Yum 10 - Moo, Millennium General Assembly, Ray Bradbury 90th Birthday

 MOO MINI-CARDS

My awesome new Moo mini-cards!

They came!  I waited and then they came!  My new mini-cards from the amazing Moo.com!  There's a lot of them - I had trouble choosing, but I like each and every one so much, I don't really want to give them away.  That's kind of a problem.

You can choose from their designs (I did), or upload your own artwork.

Sometimes I just spread them out and look at them.  Yum.

MILLENNIUM GENERAL ASSEMBLY

Through some cool friends of mine (yup - I got friends so cool they're like ice pops on a hot day) Jane Getter and Adam Holzman, I met Mai - who runs the Millennium General Assembly.  Sounds like a division of the U.N., but actually is a jewelry business.  Mai finds antique and vintage pieces and puts them together to create unique necklaces, bracelets and other artifacts.

At first, I was completely taken by a charming bracelet -- one which was named "Be Still, My Battered Heart."  Mai does not so much make pieces of jewelry as she assembles stories.  They are little poems of metal.

I'd always wanted a charm bracelet and never had one.  I found this one super fun, dangly and irresistable.  It put itself on me and did not want to come off.  I went to dinner at a friend's last week and I was wearing it.  Her 7 year-old daughter was carefully looking at the bracelet.  She was looking at the heart and the key, and she asked me what they meant.  I said, "I guess that's the key to my heart."  She said, in her 7 year-old wisdom, "But where's the lock?"

(Since then, I've seen about ten necklaces featuring antique and vintage locks.  So strange.)

Once I had the bracelet on, this necklace started making eyes at me.  My grandfather was an Elk.  I never knew what they did, but he was forever going to the Elk's Club.  I guess I just wanted to be in the club.  This one feels really good on.

You can find Millennium Assembly on Etsy and browse through yourself!

FARENHEIT 451 - RAY BRADBURY 90TH BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE

My friend Alfie - you all know Alfie by now, right? - invited me to a screening of Farenheit 451.  Great - I thought - I've never seen it.  It has Oskar Werner.  It's 60's Sci Fi.  Directed by Francois Truffaut!  Cool!

What I didn't know was that it was part of the Ray Bradbury Tribute Week in LA for his 90th Birthday.  And that Hugh Hefner would be there with Ray Bradbury!!!

It was kind of an amazing experience.  To hear Ray Bradbury talk about his work and to hear Hugh Hefner talk about the timeliness of serializing Farenheit 451 during the McCarthy era was great.  Hefner talked about books as an important part of our lineage, connecting us to the past, "If you don't know who you were before, you don't know who you are."

Say what you want, but Hefner is one of my idols.  Not many people can start from nothing and create an entire world exactly as they want it.  Not many are skillful at mixing high and low-brow culture and selling it to the world.  Not many people get to wear a bathrobe to work and not have anybody blink.

Bradbury, who looked old and frail, talked about writing every morning, and has a new book coming out in the spring.  "The great thing about writing," he said, "is that you should not know what you are doing but when you are done it explodes before you."  Clearly, the act of writing and that moment of discovery has not gotten old for him.

I didn't realize what an amazingly prolific writer he was, until the presentation before the event ran what felt like hundreds of covers and titles of stories and novels.

How cool is Oskar Werner?

The movie was both completely current and dated - Bradbury mentioned that there is a new version kicking around, and expressed that the only thing he didn't like about this one was Julie Christie playing dual roles.  The production design and costumes are impeccable.  Werner is really fantastic.  You don't think he'll open up and you don't think you'll like him, but he does, and you do.  The movie drags in parts, certainly, but well, I think that about everything, and we hadn't eaten dinner!

The end of the movie was truly moving for me - at the risk of dropping spoilers - the idea of a self-selected group of guardians maintaining and oral tradition of great literature was close to my heart.  It's the idea of the goat-singer or the Homeric poet, or any of the folks doing spoken word today.  Fulfilling your role in society by becoming the container of a specific work of art is quite an astonishing evolution. (And, no, I hadn't read the book!)

(And yeah - I know I'm behind, but there's just too much amazing goodness going on!)