The psychology of wastefulness

10 January 2011 by 2 Comments

Dan Phillips addresses wastefulness — and some of the psychology behind it — via the building industry in this TED talk.

Watch the video embedded below if you have time. If not, here are a few excerpts.

What causes waste in the building industry? Our housing has become a commodity.

Human beings have a need for maintaining consistency of the apperceptive mass. What does that mean? It means for every perception we have it has to tally with the one we had before or we don’t have continuity and we become a little bit disoriented.

It does no good to be responsible at the point of harvest in the forest if the consumers are wasting the harvest at the point of consumption, and that’s what’s happening. So if something isn’t standard it goes to the dumpster . . . I feature all those warped things.

Filed under Basis for designing well, Disposable culture, Environmental stewardship, Mass production, Modern culture, Restoration, Salvage, Sustainable living

Christmas VI

30 December 2010 by 2 Comments

During this season of extravagance I’m often reminded again — even in my tiny house with our two beat up old cars — how blessed I am and how wasteful the U.S. is as a culture. This waste bothers me more and more every year, and I try to curtail it as much as possible in my own life.

Christmas is a time for extravagance (a topic I intend to explore more in the future) as we celebrate the incarnation — although this extravagance need not be wasteful. And as we dole out gifts to family and friends, let us take note of those without family or friends. Or other things we so very often take for granted, such as the sundry food on our holiday tables.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HlFP-PMW6E]

See an interview with Jeremy Seifert, the director of Dive!, on MyFoxLA’s website.

Filed under Advent, Affluenza, Christmas, Consumerism, Disposable culture, Modern culture, Salvage, Sustainable living

Does poverty encourage creativity?

8 September 2010 by 4 Comments

Lately I’ve been wondering if poverty encourages creativity. Two things prompted this ponderment. One was Andrew Petersen’s first post in his recent series about money, titled Not the root of all evil. The other is simply the lean financial times I find myself in the midst of as we enter Autumn; the contract work I’ve had painting houses this year has dried up for the time being.

My mind is working differently than when I had that work painting. I see things now, objects and opportunities, differently. Possibilities multiply. I take the time to consider more numerous options than if our household was [somewhat more] flush with cash, able to collect in a cart from the Home Depot whatever sundries are needed for a project. Things I’ve collected, some with a specific purpose and some not, look new and become useful in a myriad of ways (I’m not really all that much of a pack rat, but I can’t let some things go.). For instance, the broken dishwasher in the backyard will now become, after being disassembled, part of my downdraft table. Anyone have a squirrel cage laying around they care to donate to that project?

Thus the question in my head is, “Does poverty encourage creativity?” Seems to me it does. I’d like to hear what others think or have experienced in this regard. Does our wealth, individually and nationally, sometimes get in the way of (and also some of the time foster) our imaginations, our ability to be at our creative best?

Paradoxically, I also find myself busier now that a month ago when I still had that [mostly] regular job. I’d love to be working on my own house right now — painting and putting to good use all the building materials I’ve salvaged over the past few months — but haven’t the time in light of trying to find other ways to generate income. As I count in my head, I’m working in no less than five directions toward that end at the moment.

One of those directions is as a freelance graphic designer. I pick up this kind of work now and then anyway, so I’m offering my talents as such if you or yours need a logo, brochure, banner etc designed and printed up. You can see a portfolio of my work under the above tab titled Design Portfolio. Email me at TheAestheticElevator(at)gmail(dot)com if you need such services.

Filed under Affluenza, Consumerism, Disposable culture, Imagination, Intentional observation, Living incarnationally, Modern culture, Personal reflection, Restoration, Salvage, The contemplative life

Laboring on Labor Day weekend

8 September 2009 by 2 Comments

This is what I labored on this past weekend.

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I had hopes of finishing at least one sculpture. Hopes were postponed when my brother called to tell me about some wooden boxes at the Salvation Army. The boxes are from a heater company in Central City, Nebraska. I’m assuming these are the scratch and dent models; the Army was given 300 of them and charged customers like me $2 a pop. Can’t buy the lumber for that.

This is a modular storage system — I screwed four boxes together to create 6 2×2 units — for my wife‘s yarn. Some modification was required, although that was fairly easy. Puttying and painting took up most of my weekend. I’m kinda worn out, but I guess that’s what labor does to a guy. The front edges may be redone in the future, and I’ll add backs to them at some point as well, but they function for the time being. I couldn’t just buy the boxes and not work on the project right away though; they took up too much space in the studio.

The white cabinet in the middle I made, mostly from salvaged wood, including the doors, salvaged from a remodel job round-about 2004. Her stash quickly outgrew it.

