Typewriter Love

Say hello to our Sears Junior Portable Typewriter, the smallest lil' typewriter in the west! If you want to see some gorgeous typewriter specimens (that are sure to inspire some insane typewriter envy) check out this site. You can search by brand, by period, by author... it's amazing!

National Park Quarters

We can't wait for the National Park Quarters to come out! Hurray for the little joys in life...

Mail bag

I know I'm not the only one out there who feels like they are tethered to their computer all day writing emails. The amount of time I spend on my laptop and on my phone checking and writing emails could be spent doing soooo many productive things! I do miss physical mail and have started trying to write and send letters again- though I know I'll never give up email. I just have a weird love/hate relationship to it is all. I went back into my "sent mail" folders earlier to see just how many messages I send per day, and it appears that I average around 20, which doesn't actually seem like that much to me. I'm sure if I only checked my inbox 2-3 times a day I could still manage to get that many replies sent out. How many emails do you send each day?

(Envelopes from Kiosk.)

Jazz on a Summer's Day

I have a new favorite movie, and it is called Jazz on a Summer's Day. Somehow Netflix knew that I would enjoy it (don't you love when that happens?) and as soon as I saw the DVD cover art and read the description I was sold. "Filmed at the 1958 Jazz Festival at Newport, Rhode Island, this easygoing documentary affords an intimate, atmospheric glimpse of a historically significant musical event. Performing at the festival were jazz heavyweights such as Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry, Thelonious Monk, Mahalia Jackson, Dinah Washington, Gerry Mulligan and Anita O'Day. Fascinating viewing for jazz and documentary fans alike."

This film is so beautifully shot and the music is sooo good, that I watched it twice in a row while I was working at home the other day. Director Bert Stern is probably best known for his beautiful photographs of iconic female actresses such as Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor. It's his photographer's eye that makes every shot of this film look like a still from the pages of LIFE Magazine circa 1958, when all the ladies wore red lipstick and the gents looked dapper with their clean haircuts and cool shades. Couldn't recommend it more.

When in doubt, flat-iron it out

Derek's solution to getting wrinkles out of your tie when you're walking out the door on your way to a dinner party? A quick run through your wife's flat iron. Works like a charm.

Making stuff at home that you can buy at the store

It's no secret that while we love living in the city, we have dreams of someday moving to the country and learning how to live off the land. In an ideal world, we'd figure out a way to enjoy country life without giving up our connection to the culture, art and community that we love so much about urban life, but for now the best we can do is embrace the city while learning as much as can about the art of making things at home. First step: cooking.

We are fortunate enough to live in a neighborhood that is chock-full of amenities, including some of the nicest restaurants in San Francisco. We live within walking-distance of some of our very favorite places to eat, which means we eat out... a lot. There is an appreciation for food in this town that we've never experienced anywhere else, and the opportunities to enjoy incredible produce and artisanal meats, dairy products and prepared foods are plenty. Of course once you have tasted the amazing flavor of $6 yogurt and $8 preserves, it's really difficult to go back to the bland, watery stuff that comes from the supermarket. And so we have started making stuff at home, which is not only educational, fun and rewarding, but even MORE delicious than the fancy stuff from the local market.

Aside from home-grown honey, which we have been enjoying for a year now, we roast coffee beans at home, make yogurt and granola weekly, and have recently been experimenting with bread, sauces and preserves. Since we don't have our own garden, we happily accept donations from the bounty of our families' gardens, which have provided us with pounds of apricots, apples, tomatoes and squash over the past year.

Making yogurt is ridiculously easy. We take a quart of milk, put it in a saucepan and heat it up to 180º. Then we let it cool down slowly to 110º, stir in a tablespoon or two of yogurt from a previous batch, and let it sit overnight, maintaining a temperature of 110º. Our stovetop has gas burners with pilot lights that are always on, so we just put the hot milk/yogurt mixture in a jar, and place it in a cast iron skillet on a burner. By the next morning, we have yogurt! You could also place your jar in the stove or in a cooler filled with warm water.

The super delicious and super simple granola recipe came from my Mom, and you can download it here.

Derek orders a few pounds of green beans from Sweet Maria's every couple months, and at around $6/pound for pretty much the best beans around (our current favorite is a Yirga Cheffe from Ethiopia), you can't go wrong. The roasting takes about 10-15 minutes per batch, and he roasts them in our "coffee" table in the living room every couple weeks.

My sister let us fill up a bag of tomatoes from her garden last weekend, which we turned into an amazing tomato sauce with the help of a KitchenAid strainer attachment that we borrowed from Leigh & Andrew. Derek cooked down the tomatoes, which we ran through the strainer and then thickened up with some onions and spices. Delicious!

