Via roadfood.com.

For sale: One herd of cows (ceramic, plywood, fabric, paint, etc.). Comes with a supply of warm, gooey cinnamon rolls and a classic cafe.

After 25 years, Jeanne Mae Barwick is retiring from Mae’s Phinney Ridge Cafe in Seattle’s Greenwood neighborhood. She’s put the place up for sale, and threatens to close it in March or April if an appropriate buyer isn’t found.

Via PhinneyWood.com.

There’s been a cafe at this location since the 1920s. But when Barwick took it over in 1988, she transformed it from a neighborhood destination into a city institution.

Michael Stern at Roadfood.com describes it as “a multi-room cafe decorated everywhere with pictures, statues, blow-up dolls and every sort of nick-nack imaginable, all depicting cows (an ode to the proprietor’s Wisconsin roots).”

On weekend mornings, it can take as long as an hour to get seated. Besides the cinnamon rolls (baked in-house), it offers large portions of your basic American breakfast and lunch fare, plus such specialties as trout and eggs.

It closes at 3 p.m. daily; in offering the business for sale, Barwick notes a new owner could make more money by opening for dinner and offering alcohol.

In an email sent to customers, Barwick says she may hold an “open house and garage sale” at the cafe in March. Depending on what items a new owner may want to keep, the sale could include the cafe’s cow-shaped salt and pepper shakers “and other miscellaneous moo-morabilia.”

Barwick also says she’ll continue to host her popular “Karaoke Bingo” once a month at the Greenwood Senior Center.

Via roadfood.com.

    

Check out this lavish hotel, made from salt.

Sitting on the edge of the largest salt flat in the world stands an amazing and unusual hotel and spa built with one million blocks of salt.

The Palacio de Sal, located in Bolivia, took two years to reconstruct after being dismantled in 2002 and almost everything is built from the salt flat. This includes the chairs, tables, beds and even the swimming pool and golf course. Hotel employees say that many guests are caught licking the walls or furniture just to make sure they are made of salt.
The hotel has 16 twin rooms and 8 double rooms, a sauna, steam room, whirlpool and of course, their own saltwater baths.

A hotel spokesperson states, “Our dining room is indescribable. Guests can enjoy our exclusive and exquisite meals prepared on the basis of salt, flame and lamb meat from the region, or salted chicken.”

Some parts of the hotel need to be maintained and rebuilt each year after the rainy season due to water damage.

Situated 12,000 feet above sea level, stunning sunsets and sprawling starry night skies are an every day event.

Bolivian Salt Hotel

Luna Salada

    

Westboro Baptist Church’s new neighbor is a rainbow-painted house

    

Via messynessychic.com.

“Quite possibly the most important street photographer of the 20th century was a 1950s children’s nanny who kept herself to herself and never showed a single one of her photographs to anyone.”

That’s quite a statement. But it may also be true, in the case of Vivian Maier.

Maier’s works are now on display at the Photographic Center Northwest Gallery in Seattle, through March 23.

How Maier’s pictures were found and brought to the world’s attention is a story at least as fascinating as the pictures themselves.

As the site Messy Nessy Chic puts it, Maier’s discovery begins in 2007, when

…in 2007, a Chicago real estate agent and historical hobbyist, John Maloof, purchased a box of never-seen, never-developed film negatives of an unknown ‘amateur’ photographer for $380 at his local auction house.

As Maloof inspected and developed some of the negatives, he discovered a treasure trove of images, taken between the early 1950s and the late 1990s. They depict thousands of unposed instants of life on New York’s and Chicago’s streets.

Via vivianmaier.com.

Maloof tried to track down the pictures’ enigmatic creator, only in 2009 to find her Chicago Tribune obituary. She’d died at the age of 83.

Maloof’s own site, VivianMaier.com, describes what he’s learned since then about Maier:

 An American of French and Austro-Hungarian extraction, Vivian bounced between Europe and the United States before coming back to New York City in 1951. Having picked up photography just two years earlier, she would comb the streets of the Big Apple refining her artistic craft. By 1956 Vivian left the East Coast for Chicago, where she’d spend most of the rest of her life working as a caregiver. In her leisure Vivian would shoot photos that she zealously hid from the eyes of others. Taking snapshots into the late 1990?s, Maier would leave behind a body of work comprising over 100,000 negatives.

Maloof hopes to complete and release a documentary video, Finding Vivian Maier, later this year. (Here’s a preview trailer for it.)

Via vivianmaier.com.

For now, Maloof has a 144-page coffee-table book compiling part of Maier’s legacy, titled Vivian Maier: Street Photographer.

    

Photo by Karolina Wallace; via Henry Art Gallery and Interview magazine.

There might be no more intrinsically “feminine” art form than fashion.

And perhaps no other art form holds so much meaning within each of its products.

A single garment can contain a myriad of stories. Stories about its design, materials, and manufacture. Stories about who would wear it and when. Stories about the social and economic status of its intended wearer.

These are some of the tangents explored by Seattle textile artist and costume designer Anna Telcs. She has an exhibit, “The Dowsing,” at Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery through May 5.

According to a gallery blurb, “Telcs explores the liminal space between form, fashion, presentation, and performance. Her recent work attempts to question existing perceptions about manufacturing, worth, and beauty – ultimately seeking to delve deeper into the armature of the fashion object itself and the systems and structures that contextualize and regulate it.”