more brooklyn photo journal

big moments

my sister got married almost two years ago. she was 24 and the groom was 23 and that ushered in the era of a wedding seemingly every week on facebook. my sister is one of the most serious people i know, but she'd been obsessively watching "say yes to the dress" on netflix, which taught me about the overwhelmingly powerful interestingness of wedding planning. i mean, my mom and i thought that the "say yes to the dress" episodes that netflix kept recommending to us were part of some weird glitch, until my sister, whose idea of an extravagance is diy reupholstering the seat of her two-person tricycle, confessed.

anyway, her wedding was so wonderful. really magical. there's all the planning, and then the day. you just have to push it and it starts to roll.

i love the idea of making a day that embodies my very favorite aesthetic. though i'm certainly not going to be married anytime soon, i already have a folder of favorite things that might somehow relate. i care about invitations, photography, and colors (red and blue). i don't care about table settings. there were three weddings in the backyard of the stately 1930s house where i grew up in durham. i always imagined how fun it would be to pour the cost of a normal wedding venue back into that house. along the upstairs hallway are giant closets which peaches macpherson flung open when she was showing the house to my mother, and declared, "and these are where we kept our debutante gowns!" i was invited to be a debutante in durham, and it is one of my greatest regrets that i didn't say yes. i didn't know who my marshal would be.

 bella figura wedding invitation

 from somewhere on style me pretty

 a jason munn poster

from the voynich manuscript

my sister made all the bouquets herself from chiffon, but i love the idea of fresh flowers, like shakespeare and company uses for decorations.

 amy flowerjugs sets up for the paris literary prize

i love spending so much on perishable things. there are very few times in life where there are truly "no holds barred."

i just love this wedding, jemima kirke's. it's given me the clearest possible image/articulation of the poignance of the perishable beauty of a wedding...

she'd been saving since teenagerhood a set of antique french candles that looked like a bride and a groom.

the hoarder in me thinks, no, don't burn them! save them, save your antique candles.

but this is the moment that we save such things for.

what warm weather brings to mind

No time of year brings up memories so much as springtime does.  And "memory" is probably the best title I can give to my life's major preoccupation. So every day of springtime is extremely rich and confusing to me. And so I hope you'll forgive me for quoting some Proust, who is the best on these topics and my fav writer:

"Many years have passed sice that night. The wall of the staircase, up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb, was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of comprehension."

En route to the Calf of Man, Part II

 The disposable camera lived up to its potential that day.

 As soon as I heard of it, I became obsessed with making the trip to the Calf of Man, an even tinier, wilder, more remote island off the southern tip of the tiny, wild and remote Isle of Man. Only one man (Ray) will take visitors there, and the day we tried there was a terrible wind. But he had to go fetch the people who'd gone onto the island in the morning. (There's no place to sleep on the Calf.) On the first trip, Kathleen was scared and I was excited. Then Ray offered to take us a second time, free of charge, to pick up the last of the people on the island. The second trip, I was scared, soaking wet, and shivering several feet in each direction, it felt like, and Kathleen was excited. I can't express how cold it was in that wind, and how desperate I felt as we teetered over gigantic waves.