What Possessed Me

Armchair travel edition

I have been agonizing over a Big Trip that will cost Money I Don't Really Have but I suspect will Blow My Mind and quite possibly answer All of My Burning Questions, filling my life with New Meaning and Direction, both of which are desperately needed. Could a single trip possibly fulfill such a gradiose list of requirements AND cause rapid, parasite-encouraged weight loss?

Well, no.

Should I do it anyway, throwing caution, responsibility, job security, sanity and money to the wind? Or should I just stay home and read George Saunders, whose essay on Dubai is the funniest and most brilliant piece of travel writing I've ever read and could quite possibly replace the need for anyone to travel anywhere ever again? This is what I think about at night instead of addressing real issues that require my attention.

But here are two young people, Julia and Yuriy, who really did throw caution to the wind - they are a pair of newlywed photographers who are traveling the world for six months and blogging about it here.

Do we hate them? No. Not even a little - even though they are talented and toothsome and write better than most professional travel bloggers. As they skip through Dubrovnik, Montenegro, Santorini and a host of other places while sharing their photographs and observations, I feel a vicarious thrill of discovery and wonder idly how they manage to look so effortlessly fabulous on the road.

Do go there and say hi. These two are going to have memorable adventures.

 

All photographs by Mr. and Mrs. Globetrot.

Tokyo DIY Gardening

I'm having a love-hate moment with my balcony garden. As an urban jungle dweller, I feel intensely fortunate to have even a scrap of outdoor space, but it seems my inner Vita Sackville-West is struggling with space constraints. I have five David Austin rose bushes, two blue hydrangeas, a cherry tree, a clematis, a climbing jasmine, an herb garden and a very, very dead honeysuckle specimen packed into a 4'x14' balcony. There is hardly any room to sit, much less prune, deadhead, mulch, and fertilize. As a result, things are looking a little overgrown and unwieldy - and not in a devil-may-care English garden sort of way. 

After stumbling on Tokyo DIY Gardening, a community-based celebration of curbside gardening, I felt a burst of inspiration as a combed through photographs of city gardeners making do with tiny spaces in the most creative and joyful ways.

Gardening up, for example.

And taking advantage of every crevice as an opportunity.

This homemade grape arbor outside an apartment building just knocked me out. 

 

As did this incredibly dense show of tumbling vines.

A riot of color and birdsong - what a gift to passersby.

Ivy perfectly framed.

An "elderly man taking a morning stroll in his pajamas stopped to share his amazement and pleasure at the sight" of this trailing bougainvillea. What on earth was he doing walking around in his PJs? Who cares - I want to hug him.

    
From their website:

Tokyo-DIY-Gardening celebrates ordinary and extraordinary efforts to bring nature into the world’s largest city. In a space more known for concrete and commerce, growing plants for ornament and food is fun, social, and magical. 

Tokyo-DIY-Gardening is an open sourcebook and resource for urban gardening on a personal level – “hands-on gardening for a crowded city”. It includes ‘how-to’ examples/instructions, photo essays, observations, interviews, articles and more with the aim of knowledge sharing and creation around low-cost, agile gardening in dense cities (with a focus on Tokyo).

The DIY element invites everyone to experiment, share, and create a garden regardless of how little soil, space, budget, or experience you have. Gardening is fun for seniors, children, cooks, bird-watchers, and all of us who spend most of our time in the city.

New York DIY Gardening, anyone?

All photographs from Tokyo DIY Gardening.
 

The Electric Pencil and Other Accidental Mysteries

You know how it goes. You stumble across an image that knocks you out, follow it to its source, and then spend three hours freebasing on the most amazing blog you've seen in a long time.

That's what happened to me when I ran across this image and followed it to John Foster's vernacular arts and ephemera blog, Accidental Mysteries. 

Then I read this completely gripping account (Parts I and II) of his adventure tracking down a set of portraits said to be from the State Lunatic Asylum in Nevada Missouri. Dating between 1895 and 1900, the drawings were supposedly rendered by an artist who called himself "The Electric Pencil." Foster's  wonderful narrative of his mad dash to procure the mysterious collection sight unseen reads like a literary thriller in the vein of A.S. Byatt.

Several hours of blog stalking later, I'm still haunted by those eyes.

All images from the wonderful Accidental Mysteries.