Fletcher's room

Like many things in our place, our one-year old son Fletcher's room is furnished with from yard sales, thrift shops, flea markets, and hand-me-downs.
The dressers and cabinets are old George Nelson for Herman Miller- the long glass case originally meant for record albums. The Mickey Myers crayon prints and signed ("For Amanda") Bil Baird Marionette Theatre prints were bought years ago at the Carousel thrift shop in Southport, Ct., which funnily enough is located in the church where I went to nursery school. We found the Stokke crib on Craigslist, from the local window-washer who washes the windows of the local Scandinavian Shop. The mobile has since moved away since I took this photo a few months ago.
Linda's old Eames rocking chair was from the 26th St. flea market and is now home to a Freudian-looking Keith Kustard. The teak monkeys are hanging around a teak floor lamp by Laurel, from a garage sale.

The Kodak Instamatic X-15 camera was a store display from the 60's. The flash cube is actually an electric light.
The wooden sail lamp was made by our friend Fidi.  Over to the left is a giant Marimekko beanbag, and an unphotogenic mass of stuffed animals and books.

The hi-fi system with fun-for-Daddy records including Harry Nilsson's The Point! and my brother's and my old Jim Copp and Ed Brown records, inscribed by them when we were kids and our mother took us to see them perform at Bloomingdale's in Stamford, Ct., in the shadow of the giant Bjorn Wiinblad ceramic fountain.

For more on his room and our inspirations click over to the super nice and extremely patient Jenny Dalton's site: LittleBig Magazine



Below is his room in its previous state as our guestroom:




related:



Julie Merz's room, Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, January 1978. From the incredible, fascinating Nooney Brooklyn Photographs, 1978-1979. From the NYPL Digital archive.

Heavy Metal 1977-81

From Ebay.
AAAAA+++++!

Related: Bowie at the Beeb:

Happy First Birthday Fletcher!!

You've come a long way, baby!

1984

Birthday, 1975

September 4th, 1975. Green Arrow, Superfriends, The Six Million Dollar Man, and Snoopy. Breakfast was probably Quangaroos or Freakies and in all hopefulness dinner was a Libbyland and a Friendly Fribble.

First I take some triangles....

Besides Richard Scarry and Al Jaffee, another artist-hero of my Marvy Marker-stained youth was Ed Emberley, whose how-to-draw books taught me and countless other kids how simply drawn lines and shapes can be put together to make fish, trains, dragons, spiders, barns, Indians, sauce pans, pigs, hot rods, weirdos, entire worlds, etc...

A rare opportunity to see some of his original drawings and book layouts is on now, so if you're in Los Angeles in the next week (hurry!) you should absolutely check out this show:

From the LA Times:

For generations of creative kids, some of whom are now fine artists, Ed Emberley's step-by-step cartooning manuals such as the 1970 classic "Ed Emberley's Drawing Book of Animals" can be summed up in a few words: Best. Books. Ever. On Saturday, Emberley will make a rare Los Angeles appearance at an exhibition featuring original mock-ups from his beloved drawing books -- 13 of which are still in print -- along with new works.

The show, "Ed Emberley & Friends," will also feature murals by five contemporary artists including curator Caleb Neelon and Los Angeles-based painters Seonna Hong and Saelee Oh -- all of whom learned to draw the Emberley way.

Breaking a drawing down into simple shapes and squiggles, the award-winning children's book illustrator crafted easy-to-follow visual recipes for colorful characters that have an innocent charm and super-cute factor that have endured for 40 years after they were created. (I mean, just look at that little yellow mouse, below.)

For the show, Emberley has created a signed, limited edition of 18-by-24-inch prints of the animals, above, and one of his lessons, right.

Ideal for a nursery or kid's room, and mighty tempting for nostalgic adults who also admire midcentury design, the prints will sell for $30 each. Original Emberley drawings are priced at $300 and all proceeds will benefit children's hospitals and the Art for Kool Kidz program.

The artist reception, which is open to the public, is Saturday from 7-10 p.m. at the Scion Installation L.A., 3521 Helms Ave., Culver City. The show runs until Aug. 7.

-- David A. Keeps

related: Draw a Sasquatch the Ed Emberley Way (Boing Boing)

and

the rarity of The Wizard of Op, including endpapers, at Stopping Off Place, (and the missing couple of pages, but no endpapers, in 1997 gif-style at Maurice D. Wagschal's homepage)

The Secret Policeman

Sting, resplendent in sublimeness at The Secret Policeman's Other Ball benefit for Amnesty International, 1981.

Also, Message in a Bottle

Here Comes the Son!

The newest and best addition to our house!

Fletcher Alessandro Ogden Meyers was born 4 days ago,

weighing in at a whopping 11 lbs.

Linda (ouch!) and baby are home and doing great.

Above: with his placenta doppelganger Bagpuss.

What, me worry?

Alfred E. Newman painting found in a Los Angeles garage 10 years ago (photo in situ). Painted by Wanda Witczak, 1969. The notation next to MAD reads, "I did, your highness!".

related>

Mad Man

Growing up, Mad magazine played a major role in my brain's development. An avid reader, letter writer, and paperback orderer, I can remember times with my mom at the grocery store checkout excitedly putting the newest issue on the conveyor belt and hoping it didn't slip into the crack at the end before the lady could grab it (this is how my dad told me Abraham Lincoln died, except on an escalator), and then making sure it was protected un-crimpedly between boxes of Freakies and Count Chocula, only to be taken out, read aloud, laughed at and folded-in when we got to the car. 

A seminal point in my Mad development came in 5th grade during our class' paper drive, when I found a bundle of old Mads that someone had dropped off to be recycled- older ones, which I'd never seen before! This was also probably also the first time I asked myself, "Why would anyone get rid of this?", a question which would reward/haunt me to this day.

In this bundle, which I asked our teacher if it was okay to not recycle (and somehow I think she said yes but that I should write an IOU to President Carter, or something) there was the single greatest article I'd ever read, written and illustrated by the great Al Jaffee, entitled, "If Kids Designed Their Own Xmas Toys". Seeing it was like a revelation-  one could draw something, and then make it- exactly the same. It was like a ten year-old's mind-blowing "introduction to design".  While in this epiphanal state I packed up all the issues in my French horn case and couldn't wait to get home -even though this meant carrying my French horn out in the open, which made it easy prey for a couple of older girls who liked to grab it, blow into the mouthpiece and then threaten to pee into the bell. 

So, our book is filled with sketches as well as photos, and whenever I drew a project (most projects being based on "why would anyone get rid of this"...), while not using the exact same concept (or at least documenting it that way), the Mad article and Al Jaffee's genius were always somewhere in my mind. So thank you, Al Jaffee. 

Related: Al Jaffee from Graphic NYC, and The New York Times. 

C'etait un Rendezvous

Rendez-vous (Claude Lelouch 1976)

Early one August morning in 1976 the French director Claude Lelouch mounted a camera to the front of his Ferrari and filmed his breakneck drive through the streets of Paris, from Porte Dauphine to Sacre Coeur. After "C'etait un Rendezvous" was shown publicly Lelouch was arrested and the car confiscated.

Not long after it was released our local library had a copy, and my brother and I used to get our dad to rent it constantly, every chance we got. Back then renting movies was a little more complicated, as the movie was an actual big can of film, and my dad would have to lug out the movie projector and thread the film, while we'd set up the giant silver screen on its rickety aluminum tripod. But when the lights went out and the movie started rolling, nothing beat sitting on the carpet staring up at the screen with a permanent smile for 9 minutes, the smell of dusty electricity, the smooth clacking of the projector, and the loud Ferrari engine blaring through the steel speakers.
Happy Bastille Day!

Two for the road

In need of some attention this spring are my dad's old Vespa, which he brought back from Rome in 1967 and I commandeered from my parents' barn 2 years ago to bring up here. It hasn't been ridden much since 1983, and thus is in serious need of a tune-up. But the priority is definitely our scraggly yard, which seems to be filled with bittersweet, mandrake, and hemlock popping up in all the wrong places. So the long hours of grease-monkeying and green-thumbing begin, but you couldn't ask for two more enjoyable projects for spring.

Locd of the Rings

Keep on Tolkien!

I can't even explain why I have so many of these.

Penn

We drove down to New York and on the way detoured over to my parents' house in Connecticut to preview their yard sale. Among the things we bought (back) was this old copy of  Irving Penn's Moments Preserved, for $1. Penn is the master of composition and still life, and his portable studio with the canvas backdrop is eternally inspiring. If you're in Los Angeles this September, The Getty Museum is having a massive retrospective. 

also at the tag sale: