dominic wilcox

Dominic Wilcox has created a series of miniature time-based sculptures using a collection of vintage watches and customised model figures.

I ♥ NY

New York City Time Lapse from Blueglaze LLC on Vimeo.

Culture 3 by Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, artists living and working in London. Their latest book is People in Trouble Laughing Pushed to the Ground. Broomberg and Chanarin are Visiting Fellows at the University of the Arts London.

Christmas cards at Make Do.

One of these days...

The Korakia Pensione in Palm Springs. Crafted after a Mediterranean-style pensione, Korakia blends Morrocan design and the Greek aesthetic, to create an oasis in the desert.

Someone is Stealing Your Life

Most American adults wake around 6 to 7 in the morning. Get to work at 8 or 9. Knock off around 5. Home again, 6-ish. Fifty weeks a year. For about 45 years. Most are glad to have the work, but don’t really choose it. They may dream, they may study and even train for work they intensely want; but sooner or later, for most, that doesn’t pan out. Then they take what they can and make do. Most have families to support, so they need their jobs more than their jobs admit to needing them. They’re employees. And, as employees, most have no say whatsoever about much of anything on the job. The purpose or service, the short and long-term goals of the company, are considered quite literally “none of their business” - though these issues drastically influence every aspect of their lives. No matter that they’ve given years to the day-to-day survival of the business; employees (even when they’re called “managers”) mostly take orders. Or else. It seems an odd way to structure a free society: Most people have little or no authority over what they do five days a week for 45 years. Doesn’t sound much like “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Sounds like a nation of drones. It used to be that one’s compensation for being an American drone was the freedom to live in one’s own house, in one’s own quirky way, in a clean and safe community in which your children had the chance to be happier, richer drones than you. But working stiffs can’t afford houses now, fewer communities are clean, none are safe, and your kid’s prospects are worse. (This condition may be because for five days a week, for 45 years, you had no say - while other people have been making decisions that haven’t been good for you.) I’m not sure whose happiness we’ve been pursuing lately, but one thing is clear: It’s not the happiness of those who’ve done our society’s work. On the other hand - or so they say - you’re free, and if you don’t like your job you can pursue happiness by starting a business of your very own, by becoming an “independent” entrepreneur. But you’re only as independent as your credit rating. And to compete in the business community, you’ll find yourself having to treat others - your employees - as much like slaves as you can get away with. Pay them as little as they’ll tolerate and give them no

