Bryan Rowland’s haunting, luminous new film, Preserve, is as fine an introduction of Blake Lively’s new lifestyle site Preserve as I could imagine. The film and the site invoke the magic of preserving the dream that is now.

Here’s to that!

It is a bit early for me to pass judgment on Preserve — it’s young, and I more than anyone appreciates that things evolve, particularly in the immediacy that is digital space, and good things sometimes need time to marinate. Preserve is a bit earnest for me at the moment, a bit trying-to-hard, but there’s no shame in your reach exceeding your grasp.

As a Southerner, I love that Preserve feels familiar, though it isn’t the South I know. Still, it contains familiar echoes. It oozes food cooked slow on the stove, and peas being shelled on the porch, and un-fancy white folks sitting outside a trailer in a lawn chair in a scraggly patch of lawn, or un-fancy black ones sitting up on a rocking chair on the porch.

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Tags: Artisans, Blake Lively, Lifestyle, Preserve