(Beth Hoeckel, featuring “Silver Gemini keychain” by Rick Owens)
This story is part of Image’s May issue, Homemaking, about home and the many ways we choose to make it.
In this sunny, gloomy town, it’s not just that things are often not as they seem — they are more than. Excess competes with restraint for the same parking spot, and they keep promising each other they’ll get lunch (neither can decide if they want to follow through). Youth and experience attend the same cocktail hour, and both leave early — one, to not miss the last bus to the Eastside; the other, to be well rested for 7 a.m. hot Pilates. To make a home of this metropolitan desert oasis requires a certain cognitive dissonance, a willingness to accept that multiple worlds will nest into each other simultaneously forever and there’s nothing you can do about it (nor would you want to). After all, the dapple of sunlit pool water reflected on the underside of a patio umbrella on a 75-degree day in June is just the mirror image of a grimy, chilly May fog crystallized on the palm trees lining cracked asphalt streets. Thanks to the ever-providential mercurial gods, we have been granted permission to leave either/or in Taurus season. Everybody knows Gemini season is for both/and.
Anyone who has ever tried to make a home of a Gemini (another kind of desert oasis) understands, for better or worse, that their beloved is an enigma of contradictions that somehow make all too much sense when looked at as the sum of a kaleidoscopic whole. It is in the spirit of this supple duality that we encounter the Rick Owens Silver Gemini key chain, aptly and concisely named as such because, well, isn’t it obvious?
Homemaking is an art, a craft, a practice, a burden, a necessity, a privilege.
A smooth brass circle meets a confident silver-tone rectangle in a holy geometric union that could inspire a passive allegory of the masculine-feminine from a less inventive mind (sorry, Virgo). But for our intents and purposes, we consider the tool (the apparatus?) of the key chain more intently, more deeply. It is a vessel intended to be secure, assumed to be trustworthy, the bearer of the most treasured of quotidian possessions that simply cannot be misplaced, at the risk of inconvenience at best, a catastrophe at worst. It’s funny how we just trust these pieces of metal to guard other pieces of metal, our access to our dwellings, our most intimate and vulnerable places.
Homemaking is an art, a craft, a practice, a burden, a necessity, a privilege. It’s in the talismans that we arrange within our homes, from the haphazardly purchased necessities to the carefully considered luxuries. It’s the memory of a past lover washing a wine glass stolen from the dive bar down the street after Sunday night supper, a dusty paw print left by a familiar venturing into a forgotten crevice. Homemaking can be taken care of, obsessively attended to or ignored altogether — it is Gemini season, after all, and that means we can do what we want. But the making of a home is something we are all compelled to consider at one point or another. And, amazingly, it all starts with a key, a tiny piece of carved metal, which, like all of us, needs something to keep it safe — even if that something contains as many multitudes as the city herself.
Goth Shakira is a digital conjurer based in Los Angeles.
