ReadyMade: Instructions for everyday life

A few weeks ago I wrote about my recent visit to Detroit. During that trip, my traveling companions and I were also able to get out to Bloomfield HIlls, about 30 minutes outside the city, to visit the Cranbrook Academy of Art. I’ve visited Cranbrook several times over the years and it’s always impressive. But this visit was particularly intriguing as we were able to pin down the director of the amazingly influential school, Reed Kroloff, and coax him into giving us a full-blown tour of the grounds.

The shot above is of the spot where Kroloff likes to begin any tour he gives because it is so illustrative of Eliel Saarinen’s unique take on architecture and design. Saarinen (the Finnish architect responsible for the design of most of the school) was known for combining the the urbane Art Deco style with a more earthy Arts and Crafts aesthetic. It was this Arts and Crafts influence that undoubtedly led to the architect’s obsession with creating near perfect symmetry and then tweaking it slightly as a tip of the hat to nature. Saarinen is famous for saying “Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context—a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.” (more…)

Last week I was given a vinyl copy of  “Brazilian Guitar Fuzz Bananas.”

It’s an impressive album filled with crunchy guitars, heavy bass, and some really, really good drum breaks. But almost more than the music I’ve been spending a lot of time with the record cover, complete with 3-D glasses. Vinyl is, of course, making a come-back in certain circles but is still a relative rarity, which obviously makes cover art that you can touch and interact with scarce too. Thankfully the concert poster (or show flier) is still ubiquitous on city streets across the world. (more…)

ReadyMade has always had a close knit relationship with the music world. We’ve run reviews; we’ve worked with musicians on various projects; we’ve had in-office concerts; and in general we’ve always been big supporters of bands of all shapes and sizes. So, it wasn’t a surprise when we got a great little record in our offices—Call of the Wolf Peach by Pale White Moon. I threw it on and had a really hard time turning it off. I was a fan. But in hopes of giving a bit of journalistic integrity to reviews that we run here now and again I reached out to an old friend, sometimes neighbor, and critic in Whipple Hollow, Wyoming named Werewolf John and asked him to give the record a listen and let us know what he thought. Werewolf John operates a 100-watt radio station and is the proud owner of America’s second-largest archive of 12-r.p.m. phonograph records (or so he claims) so we figured he’d have a lot to say and that we (and you) would want to listen—though we don’t always agree with him. So without further ado… – Andrew Wagner

“Everyone is struggling over the fact that people don’t buy records anymore. Everyone’s looking for an answer. I don’t think there’s an answer. I think there are, like, 10,000.” – Pale White Moon guitarist, Doug Slawin, from “Shoot the Moon” in the New Haven Advocate

Now there’s a sentiment ReadyMade readers can get behind! Slawin is the guitarist-songwriter behind Pale White Moon, a musical collective based in New Haven, Connecticut, that has been gaining notice of late, mainly because the TV version of NPR’s This American Life used a few of its songs in recent episodes.

How did the creators of public radio’s most esteemed documentary series discover this arty little ensemble, whose latest album, Call of the White Peach, is a somewhat disjointed collection of roomy indie-pop tunes and cello-heavy chamber pieces?

It’s simple: They didn’t. Slawin, a self-described “public-radio nerd,” picked up the phone and rang up the show’s soundtrack supervisor to offer his services. Call it answer No. 9,345 to the music business’s familiar album-sales problem. (more…)

The holidays always present a good opportunity for catching up with old friends. Even when those friends are thousands of miles away, at the risk of sounding amazingly corny, this time of year really does seem to somehow pull everyone together. So I was not too surprised to be included on a group email recently from my old friend, T’chaka Sikelianos. T’chaka and I have kept up with each other’s comings and goings over the years but I hadn’t been aware of what he’d been up to lately and so was really excited to learn about a new short film he had just put together called “Give a Chance 4 Peace!” (Below, T’chaka as T’chaka in “Give a Chance 4 Peace!”)

T’chaka’s eight minute film really blew me away for many reasons and since it seemed like a perfect story for the holiday season, I wanted to share it with you here and T’chaka was good enough to recap the film and how it came together after the jump… (more…)

As I mentioned last week, the Manhattan-based Elk Gallery will soon hit the road for a very readymade opening on the grounds of an ex-car salvage lot near the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. Celebrating the changing scenery and the area’s past, “Things That Stay, Things That Go: Danny Tinneny’s Selective Salvage” is a collection of various items amassed by the owner of the lot, Danny Tinneny, over the decades. Rearranged and recontextualized to draw attention to each piece’s unique history and their current place in a rapidly evolving New York City (below, “Boat on Lot”), “Things That Stay, Things That Go” takes “stock of these sundry inanimate things and see them in a new light.”

“Things That Stay, Things That Go” opens Friday, December 11th at 426 President Street in Brookly with a reception from 6-9. The show will be up until January 3rd. More on the exhibit, courtesy of the Elk Gallery after the jump.

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Yesterday I paid a visit to the Macro Sea offices here in New York and spent some time chatting with David Belt, Jocko Weyland, and Alix Feinkind—the masterminds behind last summer’s Brooklyn Dumpster pools. This crew is always working on re-imagining urban space and this fall seems to have been kind to them in terms of dreaming up new ideas to unleash in a town near you. Though the pools are down in Brooklyn, Macro Sea is busy reinterpreting the lot for next summer and have put together “Field Studies No. 1,” a book intended to help them think about what the space could be (cover below).

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Many years ago my mom came home and told me a tale of how my father had just bought a car for a pretty penny from a man named Bill Fink. Fink’s company, Isis Imports, she explained, was housed at the end of Pier 33 in San Francisco amongst horse stalls, fish mongers, and other nefarious enterprises whose endeavors were hidden from view by barbed wire and black tarps. The smell was terrible, she informed me. Mom was not pleased. Dad was and so was I. I was excited about his purchase but more excited about where he bought the car.

A few months later he took me down to the end of the pier to visit Fink. Fink wasn’t there but I got the picture. The space definitely didn’t look like any car dealership I—or anyone else I imagine—had ever seen and the smell I could do without but all of this was part of the charm.

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