Several weeks ago a minor water leak reached an old dictionary that has sentimental value for me. Within a few hours, a small amount of water had wicked up through all the pages of the dictionary from the bottom and half-way up. When I searched for suggestions, the techniques for drying books were more extreme than I was able to try at the time, so I put the dictionary in the freezer, a method said to buy time before the actual drying. Freezing does begin the drying-out process. Soon after, I read your story about Manny Howard drying out his iPhone with rice, and I tried it on the dictionary. Several pounds of cheap rice and the frozen dictionary in an air-tight container for two days resulted in a dictionary with no moisture, not any pages sticking together. And I live in a very humid climate. Thanks for the tip!
It looks like this rice antidote might be a nearly universal approach to drying out water-damaged goods; a cell-phone (fine electronics) and a dictionary (paper) HAVE to be pretty good tests…
(The photo by Cuban photographer Abelardo Morell is a water-damaged book that did not get rice therapy. Click here to see more of Morell’s compelling photographs.)
A quick glance of these paired photos on Emma’s blog made us unconsciously splice the two ideas together: ‘salvaged wood bedside or sofa side table’, we thought…fine idea. There is so much great salvaged wood around these days, that can be easily cut and stacked askew to great effect…
We came across this coupling of essential quotes when we were poking around John Zernings blog about Garden Trellises and Architectural Space Frames.
“Applied to architecture and structure, the former is primarily an aesthetic position; the latter is a principle of economy.” wrote Zerning. We find both immensely useful, and made a sign to remind us…”
You might wonder how we ever came across Zerning’s site in the first place, living in the city as we do, with no garden, or even a terrace. We were following the trail of some images that have been flying around the blogs, of a beautiful architecture of wires… read more…
We have a whole list of things that fall under the heading of “Practical but Ugly”, and wonder why it can be so hard to find good-looking, affordable versions of certain everyday items…dish racks, for example, or file cabinets. USB Flash drives are one of those handy items whose ugliness we’ve marveled at and put up with because we need them. Then we saw LaCie’s wonderful flash drives shaped like a key, and thought “want one!” Like many well-designed objects, they cost more than the norm – roughly $10 bucks more by our figuring. And since we’re hard-pressed to hack our own usb flash drive design, we just might treat ourselves to one…
For sure, we will buy them to give as unexpected little gifts to give..say to the host of a dinner party, or a friend we want to thank…about $18 for 4 gigabytes, $27 for 8…and up, in round, square or triangularheads. (The connectors come with a cover.)
A few weeks ago, we wrote about the artist Tom Sachs, whose amazing studio was featured in The Selby. When Todd Selby asked Sachs “What are the ten rules of your studio?” Number Ten was: “creativity is the enemy”. It is also the subject of an artwork Sachs created. Then, a reader wrote us an email that said: “I’d love follow up on why ‘creativity is the enemy’”. Good idea.
We figure the answer lies partly in the title of Sach’s artwork-sign:”Self-Fullfilling Prophecies”…It seems to warn of the danger of trying TOO hard, of being self-consciously creative and arty, rather than just…being…Maybe creativity is the enemy because it threatens the status quo, takes energy, takes us into various kinds of chaos and unknowing. Whew…We didn’t realize how Sach’s sign would make us think!
While we were mulling, we stumbled on New Liberal Arts, a free “book full of ideas” masterminded by Snarkmarket‘s Tim Carmody, and a collaboration of many. Aaron MCleran,”Generative Media Artist” wrote a section about Creativity, which we thought was SWELL even though we weren’t sure what “generative”* means. We’ve excerpted it here (underscores, ours):
“…creativity should be studied as a kind of martial art. You should train to be a ninja of creativity. read more…
One of our favorite early posts was about Andre Michelle’s visual music synthesizer, ToneMatrix which allows you to instantly improvise your own music by selecting any of the small boxes on the grid on his website. We have turned to it many times when we wanted a diversion to shift our mood or view, or to take our focus off an irritating noise. Now, we’re smitten with Michelle’s newest iteration on his make-your-own-music theme: Pulsate.
Click the black square in two are more places to generate pulsating circles and sound. Just four or five clicks make for a relaxing, meditative riff…click lots of circles within circles for elaborate (and energetic) composition.
Part of its beauty is how ephemeral it is; it’s music for the moment.
We love Nina Saltman‘s and her husband James Bullock‘s pun of a paint job at their house in San Francisco: faux brick painted on a concrete and block wall!
We’ve spent the past ten days or so on the other side of the country, looking at everything but our laptops, and being nothing but lazy. Somehow doing NOTHING filled us up, gave us lots to think about and share…
Like this sign we saw (when Nina said LOOK UP!) in Balmy Alley in San Francisco, known for its wonderful murals, from one end to another…
(and which happens to be right around the corner from Humphry Slocum, our favorite ice cream place – more on that later)… read more…
Lately, we’ve been reading posts on some of our favorite blogs saying, in various ways, “we’re TIRED, burned out, so need to disappear for a while.” 2 or 3 Things I Know really nailed it:
working in the creative
field can be so demanding
for design is quite personal
…an extension of yourself.
for me,
it’s hard to separate
work from life
the blurring of
the lines is beautiful
but sometimes it can
be quite taxing
you never know
when to stop.
step away.
refuel.
