The Power of 150

Have a little seat and ponder this:

(Favourite setting this week, from Vogue Living Australia March 2010)

Or perhaps you would prefer a pink tufted chair. I know I would: 

Did you know that the human brain developed over time to manage a particular specific number of social connections?  This is known as our social channel capacity and is one of the reasons our brain is so large.  Anthropologists argue that the larger the social grouping, the larger the brain. 

That number is 150.

Any more, it becomes difficult.   The connections become thinner, and less solid.  The time we have to spend on each relationship becomes more limited. 

Any less, and we probably have more time to devote to these spiderwebs of friendship.

Anyone who has read Malcolm Gladwell's 'The Tipping Point' will be familiar with this concept.   He provides oodles of evidence in support, including:

• a religious group, the Hutterites, who split into smaller groups each time their grouping approaches 150.
• Gore Corporation, a madly successful US business, which has found its success in part through keeping its corporate groups, and plant personnel, to less than 150 people. 

And of course we can all think of our own examples of the power of 150. 

Perhaps this is why many weddings and engagement parties have guests which number between 100 and 200.  It is why smaller schools are often better for children than very large ones.   This may also be why those who live in small country towns, bereft of the infrastructure and services of a big city, are often so happy, content and well connected.  They know all the people they need to know.

Graham Greene also had views on this topic.   He said that every single person only has the ability to really know a certain number of people, streets and the insides of houses.  Any more and we risk becoming overwhelmed.  GG didn't need some anthropologist to tell him what he knew in his bones to be true. 

So I wonder what all this means in 2010, in an era of Facebook friends in the 100s, subscribers and readers of blogs in the 1000s and Twitterers with millions of followers.  Is it all too overwhelming?  Can you ever truly know all these people?  Or are these just loose social connections - no less satisfactory, but of course different to the ones you have over coffee or a glass of wine?    Some people are marvellously well equipped to have multitudes of social connections. They enjoy and thrive on the time required to sustain them.  Others really are better off in a small social circle.     And yet isn't it strange that you can still feel an innate connection with people just through a sharing of common interests, images or even a joke. 

Maybe our brains will have to grow to cope with it.   Just like one of my other theories which is that our fingers will eventually develop froglike pads on the end to cope with all the typing we do....

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A trip to Fitzroy for some silk

Melbourne's a small town, right?  Well, for a town of 3.5 million people.

I live in the inner suburbs and across the river is Fitzroy, only a twenty minute drive. And yet I never seem to be able to find the time to do it.

Like the north shore and the southern side of the harbour in Sydney, sometimes we in the east have a little psychological barrier about crossing the river.

You see,  in Gertrude Street Fitzroy, there is a magical shop called Vixen, where you can buy these lampshades.  Well not literally these, as these are the ones hanging in my hallway, but something just like it or maybe even better.

Yes I know, I know (impatient tone) you can make your own lampshades, but these are custom made, covered in Georgia Chapman's beautiful silk hand prints and lined with a contrasting print.   And for many months now I have been dreaming of having a shade like this, in blue tones for my bedside table.  
The lampshades are actually a late addition.  VIxen now does various home wares including wonderful rugs.

But originally, Vixen became famous for its silk clothes and in particular, its sarongs.  Vixen's philosophy is not to slavishly follow trends, but to create designs which are classic and long lasting.  All their sarongs are made of sections of different silks, like an off beat patchwork, but they don't look crafty or homemade.   They look glamourous and sparkling.   I can think of many ladies from the 1920s who would have been right at home in a Vixen sarong, probably the best example is the naughty Lady Idina Sackville (known as the Bolter when she came to life in a number of Nancy Mitford novels) who scandalised England and Kenya with her multi marriages and flexible sensuous approach to life:

Here she is on the cover of Tatler in 1923, newly engaged to Josslyn Hay. 

(The Bolter, by her great grandaughter Frances Osbourne is a book which must be read).

Over many painstaking years I have collected Vixen sarongs.  When I first started buying these Vixen was located in the city, in a turn of the century Art Nouveau office building with a hand cranked lift running down the centre of the stairwell. 

The fabrics were screen printed in a huge warehouse room which probably originally housed printing presses. 

And very occasionally in Melbourne we have the weather for sarongs.   But just owning them, even if I don't wear them much, improves my life.


(Image 3 Designer Rugs Image 4 from Vixen)

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A Southern Gothic on the Porch

In an attempt to spruce up my austere veranda I have been hunting around for some inspiration.

When I was very pregnant with my first child I spent most of the daylight hours over about 3 days sitting on our front verandah in the sunshine reading this book:

This is a mystery wrapped in a childhood memoir and has been criticised for its uncertain ending.  I love Ms Tartt with a passion. I love the fact she takes 8 years or more to write books, her chain smoking, her clipped enigmatic interviews, her hermitlike characteristics.  Please write another book Donna. 

Of course porches are a great place to sit and read Southern Gothic books.  Some books are meant to be read outside.    Especially dark and twisted stories.   To me, an Edgar Allan Poe book is not for curling up with in a darkened bedroom.  

Tennessee Williams described Southern Gothic as 'an intuition, of an underlying dreadfulness in modern experience'.    

So how about this shingled porch:

for a bit of Tennessee Williams preferably The Glass Menagerie, featuring the slightly annoying  and out of touch with reality Amanda:

And this verandah suggests mint juleps, lush gardens and a bit of heartbreak, so I would recommend:

Gone with the Wind, not Gothic at all, but Southern and hot and feisty and a really great read no matter how unfashionable Margaret Mitchell may be:

Back to porches and verandahs.  I need seating, cushions, a mirror to reflect the garden back, a little side table or two.  Very simple.  Like this:

Or this, but with no cane furniture.  Even though I love cane, someone else here does not. 

