Extreme Craft

Tardis Slip

I'm turning 40 this year... and that mean's I'm OLD. Old people sit around and bemoan the fact that the kids today can't read, don't know what culture is if it bit 'em on the ass, wear funny clothes and don't know how tough it was back in the day. Some of this may be true... but I'll give the kids one thing--they know their DOCTOR WHO! When I'm sporting tweed, my students flatter me by asking if I know how much I look like David Tennant. Cough.

AnyWHO (both a pun, and something that an aging Gen-Xer would say), I was pretty excited when I saw the above TARDIS DRESS on BoingBoing this morning, so I'm sharing it with everybody who hasn't seen it yet. Everybody knows that the Tardis contains multitudes on the inside. I'm working on getting my wife to make an Oscar the Grouch garbage can skirt with a similarly vast interior.

LINK via BoingBoing

Spinski-ing a Yarn

The ceramics world lost one of its great heroes today. Victor Spinski passed away. He was full of mischief, skill and skewed wisdom... maybe not in equal parts.

I wrote about an interview I did with Victor last year in Extreme Craft... you can find that piece HERE. After the interview, Victor sent me some amazing slides that he took of one of his best pranks. An animated GIF of the event is above, and the details, excerpted from my earlier piece, are below.

Supposedly, back in the '70s, a collector bought a trompe l'oeil garbage can from a sold out show, then requested that Spinski make some changes to the piece. Spinski agreed, but as he drove the piece from Manhattan back to his studio in Delaware, he started to chafe at the request. He had some issues with his local sanitation company, so he did what any sane person would do. He decided to put the piece out with that night's trash.

Spinski hid out with a camera behind a bush and waited for the garbage truck to arrive. When it finally did, a sanitation worker (who according to Victor looked like he had a pretty rough night of partying) picked up the piece and tried to get the lid off. The lid shattered on the ground, but somehow, this didn't register, and he started whacking it against the corner of the garbage truck until the whole thing shattered, which sobered him up real quick.

Spinski got some classic photos of the whole thing, and the story ended like many of the stories I heard from him... with Victor making a quick exit before somebody beat the shit out of him.

Here is an animated GIF that I made of the sequence of photos Victor took from the bushes. He's definitely going to be missed... but maybe not by this particular sanitation worker.

Recycling Sucks: The History of Creative Reuse at TEDx Eureka

Last month, I had the pleasure of delivering a shortened version of my lecture Recycling Sucks: The History of Creative Reuse as a TED talk at TEDx Eureka. Lots of fun stuff had to be cut out to accomodate the shortened format, but hopefully the result is short, fun and still informative. TEDx was really fun in Eureka--it happened at the Arcata Theater Lounge, and the production was top notch.

Check out this playlist of other TEDx talks from Eureka, including lectures on art, math, science, laughter, weed, history, slavery... and death. The TEDx event showed how geeky, engaged and enthralling the people are up here on the North Coast.

LINK