cool lighting: stacked globes and paper shades

In a recent post about 50’s shopping centers at the Paris Review’s oddly wonderful blog, we spotted these George Nelson bubble lamps stacked one on top of another to make wondrous sculptural lighting. Copying this would be pretty expensive…but we saw an alternative in another picture. Various organic shapes of vaguely Noguchi-esque modernist paper shades stacked and…

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insta fridge fix: dalmation spots

There are a million of us who don’t have a $6,000 built-in refrigerator with wood panels etc. And we find ourselves often mulling ways to make our homely white fridge look like SOMETHING (more on that later). We LOVE this jazzy fix we saw on Japanese Trash of a totally ordinary refrigerator…it could be done…

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the first day of spring gift (x-ray tulip + a haiku)

Yesterday was the first day of spring. We were wandering around in the strangely warm weather, enjoying pure spring, not realizing that it was, technically the first day, until evening. X-rays of flowers by Brendan Fitzpatrick made us think of it. Daffodils and tulips are up. Cherry trees are in bloom. We found this haiku…

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chris hackett’s brooklyn ‘obtainium’ mine

The most inspiring article in last weekend’s New York Times was about Chris Hackett and his workshop in Gowanus, the epicenter of Brooklyn’s burgeoning underground of artists, inventors, chefs, carpenters, urban gardeners, hackers, fabricators, scavengers, repurposers, live-free-or-die,and prepare-for-the-shit-to-hit-the-fan proponents. On Chris Hackett’s personal periodic table,  the world’s most interesting, and abundant, substance is an element he…

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frida kahlo’s body cast paintings (art transforms)

We’ve just discovered The Paris Review’s blog, and some cool and illuminating posts. A recent one by Leslie Jaimison is called Frida’s Corsets: Frida Kahlo wore plaster corsets for most of her life because her spine was too weak to support itself. She painted them, naturally, covering them with pasted scraps of fabric and drawings of…

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Sushi Master Jiro Ono’s Philosophy of Work and Art

Our friend Fast Forward sent us an illuminating post from Gilttaste called “What Makes Sushi Great”. It’s about newly released film, “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”, about  Jiro Ono, 85 years old, a revered sushi chef and one of Japan’s Living National Treasures who runs a tiny, legendary restaurant inside a Tokyo subway station: “…the movie…

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