During a recent visit to Los Angeles I picked up the video compilation BLESS: Celebrating 10 Years of Themelessness at Ooga Booga. When I asked Wendy, the shop owner, about the dvd I was told “It’s not for people new to Bless. You won’t learn more anything about them. It’s for the true Bless fan.” For a moment I considered whether or not I was a true Bless fan and decided that I was.

Bless is a conceptual fashion house based in Paris and Berlin started by Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag in 1996. They release products designed to “make the near future worth living for.” They make thoughtful garments,  jewelry for electronic cables, hanging wardrobe mobiles, and other items intended to be used, lived with, and sometimes discarded.

BLESS: Celebrating 10 Years of Themelessness, released by Bureau des Videos, collects 15 short videos from the Bless archive. Many of the pieces are documentation from the public presentations of their varied collections. In N^o25, Uniseasoners, as people enter the dining area of a restaurant they are seated by servers wearing Bless clothing. The servers take orders, bring wine, and later bring food. Everything is normal, maybe even boring, except for occasional pauses to highlight elements of the clothing. A scarf turns into a hooded sweater. In another video, N^o13 Basics, a narrator lets me know that we’re in an apartment in Paris where several friends have spent the day together “wearing sweaters, bodysuits, trousers and customized Levi’s jeans” as if they were their own.

There is nothing precious about Bless. Bless is a project that presents ideas about living. There is no lifestyle to buy, you must bring your own. As their modest iWeb page says, FITS EVERY STYLE.

Apartamento Magazine, a bi-annual interiors journal, began in 2008, but seemed like folklore to most stateside bibliophiles, as it was incredibly hard to find. They had no known US stockist. Issue #1 was totally and completely sold out forever within months of its release. Post Poetics had Issues #2 & #3 for a while and I would frequently look at the page, tempting myself to buy the magazine, but the $30 international shipping permanently deterred me.

The first time I held Apartamento in my hands was just two months ago. A friend let me borrow a few of the past issues. It was as gorgeous in person as it looked in the photos I’d seen online. Thanks to art direction from designer Omar Sosa of Folch Studio and photographer Nacho Alegre, Apartamento is an object of immense beauty.

Issue #4 features watercolors of artist studios (Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons, Kiki Smith) by Grillo Demo, an interview with CFDA award winning jewelry designer Philip Crangi’s about his New York factory, an essay by Chloe Sevigny about her “70s preppy Connecticut” apartment, a photo tour of Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore’s Northhampton home, and a kids supplement curated by Reference Library’s Andy Beach with contributions from Geoff McFetridge, Enzo Mari, and more.

With the tagline  “an everyday life interiors magazine,” I was expecting Apartamento to be a sneak peek into regular, real normal, everyday interiors. My tiny apartment, a bus driver’s home, the tenants who have lived in the same building for over 30 years. Apartamento is kind of like that, except if those things looked ten times better.

Issue #4 is OUT NOW and available worldwide through Bruil.

Henry Roy’s Spirit seems to live even as it lay open on my kitchen table. The cover image depicts a sleeping man in breathtaking color. The man’s rich, dark skin and the green of a plant in the background pop against the amorphous beige interior that surrounds the scene.

Spanning the past ten years of his career, Spirit collects nearly 50 photographs and 6 short stories that capture a mystical energy. With the eye of a portraitist, Roy skillfully isolates his subjects and obscures their circumstance. Working in a “very intuitive, almost mediumnic way,” Roy manages to express a poetic tension between reverie and the mundane in his images.

My favorites stories in the book are Paris In October and A Night In Africa. The former is a brief ode to the Parisian autumn, while the latter tells of a half-drunken protagonist urinating on a bathroom wall. Both stories are narrated by an urbane young man suffering from a bout of ennui. The ordinary settings of the narratives provide a nice counterpoint to the dreamy images, and make me a little less jealous of Henry Roy’s life.

Spirit was released in October by Gottlund Verlag, a small publishing house based in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. Available at Gottlund Verlag online and Golden Age in Chicago.

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