business as usual.

[www.nytimes.com ]
alexis mabille


christian lacroix


givenchy


dior


... asked if the economy was having an effect on the spring couture season, karl lagerfeld of chanel said, “only on the conversation.”

yea, chanel laid off 200 temp staff (only one percent of its 16,000 workforce, but many families) and there're fewer shows (meaning small-fry designers feel the pinch more), and the goodie bags won't be so stuffed.

but i was still slightly more interested in the clothes, and the dreams and aspirations (inspirations?) they still promise to hold.

cos while the real value of haute couture seems hard to grasp (what? these long trains and multiple pearls and diamonds during times of hunger and crisis?!), it still represents the old trades of the various needle crafts, at its exquisite and refined best.

that is the real value of haute couture, not it's marketing value to sell, and endorse, other odds and ends of commercial luxury.

like, as says this comment from the NY Mag:
...Perhaps New York's Fashion Weeks can mature, leave the models gone wild atmosphere for a world of elegance & class, leave behind the world where fashion editors elbow each other to get to their seats.


chanel (more)

barack obama - walla

(ok. fluke. iconic face of America)



Washington...;



to even Lincoln.




The Obama morphs and yields, taking on many shapes and forms. This allows him to reach wider than most, and take root in the deepest hearts of people. It is easier to rule by love, though a tricky thing to attain.

More than plans and practical know-how, he elevated us (both the U.S. and international us, beamed through the internets) to ideas and aspirations. I spose he deserves the many metamorphoses the public is trying to place him in, to make sense of his never-seen-before inspirations.







[first dance at the Neighborhood Inaugural Ball in Washington. www.guardian.co.uk]

another planet signals another cycle.

i've come to like chinese new year more and more. while the 'literal' new year as it seems to have come to be is more about getting-out, partying and painting anything red with your reds, the traditional chinese new year has always been about the return of the flock, remembering communal ideals and just catchin' up, catchin' up.

and the food: instead of greasy fries, alcohol and cake, there's far more creative carbo-laden fare (this year's winners are kueh bangkit and pineapple tarts) and pokka drinks, and reunion dinners.

while the cusp between dec 31st and jan 1st leaves one typically spent and all worn down, the more chinese new year is about collection: renewing memories, remembering one's place in the family (regardless of whether you bring that back home), trading stories (and actually remembering them), and angbaos.

you might be tired at the end of the house-hopping, but the unmarrieds at least will not be broke. in fact, i do believe this new year is more conducive for resolution making, and cementing. all the enforced sitting down, rubbing shoulders with slighter unfamiliars, makes for some subtle mental breakthroughs.

even if it's just going home and know, more firmly than before, your path ahead for the new year is the one you choose, for better for worse. or deciding that kids are just little adults set loose (ie. not cute angels).

it's the penultimate family occasion for many families. for those with a complex pull-push relationship with theirs, chinese new year is quite usually an eye-opener.

speaking of eye-openers, i love how alecia neo tries to illuminate by taking her viewer along the process, riding the waves, stumbling through, hopefully coming out to see clearer.

here's my favourite picture of a few she entered in a photography competition:

http://www.core77.com/braunprize2009/list.php?img=497b4f702e4bc#

toddering paths

[cameron highlands. malaysia]





not knowing is fine sometimes, especially when it's simply a crisis, a period, a hiatus, whatever we term it.

not lost, - no- but certainly no longer flag-waving and blustering with epithets.

clear the tumbleweeds, and air the mothballs, go with the flow, and surely you'll collect some solid truths by the end of the walk. i think.

and let down, let loose, the stuff you've been holding on so tight.

i've been slow to blog, if only to take a meandering walk and look and observe and take in. all out of decision making and opinion forcing. excuse the haphazardness of posts, and in posts.

time for a walk.

stuff
noun
1.	the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object; "coal is a hard black material"; "wheat is the stuff they use to make bread" [syn: material]
2.	miscellaneous unspecified objects; "the trunk was full of stuff"
3.	informal terms for personal possessions; "did you take all your clobber?"
4.	senseless talk; "don't give me that stuff"
5.	unspecified qualities required to do or be something; "the stuff of heros"; "you don't have the stuff to be a United States Marine"
6.	information in some unspecified form; "it was stuff I had heard before"; "there's good stuff in that book"
7.	a critically important or characteristic component; "suspense is the very stuff of narrative"
verb
1.	cram into a cavity; "The child stuffed candy into his pockets"
2.	press or force; "Stuff money into an envelope"; "She thrust the letter into his hand" [syn: thrust]
3.	obstruct; "My nose is all stuffed"; "Her arteries are blocked"
4.	overeat or eat immodestly; make a pig of oneself; "She stuffed herself at the dinner"; "The kids binged on ice cream" [syn: gorge]
5.	treat with grease, fill, and prepare for mounting; "stuff a bearskin"
6.	fill tightly with a material; "stuff a pillow with feathers"
7.	fill with a stuffing while cooking; "Have you stuffed the turkey yet?" [syn: farce]

WordNet® 3.0, © 2006 by Princeton University.

or, explained, described and explored charmingly by george carlin:

stuff
(george carlin)

closer.

[malaysia. cameron highlands]

god is in the details,
gustave flaubert (1821-80)
(and perhaps, michelangelo, the architect ludwig mies van der rohe, and the art historian aby warburg.)

some major fishing.

[malaysia. genting highlands]

a small pond, alive with
schools and schools of fish.

this is what a child of say, seven years, will see
walking by a railing (almost) completely covered with balloons,
if he peeks through them.

winter escape.

[. from landscape ]

thats a suitably bleak picture. and many will find it romantic and lush, full of insinuated meanings and vague, blurry, triple-layered nuances.

sometimes you wake up feeling like that picture; a sharp, uncoloured awareness of yourself, and all around you. and of course, itll never feel abundant or happy or gay. you'll realise you are you, and there wasn't much to you. and that it was your own unintended fault.

or you'll feel coldly alone. except, as those who've lived homeless for long become 'used to', you'll see again the bonds that tie us all. there's the obligations and the indebtedness; the love and familiar.

there's those you held above change, above time, above physical movements and friction. those are the ones you start to wonder about in the wintry time of your soul. you muse if you let open your hand just a little, will it lift and be away, gone, to its own cadence and purpose, and/or lured away by the persistant sweets of other trains.

another feature of this wintry awakening is the incredible distance. things once held near seem far, or missing. or maybe, for the sake of longterm sanity, discovered unreal or misconceived. all directions from you, you see the lapses.

in judgement and in perception, you realise perhaps you have not failed, but oh what a distance to make up for.

of course. the landscape around you is not empty. it shouldn't be, for you are never alone in your context, but inevitably tangled in engagements, in relationships - all markers of your position in time and space. ...to see not even the physical blots is a whiteout of the soul. you're blind and dead for a time, a worse kind of winter, for you lose even perspective of your perspective.

these winter times are when the winds around me howl the greatest, and my senses demanded to be painfully acute.

fly.

[genting highlands. malaysia]

to the new year,
spinner:
of dreams and renewed energy,
of hope and exuberance.

round and again.