My New Life in Southeast Asia

It has been years since I've posted here, and much has changed. I've been living in Asia for some time, taking up photography, filmmaking, and YouTube. I'm curious if anyone is still connected to this blog, as I'm working on a trailer for a documentary or YouTube series about my experience with Garvinweasel, a ten year saga attempting to save an Antebellum home in the deep South, one that ended in a sort of ruin, which led me here, to my new life. If you're interested in seeing more about that, please let me know in the comments. I'd love to hear from you.

p.s. this photo is my desk in Bali from 2018. 

Bookstack

... is, according to Merriam-Webster, a premium word. A bookstack can reveal a great deal about the bookstacker. This one pretty much sums it up for me.

Bedroom Renovation

This is my first post using the Blogger app for iPad, as well as my first post in quite a while. The photos were taken with the iPad on a recent morning. The mantle is from a local antique shop, and the items in the built-in bookcase include rocks picked up on a trip to Colorado, and souvenirs from trips to Hong Kong and Vieitnam. The chest I bought at the Salvation Army when I lived in Manhattan. I put the top down on the VW cabriolet that I owned at the time (later sold to Victoria Secret supermodel Frederique Van der Wal, but that's another post), parked it in the underground garage until about 1 am when I bribed the doorman at Trump Parc to let me pull the car up to the front door and move it into my apartment through the lobby and into the passenger elevator, which was a big no-no according to the building rules. The big mirrors were purchased at a shop in New York's Soho and first came home to my former loft on Grand Street. They were shipped south when I moved back to the states from Paris, and I painted and stained them to match the newly refinished greige color floors in the bedroom. The mountain chair was purchased at the Place Jeux du Bal flea market in Brussels, and were featured in an older post with the hay bale coffee table, my entry in the contest hosted by Brook at the Velvet and Linen blog.

Inspiration

Source: Maisons de Charme, Printemps 2008

DIY update

Lots of work underway here over the past few months. The master bedroom, seen here from the future master bath suite, is actually done now, and I hope to post an update of the finished version soon.

Twilight Pond

Photo: jamesxvi

Axel Vervoordt Interview for German TV

I can't understand anything the interviewer asks, and while Mr. Vervoordt answers in English, the German translation audio dubbed over his voice makes it difficult to make out what he is saying most of the time. If I can translate the transcript, I will post a follow up with some quotes. You can watch the interview here.

Vervoordt r.e. Kanaal

I found an interesting site about a project by Belgium's Vervoordt family. I heard about this when I was living in Brussels in 2008, that Axel Vervoordt's son Dick was planning a development around the Kanaal complex, where the Axel Vervoordt company has their workshops and showrooms. This extensive site contains an explanation of the master plan and its inspiration, descriptions and floorplans of the properties that will be for sale, biographies of the architects and designers behind the project, information about the Vervoordt Foundation, dedicated to supporting the arts and preserving the Vervoordt collection, and probably much more. It is in Dutch, but I viewed the site in Google's Chrome browser, which did a pretty good job of translating to English.

I have been on hiatus for a while now, focusing on renovations at Garvinweasel, with lots of projects underway simultaneously... never really a good idea in my experience, but sometimes things just work out that way. I hope to post some new photos soon of the original floors stripped of a century and a half of coverings, including at least two coats of paint and two layers of carpet. This is one tough project, slow going, and I have a backup plan for new plank flooring should I just give up at some point, so wish me luck.

French Lifestyle Blog - Two Maisons

Some of you know that I lived in France for a while in the nineties, and I sometimes dream about being an american in Paris again. Here's a link to a great lifestyle and design blog, Two Masions, by a lucky expat who lives in the south of France. She also has some great items for sale in the online shop.

Zen and the Art of Axel Vervoordt

Here is a link to a great article about Axel Vervoordt, from the online edition of Art + Auction magazine.

