City Slang

Los Angeles and all points Westward.
It comes with handy-dandy buttoned straps to keep
your umbrella(s) in place—a feature more useful
in S.F. than in any of the other cities listed on
the bag. (Which is deadstock, apparently.)

Rootless

Admittedly, I've killed an air plant or two in my ambitions as an appreciator and caretaker of flora. But I can still look, marvel, and even try again. I've yet to see a really fantastic way of displaying air plants that lives up to their name, mainly that they do not need to be rooted in the ground. I've taken a couple plants home from the picture above, taken at the Bodkin fashion week presentation, where air plants were part of the invitation and given away as gifts! If these two I've got do well, I'm thinking about fishing line, windows, glass....

Eine Kleine Night Reading

Some light night table action: Three Great American Novels,
from newer (1973) to older (1925) to oldest (1851),
interleaved with a walking guide (1984) to Shitamachi,
"the other Tokyo," and an "indispensable eats guide" (2000)
to "the real Los Angeles" by the only food writer ever to win a Pulitzer Prize.

Boat of Many Coasts

We thought it would be nice to start with something right in our own kitchen. I've had this boat shelf since college. It came in two sizes from a craft store in Ohio and it was on sale. It has always had a rotating display of objects that really have nowhere else to go in the apartment.

Some current things on its shelves:
-Indian tobacco powders from Jackson Heights
-Chinese jar that once contained fermented tofu (it's the
squat blue jar with the red fringe - highly decorative and
most impractical)
-Faux Communist-era souvenir flask from Russia
-Dried black fungus mushroom in a box (they come in
large packs, but each box, once rehydrated, is enough for
a meal)
-Monkey cup made by a friend of a friend
-Plastic Japanese Usobuki Mask from Mitsuwa