Adventures in Extreme Making: The White Rose

For reasons I can’t fully articulate, I often think about an obscure film by the artist Bruce Conner called “The White Rose.” Conner’s film documents the moving of a huge and mysterious painting by the artist Jay DeFeo. The painting is so large that the moving company had to cut a hole in the wall of DeFeo’s second second floor apartment to get it out. Perhaps the appeal of this film is the problem solving or the obsessiveness of DeFeo. Or maybe...

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Saturday Tweets: Bird Eyesight, Making and Marginalia

Clear-cut tropical forest revitalized with industrial orange peel waste https://t.co/tGl1sbVvif — Root Simple (@rootsimple) September 2, 2017 Support A Skid Row Bike Lane – Sign the Petition! https://t.co/dLzwO0MFXk via @Change #bikeLA @lacbc — Colin Bogart (@ColinBogart) August 31, 2017 Right so I was researching bird eyesight and can someone explain why these feel like really obscure memes pic.twitter.com/qXkJg16iCV — max ✨ (@naxxramen) August...

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Waxed Cloth Food Wrap (Made in a solar oven for bonus self-righteousness points)

...ambitious you could sew in an elastic band to hold the cover tight. How-To Making the cloths is very easy. All you have to do is cut some squares or circles of thin cotton fabric, like muslin. Pink the edges if you have pinking shears–this looks better, but I don’t think the edges will unravel much anyway, because of the wax. Size depends on intended use. I can imagine eventually having a range of sizes and shapes. For instance, I’m imagining that...

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Baking Bread with Specialty Malts

...ecialist in Northern European breads, taught me that you can skip the beer making and just use malted grains directly in your bread. The grains used in making beer are, mostly, barley that has been malted (sprouted) and then either caramelized or roasted. To make beer you soak the grains in warm water to extract the sugars that form in the malting process. Fermenting that sugary malt water creates alcohol. Most of the grain used to make beer is tw...

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Mandrake!

...eers that has inspired ambitious plans of a fall and winter season of beer making (things are too little too hot around right now for fermentation). What separates Buhner’s book from both the geeked-out world of middle-aged home brew aficionados on the one side and the Budweiser frogs on the down-market other is his emphasis on the ancient and sacred elements of beer making which used to be, he claims, the duty of women, not men. His chapter, “Psy...

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