure out the placement of the type first. Since the type is backwards, the placement is flipped backwards, which makes the calculating a little more confusing. Practice rounds are a must in order to figure out the exact placement of the type. Once the placement has been calculated, the type has to be secured in place and then the rolling and printing can finally commence. Roll forward and then voilà! And then repeat as many times as required.

Shy has offered to help me design and make my business cards with this technique and I'm absolutely thrilled! I'd love to spend more time in this atmosphere and soak up all the energy or rather tired and exhausted energy. Thank you Shy for inviting me and making me feel super jealous at the same time. I had a blast watching them and reading Mere Anarchy at the same time. I need to do more activities and go to more places where I can take photos and immortalize these memories. When I start making money, I want to incorporate more fine art and crafty activities in my life, such as letterpress, silkscreen, printmaking, book arts, embroidery, knitting, sewing and many more.

Books are a Uniquely Portable Magic

"Books are a uniquely portable magic." ― Stephen King

“The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.” ― Elizabeth Hardwick

I never use to enjoy reading books. Whenever I was presented with the opportunity to read a book, I just shunned the book and left it to collect dust. I just never got into the habit of reading. I can't believe it has taken this many years for me to finally get into reading. It's only the beginning, so I'm not going to start bragging about my new literary knowledge, but I have a list. At boarding school, for my literature class, I had the opportunity to read Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, Emma by Jane Austen, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, but the only book/play I actually read was A Streetcar Named Desire... or sort of read. Back then, I just didn't try. And now I want to read them, but still I have no desire to read Emma, because she is probably my least favorite/most hated fictional heroine of all time.

I came across this BBC Reading List recently and I decided it's about time I educate myself and read these classics. I guess it's the epistemologist in me that is reaching out to broaden my literary knowledge. It is quite an impressive and extensive list of must read classics. I don't think I'll be able to read all of these books in my lifetime, so I came up with my own list. The books that I absolutely want and need to read are in bold.

Have you read more than six of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (read the first four)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (at least I've read Angels and Demons)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

As well as:
The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Stephen Chbosky
A Room with a View - E. M. Forster
A Passage to India - E. M. Forster
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
Breakfast at Tiffany's - Truman Capote
In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf? - Edward Albee
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
Requiem for a Dream - Hubert Selby, Jr. (I've read the screenplay and it was stunnning)
Amsterdam - Ian McEwan (I started it but didn't finish it, must start all over)
Everything is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer
Running with Scissors - Augusten Burroughs
Water for Elephants - Sara Gruen
The Illiad and The Odyssey - Homer
The Aeneid - Virgil
Other ancient historical and philosophical writings and poems by Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Plutarch, Thucydides, etc.

Since Borders is closing down, which is terribly upsetting, I realized it was my chance to stock up on Woody Allen books. I bought his last two books, Mere Anarchy and The Insanity Defense. They were lying precariously amongst the chaos of the humor section. I grabbed them and then they belonged to me. Last night, I decided to read Mere Anarchy first. Admittedly, it is one of the hardest things I've read (along with Lord of the Rings (I only read the first five chapters back in 2001 and gave up) and The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides).

Reasons why Mere Anarchy is hard to read and digest:

The use of language and vocabulary are acutely advanced, mentions of obscure and lesser known historical and literary figures and characters (and just in the first twenty pages), for example:

i) ecdysiastically: in the manner of a striptease artist
ii) troglodyte: a caveman
iii) Leeuwenhoek: a Dutch tradesmen and scientist
iv) imprecation: a spoken curse
v) abasement: degrading/belittling
vi) poltroon: coward
vii) nudnik: pestering/nagging person
viii) Megan's law: a law for sex offenders
ix) contumely: insolent/insulting treatment
x) corybantic: wild/frenzied
xi) sangfroid: composure of coolness in a dangerous situation
xii) internecine: destructive to both sides

When I come across a foreign word, I have to google it and underline the word and write down the definition for future reference. So reading this book is quite a long winded process, but it has been very enjoyable thus far.

Tonight, I picked up four novels that are on the list: Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. I was contemplating whether I should pay $20 for a hardcover copy of Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. I'm in love with the cover, but $20 is a little excessive. Once I finish Mere Anarchy, I think I want to read Catcher in the Rye, which is a book I've always been interested in reading.

As I was looking for a comfortable place to sit, I stumbled into the spree killer/serial killer sale section and I was hooked. I have a confession to make: I love reading about killings and massacres. It's very dark stuff, I know, but I've always been fascinated with these kind of stories. I could spend hours reading about this, in fact I've learned a lot from these accounts. I won't go into too much detail, since it's a very sensitive and morbid subject. I only managed to read about Ernst Wagner and Mutsuo Toi. The most fascinating part of Mutsuo Toi's story was his interest in Sada Abe's story. Click links to read if you are intrigued. If not, stay away!

I hope to read a book a week from today onwards. Once I get into the flow, I want to increase it to two books a week. Reading is quite a magical experience; I can't believe it has taken me this long for my interest in reading to manifest.

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go." ― Dr. Seuss

Garçonne à la Pipe

photographed by: caro ramirez (website | blog | flickr); inspiration: garçon à la pipe by pablo picasso; image source: wikipedia

Last October (on my old blog the girl from hk, ldn & sf), I was very inspired by Picasso and orchestrated two photo shoots that were inspired by his Blue Period and Rose Period. I decided that October would be Picasso month, since he was born on October 25th, a day after my birthday. After doing some research on his Rose Period, I came across Garçon à la pipe (Boy with a Pipe) and was instantly mesmerized by the boy's gaze and body language. There is something so enigmatic and eerie about this boy. What I love most about this painting is the contrast between the masculinity and femininity. Is it unexplained why the boy is wearing a garland of flowers on his head, but I love this finishing touch. During early preparation for this painting, Picasso experimented with different poses, but decided on sitting down. The boy looks so relaxed, yet stiff at the same time.

