This silly little guy is Tommy Tucker. In the 1940’s, he became mildly famous when LIFE magazine photographer Nina Leen decided to turn her lens on Tommy. His owner made him some sharp new outfits (all dresses, because, I have to assume, squirrels hate pants as much as I do) and a rodent star was born.
photography
Sunday daydreaming: Kilian Schöenberger’s misty woods & “Indie Alaska.”
It’s snowing again. Es schneit. Il neige. Det snöar. I don’t believe it will ever stop snowing. It is going to simply pile up and up and up until we can walk out our bedroom window onto a shifting landscape of cold pale light. I’m drowning in snow. My eyes are starving for color, but instead it’s wind-whipped and white everywhere I look. My eyelids froze shut when I was walking outside yesterday, eyelashes glued together by snowflakes and tears. It sounds poetic, but it felt strange and disorienting.
There’s no color in the Maine landscape right now, which means I must find it elsewhere, and right now, “elsewhere” is a screen. But Kilian Schöenberger’s photographs are gorgeous and make me view the winter landscape with a little more forgiveness. It can be beautiful, despite my cabin fever. 
Skeletons of saints, covered in gems.
.
When a man in a German village approached Paul Koudounaris during a 2008 research trip and asked something along the lines of, “Are you interested in seeing a dilapidated old church in the forest with a skeleton standing there covered in jewels and holding a cup of blood in his left hand like he’s offering you a toast?” Koudounaris’ answer was, “Yes, of course.”
I’ve been waiting my entire life for someone to ask me that question! Preferably an old crone with chicken feet that poke from beneath her skirt. She’ll ask me to come with her in cackling tones, then she’ll lower her voice and lean forward. “My name is Baba Yaga,” she will whisper, her breath smelling of burnt sage and rotting meat. “I know,” I’ll say. “I’ve been waiting for you.” She will nod, folds of her red calico headscarf falling around her wrinkled face and glinting eyes. “Come with me, child. Into the forest.”
But dang, some people have all the luck. Koudounaris is a photographer, author, and art historian. He has a really rad website called Empire de la Mort that you can check out here. For a more intellectual take on his work, go read the piece at Smithsonian.com.
Instagram on my wall.
Sometimes people email me about products they want me to write about. Usually, to be totally honest, I delete the emails or send them a quick “thanks but that doesn’t fit” note (I’ve been trying to respond to PR pitches more, especially after reading this great piece about gendered work and the public relations business from Jacobin, which made me think twice about clicking delete). But anyway, I was recently contacted by the folks at Instantly Framed, and because I’m an avid instagrammer I decided to try out the app (you can find my Instagram account here… in case you were wondering).
And I’m super glad I did! It took about five seconds to pick a photograph from my phone and order a framed print, which was delivered in two days. While I admire minimalist decor, I’m truthfully a maximalist myself; my apartment is covered in prints and pictures, weird textiles and pointless knickknacks. But I wouldn’t have it any other way (what are walls even for, if not to cover in pretty pictures?!).
Today I hung the above picture on my wall. I took that picture myself (on my iPhone… obviously). It’s the view from the top of Mount Kineo, a mountain that is located on a small island in the middle of Moosehead Lake. Up north, Maine is wild and green, scarcely populated and full of larger-than-life moose that chill out by the water as if they’ve got nothing better to do. (Did you know they have hollow hair, which enables them to swim, despite the fact that they’re big, huge, heavy, actuallykindofscary animals?) I love it up there. I often wish I lived further north, though I know there are few jobs to be had and a lot of economic depression. It’s a hard place to make a living, and though Maine is amazing, it’s still a state with a lot of issues. But I consider myself lucky to live here, and fortunate to have access to so much natural beauty. In the summer, I drive north whenever I can, to camp out at Lily Bay State Park and spend my days soaking in tea-dark lake water.
But I’m getting off topic. This is a cool app. I would never recommend it on my blog if I didn’t really, really like it. So, if you need some new wall art, you should check it out. And if you use the code CIKELLEHER10 you’ll get $10 off your first order (though December 15). Cool, eh?
Just because it’s pretty: Amanda Charchain’s too-cool nudes.
Amanda Charchain has some amazing photographs of nudes in the woods, girls frolicking in fields, and desolate, lonely landscapes. It’s all great, but this picture is just so perfect—a piece of brightness and color for a rough, cold Thursday.
Vociferous!
Loud summer, sun rude and demanding
an indifferent master
but my skin is impossibly hungry
for architectures of raucous light
(Photograph by Maria Kazvan from her lovely series of nudes in nature. Go see more.)
Girls.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the friendships that form between girls. As a kid, I always had just one best friend. I tended to have these incredibly close, very intense relationships with just a single person. I guess you could say my serial monogamy began back in grade school, because as an adult, I do the same thing with men.
I think I’ve always been drawn to the intimacy that can arise between a pair of two—especially between two girls. For years, the most important relationship in my life was with a friend named Sara. We spent every free moment together; we held hands, we called each other every night; we talked alike and acted alike. We were eventually voted “Dynamic Duo” in our high school yearbook. Even now, when fiances and boyfriends have become our Significant Others, we remain close. But the giddiness, the head-tingling pleasure of whispering secrets, the sweet feeling of acceptance—all that is something I will always link to childhood. To late night sleepovers and days spent passing notes, written in glitter pen, folded with intricate origami, and written in the secret language that passes between middle school girls.
While her photographs don’t depict groups of two, Osamu Yokonami’s series of schoolgirl portraits remind me of that strange, almost mystical feeling of becoming so very, very close with another person. There is nothing sexual about it, but in some ways, that makes it even more intense; it’s wanting to be someone, to inhabit the same space, to have an identity that is somehow more than yourself, yet lighter, more diaphanous, full of sweetness and light and air.
Dressed in uniform, these girls are seen from a distance. At this range, they all look the same. They could have come out of the same wooden doll, little matryoshkas walking one by one across a snowy field. They could be dolls or demons. They meld together, these girls.
The entire series is gorgeous, as is all Yokonami’s work. There is a dreamy quality to it that reminds me of old photographs, shot with clunky cameras and developed in dark rooms. See what I mean, here.
Neat.
There is a tumblr called Things Organized Neatly that is all pictures of (yeah, I will state the obvious) things organized very neatly. In spite of the fact that my bedroom is so littered with wine bottles, take out containers, and various articles of clothing that can be described with some form of the word “sweat” that you can hardly see the floor (or more likely, because of that fact) I love it. 
Also, I realize this made the internet rounds awhile ago, but I didn’t really care until now. Which is curious, since my overall level of cleanliness has only declined.
Finding beautiful things amid squalor is has become a survival skill of sorts for me; as someone used to open spaces and clear night skies, it’s pretty much necessary that I figure out ways to see the aesthetic aspect of urban life. Here’s a good slide show example (though a little more rough than I usually tend): Beauty Amid Ugliness.
Katy Kelleher 
