Cynthia Closkey's blog
“Children playing with cat,” 1957, Concord, New Hampshire, USA — Ladies Home Journal Magazine — Image by © Genevieve Naylor/CORBIS
From a set on If Charlie Parker… called Shutterbug Friday #11, Genevieve Naylor (Act Two: Wee Folk in the Eisenhower Era). Genevieve Naylor was a fashion photographer and photojournalist whose work appeared in all the best magazines in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.
I think that part of what makes staying at a hotel fun is that you don’t have all your stuff. You have only some things, but they are pretty much enough for whatever you’re doing. And the absence of the rest of your stuff means you have less to think about, less to worry about. That leaves you with more mental energy, so you can think and feel more clearly.
Today, I brought the cats to the new apartment for the first time. Continue reading “Scaredy cats”
Today I did something I’ve avoided doing for years: I shopped at the Pennsylvania Macaroni Company.
Yes, it’s a famous Pittsburgh-area foodie destination; yes, they have all kinds of delicious things like amazing cheese and orgeat syrup and amazing olive oil and real Italian imported everything. It is indeed hard to fathom that one might not want to go there.
Here’s the thing: I really don’t like crowds. And the other thing I know about Penn Mac is that, on a Saturday, the crowd there is fierce. Continue reading “Oranges and olives”
So, I’ve had this apartment for over a week and haven’t been in it for more than a few hours at a time. Why? Because while there was furniture and various amenities, there was no Internet. I need my Internet. Continue reading “Impromptu”
“The question isn’t whether or not you should wait to be picked, the question is whether you care enough to pick yourself.”
Seth Godin on self-publishing
On Friday we moved furniture from my house to the new loft. It turned out that I own almost enough furniture to furnish both a small house and an apartment — if you needed an example of overconsumption in the modern age, I think that’s a fine one to use.
My cats will be spending time in Pittsburgh with me, so I took their lovely cat tree down to the loft. The cat tree is a nice piece of furniture: It’s made of hardwood, finished with an espresso stain, with segments of carpet on the surfaces for the cats to sit on and scratch.
Here are Max and Sammie on the tree, before we moved it.
The cats are up here in Butler with me this weekend, and they have mostly adjusted to having their world turned topsy-turvy, all the places that they normally sit having been moved or removed.
But Max is little lost without his tree. He keeps looking to where it should be, as though it might reappear any moment.
Think how excited he will be to reunite with the tree in the new place!
In the late 1980s, I was a big fan of Banana Republic. Actually, I’ve bought items from Banana Republic many times since then, but the Banana Republic of today is very different from the Banana Republic of then.
It used to be that Banana Republic was more of a catalog experience, where the catalogs were printed on cream colored, heavy stock paper. The items were not photographed but illustrated, and they were described in expansive, worldly prose. Continue reading “The Weekend Dress, circa 1986”
Get out your waistcoats, goggles, and pocket watches. The Pittsburgh Public Theater is having a charming steampunk event next Friday before the evening’s performance of Around the World in 80 Days. Continue reading “Age of Steam Night at Pittsburgh Public Theater”