Suddenly, it is Halloween, one of the strangest and most magic days of the year. If you just realize you need (or want) a costume, we recommend coming through the great Kleidersachan for inspiration. It is a tumblr loosely based on the theme of textiles, or perhaps apparel, with rather mind-expanding underpinnings (and rather cryptic attributions). Here are some favorites:

…Is this outfit really something Brancusi designed?

The great Cecile Belmont has a fine strategy: proclaim SOMETHING:

This snipped from BOMBYX MORI is scary! (Video link here.)

 

If you need to have your mind opened up to the possibilities of pumpkin, check out this stop-motion animation that is the result of…

Dozens upon dozens upon dozens of pumpkins…cut, gutted, rotated, scraped, poked, slapped, and banged to make..It took a few years – pumpkins rot, schedules get busy – but…

we loved discovering the methods that worked and the many that didn’t.

The ones that didn’t were very cool to hear about, evidence that any endeavor takes fortitude and the willingness to let go of beloved idea that just isn’t working:

There were many animations that didn’t make it into the final piece which seemed like good ideas at the time but ended up being too complicated and did not work (a carved heart that emerged and beat with the pulsing of the light, a complex halloween themed pumpkin zoetrope, and an animation of a tree that grows as the pumpkins sizes do among others).

 

And if you just need to just enjoy the truly fall day, here’s a Fall Song from Mary Oliver to anchor you in it more deeply:

Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back

from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere

except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle

of unobservable mysteries – – -roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This

I try to remember when time’s measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay – – – how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.

 

 

With thanks to Lynn Lieberman of Gotham To Go and @afinelyne for use of her gorgeous pumpkin.