kazam!

i've been in love with charles and ray eames for a long time, and my heart nearly exploded during our history and theory lecture about them today.

i really admire a sense of play, and worry that i'm too serious to follow my own instincts there. their work seems so full of joy and glee and wit, and somehow it achieves both beauty and function too. i am also more than a little smitten with them both - can any two people be that much in love and that happy, really? (to the biography section, and hurry!)

my favourite of their work, or at least of what i know, is mathematica, a museum exhibit. it seems to capture the "oh wow, oh wow!" exciting parts of science and turn them into intricate, gorgeous little pieces.

an aside: i read a fairly disappointing book a while ago about a debauched french policeman tracking a mystic, who had trained as a toymaker. there was a passage in the book describing the toys, including a tiny articulated acrobat which kept somersaulting once you started it in motion. mmm. and so i find myself in love with museums, learning, mechanical toys, coin-operated machines, and crossing my fingers that i get a chance to do something with this some day. (watch out for obituaries for nerdy girls crushed to death by their homemade rube goldberg machines.)

after the lecture, we watched some eames films - blacktop, house, powers of ten, tocatta for toy trains, and kaleidoscope jazz chair. i hadn't seen any of them before and thought they were really beautiful and joyful.