The article mentions a Wabi hut on the grounds at 's-Gravenwezel, 'made of earth and fallen tree limbs'. I am fascinated by this, especially considering the vast store of tree limbs still awaiting removal here, the result of a recent ice storm. If any of you have seen it, please let me know more about it.

Happy reading and good weekend.

p.s. I found a picture of the Wabi pavillion; it's in the slideshow that accompanies the article.

Photo by Laziz Hamani

Requiem for a Tree

Let the trees be consulted before you take any action
every time you breathe in thank a tree
let tree roots crack parking lots at the world bank headquarters
let loggers be druids specially trained and rewarded
to sacrifice trees at auspicious times
let carpenters be master artisans
let lumber be treasured like gold
let chainsaws be played like saxophones
let soldiers on maneuvers plant trees 
give police and criminals a shovel
and a thousand seedlings
let businessmen carry pocketfuls of acorns
let newlyweds honeymoon in the woods
walk don't drive
stop reading newspapers
stop writing poetry
squat under a tree and tell stories.
-  John Wright

The ice storm last weekend brought with it the end for several grand trees at Garvinweasel. The pecan tree above was last seen in this post, where it was referred to in Jane's comment as 'slightly scary', which was what I loved about it. I spent one whole day outside with my chainsaw already this week, and have no idea when I will finish the work of cleaning up the remains of this and two other trees that were uprooted by the weight of the ice, along with a couple of other trees that lost major limbs. 

As Brian sang from the cross in the Monty Python film that bears his name, it's best if one can 'always look on the bright side of life'. On that note, perhaps I can turn the wood from these trees into a beautiful floor, something much needed at Garvinweasel.

I love these end-cut parquet from Atelier de Grange. I find their web site mesmerizing. At the least, I should produce several tons of firewood, which would be put to good use next winter. 

I, Blogger

Self-portrait by Jean-Michel Basquiat

The lovely Borjana Eghbalian of the blog Green and Stylish has tagged me for the Kreativ Blogger award, which requires me to reveal 7 things about myself in this post and pass the award on to 7 bloggers that I admire (and secretly want to know more about) and then leave a post on their blogs to let them know. I will also proudly display the Kreativ Blogger award image. Thank you Borjana!

So, about me..

Image here

1. As a child, I fell in love with an abandoned, octagonal house (with remnants of a wrap-around porch) seen at some distance from the road on trips to visit my grandparents. I wanted this abandoned house to be mine, to rescue it, bring it back to life, but my parents would never stop to let me go explore it. This is certainly a clue as to why I am here now, at Garvinweasel.

2. I like to write and sketch ideas and images in a Moleskin carnet with my Lamy Safari fountain pen, black ink. I have a sketch of the four acre garden plan for Garvinweasel in my current book, along with some information architecture and cloud computing diagrams with notes on predictive analytics algorithms.

3. I am incomprehensibly crazy about the nine dogs that live at Garvinweasel (Lady, Bigfoot, Daisy, Bear, Penny, Beatle, Missy, Dudley and Lucy). We have fostered twenty-five dogs over the past four years.

4. I like to read. I found a pre-publication copy of Susan Minot's first book, "Lust", in a loft I once rented on Grand Street (in New York's Soho), left there by the previous tenant, who seemed to have moved out in a hurry. I mailed the book once from Paris to girl in Seattle, along with, for some reason, a tie from Barneys NYC. She returned the book, but I can't find it now, and I sometimes miss my tie.

5. Once a month, usually on a Saturday, I drive my '67 Ford pickup to town and get my haircut in the old barbershop on the town square, across from the courthouse. Sitting in that barber chair within the tobacco smoke-stained walls, warm shaving foam around my ears and on my neck, the smell of Barbicide in the air, I feel like I have been given a Valium IV and dropped into the set of a grainy movie adaptation of a southern gothic novel.  If I was very rich, I would buy a big painting by Basquiat every March at the fair in Maastricht, and I would get a haircut and hot-shave in this barber shop every Saturday.