Filed under Fiber, Furniture, Handmade, Salvage

Airplane hotel in Costa Rica, hostel in Stockholm

1 May 2009 by 2 Comments

File this under just for fun on Friday: Costa Rican Airplane Hotel Takes Flight. Fits right into my [lagging] commercial flight fetish too.

airplanehotel

The two-room Boeing 727 suite is part of the Costa Verde Resort in Manuel Antonia, Costa Rica. Rates range from $300-$350 a night.

airplanehoteldeck

In February, The inhabitat blog reported on a Boeing 747 turned into a hostel for visitors to Stockholm. As if I needed another reason to visit the land of my (and my wife’s) ancestors,m a land full of good design, generally speaking.

jumbohostel1

The retired jumbo jet rests at the Stockholm-Arlanda airport. Tthe Jumbo Hostel‘s offers a variety of rooms ranging from 350-3300 SEK (~ $40-$400). A conference room is available for rent as well. I think the next Mission Data International board retreat should be held there (in case my boss is reading this).

jumbohostel4

Filed under Architecture, Interior design, Restoration, Salvage

Anna Keiller smoked ceramic sculptures

27 April 2009 by 1 Comment

Via Twitter (and thanks to searches I’ve set up in TweetDeck) I’ve become internetly acquainted with ceramic sculptor Anna Keiller. The most recent post on her blog, Fire and Earth, details her smoking process, which is much more exciting than using an electric kiln (as I do).

anna-keiller-smoking

She also has an older post that talks a little more about smoke firing titled Smoke Firing. I talk about my process in this post from last July. The following is one of her recent works titled The Abduction, after a Swedish fairy tale. I quite like the coloring on the piece, and give her props for the use of salvaged materials in the base and post.

anna-keiller-abduction

I think I’m going to have to find myself a barrel and try this smoking method out. It looks much more fun and is probably cheaper than running the kiln to smoke. The only trick to barrel smoking for me could be locally enforced burn bans we suffer from in Northwest Arkansas on a fairly regular basis.

Filed under Art, Artist profile, Ceramics, Found objects, Salvage, Sculpture

New Work: Thunderhead

21 January 2009 by 2 Comments

I finished a small wood sculpture I’ve been working on for a number of months today. A friend wants to buy it as a gift, or it would probably still be sitting in the garage studio collecting dust. I had been toying with ways to apply it to a sort of base for some time, not liking any of the ideas I’d come up with so far.

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It’s crafted from a salvaged board, a very crooked board, of unknown variety. My best guess is that it’s sycamore, although it really seems too heavy for that. Can you say a lot, a lot of sanding.

I really like the little guy (about seven inches tall), although when I applied a beeswax finish a couple of the laminated joints showed up more than I wanted. The form and finish are beautiful nonetheless, and I sense that similarly abstracted storms will be forthcoming both in wood and clay.

Filed under Art, Salvage, Sculpture

Gifting Don’t: Wrapping like crap on purpose

22 December 2008 by Leave a Comment

I just learned about a phenomenon called crapwrap, where people try to wrap things crappily. They’ll even do it for you, for a fee. The local news spot showed boxes wrapped with gaudy reused paper and brown packing tape.

The interview included a crap-wrapping employee talking about why they do what they do. He suggested it was a great way to present a package in a one-of-a-kind way.

He’s wrong. Really, the boxes just look like your four year old took a crack at the box. There are soooooo many creative ways to use ordinary objects to embellish beautifully instead of elementary-like. Crumpling up ugly paper, poor technique and using bawdy tape are just that, and they are not beautiful when combined. They are simple and ugly.

There are so many more so much more interesting textures and materials around your house that can be both recycled and unique. Think brown paper bags, foil, spray paint, old t-shirts for wrapping. For joining think clips, rivets, thread, thumb tacks; for tags use the inside of Avon boxes, last year’s Christmas cards (heck, use these for paper!), etc etc.

Of course, if you actually want an ugly gift to give to someone, be my guest. Just don’t say the the best way to make a gift unique is to make it ugly.

Filed under Aesthetics, Beauty, Christmas, Modern culture, Salvage

Entitlement, affluenza and we’re spoiled brats!

6 November 2008 by 3 Comments

Christmas is coming! My friend Amy, on her blog Growing Like Trees, talked yesterday about gift giving. Or, in her case, not gift giving. Her post inspired the following.

I really love the Christmas season, but I’m terrible at receiving gifts. I only realized this a few years ago. If I get something that doesn’t pique my interest, or that I wasn’t expecting, I’m not very good at hiding my disinterest — or feigning interest. No one’s ever told me that I was being a jerk, I just happened to realize it after looking back at how I’ve handled Christmas gifts in the past ten years.

“Jerk” might be a strong self-accusation, I hope. I’m not the kind of person that gets giddy about things very often (to my wife’s chagrin). Even when I’ve received something I really like, I fear my thoughtful countenance risks appearing ungrateful after I tear through the tape and wrapping paper.

Then again, maybe my countenance doesn’t look anything like I’m imagining it. Thankfully, no one in the family owns a video camera. Regardless, I know that my heart has been ungrateful when it should have been giving thanks.

xmas-gifts

I am one of a very spoiled generation. Many of our parents and grandparents live comfortably, have expendable income for luxuries — luxuries that didn’t exist even 25 years ago — take vacations at will etc. etc. Little do we realize as youth that a lot of these people lived very modestly when they were our age. By our age I mean in their 20s and 30s.

In a culture super-saturated with objects to be bought, in a culture ubiquitously and unapologetically inundated with advertising, in a culture where we are referred to (and might even refer to ourselves) as “consumers,” we expect to have what we want now. Credit makes that possible.

