Cindy's Salon

February 4, 2010 | Link This | Email this | Comments (2)

“The thing is, it’s real hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs—if yours are really good ones and theirs aren’t. You think if they’re intelligent and all…and have a good sense of humor, that they don’t give a damn whose suitcases are better, but they do.  It’s one of the reasons I roomed with a stupid bastard like Stradlater. At least his suitcases were as good as mine.” - Holden Caulfield, from Chapter 14 of “The Catcher In The Rye”

I was amazed when I read that J.D. Salinger passed away last week at the age of 91. I was amazed, really, that he was still alive. Not that 91 is so old—old JD—but that...Read More

January 28, 2010 | Link This | Email this | Comments (3)

Dona Meilach (1926-2008) was a seemingly indefatigable connoisseur, champion, and chronicler of craftsmanship. All told, she wrote over 40 books and several hundred articles on a broad range of craft topics and techniques. A glimpse at some of the titles—“Creating Art from Fibers and Fabrics,” “Creating With Plaster,” “Papercraft,” “Collage and Assemblage,”—speaks to the encyclopedic breadth of her interests, as well as the depth of her knowledge: she not only studied but also performed the crafts she wrote about. Her tactile, scholarly, and catholic app...Read More

January 21, 2010 | Link This | Email this | Comments (5)

Usually, if I haven’t produced a blog post before Thursday, I wake up early and start writing. This morning, I awakened earlier than usual, at about 5 a.m., but instead of sitting at my desk, I drove out to a tag sale on Long Island. Years ago, I did this regularly, but not so much any more. I was lured this time by a description that read “rare Herman Miller, Nelson, Rohde,” including a 4634L end table. I didn’t know offhand what a 4634 end table looked like, but the 46 prefix denotes 1946, right around the time Gilbert Rohde died and ...Read More

January 14, 2010 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Art Clokey, who created Gumby in the mid 1950’s, passed away the other day at the age of 88. I can’t say I was a big fan of Gumby’s. Like everyone who was six in 1965, I watched episodes in the morning before going to school, but I remember finding them vaguely annoying and facile. Still, even today, it is interesting to look at how the characters moved and morphed. Gumby was the first stop-motion claymation on television, a fact I did not know in 1965. Nor did I know that Art Clokey had studied film in the early 1950’s at USC with Slavko Vorkapich, a pioneer of modern montage; nor that Gumby grew, literal...Read More

January 7, 2010 | Link This | Email this | Comments (2)

Arthur A. Carrara (1910-91) was a Chicago-based architect and designer whose work channeled Prairie School and modernist influences, from Frank Lloyd Wright to Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Buckminster Fuller. But for a stint in the Army during WWII, he remained based in Chicago, designing private houses, corporate offices, exhibitions, and industrial products. Unfortunately, his name is not offhand familiar today, and his work is largely off the radar. Fortunately, his idiosyncratic career was showcased in a retrospective exhibition circulated by the Milwaukee Art Center in 1960, and preserved in a graphically arresting though largely unobtainable catalog.

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