Thursday, June 5, 2008

The Eyes Have It


Well, I said yesterday that I'd be talking more about the Garment District today, but in fact, I didn't buy the above in the Garment District. The glass eyes and small ammonite fossils are from a store on the Upper West Side, which is where I lived when I lived in the city. (The one thing that has always amazed me about NYC is, for being one of the best known metropolitan areas in the world, how provincial at heart the residents can be. You're a West Sider or an East Sider or you live in the Village or SoHo or NoHo or any one of the other many neighborhoods into which Manhattan is divided, and that pretty much characterizes how you live in the city and the 20 block radius in which you tend to hang out. This is a bit of an oversimplification but not by much. In my humble opinion, of course.)

Anyway, getting back to the eyes and fossils. I bought them at Maxilla & Mandible, a store which is kind of an institution in the neighborhood. As the name suggests, you can get a variety of bones, including full skeletons, there, along with fossils, shark's teeth, other natural history oddities and, well, things like glass eyes. Fittingly, it's located a block north of the American Museum of Natural History, and it's been around for a yonk's age. I liked the colors in these glass eyes (they are normally used for taxidermy), so I picked up a couple to fiddle around with. And I'm always a sucker for polished ammonite, and these were such a nice, small size. I'm sure you'll be seeing all of these in my jewelry in the future.

Speaking of ammonite, my post for Art Bead Scene is up today and includes, among other things, an ammonite box clasp. Please go here to read it.

Thanks for stopping by!

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