Zen and the art of the home haircut

In these tough economic times, we've had to scale back on some of the luxuries we have grown accustomed to, which for us includes visits to the salon. Monthly for Derek, and every couple months for me. I've tried cutting D's hair at home before, but never touched the top, for fear that I'd leave a big gaping hole in it or end up cutting off way too much. This week I finally felt confident enough to give it a try, and I'm happy to report that it was a success! (Thank goodness he has such thick hair...)

D's hair, pre-haircut

D's hair, post-haircut

My rules were as follows:
- Don't say "oops", no matter what happens
- Cut a little at a time, and go back to trim more if it's not enough
- Don't get overzealous with the electric trimmers

It probably would have helped if I'd watched a how-to video or two beforehand, but then again my false sense of confidence proved to be enough! I'll do a little research before the next cut, though. For myself, I've decided to let my hair grow out again, with an occasional at home bang-trim every few weeks. We'll see what happens... (Cut to photos of both of us in 6 months with long, shaggy hair...)

Bee Boyz

For any of you out there who share our love, wonder, and enthusiasm for bees and beekeeping....here's a real treat. Man, how much better would our little video have been if we had rapped over it...??

(via mental floss)

We'll Take It!

There was an interesting article in the Times yesterday about the works of art the Obama's have borrowed from galleries and museums around DC to decorate their private residence at the White House. It reminded me of a little game Lauren and I play every time we go see art called, "We'll Take It!!". With that in mind...here are a few choice pieces we'd like to borrow for our home from some local art institutions.

Three Black Fishtails by Alexander Calder, 1960

From the Doris & Donald Fisher Collection

The Rebel Albert Camus: Twenty-Five Typographic Meditations, by Jack W. Stauffacher, 1969
Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco

Promenade Deck, M.S. Brimanger, Pacific Ocean, by John Gutmann, 1933
Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco

Alameda Gran Torino, by Robert Bechtle, 1974
Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco

Water Tower, Toledo Ohio, by Bernd and Hilla Becher, 1978
Fraenkel Gallery

Model for Total Reflective Abstraction (after Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi), by Josiah McElheny, 2003
DeYoung Museum

Everything is Invented.

A little inspiration for this Tuesday morning. (via Maira Kalman's NY Times blog)

Pop-Up magazine

Just wanted to do a quick post about last week's Pop-Up magazine. Thank you so much to everyone who joined us, especially the amazing, amazing contributors! It was such a wonderful, exciting, interesting, fun, funny, and very special evening. There's no documentation (on purpose), but the picture above will give you a sense of the good times that were being had by all, as the audience and contributors mingled and drank and ate for many hours after the event had ended.

This was our Table of Contents, and below is a list of the contributors who made the magic happen. I've included links to many of them, some of them are either too prolific (thus difficult to pin down with Google...) or too lazy (and don't have websites), or very likely both:

Evan Ratliff, Steven Leckart, Farhod Manjoo, Marc Hawthorne, Bonnie Tsui, Philip Wood, Aaron Ximm, Jon Mooallem, Steven Okazaki, Joshuah Bearman, Elena Dorfman, Nate DiMeo, Darcy Padilla, Jeff Chang, Daniel Alarcon, Sam Green, Dave Cerf, Wayne White, Paul Schiek, David Maisel, Amy Standen, Elif Batuman, Tiffany Campbell & Andria Lessler.

Thanks again everyone...Hope to see you at Pop Up #3!!!

"Spooky": This week's special Photo Assignment!!!!

We've mentioned more than once here on Smarts & Crafts how much we LOVE libraries!!! So you can imagine how excited we were when Rosie (who is lucky enough to actually work at the library) invited us to participate in San Francisco's One City One Book Project. For any of you not familiar with the program you can click here to find out more, but basically it's a fun way to encourage reading, conversation, and community. And of course it's great for all the amazing writers whose books are featured—sort of like San Francisco's version of Oprah's Book Club (only cooler!!!).

Well this month all of us here in San Francisco are reading "Alive in Necropolis" by Doug Dorst. We've just started it, but it's already reeled us in....not only because there are tuxedo'd zombies running around, but it just so happens to be beautifully written. Here's the blurb on the back to give you a little taste:

"Colma, California, is the only incorporated city in America where the dead outnumber the living. A "cemetery city" serving San Francisco, Colma is the resting place of the likes of Joe DiMaggio, Wyatt Earp, and William Randolph Hearst. It is also the home of Michael Mercer, a rookie cop trying to go by the book as he struggles to navigate a new realm of grown-up relationships. But instead of settling comfortably into adult life, Mercer becomes obsessed with the mysterious fate of his predecessor in the Colma PD, Sergeant Wes Featherstone, who seems to have spent his last years policing the dead as well as the living. As Mercer delves deeper into Featherstone's story, his own sanity starts to slip, too—either that, or Colma's more famous residents are not resting in peace as they should be."

