September 26, 2005
Hands Off the Collection
Founder and former head of the Kansas Cosmosphere & Space Center, Max Ary, is facing in hot water and facing "19 charges including wire and mail fraud, embezzlement of public funds and money laundering," according to the Witchita Eagle. That's bad news for Ary but not the only bad news. During a search of his home, according to Ary's attorney, sticky-fingered feds lifted items that belonged to Ary's private collection and not his employer. Among the items MIA:
• A mission chart autographed by Gene Cernan, among the last astronauts to land on the moon with Apollo 17.• A mission patch autographed by the crew of Apollo 13.
• Rolls of film from Apollo 13 and 16 missions.
• Fifty-four autographed photos of astronauts.
• A space boot from the Gemini program.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 01:32 PM | Comments (0)
August 30, 2005
Buggy Collector Has 125,000
From the Arizona Republic:
Albert Thurman's tidy home is full of bugs. More than 125,000, to be exact.Through a hobby that has spanned three decades and nearly a dozen countries, Thurman, 58, has amassed a collection of butterflies and insects so vast, diverse and well-preserved that two prominent university museums have agreed to accept the collection into their permanent archives.
With no formal training in entomology, Thurman has earned his wings - so to speak - through a passion for creatures that spend most of their brief life spans unnoticed by the average human eye.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 10:44 AM | Comments (0)
June 17, 2005
DesignTorget, Design Year and the $3.8 Million Table
"EVERYBODY expected it. A piece of 20th-century postwar furniture, a trestle table by Carlo Mollino designed in 1948, broke the million-dollar mark at auction at Christie's New York last Thursday, a first. But nobody expected it to keep going, sailing to a selling price of $3.824 million - nearly 20 times the high estimate - that left an audience of insiders smirking and shaking their heads." William L. Hamilton's New York Times piece about the superhot market for modernist furniture includes this great quote: " 'I've never before felt like losing was winning,' said Lee Mindel of Shelton, Mindel & Associates, a New York architecture firm, who was the underbidder."
I'm in a modern design frame of mind. This morning I spoke with Lasse Folt, the head of DesignTorget. This chain of seven boutiques specializes in Swedish design, which makes up some 90 percent of its wares. As a long-time fan, I understand that. But I hadn't known that DesignTorget has a weekly design jury that chooses products to sell through its commission program. DesignTorget began as an outlet for designers to sell their wares; now there's also a buyer who scouts for interesting products outside the country. Designers still submit items for consideration and every Tuesday morning the design jury meets to choose the most appealing products and give them a test run in one or more stores.
After lunch I went to the National Museum to see the exhibit on Swedish design (1900 to 2000 or some such) as part of my personal tribute to the Year of Design. The web site is annoying as hell (no English version that I can find and no easy navigation. I thought I should be able to find a page for what I saw today under exhibits but it was under collections) but the museum itself is swell. There were no signs prohibiting photos so I snapped away (sans flash of course) at beautiful modern furniture and other goodies until a guard noticed and asked me, in the nicest way imaginable, to stop.
On the way to the museum I saw a collection of professional darkroom equipment next to a dumpster. It's the digital age after all and time to toss out old print dryers and ancient blocky enlargers. My husband and I used to have a home darkroom and it made my heart flop a bit to see this stuff trashed. Silly, I know. An odd-looking Electrolux contraption was part of the design exhibit. The olive green monstrosity was the first microwave sold for home use in Sweden. Soon we'll see enlargers and photo equipment like the stuff that got tossed today in museum exhibits as well. But that's okay. Today's digital darkroom is much cleaner than its chemical-drenched ancestor. Not as romantic, maybe, but I can live with that.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 11:07 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 16, 2005
Creepy Osama bin Laden Souvenirs
New Zealand's Scoop is all over the creepy and cheesy 911 sourvenir story:
A Thai shop selling lava lamps, magic tricks, and embarrassing gifts to surprise recipients, also offers a small, inexpensive hand puppet of bin Laden wearing boxing gloves.Stick your fingers inside and wiggle them, and little Osama punches the air.
On Bangkok's popular Khao San Road, where thousands of international backpackers flock to cheap hotels, restaurants, discos and an avant garde street market, stalls sell Halloween masks of a droopy, rubbery bin Laden, alongside other scary faces.
The trickle of souvenirs appear to be made not by Osama's supporters, but by profit-seeking factories which have slapped bin Laden's visage, and symbols of his international Islamist war, onto existing generic toys and other items in a crass effort to reach a fresh demographic of buyers.
Which is not to suggest it's the only obscene act of commerce the planet has ever witnessed. Not by a long shot.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 04:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 10, 2005
America's Coolest Stuff
Apparently the Discovery Channel is doing battle against the forces of minimalism (or maybe simply against all those other TV shows) by producing a show explicitly celebrating stuff. The Long Beach Press Telegram is doing its part to help: "We have been taking core samples of the solid mass that is the contents of our garage in search of some righteously retro stuff to haul to the appraisers/storytellers of the Discovery Channel's traveling post-'60s artifacts show 'Pop Nation: America's Coolest Stuff,' when it stops at the Long Beach Convention Center for taping on July 2. There's a lot of junk in the garage, but we have stumbled upon some things that might make the cut. The leading item so far is a laminated 1982 US Festival pass to Apple founder/concert producer Steve Wozniak's leased house on a rise overlooking the concert grounds at Glen Helen Park in San Bernardino County."