say in anything, because that’s what’s most efficient and profitable. Money is the absolute standard. Freedom, and the dignity and well-being of one’s fellow creatures, simply don’t figure in the basic formula. This may seem a fairly harsh way to state the rules America now lives by. But if I sound radical, it’s not from doing a lot of reading in some cozy university, then dashing off to dispense opinion as a prima donna of the alternative press. I learned about drones by droning. From ages 18 to 29 (minus a few distracted months at college when I was 24) I worked the sort of jobs that I expected to have all my life: typesetter for two years, tape transcriber for three, proofreader (a grossly incompetent one) for a few weeks, messenger for a few months, and secretary (yes, secretary) for a year and a half. Then I stopped working steadily and the jobs got funkier: hospital orderly, vacuum-cleaner salesman, Jack-in-the-Box counter-person, waiter, nail hammerer, cement mixer, toilet scrubber, driver. It was during the years of office work that I caught on: I got two weeks’ paid vacation per year. A year has 52 weeks. Even a comparatively unskilled, uneducated worker like me, who couldn’t (still can’t) do fractions or long division - even I had enough math to figure that two goes into 52 … how many times? Twenty-sic. Meaning it would take me 26 years on the job to accumulate one year for myself. And I could only have that in 26 pieces, so it wouldn’t even feel like a year. In other words, no time was truly mine. My boss merely allowed me an illusion of freedom, a little space in which to catch my breath, in between the 50 weeks that I lived that he owned. My employer uses 26 years of my life for every year I get to keep. And what do I get in return for this enormous thing I am giving? What do I get in return for my life? A paycheck that’s as skimpy as they can get away with. If I’m lucky, some health insurance. (If I’m really lucky, the employer’s definition of “health” will include my teeth and my eyes - maybe even my mind.) And, in a truly enlightened workplace, just enough pension or “profit-sharing” to keep me sweet but not enough to make life different. And that’s it. Compare this to what my employer gets: If the company is successful, he (it’s usually a he) gets a standard of living beyond my wildest dreams, including what I would consider fantastic protection for his family, and a world of access that I can only pitifully mimic by changing channels on my TV. His standard of living wouldn’t be possible without the labor of people like me - but my employer doesn’t think that’s a very significant fact. He certainly doesn’t think that this fact entitles me to any say about the business. Not to mention a significant share in ownership. Oh no. The business is his to do with as he pleases, and he owns my work. Period. I don’t mean that bosses don’t work. Most work hard, and have the satisfaction of knowing that what they do is theirs. Great. The problem is: What I do is theirs too. Yet if my companion workers and I didn’t do what we do - then nobody would be anybody’s. So how come what we do is hardly ours? How come he can get rich while we’re lucky to break even? How come he can do anything he wants with the company without consulting us, yet we do the bulk of the work and take the brunt of the consequences? The only answer provided is that the employer came up with the money to start the enterprise in the first place; hence, he and his money people decide everything and get all the benefits. Excuse me, but that seems a little unbalanced. It doesn’t take into account that nothing happens unless work is done. Shouldn’t it follow that, work being so important, the doers of that work deserve a more just formula for measuring who gets what? There’s no doubt that the people who risked or raised the money to form a company, or bail it out of trouble, deserve a fair return on their investment - but is it fair that they get everything? It takes more than investment and management to make a company live. It takes the labor, skill, and talent of the people who do the company’s work. Isn’t that an investment? Doesn’t it deserve a fair return, a voice, a share of the power? I know this sounds awfully simplistic, but no school ever taught me anything about the ways of economics and power (perhaps because they didn’t want me to know), so I had to figure it out slowly, based on what I saw around me every day. And I saw: That it didn’t matter how long I worked or what a good job I did. I could get incremental raises, perhaps even medical benefits and a few bonuses, but I would not be allowed power over my own life - no power over the fundamental decisions on which my life depends. My future is in the hands of people whose names I often don’t know and whom I never meet. Their investment is the only factor taken seriously. They feed on my work, on my life, but reserve for themselves all power, prerogative and profit. Slowly, very slowly, I came to a conclusion that for me was fundamental: My employers are stealing my life. They. Are. Stealing. My. Life. If the people who do the work don’t own some part of the product and don’t have any power over what happens to their enterprise - they are being robbed. And don’t think for a minute that those who are robbing you don’t know they are robbing you. They know how much they get from you and how little they give back. They are thieves. They are stealing your life. The assembly-line worker isn’t responsible for the decimation of the American auto industry, for instance. Those responsible are those who’ve been hurt least, executives and stockholders who, according to the Los Angeles Times, make 50 to 500 times what the assembly-line worker makes, but who’ve done a miserable job of managing. Yet it’s the workers who suffer most. Layoffs, plant closings, and such are no doubt necessary - like the bumper stickers say, shit happens - but it is not necessary that workers have no power in the fundamental management decisions involved. As a worker, I am not an “operating cost.” I am how the job gets done. I am the job. I am the company. Without me and my companion workers, there’s nothing. I’m willing to take my lumps in a world in which little is certain, but I deserve a say. Not just some cosmetic “input,” but significant power in good times or bad. A place at the table where decisions are made. Nothing less is fair. So nothing less is moral. And if you, as owners or management or government, deny me this - then you are choosing not to be moral, and you are committing a crime against me. Do you expect me not to struggle? Do you expect us to be forever passive while you get rich stealing our lives?

Michael Ventura, Someone is Stealing Your Life, LA Weekly Jan. 26, 1990

Luscious tree, UCLA.

"The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware."
- Henry Miller.

Writing in push pins...

“It isn’t possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”

— E.M. Forster

The New York City Polaroid Project.

I Miss You flat notecard set by TableTop Made.

Interior Design by Lazaro Rosa Violan

Hotel Praktik

Dying and Dinner Parties from ThinPlace Pictures on Vimeo.

Sebastian Bentler

Sculpture in woodland at Devil's Glen in County Wicklow. Walked through it when I lived in Ireland. Beautiful and atmospheric.

I have a thing for sculpture gardens. One of these days I'd like to visit The Gardens of Gaia in Kent.

"This was shot just after a sunset on the roof of a palace at Shugruf village in the Haraz Mountains of Yemen. No extra lighting was used. The sun has just set (see the top right corner of the image) and mist has started to rise from the valley below." Photograph by Matjaz Krivic, Slovenia.

Burgundy Street, Madrid.

Wood veneer pouches and how to.

spring fever

Altered books...

Great presentation concept by Cavalier Essentials.

