this old thing

Recent yard/estate sale acquisitions of the clothing variety:

Top: Vintage Patagonia Gore-Tex raincoat, with a Patagonia decal where the front patch usually is.

David Hicks wallet, of the softest kid glove leather ever, with a tiny leather address book. Never used, from Japan in the 70's.

Vintage New York Times t-shirt- almost as soft as the wallet- promoting their classifieds section.

1940's Hermes silk scarf featuring a pack of antsy hunting hounds chomping at the bits.

The ubiquitous L.L.Bean hunting boots, this time with leather kilties- that fringed tongue, and a 1976 Maine Road Atlas which has little dots showing every farm in the state. Kind of fun if you're out in the country and you want to show the kids some cows and goats. Also good if you go out and forget the GPS.


related: Mainer and founder of Patagonia Yvon Chouinard on finding his own way and building a successful and responsible business here, from a talk he gave at University of California Santa Barbara in 2005. It's an hour long, and well worth watching.

R.I.P. Lawrence Halprin

1x2

We wrote another guest post for Apartment Therapy, this time about the easy, gratifying aesthetic solutions 1x2 boards can offer your blank walls. Above is a photo I took behind the Shell Man, in Islamorada Florida earlier this year. The 1x2s are used to ship fragile coral and shells, then thrown away out back. If you're ever looking for wood for a project, check behind places like this, or places that have free pallets, since there could be packing crates there as well.

From top: The 1x2 opening spread from Wary Meyers' Tossed & Found in a NY apartment we did; more 1x2s in another NY apartment we did; Mrs. Mark Hampton's apartment by David Hicks (inspiration); a concept page from WMT&F which includes typographic 1x2 ideas in English, Kanji, and Cyrillic.

The New York Times

!

Mad Man

Growing up, Mad magazine played a major role in my brain's development. An avid reader, letter writer, and paperback orderer, I can remember times with my mom at the grocery store checkout excitedly putting the newest issue on the conveyor belt and hoping it didn't slip into the crack at the end before the lady could grab it (this is how my dad told me Abraham Lincoln died, except on an escalator), and then making sure it was protected un-crimpedly between boxes of Freakies and Count Chocula, only to be taken out, read aloud, laughed at and folded-in when we got to the car. 

A seminal point in my Mad development came in 5th grade during our class' paper drive, when I found a bundle of old Mads that someone had dropped off to be recycled- older ones, which I'd never seen before! This was also probably also the first time I asked myself, "Why would anyone get rid of this?", a question which would reward/haunt me to this day.

In this bundle, which I asked our teacher if it was okay to not recycle (and somehow I think she said yes but that I should write an IOU to President Carter, or something) there was the single greatest article I'd ever read, written and illustrated by the great Al Jaffee, entitled, "If Kids Designed Their Own Xmas Toys". Seeing it was like a revelation-  one could draw something, and then make it- exactly the same. It was like a ten year-old's mind-blowing "introduction to design".  While in this epiphanal state I packed up all the issues in my French horn case and couldn't wait to get home -even though this meant carrying my French horn out in the open, which made it easy prey for a couple of older girls who liked to grab it, blow into the mouthpiece and then threaten to pee into the bell. 

So, our book is filled with sketches as well as photos, and whenever I drew a project (most projects being based on "why would anyone get rid of this"...), while not using the exact same concept (or at least documenting it that way), the Mad article and Al Jaffee's genius were always somewhere in my mind. So thank you, Al Jaffee. 

Related: Al Jaffee from Graphic NYC, and The New York Times. 

Brooklyn, 2001