The #700 Bookshelf

...art. The #700 bookcase as seen in the 1909 catalog. My latest project was making a copy of Gustav Stickley’s #700 bookshelf, originally manufactured in 1904. The $30 price in the 1909 catalog would be around $900 today, not cheap considering that a good salary at that time was between $2,000 and $5,000 a year. In my cranky opinion the pre-WWI Arts and Crafts era marks the pinnacle of American design. It’s all downhill from this point. The #700 bo...

Read…

Saturday Tweets: Don’t Fear the Green Reaper

...the light relentlessly pierced through even the tiny slits in the shades, making it difficult to fall asleep. Thanks goodness I moved from that area. pic.twitter.com/ECmbRPxz4h — Robert Kwolek (@RobertKwolek) January 31, 2019 “The internet’s emphasis on metrics and quantity over depth and quality has engendered a society that values celebrity, sensationalism, and numeric measures of success.” – #TeamHuman, #39 Get the manifestohttps://t.co/QCJ0Ng...

Read…

The Institute of the Present

...while your mouth is full of dental tools. But then I asked myself why am I making fun of people who work with their hands and minds for long hours in order to alleviate suffering? If anyone deserves good pay and days off to golf, it should be dentists. Instead I thought I’d discuss what should be an April Fools Day joke but isn’t. And that is Los Angeles’ mayor Eric Garcetti’s appearance at a party last week with Lyft executives to celebrate their...

Read…

How FilmLA Blocks Bike Lanes

...lict of interest. If the choice is between the safety of bike commuters or making production companies happy, you can guess that FilmLA’s likely to opt for the latter. Previous attempts to address unsafe closures of bike lanes by myself and other bike activists have gone nowhere. Call FilmLA to complain and you’ll be greeted with either indifference or outright hostility. Call the police to complain and they’ll direct you to parking enforcement. C...

Read…

Saturday Linkages: We Are All Liars

...which the machine knows nothing. This production is not for the purpose of making meaning. It is for the purpose of producing effects on users that keep us hooked. It is for the purpose of making users the conduits of the machine’s power, keeping its effects in circulation. Faked celebrity deaths, trolling, porn clickbait, advertisements, flurries of food and animal pictures, thirst traps, the endless ticker tape of messages mean less than they pe...

Read…