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Cabinet of Chic Curiosities

Category / Life is Messy

November 19, 2018

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. CCCXXIII)

1. This staircase from the Eiffel Tower is for Sale It’s not every day that a chunk of one of the world’s most famous monuments goes on sale. But on November 27, Paris auction house Artcurial will be selling off a 24-step piece of original staircase from the Eiffel Tower, removed in 1983 to help lighten the…

November 16, 2018

One Artist, 146 Faces

She’s the woman of a 146 faces (our ballpark guess), as well as the stylist, makeup artist, art director, model, and, above all, photographer behind their creation. For today’s art students, Cindy Sherman is a postmodern prophet of the über meta in photography, a woman who toyed with the concept of selfies and identity long before…

November 15, 2018

America’s Beauty School Dropouts: A Brief Compendium

We miss the days when estheticians waxed eyebrows in a Paul Bunyan-ready cottage, perfected their perming skills in a nondescript clapboard shack, and barbers painted their 1969 Volkswagens to match their salon. More than mere institutions for a cute ‘do, the beauty schools and barber shops of yesteryear were visible extensions of major cultural shifts.…

November 14, 2018

Man steals Goat from Paris Park, takes it for a Joy Ride on the Metro

First of all, you need to know that there are goats in the Jardin des Tuileries that tend to the lawns of the iconic gardens, introduced several years ago as a form of “eco-grazing”. But more importantly– that’s a goat, on the Parisian metro– stolen from the Tuileries on November 13th and smuggled underground onto…

November 13, 2018

Here’s What Japanese Art Looked Like in the Aftermath of the Atomic Bombs

The cultural shift between pre and post-WWII world Japan was complicated and often divisive, but if you were photographer Eikoh Hosoe, that tension became fuel for creative expression that turned into a surrealist dreamworld – or nightmare, depending on who you asked. The Japanese artist’s works mirrored the state of a shell-shocked country in the…

November 12, 2018

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. CCCXXII)

1.Freddie Mercury’s First Band You can see him, centre, with his bandmates in 1958. Their band was called “The Hectics”. The school-band was formed while all five were students at St. Peter’s Boys School, an English boarding school near Bombay (now Mumbai), India. The band only played at school events and were not allowed to venture outside for bookings. Found on…

November 9, 2018

All Aboard the International Express, New York City

You can go to Paris for beauty school, and the Philippines for lunch. You can find your dream Diwali dress and a 200lb Ganesh statue on one block, then put your feet up at one of the best Chinese food emporiums in the world. The glory of New York has always been its diversity, but…

November 9, 2018

A Brief Compendium of the Weirdest Stuff Sold Online (Like Your Soul).

The Internet, that “alien life form” as David Bowie decreed in a prophetic 1999 interview, has changed a lot in the past decade. The dial-up shriek is no more, AIM Bots are probably withering away in a black hole next to MySpace, and the glory days of weird eBay auctions are behind us. Or so…

November 8, 2018

A Secret Archive in New York City that Saved Tiffany Lamps from Extinction

Whose job is it to safeguard one of the most hated designs in decorative history? In the case of the Tiffany lamp, it fell to a New York City orthodontist and immigrant from Austria who happened to be furniture shopping in Greenwich Village in 1935 when his wife spotted a “strange, old-fashioned lamp”. Dr. Egon Neustadt and…

November 6, 2018

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. CCCXXI)

1. Johnny Cash in Thigh-High Boots, 1960s Found on Pinterest. 2. Souvenirs from Getting Struck by Lighting They said it looked “like you threw a cannonball” through his cowboy hat. The story of how Jaime Santana was truck by lighting — and survived — is a fascinating read, from the moment he was thrown off…