JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

As long as we’re doing projects, here’s an accessory you can make yourself. On my birthday last year Leo gave me an old police whistle and a book by Queneau. I said, Thanks, I’ll read the Queneau, but I’m not joining the police. Leo said, No, I think the police whistle would make an interesting pendant. All it needs is a chain.

So I’ve been looking for a chain to hang the police whistle on, but I couldn’t find any I liked. Plus silver-plated stuff gives me a rash (silver-plated earrings are fine since they’re not on the skin). Then I saw Ricky wearing a leather cord around his neck and I thought it was another one of his clever (nakakainis) accessories. It was an eyeglass holder necklace with a silver hoop to hang your glasses from. I said, Is that another Margiela thingy, and he said, No, it’s from True Value.

So I visited True Value and voila, I have my necklace.

The eyeglass holder necklace is P399 at True Value. You can hang anything on it—action figures, your cat’s photo in a frame, or your actual eyeglasses.

Are you tired of your sneakers? Do you feel like you’re wearing a uniform? You could go out and buy a new pair of sneakers, but other people will be wearing the exact same shoes, and after a while you will tire of them, too.

You could take your existing sneakers and deface them.

You will need: one pair of patent leather sneakers, a soldering iron, and acrylic paint. Best to have a design in mind.

Now do this.

These sneakers were defaced by Rickyv.

Chances of you running into someone with the exact same pair of shoes: Zero. And when you get tired of them, you can deface them again.

Photo from INK Illustration.

There’s a wonderful blog called Invisible Library which catalogs books that technically don’t exist: fictional titles mentioned in works of fiction. Like D.B. Caulfield’s book of short stories, The Secret Goldfish, which his brother talks about in The Catcher in the Rye. (In a meta-move, a real-life author published a book entitled The Secret Goldfish.) Or all those books by Benno von Archimbaldi that the characters were obsessed about in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. And a ton of titles in the novels of Vladimir Nabokov.

Here’s one for the Invisible Library: Under A Loggia by Eleanor Lavish, from A Room With A View by E.M. Forster.

Invisible Library has teamed up with the London-based INK Illustration for an exhibition. Brilliant.

Photo from INK Illustration.

Which brings me to my project: I’m going to produce completely handwritten books for friends. Hard labor, but I like writing anyway.

Cardboard magazine boxes, P19 each at National Bookstore. (The Roger Federer calendar is from last year but I’m not taking it down.)

While filing my receipts and documents I found some flyers I haven’t thrown out. When you emerge from the Paris metro at Barbes-Rochechouart there are all these men handing out flyers for psychics or selling bootleg cigarettes.

Parisian fortune-tellers are not nearly as ambitious as our local manghuhula who not only forecast your fate but also promise to raise the dead.

This is for my pop-up mad (probably just mad) friends: Notecards by David A. Carter.

Set of 8 “Curlycue” cards with envelopes, 1 pop-up design in 4 colors, National Bookstore Power Plant, P929.

One should always begin the new year brimming with a sense of achievement. I don’t mean just meeting work deadlines, but dealing with something that’s been niggling at you for a while. This way you feel like the year’s just started but you’re already ahead.

For weeks I’ve been ignoring the fact that my sneakers are dirty, particularly the white ones. Washing sneakers is a pain and shoe repair shops know it, which is why they charge an arm and a foot to clean rubber shoes. Usually I use a toothbrush to clean the white-sided soles, but they don’t get that white.

Mike’s shoes are always immaculate, but then he’s obsessive-compulsive about his tennis outfits (they must matchy-matchy). I asked him how he cleaned his sneakers, and he said, dishwashing detergent and a sponge.

So I literally washed off last year’s grime from my sneakers. They’re not quite immaculate, but they’re no longer filthy.

Next I broke out the in-drawer organizer that Kermit and Scooter gave me a while back.

It fits into a drawer. The idea is to keep my earrings, rings, watches, whatnot in a single place, out of sight, instead of storing them in candy boxes and tin cans piled on my worktable. This two-tiered storage unit is made of bamboo, easily renewable and eco-friendly. My friends found it at Make Room.

First I had to clear a drawer, and it was an archeological expedition: I found two postcards Ige sent me from Dublin in 1996, a floor plan of the Frick Museum, and bills that should’ve been thrown away a decade ago. Then I put my stuff in the storage unit, which was another archeological dig because I discovered earrings I’d forgotten I own.

I’m often rushing to get out of the house so the accessories I use most frequently these days went into another box for easy grab-and-go.

Finally I picked the first movie I would watch in 2010. This is of vital importance: your choice could ruin your entire year. Last year’s first movie was Il Gattopardo by Luchino Visconti, and it kicked off a great movie-watching year. (Some turkeys, but they make everything else seem so much better.) Didn’t quite achieve my one-movie-a-day target, but I saw nearly 300 231.

My first movie of 2010: Smiles of a Summer Night by Ingmar Bergman. The light-hearted Bergman.

Ingmar Bergman’s house in Faro, photographed by Stephen Shore for W’s Art & Design Issue, November 2009.