 Photo of Joni Mitchell by Jack Robinson 1969

6. I like to listen to the music of Hildegard Von Bingen, Miles Davis, Radiohead, Brian Eno, Joni Mitchell and Iggy Pop (from whom I have a hand-written letter, but that's another post). I usually listen on last.fm, but if no music is available, I can hum Mozart's "Requiem".

7. My personal style is basically white linen or cotton shirts, hand-made cuff-links, vintage Rolex Air-King, my French muck boots (Le Chameau), khakis or Levi's and a hint of Hermès Bel Ami.

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My blogger tags...

I pass the Kreativ Blogger award to these 7 bloggers in appreciation:

Wendy at Little Chapel on the River
Jane at My Pear Tree House
LeAnn at Linen and Lavender
David at The Neo Lifestyle
Desiree at Vosges Paris
Shawn at Country French Antiques
Julie at The Provence Post

A Green and Stylish Thank You!

Checking my email this morning, I was surprised and delighted to find that I have been tagged, by Borjana of the wonderful 'Green and Stylish' blog, with the Kreativ Blogger award. Seeing Borjana's lovely wellies in her post, I decided to set up a quick shot of my own (Le Chameau 'Country Walkers'), with some of the Garvinweasel pack and their green and stylish winter house providing an appropriate background. If I am at home, it is most likely these boots are on my feet, and I took them off for a few minutes this morning to snap this picture (some of you may recognize the hay bales from an earlier post). Thank you Borjana... I will return with my list of personal revelations and blogger tags in the next day or two.

Garden Journal

The groves were God's first temples.  
~William Cullen Bryant, "A Forest Hymn"

Thomas Jefferson kept a garden journal for sixty years. I've been meaning to start one for the past four. Not that I've done much in the garden. I sometimes spend an entire weekend picking up sticks and branches, and though it is a necessary task, it hardly seems worth writing down.  I find the time I spend outdoors doing these seemingly menial or trivial tasks actually provide a space in time that is otherwise difficult to find in the everyday sense. 

I enjoy being out there with the birds and the dogs, and I am constantly looking around the property while performing needed chores, dreaming about what I could do here or there, envisioning a pond or an orchard, a vineyard or a hedgerow. My perspective on much around gardening and property management has changed. I used to rake leaves; now I am gathering raw material for organic compost, for use in a future kitchen garden. My compost heap is several hundred cubic feet, and will eventually yield a ton or more of the stuff each year.

Someone gave me a $50 Visa gift card as a Christmas gift, and I will use it to order 500 pine tree seedlings from the state's forestry service today, for delivery in February. I will soon learn something about tree planting, and plan to capture some reflections of the experience and post some images here.

Image: here

Happy New Year

“The object of a new year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul”

 -G. K. Chesterton quotes (English born Gabonese Critic, Essayist, Novelist and Poet, 1874-1936)

Many thanks to Eve, from the German blog Unikum,for sending this Irish New Year Blessing:

May love and laughter light your days,
and warm your heart and home.
May good and faithful friends be yours,
wherever you may roam.
May peace and plenty bless your world
with joy that long endures.
May all life's passing seasons
bring the best to you and yours!

A Christmas Story

"I'm ready for my close-up", our little table top Christmas tree seemed to say. With the Canon G11 Santa left for me, I too, felt ready, and set the scene by randomly placing votive candles among freshly cut evergreen branches (a la Axel Vervoordt) and snapped this photo, and the one below.

When I was little, my mother told me about what Christmas had been like for her as a child, the youngest of five born to farmstead parents in the Mississippi delta. Growing up during the Great Depression, Santa Claus would bring her a pair of new shoes... and an orange. I remember her telling me that she always really looked forward to getting that orange at Christmas.