I ♥ Maira Kalman

fonts

Love these new fonts from Tart: Bookeyed Jack and his stylish cousin Suzanne.
Carefully hand-drawn with an old school pointed pen in walnut ink.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in all of us. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

- Nelson Mandela

the golden rule

“This poster is a father and son col­lab­o­ra­tion. All ele­ments are hand drawn by Koen (age 6) with a Sharpie marker at the din­ing room table, then arranged dig­i­tally in our stu­dio. The type is the “Golden Rule” as penned in the hon­est hand of a child. Maybe what we learned in kinder­garten is most impor­tant after all.” Avail­able from Studio On Fire (14 x 20 let­ter­press poster, $30).

calligraphy collaboration

Beau­ti­ful valen­tines from Hello Handmade Paperie – a col­lab­o­ra­tion between artist Shanna Murray and cal­lig­ra­pher Betsy Dunlap. Each valen­tine is printed with Shanna’s lovely rib­boned lau­rel illus­tra­tion on the front and a cus­tomized note penned by Betsy on the inside.

Roaming Wishlist '11

1. Hotel Surazo, Matanzas, Chile.

2. Los Roques, Venezuela. An archipelago national park in the Caribbean.

3. Hapuku Lodge & Tree Houses, Kaikoura, New Zealand.

Freedom. Freedom to what?

"To what avail the plough or sail, or love, or life -- if freedom fail? Freedom. Freedom to what? Escape, run, wonder turning your back on a cowed society that stutters, staggers, and satnates every man for himself and fuck you Jack I've got mine? To be truly challenging, a voyage, like life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen, who play with their boats at sea --"cruising" it is called. Voyaging belongs to the sea men, and to the wonderers of the world who cannot or will not fit in. Little has been said or written about the ways a man may blast himself free. Why? I don't know, unless the answer lies in our diseased values....Men are enmeshed in the cancerous discipline of "security", and in the worship of security we fling our lives beneath the wheels of routine--and before we know it our lives are gone. What does a man really need --- really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in ---and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That's all --- in the material sense. But we are brainwashed by our economic system until we end up in a tomb beneath a pyramid of time payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our attention from the sheer idiocy of the charade. The years thunder by. The dreams of youth grow dim where they like caked in dust on the shelves of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed. Dedication to the sea is the symbol of migration and movement and wondering. It is the barbaric place and it stands opposed to society and it is a constant symbol in all of literature, too. As Thomas Wolfe said, "It is the state of barbaric disorder out of which civilization has emerged and into which it is liable to return."

----Stearling Hayden, Wonderer, 1964

"Sordid... but at least it's life"

Movie List (*work in progress)

I keep forgetting some of my favorite movies... time to make a list:

JAWS
In its own category. All five films are included.

AMERICAN (INDIE)
* Dan In Real Life, 2007
* Conversations With Other Women, 2005
* Stealing Beauty, 1996
* The Adventures of Sebastian Cole, 1998
* Elephant, 2003
* The New World, 2005
* Paranoid Park, 2007
* Whit Stillman film (Barcelona, 1994; The Last Days Of Disco, 1998)
* Lovers of the Arctic Circle, 1998
* The Loss of Sexual Innocence
* Secretary, 2001
* Boys Don't Cry
* All The Real Girls, 2003
* The Hi-Lo Country, 1998
* Tigerland, 2000
* The Virgin Suicides, 2003
* Lost In Translation, 1999
* The Myth of Fingerprints
* Safe
* Secretary
* High Art
* Laurel Canyon


AMERICAN (MAINSTREAM)
* Last Chance Harvey, 2008
* Rounders, 1998
* Leaving Las Vegas

AMERICAN (OLDER)
* Kramer vs Kramer
* All The President's Men, 1976
* McCabe & Mrs. Miller, 1971
* Three Days of The Condor, 1975

AUSTRALIAN
* The Waiting City, 2009
* Japanese Story, 2003
* Somersault, 2004




FRENCH
* La Reine Margot (Queen Margot)
* En Coeur En Hiver (A Heart In Winter)
* L'Heure d'Ete (Summer Hours), 2008
* The Beat That My Heart Skipped, 2005
* Dans Paris, 2006
* L'auberge espagnol, 2002 & sequel Russian Dolls, 2005

OTHER FOREIGN FILMS
* In The Mood For Love, 2005

IRISH
* In The Name of the Father
* The Matchmaker
* Once
* Hunger

SCOTTISH
* Trainspotting
* Shallow Grave

ENGLISH
* Anything by Merchant-Ivory
* 28 Days Later

MOVIES I LOVED GROWING UP...
* An American Werewolf In London
* Dead Poets Society
* The Goonies
* Space Camp
* Trading Places
* Beverly Hills Cop
* Lethal Weapon

love chooses you

"Remember that you don't choose love; love chooses you.
All you really can do is accept it for all its mystery when it comes into your life. Feel the way it fills you to overflowing then reach out and give it away."

(Kent Nerburn)

words and wallpaper

I was flipping through a magazine recently and came across a wedding dress photo spread. Never mind the dresses, what I couldn't take my eyes off of was the design and calligraphy in the background. I kind of want to create something similar in my bedroom... sweeping letters and vintage wallpaper... yum.