Category: Cultural

Remember When?

I’m not sure I was old enough, but five shakes to the person who can guess what this AllSaints ad is riffing.

I was in this store a couple of years ago. Spitalfields itself is a fun place to shop, a little out of the way of other more obvious London destinations. It used to be a market, once a prominent neighborhood of textile merchants and weavers–mostly silk industry–but it declined in the Victorian era when silks started importing from France. There’s a whole story about Huguenots in there. I’m on the side of the Huguenots. Now the place has got a kind of warehouse arty feel.

Read more

Norma Kamali and postmodern economy

Now I was just a wee lass when Norma Kamali came out with her famous “sleeping bag” coat and the Christie Brinkley bikini. My cultural memory filed her as one of the classic disco-sheen designers of the 70s, and there she lay. So when I bought a cool zippy anorak by “Kamali for Everlast” in a hunt for some funky non-yoga workout clothes, my fashion memory warmed up to the possibility of her return.

I loved that thing so much it reached a state of decay after too much painting and gardening in it. So I thought, in this day and age of you-and-me-and-everyone-we-know, of Bluefly via eBay, that I might be able to find another from someone else’s abandoned closet. I did find a few remaining Everlast pieces but discovered the brand had gone defunct. And instead I ended up at Norma Kamali’s website.

And this place is a blast.

Read more

Reading, Writing and Will We All Go Tablet?

This recent blog from CNN’s Money got my attention. Read this first (if you want), then come back here. I’ll be waiting with my 2 cents.

10 luminaries look ahead to the business of reading

My 2 Cents

I love Apple, I really do. I have been going on these machines since Apple IIe–you remember, those little taupe boxes with tiny 8-inch screens? They were really cool. You didn’t have to boot Word from a floppy disc–which was the alternative with PCs. And ever since then, even though I have owned a few PCs, I have been a Mac person. Their little ingenious devices always seem to combine several tasks into one and you have to think less about how all these little engines fit together.
Read more