Objectography

Now the problem I've got myself into is that the popular kintsugi cult depends on repair with epoxy. Most epoxy is not food-safe. Food-safe epoxy is both extremely expensive and not, as far as I can tell, available in Italy. (But the fabulous French educator Alex has done a wonderful video about it.)
Going a bit deeper I learn that Kintsugi artisans from Japan are rightfully outraged by the "cultural appropriation" of using epoxy at all.

The ritual reminds me just how confused we are in equating convenience with happiness. Spoiling yourself isn't about making things easy; it's about taking time to languidly cracking and munch on walnuts.

I do not impulse-buy. I look and look and then I walk away and wait for something to stick with me. If it remains a presence in my mind after an hour, I run back to get it. There's an exception to this. Travel. I like to buy something symbolizing my first visit to a […]

My mother brought these bags home from France when I was a child. This obviously was before anybody (other than the French, apparently) felt the need for a re-useable shopping bag. We always called them "string bags". I don't know what the French call them. They were handy because they were so lightweight that they […]

A water kettle is one of those things that is a permanent, full-time part of the visual landscape. It's used too often to be hidden away between. Further, a stovetop kettle will occupy one burner full-time. This is the kind of object to spend money on.

It looked like the kind of knockoffs sold by bored vendors at street markets. "That was your Grandmother's, you know?" "It's ugly." "Yes." "It's not real." "It's real. She bought it at Neiman-Marcus." Apparently, Grandma, who wore high heels through her last days –and worked, as a relief hotel clerk– eventually found her purses too […]

During The Distance of 2020, I unexpectedly found myself "sheltered" at my mother's home. I built a makeshift office, and then in fact I built the prototype of this website. I asked for a box in which to keep all the electronic accoutrements who sit on my desk (hard drives, flash drives, power bank, headphones, […]

In December 2014 I had just moved to Berlin. It being Christmastime, there were handcraft markets, and I went to all of them, as part of the research that would result in Artisan Modern. I wasn't allowed to shop, because I hadn't yet established my business or even got a work visa. One market was […]

The little "bible" in my hand turned out to be a 1953 printing of the 1923 Roget's Treasury of Words, edited by O. Sylvester Mawson, assisted by Katharine Aldrich Whiting, and subsequently retitled Roget's Pocket Thesaurus.