it's a material world

What is it about refrigerators that compels us to stick stuff on its surface. I’ve got photos of my “So Long STINK-TOWN,” good-bye party. There are remnants of a vegetable and fruit magnet set, where the strawberries are as big as a bunch of bananas and one potato equals a bunch of grapes. Magnetic word sets, spontaneously  erupt in sentences during dinner parties and proclaim, “Food is the world of love. Summer showers on a crack morning. Dance, Dance and Dance.” My fridge is a stainless steel wonder with more compartments than I know what to do with. I purposely put vegetables in the fruit bin and vice versa.  As you listen to this piece The Dave Project , funded by The Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee, think about  what  you post on your fridge says about you.

Photo by Dennis Wise

Believe me, I wish I could say that I did a bunch of research and found the Wil-Mar Neighborhood Center garage sale after reading about it online, in the paper or on some community announcement board. But that would be a total lie. The truth is that I found it much like I find every thing else. I got lost. My friend Dennis Wise lives in Chicago. He was on his way to Dodgeville WI. to participate in a Contra Dancing event. You may ask..what is contra dancing? Well, according to Dennis, it’s like Square Dancing and Line Dancing without the square and line part. It’s basically a bunch of happy people dancing around in circles holding hands. But I digress.

Anyway…he stopped for a visit  and we decided to go to lunch at one of my favorite restaurants which is about a mile and a half from where I live. Madison is on the small-ish side so, I tend to either walk or bike to my destinations. The restaurant is a straight shot off the bike path and about a 20 minute walk from my house. I pass it at least twice a day on my way to where ever I happen to be going. But, put me in a car and it’s easily a thirty minute, sweat inducing, profanity laced trip from hell.  So, I think it was somewhere around the fifth wrong turn that we stumbled-upon the Garage sale. So, we took a much-needed break from the road and Dennis snapped a few photos while I chatted up the sales folk. Sam Miller and Mark Kenas are dear friends and business partners. For them, this garage sale is an annual event and they give 15% of their sales to the Wil-Mar Center. Click here - Wil-Mar Garage Sale - to give it a listen.

But wait…there’s more.

I was interviewed by WUWM – 89.7 Milwaukee Public Radio’s Stephanie Lecci  for her  morning magazine show Lake Effect. You can here it online and about 20 additional minutes of tape. Just click on the link above. I think that pretty much covers it.

Be well,

gianofer

Rice c. 1913

When one is accepted to Rice University, he is randomly assigned to one of eleven residential colleges. They are, in essence, self-sustaining autonomous communities with drastically different histories, cultures, traditions, governance, and ways of doing things, complete with their own crests and colors and mascots. I was elated then to be placed in Hanszen College, one of the four original residential colleges. I myself have always resided in Old Section; built in the early part of the twentieth-century in a collegiate Gothic/Neo-byzantian hybrid, it is one of the most historic buildings on campus and one of the most influential colleges culturally.

It is this pride and yearning to honor the tradition from which we contemporary Hanszenites descend that I wanted to produce a space not too dissimilar from the class of 1912. During one’s time in university, it is standard to move in and out of one’s place of residence four times, enough times so that the smart end up with less things their senior year than they brought with them their freshman year. In this purging of excess (usually items brought from home that one thinks they might need but never really do), the senior room can become more revealing than the freshman room. Most items one surrounds themselves with in their first year of university are brought from home with the intention of making a foreign space familiar once again, coupled with doubles and triples of everything out of parental concern that the comforts of home are at one’s disposal away from it. Certainly one acclimates himself to his newfound environment: this, along with his inevitable intellectual growth, will surely influence the evolution of his living quarters so that a natural organizational process occurs and what is left is what he deems his necessities (from knowing the ins and outs of university life) and a reflection of his time as an undergraduate; indeed, Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi posits in his book, The Meaning of Things, that a house reflects where one is in his life.

My room

From the beginning, great thought was put towards my room. I am most fortunate to share with the space with a friend of mine; towards the end of last year, we scoured the real estate – two rooms had wood floors and a balcony – and after surviving our residential college’s Survivor-esque ritual of allotting rooms, it was ours. While the details or ascertaining our room is quite boring, I do recall never quite grasping the intricacies of the system leaving my roommate to the politics of it all and being most concerned that we were not going to get our choice room (silly concerns in retrospect that define my university and Hanszen years). While the reader may be more interested in the various curios as many who visit my room for the first time are, I myself am uninterested in them: the room speaks for itself, not deviating far from traditional. Instead, what I find worth more are the experiences had in this room. This is only a very recent epiphany, for admittedly, it is seemingly contradictory – much time and energy was put into curating my room.

Chalk it up to the realization that this is my last year at Rice and Hanszen and suddenly what goes on in the room means more to me. Having only inhabited it for one day, already we have hosted so many friends and their visits are mental snapshots which mean a great deal. Dismissible surely as youthful mawkish babble about university and friends which every generation repeats, it is very difficult for me to divorce these memories from the physical things which make up the space for arguably the decor allowed such times to occur in it in the first place. Material cultures and built environments is cyclical in nature – why do we create the things we do and how they affect us is the driving force behind this field of study. Theory is, I believe, integral to the creation of things and places and buildings, which, in a nutshell, is what this niche area of academia investigates. And so perhaps I am not far off in saying that when the architect designed this space over a century ago and the founders of Rice University wanted to institute a residential college system that this is exactly what they had hoped for. Maybe this feeling is a testament to its success. That such a system of organizing and drawing people together still continues to do so while the same poster of Albert Einstein has come into this room over again with each passing Hanszenite and the way music is listened to has shifted from gramophones to being streamed in from satellites in space is quite an achievement. It is easy to passively buy and live in the ways in which we are demanded to in the various lifestyle magazines and retail catalogues; as such, consider this just a cursory study of what goes on in a particular sort of space, an angle easily overlooked when we begin to think about our habitat.

