ReadyMade: Instructions for everyday life

Faced with guests overcrowding their house, one family drafted a plan to put their visitors to work on a sleeping space of their own. In our June/July 2010 issue we took a look at the finished product—the Ohanapod. Here, we share architect Craig Steely’s process shots.

Step one: laying the foundation. Steely investigates the particulars while son Zane and friend Sam Grawe, both part of the construction team consisting of “unskilled labor,” look on and await instructions.

Steely and Zane work on leveling the floor supports. (more…)

I first visited Socrates Sculpture Park in 2002 when my friend Halsey Rodman was exhibiting some of his work there. I remember taking the train to Long Island City and thinking “where am I?” But once I set foot in the spacious park, it didn’t really matter—I was completely taken with this New York City secret with the amazing views of midtown Manhattan.

When I moved to New York years later I once again found myself at Socrates, this time scheming with Alyson Baker, the executive director, on how we might pull together an outdoor exhibition featuring some of the best makers of art, craft, and design in the United States. We got our act together accordingly and pulled off the first annual Makers Market last June.

We are now hard at work on putting together the 2010 Makers Market in partnership with the Noguchi Museum and R Gallery. But much more on that later. Right now I wanted to tell you about a few other things happening at Socrates, namely the Back to the Basics Bootcamp: Survival Skills for Sustainable Living that begins this Sunday, April 18th. (more…)

Our friend and frequent contributor, Jen Turner, made her way back down to her home state of Texas for part of the epic South By Southwest festival in Austin this past week and has been good enough to report back to us. She did her best to check it all out, including our own ReadyMade Rocks party which truly did rock. Yesterday she offered up her take on some of the posters that flood the festival. Yesterday Jen focused on opening night posters. Today, she branches out a bit. Since it’s often difficult to determine the artist who actually created the posters, we’d love to hear from you if you know the designer (if we haven’t already figured it out).

We’ll be posting Jen’s recaps throughout the week…

Looking for the best posters at South by Southwest was one of my missions this year, but it wasn’t until last year that I even became aware of the value of the concert poster. My husband arrived a day earlier than me and had the privilege of seeing Andrew Bird tape a session for Season 35 of the Austin City Limits PBS series. Picking me up at the airport, he handed me this cool, limited-edition poster of a wildly plumed red-and-orange bird landing on a tree branch. The print by Diana Sudyka now hangs prominently in our apartment.

It’s not a coincidence that Flatstock—essentially Woodstock for concert posters, as the name suggests—was held at the Austin Convention Center during SxSW this year. In fact, this is the eighth time in eight years that the show has taken place during the festival. (Rock Paper Show, a book coming out in April, catalogues Flatstock’s previous gatherings through 2009.) Geoff Peveto, one of the Flatstock’s founders and the current president of the American Poster Institute, also has his design studio based in Austin. Hence this town is ostensibly the capital of the rock-poster world, just as this festival is a Mecca for each year’s would-be rock stars. And one only needs moments inside the hall to realize there are truly amazing works being designed and silk-screened (or hand-pressed) all across the nation. (more…)

Our friend and frequent contributor, Jen Turner, made her way back down to her home state of Texas for part of the epic South By Southwest festival in Austin this past week and has been good enough to report back to us. She did her best to check it all out, including our own ReadyMade Rocks party which truly did rock. For her first post, she offers up her take on some of the posters that flood the festival (below). Since it’s often quite difficult to determine the artist who actually created the posters, we’d love to hear from you if you know the maker.

We’ll be posting Jen’s recaps throughout the week…

03.18.10

Here in Austin, Texas, Day Two of the 23rd annual South by Southwest Festival is under way.

The traditional evening showcases at more than 76 venues still give the festival its backbone, but the past few years have seen a blitz of corporate-fueled “day parties,” after parties, secret shows, and unofficial showcases, many of which offer free booze and no wristband wrangling. Every coffeehouse and boutique seems to have a makeshift stage attached to it, and the bands keep cruise-ship-buffet hours; the only time the music stops is when the Dunkin’ Donuts manager is on his way to work. (Though I did bring along some black silk pajama pants, in case there’s a breakfast set this year.)

But enough about the music! There are plenty of people who can tell you all about that. What I want to do is shift the focus to the creative forces behind the machine and share with you my favorite posters and fliers from each day. . . (more…)

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…)