Manual Arts Training: Splitting Hairs

I am a pretty serious do it yourself kind of person. If it isn’t extraordinarily dangerous (home dentistry) or potentially costly, I am game for just about anything.  There are plenty of things that if you are willing to spend some time in research, tools, and materials you can do yourself, save butt loads of cash, and learn interesting things. For instance, last week I learned how to hardwire a radar detector and install an ipod dock in my car (god bless youtube), saving at least 400 in labor cost. Now 400 bucks is pocket change compare to one basic DIY service that borderlines on criminal: Cutting your hair.

The Last Wallet

One of my favorite scenes from the book Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk is when the main character is sitting on the curb outside his recently blown up apartment. Lamenting the loss of all of his stuff he says:

"You buy furniture.  You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life.  Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled."

While I don’t think that I am ready to get rid of all my worldly possessions and start fighting underground, I am pleased to report that it appears that I've finally gotten a handle on my wallet issue.

Manual Arts Training: Shifting Gears

Sorry for the recent lack of lack of bloggering, I blame the summer (and the government, ha!). Hopefully, I’ll get in to gear and catch up on a bunch of subjects that I have been thinking on for the past month. To get things started, I wanted to talk about my most recent foray into manual arts training: learning how to drive stick.

I am frankly embarrassed that it has taken me this long to really learn how to operated a manual transmission. As a car-dude, my head has hung in shame for far to long. So this summer, I made the decision to buy a new (used) car with a manual transmission to force the issue.

Filling

Artist Judith Klausner via Designboom

Material Confections

 

This afternoon I saw these radical wooden bikes made by Sueshiro Sano (via Coolhunting).

The bikes made me think about how signifigant material selection can be in the both function and meaning of an object. It makes me marvel at the versatility of this particular material and deep knowledge of the maker required to pull something like this off.

It reminds me of the all wood airplanes that were developed by both the Germans and the Allies during World War II. The de Havilland Mosquito, for instance, was a mostly-wooden British bomber that at in spite of it's size was one of the faster airplanes in the world at the time. In the case of the Mosquito, these planes were built buy the expert hands of English carriagemakers and shipwrights. These planes could be made incredibly fast, inexpensively, and could spare precious raw material (metals) for other more critical tasks.

On the other end of the spectrum are objects like Jeroen Verhoeven's Cinderella Table. This equally miraculous object was sculpted from a monolithic block of Carrera marble by CNC controled machining. While the utility of this table is unclear, it's one of those objects that makes me happy to know that it exists, and that someone had the chutzpah to actually make one.

Image via Artnet

No news from the front.

I wanted to repost this short but sweet interview from Maarten Bass filmed by Dezeen during 2011 Milan Design Week.  I have been a huge fan of Baas for many years now.  I have always admired Maarten's unapologetic (often irreverent) style, but also his uncompromising vision in spite of his meteoric rise to celebrity. In this video we see Baas’s integrity as designer taking front seat to the seasonal  drive to produce that occurs across the design world.

You go girl!

Interview: Maarten Baas in Milan from Dezeen on Vimeo.

Baanner Imaage and More Baas at:  http://www.maartenbaas.com/

It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at.

It’s been a hectic month. For the past three or four weeks I've been running around bouncing from place to place, task to task. I feel like I've spent more time [driving] in my car than in my own bed. So this week, it came as a real relief to have a couple days to myself in the studio to play.

Earlier in the week, while walking to the L train, the construction at building shown above on North 11th and Wythe St caught my attention. This 100-year old textile factory is one of the many beautiful old industrial buildings in the neighborhood that is being transformed into upscale conversions, in this case a hotel. This building was bought by developers five years ago and has been “under construction” ever since. Like most of the construction in the area, it has been stalled or following the economic downturn. However, the developers are back in the black ink, due to a $15 million dollar tax-free federal stimulus shot in the arm, and this spring there’s been a flurry of activity. I’m glad to see that the government is finally addressing troubling lack of yuppie-boarding in the neighborhood. Drrr.