Notre Dame on Good Friday

April 19, 2019

Design

...od, seen in the photo above. It would have made for a much more interesting building had they kept that old wall rather than removing it as soon as the inspectors left. Part of Morris’ philosophy is keeping earlier modifications intact so as to show the passage of time. Paradoxically that would mean leaving the surviving 19th century modifications to Notre Dame that he, no doubt, hated. Notre Dame has been altered and wrecked so many times that Sh...

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A Not So Close Shave

Mr. Homegrown

April 25, 2019

Domesticus, Shaving

7 Comments

...or making an old legend a painful force-multiplied reality. And yet, every time I look at social media it causes me to ask how am I also complicit in the curation of an idealized alternate self via this blog and our books? How many times have I presented some neatly tied up homemaking/gardening tip when the actual results were more ambiguous? Or, to go deeper with this, how often have I presented a “failure” as a kind of false modesty? At the risk...

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Embroidering the World

Mr. Homegrown

November 4, 2019

Design, Domesticus

6 Comments

...its. Both Kelly and I have done some embroidery before but now we have the time to go a little deeper. Beyond being a useful skill, embroidery has something to teach us about life. What if we took back the time that we spend on our devices to make the world a more beautiful place, to “embroiderer” our cities and suburbs? Let’s extend that metaphor beyond a physical sort of embroidery and imagine embroidering this world with a little more love and...

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How to Store Bulk Goods

Mr. Homegrown

April 22, 2020

Food, Preparedness

8 Comments

...t the Japanese introduced into the labor process in the 1970s with just-in-time production, the tight scheduling of flows of goods in space and time such that you had almost no inventory anywhere in the system. This was the innovation which gave the Japanese car industry its competitive advantage over all others during the 1980s, and the Japanese raked in the ephemeral form of relative surplus-value until everyone else caught up. The downside of t...

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In Praise of Beaters

Mr. Homegrown

September 22, 2020

Thoughtstylings

30 Comments

...d. I fantasize about finding another 1994 Nissan Sentra as a sort of 1990s time travel machine to recall the days before pandemics and Instagram influencers. I imagine getting behind the wheel, spraying myself down with CK1, downing a Zima and shoving a Pearl Jam cassette in the car stereo. Except, of course, there’s no car stereo. Just your cheap, existential little self and the sound of the not at all empty road. But why buy just one 1994 Nissan...

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