Exciting, right?!? So head off to your local library and pick up a copy, SF residents can just click here....

So before next Thursday send your very best, most "spooky-iest" picture to smartsandcrafts@gmail.com. We'll pick the one that gives us the biggest chills and that lucky person will get a free copy of the book, courtesy of our friends at the SF Public Library.

Photojojo!

Photojojo is an awesome website full of tips, tricks, projects and reviews for photography enthusiasts (like us!) and we were super excited when they asked us to contribute a DIY project for their new book which is out today.


Our magnetic photo frame how-to is one of many inspiring DIY projects in this book, which also includes instructions on how to make a snow globe, a wallet, a lampshade, a wall mural and many, many more, all featuring your own images. It's time to get your digital photos OUT of the computer and turn them into creative, fun projects!

It's Popping Up Again!

Tickets went on sale today for Pop Up Magazine #2! Get them while you can!!

Happy 09.09.09!!!

I am embracing the hype and loving how this day has turned into a Beatles holiday! My big question (which is actually an appropriate "this? or this?") is... which remastered set do I really want- mono or stereo?? Decisions, decisions...

Inspiration

I used to have this Kate Spade ad pinned to my inspiration board, and I found it again yesterday morning while flipping through some old image files. Then....

Derek spotted a 1950's hospitality cookbook at a vintage furniture store yesterday afternoon and snapped this picture. I love seeing where peoples' inspiration comes from! And how crazy is it that we happened upon both of these images in the same day?

Lunescent Streetlights

Our good friends from Civil Twilight (the talented team who designed and built out our store) are up for a big award for their amazing Lunar Resonant Streetlights, and they need your vote! The INDEX:Awards are an international design competition based in Denmark, with a mission to "generate more Design to Improve Life of higher quality all over the world. " We are super psyched that they have made it to the final round of judging- fingers crossed that they win!

Click here to learn more about the Lunescent Streetlights and click here to vote. The winners will be announced in 2 days, so please vote now!!

Two-Lane Blacktop

We were searching for a movie at the video store the other night, browsing the "new classics" section and hoping to find a '70s gem that we'd never heard of but would fast become one of our favorites. As soon as Derek picked up Two-Lane Blacktop and we recognized both Dennis Wilson and James Taylor on the cover, we knew we had a winner.


Two-Lane Blacktop the story of a cross-country car race, starring the kings of cool, James Taylor as "The Driver" and Dennis Wilson as "The Mechanic". First of all, seeing those two on screen, acting so effortlessly was amazing. Second, the story, the cinematography and the styling were incredible- and after we'd watched the entire film plus all the extras, we found out that Criterion issued their DVD version in 2007, so we're in for even more behind the scenes goodies when we decide to rent that one! I'm not going to give anything away- I'll just leave you with these photos and hopefully you'll check it out for yourself.

Laurie Bird as "The Girl"

Dennis Wilson as "The Mechanic"

Derek Bueller's Day Off

So sad to hear about the passing of John Hughes today. He was probably, in many ways, one of the biggest cultural influences on me as a young boy. His movies still make me laugh and think and laugh some more.

On a trip to Chicago last year, we took a couple of our own Ferris Bueller-inspired pictures at the Art Institute...


And in honor of the man, here are two impossible This? or This? challenges for you:

Breakfast Club? or Ferris Bueller's Day Off?

Sixteen Candles? or Pretty In Pink?

Ode to 1962

About six months ago I was browsing the Criterion DVD selection at our local video store, and realized that all the movies I had chosen came out in the same year. We rented a couple (Mamma Roma and Jules et Jim) and that started my obsession with the year 1962.




I did a quick Wikipedia search on the year and found lists of all types of cultural events that took place in 1962- including the beginnings of Otis Redding's and the Rolling Stones' musical careers, Marilyn Monroe dying, the Mona Lisa coming to the United States, and West Side Story winning the Oscar for Best Picture. I read John Steinbeck's book Travels with Charley and loved it. I got a four disk set of Motown singles that all came out that year and fell in love with early Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder songs. I continued to watch movies that came out that year, like Lolita, and Lawrence of Arabia. I even watched movies and TV shows that took place that year, like American Graffiti and Mad Men.


I keep thinking I should move onto another year, but there's still so much more to explore from 1962! The Cuban Missile Crisis! NASA astronauts orbiting the Earth for the first time! The amount of information that is available at our fingertips is overwhelming and sometimes I don't know where to start when I'm looking for new discoveries. Picking one year to do a cultural study on is so much fun- you could choose the year you were born or just pick a random year like I did.