At a garage sale whose products were dominated by multiples of cheap, un-used Christmas decorations, her muted earth tones held a measure of warmth that seemed lost to the sea of Santa snow globes, tinsel boas, and questionably functioning colored lights. Her eyes popped out at me even in the dismal, fluorescent garage lighting. Besides, anything vintage kitsch will have my heart in a second.

For one dollar she was a bargain, even more so once I saw the slit in the back of her head and realized she was a piggy bank. Her symmetrically rounded forms were pleasing in my hand, and I liked the mottled two-tone color scheme, only strayed from with her metalic gold eyes.  The faux-rustic texturing, dripping glaze and slightly off color application disguised her machine made origin in the regularity, and symmetry of her forms.

Through some quick googling, I now know that piggy banks gained their name from a common type of red clay called pygg. During the Middle Ages Pygg was used to make house wares, and housewives would drop their extra coins into a jar, eventually gaining these jars the name pygg bank. In the 19^th century someone heard pygg and thought pig, and from there the piggy bank was born.

Unlike the functional origin of the piggy bank, I don’t envision actually using my little owl as a bank, but rather as a desk ornament. As an overly meticulous child I was perplexed by the concept of having to break the bank in order to get the money out (I was the child that never played with her dolls, just took them out of their boxes, changes their outfits, made sure their hair was still perfect, and put them back in). In reality having to break this bank isn’t an issue, as my owl bank has a hole in the bottom from which you can retrieve the money, but it gets at the fact that when I was younger, I felt like by using something I loved a lot, I would destroy it. In many ways this is the case, by using something, you often wear it out beyond future use.

It is use that gives something character, and gives it meaning. While it may take away from its shiny newness, it adds something in its place. What made my owl bank stand out amongst the Christmas decorations was that she didn’t seem so shiny and new, she seemed like she might have had a history. Her warm brown and beige colors didn’t shout like the cheap plastic red and green, and echoed a different era when those colors were in fashion, when she was used by a thrifty spinster saving up for bingo tokens. Finally though, she was now part of my story. I could now remember the partly cloudy, lazy Sunday morning I spent in one of my favorite activities, perusing garage sales.

A recent New York Times article covered the supposed resurgence of the watch. Lumping together Generation Y as being responsible  for having done away with it and bringing it back in one  boomerang motion (pegged as the Peter Pan Generation, I understand the convenience of assigning such a character flaw to us), I do not believe that it ever went anywhere; rather, we were just  too young to have anywhere to go and thus never could adopt it in  the first place to then dismiss it into oblivion.

Personally, I committed to wearing a watch in sixth grade. Admittedly, its purpose throughout middle and high school was to count down the minutes left in class and coordinate with excruciating detail those first independent social engagements. Fast forward to the Amory Blaine years. To mark this rite of passage, I needed a new watch, but not just any watch would do as my sidekick. It had to be a Swatch, one part fueled by my infatuation with the eighties (as I wrote this article, both “Growing Pains” and “Teen Wolf” flashed across my television), the other by some fleeting image of my pediatrician sporting one which stared out from under his white lab coat. And besides, I was a baby of the decade. With all this attention, it was unsurprising then that when I got to university, my watch became alive.

The plastic timepiece in trillions of incarnations thrilled me, particularly since it promised to brighten up my university uniform of oxfords tucked into Levis. ‘Dad,’ ‘professor,’ I got it all for my less-than-adventurous attire, but what clung to my wrist sent this assessment into a tailspin. To some, it meant that I was an architect: in combination with my round horn-rim spectacles, the campus immediately pegged me as belonging to the Rice School of Architecture. When my aunt came for a visit she gave me a personality reading, the skill for which she recently picked up in San Francisco. Taking it into account, I was a traditionalist with nonconformist quirks, supposedly. Friends interning at consulting firms chided my anachronistic choice of time teller as they had their eyes set on Rolex Submariners.

More than anything though, my Swatch was practical. It went with anything that I picked up from the floor ten minutes before class. It stood up to the abuse of sliding on my toes into hallway walls hurriedly en route to said class. It kept time accurately, very important for a two-hour final. And it could go from the oppression of that lecture hall to the ecstatic release of a party’s early morning and was not too fragile to be dragged out of bed at one the next afternoon to what college students refer to as ‘brunch’. Reliable and trustworthy, its loud ticking kept me alive like the arterial palpitation which went on underneath its own mechanical body.

Its definitive boldness was an exclamatory rebuttal to the raillery received regarding my staid dressing, and its constant ability to fit me with a new role in Wilde’s idea of a badly cast world forced me to think about my identity: how my internal and external selves do not always match, how mere objects can redefine who we are, how they can compel us to act differently. Now I hesitate to say that this transformative property is divorced from utility, for what parameters have we set societally that define just what utility is? Indeed it is only one complexity in this field which demands much theoretical contemplation for objects are never just objects. But that is reserved for another time, time which my watch will whisper to me between our conversations about its ‘it-ness’.

Smokebaum DeVille

My cleaver. Oh, it’s magnificent. Black rubber handle, stainless steel blade with just enough curve to the cutting edge to make it perfect for mincing without affecting it’s chopping capabilities. I love to cook, and my cleaver is the only cutting tool I will ever need. I would get by just fine without it, but I use it several time per day, and each time I am thankful to have it, knowing it is something I will never take for granted.