I didn't understand when I was kid, it just seemed so weird to me, a child of the suburbs, used to seeing oranges piled high in the produce section of every grocery. Somehow, now, it seems to me a perfect memory... a Christmas story from another era, yet one that resonates deeply for me today.

I lost both my parents this year, and the holidays brought bittersweet reminders of Christmas past. We listened to Dad's favorite Christmas music (he loved Nat King Cole's versions), watched classic movies like "White Christmas" (she loved Danny Kaye) and "Christmas in Connecticut" (he really liked Barbara Stanwyck),  and we placed some oranges around the base of our little tree... for my Mom.

Tangled Up In Blue Christmas

... is what they should have titled the new Bob Dylan collection of holiday melodies. I consider myself a Dylan fan, so I happily snapped the above iPhone pic of his image on the wall of an alley during a recent trip to Brussels. Discovering his newest music offering on Amazon.com this morning while doing some last minute shopping, I thought 'oh, this might be good' and clicked on the the 'preview all songs' button. After few bars of the first couple of numbers, I was transported, as if by a Dickensian ghost, to a vision of sitting on a barstool in a dark and smoky crosstown joint on Christmas Eve, befriended by a few lonely kooks out of a Charles Bukowski novel, a malfunctioning jukebox rotating this CD all night while a gravely voiced bartender entertains us by alternately coughing up his versions of a duet and blowing Lucky Strike smoke rings. If you should give it a listen, please let me know... do you hear what I hear?

Here's a happy alternative... how about Diana Krall singing 'Jingle Bells' and other holiday standards while sharing champagne and foie gras at home with friends and family... and may Messrs. Dickens and Bukowski, merry gentlemen, rest in peace.

Good Weekend!

image: here

Patina

"Monuments are anchors in time. Epochs pass, weather erodes, people lose interest. This cannot be helped. But patina itself is worth appreciating. Patina is the value that age puts on an object. It’s what makes an antique antique. It is experience, maturity, the soft sheen of time. Patina wasn’t present at the spanking-new creation. It comes from a life lived."

- John Yemma, editor of the Christian Science Monitor, in his "open source" column for November 22, 2009, "On Thanksgiving: the memorial that time forgot"

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I need to install a gate soon, across the drive entrance, in conjunction with the installation of 2000+ feet of underground electric fence for the dogs. Garvinweasel sits on about four acres, but the dogs can disappear for hours, exploring hundreds of acres of an adjoining pastures and forests, returning with barbed-wire scratches, deer legs (they love these) and other assorted artifacts from their adventures. Every day I worry that they may not all make it back in one piece, so I ordered the underground fence wire, training flags, transformers (one backup) and six collars... all still in the box waiting on me to find a spare weekend or two. These fences have a special, twisted wire that don't send a signal to the collars, made for secured pass-through areas, like the driveway gate. All that to say I have been browsing gates on the web. Tonight I came across this jewel, and wanted to share it with you.

Gate image: here  Quote: here

Life Imitates Art... An Ephemeral Sundial

Image: James XVI

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide (1869 - 1951)

"Look" said Ms. XVI... "a sundial". Made of ice. Functional... but flawed. Imperfect. Impermanent. An accidental discovery, captured in a moment, Sunday morning at Garvinweasel. Beauty can be found everywhere you look, it depends only on how you 'see'. 

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The back-story... Hand-painted ceramic bowl: $11. Large dog kennel (with black plastic removable floor): $115. iPhone 3G: $199. Stepping outside on a freezing cold morning to find an ice 'sundial' in the dog water bowl sitting next to the  kennel with a camera  in your pocket: priceless. 

Winner of 'Axel Vervoordt: Timeless Interiors'

Image: amazon.com

Congratulations Albarosa,  from Brillante Home Decor, on leaving the third comment on the contest post!!!

Thanks to everyone who entered, I enjoyed revisiting the castle with you and reading all of your comments.

Have a great week and check back tomorrow for a post about life imitates art.

-James