That would be us. So we’re heading out of town for a week or so to rest and fill ourselves up again.
We thought we’d leave you with this beauty of a video: cooled out, fluid, dancing… improvising… in the rain. (We recommend turning the dubbed-over sound off to really SEE it…closer to how it might be if you were hanging out just down the street…)
A bumper crop of summer vegetables, fruits and herbs might well take us into early October this year, and there is no more inspiring guide for enjoying it than Canal House Cooking Volume N°4. The indie cookbook series’ beautiful hardcover ‘Farm Markets & Gardens’ issue delves deeply into tomatoes, potatoes, herbs, the grill and cocktails, to name a few. The evocative writing, photographs and drawings are so charming, the book will work find for armchair cooks as well. The recipes tend to be unfussy, to-the-point, and delicious, like Tomatoes Take a Warm Oil Bath, which has the look of a children’s story about it. read more…
Years ago, I learned a wonderfully simple method for making a rustic freeform fruit tarts modeled after French galettes, whose charm lies in their rustic imperfection. The recipe involves little more than rolling flaky pie dough into a rough free-form round, piling cut-and-sugared fruits into the middle, and folding the dough up around it. It is the quickest method I know of creating a delectable fresh fruit pastry – about 20 minutes once you make the dough – akin to a pie but without the bother. Made with lush summer fruits like apricots, peaches, nectarines, plums and berries, it is the perfect summer house dessert. read more…
Leigh Fazzina was lost in a 300-acre Connecticut wood, racing downhill on her mountain bike looking for the main road, when her front wheel hit a tree root. She flew over the handlebars and slammed into the ground, to find herself bloodied and unable to walk…and panicking. She tried screaming and calling for help on her cellphone but couldn’t connect. Then she tried Twitter, the social networking site, hoping that one of her 1000 followers might see her tweet:
“I’ve had a serious injury and NEED Help! Can someone please call Winding Trails in Farmington, CT tell them I’m stuck bike crash in woods.”
At least half a dozen people, many of them strangers, responded; the Farmington Fire Department got calls from California, Chicago and New York. A few minutes after sending her tweet, an EMS team found her.
Twitter, so often maligned for being a frivolous time-waster, proved to be an unexpectedly useful emergency tool; tweets, and text messages, will often go through in areas with spotty cell phone coverage, like state parks. Fazzina seems to have broken new ground in her improvised solution; there are no records of Twitter being used to call an ambulance before.
PS: The amateur mini-triathlon cyclist thankfully had no serious injuries, just bad scrapes and bruises. She is grateful she didn’t have to spend the night in the woods.
A few months ago, while I was clearing out a storage room in a lonely warehouse building, a friend called me on my cell phone in tears. She told me of the overwhelming fear and anxiety she was feeling about a trip she was to embark upon in a few hours, that held many potentially difficult situations.
Standing in a storage room amidst broken cardboard boxes and forgotten stuff, I listened and talked and listened, as my friend’s tears gradually subsided. “But, how will I make it through?” she asked. “What will I do if I start to panic on the long flight, or when I am in another time zone?”
I wondered what I could offer right then and there? What would be totally portable, that she could look at any time she needed to, to remind her of other ways of seeing things, the opposite of fear and sadness?
I found myself saying: “Get a pen. Now draw a heart in the palm of your hand. read more…
We wish every cardboard box we come across to look like this, which is, actually, an artwork by Hreinn Fridfinnsson. Being barbarians, we’d like to copy Fridfinnsson’s idea for our closet boxes…or, as an unexpected spin on a gift box: it would look ordinary and rather humdrum on the outside, but when the giftee pulls back the flaps…a big surprise!
…a cardboard box + flourescent paper + bookbinding material = a complete change of view.
We’re sending this post to our friend Vicki Lynn who LOVES pink – a sort of virtual gift – until we can give her a real one.
When we read that Centre Pompidou in Paris was offering a Cardboard Carton Workshop, we wanted to beam ourselves there, a la Star Trek, to see what more we could add to our overflowing file and minds about this wonderfully versatile material. We were stunned by a photo of an archway made of cardboard sheets combined in layers and compressed; it flies in the face of the usual ways of building with cardboard, of using the flat sides as walls. It is the work of Tadashi Kawamata who is known for the spare structures he builds out of humble materials – pine boards, cardboard, packing materials, chairs – in unlikely places. They seem impromptu (though they take a great deal of work and planning), and speak of temporariness and informality; they somehow question the spaces and structures we take for granted. Now wonder his workshop has lines around the block.
When we saw pictures of Kawamata’s art at the Pompidou’s site, we realized we had seen his work before and had a vivid unattributed memory of it: of beautiful, odd, slapped together-looking nests and houses perched high up in the ancient tress of Madison Square Park, in the center of New York City. They made us LOOK with wonder and, for a moment, imagine ourselves hiding out in one of them but we never stopped to find out who had made them. Now we know, and are inspired by a central theme of Kawamata’s art: read more…
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