Taxidermy Frightens Me

The picture at left is just fabulous. I love the strange fetishy looking fencing masks. The petite women in their Edwardian day clothing. It looks like an Edward Gorey drawing come to life. It was a part of a NY Times article/slide show called The New Antiquarians, which brought up some really conflicting feelings in me.

1. My first thought was, ooooh, how lovely, this is right smack in the center of my aesthetic!

2. I'm sort of actively trying to avoid crazy old lady-dom. Surrounding myself with random dusty ephemera in large piles of confusion and weirdness will not help me attain this goal. In some small way, my entire theory of interior decoration can be summed up in the phrase: "Please, God, don't let me turn into one of the Collyer Brothers."

3. Taxidermy frightens me. I'm always afraid it will spontaneously sprout maggots. When I mentioned this on fb, my conservator BFF said I would be more in danger of mercury and arsenic dusting off of it. These are not good things.

4. The sisters pictured above have no windows in their apartment. I need sunlight or I get deeply depressed.

5. But so pretty!

6. The much extolled clean, modern aesthetic leaves me cold. The Fred/Ginger deco interiors are about as clean and modern as I can tolerate.

7. I am completely aware of the fact that Virgodog would run screaming into the night if I tried to install some sort of bird carcass, or lizard display in the living room (though I tolerate the Spider Man head in the office, so he really doesn't have a leg to stand on).

10. I love this stuff, but Anthopologie makes me feel so dirty about it.

11. ABC Home makes me literally sick with acquisitive longing.

12. And so, so pretty.

13. As far as furnishing goes, I'm really more of an Art Nouveau/Arts & Crafts kind of girl. I really like some of the Second Empire French stuff, too.

14. But I can't afford any of it, and really don't have any kind of head for interior decoration.

15. All of this, for some reason, makes me think of Princess Langwidere and her many heads. When I was ten or eleven, I drew imagined portraits of all thirty, approximating John R. Neill's drawing style as closely as I could. This is why it's so odd to me when people say I draw like Gorey. What they are seeing are the remains of the Neill influence.

16. I really like intricate, cluttered interiors. I am also maybe not the tidiest person on earth, or the best at cleaning things as regularly as one might prefer. This is not the best mix to have with the intricate or the cluttered.

17. Sigh. I simply don't have the focus or single minded purpose to devote myself completely to a single aesthetic. I've been weirdly jealous of people who have the ability to do so since I was a teenager. When I bother to give it any thought, I realize it's probably best.

18. I think I should really contain my aesthetic impulses to art. Worrying about it in real life too much just makes me anxious.

19. I really need to draw more.

20. And dust my apartment.