I had planned to do an outfit shoot as a tribute to this painting in October, but I got busier and busier, so this shoot was postponed indefinitely. Until last week, Caro went to rent some props for her homework assignment photo shoot. I assisted her as a stylist and told her to rent some pipes as props for the shoot. She came back with this amazing prop pipe and I knew that this was the pipe I wanted for the Garçon à la pipe homage. This is my modern interpretation of the boy from 1905 in the painting. Dressing up like a boy isn't a challenge for me, since all I wear most of the time is high waisted trousers, button downs, blazers and loafers.

I hope to do more outfit shoots inspired by my favorite painters, paintings, artists and films. I'm planning to do more tributes soon: two of my favorite paintings by René Magritte, Golconda and The Son of Man and Henri Matisse's The Woman with a Hat (you know my undying obsession with hats). As for films, I want to do a photo shoot inspired by Before Sunrise, directed by Richard Linklater, starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. Before Sunrise is one of my favorite dialogue films. Also, Blue Valentine and Black Swan. So I have many upcoming personal projects and student film projects. I'm going to be very busy for the next few weeks.

Just as a reminder to myself: Don't forget to breathe.

Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain

photographed by: caro ramirez (website | blog | flickr); inspiration: le fabuleux destin d'amélie poulain (2001)

Starring Avalonne Hall.

When I was a kid, I loved playing with super glue with my fingers and spinning coins, although I didn't put raspberries on my fingers and eat them one by one, I wish I had thought of that. Suffice it to say, Amélie Poulain was a girl with her head in the clouds. She is a fantastically imaginative and wildly dreamy girl, with a cute angled bob and short bangs. She had her own way of perceiving the world: Amélie has no boyfriend, she tried once or twice, but the results were a letdown. Instead, she cultivates a taste for small pleasures: Dipping her hands into sacks of grain, cracking crème brûlées with a teaspoon, skimming stones on St. Martin's Canal.

Like Amélie, I have no boyfriend and I do enjoy the small pleasures in life, even though I also thoroughly enjoy reading 11,002 Things To Be Miserable About (since misery loves company). I do appreciate the small things in life and try to pay attention to the details. I, too, dip my hands into sacks of grain when I wash the rice, I don't eat crème brûlée, so I wouldn't be cracking them with teaspoons, but I love popping bubble wrap and tearing up paper and cardboard and I love skimming stones (something I learned to do when I was at camp at the age of nine). I loved taking photos for fun when I was a child and now my life revolves around taking photos.

Life's funny. To a kid, time always drags. Suddenly, you're 50. I guess in my case, I'm 22. Often I wonder how time flies by so quickly without any warning. When I was a child, an adolescent, all I wanted was time to fly by, so I can finally go to college and study film. Now it's my last semester, only three months before graduation and it has hit me. I'm going to be a real adult now. I'm going to have a find a job and start earning my own money. Three months left and then reality will finally hit me. I don't have time to spare, time is really fleeting. I'm 22 and before I know it, the next time I sit down to think, I'll be 50.

Amélie suddenly has a strange feeling of absolute harmony. It's a perfect moment. Soft light, a scent in the air, the quiet murmur of the city. She breathes deeply. Life is simple and clear. A surge of love, an urge to help mankind engulfs her. Amélie is such a wonderful human being, she makes me want to be a good person. Her naivety and charm are so endearing. This movie makes me want to cry. It makes me want to learn French again, because I really want to speak French fluently. The past weeks have been so enlightening and liberating, I feel the same sense of harmony that Amélie feels. I don't want this feeling to end.

Although, this beautiful film has given me hope to be free and imaginative, I can't help but to address a small feeling of loneliness deep inside my heart. Amélie was enchanting, adventurous and mischievous, but deep inside, she knew she used her wild imagination as a way to mask the fact that she's really truly lonely, after the death of her mother, her father's subsequent withdrawal and isolation from other children growing up. I feel a deep connection to her character and I hope one day, I can meet someone and have the courage to put myself in a vulnerable place again and start a relationship with another human being.

Amélie has taught me to be a fun-loving, goodhearted, kind spirited, imaginative, free, courageous and brave young woman. She has reminded me to enjoy the small pleasures in life. Now I feel like eating crème brûlée and raspberries one by one off of every finger, collect and skim stones, take photos at old photo booths, read, watch old movies! I had completely forgotten about the traveling gnome! Once I start traveling the world, I want to do my own series of a traveling toy or stuffed animal, we'll see. Last June, when I met Katrina of Pugly Pixel, I got a photo with Adeline's globetrotting doll named Ada, it was adorable.

Merci Amélie, Jean-Pierre Jeunet et Audrey Tautou, thanks for reminding me to love and enjoy life. A massive thank you to Caro (website | blog | flickr) for taking these photos. I hope you enjoy these photos, because I had a lot of fun perfecting my Amélie mischievous smile, we had a blast taking these photos, in my room and on Maiden Lane (we definitely garnered some attention). Thank you so much to Annie for inviting me to be one of the guest bloggers to write a post about a French Icon for her blog Time Enough for Drums. And of course, thank you to my amazing family and friends for being the most loving people in the world. I have to remind myself to be thankful every day for the people that are in my life, you guys make life worth living.

Without you, today's emotions would be the scurf of yesterday's. - Hipolito, The Writer

Want to look like or learn how to be like Mademoiselle Amélie Poulain? Click here.