Maybe a painted bench: 

Or this, what a clean and crisp, wonderful spot: 

Late last year I read what is possibly the scariest book ever.    I read it in about 6 hours, and kept thinking and thinking about it.   Of course now it has been made into a film so it is widely known.   

This is not a book to read late into the night.   It is a book to read with the sun shining down on you, perhaps a little breeze through the bougainvillea, to remind you that the world is not as horrifying as Cormac McCarthy makes it seem.

So for The Road, I would suggest:

This lovely trellissed porch:

Or something with a stiff drink on hand:

And to finish, something slightly run down and peeling, for another frightening book (so much so I couldn't finish it), written I am sorry to say by a man I would not like to have dinner with:

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.

(Images: (2) Apartment Therapy (4) Country Living (6) Skona Hem (7) Coastal Living (8) Ideal Home (9) My Sweet Savannah (11) not sure sorry! (12) Country Living (13) Traditional Home)

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Thai Street Food at home

Who said Asian food was easy?  In my view it is not.  It involves pastes, crushing, mashing, mincing,  cutting, chopping, measuring, layers, steps, braising, carefully testing,  going away for a while, coming back, testing again, making sure the separate flavours sing together, and then eating.

Nothing easy about that.  Maggi Noodles it ain't.
I wrote here about David Thompson, the technically perfect chef and protector of Thai food recipes and history in the English language.

I was given Thai Street Food for Christmas which is his second cookbook. My main complaint is that it is very large and thus falls perilously close to being a Coffee Table Cookbook, which I have A Thing about.    It barely fits in my recipe book holder which makes me wonder whether he really expected people to cook from it.  

Nevertheless, it has some wonderful images, which make me want, so desperately, to return to Thailand. 

This image, to me, is what Thailand is all about:  Saffron robed monks gathering at a laminex chair and table street cafe for the all important midday meal:

Anyway I had some time yesterday, so to save time I made dinner in the afternoon.   Yes, I am MADE of time.  And besides what is better than the smell of roasting spices like cloves and cardamom in the afternoon. 

I cooked this dish from the book:  Chicken with banana chillies and assam.  Assam is dried Asian woodruff.  You can substitute tamarind paste, which is just as well because my pantry was bereft of woodruff.

The reason I picked this dish is that I bought these wonderful lime green banana chillies yesterday morning.  They must be in season.

Firstly, assemble spices in little piles:

Then roast them (separately says David Thompson, all together says I)

Then chargrill the aromatics (chilli, garlic, turmeric, ginger):

Then bash and smash.

Then fry the paste in coconut milk and cream, add the chicken and some seasoning and roasted other bits like cassia bark.

Then eat, greedily.

There is something very therapeutic about the slow banging of a mortar and pestle, and the adding of a little bit of fish sauce here, and sprinkling of palm sugar there.   And that is why I love cooking so much. 

If you are feeling strong, and have the space, buy this book:

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Begone Lilac Walls

I wrote here about the lilac walled room my 2.5 year old son was inflicted with. 

Time has moved on, he is a bit older now (2.11) and what have I managed to achieve?  Well, we have finally painted the room, and here it is in all its Dulux Antique White USA-ness.  

It took three coats to get rid of the purple walls.   The painters were very proud of their work. 

They used oil, and stripped back years of not so good paintwork to make the architraves  and window frames sing. 

I read a column in the Christmas Spectator by Toby Young which touched a chord with me. 

His son was asked by his teacher to write down his Christmas wishes.  The sole item on his wish list was 'Lite bulb'. When asked why, he told his teacher that the light globe in his bedroom blew several months ago and as he was still waiting for his father to replace it he thought maybe Santa could do the job instead.

Of course I wouldn't want you to think that I leave my children light-bulb-less in darkened rooms but there are all those little things we mean to get around to - pumping up the bicycle tyres, fixing the loose hem on the school dress, buying a lunchbox that doesn't have cracks in it, setting up the Lego properly, finding the time to sit down and do the paper doll book properly.  And so on.  

 Am I the only one?   Oh the guilt.    It never ends does it? 

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A Rothko Room

I wrote here about rooms which evoke paintings.  There is a whole separate galaxy of rooms which evoke the primary blocks of colour Mark Rothko used in his work.   And the combination of colours he used was then really unusual.  Here is a great example.

(via Plush Palate)

White Center (1950)

I really love pink and orange together.  There is something tropical and devil may care about this combination.   It clashes but who cares? 

Incidentally, the above painting sold at auction in May 2007 for $72.87 million. This was more than triple the previous highest price paid for a Rothko.  It was speculated that the high price may have in part been driven by the paintings provenance, as it came from the collection of David and Peggy Rockefeller.

Mark Rothko was born in Russia in 1903. He studied at Yale and the New York School of Design.  He committed suicide in 1970. 

To me his paintings appear to be the product of someone with a sunny outlook on life.  Obviously that was not necessarily so.  

However, he was prolific and many of his works are in public, not super yacht owning billionaire's, hands, so we can all enjoy them for 100s of years to come. 

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Design Sponge has paid a visit...

The oh so lovely Design Sponge has done a little story on my speaker 'repurposing' today.

Thanks so much Grace and DS!  You can see their feature here.  

There is also a lovely guest bedroom before and after on this page, with a completely divine quilt (in fact the before is really rather nice on its own).


Have a happy day!

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