What would you say if I told you my father’s most significant piece of industrial design work—the BRUTE—is in the Smithsonian. Supposedly. I’ve looked for it there but have never seen it. That doesn’t mean it’s not there. It’s big and takes up space. This could restrict its appearance on the museum floor to temporary exhibits, which have never coincided with my visits. Or perhaps it’s been there in plain sight, all along, on the loading dock out back, being used as it was meant to be used, as a trash can.

My father designed the BRUTE during the sixties, the Golden Age of plastics. It came out in 1968, just one year after movie goers heard Mr. McGuire, in The Graduate, give Benjamin Braddock the career tip of a lifetime in a single word: plastics. At that time, the then glamorous material was the promise for the future: it could answer all design problems, more inexpensively, and make the world a better place.

Today we know that’s not true. We know the opposite is true—that plastics are the source of many of the earth’s problems, affecting the health of the planet and her inhabitants on a macro and micro level.

The BRUTE would be a fitting object to include in a Smithsonian exhibit contrasting the zeal for plastic in that era with the present fallout. What was thought to be an inherent good by many leading ultimately to unintended consequences. Can we solve the problem of plastics? This problem we created for ourselves.

Now that the Commander-in-Chief has become a curator of the Smithsonian Institution, that exhibit would surely not occur. It’s too negative, too realistic, and too anti-business. The ideologically correct exhibit would be a look at the innovative Golden Age of Plastics, celebrating iconic design achievements, like the BRUTE, and that is all.

Ironically, this new development of President-as-Curator could help to give my father’s innovative design more time, maybe permanent time, on the museum floor. Since it’s big, it could help to fill up holes in exhibition space created by the removal of other objects that tell the problematic history of America. Such as a “White’s Only” public bathroom sign, a relic from America’s apartheid past.

In the aim of focusing entirely on objects that tell a positive story of the United States, perhaps President Trump will issue an executive order to bring all BRUTES off the Smithsonian’s loading docks and inside the institution’s walls, where they can live out their slow-to-degrade 1,000-year lifespan in complete inutility.

At the moment of transition from one DCCC pick to the next, new exciting cookbook, I always want to linger a bit more with the old one. After several weeks of cooking and reading, I develop a relationship with the author, the book, and the recipes, and, in the case of 70 Traditional African Recipes, a newfound taste for the food. Each book becomes a familiar (more…)

Retro is good when it comes to ice cubes. And retro ice cubes are good when it comes to cocktails.

This is the discovery I made with my vintage “Quickube” ice cube tray, something I picked up last week at a second hand shop just days before our Dowdy Corners holiday cocktail party, which was attended by DCCC members as well as friends from other parts of our lives.

I consider myself a passionate connoisseur of (more…)

Every Christmas my Aunt Stephanie makes handmade ornaments. They are always made of cloth or paper, or often a combination of the two, and fit unassumingly into a common letter-size envelope, which carries them to friends and family members.

This past holiday’s handwork is a bird constructed of white paper using deceptively simple origami folds. In its beak is a small portion of (more…)