Hasta La Ideas

The urchin followed me down the street, cajoling. I was backpacking through Hanoi, and this poor kid living on the street had latched onto me with his broken English, claiming that no matter what it was I wanted, he could find it and sell it to me. In fact I’d been looking for a particular book written by Vietnamese writer Bao Ninh, and in those pre-Amazon days I asked the kid if he could find an English-language copy, as there were no bookstores I could see on Hang Bac Street. I was shocked when he returned with a faded copy of the book in an hour, and I gladly paid him the asking price: US $15.

I’d become friendly with Quang, the young Vietnamese manager of my hostel and showed him the book. Quang was surprised I wanted it and asked how much I paid for it. When I told him, he became incensed: “That book is $1.50, not $15,” he said. He barked something to a cyclo driver outside and the two of them set off. Thirty minutes later they returned and pulled me out into the street, where a crowd had gathered.

Quang knew the urchin, had tracked him down, and bloodied his nose. I was horrified. Quang stood up on a box, cupped his hands to his face and began yelling an explanation in Vietnamese to the passersby, which caused more of them to stop and listen. The cyclo driver translated for me: Quang was telling everyone that this kid was a thief who had ripped off a visitor to their country. The crowd grew visibly disgusted and a small queue spontaneously formed. People—housewives, day laborers, people carrying stuff to the market—each took a turn approaching the urchin and unleashing a one-sentence verbal smackdown before departing. At the end, despite my protests, they forced the kid to apologize to me.

Coming from a then-high-crime neighborhood in Brooklyn, where my neighbor’s apartment was robbed so thoroughly that they took the sheets off of her bed, this was astonishing to me. My limited experiences in Communist countries like Vietnam or Cuba has shown me that things weren’t about the money there, because there was no money to be had. And when people are not motivated by profit, they instead adhere to whatever moral code they were raised under. Nowadays the economic structure is different in Vietnam than it was sixteen years ago, and you can legally earn an American buck, as young game developer Dong Nguyen has done with his Flappy Bird app. So it probably seems shocking to us Americans that after raking in US $50,000 per day with his app—this in a country where most earn just US $2,000 per year—Nguyen shut the app down.

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Are you tired of recognizing and enjoying your background jams? Do you strive to have a sonically obscure yet socially sharable music collection? This weekend give a listen to songs literally no one has tried out on Spotify. Forgotify is dedicated to bringing songs with zero plays to an audience of at least one.

The offerings are understandably wide-ranging—apparently there are a lot of stray songs in the world, 4 million if you ask the guys at Forgotify! You’ll find off-brand covers of yesteryear pop hits, symphonic arrangements of classical classics, and truly difficult to explain foreign soundtracks. Something is bound to strike your fancy, or at least raise an eyebrow.

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Since the dawn of time, high fashion has recycled low… and congratulated itself for doing so. Antique Japanese boro fabric, increasingly popular among the edgy styluminati, is simultaneously co-branded couture, lowbrow folk tradition, and literally recycled. Boro traces its lineage to the traditional cloths used and reused and re-reused by rural farmers, artisans, craftspeople and laborers between the 18th and 20th centuries. Before cotton was widely available in Japan, the most commonly used fibers came from tough and abundant sources like jute, wisteria and bast. Rough stuff for sure, but resistant to wear and tear. As cotton production increased and cotton products began to spread, used cotton kimonos and other textiles became available at more affordable prices.

Exploded diagram of a kimono, Boro fabric exploding at the seams

Tasteful French gallery show of other people’s old workwear

To get the most out of these valuable softer fabrics, they were patched over and over, sometimes being torn into strips and rewoven, integrating the tougher materials for reinforcement. Dyed textiles would often be taken apart, redyed and rewoven in multiple iterations, creating a deeply textured and mottled appearance over time. Sometimes you can find signs of a fabric’s earlier life, like the darker strip on a blanket where a kimono collar used to be. The most recognizable boro fabrics feature an array of indigo hues, carefully patchworked with strong quilting or darning stitches. (For a good time, look up “sashiko” stitching, which literally translates as “little stabs.” Quilting is pretty metal.) The patches on most boro fabric, while varied in color and size, are usually square or rectangular. Coincidence? Nope, nor a cultural obsession with rigid angles. It’s another sign of efficiency and good design.

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If you’ve got the bucks, an HD projector is a cool alternative to a television. It’s about as unobtrusive as it gets, turning any white wall into a screen larger than the biggest LED or plasma screen you can buy. But installing a projector is a pain—I helped a buddy hook one up, and mounting it to the ceiling required us making a custom plate for it, then dragging the ladder back and forth to find the perfect spot for it, not to mention drilling into a stamped-tin ceiling. Then came the PITA of getting cables to the thing and having to drill supports for the cables along their length. And once it’s up and running, if you find you need to make physical adjustments to the thing or de-dust it after a period of months, well, time to break out the ladder again.

Sony’s brilliant design solution to projector hassles is their 4K Ultra Short Throw Projector.

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To some, an art form. To others, common sense. To the messy outsider, pointless de-jumbling. As a savvy designer or design enthusiast, you’re most certainly familiar with the principles and outcomes of knolling, even if you had no idea it deserved its own word. As the story goes, knolling got verbed by the fastidious janitor at Frank Gehry’s furniture shop, who would make sure all tools and materials were 90-degreed at the end of the day, mirroring rigid angles and clean lines of Knoll furniture they produced. It was picked up by the artist Tom Sachs while he worked there. Sachs institutionalized the principle in his own work and defined in his virally adored “10 Bullets”:

But knolling means more than just tidying a space by aligning tools to each other or their creative confines. Through neatness, it suggests an improvement to functionality, accessibility and efficiency. In a way it’s like making your workspace into a 3D exploded diagram. Which is awesome.

Although well-organized spaces and prettily arranged items are in no way new, the hyper tidy appeal of knolling is definitely on the rise. It’s seeped into every visual form you can imagine. Infographics, advertising, fashion blogs, cookbooks, whole dedicated tumblrs, merchandising, photography collections. And Pinterest… Pinterest everywhere.

Big Improvement

So much easier to use!

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