And then causes the economy to collapse (when misused).

Frankly, I could go without any gifts at Christmas. The food, family, [good] decorations, mystery and so on are enough. Further, I tend to buy things I want, if I can afford them (i.e., not on credit), when I want. My father-in-law is the same way. It makes it difficult, I’m told, for others to buy gifts for us around this time of year.

On the flipside, I very much enjoy giving thoughtful gifts. Thoughtful gifts are generally not iPods and laptops. Sure, the tweens in the house will think these are great when wrapped, under a tree and tagged with their name. But thoughtful gifts are usually not LCD televisions and barbie dolls or Tickle Me Elmo.

Thoughtful gifts are one-of-a-kind, unique and tailored to an individual. An original painting is a great example, and yes you can afford one, especially if you’re already thinking of spending $300 on an iPod Touch or $900 on a Sony flat screen TV. You just have to know where to look. Handmade scarves or teapots are other examples, which you can find a plethora of on Etsy.

I’m just learning that I like to find or create thoughtful gifts, just like I’ve just learned that I’m a jerk about receiving gifts. One of the better examples of a thoughtful gift was an advertisement I framed for my brother. Three years ago my home group — cell group, life group, Bible study, call it whatever you want — spent a day helping a diabetic woman clean out her garage. The garage was full of a amazing stuff, a lot of which was moldy and falling apart and went to the dump. The rest went into a garage sale.

There were all kinds of decorative things she used years ago in a shop she owned in California. There were enormous boxes of outdated clothing. She kept saying there was probably a bong out there too. The friend orchestrating the cleanup wanted to find it and take it home, which I thought was hilarious since he was an elder in our church.

We didn’t find the bong.

Being a dumpster diver and prone to salvaging anything I find interesting enough, I kept a keen eye on the stuff headed for the dump. A large stack of catalogs, of all the things to keep around for 25 years, ended up being the golden ticket.

I took home a 1979/1980 retailer’s catalog. It was full of things like VCRs and Camcorders listed for ungodly amounts of money, and the back cover proudly presented an Atari 2600 console. I had one of these growing up that grandpa found at a garage sale. My brother was and is an avid gamer. The page displaying the game console was in great condition. I held onto it for months before the holidays rolled around when I cut the page out, framed it and gave it to Daniel for Christmas.

Opportunities like that have to be made, sought out, and even when you’re looking out for them they don’t always show up. It also helps to know a person well. Finding or devising the perfect gift for that second cousin you met ten years ago at a reunion will probably be exponentially more difficult than for your nuclear family members.

Two things in conclusion. First of all, to any friends or family who may have felt slighted by my spoiled brat reaction to a gift you gave me in the past, I’m sincerely sorry. I pray I’m a more gracious person in the future, starting this year. Secondly, this post introduces a two month series where I will recommend ideas to readers for unique and one-of-a-kind gifts.

The series will be titled Gifting, and will be published whenever I come across a good idea up until Christmas.

Filed under Affluenza, Art, Christianity, Christmas, Entitlement, Etsy, Handmade, Intentional observation, Modern culture, Salvage

In the Studio: Saturday smoke and salvaged oak

19 October 2008 by 3 Comments

This weekend I made a complete disaster of my studio as I began sorting and cutting boards for my dining room table project, so help me God I’m not biting off more than I can chew.

I salvaged the rough sawn oak planks and 2-bys three years ago while working as a sub, helping remodel houses. The planks came from a wreck of a house in Gentry, Arkansas, that probably should have just been torn down. Apparently the man who lived there had made his living at a saw mill. The 2-bys — ranging in measurement from 1.5″ to 3″ thick — were used to frame a ceiling in an old farm house on south Elm Street in Siloam Springs. We vaulted the living ceiling in the house, and I saved these from the dumpster.

I need to borrow a friend’s planer to work the boards into a more furniture friendly state of mind before going much further. The gist of the plan is to use the planks as the tabletop, with their wonderfully warm aged color, the quartersawn 2-bys as an apron around the planks and the rest as the base.

While I was arguing with my radial arm saw — which apparently died as I cut the oak yesterday — I smoked a few of my storm forms from last weekend’s successful firing.

I started with the least successful form, that also cracked last week, with very low expectations. I failed to apply terra sigs to these, and in my experience so far clays without sigs don’t take smoke very well. This clay, a mid-fire Texas white, does as you can see in the photographs.

There are some incredibly subtle and beautiful variations that I haven’t gotten in any of my other smoking attempts. After this one turned out so well I worked on two others. I wrapped the works in newsprint and then foil and put them in the electric kiln for one hour, with the lower element on high. I tried something a little different with a thunderhead, where I wanted the top to be white (since it’s in the sun) and the updraft below to be dark. So I wrapped the bottom only. This worked, in that the color was only where I wanted it to be, but the variation in the color wasn’t nearly as interesting.

My wife still like the results of that one though, which is saying something.

Filed under Art, Ceramics, Disposable culture, Northwest Arkansas, Restoration, Salvage, Sculpture, Siloam Springs

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