Wonder if Steven Levy knows about this show. Or the macaroni-and-cheese guy. I just cooked up a generic box of mac-and-cheese for my daughter's lunch. She considers this stuff, now available on the American shelf of the local supermarket for a small fortune, some kind of delicacy. I don't know when packaged mac-and-cheese came into being but doesn't the neon orange of this appalling concoction simply scream 1960s?
If Pop Nation comes to town, what would your treasured post-60s item be? Imagine all the Silicon Valley pop treasures in storage, such as T-shirts from the original Macintosh development team. My husband kept our original Amiga for years. Then I put my foot through it while packing for the move to Sweden. Oops! What are you hanging on to that's really cool?
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 01:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 28, 2005
Events: Reboot and "Cultures of eBay"
I'm slobbering over two events that I probably can't attend. Please go for me and report back.
The first is Reboot, which is slated for June 7 to 10. (Its search for "practical visionaries" is endearing.) While I would crawl over moderately sharp glass to hang with Doc Searls and Robert Scoble in the flesh once more, I can't spend money I don't have. Not even to meet and/or hear from interesting tech folks who are speaking in a city that's practically in the neighborhood. It's painful that I haven't been able to convince an editor to subsidize a cheap trip to Copenhagen to cover this tech conference, which is run by a guy named Thomas Madsen-Mygdal. He appears to have modern Scandinavian values, and I mean that in a good way. How do I know? Well, Reboot has been around for awhile but wasn't held last year because Madsen-Mygdal was on paternity leave after the birth of his first child. (The very thought makes my feminist heart beat a little faster in joy.)
Not that I have a clue what Reboot actually is. "After more than 10 years of old ways of creation, old values, and old models for communicating and organizing ourselves, new ways are emerging. That is what reboot7 is about." Hmm, only 10 years? I was sure the planet was a tiny bit more elderly than that. In any case, Reboot's "heroes are the mavericks who live the new ways and thereby lead and validate their possibilities—The Sharing Way, The Creation Way, The Web Way, The History Way and The Natural Way." So it's a little confusing to this girl, sign me up for a sponsor, I don't want to miss it.
As a Material Girl (yes, I know there are many of us), I don't want to miss "Cultures of eBay" either, an intellectual slamdance slated for August 24 and 25 at the University of Essex in Britain. "The overall aim of this conference is to bring together academics and practitioner groups from both business and the voluntary sector, to explore and ‘make sense’ of the cultural, social and economic aspects of eBay, the Internet auction site, and consider its social and business implications." Yes, yes, yes but will there be a boot sale?
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 04:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 22, 2005
Special Closets for Special Stuff
Hollis Gillespie, who is apparently known nationally but is entirely new to me, writes about the appealing contents of one special closet:
"For months now, Grant has been buying women's clothes, which by itself isn't anything new, but these women's clothes don't fit him. 'Bitch,' he said to me over the phone yesterday, 'I just found the goddamnest, most gorgeous cocktail suit in '50s bubblegum blue ...'
" 'Bubblegum blue?' I asked.
" 'Believe me,' he said, 'when you see this blue suit, you will want to chew it. It's that fabulous.'
"I saw it, and he's right, it's that fabulous. 'But it doesn't fit you,' I pointed out.
" 'Whoreslutbitch,' he said, exasperated, 'I know that, do you not see me putting it into the special closet?'
"That's right, Grant has a special closet. He's been keeping all the women's clothes that don't fit him in an entirely different closet from his own, one way down the hall. In addition to the cocktail suit, he has a tangerine swing coat, some sweater sets, two A-line shifts, a white patent-leather belt and panty hose.
"I used to live in the Telephone Factory as well, in an apartment with the same floor plan just two doors down from where Grant lives now, and I also used that closet for crap I was clinging to for odd reasons. Some of it didn't even belong to me, like the chipped plaster panther that my sister had unwisely given me for safe keeping 11 years ago. Evidently my mother had bought it for her in Tijuana, world central for crap-ass plaster products. Why my sister thought it would be safer with me is a mystery, as it was chip free when she handed it over. I also had a kitchen clock that once belonged to my grandmother. Besides a hand-knitted pin-cushion, that clock is the only heirloom I have."
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 12:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 08, 2005
Muscle Cars and Denny's
My dad goes for coffee about three times a day at the local Denny's. That's down from five times when he was younger. Thursday morning he postponed his usual 4:30-ish pilgrimage to 6:30 so I could come along on the first run of the day. This Denny's is a coffeeshop version of Cheers, where everybody knows everybody and even the strangers passing though seem chatty. We sat at the counter next to Keith, a Grand Junction native who's run a lawn-care service for some twenty years. Dad and Keith told me all about Keith's shiny orange 1972 Duster, the muscle car he bought and lovingly restored over many years. "It's a memory car," he told me about the Mary Lou II, a tribute to the first car he owned, a Duster called Mary Lou. "It was my girlfriend," he said, then explained how it was actually better than a woman because it kept him warm in the winter, sang to him, and took him places. As long as he took care of Mary Lou, she took care of him. But he had sell her to buy a truck for work.
Two weeks later he deeply regretted the move but by then the new owner had taken Mary Lou to Denver and wrecked her. Keith's hankering for Mary Lou didn't lessen so he eventually found a replacement in Tennessee. An expensive replacement, what with the $6000 paint job and all the body work. Work he couldn't afford for a long time because he was married and raising a family by then. "A lot of cancer had to be cut out," he said, which I take to mean rust. He keeps the car stored during the Colorado winter but takes it out the rest of the year. "I took curves at 100 miles per hour and the car always stayed on the road," he said about the original. "You know how MGs look too small? But for an MG owner, once they get inside, they just fit." For Keith, the Duster just fits.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 09:03 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack