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. (more…)

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…)